The dramatic Republican victory in the Massachusetts Jan. 19th election which destroyed the Democrats filibuster proof margin in the Senate seems for the moment to have thrown the bourgeoisie's plans to "reform" health care into complete disarray.  It is still too soon to know what the final outcome will be, but the current situation illustrates yet again the serious difficulties confronted by the ruling class in the period of social decomposition of capitalism in controlling its own political apparatus and implementing policies that clearly serve the interests of the national capital.

Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, following an acrimonious, highly partisan  debate, the U.S. Senate passed its version of health care reform on a strictly party-line vote of 60 to 39. President Obama immediately addressed the nation declaring this the most important social legislation since the New Deal. At the time, this "momentous reform" still faced the arduous task of reconciling the Senate and House versions of the bill,  and the final outcome depended upon the results of the special election in Massachusetts to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.  But at Christmas the Obama administration assumed that the seat held by Kennedy for 47 years would remain in the Democratic column and seemed to count their chickens before they hatched. It looked as if the ruling class would finally manage to deal with the health care crisis.

As we pointed out in Internationalism No. 145 [2], "In reality, there are two versions of the health care crisis in the US -- one for the working class and a separate one for the ruling class." For the working class, the attack on medical benefits has been a central feature in virtually every contract struggle in the past decade.  Large companies routinely used to cover 100 percent of insurance premiums, but management increasingly forces workers to pay for a percentage of the costs and once they pierce the barrier of getting workers to pay, in each subsequent contract management pushes to increase the worker contribution. At the same time, workers and their families face skyrocketing co-payments, fees and deductibles and declining quality of medical care as the government grants doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies exemptions from liability for malpractice, incompetence, and defective drugs with disastrous side effects.  Recent court rulings permit unions and companies to drop retirees from existing insurance plans, forcing them to rely solely on Medicare and the purchase of their own supplemental coverage. And this doesn't even include the nearly 50 million who have no health care insurance at all.

For the ruling class, as we noted previously, "the health care crisis is that they are saddled with an incredibly inefficient and expensive system that damages American capitalism's economic competitiveness on the world market. Insurance costs, doctor fees, hospital costs, overhead and administrative costs are out of control. The US has the costliest health care system in the world, with per capita expenditures more than double that of most major industrialized nations. Health care costs as a percentage of GDP are 9.9% for Canada, 10.1% for France, and 8% for the United Kingdom, but an astronomical 15.2% for the US. And all of this extra cost provides an inferior quality medical care that makes the US look ridiculous on the international scene. Patient outcomes are among the worst in the industrialized world. In Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, life expectancy ranges from 79.5 years (France, UK) to 82.5 in Japan. In the US it lags behind at 77.  A study by the World Health Organization evaluating the overall quality of health systems ranked the US as 37th in the world, trailing behind Dominica, and Costa Rica. Infants born in the US are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway." Having so many uninsured people further harms the US economy, as the costs for providing emergency care for such patients is covered by general tax funds. The need to "rationalize" the health care system and control rising health costs, particularly as the baby boom generation nears retirement, is recognized as a pressing policy necessity by economists and politicians across the political spectrum. For the capitalist class, health care reform is NOT intended to improve the health of workers, but rather to cut costs and improve competitiveness in the world economy.

The legislation currently stalled in Congress in the aftermath of the Massachusetts special election addresses the health care crisis for the ruling class, but will only aggravate the health care crisis faced by American workers. No matter how many times the Obama administration uses the word "reform" in their propaganda, they cannot cover up the fact this health care package is part of an austerity attack on the working class. Admittedly, the propaganda about "universal" health care has tremendous mystifying power for the ruling class. For individuals who currently have no health insurance, any expansion of health insurance coverage may sound better than nothing, but this is illusory. For the working class as a whole what is coming is an attack on health care.

Yes, more people would be covered by health insurance, but there will still between 26 million and 32 million without insurance, depending upon whether Senate or House provisions of the bill are incorporated in the final version of the law. In either case, those who will be newly covered will be forced to pay for it themselves. If they fail to purchase insurance, they will face penalties of up to 2.5 percent of their taxable income. Some lower paid workers may be eligible for subsidies from the government to pay for insurance premiums but the funding for this will come out of the hides of the rest of the working class.

Both the Senate and House bills propose cutting medicare and Medicaid benefits to retirees and the poor respectively. Most onerous of all, is the proposed excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" health care benefit plans, defined as plans that cost at least $8,500 per year for individuals or  $23,000 for families, which will include an estimated 19% of existing employer-based health plans, including many currently in place for workers in unionized industries. This proposed excise tax is supported by the White House and by leading economists. The excise taxes will be levied against the insurance companies, but by definition the cost of an excise tax may be passed along to consumers, permitting the insurance companies to recover the money. Excise taxes are generally used by the state to discourage certain "undesirable" social behaviors - for example excise taxes on alcohol or tobacco products. In this case, the undesirable "social evil" is what the bourgeois calls "overly generous" medical benefits, which economists deem too costly to the economy. This will lead either to sharp increases in employee contributions to cover health insurance premiums, deductibles or sharply curtailed benefit plans. As Beth Umland, director of research for health and benefits at the Mercer consulting firm put it, "the majority of employers will respond the way policymakers hope, by reducing benefits." According to a recent survey of 465 major corporations by Mercer consultants, 66 percent of the employers plan to cut benefits or increase employee contributions in response to the legislation, by dropping flexible spending accounts, used to cover unreimbursed medical expenses, or by dropping dental or vision coverage. This would "tend to shift more costs to workers - but could help accomplish one of the goals touted by economists and policymakers who support the excise tax: slowing medical spending."

The White House web site openly supports this excise tax and tries to sugar coat it by minimizing the number of medical plans that will be impacted and cynically claiming that it will lead to wage increases for workers: "for the small sub-set of plans that are affected, the primary impact of this provision will be to increase workers' wages... Economists agree by taxing the highest cost plans this provision will lead insurance companies to be more efficient and provide quality care to consumers at lower prices (see this endorsement in a letter from a group of prominent economists - including three Nobel laureates and previous members of both Democratic and Republican administrations and this analysis by CBO 2009). Even a report commissioned by the insurance industry's trade association acknowledged that: ‘[w]e expect employers to respond to the tax by restructuring their benefits to avoid it.'  As a result, employers will be in a position to increase workers' take home pay."  What incredible nonsense - as if employers will pass on the supposed cash savings gained from cutting workers medical compensation in pay increases. Even if they did the money would be taxable income, which means workers would lose 25 to 35 percent to the government, whereas currently their compensation in the form of medical benefits is non-taxed.  In behind closed door negotiations between Congressional leaders, the White House and union officials, it's been agreed that the final version will slightly decrease the amount of the excise tax and delay its implementation for five years (from 2013 to 2018), giving the unions a chance to ‘voluntarily' cooperate in designing the cutbacks in workers' medical coverage.

If health care reform is so obviously essential for the bourgeoisie, as evidenced by the the fact that every Republican and Democratic presidential primary candidate in 2008 offered some form of health reform policy proposal, why have the Republicans opposed this legislation so virulently? Why all the ridiculous denunciations of Obama's alleged "socialism" and "death panels"? There are two plausible explanations:  the first, of course is the political division of labor that the ruling class often employs to augment the democratic mystification, to create the illusion of genuine political debate. Before the Jan. 19th election, with 60 votes under Democratic control, passage of some form of health care reform was guaranteed and Republican opposition in no way threatened to undermine the achievement of the necessary rationalization of health care for the bourgeoisie. But secondly, we must also acknowledge an aspect to this opposition that reflected the impact of the social decomposition of capitalist society on the political processes within the ruling class as well. In the past ten years we have noted other instances of the political difficulties for the bourgeoisie to act effectively in its own interests, such as the botched presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, in which the "every man for himself" tendency so clearly manifest on the inter-imperialist terrain where bloc discipline disappeared with the fall of the Russian imperialist bloc, led the major political parties to pursue electoral advantage and victory in a manner totally disregardful of what was genuinely in the best interests of American state capitalism. In this context, no doubt, the racism afflicting the far right in regard to an African American president in the White House, has come into play. This deep seated racism fuels the "birthers" who deny Obama's "legitimacy" because he wasn't born in the US or those who charge that he is a secret Muslim or a "socialist". If Obama were to propose that Ronald Reagan's birthday become a national holiday, one could only imagine that these elements would denounce the proposal as a nefarious socialist-Islamic plot. Another aspect to this decomposition may be seen in the dogged resistance of the insurance industry which finances the opposition of so many conservative members of the House and Senate. We even see in it the ridiculous, petty maneuvering of the more conservative Democrats who held out for particularistic concessions for their own pet projects or financial backers. Such difficulties in implementing policies that serve the vital interests of American state capitalism are not a healthy sign for the ruling class.

The bourgeoisie truly faces a bizarre political situation. It is at last on the brink of "solving" its health care crisis, imposing a change that will NOT be a reform, not an expansion of health care, not an attempt to improve the health of the working class but will in the end be an austerity attack against the working class as a whole.  The goal is to cut health care expenses and improve American economic competitiveness by attacking the standard of living of the working class. And for the moment it looks like the one remaining obstacle to this austerity attack against the working class is the opposition of the Republican party. It's too soon to tell whether the political situation is so out of control for the bourgeoisie that this measure which is so vitally important to American state capitalism will be wind up on the garbage heap of missed political opportunity.  It is still possible that mainstream Republicans will realize that their "bluff" has been called, that they will have to find some way to compromise with the Democrats in the interest of the national capital, even if it's only a handful of Republican senators who in the end wind up voting for some kind of modified bill.

But if a compromise measure emerges, there can be no doubt about its nature as an attack against the standard of living of the working class. Such is the net result of so-called "reforms" in the period of capitalist decadence, demonstrating yet again that capitalism has no future to offer humanity. Only the replacement of the current society driven by the relentless quest for profits with one where the guiding principle is the fulfillment of human needs offers any real solution to the health care crisis confronted by the working class. 

Jerry Grevin, 23/1/10

After more than two years of grim economic news, last year came to a close with cheers for the supposedly "budding" economic recovery. However, so far 2010 does not seem very promising. Presently the mass media message about the economic crisis is quite ambiguous: on the one hand we are told that the recession is over. Why? Because the economy is growing again, bankers are making money, Wall Street is again flying high, etc. On the other hand the bad news of the last two years of recession keeps on coming. For instance, unemployment is still growing, the housing market is deep in shambles, commercial real estate is hitting the wall only now, consumer loans defaults remain at record highs, and banks are still failing.

 In the specialized economic media, the mood is mostly gloomy. In general it seems that bourgeois economic specialists have no confidence in the long term effectiveness of the state capitalist policies that have been put in place to pull the global economy out of the recession. And surely it is difficult to be optimistic when you know that these policies are, essentially, no different than the policies that have so much contributed to the severity of the so-called "great recession". In particular there is a growing anxiety among bourgeois economists about the huge increase of state debt the world over as governments have been trying  to ‘stimulate' their national economies.

A new surge of public debt

From so-called ‘communist' China to democratic America, the bourgeoisie has been keen to spend its way out of the recession. Every national state is everywhere intent on saving capitalism not just by increasing the money supply through interest rate manipulation, but by a direct massive injection of money both in the sphere of production and the circulation of commodities. Sure the question arises, where is all this money coming from? According to some good thrifty souls, national states, like individuals, are supposed to spend only what they have. But obviously nobody follows this frugal advice. Like individuals, states, through credit, can "buy today, and pay tomorrow," and in fact have been covering their budget deficits through public debt more or less forever - which of course does not exclude the occasional running of the printing money machine at full speed. However in the last four decades, in the context of an insane policy of abusing the credit system to alleviate the devastating consequences of capitalism's chronic crisis of overproduction, state public debt the world over has grown to monstrous and more and more unsustainable levels.  The reality that the mountain of debt that national states are sitting on all over the world has no chance of being repaid, is creating a nightmare scenario for the whole capitalist system.

 We've seen on a smaller scale what can happen when you hit the limits of this policy.  This has already been demonstrated several times; for instance, when Argentina and Russia defaulted on their foreign debt in 2002 and 1998 respectively, and in 1997-98 during the collapse of the so-called Asian dragons and tigers that once were paraded as an example of the vitality of capitalism. We could also point to the decade long Japanese crisis in the 1990s -the so-called ‘lost decade' in this country economic history.

That capitalism's  day of reckoning is fast approaching has been signaled recently by the bankruptcies declared by Iceland and Dubai, which are likely only the opening salvo in a coming storm, but also by the quasi-official insolvency of several "developed" countries that are much closer to the epicenter of capitalism, such as Spain, Ireland and Italy. These countries are still standing only because of European ‘solidarity,' or better said, because the European bourgeoisie is afraid of the economic, political and social consequences that their collapse could create.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published a research report by its economists about the finances of the world's "richest" countries, (the G-20 club) which provides considerable ammunition to support the argument that world capitalism is heading towards new convulsions, spearheaded this time by the financial insolvency of the biggest economic powers. A full analysis of the dozens of tables published in the IMF document is beyond the scope of this article, but we can extract from them two unavoidable conclusions.

- in most countries national debt has grown tremendously in the last two years, as governments the world over have tried to spend their way out of the recession and at the same time confronted diminished tax revenues. In addition, according to the IMF, this imbalance between expenses and revenues, financed by a growing debt, is not likely to end any time soon. The IMF document shows that in 2007 the average government debt to GDP ratio among the advanced economic nations of the G-20 group was 78.2 percent; by 2009 this average had grown to 98.9 percent, and by 2014 it will reach the breathtaking figure of 118 percent. Among the economic heavyweights of the G-20, Japan, Italy, the US and Great Britain are the countries with the biggest total government debt loads as measured by the debt-to-GDP ratio (this figure expressed as a percentage is found by dividing the total debt of a country  by a year's worth of its domestic production).  Thus Japan, Italy, the US, and Great Britain are expected to reach by 2014 a public debt-to-GDP ratio of 245.6 percent, 128.5 percent, 108.2 percent and 98.3 percent respectively. In other words it would take Japan about two and a half years worth of its gross domestic production and around one year for the rest to paid off their debts and balance their public expenses!

-there is no way that this mountain of debt can be repaid and the most likely scenario is a wave of defaults that will make the "great recession" look like child's play in comparison. The IMF report has not said so, but its own projections of the governments budget adjustments needed - draconian cuts in expenses, particularly in social programs, and sharp tax increases - in order to get the debt under control speak for themselves. For instance the IMF estimates that getting public debt under control "...will require a sharp correction in the structural primary balance of advanced countries. On average, bringing government debt-to-GDP ratios in advanced economies below 60 percent by 2030 would require steadily raising the structural primary balance from a deficit of 3½ percent of GDP in 2010 to a surplus of 4½ percent of GDP in 2020 - an 8 percentage point swing in one decade-and keeping it at that level for the following decade." By country, based on spending cuts or tax increases or both, this "correction" swing would amount to 8.8 percent for the US, 12.8 percent for Great Britain, 13.4p percent for Japan and around 10 percent for Spain, Greece and Ireland.

Incidentally it is a wonder of bourgeois economics that today the IMF is considering a 60 percent debt to GDP ratio as a prudent fiscal policy for the so-called advanced economic nations, when the same organization back in January 2003 chastised the Bush administration for running up a record breaking budget deficit of $400 billion, which now looks like peanuts, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 40 percent. "An unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country"  would push up interest rates and slow global growth, as the IMF warned just seven years ago.  Today the US is running deficits of over a trillion dollars a year, its national debt has more than doubled in the last decade, and probably will pay more for servicing its debt this year than the total budget deficit of 2003. In the face of these "little" changes, the IMF economists mainly recommend a bogus budget adjustment. The bourgeoisie has really lost any sense of reality!

No way out under capitalism

The bourgeoisie can finagle its numbers all it wants to pretend that it can get society out of capitalism's historical crisis. Four decades of ever worsening economic conditions prove the reality that there is no solution to this crisis on capitalism's terms. The monstrous increase of state debt is just as much a dead end policy as the consumer credit bubble burst during the "great recession." Yet strictly speaking it is even worse. While consumer credit can stimulate production and thus help valorize capital, debt financed state expenses are mostly parasitic, a pure waste of value, which, except for economically sound infrastructure enterprises, don't add anything to the national economy. In fact the huge increase in state debt all over the world, reflecting growing government expenditures and diminished national revenues, mirrors also the repugnant growth of the bourgeois state which is sucking up the blood and energy of civil society. The upkeep of an omnipresent permanent bureaucracy, the running of an efficient repressive apparatus able to maintain bourgeois law and order and the maintenance of a well fed and equipped military - a  killing machine able to wage war and defend the bourgeoisie's imperialist interests; all these cost enormous amounts of money. For instance in 2008 the world military expenditures amounted to $1.473 trillion, of which, not surprisingly, 48 percent ($711 billion) were spent by the US alone.

In the coming period we will frequently hear the government call for sacrifice and a national "solidarity," a call to accept higher taxes and less social services to help shoulder the burdens of "our" public debt. The working class has only one way to respond to this bourgeois gimmick: the development of its class struggle on its own terrain, for its own demands, refusing to bear the brunt of the crisis. The only solution to the crisis is the overthrow of capitalism and its state, and the building of a real human community. This is the historical mission of the world working class.

Eduardo Smith. 21/1/10

In early January Internationalsm hosted its second weekend-long Days of Discussion conference in New York, once again bringing together sympathizers, readers, and correspondents from across the US and Canada for the opportunity of political discussion and theoretical deepening. As at the previous conference last April, the agenda was developed in consultation with the participants and presentations for each discussion were prepared by non-members of the ICC. Participants represented the old, young and middling generations, ranging in age from 18 to 63, coming from as far away as California, Manitoba, and Florida. Some were veterans of political activity; for one comrade, whose previous political experience had been conducted exclusively via the internet, the conference was the first "real life," face-to-face meeting with other left communists. There were university students, workers, employed and unemployed, comrades born in the US and immigrants from three continents.  The conference sent solidarity messages to two comrades who couldn't participate because of health problems and to another comrade who was stranded by automobile problems en route to New York. 

The welcoming remarks that opened the conference, prepared by a young sympathizer, stressed the importance of the discussion conferences as a means of overcoming the terrible isolation often suffered by geographically dispersed left communists, contributing to the work of theoretical clarification so crucial for the effective intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle, and developing a fraternal spirit and openness to the exchange of ideas. This introduction set the tone for the entire weekend. The presentations were exemplary and helped to focus the discussions in a manner that permitted serious deepening on the understanding of the Russian Revolution, state capitalism, and the connection between student movements and the working class. The discussions were rich; there were no hesitancies to speak or express divergent views. Disagreements were discussed fraternally and openly.

The presentation on the Russian Revolution correctly avoided focusing on the events themselves, but instead stressed the lessons of the revolution for the workers movement. There was immediate consensus that the Russian Revolution was the highest achievement yet attained in the history of the working class, rejecting libertarian assertions that it was not a proletarian, but a bourgeois revolution. The fact that the revolution ultimately failed and was consumed by counter revolution made it all the more important that revolutionaries learn the lessons of what happened in order to avoid similar tragedy in the future. The discussion developed very quickly around  the issues of the relationship between the workers councils and the working class and the state in the period of transition - some of the same themes that had attracted the attention of the ICC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This reflected an ability of the younger comrades to pick up the analysis of the Russian Revolution at a higher level that was possible initially in the 1970's.

 The presentation on state capitalism demonstrated that contrary to the assertions of leftism, the state capitalist analysis defended by the left communist movement is not some new, outlandish conception, but was in fact the position developed by the workers movement at the time of the founding of the Communist International at the height of the first revolutionary wave. The irreversibility of the "state-ization" of the economy was identified in the Manifesto of the Communist International in 1919, in the writings of Bukharin and Louis Fraina, in the US. There was no time lost in musing over whether state capitalism applies only to Stalinist states, as well as to countries like the United States.  This was in effect taken as a given - a huge step forward in relation to the situation in the 70s and 80s.

The presentation on student movements and the working class described the difficulties of the workers movement to situate students demographically within a class framework, sometimes considering students as a "privileged" petty bourgeois strata, and sometimes as linked to the working class, identified the links between student struggles and the working class, whether France 1968, the French CPE struggles in 2006 or the student struggles in Greece in December 2008. The increasing proletarianization of the professions and the petty bourgeoisie, as well as the rising college loan debt for students in the US, belies the notion that students are an over-privileged strata. The discussion was particularly animated as student participants described struggles and political discussions on their campuses, the ideological confusions rampant on college campuses, such as identity politics, a contempt for the working class (an idea of seeking an education to escape from the proletariat), and a tendency for leftists to personalize responsibility for attacks against students (tuition increases, cutbacks in services and academic programs) as emanating from pernicious administrators and thereby obscure the fact that the general economic crisis of capitalism is the culprit. The point was raised several times that student debt is used by the bourgeoisie as a form of "indentured servitude," to depress student militancy and tie workers to the state.

A wrap up discussion on Sunday emphasized the importance of continuing the discussions in the future and explored the possibility of regional meetings to draw other interested people into the discussion.  We are publishing the presentations on the Russian Revolution and state capitalism below. The discussion on student movements and the working class continues via an online forum and will be the topic of an article in a future issue of Internationalism. 

Internationalism 28/1/10

The Russian revolution of 1917 was a heroic moment in the history of the working class, when it took political power for the first time, and did its best to hold it. Its aftermath is one of the great tragedies in the history of the working class: isolated by counter-revolution in the west, and outmaneuvered at home, it was beaten finally into line by the goons of Stalinism. The events of the revolution are well-known, and I don't think that so many people asked to discuss the lessons it can teach us because they wanted to dwell on heroic images or agonize over tragedy. The fact is that the Russian revolution, precisely because it is as of now the highest tide-line of the proletariat's ebbing and flowing struggle, is the richest experience from which revolutionaries today can draw lessons for their politics. The Left Communists of the twenties and thirties saw this clearly, and saw as their task the preservation of the theoretical gains made by the workers' movement during the Russian revolution and its Russian and international aftermath. Today, as the world situation forces the proletariat to struggle in defense of its living conditions, it is important that, as we intervene, we keep the lessons the Russian revolution can teach us firmly in mind, so that we can be as clear and as effective as possible.

Internationalism is one of the core principles of the workers' movement, and we would be remiss in our duty to the working class if we failed to examine the Russian revolution in an international framework. It is a favorite tactic of bourgeois commentators and especially academics to isolate the Russian experience from the experience of the world proletariat. According to these distorters of history, the Russian revolution was noteworthy at all because it ended Tsarism. In this world, the most important consequence of the revolution was to make the Allies of World War I entirely "democratic", set against the "autocratic" German bloc and to make it acceptable for the pure-of-heart, democratic United States to enter the war. Another favorite distortion is to locate the rot at the heart of the Russian system in the countryside and to emphasize the role of the peasantry in bringing down Tsarism. Against this distortion, revolutionaries must recognize, from an examination of the facts, that the rot at the heart of the Russian system was the endemic crisis of world capitalism, the same crisis that had produced the World War. We must reaffirm that what made the revolution possible was not simply the internal weakness of the regime, but the change in historical epoch that marked the end of capitalism as a progressive system. We must recognize that the epoch of "wars and revolutions" identified by the Communist International is the epoch in which we live, and that changes in the balance of force between classes only push society towards either war or revolution.

Nor may we forget that the Russian revolution, though it marked the only point where the proletariat managed to seize power, did not happen in a vacuum. It was the first act in a worldwide revolutionary drama, and inspired and taught the other actors by its performance. The German and Hungarian working classes learned to demand a republic of workers' councils from the Russians. The Mensheviks', the Social Democrats' defense of their old slogan of the democratic republic reaffirmed their allegiance to the counter-revolution. Today, the demand for the democratic republic in Iran and countries like it is used to tie the workers in those countries to a faction of the bourgeoisie. The Russian revolution teaches us that this demand is an intrusion of bourgeois ideology into the workers' movement. Lastly, history shows us that the revolutionary wave was not merely international, but also internationalist. It was the uprising of Russian workers that led to that country withdrawing from the World War. It was the rising of German workers, and not, as bourgeois academics would have it, the Junker military, that forced Germany to ask for an armistice. It was not out of some special kindness, but rather due to the mass struggles of British, French, Japanese, and American dockers, railroad workers, munitions makers, and other workers that the British, French, Japanese, and American ruling classes were forced to withdraw from Russia.

What principles, besides the necessity of international working-class solidarity, and the fact that a good way for workers to defend themselves is to spread their struggle, does the Russian revolution teach us to reaffirm? The Russian experience shows us that, yes, the working class does possess the power within itself to organize to overthrow capitalism. Moreover, it reveals the forms in which this organization takes place, and that its development is directly linked to the development of the class struggle. First, when the struggle is defensive, isolated and a-political, there is the discussion circle, examined during the last Days of Discussion. Confined to a small group of workers-perhaps not even a whole workplace, depending on the level of struggle-this is just what it sounds like, a place for interested workers to talk about what's going on around them and how to defend themselves. If a struggle spreads, there appear the strike committee, the mass meeting, and the general assembly. The workers are beginning to take confidence in the ability of their struggle to succeed, and planning on how to achieve it. They are reaching out, finding and drawing in allies amongst other workers and in the non-exploiting general population. They begin to monopolize space, to convert it to their purpose. As the struggle becomes broader, and to become political, there appear workers' councils, elected and responsible bodies composed of recallable delegates. Only in a few places and times in history has the workers' council form appeared, and only when and where the struggle became political, where workers demanded power. Finally, this capacity to struggle as a class shows that it is the working class alone that can pose this question of political power.

Beyond reaffirming in the heat of reality what we already know, the Russian revolution disproved certain theories long-held by the workers' movement, and still paraded out today by the left of capital in order to prove its socialist credentials. One of the most important is that it is not the revolutionary organization that takes power, whether riding the wave of an insurrection or a democratic election. The idea that it was the organization that takes power was widely accepted in the workers' movement up until the Lefts in the Communist International began to examine the Russian experience critically, and to see that one of the major factors that led to the degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the International itself as revolutionary organizations was their integration into the Russian state. In fact, and this is another important lesson, it was that state apparatus itself, and not the dangerous but historically disarmed small bourgeoisie or foreign imperialism, that became the instigator and conductor of the counter-revolution. In order to understand how the state that emerged out of the revolution began and carried out the counter-revolution, we must understand its social foundation. The social foundation of the post-revolutionary Russian state was nationalized property. Most large industry, money, and transportation capacity was, during the revolution, deeded over to the state specifically, by means of nationalization. At the time, this was considered a revolutionary act: the history of the twentieth century teaches us to know better. Nationalization a recognized tool of bourgeois policy, and the property of the state is not the property of society. In Russia, this property, over time, came to be managed by agents of the state, people who had been union leaders, party leaders, or middle management in the old firms. Reacting to the defeat of the revolution outside Russia, this state found itself bound to follow the law of value and the other laws of motion of capitalism. Because the Bolsheviks had, by their own policy, integrated both themselves and the whole social capital into the state, they were unable, despite ferocious intra-party struggle, to resist the transformation of the state into the national capitalist, and their transformation into agents of the national capitalist. State capitalism developed the way it did in Russia because of the theoretical and practical errors the Bolsheviks made, and because the defeat of the international revolutionary wave allowed no room or time for such errors to be corrected.

This raises an important question which I hope will be considered in discussion: just how does property become the property of society. Not through nationalization. Nor can it be through the ownership of property by the workers' councils. To conceive of these bodies as organs of economic management weakens them, and diverts them away from the question of political power. The Russian experience proves this: prior to the revolution, the workers' councils were political bodies. Afterwards, and especially once the counter-revolution had begun, they were shut up in the factories, cut off from each other, and tied to the state by converting them into transmission belts from the economic planners to the workers. Today, the demand that workplaces be owned by the people who work in them amounts to imprisonment inside the workplace, the inability to reach out and spread the struggle.

The last lesson that we must learn from the Russian revolution comes not from the revolution itself, but from the way it was examined after the revolutionary wave had ended. There exists the conception among council communists and some anarchists that the protagonist of the Russian revolution was not the proletariat at all. For them, the revolution began as a bourgeois revolution that may or may not have dragged the proletariat along, ending in a coup by the Bolshevik party that put that party at the head of the already created bourgeois state. They arrive at this position by examining the product of the counter-revolution-state capitalism, and a Bolshevik party integrated into the state-and assume that endpoint was the only and inevitable consequence of the revolution. There are a number of problems with this conception. First, it ignores entirely the question of capitalist decadence, assuming there could be a bourgeois revolution in a world already dominated by capitalist relations of production. Second, and quite oddly, given this tendency's emphasis on the need for proletarian self-organization, it ignores or emasculates the independent political activity of the working class, and ignores the fact that the revolution was fundamentally a political act. The Bordigist conception that Russia saw a simultaneous bourgeois and proletarian revolution that led to the defeat of the latter by the former, and that the former was the bearer of state capitalism in Russia is similarly flawed. Revolutionaries today must defend the Russian revolution as a proletarian event, as a political event, and as an event that was not foredoomed to failure by its own shortcomings, but defeated in bloody counter-revolution. 

Ron 2/1/10

From Manifesto of the Communist International, 1919:

"The catastrophe of the imperialist war has completely swept away all the conquests of trade union and parliamentary struggles. For this war itself was just as much a product of the internal tendencies of capitalism as were those economic agreements and parliamentary compromises which the war buried in blood and muck.
"During the decades preceding the war, free competition, as the regulator of production and distribution, had already been thrust aside in the main fields of economic life by the system of trusts and monopolies; during the course of the war the regulating-directing role was torn from the hands of these economic groups and transferred directly into the hands of militarystate power. ...all these fundamental questions of the world's economic life are not being regulated by free competition, nor by associations of national and international trusts and consortiums, but by the direct application of military force, for the sake of its continued preservation. If the complete subjection of the state power to the power of finance capital had led mankind into the imperialist slaughter, then through this slaughter finance capital has succeeded in completely militarizing not only the state but also itself; and it is no longer capable of fulfilling its basic economic functions otherwise than by means of blood and iron.
"The state-ization of economic life, against which capitalist liberalism used to protest so much, has become an accomplished fact. There is no turning back from this fact - it is impossible to return not only to free competition but even to the domination of trusts, syndicates and other economic octopuses."

Why is state capitalism an important concept

Understanding the tendency toward state capitalism is fundamental to understanding key questions in the class struggle, especially the neutralization of reformist parties and unions, national liberation struggles, nationalization demands, etc. The ICC says that the unions and the left parties have become integrated into and are now a part of the bourgeois state. What does this mean? How did it come about? What is the nature of state capitalism? How did it come about? Through what mechanisms, and why?
Understanding this process will allow revolutionaries clarity to explain fundamental questions like why these organs can't be reconquered any more than the Democratic Party can taken over for the working class-in short, any more than the bourgeoisie can be persuaded to fight for socialism. Also crucial is understanding the development of state capitalism to avoid being driven off class terrain in struggles by falling into leftism which demands union recognition, arbitration, nationalization, etc.

These phenomena must be understood from a materialist standpoint-understanding what it is about the unions and 2nd International that led to their integration into the state. It is only thus that one can understand why a mass party for reforms within capitalism is, as soon as capitalism enters its historical period of decadence, when the capitalist expansion upon which those reforms were based becomes impossible, doomed to be integrated into the state's management of the national economy and doomed to lead workers' struggles into the hands of the state. Similarly, only with a materialist understanding can one grasp what it is about the structure of the unions in state capitalism that leads them to be enforcers of capitalist austerity, and police against real mass struggles.

What is  state capitalism.

"The debate on Russia or any specific economy has often clouded the issue of state capitalism as a general tendency in all capitalist countries and it is by no means clear what is meant by "state capitalism" as used by anyone from International Socialism [Cliffite] to Bordiga to Mattick." (A Contribution on the Question of State Capitalism)

Rather, "In the decadence of capitalism the general tendency towards state capitalism is one of the dominant characteristics of social life. In this period, each national capital, because it cannot expand in an unfettered way and is confronted with acute imperialist rivalries, is forced to organise itself as effectively as possible, so that externally it can compete economically and militarily with its rivals, and internally deal with the increasing aggravation of social contradictions. The only power in society which is capable of fulfilling these tasks is the state. Only the state can:

take charge of the national economy in an overall centralised manner and mitigate the internal competition which weakens the economy, in order to strengthen its capacity to maintain a united face against the competition on the world market.

develop the military force necessary for the defense of its interests in the face of growing international conflict.

finally, owing to an increasingly heavy repressive and bureaucratic apparatus, reinforce the internal cohesion of a society threatened with collapse through the increasing decomposition of its economic foundations; only the state can impose through an all-pervasive violence the preservation of a social structure which is less and less capable of spontaneously regulating human relations and which is more and more questioned the more it becomes an absurdity for the survival of society itself.

On the economic level this tendency towards state capitalism, though never fully realized, is expressed by the state taking over the key points of the productive apparatus. This does not mean the disappearance of the law of value, or competition, or the anarchy of production, which are the fundamental characteristics of the capitalist economy. These characteristics continue to apply on a world scale where the laws of the market still reign and still determine the conditions of production within each national economy however statified it may be. If the laws of value and of competition seem to be ‘violated', it is only so that they may have a more powerful effect on a global scale. If the anarchy of production seems to subside in the face of state planning, it reappears more brutally on a world scale, particularly during the acute crises of the system which state capitalism is incapable of preventing. Far from representing a ‘rationalization' of capitalism, state capitalism is nothing but an expression of its decay.

The statification of capital takes place either in a gradual manner through the fusion of ‘private' and state capital as is generally the case in the most developed countries, or through sudden leaps in the form of massive and total nationalizations, in general in places where private capital is at its weakest.
In practice, although the tendency towards state capitalism manifests itself in all countries in the world, it is more rapid and more obvious when and where the effects of decadence make themselves felt in the most brutal manner; historically during periods of open crisis or of war, geographically in the weakest economies. But state capitalism is not a specific phenomenon of backward countries. On the contrary, although the degree of formal state control is often higher in the backward capitals, the state's real control over economic life is generally much more effective in the more developed countries owing to the high level of capital concentration in these nations.
On the political and social level, whether in its most extreme totalitarian forms such as fascism or Stalinism or in forms which hide behind the mask of democracy, the tendency towards state capitalism expresses itself in the increasingly powerful, omnipresent, and systematic control over the whole of social life exerted by the state apparatus, and in particular the executive. On a much greater scale than in the decadence of Rome or feudalism, the state under decadent capitalism has become a monstrous, cold, impersonal machine which has devoured the very substance of civil society." (ICC Platform [9])

A couple of points about State Capitalism to be deepened

How did the transition to State Capitalism come about and through what mechanisms?
...The ICC's position is that "there is no section of the bourgeoisie which is the exclusive carrier of state capitalist tendencies: the military (as representatives of national unity and the "forces of order"), the technical bureaucracy, the educated elite, the disenfranchised tribal groups, or the powerful members of the private capitalist class in crisis can be instruments of the state capitalist tendency depending on the specific needs of the situation." (Contribution...) Still, it is important to understand why the system of monopoly capitalism developed into State capitalism, and why it could not have been otherwise.

Indeed, before the onset of state capitalism, the world market was divided into trusts, cartels, and syndicates based on industrial monopolies, sometimes international and transnational in character. Thus, "The tendency towards state capitalism did not appear as a gradual, intrinsic "rationalization" of the system. Unlike monopoly capital, which gradually grew out of laissez-faire competition without any particular planning or over-all design, state capitalist measures grew abruptly out of the situation during World War I as a conscious, economic policy of the national governments. State capitalism was not a direct outgrowth of the freely developed previous economic trends but was a breaking down of the tendency towards international cartels and trusts, a movement towards national concentration and unity." (Contribution...)

State Capitalism & Workers' Struggle

"State capitalism enchains the proletariat more firmly than ever, and it does it with its own traditions of struggle. This is because the capitalists, as a class, have drawn the lessons of experience and have understood that the essential weapon for preserving their class rule is not so much the police as direct ideological repression. The political party of the workers has become a capitalist party. What has happened with the trade unions, emptied of their former content and absorbed into the state, has also happened to what used to be the workers' party. ...the old objectives of struggle, linked to a bygone period, have disappeared, while the forms of struggle survive, without their former content." ("Evolution of Capitalism and the New Perspective [10]," Internationalisme 1952)

From this we have the question, what is the state? What does the ICC mean by saying that the unions & workers' reform parties are "part of the state"? Surely this doesn't mean that left parties are always in power or that in all periods the ruling class utilize the unions in the same way or collaborate openly. Is it because they don't challenge the state's framework? Because they participate in state initiatives (wars, arbitration boards, national economy plans)? Does every bourgeois ruler know what an ally they have in these organs and consciously use them? Or is it rather that the structure, material basis, and mode of existence and operation of these organs necessarily compels them to ACT as instruments of the state, even if they are unconscious of this? How much does Machiavellianism play into this?

Decadence:

The idea of state capitalism and what it implies is deeply tied to the notion of decadence-the idea that capitalism has long since reached the objective limits of its real expansion and thus campaigning for reforms from the state, and concessions from individual employers has become useless because these reforms and concessions cannot be granted in a lasting way. ...As Trotsky indicated, the reforms which had been possible in a certain period of capitalism had as their precondition the expansion of capitalism across the world and the expansion of the market and the accumulation of capital.

This notion of decadence is something that needs to be debated by revolutionaries, in order to ensure that the revolutionary strategies and forms of struggle are rooted in the objective historical reality of the development of capitalism. Just as the reforms of the 19th Century parliamentary and trade union struggle were only possible based on the expansion and accumulation of capitalism, revolutionaries need to know whether such expansion is possible and base their intervention on that knowledge. For communist revolution is only a possibility when it has become an objective historic necessity. State capitalism itself only exists on this same objective economic and historic basis.  

Jeff 2/1/10

After 8 years in Afghanistan, the international force led by the USA is sending in more troops. Far from a blow for democracy or the ‘war on terror', this conflict is turning the region into an ever worsening hell.

Eight years after the ‘great victory' that overthrew the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the international NATO and Enduring Freedom forces are not only still there, but due to be increased by another 30,000 US and 500 British troops with another 10,000 requested from NATO. The 100,000 international (and 200,000 Afghan) soldiers and police have already lost over 1200 dead and countless injured and maimed. In addition there have been more than 2100 civilian deaths caught in the crossfire of the Taliban, Al Qaeda terrorism and western forces, with the latter responsible for 40% of these deaths according to UNO (such as the 90 killed near water tankers in Kunduz last September). And the risk of death, from bombardment, drones and terrorist bombings has been exported across the border into Pakistan. This spread of chaos, fear and death is the first great achievement of this military adventure, which like operations in the Middle East, Iraq, or ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, are carried out for imperialist interests, however they may have been dressed up as ‘peace-keeping', ‘democracy' or the ‘war on terror' to disguise the build up of military tensions and sanitise the death and suffering visited on the population. To give an idea of western priorities, current US military spending is $100 million a day, while international aid by all donors is $7 million a day, and half that promised has never materialized - with Robert Gate proposing that the US cut off this sort of aid to punish corruption. Similarly France spends 200 million Euro for the army and 11 million on civilian aid. While the cost of the war to ‘save' the people of Afghanistan is $3.6 billion a month, the population suffers. Drug barons drive about in 4x4s along with other dignitaries while only 5% of aid goes to supporting legitimate agriculture that is not only the livelihood of 70% of the population but also key to stemming the tide of drugs.

Meanwhile around 50,000 children work on the streets of Kabul, cleaning cars, shining shoes, collecting papers, and still suffer hunger, disease, violence and slavery. Conditions are worsening throughout the country. Afghanistan's maternal mortality is the second highest in the world, but in the North-East province of Badakhshan, a centre of opium traffic, it is significantly worse with 6,500 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births, the highest rate ever recorded. 75% of the newborn die from lack of food, warmth and care. Furthermore on average a pregnant woman has a one in 8 chance of dying, and half of them are under 16. This UN study showing just one aspect of the devastation of war and poverty on the population has not been publicized by the British media, which is sufficiently bare faced to imply that the war is necessary to improve the position of women. The election fiasco was well publicized, as is criticism of the corruption of Karzai and his regime by Gordon Brown, Obama, Clinton and others, but he is their man!

More oil on the fire

Despite the failure of the military intervention Obama has announced a troop surge, a second one after sending an extra 17,000 in February. He is claiming that "these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011", although NATO secretary general Rasmussen has assured us that the troops are there for as long as it takes, and the US is planning to send in a ‘high representative' to take over day to day control in Kabul. The new troops show that Obama is following exactly the same strategy as his predecessor George Bush, with the same justification: "we cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear".

This is despite recent revelations that US forces had bin Laden ‘within their grasp' in 2001, but chose not to send the troops in to capture him and that Obama's national security advisor, James Jones, told Congress that Al Qaeda's presence is much reduced, with less than 100 operatives in the country, no base and no capacity to launch attacks against the ‘allies'. Even in Pakistan, the Wall Street Journal notes that Al Qaeda is pursued by US drones, short of money and having difficulty attracting young Arabs to fight in the bleak mountains of Pakistan. However, when Obama says that he will not tolerate a safe haven for terrorists, and that his policy must work for both sides of the border, this is clearly also a veiled threat against Pakistan.

So why such slaughter when the neither the threat of Al Qaeda nor the benefit to the population are in any way credible? Many of the ‘allies' are becoming more reluctant (Sarkozy has announced France will send no more troops, Germany is waiting till the New Year to decide) and even announcing the war is lost in advance. The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, told CNN that Canada does not report the war since it was not fighting with the insurgents - a US complaint about many of the ‘allies'. Obama's announcement told us that the troop surge is in "the national interest". Precisely.

For the USA the national interest is the control of this strategic region close to China, Iran and Russia, essential trade routes for primary commodities and a region that looks across to Africa from Asia. It is, therefore, a major prize for the world's greatest power, its allies and its rivals, all of whom have complete contempt for the population. We can expect imperialist forces will be fighting over and devastating this region and massacring the population for a long time to come.

Wilma/Alex 5/12/9

Today, a year after Obama's inauguration and the euphoria that accompanied it, what assessment can we make of the "change" that Obama was supposed to deliver? There's been plenty of change but not much of it for the better. The government still dreams up more bail-outs for the banking and auto industries, while unemployment is still going through the roof and has risen officially above 10 percent (in reality if we count  discouraged workers, who have given up looking for jobs that don't exist, and underemployed workers who are forced to accept part-time employment, it is close to 20 percent), foreclosures and evictions continue unabated, and slow, partial withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq has begun to enable Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan and unleash a virtual civil war in Pakistan (some bourgeois media pundits now call it the "Afpak" war. President Obama even became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner in history to deliver an acceptance speech justifying war.

At this time last year the ruling class enjoyed a great ideological victory and basked in the glow of the after-election euphoria and rejuvenation of the democratic mystification, which led to a lull in class struggle. At the time, we predicted that the euphoria would be short-lived, perhaps a year or a year-and-a-half until it wore off. As we noted in Internationalism 149, "the failure  of the Obama administration  to bring the promised ‘change' for the better will lead inevitably to disenchantment and seething discontent."  This has proven correct.  There has been considerable inroads into Obama's support, as his promises of "change" are increasingly revealed as demagogic rhetoric lacking substance.  Even the bourgeoisie's own polls show that Sarah Palin's approval ratings (48%) are higher than Obama at 44%! 

We have not yet reached the point where workers have returned to open struggles to resist the attacks on their standard of living on a large scale, but one year after the inauguration, the reality of the crisis and the current US imperialist orientation have increasingly exposed the vacuity and hypocrisy of the promises made for ‘change' and ‘peace', while the total inability to do anything at all vis-à-vis the environmental crisis has demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist system.    Today, if any dancing in the streets occurs at all, it is not over Obama's victory or speech at any summit about global warming, but for rejoicing over having found a job. As the economic crisis deepens and spreads, the bourgeoisie is more and more forced to frontally attack the working class with unprecedented brutality. Obama's strength rested on his charisma and his ability to galvanize, mesmerize, and mobilize the masses, especially the youth, behind the electoral mystification, with his empty promises, but that was the extent of his power. As we said in Internationalism 145 more than a year ago, even before Obama's victory:

 "No matter who wins, no matter who occupies the White House, the situation for the working class will be the same:

-our sons and daughters will be called upon to shed their blood for American imperialism, which will be forced to resort to more and more military interventions throughout the world

-the economic crisis will continue unabated attacking our wages, our standard of living, our health care, our pensions, our housing conditions, and social services

-the social divisions that exist in the U.S. will continue to worsen; the rich will get richer and the poor poorer

-unemployment will continue to grow the future will continue to look bleak."

Why so?  The difficulties the US ruling class has experienced on the international arena and the unpopularity of the previous administration among the working masses at home were not the result of Bush's idiosyncratic stupidity, but rather of capitalism's historical crisis as a social system, its failure and inability to address the enormous problems humanity is faced with on all levels of social life.  This historical crisis is most clearly expressed in the current economic crisis, which is neither a passing one, nor one of those crises ‘of growth' which the system experienced in its ascendency. It is rather a crisis of ‘senility'; its character is irreversible and its trajectory is toward a deepening and spreading of all the ills which ails it, like an old man dying of an incurable disease.  This is the essential reason why, regardless of who wins the election at any time, the promises for improving working and living conditions are a total lie aimed at buying social peace and trust in the democratic mystifications. 

For the working class, the onslaught of the present, most serious economic crisis in the history of capitalism has shattered any illusion it may have had regarding a ‘change' for the betterment of its economic conditions.  Reality has shown to be quite different from the mythology of the electoral mystification. In the context of this crisis, the Obama administration will be unsurpassed in the ferociousness and determination it will use to pass the most draconian attacks against workers' economic and working conditions, and social wage.

The intensification of exploitation, accompanied by further layoffs as companies try to protect profits, is on the agenda for the foreseeable future. This will be compounded by the impoverishment of the masses as state capitalism continues to escalate austerity attacks.  For example, the bail outs of a few months ago, but also of the ones to come, will engulf the masses in trillions of dollars of debt for generations to come, while not improving the present fragile situation of the world financial markets.  Slashes in social programs and state and local budgets also add to the impoverishment of the conditions of life and the list of the millions of unemployed.  The perspective for the working masses is not of improved working, social, and environmental conditions, but of a deepening and intensification of misery never seen before.

Despite the urgent need to address the looming environmental catastrophe, the latest ‘summit of the greatest' on global warming held in Copenhagen has done nothing but repeat what the previous such international gatherings have done: accomplish nothing other than getting bogged down in controversies which will be irresolvable as long as capitalism is the dominant system. By reason of the competitive nature of capitalism, the bourgeois governments of this world are incapable of the level of cooperation necessary to deal with the environmental crisis.  The relentlessness of the economic crisis has also silenced the talks about ‘green jobs' that were supposed to sprout from investing in ‘green technology'. It is clear that the ruling class has reached an impasse here too, as its system of exploitation has reached its historical limits and can no longer provide answers to the burning issues of humanity.

Regarding war and peace, as we said in our press at the time, the American bourgeoisie desperately needed a break with the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policies in order to restore its status on the international level.  Obama's promise to pursue a more ‘multilateral' approach appeased the European powers.  In this way, the US hoped it could redress the isolation it had found itself in during Bush's years and thereby re-gain its worldwide authority.  This approach, however, has only given mixed results: the US is currently, if only temporarily enjoying greater popularity among the European powers.  Also, greater diplomatic ‘openness' results in smaller imperialisms taking advantage of the present US flexibility to advance their own interests.  This means that there will be no ending to imperialist barbarism.

Obama was not a "peace" candidate. We knew this at the time of his campaign, but if anyone had still any doubts, the recent decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan certainly should dispel them.  His criticism of Bush was that the latter got bogged down in Iraq, spread the troops too thinly, and left American imperialism incapable of responding adequately to future challenges to its dominance. That the current US imperialist policy is a continuation of Bush's is best demonstrated by Obama's very words at the speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, in December 2009: "We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.  So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play."

Here are the words of a true war monger! And not so different from Bush's words themselves, either! As Obama himself admitted, we can only expect the continuation of militaristic interventions for decades to come, as the US defends its dominance as the world's only remaining superpower. This is why the US current policy, rather than resulting in ‘peace', aims at a far-ranging re-assessment of what geo-political realignment and diplomacy can best help it achieve its goal of recuperating the terrain lost by a decade of policy damage wrecked by the Bush administration. This is the meaning for the cessation of military operations in Iraq, which, while still allowing the US to occupy the area with 100,000 troops stationed outside the major cities of this country and in the Persian Gulf, gives the US both a respite from the criticism by the working class at home, and an opportunity to better deploy in Afghanistan and, above all, Pakistan.  This is a strategic area that can allow the US to confront Iran to the West, the Caucasus and Russia to the North, China and India to the East.  It is particularly because of China's rise as an imperialist power that the US sees the need to adjust its policies regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan. So much for ‘peace'!

Bourgeois elections are the most sophisticated swindle devised by a ruling class.   The promises Obama made were the result of a very  well orchestrated campaign which aimed at refurbishing democratic mystifications. They also aimed at helping the US regain credibility and authority in the international arena. The actions taken by the Obama administration since it has taken power prove that the working class cannot trust the falsehoods concocted by any presidential candidate, whether black, white, male, or female. Capitalism has reached its historic limit and lies, falsehoods, and untruths will not be able to reverse its chronic path of decay.

Ana, 12/19/9

Despite all the talk about the recovery of the economy, the jobs have not returned, and those who still have jobs are still haunted by the threat of unemployment.

The political sham

Meanwhile, the ongoing political drama on Capitol Hill over the extension of unemployment benefits looks more and more like a daytime soap-opera. The delay in the Senate in late February over the extension of unemployment benefits led to a temporary lapse in benefits for close to one million people. There's lots of bickering with the major capitalist parties blocking each other's measures, while painting their opponents as inconsiderate, out-of-touch, or incompetent.

These back-and-forth battles serve a number of objectives for the ruling class. When the Democrats blame the Republicans for failing to extend unemployment benefits the aim is to present the state as the ultimate social guardian, the lie that the state cares for the needy and protects its citizens. But the very nature of these extensions is that they are only happening one month at a time, constantly keeping the unemployed waiting, worrying, dependent, and always on the verge of total destitution. Despite the claims of "concern" these measures aim to maintain the feeling of helplessness and powerless among the unemployed which is already created by the frustratingly complex and humiliating processes of applying for and collecting these benefits in the first place.

This feeling of powerlessness is reinforced by the mechanism of the unemployment benefits system itself, whereby each unemployed worker relates to the state as an isolated individual - a needy person asking for help - powerless to do anything but beg. But where the individual can feel lost the working class has the capacity to collectively confront the state.

The Republicans, on the other hand speak the language of "fiscal responsibility" to try and reinforce the stereotype of the unemployed not trying hard enough, and being a drain on the national economy. This propaganda tries to mask the real extent of capitalism's crisis as well as undermine the real solidarity those in work feel for those who are unemployed.

Yet when workers see the petty squabbling between the parties it's not taken as proof that one or the other is uncaring or incompetent, but that the state in general, does not care about unemployment. And the idea that the unemployed are undeserving wears thin when more than 1 in 6 people in the US are either out of work or working part-time because they cannot find jobs, and when every worker knows that he or she could be laid off at a moment's notice, like so many others already have been.

A deepening catastrophe

The official unemployment rate in the United States for March was already 10.2%, but if we count those who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, this number is raised to 11.5%, and if we add workers who are employed part-time because they can't find full-time work, the number is 17.5% of the civilian population. [1] On top of that this final figure doesn't say anything about the number of workers who've entered the military due to difficulty in finding work, nor does it count those among the chronically unemployed who have turned to crime and are serving prison sentences. A 2009 study from Rutgers University estimated that only 43% of the unemployed are actually collecting benefits.[2]

Among those who do receive benefits, the average length of their unemployment, as of February 2010, was 29.7 weeks (30.2 in January), with 41.2% of those receiving benefits already past the normal benefit period and into emergency benefits. These figures are the highest on record.[3] A recent statement from Goldman Sachs estimates that in the coming months as many as 400,000 people will lose their benefits. Paying out at an average of $1200 a month per person this means roughly $0.5 billion lost in monthly compensation for these workers, which, in turn, presents major problems for the US economy as it reduces potential consumer spending.[4] With less benefit payments in circulation, unemployed workers will have to cut their spending, thus leading to further economic woes as US consumers will be providing an even less adequate market for commodities produced.

As an indicator of what capitalism has to offer to the working class, unemployment expresses the grim truth of capitalism's dead end very clearly. The crisis of unemployment in many ways expresses the central historic crisis of capitalism: overproduction. Capitalism can only continue its cycle of reproduction at the cost of excluding ever greater numbers of producers from the process of production and thus of their means of earning a livelihood.

But, from the point of view of the exploited working class the phenomenon of mass unemployment can act as a powerful stimulant to the development of class consciousness.

How can unemployed workers fight back?

At first, layoffs and unemployment present a very significant obstacle to the class struggle. The bourgeoisie still try to use the unemployed as blackmail against those who are still working to keep them from struggling. And in addition to having to beg to the state and being made to wait on the mercies of the bourgeoisie for another month's rent, unemployed workers may also feel powerless without the weapon of the strike. But, while the unemployed can't strike, they are still part of the working class, and the struggle of unemployed workers is at its strongest when they see themselves as a part of the wider struggle of the working class as a whole. As the ICC wrote in 1978:

"The struggle of the class for wages isn't a sum of struggles by each worker against his individual exploitation, but a general struggle against capital's exploitation of the labor power of the whole working class. The struggle of the unemployed against miserable unemployment pay or rents or social services (gas, electricity, transport etc) has the same basic nature as the struggle for wages. Although it's true that this doesn't immediately show itself in a clear way, it is still based on the global struggle against the extraction of immediate or past, direct or indirect, surplus value which the working class has suffered and continues to suffer. (...) It is not true that the unemployed workers can only participate in the class struggle by taking part in or supporting the workers at work (solidarity with and support for strikes). It is by directly defending themselves tooth and nail against the conditions capital imposes on them, in the place it makes them occupy, that the unemployed workers make their struggle an integral part of the general struggle of the working class against capital, and as such this struggle has to be supported by the entire class." (International Review 14 [16])

If we look to the struggles of the unemployed in the United States in the 1930s, we can see that the unemployed can struggle on a mass basis to fight the state for their interests as part of the working class, even in the darkest periods of counter-revolution. In the first years of the Great Depression, unemployed councils were organized in the neighborhoods of Harlem and the Lower East Side of New York City, which occupied relief offices en masse, stormed City Hall, engaged in demonstrations, and opposed evictions and other attacks with the force of numbers and resolute class violence. Before long, similar loose organizations of the unemployed sprang up all over the country.

The tactics used were in the beginning very effective and entirely on a class terrain. One of the most dramatic ways the unemployed resisted attacks was during evictions. Someone in the neighborhood would hear of a neighbor being evicted for not paying rent and would run down to where the unemployed council met to get everyone to rush to the evictee's apartment. Along the way they would meet others and explain the situation and by the time they would arrive at the apartment, there could be one or two hundred unemployed workers standing outside, opposed to maybe ten police marshals who were moving the furniture out. The crowd would surround them and either fight them to prevent them moving the furniture, or would simply begin putting the furniture back in the home.

Unemployed workers would also storm charities and relief offices with large crowds demanding funds and financial help to pay for rent, groceries, etc., refusing to leave until these payments were made. Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's book Poor People's Movements: Why they Succeed and How they Fail describes these tactics of disruption and direct class violence in more detail and demonstrates that they often yielded results. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais' Labor's Untold Story for example, claims that strongarm tactics against evictions restored 77,000 evicted families to their homes in New York City alone. Despite being cut off from the point of production, unemployed workers were still able to force the bourgeoisie to back off.

However, the political climate of the 1930s was very disorientating. The Communist Parties everywhere promoted the reactionary idea of "Socialism in one country" with reference to Russia, and, with the Popular Front in Europe and support for the New Deal in the US, showed their support for the national capital everywhere. This led to great confusion even among genuinely revolutionary elements, as the Communist Parties became more and more actively counter-revolutionary.

Most of the unemployed councils in the US had a core of Communist Party members but were not really permanent organs for reform. They were small groups of workers who were able to draw others into sporadic defensive struggles as they erupted. Yet most of the Stalinized Communists were not happy with this. They wanted a permanent, mass, reform organization for the unemployed, and began to form an organization for more "disciplined" and "systematic" campaigns for electoral "pressure" to win things for the unemployed. Portraying the New Deal as a great working-class reform, they directed their energies toward building a voting bloc, lobbying "progressive" Democrats in government. This is how the Communist Party sabotaged the movement. Local initiative vanished, the disruptive tactics were suppressed in order to be diverted into electoral politics, and many of the Communist Party members were eventually recruited into working for the new social welfare programs the state undertook - directly administering the state's austerity in the vain hopes that they could do this "for the unemployed."

Additionally, the general attitude of the working class in the 1930s around the world was profoundly marked by the defeat of the revolutionary attempts of 1917-1923. After the defeat of its most important struggles - and the murder, disintegration, or betrayal of the most influential revolutionaries and militant workers - the working class was profoundly disoriented around the world. Seeing no possibility of another revolutionary offensive against the bourgeois order, the working class was dragooned into the arms of the state.

The US government was able to isolate and compartmentalize the working class by treating the unemployed, those employed by the new Works Progress Administration, and those in regular employment as separate categories. The state also related to workers as individuals through the new administrations set up in the New Deal, thus fragmenting the class into a mass of separate citizens, each relating to the state as only one person asking for assistance, rather than as a class confronting the state with demands. The state was able to pass itself off as the guarantor of social solidarity and savior of the needy with unemployment insurance programs, social security, public works programs, and other measures. All these were, of course, financed with taxes levied from those members of the working class still receiving an income at work. These measures didn't show the generosity of the ruling class. On the contrary the bourgeoisie was able to divide the workers still at work from the unemployed, demanding sacrifices from the former in the name of the latter.

Prospects for the future

These social spending programs were relatively new at the time, and therefore much more suited to disorienting a defeated working class. Today, in contrast, we are witnessing the unraveling of all the so-called "welfare state," public debts that would have been unthinkable to the engineers of the New Deal. More importantly, today the working class is willing to struggle and has not had a revolutionary attempt crushed for generations.

The state is exploiting notions of a kind of solidarity to push through austerity attacks (such as the recent healthcare reform), and there are still many illusions in the power of the state to resolve the crisis. However, given the massive nature of unemployment and the more and more obvious impasse of capitalism, the bourgeois state has great difficulties in selling the ideological campaign against the unemployed as being ‘lazy' and has not succeeded in dividing the class between employed and unemployed.

Of greatest importance is the growing force of the class struggle, both internationally and in the US. In recent years we have seen the massive struggle of students and workers against the CPE law in France in 2006. In the time since the crash kicked in there have been the struggles in December 2008 in Greece, and their continuing echo in 2010. There were the solidarity struggles in Britain in the winter and summer of 2009, and this winter the nation-wide struggle of the Tekel tobacco workers in Turkey, and closer to home the massive mobilization of students (predominantly working class) in California against the state's austerity measures. All these have shown that workers are not going to bow their heads and allow themselves to be sacrificed to pay for capitalism's crisis.

The struggles have shown  a strong tendency for inter-generational solidarity (something that workers unleashing struggles in the 60s and 70s often lacked), and, most recently, in Vigo, Spain we have seen a joint struggle of the unemployed and the employed in the shipyards.[5]

Laid-off workers in Vigo demonstrated outside the factory gates of the Bolsa shipyards against the deplorable conditions that foreign workers were living in and the shameful tactic of exploiting immigrant labor in particularly bad conditions in order to lay off workers whose salaries were deemed too costly for the company. Those laid-off made it clear that they were not against foreign workers or immigrant labor being used, but against the terrible conditions these workers lived in and that they were not hired under the previous agreement that had governed the living standards of workers in that industry. They brought a megaphone and invited the workers outside for a mass assembly calling on them to join in their struggle and a majority came out and marched with them all through the shipyards stopping work at all the major factories. These workers have shown the power that the working class has when it refuses to let itself be divided into the unemployed and the employed, or into foreign and native workers. With the solidarity of their unemployed comrades, the employed workers had the courage and strength to stop work and demand that the previous agreement be kept to, and the unemployed, rather than resigning themselves to their fate, were able to call on those at the point of production to further their struggle!

Unemployed workers can resist and fight back in their position as unemployed workers even without the strike weapon. But when they enlist the active solidarity of workers still at work, when they convince them to enter the struggle, they not only gain the advantage of disturbing the production process, but the very regroupment of workers as a class, both employed and unemployed, already implicitly poses a number of political questions about the bourgeois order, and terrifies the ruling class.

Capitalism uses unemployment and the threat of unemployment to blackmail, pacify, and discourage the working class from struggling. Everywhere the ruling class tries to tie the unemployed as individuals to the state and prevent their struggles from linking up with the rest of the working class, and tells the rest of the workers to "keep your head down, or it'll be you on the chopping block next."

Despite the traps of demoralization, the class struggle is strongest when the unemployed and the employed unite their struggles and overcome the obstacles the bourgeoisie puts in their way. Unemployed workers see that they have allies still at work and workers on the job know that they have allies in the streets that aren't tied to one particular workplace. The impulses of solidarity can help generalize the struggle throughout the whole working class, give it a political direction, and create a force that can take on the ruling class. Unemployment starts as a problem for the working class but can become a factor in the process that makes the working class a threat to capitalism.

Soyonstout 9/4/10

[1].- Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Table A-15. Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization."

[2].- John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. "The Anguish of Unemployment." September 2009.

[3].-  Michael A. Fletcher and Dana Hedgpeth "Are unemployment benefits no longer temporary?" Washington Post. March 9, 2010.

[4].- This report is available on several financial blogs, including ZeroHedge and the ShiftCTRL Group blog.

[5].-  See the ICC's article online at https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/3/vigo [17] for more details of this struggle

With great fanfare Mr. Obama on March 23 signed into federal law the health care reform legislation that the House had passed with a narrow majority two days before. News media sympathetic to the Democratic Party have hailed the new health care legislation as a "historical reform", a "towering achievement", a "landmark win for the American People" who are supposedly closer than ever to the promised land of guaranteed medical services. It has been a remarkable turn of events for a policy that seemed all but dead two months ago, when the Democratic Party lost its ability to pass legislation on a party line basis when it lost its supermajority in the Senate with the election of the Republican J. Brown following the death of Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy.

With the signing into law of the Democrat sponsored health care reform, a page has been turned on a highly charged political drama that has dominated US politics for many months. Yet the spectacle of bitter divisions between America's two main capitalist parties around the question of health care seems to be far from over. Already the Republican Party politicians and their supporters have ratcheted up their oppositional rhetoric, portraying the new bill as a "government health care takeover", an "assault on Americans individual freedoms" and vowing to repeal the new health care legislation. The stage is being set for a second act of vitriolic finger pointing and legalistic maneuvers while both parties fervently position themselves to use the health care issue to gain votes in the next Congressional mid-term elections. So, the circus is far from over!

Both sides are cynical liars

Throughout all these vicious factional ‘debates' within the ruling class, from left to right of the political spectrum, all politicians have a common message: they all want what is best for the nation, for society at large and for every individual of the American population. They all pretend that capitalism has a human face and that this system cares for the health and the well being of those that it exploits. Both sides are cynically exploiting for their own political ends, the very real dreadful  state in America of a great part of the medical services accessible to the working class and other strata of the population. Who are they kidding? It is obvious that in America as in any other country there are two health care systems, one for the ruling class and the well-to-do and other for the rest of society. It is true than in the worst-off capitalist countries medical services are practically nonexistent for the working masses, while, at the other extreme, most industrialized countries have a long-standing tradition of a more or less well developed health care system. However for decades now, world capitalism's worsening economic crisis has everywhere put medical services for the working class in the line of fire. The so-called "socialized" medicine under the centralized control of the national states that exists in one form or another throughout Europe is everywhere leaking water. As a result it is not hard at all for the self-interested defenders of the "American health care model" to point to horror stories from the "socialized" care systems. Nonetheless in America things are no better (in many important respects they are worse: according to OECD Health Data for 2004, the US spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care than other industrialized countries, yet has fewer doctors and nurses per 1000 inhabitants, lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality.)  The patchwork of government and privately controlled medical services (Medicare, Medicaid, employment based medical coverage....) that pass for health care system for the working class and the destitute, have  also been under attack for decades. In every industry that still offers medical insurance as part of the salary paid as "benefits", workers have been paying directly from their wages a growing part of their medical needs in the form of co-payments and direct contributions towards insurance premiums. The Medicare and Medicaid programs have been tweaked around in order to impose austerity measures by both Republican and Democratic administrations alike. In fact the American health care "model" competes very well on horror stories with its European counterparts and even compares badly to them in two points: It costs far more, yet still leaves 15% of the population (45 million people) without any permanent medical coverage.

Behind "Health Care Reform", Capitalism's economic interests

 Against the pile of lies of all the left and right wing politicians that pretend to be acting in the best interests of society as a whole, let's be clear that under capitalism there is nothing humanitarian in the way health care is provided for the working class. For capital, medical services are an expense, a part of the total cost of production and reproduction of the commodity labor power and as such subject to the laws of capitalist production. That in some countries the government runs a national health care system directly while in others like the US the state shares the field with the private sector does not in essence make any real difference. In the end, for capitalism as a whole the medical upkeep of the working class is an expense that the national state needs to control in an economically rational way in order to be able to compete in the world market. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the first state health care was introduced in Germany in 1883 by the monarchist government of Otto von Bismarck essentially for two reasons: first, to increase workers' productivity, and second to stop workers from being attracted to the revolutionary politics of the Socialist Party.

The American bourgeoisie has recognized for years that the American health care system is expensive and inefficient, and, in the end, detrimental to the ability of the national capital to defend its interests in the world economy (to give just one example, in 2005 G Richard Wagoner, then the boss of General Motors, estimated that health benefits added $1,500 to the cost of every car built by GM). Only the right wing extremists in and out of the Republican Party, whose ideology blinds them to the interests of the national capital as a whole, can still defend the supposed virtues of the "American health care model". In fact the so-called health care reform legislation that the Democrats have managed to pass is driven not by altruism, but by the economic needs of American capitalism, and is by no means a "socialist" gift of the American government to the working class. Sure if all goes as planned more workers will have medical coverage as a result of this legislation - though by government calculations 13 million will still go without medical insurance - but this increase in the covered population will be financed in large part directly by the newly insured themselves, who will be obliged by law to buy their own medical insurance or pay a fine to the federal government.

Workers need to defend their own interests

From a working class perspective there is nothing to win in the "Health care reform". Besides the fact that the new legislation will eventually imposed an excise tax on the so-called "Cadillac plans" that still cover many workers, it will do nothing to address the main concerns today regarding their medical needs: the surging share of medical services that workers are obliged to pay from their own wages and the deteriorating quality of the health care that they receive. With the worsening of capitalism's economic crisis, the bosses will continue attacking working class living conditions as they try to make workers bear the brunt of its system collapse. These attacks will often come disguised as "reforms" - health care reform, immigration reform, social security reform... to make them more palatable to the working class. Workers will hear much about the need to oppose these "bad" policies in elections. However the response of the working class to these attacks can only be its intransigent independent collective struggle for the defense of its living conditions. It is only by developing this struggle at the point of production and the streets through the mass strike and its class independent organization (mass assemblies, strike committees...) uniting the unemployed and employed, that the working class can beat back capitalism's attacks. Against capitalism's drive to destroy humanity workers need to oppose their own revolutionary perspective.  Eduardo Smith 7/4/10

On March 4, 2010, following months of draconian budget cuts and furloughs in the higher education system throughout the United States, a national day of action was called by a variety of organizations across the political spectrum, including a number of leftist organizations, but also anarchists. The slogan adopted was "save education", a deceptive way of framing the issues at stake, as it is used to contain the student movement within the illusion of democratic reformism and also to characterize the cuts to public education as ‘particular' or unique, as if this was the only sector under attack. This is why there is often an improper framing of the question as being one based on a political emasculation of education. In fact, the crisis in education is a direct result of the deepening generalized crisis of capitalism and the student struggle needs to be understood in that context. The proper positioning of the student struggle in the larger class conflict is vital to understanding the dynamism of the struggle as capitalist contradictions are further exacerbated. It is also important to understand the weaknesses, limits, but also potential of the student movement, if it is to achieve that potential to the full.

The background: the economic crisis

It should serve as no surprise to anyone that California is the scene for the more numerous, well attended, and concerted actions by the student movement. California is home to three higher education systems: University of California (UC), California State University (CSU) and California Community College-(CCC) with CCC serving as the largest higher education system in the world. These three systems share 160,000[1], 433,000[2] and 3,000,000[3] students respectively - or roughly 10% of the entire population California. The state's severe fiscal crisis, a $20bn deficit - the largest both in the state's history and of any other state in the nation, has resulted in cuts across the state as the government frantically tries to stave off defaulting on loan payments. The situation in California is so severe that top financial leaders like the head of JP Morgan Chase have characterized California's fiscal situation as worse than that of Greece - a country wracked by internal instability and increasingly dire financial woes. This situation has led the Sunshine State to straddle the three higher education systems with increasingly drastic cuts. For the 2009-10 school year, across these three systems there was a total budget cut of $1.7bn - divided among the three systems roughly equally but with each system finding their own ways of adjusting to it. UC and CSU increased their respective tuitions by 30% and have instituted pay cuts and furloughs for their employees, while the CCC campuses are cutting classes, to a point  where students are unable to enroll in classes necessary for transfer or graduation.

This situation is especially toxic when taken in conjunction with the debt that often weighs down graduates from these higher education systems. The California Postsecondary Education Commission, a government institution, stated in 2007 that "rising tuition and fees and increased cost of living are putting a squeeze on lower-income to upper middle-income families, causing students and parents to incur substantial debt."[4] It's notable that this was written in 2007, before the financial crisis and the tailspin the economy has been spiraling in since. At the time of the report, the average debts for graduates from California's higher education systems were $12,459 for four year institutions and $9,214 for two year institutions. That's not the end of the story, however, as often times these loans are further compounded by Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (PLUS), which are taken out by parents to pay for their children's education, and which were averaged at $12,066 and $12,742, respectively. This allows for quite a range of debt burden for the multitude of students in the California's education system. On the whole many graduates will leave school already facing interest payments on the loans they accumulate from their years in college, which often adversely affect not just the students but also their families, who take out loans on their behalf.

It is in this framework that the class nature of the cuts to education begins to take shape. The rising cost of education, manifested in the most vulnerable segments of the student population as increasing debt burden, and the budget cuts compounded with that rise are part of the generalized and direct assaults on the working class' living standards. Education functioned for many as a means to achieve a better material condition and the public education system in California was once one of the most accessible. The mechanism of student debt is used to incorporate the student population into the state apparatus and deter radical action. In many ways, today's student loans relegate the student to a modern form of debt slavery and this condition tends to encourage docility. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, it is the working class that is asked to bear the brunt of these austerity measures so as to weather the storm of the capitalist crisis. This is repeated throughout the economy. As the reality of the crisis shatters the rose-tinted glasses of even the most optimistic bourgeois economists, the working class is again called to take the force of the recession through layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts, and cuts to the social wage, as the present assault on public education illustrates.

This situation isn't just limited to the United States. Austerity measures are being called throughout the industrialized world, and public services like education are routinely targeted as avenues for rescuing the ailing capitalist economies. The assault on education in California is directly connected to the attacks against the working class on a global scale. In Greece, a country weighed down with a $419bn debt, Prime Minister George Papandreou has described the economic crisis as a "wartime situation."[5] This has unleashed a new round of massive cuts which the working class has to absorb through increased taxes and deep cuts in public services. This has exacerbated an already volatile social situation within Greece. Their student movement, set off in late 2008 by the police murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, set off a cascade of open confrontations with both the police and, in some cases, the unions. The student demonstrations were not confined to students alone, often reaching into work places and complementing strikes against the increasing attacks against the working class.

Weaknesses and potential of the student movement

Out of this global situation arises the California student movement. The movement is best understood not as a single entity but as a constellation of movements. Although there are many different ideas present in the student movement, many of the student organizers are inevitably inexperienced and often times student actions fall into the camps of labor unions. With the budget cuts directly affecting the constituency of workers on individual campuses, the labor unions are in a power play with individual campus administrations to maintain their heretofore established influence on the campus. Students are mobilized by the labor unions, often through groups on campus promoting supposed "worker-student" solidarity and are then funneled into actions designed to promote a union agenda - hence the popular slogan at student protests "We have the power/What power?/Union power!" Beyond symbolic, and innocuous, protests on individual campuses, the unions and their allies in the student population also promote an electoralist agenda which calls on students to write to their legislatures in Sacramento and lobby for a reversal of the budget cuts. These demands are often framed on a mystified notion of the university and, through the promotion of the union apparatus, derail the class nature of the crisis itself. They ignore the fact both that the State of California is simply unable to provide funding in the face of a massive deficit and that restoring the budgets of the various higher education systems would necessitate cutting from other sectors serving the state's population: this is neither here nor their for the narrow framework of union chauvinism. Spinning off of this framework is a camp of student leaders calling for an empowerment of the unions but through the use of a highly ideological racialized rhetoric which actually seeks to replace class with race. I was recently at an event with proponents of this idea where one of them talked about "reframing the debate in order to understand that anti-blackness gave rise to capital." The rhetorical focus is "anti-blackness," but this is expanded along a hierarchy of the oppressed and is used as a form of analyzing the education crisis as a racial crisis. This framework is incredibly reactionary as it actually exacerbates divisions within the student movement along racial lines. This group is marginal in their numbers but influential insofar as to their ability to tap into divisions fostered by the ruling class for over a century in order to quell class solidarity.

There are, however, students who break free from this and recognize this dichotomy as two bourgeois manifestations fighting over the scraps of an ailing system that extends beyond the university proper. These students function along broadly anarchist/communist lines and favor a variety of tactics often decried by unions and their supporters as being too incendiary. A popular tactic is one of building occupations and various forms of confrontational protest such as attempting to seize highways. An accepted slogan of this camp is "occupy everything, demand nothing" and they are heavily influenced by Situationism. They also draw a certain inspiration from the Greek student struggles in their self-described assault on "commodified life" (though when we consider that the Greek students also described themselves as belonging to the "400 euro generation" - ie those who have to survive on $550 per month - we can only wonder how much access to "commodities" they really have!) Theoretically, this grouping is closest towards grasping the educational crisis as being part of the permanent crisis of capitalism. The foundation of their slogan is that capital cannot afford any concessions, it cannot afford any reforms and therefore what remains is to take over what exists and reorient it for use by all. This group, while very good at getting publicized, is still a very small fraction within the developing student movement.

These divisions run deep and are highly fractious in the increasing momentum of the student movement. A popular organizational form arising on campuses are general assemblies and these have varied in their makeup. Often depending entirely on who put them together, they're dominated by any of the aforementioned camps and it becomes very difficult to make headway into presenting a dissenting opinion. This is again due to the inexperienced nature of the many of the students getting involved in this movement and this allows more seasoned union bureaucrats and their supporters to turn these spaces into platforms for their organizations.

However, many students are increasingly aware of the opportunistic elements within the movement. As the contradictions of capitalist democracy are progressively exposed through the sheer arrogance of its representatives and their inability to make any sort of concession, much of the discussion within the freer general assemblies has moved towards ideas of student-worker solidarity beyond the union and the legislature. A certain ambivalence still exists on the question of strikes and more militant working class action, but there is a noticeable increase in the radicalization of the student population since the March 4 event.

There is an increased interest in reaching out not just to workers but also to high school and middle school students and their teachers. This was successfully pulled off in the Oakland March 4 rally in which upwards of 1000 students walked out of their schools and participated in a rally - many of the speakers had never spoken in public before but they, children really, were yelling into the bullhorn about the destruction of the public education system.[6] There is a lot of potential power within the California student movement because, despite the efforts of those who would derail the class nature of the crisis, there is an increasing number who reject the entire discourse and seek out other explanations. There is a rising understanding that the problem facing students is not a problem of mismanagement, but deep systemic crisis that affects the entire world. 

AS 5/4/10

[1].- www.ucop.edu/sas/sfs/docs/loan_rfp_att_1.pdf [21]

[2] .- www2.calstate.edu [22]

[3] .- www.cccco.edu/Portals/4/News/press_releases/2009/Enrollment_Surge_CCCs_%... [23]

[4].- www.cpec.ca.gov/Agendas/Agenda0709/Item_14.pdf [24]

[5].- news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8546589.stm [25]

[6].-  https://oaklandnorth.net/2010/03/04/oakland-students-and-teachers-turn-out-for-march-4-pickets-disaster-drills/ [26]

At least since the debacle of 2000 Presidential Election, which brought the often incompetent and clumsily bellicose Bush administration into office, Internationalism has often pointed to the increasing difficulty of the U.S. capitalist class  to manipulate its electoral apparatus in order to achieve the optimum political outcome in the interests of the overall national capital.

However, with the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, the U.S. bourgeoisie at last seemed to have put the Bush years behind it. The new administration was supposed to reinvigorate confidence in the democratic and electoral process, revive the United States' standing in the world arena and enact policies and legislation to address pressing problems facing the national capital, which the Bush administration had either ignored or bungled.

Yet even prior to Obama's electoral victory a new political movement had begun to emerge, determined to derail his election and/or obstruct and ruin his administration should he take power. This movement has evolved today into a self-styled grassroots "alternative" political party: the so-called "Tea Party." In this article, we will review the emergence of the Tea Party during the Presidential campaign and the first year of the Obama administration and attempt to draw some preliminary conclusions about the significance of this movement in the life of the U.S. bourgeoisie.

Originally emanating from the right-wing fringes of the American political spectrum, such as racist white militia groups, hyper-libertarian anti-tax activists, various incarnations of Christian fundamentalists, anti-immigration activists and assorted other extremists, nasty rumors - spread via right wing talk radio and the internet - begin to circulate during the Presidential campaign that Obama was really a Muslim agent, sent to take over the federal government and surreptitiously lead America's capitulation to the terrorists. Other equally ridiculous rumors asserted that Obama's election as President would be illegitimate since he was really born in Indonesia, violating the Constitution's requirement that the President be a "natural born" United States citizen. These bizarre claims of the far right fringe begin to exert a serious weight in the 2008 election campaign, as Republican Party political operatives tacitly encouraged these rumors with the full cooperation of a salacious media.  Despite ample evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii and his numerous proclamations that he was - in fact - a Christian, public opinion polls conducted in the months prior to the election consistently showed a significant percentage of the electorate believing Obama was really a Muslim or a foreign born person ineligible for the Presidency.

As the 2008 election campaign heated up in the summer and fall, these claims were given new life by Republican candidate John McCain's nomination of the far right, libertarian Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. Palin - an often volatile political novice - immediately injected a new round of cutting political rhetoric into the campaign. From the summer up until the election in November, the official Republican line attacked Obama as a "socialist" and a "Marxist," who during his days as a "community activist" in urban Chicago, associated with terrorists from the New Left. Just as the American banking system was collapsing in the wake of the housing market and sub-prime loan debacles, the Presidential campaign was defined by Republican Party operatives' attempts to brand Barack Obama a proponent of "big government socialism"!

However, Obama always enjoyed the determined backing of a very significant fraction of the American ruling class, who had recognized the imperative need for a break with the Bush era. This fraction was aided in its efforts to win over many of the more uncertain elements by the near collapse of the American banking system - just weeks before the election. This changed the campaign debate, giving Obama the ultimate impetus to win the election. The lame duck Bush administration orchestrated a massive federal government bail-out of Wall Street and the banks, which prevented a catastrophic outcome in the short term. However, the bail-outs proved deeply unpopular with the public at large and a "Wall Street vs. Main Street" theme emerged in the Presidential campaign, giving a natural advantage to the Democrat Obama (despite his open support for the bail-outs). Faced with the growing realization that an economic crisis of untold proportions lay ahead, many - who otherwise may have supported McCain and Palin on cultural and social grounds - held their nose and decided to vote for the Democrat and soon to be first "African-American" President.

After the election, the right-wing reaction

While the dominant factions of the bourgeoisie celebrated Obama's victory in November and his stated intention to address many pressing problems facing the U.S. state - such as the nation's arcane health care system, which boasts higher costs and worse outcomes than any other industrialized nation - the right-wing plotted its next move. Within weeks of his inauguration, a new challenge to Obama and the Democrats emerged born of the ideological detritus of the various permutations of anti-Obama rhetoric spewed during the Presidential campaign: the so-called "Tea Party."

The Tea Party boasts of its "grassroots" appeal in its stated intention to oppose the bail out of Wall Street and punish the greedy bankers, while at the same time fighting the growth of the federal government, "pork barrel" spending, increased taxes and the so-called "socialism" and "Marxism" of the new Obama administration. Spurred on by right-wing radio and the internet blogosphere, and even given legitimacy by Republican politicians, including Sarah Palin, the Tea Party - despite its grossly eclectic ideological allegiances - has grown over the last year into a serious political force in American politics.

Tea Party ideology is said to have had a major role in the Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate Race in February of 2010, which saw the long time Democratic held seat of Edward "Ted" Kennedy pass into Republican hands and which cost the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate. Similarly, right-wing Republican political candidates have taken up Tea Party ideological themes in advance of the 2010 Congressional elections. Some Tea Party inspired candidates have launched primary challenges to unseat well-established Republicans, including 2008 Presidential candidate John McCain.

The campaign around ‘health reform'

However, the Tea Party movement is most famous today for the part it played in the political and media circus surrounding Obama's health care "reform" efforts, which has dominated U.S. domestic politics for months. Tea Party inspired demonstrations have taken place across the country, protesting against what they see as a "government takeover" of health care embodied in Obama's plan to force everyone to buy health insurance from private, profit-seeking insurance companies, as well as the plan's overall cost, which they believe will increase the national debt.These demonstrations are often replete with provocative slogans decrying "Obamunism" and stoking fear of legislation that would supposedly create "death panels," through which government bureaucrats would decide when to "pull the plug" on elderly and terminally ill patients. Faced with pressure from the right wing base of the party now dominated by Tea Party ideology, sitting Republican Congressmen and Senators have taken up many Tea Party slogans, calling the health care "reform" legislation, "the loss of freedom" in America.

Now that the health care legislation has passed, Republicans pledge to repeal it at first chance, while grassroots Tea Party activists make death threats against Democratic Congressmen, smash Democratic Party office windows and vow to "resist" legislation they call an "attack on freedom" by "any means necessary."  Meanwhile, Democratic leaders protest the "decline of civility" in politics, excoriate their Republican colleagues for failing to adequately denounce the dangerous rhetoric on the right, and publicly fear for their own safety.  American domestic politics has turned particularly brutal and ugly these days, harkening back to the nastiest days of the 1960s and 70s. While not openly expecting fascism any time soon, one Democratic Congressman has predicted a dangerous turn in American politics, should the Democrats attempt to pass immigration "reform" in the same way they did health care legislation.[1]

So how should the working class and its revolutionary minorities make sense of the tortured evolution of the Tea Party and its highly eclectic, and often contradictory,  ideology?

A good deal of further analysis is needed in order to fully understand the evolution of U.S. politics, the extent to which decomposition has infested the political life of the American bourgeoisie and the complex effect of bourgeois ideological campaigns on working class discontent and resistance. However, it is possible to offer some preliminary analysis of the "Tea Party" phenomenon from a proletarian political perspective and draw some of the implications for the working class struggle against capital.

The Tea Party reflects a very real decomposition of bourgeois ideology in the face of an increasing inability of that class to manage its own political affairs. More and more, faced with the Tea Party to its right, and the infiltration of many Tea Party activists in its ranks, the Republican Party is expressing an extreme right-wing ideology that seeks to eviscerate the federal government, devolving power back to the state level. This ideology is strongly opposed to Keynesian economic politics in order to address the crisis, including extending unemployment benefits to displaced workers.

While this ideology has a long history in the life of the U.S. bourgeoisie, going back to the Civil War and the debate on slavery (or even further, since the emphasis on "states' rights" goes back to the foundation of the Republic), today it is completely incompatible with the United States' role as the lone remaining imperialist superpower and the needs of the national state to implement policies to manage the ever deepening economic crisis.[2] Although previously this ideology may have been deployed strategically by elements of the Republican Party to achieve immediate political goals with no intention of carrying them to their conclusion, this right-wing ideology is increasingly assuming its own autonomous character, despite the immediate practical needs of the national state.

To a certain extent, U.S. domestic politics is becoming "ideologized" in a way that negatively impacts the ability of the state to effectively manage the interests of the national capital. This reflects both the deepening difficulty of the U.S. state in the international arena, as well increasing social decomposition shown in the "everyman for himself" approach to social and political life and the flourishing of backward looking  ideologies typified by the Christian right and the Tea Party movement.[3]

Despite the reality of the Tea Party as a political force and its infection of the Republican Party, the U.S. bourgeoisie - through its media apparatus - is perfectly capable of exploiting this movement in a number of ways to defuse working class discontent over the deepening economic crisis. First, the constant media images of enraged Tea Party rallies where supporters proudly wear t-shirts and carry placards adorned with colorful phrases, such as "Marxism is an Obamanation" and "I Didn't Vote for Socialism," simply continue the long ideological campaign against Marxism, communism and the working class movement that once identified them with Stalinist totalitarianism. Today, the campaign identifies Marxism with Obama's Keynesian state capitalist policies. The goal here is to associate proletarian politics with state capitalism and corporate giveaways so as to divert the working class away from its own class terrain and toward a simplistic attack on the "state" in the name of a mythologized primordial American "liberty" emanating from the days of the Revolution of 1776.

Second, and complementary to the first goal, the media campaign around the Tea Party seeks to stoke fear in those who reject their ideology, but who remain angry and concerned about the economic crisis. The goal here is to enroll these workers around a defense of the federal state, state capitalist policies, democratic ideology and a now under siege Obama administration, supposedly threatened from an increasingly violent, racist and utterly irrational proto-fascist tendency within the Tea Party.

In short, whether the Tea Party is presented as a dire threat or a positive force for freedom, workers are going to be called on to take sides in an increasingly bitter struggle between factions of the bourgeoisie which, in historical terms, are equally anti-working class and reactionary. This is a dangerous trap which can only be sprung by workers developing their struggles.[4]

With its fervent individualism, anti-welfare and anti-immigrant sentiment, Tea Party ideology is essentially a rejection of social solidarity, which is the life blood of the working class fighting  on its own class terrain, in defense of  its own living and working standards.[5] This alone can provide the necessary antidote to all  the ideological poison emanating from this dying social system. 

Henk 10/4/10

[1].- House Democratic Majority Whip, James Clyburn (Democrat, South Carolina) on "Hardball With Chris Matthews" MSNBC. March 24th, 2009.

[2].- Although an argument could be made that the Republicans rhetoric about the national debt reflects a very real growing realization within the bourgeoisie that Keynesian tactics, though they may provide a short term relief, only dig a deeper grave for the national economy in the longer term.

[3].- We should be careful to not overstate this phenomenon. Despite the fact that not a single Republican voted for the legislation, the state was still able to push through health care "reform" by alternative parliamentary procedures, avoiding the prospect of a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Moreover, despite the opposition of the particularly grumpy Republican Senator Jim Bunning from Kentucky, the state has found a way to push through a series of last minute "miracle" extensions of unemployment benefits (charged of course on the national credit card!).

[4].- Ironically, despite their vitriol against "socialism" and "government run health care," many Tea Party supporters actually receive coverage through Medicare, leading to the odd sight of protesters carrying banners reading, "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare."  

[5].-  Consequently, a large part of the media campaign regarding the Tea Party is to identify social solidarity, compassion and empathy for others with the state, as if only a strong state can safeguard these values against the threat emanating from an increasingly belligerent and sociopathic right-wing.

The year 2010 is the 90th anniversary of the presidential campaign of Federal Prisoner 9653, Eugene Debs, and in anticipation of the ruling class' efforts to distort the historical contributions of Debs, we wanted to take a few moments to set the record straight.

A central element in the ruling class ongoing efforts to prevent the development of a class conscious working class movement is to hide or distort the real history of the working class, a history that has always been characterized by  a struggle to resist oppression and exploitation. Back in the 1970's the arch-conservative labor leader, George Meany tried to rehabilitate Debs by deleting any reference to his revolutionary politics and depicting him as well meaning idealist, reformer, and pacifist who was misguided about World War I and defended an outmoded notion of class struggle. Furthering the distortion of Debs' legacy, last year,  the Eugene Debs Foundation in Terre Haute, Indiana presented its annual award to Ron Gettlefinger, the president of the United Auto Workers , who they claimed "has been reasonable successful, although fighting against overwhelming odds, to protect the wages and benefits of UAW members, active and retired," as if someone who cooperated with the ruling class' restructuring of the auto industry and destruction of thousands of jobs somehow personified the political principles of Eugene Debs.

The staff writers at the AFL-CIO's official web site apparently worked around the clock to concoct an image of Debs as the ideological architect of the New Deal. "Although none of his dreams were realized during his lifetime, Debs inspired millions to believe in ‘the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood of all mankind,' and he helped spur the rise of industrial unionism and the adoption of progressive social and economic reforms

What we see is the concert effort to transform Debs, a revolutionary internationalist, a militant who lived and breathed the class struggle and transform into a good-natured reformer, a moralists and pacifist and thereby rob the working class of part of its revolutionary legacy.

The underlying premise of Debs' activity was the Marxist understanding the "there is nothing in common between the exploiting and exploited classes; that there is in truth a conflict between them old as the centuries and this conflict must continue with ever-increasing education and organization on the part of the working class until they developed the power, economic, political and otherwise, to abolish the prevailing system and establish the world-wide industrial democracy and commonwealth of comrades (Letter of Acceptance, American Soicialist, April 2, 1916).

In 1977 when AFL-CIO leader George Meany received the Eugene Victor Debs award he declared that the current union movement is a blend of the "social idealism of Debs and the pragmatic trade unionism of Samuel Gompers, the founding leader of the American Federation of Labor, washing away in a single sentence one the bitterest political disputes in the history of the workers movement in the United States. Debs once wrote that

 "Wall Street does not fear Sammy Gompers and the AFof L...Every plutocrat, every profiteering pirate, every food vulture, every exploiter of labor, ever robber and oppressor of the poor, every hog under a silk ties, every vampire in human form, will tell that the AF of L under Gompers is a great and patriotic organization..." IWW Bogey, International Socialist Review, `February 1918).

On an another occasion, Debs wrote in reference to Gompers:

"the trade union under its present leadership and as now used, is more beneficial to the capitalist class than it is to the workers, seeing that it is the means of keeping them disunited and pitted against each other and as an inevitable result, in wage slavery." (Working Class Politics, International Socialist Review, November, 1910.

It comes as no surprise of course that the biggest distortion of Deb's legacy comes in regard to his opposition to World War I. The Debs Foundation web site says only that " in 1918 Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning the U.S. entry into World War I."  Debs didn't "question" the war; he opposed it, denounced it, affirmed that the workers had no country to fight for and called for the working class to unleash a revolutionary struggle.

In response to a letter from novelist Upton Sinclair, who like many other adherents of the Second International, betrayed the working class and rallied to the flag of the national bourgeoisies during WW I, Debs wrote:

"Any kind of any army that may be organized...under the present government will be controlled by the ruling class, and its chief function will be to keep the working class in slavery." He also wrote, "The workers have no country to fight for. It belongs to the capitalists and plutocrats. Let them worry over its defense, And when they declare wars as they and they alone do....let them also go out and slaughter each other."

On another occasion, Debs wrote:

 "I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist...I am opposed to every war but one: I am for that war with heart and sould and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in anyway the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades." (Appeal to Reason, September 11, 1915.

In his analysis of World War I, Debs wrote:

 "It should not be overlooked that this frightful upheaval is but a symptom of the internal readjustment which the underlying economic forces are bring about, as well as of the fundamental changes which are being wrought in our industrial and political institutions...Permanent peace, however, peace based upon social justice will never prevail until national industrial despotism has been supplanted by international industrial democracy.  The end of profit and plunder among nations wil also mean the end of war and the dawning of the era of ‘Peace on Earth and Good Will Among Men.'" (Prospect for Peace, American Socialist, February19, 1916.

Debs recognized that WW I marked a crucial turning point in the development of world capitalism and the workers revolution was the order of the day. In the Canton, Ohio speech for which was sentenced to 10 years in prison, he not only attacked the war and praised other revolutionaries who had spoken out against the war, but also expressed solidarity the Russian Revolution, hailing it as the dawn of a new world. In an article written in 1919, after the uprising  by the German proletariat, Debs wrote:

"The reign of capitalism and militarism has made of all peoples inflammable material. They are ripe and ready for the change, the great change which means the rise and triumph of the workers, the end of exploitation, of war and plunder and the emancipation of the [human] race.

"In Russia and Germany our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution; which knows no race, no color; no sex and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for world-wide emulation. Let us like the, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our own ranks, challenge and deny the robber -class power and fight on that line to victory or death.

"From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik and proud of it." The Day of the People, Class Struggle, Feburary 1919.)

Debs was far from perfect. Some of his political shortcomings were the inevitable result of the period in which he lived. The workers movement itself still had many lessons to learn as capitalism entered its decadent phase.  Debs tended to equate nationalization with socialism, a mistake he shared with many revolutionaries of the period. But other misconceptions reflected his own personal difficulties to recognize the changing class lines that came with capitalist decadence. While he recognized profound historical changes were occurring in the world with the advent of the world imperialist war and supported the Russian Revolution as the first step in  the world revolution, he could not bring himself to break with the Socialist Party or see the need for the formation of a communist party. He did not clearly understand that the era of reform had ended and that unions had crossed to the other side of the class line. Any conception of workers councils is missing from his writings and he was unclear on the relationship between party and class.

But on the  key issue of imperialist war, Debs was true to the principles of proletarian internationalism. He spoke out against workers slaughtering workers for the bourgeoisie. On this issue he took the same stance as Lenin and Luxemburg, and for this he went to prison, under the Espionage and Sedition acts for these words:

"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke.... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles." (The Canton, Ohio Anti-war Speech, June 16, 1918)

Debs was no stranger to the inside of a prison cell. During forty years in the workers movement, he spent nearly four years behind bars. An inmate of three county jails, one state prison, and a federal penitentiary, what kept him going was his passionate commitment to and confidence in the working class. Shortly before his death, Debs wrote:

"Often at night in my narrow prison quarters when all about me was quiet, I beheld as in a vision, the majestic march of events in the transformation of the world.

"I saw the working class in which I was born and reared, and to whom I owe my all, engaged in the last great conflict to break the fetters that have bound them ages, and to stand forth, as last, emancipated from every servitude, the sovereighn ruler of the world.

"It was this vision that sustained me in the hour of my imprisonment." (Walls and Bars, 1926).

While imprisoned in federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Debs refused every privilege offered by authorities to him as a prominent political prisoner and spoke out against the mistreatment of his fellow inmates. In 1920, he ran for the fifth time as the Socialist candidate for president, running as Federal Prisoner 9653 and received nearly 1 million votes without ever setting foot outside the prison. His 10 year sentence for speaking out against the war was commuted by President Warren G. Harding at Christmas 1921.  " On the day of his release, the warden ignored prison regulations and opened every cell-block to allow more than 2,000 inmates to gather in front of the main jail building to say good-bye to Eugene Debs. As he started down the walkway from the prison, a roar went up and he turned, tears streaming down his face, and stretched out his arms to the other prisoners. (Howard Zinn, Eugene V. Debs, and the Idea of Socialism, Progressive, Jan 1999).   

 J. Grevin 15/01/10 (based on an earlier article published in Internationalism 13)

This article on the Deepwater Horizon disaster was written about one month ago. The time elapsed has not brought the relief and solution to the resulting greatest ecological disaster in the history of the US, which the ruling class had promised. Instead, it has sadly confirmed the premise of the article: capitalism in its death throes cannot offer any perspective to humanity and the planet. In fact, the longer the oil continues to gush, the clearer the bankruptcy of the system becomes. The Obama administration had just lifted a ban on drilling in protected areas when the oil rig exploded. After this latest capitalist disaster happened, it became clear that the administration had no means to address it.  Most notably, the utter lack of any plan as to what to do in the face of a disaster has become widespread public knowledge. This has so exposed the ruling class to shame, embarrassment, and the truth about its bankruptcy, that it had to pass a six-month moratorium on the ban on off-shore oil drilling it had just lifted. Of course, it did so in an effort to refurbish its image as an ‘environmentally aware' state, and not out of any real concern for the planet or human lives! It is amply evident that this ridiculous measure will do nothing to change the damage already inflicted on the environment and human lives. It also cannot stop American capitalism's reckless and furious search for cheap oil in the politically stable waters of its homeland as it reckons with its desperate necessity to be competitive on the world market.  The six-month moratorium will do nothing to address the obvious disregard for even the minimum of accident-prevention, safety, or emergency measures, as we have observed in the Mineral Management Service's practice of rubber-stamping the oil companies' requests for approval for drilling. It's a well-known fact today that BP provided phone numbers of defunct agencies and deceased ‘experts' in environmental protection and intervention whom the MMS was to contact in case of an emergency! This latest capitalist disaster has exposed the truth about the system: its drive for profit overrides any human or environmental consideration, which is why we can only expect more such disasters to happen in the near future and as long as capitalism exists.

 On 20 April 2010 an explosion rocked the floating rig Deepwater Horizon about 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The rig finally sank on Thursday, April 22, causing the worst oil spill in history and leaving the blown-off drill pipe gushing millions of gallons of oil and methane gas into the ocean every day. This has been going on for almost one month at the time of writing, and will go on for an unforeseen number of months to come. This oil spill adds to the long list of ecological catastrophes caused by capitalism's blind rape of the planet as it searches for ever cheaper ways to maintain a competitive edge. It also reminds us of what's in store for the workers' future safety conditions. The explosion killed eleven workers, and comes in the wake of the recent explosion of a West Virginia coal mine which left 24 workers dead.

At the level of the impact on the environment and the livelihood of the local people, the damage being caused by this disaster is immeasurable, and will last for decades to come. The ‘disaster prevention' agency set up by the capitalist state in the form of the Minerals Management Service has been exposed as totally corrupt and utterly inept. While its function was officially to make sure that pre-drilling operations were safe for the environment, and that the equipment used was safe for human lives, it was at the same time charged with collecting hefty royalties from the oil companies, a practice put in place in order to allow cheap costs of production to take precedence over considerations for the environment and human lives. In fact, the federal government fills its coffers with oil company royalties, and buys oil at a cheap price as the oil companies shift the economic burden onto the backs of their workers by cutting costs and more and more disregarding safety measures. This is reminiscent of the role of the state agency that was supposed to deal with the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, FEMA. The total bankruptcy of these bodies put in place by the capitalist state is so evident that president Obama has decided to split the MMS in two. One part of it will now collect the royalties while the other will supervise operations. This is how capitalism is trying to save face and mop up the mess.

Oil giant BP itself, as well as Transocean which BP contracted for labor, and Halliburton, contracted for equipment and some drilling procedures and material, blame each other for the disaster, in a daily mud-slinging match. BP is so confident in the force of its economic stature that it even pleaded to surpass federal government standard liability imposed in such cases. While the maximum penalty imposed is $75 million, BP has pledged $89 million. It does not say, however, that its revenues for the first quarter of 2010 were in the billions. BP's added self-imposed liability amounts to increasing our cable bill by about $5 a month for just a couple of months of the year. Halliburton, on its part, laughs at the supposedly ‘strict' penalties the capitalist state will pass against it because it knows its insurance will pay it about three times as much as it will have lost in revenues. And what about the ‘cleaning up' of the environment? Well, the Coast Guard is using oil boons! That's the equivalent of using Kleenex tissue to try and mop up the water from a flooded house.

These operations are so totally inadequate that residents of New Orleans anticipate that the oil from the spill will be dumped on shore during this year's just starting hurricane season, causing further devastation to an already impoverished and contaminated area. As for the bosses' regard for human lives, the explosion led to a night of terror for the men working on the rig, and an anxious night of waiting for their families. During the rescue operations performed under Coast Guard supervision, several oil workers contracted by Transocean, the Swiss-based company that owned the rig, were kept on board a rescue boat, watching the Horizon burn for about 12 hours before the vessel finally headed to shore, a trip that then took another 12 hours or so. One of the workers said, "They kept us there until almost 11:30 the next morning, letting us watch our buddies burn. We counted over 25 boats there. There was no reason to keep us there." They were pulled aside for tape-recorded interviews before they were allowed to see their families and were not given phones or radios to get in touch with them. It is obvious the authorities wanted to question the oil workers before they could speak with anyone on shore, the better to distort and obscure any inkling as to the truth of the ‘accident'.

All of this is enough to indict the moribund system we live in. But it doesn't end here. The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico is at least 10 times the size of official estimates. Expert findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil, remnants of which can still be found today, 21 years later. Scientists' estimates, more accurate than the lies peddled by BP in its attempts to limit its liability and clean up its image as an ‘environmentally responsible' oil giant, put the amount of oil and gas spilled at between 56,000 and 100,000 barrels a day. This new, much larger, number suggests that capturing - and cleaning up - this oil will be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on. BP keeps claiming the spill is 5,000 barrels a day.

Sure enough BP has a long history of violations, but it has many accomplices, the US state being the greatest. One of BP's largest refineries in the US exploded in March 2005 causing 15 deaths, injuring 180 people and forcing thousands of nearby residents to remain sheltered in their homes. The incident was the culmination of a series of less serious accidents at the refinery, and the engineering problems were not addressed by the management. Maintenance and safety at the plant had been cut as a cost-saving measure, the responsibility ultimately resting with executives in London. There have been several investigations of the disaster, and eventually the company pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Clean Air Act, was fined $50 million, and sentenced to three years probation. On October 30, 2009, the US Occupational Safety and Hazards Administration (OSHA) fined BP an additional $87 million - the largest fine in OSHA history - for failing to correct safety hazards revealed in the 2005 explosion. Inspectors found 270 safety violations that had been previously cited but not fixed and 439 new violations. BP is appealing against that fine.

The list of violations by BP is endless, and the list of disputes between BP and the US government is impressively long. One has to wonder, then, why such an environmental charlatan as BP is allowed by the US to have 40% of its market in this country. In fact, by allowing very lax environmental and safety safeguards, the US is a prime accomplice in the disasters perpetrated by BP. It is certainly economically very convenient for the US to have to buy its own oil from a company that produces it at a low price. The US allows it to contract out parts of its labor - as BP did in this case with Transocean and Halliburton - and BP operates in US waters. Its record of malpractice, cost-cutting, use of old or malfunctioning equipment, and utter disregard for workers' safety make it possible for BP to produce at a low cost! The drawback is nonetheless serious: it is that the US is at a technological disadvantage in the modernization of its own oil extracting and production apparatus in the context of an increased need for the cheapest sources of energy available, i.e. oil. This is what lies at the heart of the present proposed energy reform bill by the Obama administration. In the contest of the aggravating economic crisis, the US desperately needs to gain a competitive edge on the world market. The disputes have also involved the US and Britain over their involvement with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, for example, a thorn in the side of the US as it tries to gain control over resources which other countries - European states, China - also want. This is why we would be mistaken to believe that the actions by the US agencies aimed at penalizing BP's worst behavior are a reflection of the state's concern for the safety of the environment and human lives. On the contrary, the US is using these environmental disasters to clean up its own image as the champion of environmental protection and assert its authority in an industry which is vital to its competitiveness on the world market. It is effectively transforming such disasters into weapons of its own trade wars against other countries, in the case of BP, against Britain.

The US, like all other capitalist states, knows perfectly well that the dependence on oil will not be done away with any time soon under current capitalist conditions, and less so at the time of its most acute economic crisis. Oil is the only source of energy that can give it a competitive edge, regardless of the environmental or human cost. And above all, oil is absolutely indispensable as a weapon of war, the ultimate expression of capitalist competition - both because it is vital for fuelling your own war machine, and because control over its sources can be used to hamper the war machines of your rivals.

Capitalism will never be ‘green'. Its disregard for man and nature explodes each day more forcefully the bourgeoisie's mystifications and lies about its ability to bring a better tomorrow. The many images of dying wildlife, and the knowledge of the loss of human lives and livelihood resulting from this and other disasters, can only fill us with horror and outrage, and a deep concern about the future. This event further exposes the utter irrationality of capitalism. It can prompt a fruitful reflection on the fact that human life and the planet are at a crossroads where there is a real possibility of the human species becoming extinct because of the continued existence of capitalism. It is high time we destroy capitalism, before it destroys us.  

Ana 19/5/10

California is the epicenter of the developing student movement against cuts to public education.[1] The March 4 (M4) demonstrations were a manifestation of the response by the various actors involved in the movement. This article will analyze the specific origins of M4 and tendencies involved in the movement, which were only briefly enumerated in the previous article [37]. These aspects are presented so as to better understand the formulation, direction, weaknesses and strengths of the California student movement.

Origins of M4

The selection of the March 4 date as the proposed "Day of Action and Strike" came out of the October 24 2009 conference held at UC Berkeley. The conference was called after a coordinated state-wide protest on September 24. It was organized almost entirely by various union organizations[2] and their Trotskyist allies (ISO, LMV, SO[3]); with the participation of Trotskyist influenced student groups like Advance The Struggle (AtS)[4] and Student Unity & Power (SUP).

Two clear factions among the 700 - 800 delegates around the question of what precisely to call the "day of action," with the union allies calling for a "diversity of tactics" ("Day of Strike and Action") and AtS/SUP calling for more militant action ("Day of Strike"). The argument used by the Trotskyist camp was that by being restricted to strike efforts this "would limit participation dramatically and give the unions an excuse to remain passive."[5] In the end, the union current won out and M4 became a "day of strike and action." The Trotskyists celebrated the victory because now, with the encouragement of actions such as letter writing campaigns to the state legislature, union participation could be maximized. However, AtS/SUP - who've been angered at the tactics adopted by the ISO -- have still been actively involved in spreading the idea that the unions should come to the ‘defense' of the struggle and help in the mobilization.

Here again we are provided stunning clarity with how the union apparatus and its leftist appendage continually derail class struggle. Their role is to sabotage working class militancy and efforts at autonomous organization. One way in which this is accomplished is through the continuous funneling of working class struggles into the coffin of bourgeois electoralism and blocking the development of its consciousness with the bourgeois ideologies of nationalism and inter-classism. As this neurotoxin courses through the veins of the class, workers' struggles become isolated behind one camp of the bourgeoisie in rivalries which the proletariat have nothing to gain from. The unions are active agents in this process and leftists are their willful servants in this.

Since M4: The movement fractures

After M4, a conference was held in Los Angeles on April 24 to discuss the next proposed "Day of Action" (slated for October 7) as well as to formulate the principles of the movement. The conference was poorly attended, with between 70 - 100 participants, and was unable to vote on anything other than the next proposed "Day of Action" due to the poor attendance and fractious nature of the groups present-just as well since several groups spoke against the inclusion of "anti-capitalist" as a principle of the movement!

The student movement itself has been winding down as the school year ends but two additional pressures are also putting a drain on organizing efforts: coordinated harassment on the part of university administrations and failure on the part of the movement to garner wider support from the working class. These two pressures are interconnected and reflect on the movement's significance and weaknesses. Across the state, university administrations have coordinated their targeted harassment of student activists. The violent brutalization and hostage taking of a student at UC Davis by police forces on M4 is one extreme example of this. Since M4 there has been a pernicious abuse of the "student conduct" hearings to threaten students with academic sanctions so as to deter further action. On at least one campus, university administration conducted disciplinary hearings against students for an action initiated on another campus![6]

The movement was largely unable to significantly extend beyond narrow confines of the union apparatus and selected groups of radicalized students. And thus, the student movement fell prey to all manner of leftist derailment of class struggle-unsurprisingly; "diversity of tactics" really just means one thing to a unionist: any response besides class struggle!

The influence of the ‘occupationist' tendency

However, if one end of the derailment came from leftist organizations seeking to impose their "united front" ideology on the movement another came from within the groups which positioned themselves in opposition to them: the radical students associated with the "occupationist" tendency-a trend most vocal and theoretically centralized in Santa Cruz. One of the opening lines of The Coming Insurrection[7] states "'The future has no future' is the wisdom of an age that ... has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks." This text had an indelible impact on the development of the occupationist trend in the movement. This is expressed throughout their literature. One of the pivotal texts produced by this tendency is entitled "Communiqué from an Absent Future."[8]

Within Absent Future, the failure of the "occupationists" to adequately grasp the nature of the capitalist crisis becomes apparent. Their increasing isolation stems precisely from their classless analysis encapsulated in statements such as, "[calls] for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who seek to uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it." Along with the correct rejection of "united frontism," they also reject the basis for the evolution of a proletarian movement: the mobilization of the class in general assemblies for the widest possible discussions and the election of revocable delegates. They then go on to provide the anti-CPE struggle as an example of a movement which began as an expression of "a rebellion that starts in the classrooms and radiates outward to encompass the whole of society" but, despite successfully forcing the bourgeoisie to reverse their hand and repeal the CPE, "the movement was unable to transcend the limitations of reformism." It's difficult to understand precisely how the authors understood the anti-CPE movement, which from the beginning represented the very unity they seem to reject, i.e. class unity rallied to the defense of the working class[9].

The a-historical analysis in Absent Future does not stop there, however, as the text goes on to herald the 2008 Greek uprising as "[breaking] through many of these limitations" represented in the burning, looting & rioting-all the while lamenting the lack of broader working class solidarity with the uprising of the Greek youth. This is simply not true as the framing of the youth revolt was always, even among most of the anarchist groupings, on the terrain of class struggle. The violence expressed in the months following December 2008 certainly cannot be denied, but the authors of Absent Future fail to grasp the class nature of the uprising by being obsessed with the violence itself. Nowhere is there mention of the general assemblies held in the midst of the flames so celebrated by Absent Future; or the expressed occupation of GSEE, the largest union, headquarters not to simply burn it down but to "to disperse the media-touted myth that the workers were and are absent from the clashes" and further to expose the role of the unions in undermining class struggle.[10] A far cry from the claim that they made almost no demands! The demand was class struggle and working class solidarity, both of which are lacking from the arguments presented within the article and increasingly within the tendency. The Greek anarchists themselves are reorienting their tactics after the tragic death of three bank workers during the May 5 riots; in this event World Revolution's article "Anti-authoritarians in Greece: reflection on violence" is particularly illuminating[11]. As capitalism's primal crisis deepens, violence certainly will occur but minority violence will always derail a class response.

Returning to California, the mobilization for the "defense of public education" is currently caught within a quagmire. The union chokehold over the students' movement remains in place, while some of the student groupings have begun descending into isolation, due to the twin impacts of police harassment and a limited and very confused political praxis. The struggle needs to expand beyond the university. The crisis of education is part of the ever worsening crisis of capitalism and the assault on the public sector is just one part of a broad array of austerity measures being forced upon the working class; and the inability of capitalism to reform itself in the face of its own crisis necessitates a response that goes beyond simply defending one part of that class. The only response is a struggle waged on a working class terrain which extends to all sectors of the class and the fight for this continues on.

AS 8/6/10.

[1]    "Students in California Fight Back Austerity Attacks," Internationalism 154

[2]    For endorsements see: https://www.savecapubliceducation.org/?page_id=7 [38]

[3]    International Socialist Organization (Socialist Worker), Socialist Organizer (The Organizer), Labor's Militant Voice

[4]    Advance the Struggle, https://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com [39]

[5]    See Socialist Worker's article: "March 4th and the next steps," May 29 2010

[6]    See Occupy CA's article: "First Student Conduct letter issued at UC Irvine," 19 April 2010.

[7] tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection

[8] https://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/ [40]

[9] See the ICC's ‘Theses on the spring 2006 students' movement in France'  [41]

[10]  See ICC's article: "The youth revolts in Greece confirm the development of the class struggle [42]," International Review no. 136 - 1st quarter 2009

[11] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/334/reflections-on-struggles-in-greece [43]

In April, the Arizona state legislature passed a bill (SB 1070), since signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer, unprecedentedly brazen in its attack on both illegal immigrants and workers generally. The immigration issue, which had been gaining importance in the United States for some years, has grasped the head of the bourgeoisie and tugged the bourgeoisie's rhetoric around itself. The various factions of the bourgeoisie, in turn, have endeavored to drag the working class into its discourse on immigration by means of sponsored demonstrations and rallies, all of which play to some nationalism or other and all of which can only be destructive to the working class' actions in its own defense.

One need not read very far into the bill to find what has ignited so much controversy. SB 1070 is a collection of amendments to Arizona's existing collection of immigration laws. The first amendment it makes gives new powers to any Arizona law enforcement official. It states that, "where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person"[1]. SB 1070 also mandates the sharing of information gathered about illegal immigrants with Federal agencies, and makes it a crime to obstruct the, "receiving, sending, or maintaining"[2] of information about immigration status. The information can affect applications for Federal or Arizona welfare benefits, drivers' and business licenses, or other government services. Finally, "a law enforcement officer, without a warrant, may arrest a person if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States"[3]. All of this can be found in the first two pages of the bill. The dominant faction of the bourgeoisie in Arizona has certainly been up front with its policy!

That the right faction of the bourgeoisie in Arizona chose to represent its bill as "cooperative enforcement" of Federal immigration laws within Arizona speaks to its intentions. SB 1070 is not intended merely as "an indispensible tool for the police in a border state that is a leading magnet of illegal immigration"[4]. It's meant to provide a model for other states that have been revising their immigration laws since 2007, the last time a federal effort to reform immigration law collapsed[5]. More than that, it is one model that new Federal efforts at the revision of immigration law would have to consider. Certainly SB 1070 has inspired the Congressional leadership in both houses to revisit the issue: Democratic leader Harry Reid acknowledged that, from the bourgeois point of view, "our immigration system is broken", and invited Senate Republicans to work with Democrats in creating comprehensive immigration legislation[6]. Whatever proposals they might bring will certainly be influenced by SB 1070, as Republicans have been forced, under pressure from primary challengers, to line up in support of the bill[7]. Clearly, the right wing of the American bourgeoisie wants immigration law more restrictive, wants greater police power, and wants these increases codified in Federal law. However, in order to understand the situation fully, it is necessary to grasp the reasons why the right wants these things.

The need for a new policy is something on which the whole of the bourgeoisie can agree. Apart from any other considerations, the bourgeoisie knows very well that their system is always at a rolling boil, and that the conditions of 1986-the last time the Federal government has comprehensively overhauled immigration law-are not the conditions of 2010. The provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, gave amnesty to certain long-term-resident illegal immigrants, and provided a path toward legalization for some illegal immigrants who worked as seasonal workers. However, since then, the number of illegal immigrants has grown to an estimated twelve million.  Objectively, this is not a bad thing for the bourgeoisie, for various factions of which this is variously a pool of laborers to be exploited, competitors with which to threaten other workers, and potential union dues-payers[8]. However, it would be even better for the bourgeoisie if they could keep this group of people in their current condition-cowed, desperate, and afraid to struggle-as well as countable and regulated. This reflects the need of the bourgeois state to bring all social life under its oversight.

That objective, to turn a useful and exploitable group into a useful, exploitable, and controllable group, is at the heart of any bourgeois immigration strategy. The right's turn towards police repression and tightening of border controls allows the state to invade the lives of illegal immigrants, putting them "in the system", as well as making them even more afraid of the state than they are now. This fear will, the right hopes, deter further illegal immigration, drive illegal immigrants away from claiming welfare benefits, and most importantly, make them docile in the workplace[9]. The left of the bourgeoisie, however, is concerned that repression will have other consequences. An actual decrease in illegal immigration would, as already seen, be harmful to the bourgeoisie in its war against the proletariat. They worry also that the United States could be cutting off its nose to spite its face. For this section of the bourgeoisie, the history of segregation, which was useful in the labor market in the same way SB 1070-style immigration reform would be useful, weighs heavily on their minds. They remember the damage that discrimination did to the reputation of the United States, both internationally and internally, as a champion of democracy and "human rights"[10]. At the same time, they remember how useful the movement against segregation was to them politically as a faction, and have speculated that "an immigration debate could help energize Hispanic voters and provide embattled Democrats seeking re-election in November"[11]. These double priorities help explain the energy of the anti-SB 1070 demonstrations, whose members are animated by "anti-racism" and anti-fascism-comparisons to Nazi-era demands for "papers" are rife at their rallies[12]-and whose organizers are backed financially by the movers and shakers on the bourgeois left.

Both factions of the bourgeoisie have appealed to the working class in the language of nationalism. The Right speaks the language of crime and culture, exhorting ‘native' Americans to mobilize against illegal immigrants in defense of their safety and way of life. The Left speaks the language of common humanity, but also the language of ‘pride'. The various Latin American nationalisms are all given play when the Left of the bourgeoisie demonstrates on this issue. One speaker remarked, un-ironically, that Arizona was "Mexican land", a variation on the common Leftist theme that the land was stolen from Native Americans. All these tactics are meant to destroy any relationship between immigrant and ‘native' workers, and to build up nationalist barriers even between citizens. This ultimate aim of dividing the working class, even mobilizing ‘native' workers so that they might police their ‘illegal' fellows, is one of the few things on which the bourgeoisie can agree.

From the point of view of the dominant class there is a pressing need for some kind of 'immigration reform'. However there is no guarantee that they will be able agree on and implement a common policy. As we have seen during the 'debate' over health insurance, and the previous attempt at a comprehensive immigration reform, the ideological polarization within the right and left factions of the bourgeoisie can obstruct policies that are obviously in the best interest of the national capital as whole. Whatever the outcome of the American bourgeoisie's current ideological squabbles on the issue of immigration, one thing is for sure: the only 'solutions' they can offer to the massive displacement of impoverished workers and peasants from the periphery of capitalism will involve more repressive policies, in all their forms. They will continue to have no qualms about taking advantage of this particularly vulnerable sector of the working class for capitalism's benefit.

The only possible solution is for the working class to recognize, not the "common humanity" of all its members, but their common social situation. Against the ideological and material attacks of the bourgeoisie, the working class can only resist by building its own solidarity amid its own struggles, slow as they might be to develop in the current climate.

RW, 6/25/10.

[1] SB 1070, Section 2

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Archibold, ‘Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration', New York Times, 23 April, 2010

[5] Ibid.

[6] Hulse, Herszenhorn,, ‘Democrats Outline Plan for Immigration', New York Times. 29 April, 2010.

[7] Archibold, op. cit.

[8] Immigrant Demonstrations, Internationalism 139

[9] Alexander, From SB 1070 to J.D. Hayworth's Book on Illegal Immigration, "Whatever it Takes", Intellectual Conservative, 2 May, 2010.

[10] Archibold, op. cit.

[11] Ibid.

[12] https://nuevaraza.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/austin-counterprotest-rally-against-supporters-of-sb-1070-june-12/ [45]

We welcome this leaflet  addressed to the striking nurses in Philadelphia, in order to help organize and extend the struggle that the unions wanted to sabotage. We want to salute wholeheartedly these kind of initiatives.

What is REAL Solidarity?

The Nurses' Strike Rally today is not the first time that various unions throughout the city have called on their members to attend the rallies of other workers in struggle.  When city workers' contracts expired last July, workers represented by TWU, AFSCME, and the SEIU had a joint rally downtown in Love Park as they all had either been without a contract, or were having a contract expire-and they were all facing similar attacks.  The bosses and the politicians want to push the effects of the crisis onto working people, to make them pay for the system's failure by giving up things they, their parents, and their grandparents had been fighting for decades to win.  Today again, various unions throughout the city representing a variety of workers have called on their members to come to the Temple Nurses' & Health Professionals rally to support them. 

Yet this is as far as the unions' call for solidarity goes.  Despite the fact that city workers and the Temple nurses were without a contract during the SEPTA strike, we were not encouraged to help that struggle, we weren't attending demonstration, pickets, or mass meetings, and the SEPTA workers were basically "on their own" (even the suburban train workers continued to work because they are under a different contract!)  Now that the Temple nurses are on strike, workers in other sectors and workplaces are called to attend a short rally in support of the nurses.  Yet there is no talk of what other workers are going to do about the fact that they are facing the same attacks Nurses are: our bosses want us to pay more for benefits, accept raises that don't keep up with inflation, and happily work in worse and worse conditions.  City workers still don't have a contract and are facing massive attacks from the mayor, and there's no talk of trying to get solidarity from other workers at Temple (both in the hospitals and the Universities).  Why do workers attend each others' rallies, yet struggle and strike at different times throughout the year all alone except for the extra head counts at the rallies?

Despite what we all may hope, one group of workers against a rich and powerful employer has the deck stacked against them.  Real solidarity means struggling together, not just as this or that sector of workers, but as the working class, fighting together against the attacks to our living standards that we all face.  Real solidarity means uniting our struggles, it means taking decisions together about how to push the struggle forward, it means mass meetings open to every worker to discuss and decide how to struggle together, it means sending delegations to other workplaces to convince others to join the struggle for their own demands and our own!  The unions can't do this-as the legally recognized negotiators of the price of our labor, they have to conduct "respectful" struggles and be on good terms with the bosses-yet what would scare our employers into backing off from their attacks more than a movement that spread?  Workers need to meet together and discuss for ourselves how we can struggle together; we can't just wait for the union to do the struggling for us or to tell us how to struggle.  And we need to struggle together-to reach out to other workers to join our struggle.  Maybe some workers cannot go on strike with us, maybe they can do a sick-out, or take a long lunch to meet together, demonstrate, or some other action.  The point is we need to struggle together to win.  We need to do this ourselves, deciding what to do together-we can't let the unions do this for us, or we will keep having the same kind of half-hearted solidarity and support.  We need real solidarity!

If you're are interested in discussing how we can fight back together as workers, talk to your co-workers, other workers in struggle you know, and if you want, feel free to email:

[email protected] [49]

On April 5th, 2010 a deadly explosion of methane gas ripped through the Upper Big Branch coal mine near Montcoal, West Virginia. Early reports from the authorities stated that 25 miners had been killed, but 4 were unaccounted for, and could possibly have survived had they made it to the underground survival chambers that are supposed to offer a safe haven of clean air and fresh supplies to any miners trapped below ground.

One can only imagine the collective exasperation that gripped the mining towns of southwestern West Virginia, and indeed the entire Appalachian coal belt, as they were once again forced to faced the grim reality of the brutal demise of family, friends and loved ones deep in the mines. One can hear the resounding cries of "Not again!" emanating from mining families across the region, as the Upper Big Branch disaster follows on the heels of a similar catastrophe in Sago, West Virginia just four short years before, in which 12 miners were killed in another explosion of combustible methane gas.

Much like Sago four years earlier, the media from across the nation and globe descended on the small West Virginia town pursuing yet another ‘disaster story' that promised to pump up ratings and keep a worried nation enthralled with the suspense surrounding the rescue the efforts for the 4 missing miners. Over the next several days, we were treated to televised press conference after press conference from local politicians, the state Governor, rescue authorities and company officials encouraging us to keep up hope that the missing miners would be found alive.

However, regardless of the media-driven suspense, anyone with an objective view of the situation could only conclude that after an explosion of such magnitude so far underground, the missing miners would not be found alive. Indeed, as the days passed, the tone from the official press conferences grew more and more grim. On April 9th, four days after the explosion, officials announced that there were in fact no survivors. Apparently, the damage inside the mine has been so great that rescuers had passed by the bodies of the four missing miners in their initial searches several times without even recognizing them. The underground survival chambers-another supposed marvel of modern technology to eliminate the ancient perils of underground labor-utterly failed to do anything to stop a violent explosion of methane gas.

Another mine tragedy has this time taken the lives of 29 miners. Combined with similar recent mine disasters in Russia and Mexico, the world is once again grimly reminded that even in the so-called ‘post-work information age', significant numbers of workers continue to make their living putting in long hours in a dark hole dug into the side of a mountain filled with poisonous gasses than can ignite at any time and where the risk of a deadly cave-in is omnipresent.

However, despite the media's perpetual desire to exploit the suspense of the rescue efforts-a theme common to all disaster stories-there was nevertheless something a little different about the media's response to the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion compared to how it treated the Sago disaster four year earlier. Now, the political climate is different. George W. Bush-a fellow known for his close connections to the energy industry-is no longer President. The new President is none other than Barrack Obama, a man elected on a solemn pledge of ‘bringing change'. Moreover, this disaster takes place in a climate of anti-corporate rhetoric emerging from the Wall Street collapse and subsequent bailouts in 2008. The dominant narrative of bourgeois ideology is that the state is now the working man's friend-his only real protection against the greed of the banks on Wall Street that have the power to wreck the entire economy, and the vicious pursuit of profits by reckless companies such as Massey Energy (the Upper Big Branch Mine's owner) that skimp on costly safety measures in order to increase their bottom line.

Keeping in line with this narrative, the media subjected us to a barrage of "investigative reporting" in the week of so after the disaster documenting the numerous and repeated safety violations at the mine and the outrageous political conduct of Massey Energy in pursuit of maximizing its profits-conduct, we were told, that included the effective purchase of a seat on the state Supreme Court for a barrister friendly to Massey's corporate vision.

As a result of this reporting, we learned an entire slew of disconcerting facts such as that in the month prior to the explosion the Upper Big Branch Mine had been cited for 57 safety infractions by federal inspectors, including 2 citations just the day prior to the explosion. Similarly, we learned that in 2009, Massey Energy had been fined a total of $382,000 for "serious and unrepentant" violations for lacking proper ventilation as well as failing to follow through with its safety plan. In the year prior to the explosion, federal regulators had ordered portions of the mine closed over 60 times. Finally, as if to reassure us that the state was on the case, we were informed that the FBI has opened a criminal probe into the explosion, investigating charges of criminal negligence by Massey Energy and the possible bribing of federal regulators. Then, as if to show us his profound difference of character with Bush, President Obama himself attended the memorial service for the dead miners, eulogizing them with the gift of eloquence his predecessor sorely lacked.

So how did the dominant media narrative explain the apparent powerlessness of federal government regulators to do anything to stop yet another mine explosion of an almost identical cause as that which caused the Sago disaster four years earlier? They blamed it on Bush. According to this narrative, under George W. Bush, a ruthless conservative, free-market ideology fell over the federal government, through which big business was able to ‘capture the state' and effectively neutralize its power to regulate the private accumulation of wealth when it comes into conflict with the overall interests of society.

This narrative of corporate domination of the state under the auspices of Bush and his Republican buddies is being carted out to explain just about every disaster that the Obama administration has had to deal with since taking office. The collapse of Wall Street and the subsequent necessity of the mega corporate bailouts is blamed on the gutting of banking regulations under Bush, which allowed the development of banks ‘too big to fail'. Similarly, the mine disaster (and now the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico) is blamed on the evisceration of regulatory agencies during 8 years of Republican rule, in which the conservatives pursued a devastating strategy of ‘starving the state', resulting in the loss of competent regulatory personnel, deflated budgets for regulatory agencies and the development of a cozy relationship between industry and government in which government regulators looked forward to a giant pay day upon retirement from public service in the very industries they were supposed to regulate. "Surely," the narrative goes, "Obama can't be expected to fix this mess in just two short years in office. But he's on the right track. For starters, he really cares enough to show up to your funeral and make a nice speech."[1]

Of course what this narrative fails to mention is that the process of selling off the job of essential state functions to private businesses and neutering federal regulatory agencies-while it may have been the ideological brain child of the Regan/Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s-has been pursued with as much fervor by Democratic administrations as Republican ones. Clinton himself was a champion of the so-called ‘entrepreneurial state', a stance shared by his Vice President turned anti-global warming activist Al Gore. Moreover, despite paying lip service to some of the anti-corporate rhetoric sweeping the country, Obama's own connections to big business interests, particularly Wall Street is well known-a fact the media has found difficult to conceal, necessitating some tepid criticism of his administration as "too close to the banks."

What does this all mean for the working class who bear the brunt of such disasters as the Upper Branch Mine explosion in the form of lost lives, lost jobs, shattered families and economic ruin? Who are our friends and enemies? Where can we turn for protection against the big greedy corporations who obviously show little hesitation to put our lives on the line when it comes to making a profit? Well, for one thing, it should be clear from the Upper Branch Mine disaster and those like it, that we cannot rely on the state. Despite pledges and promises to increase safety following the Sago disaster in 2006, the explosion at the Upper Branch Mine belies the futility of relying on the state to protect us on the job, or even to make simple changes that could save lives, such as ensuring the proper ventilation of methane gas, which experts all agree could have prevented this explosion. Obviously, Massey Energy has more to fear from its shareholders for not making a profit than it does from the federal government for failing to comply with tepid safety standards. This has proven the case as much under the Obama administration as under the previous Bush regime.

The question of the increasing privatization of essential state functions and the idea of the ‘capture of the state' by various corporate interests in the most powerful state in the world is a question that is ripe for theoretical deepening for the workers' movement. To what extent is this idea an actual reflection of the dynamic in decomposing capitalism? What are the implications for the state's ability to do its job of advancing the overall interests of the national capital against narrower sectoral interests? What are the implications of this for the tactics and strategy of the workers' movement? These are all questions that demand further clarification. However, the point of departure for this remains the perspective defended by revolutionary Marxism: the state is the executive arm of the bourgeois class; it is not a neutral organ, which the working class can use to protect itself from greedy corporations. The state is an organ of the very same social system that produces that corporate greed: world capitalism.

We will hear a lot about this in the period ahead. The bourgeois media will continue to work the theme of the state against the corporations as long as it can.[2] Workers must recognize this for what it is: an ideological ploy to tie the working class to the state, to make it see its future in defending the state from corporate seizure. Workers must realize that in reality there is no fundamental difference between the corporations that exploit them and the state agencies that are supposed to regulate those corporations. This is true even when the state takes action against a particular corporation whose actions call the credibility of the state as the protector of society into question. [3]

As for the miners of West Virginia, this disaster is one more example of the assault on their living and working conditions, which has already been declining for decades. These workers have suffered between the Scylla of a declining coal industry in a state which offers few other employment opportunities on the one side, and the Charybdis of speed- up and declining safety standards on the other, as the coal companies struggle to make their remaining operations profitable. However, regardless of the desperate state of the working class in the coal belt today, we should be careful not to fall into an uncritical nostalgia for the early twentieth century when the miners of West Virginia fought numerous pitched battles with the coal companies' hired goons in an effort to win the right to organize. These episodes took place in a different historical period, during the transition between the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalisms, when the integration of the unions into the state had not yet been fully completed. Moreover, almost without exception, these actions were eventually defeated-often violently crushed-generally with the generous assistance of the federal state. [4]

Today, the future of the class struggle lies not in pitched armed battles, but with the extension of mass struggles across sectors, eventually unifying the entire working class behind a decisive confrontation with the capitalist state.

Henk 18/06/10

[1] Consequently, this line has proven much more difficult to maintain during the continuing carnage resulting from the explosion of the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, with the media now talking about "Obama's Katrina," in the wake of the federal government's inability to do anything to stop the release of oil into the ocean. See article in this issue.

[2] The emerging dominant narrative of the state as the protector against greedy and socially irresponsible corporations is not without challenge. As we showed in on our article on the "Tea Party" in Internationalism #154, capitalist ideology in decomposition is also capable of producing a bizarre anti-corporate ideology, which is simultaneously, if somewhat inconsistently, anti-state.

[3] Somewhat luckily for the U.S. bourgeoisie, the recent oil rig catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico has taken place on the watch of British Petroleum, giving the U.S. the chance to convince the world that not all greedy irresponsible corporations are American.

[4] This included the now infamous use of the United States Army Air Core to bomb rebelling miners during the "Battle of Blair Mountain" in 1921

"Brothel, fortress, hospital, miserable death: this is the gift that will be received by the family members of those heroes who die for the fatherland, while the rich and the politicians will binge away the gold that has been sweat by the people in the factory, the shop, and the mine."

-Ricardo Flores Magon on WWI (from Regeneracion, 9th October, 1915)

Ricardo Flores Magon is a well known figure in Mexican history. Although an anarchist until his death, the Mexican authorities were able to recuperate his martyrdom and integrate his image to the social order by baptizing him as one of the spiritual authors of the modern Mexican constitution. So, today in Mexico, a politically sanitized Flores Magon is recognized as one of the first vocal adversaries of Porfirio's Diaz dictatorship. However, communists and anarchists, and people well acquainted with the labor history of Mexico, are well aware of his anarchist-communist convictions, his roots in workers' organizations, and his numerous and failed attempts to spark a workers' revolution in Mexico.

He and the bulk of the leadership of his political organization, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party), were for most of their political lifespan, situated in the United States. Most of the PLM's political activities in Mexico were coordinated in exile. However, little is ever mentioned about the PLM's relationship to the American workers' movement, or their belief that a workers' revolution in Mexico was important in so far that it is part of a worldwide struggle against international capital and in a sense, part of the international project to end the exploitation of man by man. In fact, if it wasn't for the continuous support of workers' organizations both in the U.S. and other countries, the PLM would not have been able to accomplish what it did politically (or pay prison bailout - Magon spent more than half of his exile years in prison). The PLM, with all their flaws, confusions, and quite honestly, some very big mistakes, were ultimately part of a workers' movement increasingly receptive to the idea of world communist revolution. There are lessons to be learned about their tribulations. Therefore this article will be about the PLM as part of not only the class struggle in Mexico, but in the United States and the rest of the world.

The story starts in October of 1903, when Ricardo Flores Magon was released from prison in Mexico City. Well aware that the Diaz regime was losing its patience with him - to the point that he might get killed if he continued with his political activities - Ricardo, his brother Enrique, and a group of his collaborators crossed the Mexican-American border. In the early years, Ricardo's group exposed through their paper Regeneracion (Regeneration) a brand of anti-Diaz liberalism. They illegally smuggled the liberal paper to Mexico and at one point it became the most popular newspaper in Mexico. However, increasingly but assuredly, the group's liberalism diminished as they got immersed in the American workers' scene. In St. Louis Missouri, the soon-to-be PLM militants studied Marxism and anarchism, and befriended all sorts of political exiles, from both anarchist and Marxist affiliation. Their class perspectives increasingly burgeoned in 1906 in the Cananea and Rio Blanco strikes in northern Mexico. In both strikes, PLM members participated. In the early 20th century, the class struggle in northern Mexico and the southwest of the United States was particularly intense due to the nature of the border. At that time - while in formal political terms there was a border - economically the border seemed tenuous at best. Workers from America and Mexico crossed the border all the time to participate in the area's mining and railway projects. So the region was particularly fertile for class struggle and the radicalization of the PLM. PLM militants participated in the 1906 strikes of Rio Grande and Cananea, both situated in Northern Mexico, strikes that eventually ended in bloodbaths.

The strike experiences would eventually lead the PLM to entertain the idea of armed insurrection. In July of 1906 the PLM officially solidified into a party by publishing their first manifesto. It called to use "whatever means possible" to overthrow Porfirio Diaz[1]. By this time, the PLM leadership was anarchist, but due to a fear of repression and alienating their audiences, they pretended a liberal façade by speaking in terms of "political liberty", but identifying that such liberty cannot come without a solid economic base. The manifesto identified the PLM's cause with that of the "workers of the world" observing that the workers' cause has no frontiers. In their attempts to use "whatever means to overthrow Diaz", the PLM organized an insurrection by conducting raids into Mexico using El Paso Texas as a base. The insurrection got thwarted due to treason and bad logistics.

In the United States, the socialistic political tendencies of the PLM started to become evident. In 1907 Ricardo Flores Magon and some of his collaborators where imprisoned for violating neutrality laws. In the trial, all sorts of socialists and anarchists and trade-unionists publicly defended the militants of the PLM. The anarchist Emma Goldman published their manifesto in her journal Mother Nature. Eugene Debs argued that the imprisonment of the PLM militants was part of an international attack against working class militants. The Western Federation of Miners financed the PLM's defense. Mother Jones collected thousands of dollars to aid the PLM in the trials. The popular socialist journal The Appeal to Reason argued that the PLM's activities were part of a global struggle that could lead the United States to a workers' revolution. Finally, several PLM members were known to distribute IWW propaganda. In the eyes of the state, the issue quickly became more dangerous than mere violations of neutrality laws - the PLM was intimately tied with the American anarchist and socialist scene.

After Ricardo stepped out of jail in 1910, he became increasingly disillusioned with the mainstream American left. He called many socialists cowards and he ridiculed the AFL. Furthermore there was a recurring racist attitude about them. American leftists sometimes stereotyped the Mexican worker as a dumb, illiterate peasant. Most of the members of the PLM were workers, including Ricardo Flores Magon, who was very poor for most of his life, thus he naturally resented the stereotype. He found anarchist support more acceptable: Emma Goldman routinely spoke about Mexican affairs in Mother Nature and concluded that Mexico was an important region for the hypothesized world revolution. Nevertheless, Flores Magon thought that the PLM should solidify relations with various international workers' groups, in order to spark a broader workers' movement in the American southwest and the Mexican north.

In September 1911, the PLM released another manifesto. At this time, Mexico was burning with the so called "revolution", so the PLM leadership felt that it was necessary to make explicit their revolutionary goals. The new manifesto transcended the liberalism of the first one, arguing to transcend the so called "1857 Constitution" which was liberal in - the latter which the PLM initially professed to defend from Diaz' authoritarianism. In the new manifesto, Ricardo wrote:

"Against Capital, Authority and the Church the Mexican Liberal Party has hoisted the Red Flag on Mexico's fields of action, where our brothers are battling like lions, disputing victory with the hosts of bourgeoisdom, be those Maderists, Reyists, Vazquists, Cientificos or what not, since all such propose merely to put in office someone as first magistrate of the nation, in order that under his shelter they may do business without any consideration for the mass of Mexico's population, inasmuch as, one and all, they recognize [sic] as sacred the right of individual property."[2]

The PLM leadership, well aware that different factions of the boss class were trying to dominate the anti-Porfirio sentiment, formulated a plan for action. The PLM leadership, still based in the United States, thought that in order to engage effectively in a military campaign, it would be easiest to start by a takeover Baja California, a thinly populated border state in Mexico. By January 29th of 1911, the PLM, with the help of numerous American militants, took Mexicali, the capital of Baja California. The success was followed by other takeovers of northern Mexican towns by PLM insurrectos, including Tijuana.

The PLM's military campaign was truly an international phenomenon. The PLM had some grounding in the American workers' scene at that time, and several of its fighters where "Anglos". From this international perspective, the takeover of Tijuana was the most interesting - the American town of San Diego, which was an IWW stronghold, was situated north of Tijuana. Wobblies filled the PLM's insurrecto army to the extent that Americans became the majority of "liberal" fighters in Tijuana. Unfortunately, the fact that there was a large American presence in the insurrectos' ranks was used by the PLM's political enemies to discredit them. The main myth that came out from these propaganda attacks was that the PLM was engaging in filibustering - a myth that still lingers today.

The PLM's strategy proved ineffective in the end. The "revolutionary" soldiers under the control of the reformist and liberal Madero eventually crushed the PLM insurrectos. The PLM never recovered politically from this. It was a victim of its confusions and political weaknesses: in particular its conspiratorial vision of a worker's revolution, despite the break the PLM had made with liberal bourgeois politics. That this break with liberalism was influenced by anarchist ideology did not help either, but this is a secondary question here.

After 1911 the PLM entered a downward spiral of political dissolution and irrelevance. Its political mistakes and the military defeat of the Baja "adventure" have already been referred to. But also, historically, there is also this fact: the working class in Mexico had failed to build a class movement independent from the warring bourgeois factions and was ideologically or militarily engaged with one or the other ‘revolutionary' armies. To weather this period would have required a lot more organizational strength and political clarity than the PLM already had.

After the PLM lost its influence in Mexico, two more historic events in the period proved his class allegiance: the First World War and the Russian Revolution. In March 1918, Ricardo wrote for the last issue of Regeneracion an internationalist manifesto calling for the workers of the world to oppose WW1 and to overthrow their bosses. Ricardo and his brother Enrique Flores Magon were thrown into an American jail for opposing the war effort, where Ricardo died in 1922. He was an unmistakable supporter of the Russian Revolution, despite his criticisms of it. These two positions by themselves prove his loyalty to the principles of the proletariat, and we can say without a doubt that despite his political weaknesses he died as a true militant of the world working class. And that we honor. 

RS 28/6/10

[1] www.archivomagon.net/Periodico/Regeneracion/TerceraEpoca/PDF/e3n11.pdf [54]

[2] www.archivomagon.net/Periodico/Regeneracion/CuartaEpoca/PDF/e4n56.pdf [55]

Throughout the United States in recent months there have been a number of important strikes. The working class’ refusal to accept austerity is expressing itself in its increasing willingness to struggle. While these struggles have remained largely within the control of the unions and have mostly ended in defeat, revolutionaries should salute these signs of increasing combativity in the class and follow them closely. With public debt crisis and struggles against austerity in Europe, major struggles in India, South Africa, and Latin America, and China, the recent strikes in the U.S. are part of an international dynamic of the working class’ recovery of solidarity and self-confidence in the world working class beginning around 2003. This dynamic was interrupted by the worldwide financial crisis in 2008 (despite impressive struggles in Greece, Britain, and other countries), but since the beginning of the year, the working class has been returning to the path of class struggle, and shown that it will no longer accept austerity without a fight.

Since late spring, workers have gone on strike in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Illinois, Washington State, New York State, and nationally in the aeronautics industry, and as we go to press an unofficial illegal dockworkers strike movement is spreading throughout the East Coast port cities. Significantly, these struggles have taken up many of the central issues of the pre-2008 strikes: health care, benefits, pensions, layoffs, and the general perspective of the future that capitalism has to offer. In 2003, for instance, the grocery workers strike movement in Southern California was concerned primarily with the creation of new tiers of health and pension benefits for new hires, and in 2005 the NYC transit strike over the future of a pension plan for new hires expressed major step forward in the development of inter-generational solidarity in the working class over these same questions.

With the onset of the crisis, workers were at first somewhat paralyzed, like deer in the headlights, with the very real threat of unemployment and plant closure. The decision to go on strike and confront the bosses was not taken lightly -- no one can afford to be laid off in a country with over 10% official unemployment and over 16% real unemployment[1] -- most workers retreated from the class struggle, sometimes expressing hopes that the next generation could recover lost ground when the time for struggle was better.

Another factor delaying the working class’ response to the attacks associated with the recent financial crisis was undoubtedly the democratic mystification and tremendous hope people had in the newly elected Obama administration to deliver on its promise of “change.” On election night there were parties in the street with elated voters banging pots and pans in celebration. Instead, what we have seen from almost two years of the Obama presidency is no real drop in unemployment, a real economy that continues to stagnate despite massive injections of credit from the State, health care “reform” that is already beginning to raise workers’ health care premiums, and the return of dramatic increases in the cost of living while employers continue to take advantage of the crisis to attack wages, pensions, benefits, and staffing levels across the board. By and large, the unions had put their hopes in the new Obama regime, hoping for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (now dead in the water), selling the health care reform and promising all kinds of other reforms for workers from the new administration. Today workers’ discontent is no longer able to be channeled entirely toward the governmental reforms and the electoral circus—workers are more and more ready to struggle to defend their future.

The first signs of struggle on a massive scale were in the education sector in California this spring. When in the face of the state’s bankruptcy, tuition fees were raised 30% and staff faced serious attacks on their living and working conditions, students occupied universities, blocked roadways and attempts were made at creating assemblies and drawing teachers and staff and other parts of the California working class out in support[2] .

But this was only the beginning. Shortly afterward nurses in Philadelphia struck against employer provocations of removing tuition benefits and instituting a “gag clause” against criticizing their hospital’s administration, drawing significant sympathy from other workers throughout the region. In early June, 12,000 nurses from 6 hospitals in Minneapolis-St. Paul engaged in a one-day work stoppage and voted to authorize an open-ended strike that would have been the largest nurses’ strike in U.S. history. Here nurses were fighting primarily for the restoration of staffing levels and for specific nurse-to-patient ratios to be written into their contract, whereas the hospitals were seeking to institutionalize the low staffing levels they’d had since the onset of the 2008 recession. After the strike authorization, just as the contract was set to expire, the nurses’ union (Minnesota Nurses Association) agreed to non-binding federal arbitration and a 10-day “cooling off period,” during which they announced more than a week in advance their plan for a one-day strike on June 10. Despite the real militancy of the nurses and their willingness to defend their working conditions, the union was given a free hand to conduct the struggle, and immediately after this one-day strike they announced a tentative agreement that dropped the central demand of mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios, took the hospitals’ pay offer, and made no changes to health and benefit plans. Leftists and unionists throughout the country continue to hail this is a major class victory, but the nurses’ own Facebook page revealed a real dissatisfaction at the abandonment of the central demand in exchange for no real gains.[3]

One month later, more than 15,000 construction workers in two different unions struck in the Chicago area for much needed wage increases to cover health care costs and make up for rampant unemployment and decreased hours in one of the industries hit hardest by the recession. In the month of July alone, the Illinois construction industry lost 14,900 jobs.[4] A statement from International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150 President-Business Manager James Sweeney during the strike reported that hours for their members have been reduced by 40%, and that out of 8500 members, 1000 depend on food banks and 1200 have lost their health care benefits.[5]   After 19 days, workers ended the strike accepting the lowest pay increase in 10 years and no attempts at offsetting rising health care costs or dealing with unemployment and decreased hours. Still, despite the stranglehold of the unions, many workers in other trades honored picket lines and refused to work on struck projects in solidarity. Interestingly, the Illinois Department of Transportation informed the building contractor’s association threatening to refuse deadline extensions for state projects and indicating that it may invoke no-strike requirements against future struggles. Also in Chicago in early September, Hyatt hotel workers staged a one-day strike (just as the nurses’ union had) in protest at layoffs and demanded concessions in their upcoming contract.

The summer also saw 700 workers in Delaware striking for the first time against Delmarva Power and Conectiv Energy against cuts in pension benefits and the elimination of retiree health for new hires, returning to work with a split contract vote and repeated calls for a recount. Teachers struck in Danville, IL, for the rehiring of those laid off in recent emergency budget cutbacks and against a contract including a pay-freeze and the institution of bonuses based on student-performance, and in Bellevue, WA, for wages and against standardized curricula. Also in Bellevue, Coca-Cola workers staged a week-long strike over a new contract requiring them to pay 25% of all health-care premiums as opposed to their previous flat rate, but returned to work after the company cancelled their health insurance and the union filed a class-action lawsuit, insisting it was better to go back to work. Bellevue is also home to one of the Boeing plants on strike this summer (plants in St. Louis, MO, and Long Beach, CA also struck) where workers returned to work after 57 days with no changes to the company’s proposed contract except $1/hr increases for some of the lowest paid.

The longest strike this summer (and the one receiving perhaps the most sympathy from the rest of the class) was at a Mott’s Applesauce plant in Williamson, NY, where the company determined that even though they’d been making record profits, the wage they paid to their 300 employees was out of line with industry standards and demanded $1.50/hr wage cuts in the new contract. The strike drew national attention as a particularly savage and unnecessary attack by the company and after an isolating, demoralizing 16 week attrition battle, the union “won” a contract that left wage and pension levels for existing employees alone, but eliminated defined pensions for all new hires, cuts matching payments to retirement health plans, and requires workers to pay 20% of health care premiums and half of any increases above the first 10%. Despite the union’s cry of “victory,” even dyed-in-the-wool unionists have asked whether the strike was really a success.[6] 

Most recently, in the final days of September, longshoremen in Camden, NJ, and Philadelphia engaged in an unofficial two-day strike against Del Monte who had moved 200 jobs to a non-union port in Gloucester, NJ which was joined by dockworkers all the way up New Jersey into Brooklyn refusing to cross the informal picket line. Right at the start of the strike, the New York Shipping Association got an injunction from a federal judge in Newark declaring the strike illegal and on the second day of the action, the International Longshoreman’s Association disavowed any association with the strikers, calling on union stewards to send the pickets back to work, and promising that they had convinced shipping associations and industry heads to meet with them a week later to “discuss” the eliminated positions.

While all of these strike movements have remained either mostly or completely within the union straitjacket, and as such, have been defeated (usually with the declaration of “victory” by the union), the return of the class to the path struggle is helping the class regain the necessary confidence and relearn the lessons of past struggles. This will throw the role of the unions into stark relief. As the ‘victories’ they are able to win with pre-announced one-day strikes, isolated battles of attrition, federal arbitration, class-action lawsuits, and the rest of the union rulebook are shown to be defeats, the working class through its struggles will have to re-learn the lessons of self-organization and extension that the ruling class has tried so hard to make it forget. These struggles are an expression of the same international movement of the working class that has brought strikes in Britain, Spain, Turkey, and Greece in the face of state austerity measures, a nation-wide strike in India, wildcat strikes in auto plants in China, and important strike movements in Latin America. The return to struggle and recovery of solidarity, the preoccupation with the future and the willingness to strike to defend it are an expression of the international working class’ return to its historic struggle and should be hailed as such by revolutionaries everywhere. 

JJ, 10/10/10.

Spurred on by the deepening economic crisis, the aggravation of imperialist tensions to a point of paroxysm, and the more and more apparent inability of the bourgeoisie to offer any viable solution to the worsening deterioration of the environment, a maturation of class consciousness has been brewing below the surface for a number of years. This maturation is following a difficult and non-linear path, and in the last few years it has manifested itself not only in the return of the class to the path of struggle, but also in a veritable world-wide explosion of discussion circles, reading groups, internet discussion forums, and individuals in search of political answers and clarification. We have seen this phenomenon surge virtually in every continent, from Latin America to the Philippines and Korea, from Australia to Russia, Turkey, Great Britain, and, finally, here in the US. We think this is a very significant development, deserving great attention and putting great responsibilities on the existing revolutionary organizations of Left Communists. We would like to pay special attention to the emerging discussion groups. As they surge and develop, it is important that they pose the question of who they are, what their role is vis-à-vis the working class, what perspectives they can pose for their future. It is in response to these preoccupations about the discussion circles’ nature and function that we decided to write this article.

Why do discussion circles form?

Discussions circles are not a new phenomenon in the working class. They existed during the ascendant period of capitalism alongside the mass parties and the trade unions, as in France and Great Britain, when both structures were true organizations of the workers. But the entrance of capitalism in its decadent phase transformed once and for all the aims, means, and forms of working class organization by turning these organizations which were once instruments of the working class into instruments of the ruling class. Today, there are no permanent political organizations that have a proletarian nature which the working class can turn to or claim their own. Discussion circles re-appeared at the end of the 1960’s, with the massive return of the class struggle, marking the end of the counter-revolutionary period which followed the defeat of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-1921. At the end of the 1960’s the return of the open economic crisis provided the material conditions for the reappearance of the class on the historic scene. This is the first historic condition for their existence: the class must have weakened the ideological yoke of the bourgeoisie and re-entered the terrain of class confrontations. However, when the class first returned to the path of the struggle at the end of the 60’s, it found a fragmented and dispersed revolutionary movement and the break in the organic link with the revolutionary organizations of the past effected by 50 years of counter-revolution. The small communist fractions that left the degenerating International and which survived the defeat and preserved the lessons of the past were all but wiped out by the counter-revolution. Deprived of their traditional apparatus of support such as it existed during the ascendance of capitalism, i.e. the trade unions and the mass parties, and of their natural framework of organization and debate such as it was the International, workers felt the need to come together to discuss and reflect. This is the second historic condition for the emergence of discussion groups today: the inexistence of the revolutionary party.

The appearance of discussion circles today happens in the same historic context of class confrontations that existed at the end of the 60’s, and at a time when the specific conditions and dynamics of the crisis and, more generally, of the life of capitalism in all its aspects have obviously worsened. The Midland Discussion Forum in Great Britain, for example, formed around discussions on the war in Kosovo.   The Manchester Class Struggle group, also in Great Britain, formed just over a year ago in the context of the aggravation of the economic crisis. But of course there are also the groups formed in Turkey around the Tekel workers struggles, and many more around the world. 

Groups forming on the West Coast of the US come from a reflection on the bankruptcy and dead end of capitalism, and the California students’ movement. In some instances they form as a result of working class struggles, or sometimes come from a critique of leftism. They come from many different political backgrounds and form a heterogeneous terrain. The groups in the US show similar characteristic to those in other parts of the internationalist milieu: they are animated by similar questions and concerns as their class brothers’ and sisters’ across the oceans, ranging from a desire to resist the present attacks against the working class, to concerns about workers self-organization, the question of solidarity, the culture of debate, the role of the left of capital, but also questions around the party, the different conceptions of the party in Left Communism and Trotskyism, the organizations of revolutionaries, the heritage of the ICC in the Communist Left and how Trotskyism obscured this history (see the article in the present issue for a more in-depth presentation and discussion of this summer’s ICC public forums). It is clear that their emergence, observed in other parts of the globe, has spread to the US as well, confirming the inscription of this country in the larger dynamic of the working class internationally.

What are the nature and function of discussion groups?

These groups are animated by the need they feel to link up to the struggles of the working class, to understand what the working class has to do in order to take its struggles to the level of political preparedness for its ultimate historic task of overthrowing capitalism. They want to know how the class struggles and how revolutionaries can contribute to the development of class consciousness. This shows that they are motivated by a militant need the class feels to question capitalism and fight back. As such, they are a product, a secretion of the class itself.

The resurgence of discussion circles show that we are in a period favorable to the development of class consciousness. They express the need the class has to not only clarify political positions through discussion, but also to arm itself politically for its task to offer the revolutionary perspective. In this sense, it is important that they do not get stuck in endless discussions about Marxism, risking becoming academic talk-shops or never develop politically, but rather sharpen their theoretical deepening the better to intervene in the practical, concrete aspects of the class struggle and what it needs to be armed, theoretically and politically, to fulfill its historic task. In other words, discussion circles are fundamental in the effort and process by which the class achieves class consciousness if they are capable of uniting theory and practice, rather than staying locked in academicism. Discussion circles express the necessity and the tendency the class has to form a political organization, not an academic school of Marxism. As we said in International Review 7, in an article devoted to drawing a balance sheet of a discussion circle that had emerged in Naples, Italy in 1975, “In general, discussion or study circles cannot be seen as ends in themselves. One does not search out ‘ideas’ for their own sake, but as the expression of a social activity. These circles are part of a whole social process within the working class by which the class tends to secrete a political organization.” This article was written 35 years ago, but its approach is still valid today.

It is important here to underline that while circles express the class’ tendency toward the formation of the party, they are neither the ‘ante-chambers’ of the party, neither ‘schools of the party’. They are not the property of any political organization, and they are not, and neither should they try to be, political organizations themselves. An article in World Revolution 207 expressed this idea very well: “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 organization 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 and international currents of the Marxist proletarian milieu…A political organization of the proletariat is necessarily an internationally orientated organ, a product of the historical effort of the working class fighting for its political clarity. It doesn’t arise locally, but is a direct continuation of the political and organizational 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…” We should add that while the temptation to form a political organization may be strong, these groupings should not confuse the process of political clarification with its final goal of political decantation and crystallization in a political organization. This would result into a short-circuiting of the process of clarification and an attempt at creating a ‘semi-platform’, or setting up local, ’isolated ‘organizations, or intervening as a political body in the class struggle without any clear political or organizational framework for doing so.   Rather than ‘defending’ their existence as such, the task of discussion circles is to question everything and sift everything through the test of the most open, yet rigorous and fraternal debate. This is how discussion groups can develop an ability to recognize the criteria which unite revolutionaries in spite of their differences.

In order to do so, it is extremely important that they be open to anyone who is willing to discuss working class political positions, including the existing revolutionary organizations. It is vital for the class today to deepen the reflection on the historical impasse of capitalism, what it means for the future of humanity, and the challenges this presents to the class. Clarification occurs through the most open debates among different and even divergent viewpoints. This means that in order to fulfill their function of being spaces for debate and confrontation of different ideas, discussion circles should not start by establishing criteria for joining, and should not create or adapt a platform, which would transform the circle into a semi-organization neither able to fulfill the task of an organization nor that of a circle. This would short-circuit the very process of clarification they were created for. Instead, we urge them to continue deepening, debating, and opening up to the confrontation of ideas which can lead to the clarification of the aims and means of the class struggle. This is the true contribution discussion circles can make to the class. 

Ana, 9/29/2010

This past summer the ICC held a number of public forums across the US, which provided the opportunity for comrades from the ICC to meet a wide range of people and discuss a variety of issues with them. On the West Coast there were two forums in Los Angeles (one organized by the ICC, one by the IDP[1]) and one in Oakland, SF, where the central concern was to discuss the student movement in France against the CPE in 2006 and the lessons it may have for the contemporary student movement in California. On the East Coast forums were held in Philadelphia on the lessons of the Tekel strike in Turkey, and finally in New York on the economic crisis. None of these events would have been possible without the practical support and collaboration between our sympathizers. Their efforts, and those of other comrades who participated in the forums, ensured there was a real debate between revolutionaries. 

West Coast: Lessons from the student movements

Both forums in LA were attended by student organizers who had participated in the recent struggles in the universities of California. They reported the militant change of mood amongst the students, how they felt that the recent proposal of the authorities were a straightforward attack on their future. As such, the questions were primarily gained at learning more about the anti-CPE movement at the tactical level. The discussions centered first on the importance of the autonomy of General Assemblies (GAs) in order to wage a successful struggle. Many of those present had experienced the typical tactics and proposals of Trotskyists -- proposing ‘co-ordination committees’ for example – that effectively take the decision-making powers away from the mass meetings of the GAs, undermining their autonomy. In the anti-CPE movement in France the leftists were not very successful at this, and that was the movements’ strength. In California the leftists had succeeded in dividing the movement and downplayed the role of the GAs. So, the movement wasn’t yet strong enough to prevent this sabotage.

There was also a reflection on the differences with 1968: today the generation gap is not as large as it was back then. Several generations have experienced years of economic crisis since the 1970s so there is more scope for solidarity. Also, there is a far more equal participation of male and female students, and a effort to make demands that concern the whole of the young generation in relation to the workforce, since a lot of them are working during their studies. There is also a greater concern to reach out to and make contact with the wider working class in struggle. At all the meetings the question was raised: What initiatives were taken towards the urban youth of the suburbs and did it result in anything positive? We were able to give examples of where the students in France sent delegations to the urban youth, linking their problems in the general demands. And slowly but gradually this youth started to join the demonstrations, first the girls then the boys.

On two occasions there was a lively exchange of opinions about how to interpret the struggles in Greece and the difference between the revolt of the youth back in 2009 with efforts towards self-organization and the present movements dominated by the left and the Greek Communist Party and the Unions turning the anger into dead ends. There was also some discussion on the use of violence on the part of some anarchists and terrorists that also derails class activity and autonomy.

There was also an interest in the role of transit strikes (always called for by unions) in derailing struggles and preventing their extension. We discussed about this general type of union tactic, one that claims to support a strike movement but then boycotts and sabotages it in a subtle way, such as forgetting to distribute solidarity leaflets at all, or distributing them just days or hours before the strike. But above all, declaring strikes in transport and communication sectors when there is a threat of extension of the struggle towards other sectors risks cutting transport and information links for those joining the demonstrations. This did not succeed in France. The students wanted their demonstrations on days and times when the workers were not at work. This explains the mass participation of the working class in the student demonstrations: over 3,000,000 in the final demonstration! Finally, there was a discussion on the strong ability of the American bourgeoisie to manipulate its media, making it a master in the black-out of proletarian movements and being capable of changing the agenda through the media manipulation. An example was give about the 1st of May 2010, when 1,000,000 people participated in the demonstration in LA and not one single word was said on TV!!

During the LA forums (but more so at the Oakland forum) there were discussions of the historical challenges of the present period and the activities of the ICC: What are the conditions for the creation of a ‘culture of debate’ and what does it really means? We stressed the importance of creating an atmosphere of open and fraternal debate and collaboration between internationalists -- be they other left communists, anarcho-syndicalist groups like the KRASS in Russia, the joint intervention of the ICC and two anarchist groups in Mexico during the electricity workers strike, fraternal meetings with anarcho-syndicalists in the South of France, etc. Of course, the question of the ‘Party’ came up and the different meaning it has for Left Communism in contrast to the leftist concepts of the party serving for manipulations of the movements and their strive to power. The ICC strives for the power of the workers’ councils.

Another point brought forward in Oakland was how the existence of discussion circles all over the globe demonstrated the need for open non-sectarian debates internationally. We underlined the efforts of the ICC to create arenas for proletarian debate. In this sense, the discussion and collaboration between left communists and internationalist anarchists is one expression of the same striving of the class towards unifying its forces against capitalism. In order to destroy capitalism the working class must have the broadest and widest reflection possible to achieve a level of class consciousness that will ensure it is politically armed for its task to offer its revolutionary struggle as a perspective to humanity. In this sense the aspect of solidarity (shown at the most radical strikes today in China and other places) plays an important role in the working class regaining its identity, which has been weakened after the endless anti-communist campaigns following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

After all the meetings there were friendly chats with those present, during which one of the organizers said: ‘The ICC has a big shadow’, pointing that the ICC is much more known than even the we are aware of! We want to thank the comrades who made these debates possible and invite them to continue the discussions by writing or through our Forums on the website. 

East Coast: Lessons from the class struggle

Moving over to the East Coast, our forum in Philadelphia was on the topic, “Lessons of the Tekel workers’ struggle in Turkey: How to struggle from below?” Right from the start the discussion took an historical and global approach when one of the audience members, who was in the process of reading Rosa Luxemburg’s “Mass Strike” for a reading group, started with a question on 1905, so we could deepen on the real meaning of the soviet form of organization, the mass strike (as opposed to the planned general strike), and the general assemblies, which have been the shape which every radical strike movement has tended to take ever since.

We also discussed more about the strikes in Tekel as examples of the present strike wave which brings the question of ‘solidarity’ to the center of struggles much more drastically than in the past: not only solidarity with workers of other sectors, but also between different generations, as shown by the student movements in France who invited pensioners and unemployed to their general assemblies, the NYC and Toronto Transit strikes who fought also for decent contracts for the next generations and were greeted by the public. In the Tekel strike, we saw new expressions of solidarity such as German workers who went to Turkey and Tekel workers who made a tour through Germany, Italy and even to Greece, which was a real blow to the ‘nationalists’ who have tried their utmost to separate Greek and Turkish workers ever since the beginning of the 20th century. In Turkey itself Turkish and Kurdish workers refused to be separated and overcame heavy cultural borders during the Tekel strike movement.

Another topic was the situation of the working class in the US and if it is weaker here than elsewhere. We said that maybe the ruling class was stronger and able to use the unions, the mass media and the rule of law in a very sophisticated way to quell class anger. This inevitably strengthens the influence and the ‘confidence’ in the state as an ‘impartial’ body above class conflicts and ultimately weakens the class identity of the workers.

There was a lively discussion on the union question and the difference between unions in the 19th and the 20/21th centuries. In the 19th century, workers saw the unions as their own organizations and sacrificed for them willingly and enthusiastically, whereas now unions are often hated because dues are paid involuntarily in many workplaces and workers, feeling that they derive no real benefit from the unions and see the dues as a kind of tax. Ever since the beginning of the decadent period of capitalism around the turn of the 20th century unions went gradually over to the other camp, supported the nationalist reformist framework, ended up mobilizing the workers for the First World War and ever since have belonged to the class enemy. The audience admitted that the unions certainly have a role in leading workers to defeat, but still wondered about the situation of workers in the US Southeast, where unions are illegal and workers are exploited very harshly. The question was asked whether the unions, despite their conservative and counter-revolutionary nature, could help those workers as an intermediate step before self-organization. Comrades responded that generally you have unions where the ruling class needs them and that better conditions are not the result of having a union but rather that both the existence of a union and better conditions are results of workers’ combativity in a given sector. The example of the recent wildcat strikes in the automobile industry in China was given as ample evidence that workers don’t need a union in place to struggle. In this country the unions are explicitly part of the state and workers were still able to struggle and win on their own.

This led to a discussion of how workers can organize outside the unions and the question of the IWW. We detailed also more about the IWW in the past and today: being an expression of radical class activity through its mass activities in the past and today being torn between 2 tendencies: one that seems to want the IWW to act as a union, represent workers in negotiations, sign contracts, etc., and another that wants the IWW to act more as a struggle committee aimed at stimulating solidarity in the class. All the audience agreed that this debate has to be deepened more in future discussions, and that the issue of the IWW will come up more and more both among revolutionaries and potentially among the working class at large as it looks for historical alternatives to the traditional union-controlled struggle.

In New York where the presentation was given on the latest phase of the crisis, the discussion tended to move very quickly toward the struggle against austerity. The first comments on the crisis asked: ‘Does it have to get worse for workers to react?’ as the leftists say, and all agreed that the answer is NO -- misery is not a good condition, that’s why we have to fight back, but why is the working class’ level of struggle not corresponding to the level of the attacks? The discussion advanced various reflections: first we have to look at the struggle from an international perspective; second, we have to take in account that there is a certain fear compared to the 1970s and 80s, when wildcat strikes were a common phenomenon and a much smaller rate of structural unemployment meant that workers risked much less by engaging in struggle, as they could quickly find other work if victimized by employers; third, the setback after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc is still present

Another discussion was about the loss of class solidarity. Also this question was deepened from different angles. Globally strikes now increasingly start for reasons of solidarity: the New York transit strike for a decent contract for future workers, the Tekel strike in Turkey, and solidarity strikes in Spain in support of immigrant workers. Also, historically, there was a difference in mood between the period around 1968 and since class struggle 2003. Back then the feeling was that revolution was possible, but maybe not necessary, and now that it is more obviously necessary, but might not be possible. There is a fear to overcome and a class identity to regain and his passes necessarily through to expression of solidarity, a capacity only the proletariat can develop.

Another discussion was on the role of leftists, who approach the working class struggle in order to derail it to hopelessly ‘reformist’ perspectives that lead ultimately to defeat. Also discussed was the upsurge of Capital reading groups and discussion circles, in many places in the US, which are part of an international phenomenon and a sign of revival of the reflection on how to overcome capitalism

JZ/AS/JJ, 14/10/10.

On the morning of Tuesday, October 5, 2010, communists in the San Francisco Bay Area lost a comrade who was our direct link to multiple generations of past class struggle. That comrade was Ben Epstein, who passed away at the age of 92. He embodied the history of those fights, having participated in them himself, and was one of the last in the tradition of self-educated working class militants. When the current crisis hit in the summer of 2008, our study group was groping for historical references. Ben told us inspiring stories of the early Depression when workers and farmers joined in his hometown of Sioux City, Iowa to thwart auctions of foreclosed homes and farms, returning them to their former owners in “penny sales.” His town had been the epicenter of the movement of farmers’ councils that spread throughout the Midwest, in some places becoming near-insurrections. Most of us only knew Ben in the last 5 years of his life, but his influence went well beyond those few years and will always stay with us. But it was reciprocal. There were times when Ben would get giddy with excitement while we were reading texts like Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts or Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike. When asked why, he’d say “because it’s been such a long time since young people understood Marx and its implications for class struggle.” Ben always helped us see the concrete ways those theories could inform the struggles of our class. I will never forget the wisdom he so generously shared.  

HH, 10/17/10.<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

Latin America is still America’s Backyard

US imperialist policy in the “new world order”

One of the characteristics of the miners’ strikes in the United States was their deep rooted confidence in their unions as defenders of the working class. While this was true during the 19th century during the ascendant period of capitalism, by the beginning of the 20th century with the onset of capitalist decadence the unions were gradually integrated into the state machinery through regulation of working conditions and guaranteeing labor discipline, only ‘demanding’ the most modest and limited benefits. During the early 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a proletarian response to the change in function and operation of the established labor unions and worker’s parties when capitalism entered the period of decadence. Though once the counter-revolution gained the upper hand after the decline of the first revolutionary wave (1917-1927) in the latter half of the 1920’s, the unions regained their grip on the working class and were able, with few difficulties, to aid in the militarization of labor for the war effort of World War II.

After the Second World War, the US lived through an important upsurge in class struggle that often moved outside of the union stranglehold and asserted itself as a class with its own interests separate from those of the state. One such experience was the miners’ strike movement of 1949-1950.

How Did It Start?

Following the imperialist world war the United States emerged as a world superpower and the leader of the Western imperialist bloc, a position which required it to assert strict discipline at home and imposed on its workers the Taft-Hartley Act (passed despite a veto from President Truman) in 1947; mainly to curb organized labor’s power and introduce a major provision that established an 80-day ‘cooling off’ period for strikes that could supposedly create a ‘national emergency’. A long established tradition of ‘No Contract, No Work’ had become part of American labor, and there had been mass rank-and-file opposition throughout 1947 and 1948 to the Act- which caused swift action to be taken by the Truman administration (since Truman had won the 1948 Presidential election under the promise to repeal Taft-Hartley). All through 1949 there was a back and forth fight between the administration and the President of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), John L. Lewis. Although he is considered an important strategist, his actions against the US Direction of Mines always used the miners as a maneuverable mass in order to obtain some amelioration at the expense of any self-organization practiced by the workforce.

Two events that shook the miners were the wildcat strike of 62,000 Ford Rouge auto workers against speed-ups at the huge Detroit plant and the introduction of the ‘Continuous Miner’; a Caterpillar mining machine (called ‘man-killer’ by the miners) that would worsen labor conditions considerably (more dust, heat and danger of fires) and reduce the need for the current workforce to only one-third of its size compared to traditional mining practices.

Mid-September a strike had started as a result of an announcement by Lewis of the suspension of all payments by the UMWA Health & Welfare Fund because the coal operators were refusing to make their royalty payments and the Fund’s resources had been cut. It started in the largest captive mine in Barrackville and the state’s largest commercial mine, Grant Town, both in Northern West Virginia, where local union meetings were called. Almost immediately, union miners all over Northern West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania had followed suit. Roving pickets mushroomed throughout the area to halt all production and transportation of coal, including non-union operations. Many of the miners were armed. The strike spread throughout the whole of Appalachia- West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Ohio- with Western miners also walking out to make the strike total. Lewis ordered the 78,000 Pennsylvania hard coal miners as well as the 22,000 soft coal miners west of the Mississippi back to work, whereas on the next day United Steelworkers (USW) President Murray called a steel strike following the collapse of mediation talks with the government. This was the first time that coal and steel were on strike at the same time, with over 900,000 workers walking out. During those same summer and fall months auto workers at Ford, Chrysler and GM also went on strike. But the rejection of a joint strike fund by American Federation of Labor (AFL) President Green and the separate agreement at the end of October with Bethlehem Steel thwarted the possibility of a General Strike.

Workers Overrun Union Strategies

With the Eastern miners ordered back to work to their three day work week by Lewis, the rest of the miners felt isolated and so the Consolidation Coal Company brought a court action against UMWA to fight the three day work week. But when Lewis called the six Consol mines in Morgantown-Fairmont out, most of the other area miners spontaneously walked-out as well. When they were called back to work by Lewis, they voted against it. There was mass spontaneous picketing and every picket line was honored. “Monday, the day Lewis had ordered us to go back to work, came and went. Not only did we stay out, we began to spread the strike.” (p.20). Union bosses, like Urbaniak and Cappellini, who tried to regain control of the strike movement were booed and in the meetings the miners re-affirmed their determination to spread the strike throughout the country and to stay out ‘until hell froze over’. “This turning point, begun at the Sunday Grant Town meeting, reached irrevocable completion at the Thursday Monogah meeting. The rank-and-file were now in control of the strike.” (p.21). As soon as Truman invoked the Taft-Hartley Act the union could be fined for contempt of court and so too could every miner that would try to influence any other miner to stay out on strike. But activists found out that it is against the Constitution of the United States for a law to be passed against an individual. So the miners found the answer when the cable came with Lewis’ back-to-work telegram. They said, “We have all heard the telegram. I can’t tell you what to do, but they can’t pass a law against an individual. You can do what you want, but I can’t tell you I’m not going back to work until we have a contract! Meeting adjourned.” (p.22). So the miners reconvened with the legal decision and continued the strike, but now they had to organize themselves if they were to be successful.

Workers Assert Their Own Class Perspectives

The ruling class was stunned by this loophole in the law and tried by all means to quell the strike and to starve out the miners and their families. This was the reason why so many miners’ wives participated in an important role during the mass picketing and the organizing of relief to the neediest families. Because the strike was declared illegal, “all established avenues of aid dried up or cut off, the top priority became massive relief to help the miners and keep the operators from starving us in defeat.” District officials tried to sabotage the setting up of a miners’ relief committee that would seek help from workers of other industries who were sympathetic to the miners and were anxious to help. Once the relief committee was approved in Grant Town, WV, “committee members were appointed to go out and get aid from other workers throughout the country (…) The following week, two miners headed East to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, and two others went North into Ohio and Michigan. All were totally committed to winning the strike, and no more effective speakers could have been sent out to do the job.” (p.25-28). One should not forget that, “the local press and company stooges tried to whip up anti-Red hysteria, accusing the strike leaders of being Communists or dupes of Communists and charging that Reds and outside agitators were infiltrating and taking over the leadership of the strike.” But the rank-and-file stood firm and defended their strike and relief committees. “The red-baiting and accusations took a particularly vicious turn when a van of relief collected in New York by a teachers’ union, the American Labor Party and the Progressive Party came into the Barrackville local union. Those who brought the good and clothing came with movie cameras and lights to photograph the delivery, and they in-turn were photographed and their visit reported in the local press (…) many blacks accepted the relief. The implication was that they were somehow un-American for accepting the ‘Red’ food (…) The press attacks became so vicious that many local union presidents publicly denounced the acceptance of any ‘Red’ food, some even declaring that ‘Red’ food sent to their locals should be dumped into the river.” (p.28). “It was in Detroit that autoworkers organized a city-wide relief program to help the miners with the giant Ford local 600 spearheading the effort. Food and clothing to fill five huge trailers were donated by the workers and others, including students, who contributed generously to the appeal.” (p.30). Another characteristic of how class solidarity works was shown “When the miners cheered the 12 tons of food that the auto workers had sent, and a check for $1,000 from United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 600, and another $333 from Local 155, Joe Hogan (UAW) rose to say that the auto workers didn’t come ‘to get thanks from the miners, but to give thanks to the miners for their splendid fight,” which was not only on behalf of themselves but helped the whole labor movement.” (p.30). William Massey of the relief committee concluded: “Our victory shows what can be done when we fight together.” (p.30). “The relief committee, in operation for only two weeks, got over $6,000 in cash contributions from workers in other industries, plus the relief truck caravan. The relief pipeline was open. The operators and the government were not going to starve us into submission.” (p.31).

Not only did the miners win this strike but the experience they went through widened even further the gulf between the rank-and-file and the top of the unions, in the person of John L. Lewis. The next year, in 1951, a wildcat strike erupted in Northern West Virginia, where the miners demanded seniority rights; they knew that the ‘Continuous Miner’ would cause an enormous amount of layoffs and they wanted the seniority system to have protection from automation. “The wildcat strike centered on Consol’s 13 mines in Northern West Virginia, but quickly threatened to spread as miners from other areas began to plead for us to come and pull them out because they faced the same situation. So intense were the feelings of those of us on strike that we forced Lewis and Consol to negotiate a seniority protection clause without first going to work. This was the first time a provision was won while workers were on strike.” (p.31). Under the renewed pressure of these very militant wildcat strikes, the bosses from the mines and the unions had to give in. Recognizing the threat of these militant workers, the bosses chose to give-in in order to prevent these experiences of self-organization spreading through the wider working class.

Lessons For Today

The pamphlet from News & Letters from 1984 concludes as follows:

“Lewis and the operators had clearly understood the revolutionary implications in the 1949-1950 rank-and-file movement. That became the last great strike Lewis ever led, and never again directly involved the rank-and-file in any contract negotiations. All subsequent contract talks were held in secrecy, and we first learned of new agreements when they were reported in the press (…) Within 10 years, from 1950 to 1960, the nation’s miners were slashed from 500,000 to less than 175,000. The whole of Appalachia became a permanently depressed region for two decades.” (p.32).

“The historic significance of the 1949-50 strike, however, was not only that the miners had revealed the course of the strike that they were far ahead of their leaders (…) they had also demonstrated that to achieve their ends they had to create their own organization- the mass meeting. They made their own decisions, carried them out in opposition to the power of the government, coal operators, a hostile press and their own union leadership, and at the same time had directly involved broad segments of the working class in the nation. To some, many of the things the miners did seemingly spontaneous, as though the actions came from nowhere. Just the opposite was true. The spontaneity of the miners flowed from their own repeated collective thought and action that preceded their ‘spontaneous’ activity.”

We can only add that this experience, as many others confirm, of the working class since the onset of capitalist decadence can only achieve temporary victories and a rise in its class consciousness through self-organized struggles. It is the only way of developing its collective capacities of solidarity and the perspectives of a class that has the capacity to overthrow capitalist social relations. It has to rise up and affirm its historic role of freeing humanity from class based societies and capitalism (whose only solutions to its crisis of overproduction are austerity measures and war). The working class has a communist perspective for humanity, because in its radical struggle lays the germs of a strong solidarity and class consciousness that are totally opposed to the logic of capitalist society. Now that the working class in the United States is reacting to the crisis and austerity measures, it is very useful for the working class to remember its own capacities for self-organization and solidarity, largely unknown to the present generation.  

JZ  12/12/10

(1) The Coal Miners’ General Strike Of 1949-1950 And The Birth Of Marxist Humanism In The US by Raya Dunayevskaya.

 The shelling of the Yeonpyeong islands on November 23 by North Korea, killing two soldiers and two civilians, has brought tensions on the Korean Peninsula to a new height, with increasing worry throughout the world that the situation will develop into an explosive confrontation. Despite all the public displays of caution and concern for stabilizing the region, both the US and China have been playing a dangerous game of confrontations throughout East Asia over the past year, and each side is seeking to exploit the situation for the advancement of its own imperialist aims. The fact that North Korea, an isolated anachronistic state, is able to enrich uranium while the majority of its population is devastated by famines and droughts speaks to its strategic importance to China as a buffer against the South, where US troops have been stationed for almost 60 years. It is in this broader context that the conflict between North and South Korea must be understood.

A year of mounting tensions

Tensions on the Peninsula

The 2010 Mid-Term Elections have come and gone with disastrous results for the Democratic Party. The Republicans won a strong majority in the House of Representatives, giving them the ability to obstruct any legislation that must pass both houses of Congress. For the bourgeois media, these elections were nothing sort of a sea-change event putting the Republicans in the driver’s seat to defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 Presidential Election. President Obama himself admitted to taking a “shellacking” in the elections and promised to do his best to work with the Republicans in Congress. Meanwhile, “progressive” Democrats sang a different tune, arguing that the election results were best explained by the collapse of the President’s electoral coalition due to his fecklessness in the face of Republican obstructionism, his sell-out on national healthcare and his pro-Wall Street agenda.

However, it was not all good news for the Republicans as the election served to highlight important and deepening fractures within the GOP. The growing weight of the Tea Party within Republican Party ranks probably cost their party control of the U.S. Senate. Although the Tea Party’s right-wing demagoguery was useful in rallying the party base in conservative House of Representative districts; it actually worked to turn voters off to the Republican candidate in a number of Senate races that they might have otherwise won. Still, a number of firebrand Republicans, such as the extreme libertarian Rand Paul of Kentucky, will take seats in the Senate when the new Congress convenes in January 2011. The GOP will enter the new Congress with growing divisions, as its insurgent right-wing faction often appears to be as much at odds with “mainstream Republicans” as with the Democrats.

It is clear that the bourgeois political system in the U.S. is under severe stress in the face of a persistent economic crisis that no matter what the bourgeoisie does just will not go away. Unemployment remains sky high, credit is still largely frozen, and businesses supposedly sit on mounds of cash that they simply cannot invest profitably, just as the consumption power of the working class is massively reduced by the collapse of the home equity/debt shell game. Meanwhile, the bourgeois class finally begins to take notice of the ominous national debt, at the same time state and local governments face severe budget shortfalls.

So what does all this mean for the working class? As we pointed out in the last issue of Internationalism[1] [77]the proletariat has no stake in the outcome of bourgeois elections. Elections are moments in the life of the bourgeoisie through which it attempts to tie the working class to the state through the electoral circus, settle internal disputes within its ranks and manipulate the machinery of the state and media to bring the best ruling team to state power for a given historical juncture. However, the working class does have a vital need to understand the political strategy of the bourgeois class as it attempts to utilize the state to manage the permanent economic crisis and suppress the mortal threat to its existence that emanates from the class struggle. As we have argued in Internationalism for some time now, the deadening weight of social decomposition on the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus has resulted in a growing difficulty for the ruling class to manage its political and electoral system to achieve the best possible results from the point of view of the national capital as a whole. The increasing tendency for “everyman for himself” in the arena of bourgeois politics, the growing number of factions, and movements and the increasing unpredictability of bourgeois elections are weighing heavily on the U.S. bourgeoisie at the moment. What depth has the political crisis of the bourgeoisie reached? This is the vital question facing the working class movement when it comes to analyzing bourgeois elections.

The Contradictions of Bourgeois Economic Policy: Austerity or Stimulus?

According to the bourgeois media, economists are divided on what should be the most pressing economic policy priority at the current juncture. On the one hand, the “deficit hawks” believe that the U.S.’s national debt has spiraled out of control threatening the nation’s long-term position as global imperialist leader. For these economists, the most-pressing need facing the state is to enact painful austerity measures to reduce federal spending, enact deep cuts in social programs, reduce the federal workforce, rationalize the tax code and make the state solvent once again. According to this line of thought, if the debt is not brought under control, the U.S. will eventually face a sovereign debt crisis on the order of what Greece and Ireland are now experiencing. Seeing the U.S. as a bad investment, unwilling to take the necessary measures to get its financial house in order, foreign investors will stop buying U.S. government bonds; pulling the rug out from under the “borrow and spend” model that has kept the U.S. afloat for at least the past decade. The recent report of the Presidential Debt Commission, operating in this vein, called for raising the Social Security retirement age, eliminating the mortgage tax credit, cutting the federal workforce and even certain reductions in the military budget in order to reduce the national debt.

On the other hand, economists on the left, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, argue that concern over the federal debt—although a real problem—is overblown. The most pressing priority facing the state is to get the economy moving again by enacting expansionist stimulus programs in order to boost consumer spending and create jobs. According to this perspective, the U.S. economy is suffering from a massive problem of “underconsumption” in which the wages of the working class have been reduced so far in real terms that they simply cannot afford to buy what is produced. While this problem was suppressed during the last 20 years through a massive resort to consumer debt, this logic has now run its course. According to the Reich-Krugman thesis, another round of Keynesian stimulus is necessary to put more money in consumers’ pockets, eventually causing economic growth to resume and unemployment to drop. Only once a “normal economy” prevails again do followers of the Reich-Krugman thesis believe reducing the national debt should become a priority for the national state. To enact austerity too soon and too fast could be a disaster.

It doesn’t take much analysis to recognize that in the short-term these two policies are in complete contradiction to one another. One calls for contracting the economy in order to improve the long-term fiscal position of the state, while the other risks making the national debt worse in order to improve the economy now. However, it shouldn’t be surprising that two different factions of economists produce two contrasting visions of the most important policy priorities for the state. This simply reflects the fundamental contradiction that state capitalism finds itself in on the international level. After nearly one hundred years of full-fledged state capitalism, nearly all states find themselves faced with a fundamental choice in the face of the permanent economic crisis: attempt to stimulate the economy and risk further long-term fiscal damage or enact austerity now and potentially cause a weak economy to become comatose.

Nevertheless, we should not interpret the debate between these two policy positions as evidence of any real difference within the U.S. bourgeoisie over the need to enact austerity against the working class’ living and working conditions. All bourgeois factions recognize that the fiscal crisis of the state is real and will eventually need to be dealt with by making “painful sacrifices.” The policy debates within the bourgeoisie at the moment concern only the timing of austerity and the question of whether or not another round of stimulus—given the long term risks—will actually help the economy recover. Despite a concerted media campaign directed towards the working class around the threat to the nation posed by the national debt, a strong faction within the U.S. bourgeoisie believes that greater stimulus is needed. At the moment, this faction appears to have the ear of the Obama administration.[2] [78] The recent extension of the Bush era tax cuts, combined with another extension of the federal emergency unemployment compensation program and a cut in the Social Security payroll tax has been marketed by the administration as a “stimulus program” that they believe will add up to 1.3 million jobs in the next two years.[3] [79] Of course, all of the tax cuts and the extension of unemployment benefits will have to be charged on the national credit card.

The working class should not be fooled by the Obama administration’s continued resort to Keynesian policies. Behind these short-term policies, all factions of the bourgeoisie know that the day of reckoning is coming when the Scylla of debt and fiscal crisis will outweigh the Charybdis of unemployment and economic stagnation.[4] [80] The question facing the bourgeoisie at the moment is what political faction should hold state power when the assault on the social wage begins?

From the perspective of history, it would appear likely that the U.S. bourgeoisie would attempt to move the Democratic Party out of power so it could play the traditional role of the left in opposition when the Republicans preside over enacting the tough austerity measures that lie ahead. However, given the amount of turmoil that has occurred in the U.S. political system over the last decade; this is no longer either a straightforward decision or such a simple maneuver for the bourgeoisie to accomplish. While social decomposition has affected the entire bourgeois political spectrum over the last ten years, it has not affected both American political parties equally. Over the last decade the Republican Party has become increasingly penetrated by factions of the bourgeoisie that do not necessarily have the capacity to act in the overall interests of the national capital. The Republicans current coalition includes the obscurantist Christian Right, ideological libertarians who want to abolish the Federal Reserve, free-market fundamentalists, the most belligerent anti-immigrant factions the bourgeoisie has to offer and those who relish the legacy of Cowboy diplomacy from the Bush era. On top of this, we now have to add the Tea Party, many of whom are true ideologues who really believe the extreme philosophies they preach.[5] [81] While “mainstream Republicans” wise to the ways of Washington still control the levers of power in the Republican Party; they are under increasing assault from the right-wing insurgency in their ranks, causing them to pander to this constituency at the same time they manipulate it to improve their electoral position.

There are numerous risks for the bourgeoisie in the period ahead as it attempts to negotiate this difficult political situation. Should it move the Republican Party back into power in preparation for the tough austerity necessary, risking a repeat of the Bush years and empowering the ideological wing of the GOP? Should it rally behind Obama again in 2012 in the hopes of maintaining a more responsible and competent center-right Democratic administration, but risk upsetting the ideological division of labor against the working class?

The 2012 Presidential Campaign

In the days following the Mid-Term elections, Obama looked like a certain one-term President. His party had suffered an historic defeat at the polls. Democratic Congressional candidates in important industrial states Obama won in 2008, suffered defeat after defeat. The Democrats were even unable to hold Obama’s former Illinois Senate seat. The media called these elections a “Republican Tidal Wave.” It was billed as a total rejection of the Obama agenda, especially his controversial health care reform legislation. It was declared certain that the only way the Republicans would lose in 2012 would be to nominate an extreme Tea Party candidate like Sarah Palin. All the Republicans had to do to return to power in 2012 was nominate a credible candidate, who would promptly trounce a discredited and demoralized Obama. The Republicans would obstruct any and all legislation from making it through Congress for the next two years, leaving Obama looking weak and ineffective. The public would reject him for sure.

However, just two short months since the election, the political wind has seemed to change once again. Obama is fresh off a series of important legislative victories in the lame-duck Congress and he now looks Presidential once again. He pushed the New START treaty with Russia through the Senate against the obstinate obstructionism of certain Republicans. He has also pushed through legislation ending the “Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell” policy in the military, which caused many qualified gay people to be banished from service. The ending of this policy was endorsed by Obama’s Republican Secretary of Defense against the gratuitous objections of a number of obstinate Republicans, including Obama’s 2008 Presidential opponent John McCain.

Still, this did not stop a mini-revolt from taking place in the Democratic Party over the tax deal Obama struck with Republicans. So-called “progressive” Democrats rose in an angry revolt against their own President, accusing him of selling-out, compromising without fighting and caving into the Republican Party’s demands to continue irresponsible tax cuts for the richest Americans adding to the national debt.

For the better part of the week, left-wing blogs and the MSNBC network were ripe with calls for a 2012 primary challenge to Obama or the launching of a third party challenge from the left.[7] [83] Congressional Democrats vowed to vote against the tax compromise, while Bernie Sanders—the self-professed Socialist Senator from Vermont—grandstanded on the Senate floor with a mock filibuster against the tax compromise, railing against the decline in living standards of the American working-class, while the richest Americans keep on lining their pockets.[8] [84] During this period, a sense of shock and disbelief emanated from the base of the Democratic Party as they appeared to form an angry left opposition to their own President.

Nevertheless, quickly the hoopla died down and the tax compromise qua stimulus program won enough Democratic votes to pass both houses of Congress and become law. The drama over this legislation may be a preview of things to come. Should the bourgeoisie decide it is too risky to move the Republican Party into power, is it possible they could attempt to enact austerity through a center-right Democratic administration supported tacitly by “mainstream Republicans,” while the Democratic Congressional base plays the role of the left in opposition. At this time, we cannot say if this will occur. However, the controversy over the tax compromise gives some precedent for how such an arrangement might work.

Still, this governmental arrangement could risk further radicalizing the right-wing of the Republican Party and possibly evoking a split with the Tea Party and a third party challenge from the right. Many ideological Republicans in Congress will reject the attempts of their leaders to compromise with Obama.

Already a campaign is under way in the media—led by “responsible Republicans” to try to persuade Sarah Palin from running for President in 2012. While she may be useful for raising campaign funds for Republicans and rallying the conservative base to come out and vote, there is a general consensus among the main factions of the bourgeoisie in both parties that she would make a disastrous President—exponentially worse that Bush. Moreover, her candidacy could pose difficulties for moving the Republican Party into power in 2012, as she is likely to reenergize Obama voters from 2008.

In the final analysis, the U.S. political situation is currently characterized by the instability wrought by decomposition. All responsible factions of the bourgeoisie recognize the eventual imperative to enact austerity. However, there is little consensus at the moment about how to accomplish this at the political level. While history tells us that the bourgeoisie would seek to move the Democratic Party into opposition, so the Republicans can enact the needed cuts while the Democrats work with the unions to control the working class’ response; the current situation of decomposition makes this somewhat less than straightforward for the bourgeoisie. The ruling class could opt to try to enact these cuts with a center-right Democratic President in league with the Republican establishment, with the Congressional Democratic caucus, along with the unions[9] [85], playing the role of the left opposition. This course of action would come with the serious risk of upsetting the traditional ideological division of labor between the Democrats and Republicans. However, given the ideological deterioration of the Republican Party and the potential for a dangerous Presidential candidate emerging from its ranks, the bourgeoisie may have no other choice than to opt for such a policy.

Of course is it also possible that the effects of decomposition have already taken such a toll on the bourgeois political apparatus that in the end the main factions of the bourgeoisie cannot prevent a President Palin—or some similar right-wing cook—from taking office. If Palin decides to run, it is possible that the Tea Party insurgency will carry her to victory in the Republican primaries. As the Republican Party candidate, she may energize the Democratic base to come to the polls—but given the constraints of the American political system, in particular the anachronous Electoral College, it is possible that in a farcical repeat of the 2000 Election, Palin could win the Presidency, but lose the popular vote. While this is only remote possibility at the moment, we can be assured that it is an outcome the main factions of the bourgeoisie are preparing for and trying their utmost to avoid.

Henk 12/25/10
 

 The bourgeois press greeted the New Year with the usual celebratory narcissism. The carefully crafted rhetoric of the supposed “economic recovery” was continually punctuated by the tacit reminder that hard times are still ahead. The bourgeoisie’s calls for sacrifice are heard more thoroughly and the recent mid-term elections have potentially provided the bourgeoisie with the political pieces necessary to institute a harsher round of austerity. The incoming House majority leader, Mr. Boehner, has referred to the period ahead as an “adult” time for political leaders. Only time will tell whether or not the “freshmen” coming into office can pass the first major test of being responsible bourgeois managers of the US economy. Will they vote to raise the debt limit of the United States again (as is tradition) or will they act in accordance with the lunatic ideology they’ve espoused in the run-up to the election? The pressures upon the Republican Party from the right are analyzed deeper in another article within this issue of Internationalism that deals specifically with these elections. Instead, this article will turn its attention more pointedly towards the elements of austerity that the working class are faced with today and try to present these elements within a historical framework of global capitalism’s permanent crisis.

The Necessity of Historical Perspective

There are layers of mystification whenever the bourgeoisie attempt to analyze and represent the crisis to the working class. One of the first layers is through (mis)-classification. Case-in-point, the crisis as a “financial” crisis that has its roots in the 2008 bursting of the housing bubble and the meltdown of some of the largest financial institutions. This is a necessary layer of deception for the bourgeoisie, whose principle assault on revolutionary consciousness is the stripping away of any historical framework for analyzing the capitalist system. With a degree of calculation characteristic of the Machiavellian class, the reframing of the crisis as a financial one is directly in line with this tactic of isolating historical crises within a-historical frameworks. For revolutionaries, it is therefore necessary to establish and reiterate the historic nature of this crisis before diving into the austerity that the bourgeoisie find compelled to enact.

Who is to be the judge, jury and executioner?

The bourgeoisie only speaks in lies

There is no freedom in bourgeois democracy

 At the close of 2011, for a brief period of time, the “WikiLeaks affair” was at the center of every news media outlet in the States and, presumably, the whole world over. Although by now the barrage of media coverage of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, have become a trickle, there is still a need to make some remarks about this event that has so much shaken the bourgeois media world.

What was all this excitement about?

The facts are well known. At the end of November, following a well prepared sensationalist media campaign, Wikileaks started to release some of the hundreds of thousands of classified US government diplomatic cables that it claims to have in its possession. At the same time several commercial news media organizations throughout the world (The New York Times, France’s Le Monde, Britain’s Guardian, Spain’s El Pais, and the German magazine Der Spiegel ), to whom WikiLeaks have given these files in advance of its own release, started running stories based on these documents. If someone had really been fooled into believing that the “State secrets” of the US were on the verge of being exposed, the reality is surely disappointing. Leaving aside the entertaining value of the quasi gossip-mongering of the US diplomatic cadres in their tiresome task of advancing American imperialist interests, from what has been made public so far these documents contribute little new to what is already widely known about the US policies around the world. Embarrassing as these diplomatic cables might be for some individuals caught off guard in their expressed opinions (both American and foreigners), they are far from being the “smoking gun” exposing the top secret policies of US government that some commentators in the left wing of the bourgeois political spectrum claim them to be.

Perhaps the best assessment (besides being remarkable for its brutal honesty) of the significance of the publication of these documents for the US bourgeoisie was made by the US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said:

But what really is WikiLeaks?

At the time of writing, the situation in Wisconsin has calmed considerably from the turmoil we described at the end of February in "Wisconsin Public Employees: Defense of the Unions Leads to Defeat"[1]. Although Republican/Tea Party Governor Scott Walker was able to use questionable parliamentarian maneuvers to ram his “union busting” bill through the state legislature, there has been no general strike as the unions promised and protests at the state Capitol building have steadily dwindled. Although the national union apparatus treated us to a “day of action” in major cities across the country, the focus of events in Wisconsin has shifted to the shady world of bourgeois legalism, as the unions—along with their Democratic and “progressive” allies—engage in a court room battle to prevent enforcement of the Republicans’ multi-faceted bill to attack public employee unions. Meanwhile, Democratic political operatives have launched an electoral campaign to recall Republican legislators who voted for the bill.

Although America’s new imperialist adventure in Libya and the earthquake and nuclear catastrophe in Japan have overtaken the events in Wisconsin as the “hot” news stories of the day, a steady media campaign continues around the theme of “union busting” in the United States. The right-wing media—spearheaded by the demagogues at Fox News and talk radio—continue to spew toxic venom against public employees and their unions, describing them as public enemy number one in the fight to control spending and get budget deficits under control. Meanwhile, left-wing media—primarily through the mouthpiece of the MSNBC network and the pages of The Nation and Mother Jones magazines—keeps up a steady message railing against the unabashed cruelty of the Republican/Tea Party crowd, who they say seek to destroy the unions as part of a broader attack on the American “middle class.” According to the left-wing narrative, the unions remain the last best hope for working Americans, in a time of growing inequality, to make the economy work for everyone.

The unions and the “progressive” left have attempted to seize upon the momentum of the Wisconsin protests to build a movement against other Tea Party/Republican governors’ efforts to enact similar bills in their states. Protests have taken place in Indiana and Ohio, while a movement builds in Michigan to oppose even more draconian measures that would allow the state to take over entire town governments, appointing local officials at whim. The specter has been raised that state officials could even appoint corporations to run town governments as part of these “emergency fiscal measures”!

What is the working-class to make of the lessons of the Wisconsin events?

Are the unions indeed the last best hope for working people to salvage some kind of standard of living in an age of a growing income gap and increasing plutocracy? If the unions are indeed weapons of the ruling class to hijack the class struggle—as the ICC claims—why have parts of the U.S. bourgeoisie acted so aggressively to destroy them? What is the nature of the “union busting” politics that has exploded in the U.S. since the November 2010 elections? What do the Wisconsin events tell us about the nature and depth of the U.S. bourgeoisie’s political crisis?

We cannot exhaustively answer all of these questions in this article. However, we believe it is important to attempt to draw the essential lessons for the working class from critical moments in the class struggle and the political life of the bourgeoisie. The events in Wisconsin fit both criteria; thus, it is vitally important that revolutionaries put forward their analyses of these events so they can be debated and refined in the vigorous confrontation of ideas that the advancement of revolutionary theory requires. This article is an attempt to contribute to that process, particularly on the meaning of the lust for “union busting” that has developed among certain factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie.

From Internationalism’s perspective, we believe that the orgy of union busting undertaken by Republican/Tea Party governors does not fit with the overall strategic plans of the main factions of the U.S. national bourgeoisie in a period of sharpening class confrontations. In our view, the union-busting aspect of the bill proposed by Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and similar efforts in other states, is a potential mistake for the ruling class that—if enacted—could serve to deprive it of a vital tool in its efforts to derail the working-class’ struggle, drown it in the false alternative of unionism and prevent the proletariat from engaging in direct confrontation with the bourgeois state.

It is therefore vitally important to distinguish between two key aspects of legislation proposed by Republican/Tea Party state governors since November 2010:

1.      The efforts to enact austerity measures against the working class’ living and working conditions, which is a central need for the U.S. bourgeoisie faced with the economic crisis.

2.      An ideologically driven quest to smash the unions, “starve the state” and sell-off public functions to corporate cronies, which threatens to further destabilize American state capitalism.

In our view, the first aspect of enacting austerity is a clear necessity for the bourgeoisie faced with an economic and fiscal crisis of historic proportions; however the second aspect of “union-busting” and the pursuit of other right-wing tropes are ideologically driven, short-sighted policies that risk going too far and negatively impacting the ability of the ruling class ability to manage the class struggle. For us, the vigorous attempts to enact these types of laws by certain sectors of the U.S. bourgeoisie reflect a growing tendency towards the decomposition of the U.S. political apparatus, complicating its ability to act in a strategic manner to address the economic crisis and manage the class struggle in the interests of the national capital as a whole. This decomposition is reflected in the increasing difficulty the U.S. bourgeoisie faces in controlling its electoral process; evident in the outcome of the 2010 mid-term elections, which brought Governor Walker and fellow-travelers to office.[2]

In order to understand the depths to which the ideological decomposition of the U.S. bourgeoisie has reached in terms of the recent attacks against the union bureaucracy, we should briefly review the historical role of the unions in the U.S. since their definitive incorporation into the bourgeois state during the New Deal of the 1930s. We will then examine whether the recent attack on the unions fulfill some kind of economic logic for the bourgeoisie, as some in the proletarian political milieu have argued, and then conclude by attempting to situate the nature of today’s union busting crusade in the overall political life of the U.S. ruling class.

The Role of the Unions in the Political Life of the U.S. Bourgeoisie

It was during the Franklin Roosevelt administration of the 1930s that the union bureaucracy became fully integrated into the American state apparatus and assumed the mantra of the bourgeoisie’s trusted tool for ensuring labor peace, deflecting struggles and helping to manage the industrial economy. During the 1930s, this was accomplished by the direct encouragement that trade union leaders associated with the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) received from the American state to organize the unskilled mass proletariat. Internationalism has written extensively about the politics surrounding the formation of the CIO, in particular in our article The Formation of the CIO: Triumph of the Bourgeoisie.[3] Interested readers can refer to that article for more details about this period. We will not repeat our entire analysis here, except to emphasize the role that the CIO played for the capitalist state in controlling labor discontent in the run-up to the Second World War, enforcing a no-strike pledge during the war, and enforcing industrial speed-up and labor militarization.

We should remark here that all factions of the American bourgeoisie did not accept the unionization of the unskilled mass proletariat at the time. On the contrary, FDR faced intense political challenge from some recalcitrant industrialists who felt the unions would put a crimp in their profits, and right-wing demagogues who viewed the Roosevelt administration’s pro-union New Deal as an incipient form of “Bolshevism.” Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that at this time the American state was able to impose the unionization of the mass of unskilled workers through the CIO over the objections of recalcitrant bourgeois factions. The American state recognized that it was in the overall interests of the national capital to ensure the smooth running of industry in its drive to develop a permanent war economy in the preparation for the brewing military confrontation with Germany and Japan. The unions would play a critical role in this process. 

The role of both the AFL and CIO in mobilizing the American working-class for the imperialist slaughter of the Second World War—including the vigorous enforcement of the unconditional no-strike pledge—proved the perspicacity of the American state’s unionization polices under the Roosevelt administration. This period saw the passage of such landmark legislation as the Wagner Act—making collective bargaining a fundamental feature of the permanent war economy—and the establishment of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); both of which would become important pillars of the post-war New Deal order for over three decades.

In the period following the war, the unions became one of the most important lynchpins of the New Deal order, which would last until the end of the 1970s. Although a post-war strike wave would lead to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947—making it more difficult for unions to organize collective bargaining units, banning the closed shop, prohibiting various types of strikes and allowing conservative inclined states to pass their infamous “right to work to laws,” this did not seriously erode the position of the unions within the post-war order. Throughout the next three decades the unions were important players in American domestic politics, with the ability to make or break presidential campaigns through their close integration with the Democratic Party apparatus. [4]

During the period of the post-war boom, the American unions became a more or less accepted facet of economic and social life; an almost equal partner with industry in ensuring the growth and strength of the American economy within the system of military Keynesianism. On foreign policy matters, once the Stalinists were largely eliminated from the unions, the AFL-CIO (merged in 1955) would play an important role in supporting the American state’s cold war strategy, in particular in advocating for “free trade unions” in Stalinist countries. In 1979, the number of U.S. workers in unions would peak at 21 million (although union density peaked much earlier in 1954 at 28 percent).[5]

However, it was in the 1970s that the place of the union bureaucracy within the American ruling class and the role of unions in the economy and society in general was called into serious question for the first time since the formation of the CIO four decades before. The economic shocks of this decade, including the Arab oil embargo, the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system and the development of “stagflation,” changed the calculus for important factions of the American ruling class. Many economists blamed the economic woes on the excessive wages paid to workers. Economists talked about a “wage squeeze” causing runaway inflation to endanger the economy. Austerity was in the offing.

Broad economic and social forces corresponding to the return of the capitalist crisis moved against the American union bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s. Insurgent bourgeois factions—rallying around the presidency of Ronald Reagan—began to question whether the union apparatus was just too costly in an era marked by economic crisis. This tendency came to a head in 1981 when Regan responded to a strike by federal air traffic controllers by firing the strikers and jailing their union leaders.

Since the ascendancy of Reaganism, the importance of the union apparatus in the management of the national economy has steadily declined. From a high of over one-quarter of the labor force in unions in the 1950s, union density has slipped to just 11 percent of all workers and just 7 percent of private sector workers today.[6] Nevertheless, despite declining membership, the unions have remained an important force in the political life of the American bourgeoisie, as well as an important bulwark in diffusing the class struggle—above all, among public sector workers who are today among the most combative sectors of the working class.

From the Los Angeles grocery workers strike in 2003-2004 to the New York City transit strike of 2005, the bourgeoisie has skillfully deployed its union apparatus to derail the working class’ struggle whenever possible. Moreover, on the national, state and local levels the unions remain a potent force in bourgeois politics, funneling campaign cash to mostly Democratic candidates, funding initiative campaigns, pressuring state governments towards particular policies, funding policy think tanks and political strategy research efforts, etc. The nation’s largest union, the Services Employees International Union (SEIU)—despite recent internal conflicts—remains a potent player in politics at all levels. Former SEIU president Andy Stern even sat on President Obama’s commission tasked with balancing the federal budget.

We can see from this brief history that the unions—despite their recent troubles—remain an important component of the American state apparatus and a key faction of the American bourgeoisie. In addition to their special role as the shop floor police of the working class, the unions constitute a key link in the reproduction of the Democratic Party at all levels and therefore an important mechanism in the maintenance of a credible two-party electoral mystification.

Why then have certain factions of the bourgeoisie turned so violently against the unions in a way that not even Reagan himself contemplated? In order to answer this question, we must first consider whether or not the move to bust the unions—in particular the public employee unions—fulfills some kind of economic “need” for the bourgeoisie faced with the economic crisis. If this were the case, the “union busting” politics we have seen of late could conform to some kind of economic functionalist logic, and therefore be quite rational. We will consider this question in the next section.

Is There an Economic Logic to Public Employee “Union Busting” Today?

So what is behind the drive today, primarily by Republican/Tea Party state governments to enact draconian legislation that poses a real existential threat to public employee unions? Is there some kind of economic logic that is being fulfilled here?

According to the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT), Governor Walker’s efforts to destroy the public employee unions are part of a broader campaign by the capitalist state to “lower labor costs as much as possible.” The ICT writes, (emphasis added) “Collective bargaining agreements with state employees, in Wisconsin, were put in place primarily to avoid strikes and keep the government functioning. The 1971 state law allowing for it was put in place in the wake of the massive nationwide strike of US postal workers in that year. Technically, the tradeoff for not being allowed the same right to go on strike as workers in the private sector was a collective bargaining process. These state labor peace treaties have now become an obstacle for the capitalist class in power as they attempt to lower labor costs as much as possible.”[7]

The ICT’s view seems to be that the public employee unions constitute a barrier for the state in carrying through the process of the “recomposition” of the American working class on the state’s own labor force. This process of recomposition is marked by the elimination of relatively well paying, permanent, benefit providing, union secured jobs and their replacement by lower paying, deskilled, casualized, service industry jobs. In this view then, in order to reduce the wage bill of public sector employees as much as possible, it is necessary for the state to erode the power of the unions, as they constitute an “extra cost” to the industry concerned—in this case the state itself—and the economy as a whole. Seen this way, the actions of Governor Walker and other Republican/Tea Party Governors are perfectly rational—even if clumsily executed—policies, which seek to fulfill an economic need of the bourgeoisie.

While we do not contest that a process similar to what is described here has been underway in the American economy in general since the 1970s (de-industrialization, financialization, the increasing insecurity of the working-class, etc.) it is difficult to see the logic that requires the utter destruction of the unions.[8] On the contrary, it would seem to us that in a situation that demands the ruling class impose austerity on the proletariat, it would prove vital for it to maintain a functioning union bureaucracy in order to deflect and neutralize any response from the working class. This would seem to be all the more important when it comes to public employees, who have repeatedly been on the front lines of the class struggle in recent times.

Moreover, it is difficult to see the economic logic in Governor Walkers’ union busting bill, when the unions themselves agreed to the austerity measures and were only moved to launch a campaign against the bill when it became clear Governor Walker was serious about his threat to put the unions themselves out of business. As the ICT comrades themselves write, “The Democrats and their union apparatus were perfectly willing to throw workers under the bus and maintain a shred of collective bargaining, just enough to keep funding their election coffers and keep turning out the vote for them during election campaigns. What has not been debated is the austerity budget that the unions accepted from the beginning of the current struggle, if only they were allowed to retain the structure of collective bargaining of labor contracts with state employees.”

The ICT comrades appear to believe that the processes of the “Wal-Martization” of the economy knows no bounds and is now asserting itself against the state’s own labor force through an attempt to deskill, marginalize and casualize it. This idea would seem to us to be problematic. Public employees today are among the most educated sector of the workforce; their labor constitutes a vital moment in the reproduction of the state apparatus itself. While it is certainly true that some of the broader trends affecting the American working-class in general have begun to be applied to public employees—in particular public school teachers; it is difficult to see an economic necessity for the ruling class in destroying the public employee union apparatus itself. On the contrary, the increasing importance of public employees on the front-line of the class struggle would seem to demand a strengthening—rather than an attempt to eliminate—their union apparatus, so that the unions can play their historic role of derailing their struggles. It is not for nothing that public employees are among the only sectors of the working-class where union density has actually grown over the last several decades!

We think that in order to understand the recent wave of union busting legislation we must go beyond economic functionalism. We must look at the effects of capitalist social decomposition on the political life of the bourgeoisie itself.

Political Decomposition, “Union Busting” and the Strategy of the Bourgeoisie

As we wrote in our analysis of the 2010 mid-term elections, the preferred political strategy of the main factions bourgeoisie at this time would most likely be to maneuver the Republican party into power, so that it can begin to enact the needed austerity measures against the working-class, while the Democratic Party and the unions play the card of the “left in opposition.” However, we pointed out how the forces of decomposition have already impacted the political life of the bourgeoisie to such an extent as to significantly complicate the implementation of this strategy. The increasingly ideological nature of the Republican Party—spurred on by the Tea Party insurgency—makes it more and more difficult for the GOP to function as a credible party of bourgeois government. This analysis seems to be born out on the state level by the incredibly shortsighted and clumsy actions of Governor Walker and his ilk.

We think we must see the union busting laws pursued by Republican governors since the mid-term elections in this light. One of the most important outcomes of the election was the victory of Republican/Tea Party governors across the industrial Mid-West, generally accompanied by Republican majorities in the state legislatures. True to their campaign words, most of these governors have wasted no time in attempting to implement extreme right-wing programs including the draconian union busting laws. These governors have shown little political flexibility, embarking on a sweeping program of right-wing initiatives that have even left many of the people who voted for them stunned.

Clearly, the most ambitious of these initiatives is the attempt to destroy the public employee unions by limiting their collective bargaining power, hindering their ability to collect dues and requiring them to undergo annual certification votes. It is without question that such policies are designed to wipe the unions out by eliminating their raison d’être in the eyes of the workers they represent, depriving them of operating funds and subjecting them to the perils of regular representation campaigns. Moreover, these measures threaten to deprive the state Democratic Party of needed campaign funds, election organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts, which are generally managed by the union bureaucracy.

For us, this conflict is more than a mere stepping up the faction fighting between Democrats and Republicans. It represents a concerted effort on the part of an insurgent right-wing faction within the Republican party to destroy politics as usual as they implement the most extreme elements of a right-wing program that until recently had been largely limited to the margins of the Republican Party, or at the very least kept in check by the main factions of the bourgeoisie. In fact, far from a mere acceleration of partisan jockeying, the efforts of the new crop of Republican governors reflects an intensification of the ideological breakdown of the American bourgeois political apparatus itself, which threatens not only the unions and their Democratic allies, but the main national factions of the Republican party as well. As many bourgeois commentators have noted, the actions of the Republican governors go so far as to threaten the continuity of the two-party system, which essentially threatens the continuity of the state apparatus itself.

The attempts by the Republican governors to destroy the unions would appear to fly in the face of the strategy of the main factions of the national bourgeoisie who have actually been trying for the last decade and a half to revitalize their struggling unions. From the replacement of Lane Kirkland as head of the AFL-CIO with the insurgent John Sweeny from SEIU in 1995 to the attempt to amend labor law to make it easier to organize workers with the proposal of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in 2007, important factions of the national bourgeoisie have been making a concerted effort to bolster its flailing union apparatus in anticipation of the class confrontations to come.[9] The failure to fully implement these efforts—in particular the collapse of EFCA in the early months of the Obama Presidency—reflects the extent to which the political decomposition of the bourgeois political apparatus has prevented the ruling class from implementing a whole series of policies designed to prepare the national capital for the coming period of class struggle in the face of the crisis. Of course, the process of decomposition has also infected the union apparatus itself, as witnessed by the fracturing of the AFL-CIO with the formation of the Change to Win Coalition in 2005. [10]

Thus, it is not surprising that more far-sighted factions of the U.S. national bourgeoisie have seized upon Governor Walkers’ actions in order to attempt to launch a new campaign to revitalize the unions. The talk emanating from certain circles on the left of a new “people’s movement” that will supposedly re-channel the populist anger currently manipulated by the Tea Party seems like more than idle chatter, but a very real attempt to both revitalize the unions as a buffer between the proletariat and the state and steer the working-class’ anger over the crisis in a political avenue more amenable to stable bourgeois politics. Whether or not these efforts will come to fruition, we cannot at this time say.

For the working class, the lessons of this conflict are clear. The unions are on the terrain of the bourgeoisie. Far from the last best chance we have to make the economy work for ordinary people, the unions are really the bourgeoisie’s best hope to derail our struggle for another world. The fact that certain factions of the bourgeoisie have developed a cannibalistic instinct towards the unions should serve as a clear symbol to us workers about the depths that the crisis of capitalist society has reached today.

Henk   3/4/2011

On March 17, 2011 the UN Security Council adopted a resolution which declared a no-fly zone over Libya and authorized the “international community” to take whatever additional measures necessary to “…protect the country’s population” (UN Security Council Resolution 1973) short of sending ground troops. Ever since, the “international community” has displayed an utter inability to come to any agreement on the next steps to take. The divisions and hesitations on what approach to take to the chaos in Libya run deep even at home, among the US ruling class itself. Richard N. Haass of the US Council on Foreign Relations told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the future will require boots on the ground in an “enormous, multi-year effort to help Libya become a functioning country.”[1] Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ruled out US ground forces, and Haass himself agrees that, “US interests in Libya simply do not warrant such an investment.” At the time of writing, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for the chaos that has engulfed Libya. Indeed, the divisions within factions of the US bourgeoisie and their hesitations vis-à-vis the situation in Libya point to a new development in the convulsions of a ruling class less and less capable of having any coherent strategy. We see this at the level of the economic crisis, and now, clearly so, also at the level of imperialist decision making. Why has the US decided to intervene in a conflict where it doesn’t know who the opposition are? What’s at the root of the divisions and hesitancy as to what to do next? What are the perspectives ahead for this latest imperialist adventure? Above all, what does this all mean to the working class in Libya and elsewhere?

Imperialism is a necessity for the world bourgeoisie

Eight years of the Bush administration wreaked so much havoc to US international relations and tarnished its image as a ‘fair’, ‘democratic’ world leader so seriously that when Obama campaigned for the presidential election in 2008 he rejected outright the Bush administration’s notions of unilateral military intervention. But intervene it must. The notion that the US should overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible even when they do not present an immediate threat to it, or that it should forcibly bring democracy to other nations not so… blessed, has given way to the rhetoric of “international cooperation”. In the words of US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, “When the earth shakes or rivers overflow their banks, when pandemics rage or simmering tensions burst into violence, the world looks at us.” This means that in spite of its rhetoric of “international cooperation” the US cannot renounce its position as world cop. Its reluctance or hesitance regarding the present intervention in Libya has nothing to do with the US slouching toward any degree of humility and everything to do with the imperative of struggling to defend its position of hegemony in the world. This is why from dragging its feet regarding the possibility of intervention in Libya, the US resolved in its favor almost overnight when France decided to move in support of the rebels. It is clear that the strongest stimulus toward intervention has been the fact that France first, followed immediately by Great Britain –who even sent an incognito diplomatic envoy to discuss policies with the anti-Qaddafi forces – rushed to scene, proclaiming their full support for the ‘revolt’. This is the single most powerful reason for the US to intervene. Of course the outcry of disapproval for the ‘madman’ Qaddafi is complete hypocrisy, all the major imperialist powers, including the US went along with his 42-year long dictatorship and terror against his population. Qaddafi has been a force capable of imposing some kind of order in an area where “jihadist” extremism threatens to rip apart the already fragile and volatile balance of imperialisms. The can of worms opened by the destabilizing effect of the civil war in Libya may not grant the necessity for intervention but there are other considerations.

Why the US bourgeoisie’s divisions and hesitancy?

The world imperialist situation since the collapse of the Eastern bloc has been characterized by a volatility and precariousness in the alliances between the imperialist gangsters. The predictability and relative stability of the Cold War years have been replaced by a tendency toward ‘each for themselves’. The economic crisis can only aggravate this already explosive situation. This situation of fragility at the international level is what best explains the divisions and hesitations of the US bourgeoisie. In Libya, these centrifugal tendencies are, and have been, at work both at the level of this country’s internal stability and cohesion, and that of the impact the present civil war is having on the western imperialist powers which have historically played a role in the area. Libya is essentially made up of two provinces, one in the north-west, where Tripoli is located, and the other in the east, where Benghazi is located. These two provinces are divided by long-standing tensions. Qaddafi has historically neglected the eastern province because he judged the tribes there to be potentially disloyal. At the same time, Qaddafi exacerbated the divisions between the two provinces by playing each off the other in order to stay in power and gain the approval and tacit support of the “international community”. The situation of utter dejection, lack of a future, unemployment, and repression opened the door to the influence of jihadist forces and Al-Qaida-influenced groups in the eastern part of the country. The weapons that flowed through Libya’s porous border during the anti-Qaddafi campaign have left the region’s tribes more powerful and emboldened by Western intervention on their behalf. As the US is pondering whether to intervene on the ground or not, it is making calculations as to whether it really wants to get involved in a situation that risks bogging it down in yet another drawn out conflict in which the perspective is one of all-out intertribal and interprovincial warfare. This is because although there is as yet no other opposition group, none among the council representatives of the Interim Libyan National Council –the provisional government officially recognized by France and Italy, among others-- can command allegiance in all provinces and across all tribes. Neither does it have the ability to bring the different sides together in a post-conflict situation. In addition, displacing Qaddafi would give a number of groups, including Al-Qaida, the opportunity to use the current chaos in Libya to extend their influence. On the other hand, leaving Qaddafi in control would leave the country unstable. The alternative of a divided Libya would not resolve this situation. In the context of this utter chaos, the US may conclude that Libya is not important enough, nor Qaddafi dangerous enough, to command a long-drawn intervention with troops on the ground. Indeed, it may even be better, after all, to leave Qaddafi in power or find other, less ‘radical’ solutions, such as a cease fire followed by some kind of sanctions. These calculations, however, rather than reflecting a coherent strategy, are an expression of the chaotic nature of the current period, and why instead the imperialist powers increasingly have to react to the events of the day.

What perspectives ahead?

The UN Security Council Resolution 1973 –“to protect the country’s population”—is shown up for what it is: the usual hypocritical rubbish spouted by a bourgeoisie utterly uninterested in the well-being and safety of any population and mired in the contradictions wrought by the decay of its system. As the unrest spiked in Libya, all the imperialist gangsters engaged in a furious race as they each tried to beat the other to the scene, attentive to how the mess was disrupting their interests in the region or whether there were any possibilities for new alliances, new trade agreements that could give them an advantage over their opponents. Their own divisions, their fight for ‘the survival of the fittest’ makes them incapable of having a coherent, unified strategy capable of bringing lasting peace to any conflict. Instead, it is their self-interest in the context of a dying system that causes them to become the motor force of the spreading of further chaos, hurling humanity as a whole in a maddening spiral of violence. Thousands upon thousands of people have fled the area, in many cases either by giving themselves to the desert or drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Those who survive are directed to ‘welcoming centers’ or refugees shelters, veritable jails with sub-human living conditions. Those left behind, among whom teenagers, often fall prey to jihadist ideology and embrace violence. This is the future that capitalism has to offer. This is the ‘protection’ humanity can hope to gain from it. Indeed, the situation in Libya opens up a real perspective for utter chaos in the Middle East and North Africa. In Libya, a weak and inexperienced working class could not impose its will on the historic scene and sustain the struggle it had timidly started. However, it is the working class worldwide that is the only force in society capable of giving society a different direction and offer a real solution to the problems facing humanity. The timid, weak, clumsy struggles that the working class in Libya first waged at the beginning of the ‘anti-Qaddafi movement’ can find again their initial élan when they are inscribed in the larger historical struggles of the world proletariat.

Ana, 4/12/11.

After weeks of protests that drew national and even international attention, the streets of Madison are again empty. Scott Walker’s state-budget repair bill has passed (pending a court appeal delay), and where cries of “general strike” once rang through crowds of thousands of demonstrators, the air is silent and workers are back at work. The union leaders scramble to push through all the Governor’s economic demands in exchange for the right to “collectively bargain” one last contract. Workers’ action has been reduced to the signing of petitions to recall state senators. While some groups are trying to resuscitate the movement, it has mostly been defeated. The question is: why?

Throughout the United States, public sector workers are being targeted, and then attacked, in the name of state fiscal solvency. Most state governors expect hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of savings from new contracts with public employee unions, enough to cover their states’ colossal budget shortfalls. The better to accomplish this goal, the bourgeoisie has unleashed a broad campaign to demonize unionized public sector workers as overcompensated and privileged at the expense of “the taxpayer”. Ohio and Nebraska have passed legislation similar to Walker’s, and many other states are considering similar bills. Meanwhile the unions have called for solidarity rallies throughout the country for the defense of collective bargaining “rights,” presenting themselves as the last best hope workers have for the defense of “democracy” and “middle class jobs.” To understand the defeat of the movement in Wisconsin and to prepare for further attacks to come, we must examine these ideological campaigns. We must understand how they contributed to derailing the movement in Wisconsin and how they can only deliver the working class up to the bourgeoisie.

The official media presents the wave of austerity attacks on the state level, and the mass movement in Wisconsin, as a showdown between newly elected, ideologically-driven Tea Party governors pushing a “union-busting” agenda, and the Democratic-aligned public employee unions. The unions and the Left peddle this narrative as well. They have zeroed in on the defense of “collective bargaining rights” in their solidarity rallies, letter-writing, and now the campaign to recall Republican state legislators in Wisconsin. This narrative obscures the reality of the situation to workers, and makes those workers who accept it more amenable to the “solutions” advanced by the bourgeoisie. 

The Public Sector in the U.S.

While it’s true that Governor Walker, Ohio Governor Kasich, and some of the other Tea Party-backed governors are ideologically motivated in their attempts to end collective bargaining and dismantle the unions, their states’ fiscal problems, and their need to attack the living standards of public employees, are very real. They are common to states under the control of both parties. All but 6 US states face massive budget shortfalls for the 2012 fiscal year.[1] The combined deficits through 2013 total $175 billion, on top of the $230 billion in budget gaps already filled for the last three fiscal years.[2] Governors of both parties are preparing attacks on state workers’ salaries and pensions, even pursuing the end of collective bargaining rights, to help close these budget gaps. The newly elected governor of Connecticut, Democrat Daniel Malloy, is demanding $1 billion in savings from state employees for each of the next two years—the biggest cuts per capita of any state. Democrat Jerry Brown in California imposed a hiring freeze on February 15 while negotiating his budget, and Democrat Andrew Cuomo in New York announced a one-year salary freeze for state workers as part of an emergency financial plan, on top of $450 million already conceded by public sector unions on behalf of the workers. 

Teachers at “underperforming” public schools are being blamed for low tests scores and graduation rates, and school boards and teachers unions are debating merit-based pay and job security ratings. Teachers are being pitted against each other, with younger teachers being told that merit-based pay will give them all the advantages associated with youth, while older teachers are told that accepting new tiers for pensions will protect their jobs in the case of layoffs. The bourgeoisie is attempting to head off a strong display of solidarity between the young and the old, between students and workers. The working class has demonstrated this solidarity in many of its major mobilizations since transit workers in New York City struck against pension cuts that would primarily affect workers yet to be hired.

In all these cases, both parties have united in pursuing and passing draconian austerity measures against public sector workers. Contrary to the narrative of the media, the unions, and the left, the unions work with state governors, through collective bargaining negotiations, to decide how to implement the attacks. They push them on the workers with promises to wage a struggle or elect different governors in the better future they, along with the state governments, assure us is just around the corner so long as we accept “sacrifices” today. In New York State the unions have held countless “solidarity” rallies in support of the collective bargaining in Wisconsin, but have said nothing about the prospect of layoffs in education. They have even supported merit-based pay initiatives for teachers. Unions across the nation clamor about the need for solidarity rallies with already-defeated workers in Wisconsin - whose only struggle currently is a recall campaign in which only Wisconsin residents can participate - yet they accept all the layoffs and contribution increases being proposed for their own members. What role are the unions really playing?

The public sector unions, far from defending the workers they represent, do not question the need for workers to “make sacrifices”. They have only mobilized to the extent they have in order to maintain their position as trusted partners with the state in implementing the cuts necessary for the health of US capitalism. From the beginning of the movement in Wisconsin, the state’s two largest public sector unions, AFSCME and the WEAC teachers’ union, offered to accept every economic demand, and help ‘negotiate’ the attacks, so long as their collective bargaining rights, and with them the closed shop and dues check-off system that funds them, were left unscathed. Indeed, since the passage of the bill, public sector unions across the state have rushed to push through contracts containing all the economic demands of Walker’s bill, knowing that if their contract is ratified before the new bill becomes law, they won’t have to hold another election next year to keep their dues money flowing in, as they will maintain the “closed shop” for the duration of that contract. This also explains the widespread opposition to ending collective bargaining rights from Democratic Party politicians, as the Democrats rely on public sector unions as their chief source of campaign contributions for local and state elections. 

The Movement in Wisconsin

On Monday, February 14, the first weekday after Walker’s announcement, over 100 students spontaneously walked out of class in Stoughton, Wisconsin. They were followed the next day by over 800 Madison students, who struck class and marched through the town to demonstrate in front of the government buildings. By Wednesday, Madison public schools had to close due to a sick-out action by teachers, many of whom joined their students in marching to the capitol building. As early as Thursday, the Wisconsin Educators Association Council (WEAC)’s president Mary Bell told reporters, “This is not about protecting our pay and our benefits. It is about protecting our right to collectively bargain.” In a statement released to the press the following day, Marty Beil of AFSCME Council 24 explained bluntly, “We are prepared to implement the financial concessions proposed to help bring our state’s budget into balance, but we will not be denied our God-given right to join a real union.”[3] Teachers and students continued their actions throughout the week, and public sector workers and supporters from the surrounding region joined in the demonstrations. These grew and grew until the weekend, when the state capitol building was occupied. The WEAC ordered teachers to return to work on Monday, but Madison teachers voted to stay out sick an additional day in defiance of the union president’s order.[4]

Leftist celebrities (including Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson, among others) poured into the city to praise the 14 Democratic state senators who had left the state to prevent the passage of the bill as labor heroes, and to help solidify the union rhetoric that the fight was entirely about collective bargaining rights. The presence of high-profile politicians and activist celebrities also helped to bolster all kinds of illusions in the Democratic Party and in mostly harmless actions as opposed to real class struggle. The unions had said from the beginning that they weren’t interested in strikes. Meanwhile, the Madison IWW and others attempted to gain an endorsement from the South Central Wisconsin Labor Council of a state-wide general strike in the event of the bill’s passage. A great deal of propaganda was carried out amongst the workers about what a general strike would mean, and in fact, the day before the bill passed, chants in favor of a general strike were among the loudest heard in the capitol building and on the streets.[5] Despite all this, the day the bill was passed, the unions and the Democrats unveiled their new strategy: they would channel all the energy of the protests into a protracted campaign to recall 16 Republican state senators whose presumably Democratic replacements would eventually reverse the bill. 

The ‘General Strike’ Slogan

The US has not witnessed a general strike in years, making the slogan’s appearance in Wisconsin surprising at best and mystifying at worst. Despite the image of power the call for a general strike conjures, we must ask what a general strike would look like or accomplish if it allowed the unions, which had already agreed to carry out attacks on the working class’ living conditions, any leadership role. In the past two years throughout Europe, the unions have called national general strikes against austerity measures presented as solutions to state debts, and have led them all to defeat. Just last fall in France, 14 general strikes led by the “radical” CGT and other unions, as well as oil blockades, were unable to block the passage of pension reform, and the only significant movements for self-organization and class-wide struggle were all conducted in direct opposition to even the most radical of the unions. The trouble is that the ‘general strike,’ as a planned, mass walkout of all the workers, is a tremendously ambiguous slogan. Who is to call the strike? Who will run it and decide how long to stay out, how to picket, and how to spread it? If weeks of strikes and demonstrations throughout a France far more heavily unionized than the US were unable to stop pension attacks last fall, what would come of one-day general strikes or ‘Days of Action’ by American unionized workers, who make up less than 12% of the American workforce in the first place?

In contrast to the “general strike” slogan, for the workers to defend themselves they need to develop a dynamic similar to what Rosa Luxemburg called the “mass strike”[6] —a wave of strikes which is not planned for a single day or period of time. In the mass strike, both unionized and nonunionized workers from various sectors enter the struggle for their own demands and the demands of their brothers and sisters in struggle. The dynamic of the mass strike always seeks to widen the extent of the movement and collectively develop its goals and demands. Such a movement, organized by the workers themselves, coordinated by committees which owe their mandate to, and can find it revoked by, assemblies of all the workers, would immediately threaten the state. It would not be in the hands of the state’s trusted negotiating partners and could at least temporarily beat back some of the proposed austerity measures. Furthermore, such an experience would develop the combativeness, creativity, and confidence of the working class on an unprecedented scale, making workers all the more ready to defend themselves in the future, eventually to the point of posing questions about how and in whose interest society is run.

The Union Obstacle

Last spring in New Jersey, very shortly after the University of California students had begun their struggle, high-school students staged walkouts all over the state against cuts to education spending and attacks on their teachers. The students often looked to these same teachers to advance the struggle. Despite the widespread admiration and appreciation felt by the majority of teachers for this show of solidarity, the teachers’ union discouraged the students’ mobilization and agreed with the administration that the students involved should be punished.[7] A very similar story developed in Wisconsin. Students, who worried that this system holds no future for them, decided to take action both for their own demands and in solidarity with workers who had not yet even begun to struggle. Knowing that they could not win these demands alone, the students asked these workers to join the fight. It was the belief, still held still by many teachers and their students, that the unions exist to defend them, and will be fighting alongside them, that prevented this solidarity from growing. 

Unions in today’s decaying, moribund capitalist world do not even modestly defend the working class. The problem is not that they are ossified, their vision and strategy that of the post-war boom when they were at their peak. Unions, while built by the workers and able to be controlled by them in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, now exist as agents of the state. Their task is to police the struggles of the working class, to chain them to legalism, democratic illusions, and the interests of national capitalism. Through a thousand mechanisms of state recognition, legal structures, and structural mechanisms, the state has captured these organizations completely, and uses them to prevent, by diffusion and derailment, any dispute from developing into an actual struggle of class against class. The unions demonstrated this perfectly when they, despite being threatened with total emasculation by the new bill, preferred to channel the workers’ anger into a fruitless recall campaign that could take over a year. The unions preferred being reduced to electoral pressure groups to further aggravating the class struggle with strike action, even strike action under their control. Madison AFSCME Local 60 exposed the unions’ nature again when it rushed to sign a new contract which would crush workers’ living standards down to the level Walker’s hated bill had demanded by 2014. Madison’s Mayor praised the union’s cooperation. “We did it with collective bargaining,” he said. The system worked exactly the way it was supposed to work.”[8]

When teachers and public sector workers, legitimately threatened by legislation that directly attacks their salaries, healthcare, and pensions, fight for the defense of the unions rather than the defense of their own living standards and those of their class brothers and sisters, they move from fighting for their own class interests to being foot soldiers in a faction fight between different parts of the ruling class. Workers should not let their guard down against unions which implement cuts, negotiate layoffs, and silence any real struggles against these measures, just because certain ideological sections of the ruling class attack the unions while attempting to carry the cuts through. While many workers have illusions in the unions, revolutionaries should seek to help them break their illusions down. They must be clear that the unions are not just “the best we have,” or simply conservative, ossified, and bureaucratic: they belong to the class enemy, and real class struggle will be waged against them just as it will be waged against the bosses and the state. 

JJ 4/10/11.

The capitalist crisis continues to deepen despite increasingly desperate proclamations to the contrary. Nestled behind the claims of recovery, class conflict and internecine bourgeois rivalries threaten to tear the social landscape of capitalist society apart. For all of the grandstanding and optimistic rhetoric, there is a noticeable silence about even the possibility of rolling back of austerity measures. The bourgeoisie must continue its assault on the working class--its frustrated attempts to alleviate the crisis demand nothing less. The steady drumbeat of austerity demands further sacrifices on the part of the working class.

The latest round of attacks has caught public sector workers in its cross hairs. Wisconsin represents one battleground, and Walker and public sector workers two combatants in a global class struggle. Elsewhere in the United States, teachers are coming more and more under the knife. One of the bourgeoisie’s most powerful propaganda tools is the unemployment rate. Currently, the official unemployment rate falls around 8.8%--a marked improvement over the employment rate in recent memory indeed! Revolutionaries must look between the lies propagated by the bourgeoisie’s media apparatus and arrive at the truth behind the situation.

The global capitalist system is gripped by the most serious crisis in its history. The managers of this system, embodied in the national states, attempt to respond to the crisis in such a way that their imperialist faction may benefit over others—but this becomes increasingly difficult with each manipulation. The ruling class needs to hide the truth about the seriousness of the crisis, thus they fudge up statistics to ‘prove’ that their system is resilient and on the way to prosperity. The “official” unemployment rate exemplifies this statistical manipulation. Has unemployment really fallen, in any meaningful sense? A deeper look at the bizarre world of bourgeois pseudo-science exposes the lie behind the 8.8% rate. Workers who are not actively looking for jobs, including workers who have been forced back into school to gain new skills or who have given up looking for a job, are not included in the statistic. Furthermore, the bourgeoisie considers you unemployed only if you receive unemployment benefits. It should surprise no one then that when the bourgeoisie rescinded unemployment benefits, the stats suddenly improved! What the unemployment rate really represents is not, as is implied, the number of workers who do not have jobs. Instead, it represents the number of workers the state finds convenient to count as not having jobs! It is also worth underlining that the retail industries are responsible for most ‘re-absorption’ of previously unemployed people. In most cases this means that workers moved from previously gainful employment to jobs that pay less and provide poorer benefits. It is also worth noting that after all the attacks, amounting to billions and billions of dollars in savings, the reduction of the government deficit will amount to about 3%! It will go from something like 43% of the GNP to 40%. The bourgeoisie will have to resort to more and more severe austerity measures, accompanied by more layoffs, in the future. Indeed, even some bourgeois economists, urge caution as to the sustainability of the much-vaunted decrease in unemployment.

Clearly, bourgeois economics cannot be trusted. It provides only the most distorted picture of society, a picture designed to mystify and deceive. We must attempt to more accurately tally the actual effects of the crisis and the extent of the “recovery.”

Intensification of work

For those workers who are lucky enough to still have jobs, the situation does not appear any less bleak. Capitalism’s inability to address human needs manifests itself clearly in the intensified working conditions which threaten the physical and emotional livelihoods of everyone who has to endure them. Meanwhile, corporate heads are continually awarded exorbitant salaries for doing ever less work. Transocean, one of the companies responsible for the deaths of 11 workers and untold environmental damage to the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding communities, said that “despite the gulf tragedy, by its internal statistical measures, ‘we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company’s history.’ Consequently, executives received most of the safety-related portion of their bonuses for the year.”[1]

The working class is bludgeoned into submission with the threat of unemployment and then forced to work in abysmal conditions. Internationalism analyzed the pernicious manipulation of bourgeois corruption in Los Angeles in its previous issue.[2]The public school system is being dismantled brick by brick through underfunding and charterization, exposing teachers to the conditions faced by their class brothers and sisters. Teachers in charter schools work harder and longer for less pay and fewer protections. Some schools in Los Angeles have even begun hiring long-term substitute teachers to skirt many of the labor regulations. The unions, complicit watch dogs for the ruling class, are seeking an arrangement with the state which would allow them to be grandfathered into the newly formed charter schools. 

However, charterization is simply one facet of a broad campaign against teachers. The situation for teachers in non-chartered public schools is just as dismal. New York City has introduced a tiered retirement system where new teachers are forced to pay into the retirement fund for longer than older teachers. States and cities across the United States have repeated this direct attack on working conditions. Schools are being shut down, class sizes are growing and workload is multiplying. Detroit teachers are waiting to discover which of them will be laid off when 70 of the city’s current 142 schools will be shut down. This will drive up the average classroom size to an astounding 60 pupils! 

Supporting this material attack on teacher’s conditions is a sustained, vicious ideological campaign. Teachers are decried by the right for their laziness, told by the left to work harder and justify their paychecks—meanwhile workloads are increased and wages are depressed! These and other travesties are all coded behind a sophisticated, layered system of mystification. This is the true character of bourgeois “recovery:” meaningless, optimistic statistics derived from the navel gazing of capitalist apologetics while the working class faces death at the hands of a truly decadent social system! 

Absorption of youth into the workforce

When the bourgeoisie targets education they do not only target teachers. Capitalism’s historic crisis, and the bourgeoisie’s frenetic and counterproductive attempts to circumvent its effects, impact on the prospective workforce, the youth, as well. The cost of primary, secondary, and higher education for working class families has risen to astronomical levels.   As the public high school system unravels into a wilderness of chartered fiefdoms, public universities are also being dismantled. The University of California, once the model for how public university education could cost next to nothing (in the 1960s, tuition was less than a thousand dollars a year), is in a tailspin as its managers attempt to offset cuts coming from the state and their own deadly gambles with speculators. The tuition now costs nearly $12,000 a year, with more increases coming down the pipeline!

The condition of students is deteriorating along with the rest of bourgeois society. Furthermore many students are also workers, paying for school usually through a combination of part-time jobs and the carefully laid trap of loans (maliciously labeled synonymously with grants and scholarships as “financial aid”). These loans are advertised to students and their parents during the application and matriculation process. The “very low” interest rates are advertised and applicants are overwhelmed by a flurry of loan categories that are difficult to navigate. The story is the same with all other forms of debt pushed onto the working class—whether they are from automobiles, homes or credit cards. The interest compounds, the loan takes on a life of itself and repayment of loans becomes a consuming drain on the debtor. The introduction of personal credit lines on a mass scale in the ‘50s only seemed to avert capitalist crisis—it appeared to cheat the law of value and allowed capitalism to continue expanding accumulation without physical expansion. The Bretton Woods restructuring of the international fiscal system was another similar attempt to sweep the crisis under the carpet—the credo of the ruling class appears to be “out of sight, out of mind.” This game, however, can only be played for so long before the house of cards begins to topple. Cards are still cards, regardless of how many times you re-label them as stone. 

In 2006, an astounding 60% of undergraduate students took out loans to pay for education. By the time they graduated they owed their creditors $22,000. These supposedly privileged youth are already thrust into a race against the always ticking clock of interest rates. Many of them will not pay off their education for years to come. The accumulation of debt doesn’t stop with undergraduates either: more than half of graduate students borrowed an average of $40,000 for their education! 

The global nature of the crisis means that these assaults on education are occurring throughout the world. Tuitions are increasing worldwide, and student protests are erupting across the globe in response. Much has been written about the outbreaks of student violence in the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain, France, the Philippines and elsewhere. It appears that the university, and schools in general, are in crisis. They can still play a pacifying ideological role, allowing students to think that if they attend school they will become successful. However, with the economy unable to absorb even its own unemployed labor force, youth today are offered a bleak future: through debt, you are tied to a sinking ship.

Tax the rich?

The solution most often proposed by the delusional left wing of capital is to raise taxes--especially targeted towards the rich. The latest revelation of General Electric’s ability to somehow avoid paying any taxes to the US government helped to reinforce the salivating “progressive” left. “If only the rich,” they clamor, “were made to pay more taxes things would be okay.” Whether they argue this position with ignorance or deception in mind, they betray a complete disregard for the actual nature of the crisis today. In fact, only the pumping of ever more money into the financial behemoth has managed to stave off capitalism’s historic crisis for the past 40 years. The bourgeoisie have had to resort to increasingly abstract methods to keep their system afloat.   However, capitalism’s lifeblood is the realization of surplus-value extracted from the workers, and taxes do not represent surplus value. Increasing taxes will not restore the ability of capitalism to function because the crisis is not one of liquidity, but of insolvency. Capitalism is not ossified, but bleeding out.

Simply adding more money to the bloated system is not going to do the trick. The left wing of the bourgeoisie is spreading the ideology that capitalism can buy itself out of the crisis: this is impossible. Taxing the rich does not provide a solution for the crisis. Neither does it shield workers from attack, nor provide the youth with a future. Most importantly, the left wing of capital uses this ideology to line workers up behind a paternal state. The state is an instrument of capital, and cannot protect the working class’ living conditions or advance their liberation. The idea that it can is a total mystification. As an instrument of class rule, the state works for the capitalists--for their interests and against ours. This relationship is structural as much as it is ideological.

Nothing for the working class in capitalist recovery

Capitalism is not recovering. The much touted recovery is nothing more than bourgeois pseudo-science. Taking a series of unrelated and trivial statistics, manipulating data and concocting an ideological scapegoat,the bourgeoisie are capable of weaving a fairytale of progress that does not correspond to the material reality of workers anywhere. The bourgeoisie repeats this process of mystification and propaganda, a process perfected through decades of ruthless Machiavellian governance, throughout the world. The working class is beginning to struggle and is attempting to break through the layers of deceit and reaching towards a truly revolutionary consciousness. However, there is no guarantee that this will happen. The return to combativeness and questioning of the future are positive developments, but revolutionaries should not indulge in overconfidence. . The stakes are dire as the bourgeoisie responds to the crisis and to workers’ struggles with increasingly brutal attacks. Nonetheless, despite all their efforts to contain the working class and to avert a complete breakdown of their system, the bourgeoisie cannot avert the crisis. Capitalism is a deadly social system which is spiraling out of control. The only possible future for humanity is communism and the working class is the only class that can avert the catastrophe towards which un-arrested capitalism will guide the world..

AS 4/9/11

We think that the recent mobilization in Wisconsin represent a further step forward in the development of the struggles that we saw starting around 2003. We think it is therefore necessary to develop a frame for understanding these recent developments. We will look at the struggles that started in 2003, paying attention in particular to the NYC Transit strike of 2005, and ask the question about how or whether the events in Wisconsin are any different. We hope this will give a better idea of the period we have entered and the perspectives for the future struggles.

The issue that pushed the US workers to take the path of struggle again was not, as in many European countries, the attack on pensions starting around 2002-2003, but rather the attack on health benefits.    As we wrote in Internationalism 128, “The era when large companies covered all or most of health care costs is over. In the last two years insurance premiums rose fastest in a decade, at the rate of 14% per year, more than 3 times the official government rate of inflation. In 2003, only 4% of large employers still pay 100% of insurance, down from 21% just 15 years ago in 1988. From 2000 to 2003, there has been a 50% increase in what workers must pay for their medical coverage. The situation in regard to prescription coverage is even worse. The amount that workers must pay for prescription drug coverage jumped 46 to 71% in the same period. A total of 43.6 million people in the richest, most powerful capitalist country in the world have no medical coverage - 15% of the population. All of this combined has meant a gross deterioration in the real wages and standard of living of the proletariat and has pushed workers inescapably towards the necessity of taking up the class struggle in defense of their class interests.”

As a result, in 2003 General Electric, sanitation workers in Chicago, transit workers in Los Angeles, 30,000 grocery store workers in Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia, and then 70,000 grocery store workers in California struck. The significance of these strikes was the resurgence in combativeness they showed in contrast to, most notoriously, the UPS strike in 1997, which was essentially a union maneuver to recredibilize the image of the unions and strengthen capitalism’s shop floor presence—the unions—among the workers. It is important to show this contrast because it helps us understand the dynamic of the class struggle. Significantly, the struggles picked up in the context of the aggravation of the economic crisis and the myriads difficulties imposed by social decomposition. From 2003 to 2008, when the financial crisis shook world capitalism, increasingly the class came out struggling with a growing awareness of the stakes. Compared to the 1960’s, when the global economic crisis returned, and, with it, the class struggle, the struggles of the new millennium showed a loss of the illusions in the possibility for reforms that existed in the 60’s. A growing sense of uncertainty about the future accompanied a deepening questioning of capitalism itself. During this period, workers went on strike at great danger and risk of losing their jobs to strikebreakers, to company bankruptcy, to permanent disappearance of jobs, and risked incurring heavy penalties. The highest point reached by the struggles of the class in this period was the NYC transit workers strike of December 2005. The willingness to return to the path of struggle meant that the class was on the way to regain its own self-identity, demonstrated time and again by the echo these strikes had within the proletariat. In the early 1980’s, there was a tendency for workers to join the strikes of other workers, an essential step in the generalization and extension of the struggle, but the NYC transit strike left a legacy of a deeper, and more generalized, sense of solidarity in the class at large. This sense of solidarity was inspired by the courageous fight the transit workers waged against the establishment of a different tier for new hires, with much worse health and pension benefits. The transit workers’ solidarity with the young generation left a profound mark on the rest of the class, who responded in kind with many expressions of support. In 2006, when the young generation in France took to the streets consciously seeking to link up with workers and other sectors of the population, the bourgeoisie worldwide once again took note of this new development. In the US the bourgeoisie has been very aware of it, as shown by its repeated attempts at dividing workers among ‘older’ and ‘younger’, most infamously with the presently heating campaign against teachers contracts’ seniority clause, and in general by forcing contracts that increasingly reduce or extinguish the benefits for the new hires. This is both an expression of the crisis, but it is also a divisive tactic consciously pursued in an effort to divide the class among itself in the face of the efforts by the working class to forge its self-identity and strengthen its solidarity.

In 2008 the world financial crisis started to rock global capitalism. At first, the working class suffered a moment of panic and the bourgeoisie thought that the class’ hesitations as to whether and how to struggle would allow it to impose its austerity attack with impunity. Instead, the scale and scope of the attacks have only confirmed for the working class that the only way to defend its living and working conditions is by fighting back. The struggles in Greece, France, Portugal, Italy, Great Britain, Egypt, the Philippines, India, Turkey….the list is long-- don’t all have the same strength or development. What they do have in common though, is their roots in the present unprecedented depth of the economic crisis and the stubborn willingness to fight back. They also seem to pick up from where the struggles have been left in any particular country, only to pop up somewhere else even more massively and insistent. In the US too, the list of strikes and street demonstrations is long, with important mobilizations across the country, especially, but not only, among the public sector workers. On several occasions teachers have come out in the open even with walkouts. We have seen the mobilization of hospital nurses and factory workers at Mott, and the wildcat strike on the East Coast which briefly spread along the entire Eastern seaboard, to mention a few. More important than their numbers, though, is the quality of their nature. The most important in this sense has been the public sector workers mobilization in Wisconsin. It started at first totally in the class terrain of the defense of working and living conditions and against cuts to health and pension benefits, and it has gone beyond the point reached by the NYC Transit strike of 2005. The first important aspect to pay attention to about this mobilization is the fact that, contrary to the NYC Transit strike, it started as a walkout, outside of the union control, showing in this way the same characteristics we see in other recent struggles: there is an important tendency toward the spontaneity of the action that points in significant ways to the future possible development of the mass strike. These characteristics are focused on the issue of the re-appropriation of proletarian methods of struggle, as illustrated by:

•         The extension of the struggle

•         The spontaneity of the struggle

•         The tendency not to be drawn into ‘battles of attrition’

•         The tendency toward walk outs and work stoppages

•         The active search for solidarity: intergenerational, with unemployed, underemployed, immigrants, retirees, students, across ‘professional’ boundaries

•         The reliance on ‘the street’ as the public place where General Assemblies take form and where wide discussions happen around how to organize, what to do, with numerous examples of elections of delegates sent to other workers. This is a development that was not as widespread as in some European countries or as in Egypt, and it is also important to underline that the movement in Wisconsin was very quickly co-opted by the unions.

Notwithstanding the weaknesses, it is the overall tendency and characteristics of the movement which point to a new phase in the development of the struggles in the US, a phase with the same characteristics that belong to the struggles of the working class world-wide, inscribing the US proletariat entirely in the international picture.

The bankruptcy of capitalism brought out in the open by the financial crisis has forged a mood of defiance and indignation in an undefeated class. The conditions under which the class struggles today are doubtlessly very difficult, but the path it has taken toward the struggle is instilling in it a greater confidence and a sense of class identity that the class needed to recover. Today the conditions exist for its hesitations, defeats, and failures to be so many opportunities to forge an even deeper confidence in its strength and its ability to lead humanity out of the infernal chaos capitalism has plunged it in, to understand that it is indeed the only force in society capable of this gargantuan task. Following the mobilization in Wisconsin, the self-identity of the class can be strengthened as it drops its illusions about the state as the guarantor of its protection and about the unions as its defender. A result of this can be a greater reliance on and experience with self-organization, and the beginning of a distancing of itself from the stranglehold of the unions. As the class develops its combativeness, it can also develop the awareness that what it is engaged in, this class struggle, is not merely a defensive struggle on the economic terrain, but a political struggle against oppression, for the wrestling of power from the exploiters, and for the construction of a new world. 

Ana. 26/3/11          

On March 25th, Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government fell, losing a Liberal Party confidence motion in the House of Commons, after having been found in contempt of Parliament by the speaker just days prior. The stage is now set for federal elections to take place on May 2nd, marking the third time in five years Canadians have been called to the polls. Already the media machine is in full swing reminding Canadians of the importance of voting to the health of their nation’s “democracy.”

The battle lines for the campaign are by now pretty well set. The Liberal Party, under former Harvard history professor Michael Ignatieff, will try to make this a campaign about the Harper government’s gross disregard for democracy, its abuse of Parliament, and irresponsible corporate tax cuts, while Harper and the Conservatives will run on their reputation as the best managers of the economy, citing Canada’s relatively strong economic condition compared to other western nations. Meanwhile, the New Democratic Party (NDP)—Canada’s Social Democrats—will urge working-class Canadians to support them as the only party really looking out for the “middle class,” and fighting to protect Canada’s socialized medical system; while the officially separatist Bloc Québécois will call on the voters of Canada’s only majority francophone province to support them in their quest to win more sovereignty for la belle province.

When we last wrote about the Canadian political situation at the time of the 2006 federal elections,[1] we pointed out the vital need at that time for the Canadian bourgeoisie to attempt to revive its electoral mystification after 13 years of corruption laden Liberal party rule that had finally run its course. Burdened by numerous corruption scandals, most notably the Quebec sponsorship scandal, confidence in the Canadian state was nearing an all time low. It had become essential for the Canadian bourgeoisie to dump the Liberal government, even if there was no need for a drastic change of course in international or domestic policy.

To that end, the Canadian bourgeoisie pulled off an immediate success, by bringing to power a new Conservative Party minority government, which could give the Canadian government a fresh face and revive illusions among the populace in the power of electoral democracy to enact change. At the same time their minority government status would serve to keep the Conservative’s more ideologically aggressive domestic policy desires from coming to fruition.

Nevertheless, despite the initial success in pulling off this transition in 2006, after five years of Conservative minority government, we can definitively say that the Canadian bourgeoisie has roundly failed to revive confidence in the nation’s political system and its democratic and electoral mystifications remain fragile. The last five years have been far from a model of stable government, as the Harper regime itself has been plagued by scandal, displaying a contemptuous and cavalier attitude towards “representative democracy” reminiscent of the George W. Bush years in the United States.

The time has come once again for the Canadian bourgeoisie to attempt to give its state a new gloss of legitimacy through another election campaign. However, the challenges facing the Canadian ruling class this time around would appear to make the tasks it faced in 2006 look mild. While there again seems to be little need for a drastic change in course in domestic or international policies, the damage done to the legitimacy of the political system in the last 5 years has been tremendous and, what’s more, it appears that there is no clear consensus among the Canadian bourgeoisie about how to repair the damage.

Should it give the Harper Conservatives a majority government on the grounds of creating the conditions for a stable government skilled at shepherding the still buoyant Canadian economy through the shoals of a perilous international economic environment? Should it keep the Conservatives in a minority government, a possibility that looks less and less viable everyday, or should it try to give the government an entirely new face once again, most likely through the mechanism of a Liberal/NDP coalition?

None of the choices facing the Canadian bourgeoisie at the moment are without their risks, and as a result it is not surprising that its main factions are having a hard time settling on a concerted policy. While we can not say for certain what will happen in May, polling trends currently suggest the Conservatives are toying with winning a majority government without winning a majority of the vote, a prospect that likely frightens all those worried about the health of the Canadian democratic mystification.

In this article, we will attempt to analyze the trajectory of the Canadian national situation, showing that behind all the talk of its buoyancy in the face of international economic chaos, the Canadian economy remains quite fragile, even if its condition does not pose the same level of urgency to launch drastic austerity measures against the working class immediately, in the same way posed in other western nations. While this economic “breathing space” allows the Canadian bourgeoisie to be more flexible in its approach to national politics, it is finding it difficult to exercise this flexibility in the face of a serious political crisis resulting in a dangerous erosion in the populace’s confidence in the electoral process and the “democratic” state.

Behind the Canadian “Miracle”: Economic Fragility

For the last several years now, the Canadian bourgeoisie has roundly patted itself on the back for the swell job it has done mitigating the nation’s exposure to the “Great Recession.” In many aspects, the Canadian ruling class has some justification for its bragging. While the U.S. economy suffers a dramatic economic calamity as a result of the implosion of the real estate bubble in 2007 and Europe continues to face the specter of further sovereign debt crises, the Canadian economy has shown certain signs of resiliency. Canada boasts the lowest debt to GDP ratio in the G7, its banks remain solvent as they were largely unscathed by the sub-prime mortgage and associated collateral debt obligation crises, the domestic real estate market continues to expand and the Alberta oil sands are booming.

On the surface, among the major powers, the Canadian political class appears to have been among the most skilled managers of its national economy over the last decade. By keeping the most destructive impulses of the banking industry in check and eschewing the Anglo-American model of cheap and easy mortgage credit, while quietly streamlining government operations, the Canadian state has managed to avoid the outright economic disaster that has rocked its competitors, in particular its neighbor to the south. It is easy to detect the growing sense of smugness in the Canadian media as they begin to look at the United States with a sense of cold pity after many decades of displaying a profound inferiority complex to the world’s number one power.

Nevertheless, despite the comparative advantages over its competitors, the Canadian economy is not exactly standing on solid foundations. Although the state was largely able to prevent the banking industry from indulging in the most excessive financial games of the last decade, the worldwide recession has not spared Canada completely. Officially going into recession at the end of 2008, the nation suffered its first budget deficit in 13 years that same year. Canada’s federal budget deficit now stands at about $40 billion—small potatoes compared to the woes of the United States, but of enough concern to make reducing the deficit a central focus of economic policy debates in the country.

The official unemployment rate in Canada continues to stand at around 8 percent, only slightly lower than the U.S. The average household debt load in Canada is now at an all time high, further indication of the shallowness of effective demand in the consumer economy. In 2009, the average Canadian family was burdened by $91,000 in debt.[2] In an all too familiar replay of the U.S. real estate farce, many Canadian families are now burdened by high mortgage debt in a real estate market that continues to spiral upward. Although Canada largely lacks the dangerous phenomenon of “liar loans” that was the impetus for the collapse of the U.S. housing market, many young families are stretching their incomes, taking on high ratio mortgages at variable interest rates in order to afford homes. Earlier this year, the Bank of Montreal stated its concern over a potential housing bubble in the nation—prompting the Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to announce tighter rules for mortgages.[3] In many ways, although lacking some of the more outrageous abuses that characterized the U.S. bubble, the Canadian consumer economy has been kept afloat by the same smoke and mirrors of increasing consumer debt spurred by unsustainably low interest rates.

However, perhaps the biggest challenge facing the Canadian economy is that fact that close to three-quarters of its exports must currently find a market in the United States. Continued economic troubles south of the border, coupled with a high Canadian dollar that is currently trading above par with the U.S. greenback, pose the threat that Canada’s relative economic strength will be turned into weakness in short order. Although Canada has seen its share of plant closings over the past several decades (particularly in southern Ontario), it remains a largely resource extraction/industrial oriented economy vulnerable to rapid changes in international—and in particular U.S.—demand.

Moreover, Canada’s provinces—outside of insurgent Alberta still basking in the glow of its oil boom—cannot claim the same level of comparative fiscal strength as the Federal government. By some estimates, Ontario’s debt stands at a whopping $250 billion, while Québec suffers from a 50 percent debt-to GDP ratio, making it one of the most heavily indebted jurisdictions in North America.[4]

The Crisis of the Canadian Political Class

Although the Canadian bourgeoisie does not face the same immediate imperative as the other major powers to launch a frontal assault on the living and working conditions of the working class, the underlying fragility of its economic situation should have its political class concerned about developing a coherent strategy for implementing future austerity and responding to working class discontent. For now, however, the Canadian ruling class is finding it difficult to go beyond a basic struggle to legitimate its electoral and political apparatus in the eyes of a rather disengaged populace.

While the Canadian bourgeoisie may currently display a thinly-veiled sense of superiority towards their American neighbors regarding the latter’s economic woes, they remain envious of the success the U.S. bourgeoisie had in 2008 in revitalizing the electoral mystification accomplished through the “historic” candidacy of Barack Obama. Voter turnout in Canadian elections has been dismally low for some time. The last federal election in 2008 marked the lowest voter participation in Canadian history, with only 59 percent of registered voters casting a ballot.[5] Participation among young voters was particularly appalling, as only 37 percent of voters aged 18 to 24 bothered to show up at the polls.[6] Although the usual non-profit civic groups engage in media campaigns to preach the importance of participation to democracy and the candidates themselves attempt to reach out to the youth through YouTube and Facebook, the Canadian political class continues to find it next to impossible to get many in the younger generation to give a damn about Canadian elections. Watching Canadian television news for an evening, an outsider could be forgiven were they to conclude that Canadians would prefer Obama were a candidate in their elections, rather than Harper, Ignatieff, Layton or Duceppe.

Canadian politicians themselves have certainly not made it easy to revive faith in electoral democracy in their own country. Over the last five years, the Conservative Party in particular has willfully flaunted parliament on numerous occasions, giving the impression that the political class itself could care less about the rules of the game. In late 2008, just months after winning his second minority government, Harper was forced to ask the Governor General to prorouge (suspend) parliament for three months in order to avoid being ousted from office by a Liberal/NDP coalition that would have governed with support from the Bloc. Citing the need for stable government and to save the nation from a coalition that included separatists, Harper decided to forgo parliamentary democracy altogether for a quarter of the year! If Harper would have ended there he may have gotten away with it, but in early 2010 he did it again— this time in order to avoid a parliamentary mandate to turn over documents regarding the Canadian military’s treatment of detainees in Afghanistan. This time, Harper slyly told the public that parliamentary democracy must cease, so the nation could focus on the Olympics, then being held in Vancouver! Still, despite holding the majority of seats in parliament, the opposition parties remained so divided amongst themselves—so afraid of being associated with the Bloc—that they could not at the time find the stones to bring down the Conservative government.

Over the last year, the Conservatives have shown no sign of attempting to repair their image. In March of this year, Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda was found by the Speaker to have misled Parliament by essentially lying on the floor of the House of Commons regarding documents her office appeared to have forged, overriding career civil servants to deny funding to an international development agency alleged to have anti-Israeli views. This scandal was followed by revelations that Brian Kenney—Minister of Immigration—used his ministerial office to campaign on behalf of the Conservative Party among “ethnic voters.” Further allegations that the Conservatives misrepresented the costs of an ambitious anti- crime bill and grossly and intentionally understated the costs of their plan to acquire sixty-five F-35 fighter jets were the final straws that broke the camel’s back. For the sake of the image of the Canadian state, the opposition parties had to bring the government down.

With such utter contempt for the trappings of parliamentary democracy on the part of the Conservatives, coupled with such utter lack of will on behalf of the opposition parties to defend it for over two years, its no wonder most Canadians are completely turned off to the electoral process in their country. Nevertheless, given the structure of the Canadian state and the balance of power between the parties, it is very likely that the Conservatives will win the most votes in the May election. The only question that remains uncertain is whether they will win enough to form a majority government. Thus, the difficulty facing the Canadian ruling class is that there appears to be no immediate way to give the government a new face without endorsing a Liberal/NDP coalition government that would be quickly painted by the Conservatives as a Liberal/NDP/Bloc coalition, depriving it of legitimacy in the eyes of many Anglophone Canadians from the start.

The Canadian political class finds itself in a tough political quandary. If the Conservatives win a majority government without winning a majority of the vote, it will prove difficult to legitimate it in the eyes of the majority of voters who supported the opposition parties. If the Conservatives form another minority government, more political instability will surely follow. Still more, a Liberal/NDP coalition might prove even less legitimate as it would surely be tinged by the defeated Conservatives with the stench of separatist support, inflammatory rhetoric that would certainly alienate many in Québec.[7]

The Canadian bourgeoisie is currently hampered by the structure of its state that at the present time seems incapable of producing a government that commands much legitimacy. While the somewhat exceptional nature of the Canadian economic situation grants the Canadian bourgeoisie some flexibility to solve this problem, the constant threat of a renewed economic downturn in a fragile international environment increases the urgency of this task.

The working-class in Canada must not be fooled by the attempts of the bourgeoisie to revitalize its electoral/democratic apparatus, nor should it allow itself to be drawn into the campaigns around the legitimacy of particular governments. For the working-class, all capitalist governments are equally illegitimate, as they will all eventually have to carry out the same mandate to attack the proletariat’s living and working conditions.

Henk 4/7/11.

The acceleration of capitalist decay has become a matter of everyday front page news. Not two months go by without this obsolete social system inflicting further violence on the environment and humanity: in the past ten months alone, we have been treated to the horrors of the Deep Water Horizon oil rig explosion, followed by the “red slush” from the Czech factory poisoning the Danube river and surrounding farmlands, and most recently by the hair-raising nuclear nightmare in Japan (see article in this issue of Internationalism). The total irrationality of this rotten system cannot go unnoticed when we juxtapose the pictures of human misery and pain suffered by the Japanese population to those of, on the one hand, Colonel Qaddafi’s bombing of the population in Libya and, on the other, that of the French, British, and American gangsters’. These events openly give the lie to any illusion in capitalism’s ability to offer anything other than a future filled with the most infernal social and environmental convulsions ever experienced in the history of humankind.  Horrific and terror-inspiring as they are, these events can prompt a fruitful reflection in the heads of the masses of the oppressed and the exploited because they are taking place at a time of an important resurgence of class combativeness and consciousness worldwide.   In the midst of this utter chaos, such reflection is further fueled by the deepest economic crisis in the history of capitalism relentlessly eating away at the working class’ very conditions of existence and leaving in its wake millions upon millions of suffering human beings.   This is further proof of the bankruptcy of capitalism.   It has become evident that the survival of capitalism is achieved only with the destruction of the environment and human life. Is there any force in society that can take humanity out of this spiraling inferno? 

In the midst of this barbarity, it is the international class struggle that has emerged as the beacon for an alternative. Even though the death agony of capitalism presents it with incredibly daunting difficulties, the working class world-wide has not been a passive by-stander. Its challenge to the capitalist order and its refusal to keep silent and submit to the attacks raining on it are an inspiration for millions of people world-wide, and for the future struggles to come. They are irrefutable proof that, notwithstanding the ebbs and flows of its struggle and the tortuous way in which it develops its class consciousness, it is the working class that is the historic subject of the communist revolution, only alternative to capitalism.

The Importance of a Historical Method

It is impossible to understand the potentiality the working class has to overthrow capitalism without taking a wider, more historical view of the development of its struggles. It seems unquestionable that the working class today is in a very different period than it was in the 1930’s. Then, the defeat of the Russian Revolution ushered in a deep and prolonged reflux in the consciousness of the class which created the conditions for the bourgeoisies of the most powerful nations to tie the class behind the ideology of the defense of the nation when the paroxysm of the global economic crisis –called “the Great Depression” in the US— pushed it to unleash the second imperialist slaughter—WWII. Even though the class waged important struggles in the 1930’s and into the 1940’s, the balance of forces left by the defeat of the Russian Revolution left the ruling class enormously powerful and the consciousness of the working class severely impaired. In addition, only a small minority of revolutionaries survived the repression of the counterrevolution, and the class all but lost its historic links with its own political organizations. Those struggles did not overcome the ideological stranglehold of nationalist ideology and the class was drawn in the deluge of imperialist barbarism. 

1968: The Return of the Class on the Historic Scene

It is not until 1968 that the class was able to recover from the oblivion of the counterrevolutionary years. 1968 saw the massive return of the class to the historic scene and the terrain of the struggle globally as the global economic crisis returned with a vengeance after a relative stability following the years of post-War reconstruction. A new generation of largely young workers who had not suffered a historic and ideological defeat entered the stage of class confrontations. These developed at different paces in different countries, yet with similar characteristics, and similar weaknesses, right up until the late 1980’s. From the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s, the struggles were massive and, in the beginning, took the bourgeoisie by surprise, but they did not challenge the unions’ stranglehold, were marked by corporatism and latent illusions in democracy-- characterized by the idea that reforms and betterment were still possible, or the idea that revolution was a possibility, yet not a necessity. In the mid-1980’s the struggles heated up and we saw a qualitative development in the search for extension and unity and the simultaneity of struggle in different industries and countries. In the US, it was the Greyhound strike of 1986 that marked this phase of the class struggle. As Internationalism said in its report on the class struggle in the US in 1987, “This phase quickly manifested itself in the US in the strike at Greyhound, in which workers fought back against threatened wage cuts. When management attempted to emulate the example of the Reagan administration in the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981 by hiring scabs to replace strikers, militant workers from other industries rushed to show their solidarity. These demonstrations, called by the central union councils in city after city, often posed the possibility of breaking free from union control…The Greyhound strike was a qualitative step forward, as for the first time workers outside the specific contract dispute sought to participate directly in the struggle.”   In addition to the quest for active solidarity, the struggles of this period were characterized by:

-       Violent confrontations in pitched battles with police

-       Unofficial wildcat strikes which on a number of occasions spread widely, as in the General Electric wildcat strike which spread to four factories in Massachusetts, the strike by Maine railroad workers, which spread across New England as other rail workers displayed an active solidarity, and the municipal workers’ strikes in Philadelphia and Detroit in July and August 1986

-       Steps toward self-organization, as in the Watsonville cannery strike, where a mass workers’ assembly elected a strike committee

-       Mass picketing

-       The refusal to let the unions use jurisdictional divisions and the defiance against court injunctions

In face of the upsurge in class struggle, the ruling class switched to a campaign of dispersed attacks, picking workers off one company, one factory, one sector at a time. In order to undermine solidarity and extension, the unions took pre-emptive action before waiting for pressure to build for solidarity demonstration and marches, announcing instead plans for such actions by the unions, effectively short-circuiting spontaneous action and dragging the class struggle in long ‘battles of attrition’—the long strike. As the ruling class was developing these tactics of dispersal of the struggles and putting in place of base unionism to pre-empt spontaneous class action, the onset of a new global recession increasingly put the bourgeoisie under pressure to switch to a frontal attack on the entire working class. 

The Collapse of the Stalinist Bloc and Its Impact on the Working Class

The struggles from the mid-80’s until the collapse of the Stalinist Bloc occurred in successive waves, each of which showed greater radicalization and politicization. So much so that the ICC developed the analysis of the waves of struggles, perhaps falling once again prey to the 1968’s illusion that revolution was around the corner, and not so difficult to accomplish. Certainly, it became clear with the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the subsequent retreat in class combativeness and consciousness that the class struggle never develops in a linear way, without even serious lags and setbacks.

The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 allowed the bourgeoisie to temporarily unleash a tremendous ideological campaign about the ‘end of communism and the class struggle’, which left the class temporarily, yet deeply, disoriented and unable to put forth a counteroffensive. The consequent reflux in class consciousness and combativeness was significant and relatively long, and it was furthered by the unleashing of the Gulf War in 1991. The disappearance of the Eastern bloc wracked havoc in the long-standing alliances of the Western bloc itself, ultimately unraveling the entire Cold War –era world order. No longer could the bourgeoisie rally its respective working classes behind an all-out imperialist massacre.   However, the serious reflux in consciousness following this unprecedented historic event made the working class itself incapable of imposing its historic revolutionary task. This stalemate between the two major social classes is at the root of the phase of social decomposition, under which we are presently living (see the many articles we have written on this topic in the International Review.)   The class was significantly disoriented, but not historically defeated. In addition, and very importantly, the class continued to undergo a process of reflection and subterranean development of class consciousness, surfacing here and there with the emergence of revolutionary minorities in search of a political orientation, who created reading and discussion groups, came in contact with existing revolutionary organizations, and actively searched for ways to connect themselves to the historic movement of the class. The existence of this minority up to today is a sign of the vitality and resilience of the class foretelling that the lull in the broader and open combativeness and consciousness was bound to be dispelled. And dispelled it was, starting around 2003, with the massive demonstrations in France and Austria against the renewed attacks on the working class which the ruling class was compelled to unleash as the economy took yet another dip.

In another article [137] (on page 4) we present an analysis of the recent developments of the class struggle. Those developments too, need to be placed in the larger, historic motion of ebbs and flows as the class struggles to conquer its own class identity and class consciousness. The benefit of this approach is that it allows us to understand the dynamic of the class struggle. This, in turn, helps us forge a long-term perspective and a materially based confidence in the class and in its potential and ability to carry out its historic revolutionary task.

Ana, 7/4/11.

Internationalism has devoted an article in each issue since the November 2010 Mid-Term elections to analyzing the political situation facing the U.S. bourgeoisie. Our analysis has centered around the increasing difficulty of the U.S. political class to overcome the effects of social decomposition on its own apparatus, expressed primarily through the progressive descent of major elements of the Republican Party into openly ideological politics—a situation that puts the GOP’s ability to act in overall interests of the national capital in jeopardy. In our last issue, we analyzed how this process has been carried the furthest at the level of state government, evidenced by the totally ham fisted attempts of certain Republican Governors to smash public employee unions, thus depriving the bourgeois state of one of its most important bulwarks against class struggle.[1] In our analysis, these policies run counter to the overall need to maintain a functioning union apparatus, faced with the threat of renewed class struggle in response to an economic crisis that shows no signs of going away.

As a result of this descent into ideology by elements of the U.S. political class, the main factions of the national bourgeoisie[2] now face a stark dilemma threatening the traditional ideological division of labor between the Democratic and Republican parties at the national level. The beginnings of a class response to the economic crisis, symbolized by the massive mobilization of workers in Wisconsin in March (before being recuperated into a defense of unions and “democracy”), should move the main factions of the national bourgeoisie to consider a policy of putting the left in opposition in order to better control working class anger. This strategy would seem to be best accomplished by the election of a Republican President in November 2012.

The Dilemma of the 2012 Presidential Election

However, the increasingly ideological nature of many elements of the Republican Party makes implementing this strategy dangerous for the U.S. national capital. The GOP’s increasingly inflexible approach to politics calls into question its ability to serve as a credible party of government on the national level. Thus, the main factions of the U.S. national bourgeoisie seem to be faced with two choices looking forward to 2012. The first is to work for President Obama’s re-election in order to avoid the possibility of a radical Republican taking office, unable to effectively govern in the overall interests of the bourgeoisie, enacting policies more in line with libertarian, free-market, “starve-the-state ideology” than the concrete needs of the national capital as a whole. The second is to attempt to give life to a more moderate Republican candidate who is able to resist the most extreme interpretations of GOP ideology. This figure would need to be capable of governing from a more pragmatic perspective, recognizing the need to avoid unwise and untimely provocations—utilizing a more levelheaded approach to managing the social and economic crisis besetting the country.

In our view, there are major problems in implementing either of these options for the U.S. bourgeoisie. The first option would risk further upsetting the ideological division of labor between the Democratic and Republican parties, almost forcing a second term Obama administration to engage in open austerity against the working class. Moreover, an Obama re-election would likely require engineering a repeat of the massive voter turnout effort of 2008. If the President is to win re-election, the bourgeoisie will need to mobilize the younger generation behind his candidacy again in order to counteract the strong anti-Obama fervor among Republicans. Undoubtedly, this will be much more difficult to pull off a second time. Many 2008 Obama voters have grown frustrated with his vanilla Presidency that has not lived up to their “historic” expectations. Enthusiasm for the Obama administration is currently rather low; although, it is possible the nomination of an extremist Republican candidate could produce a similar motivation to turnout for the President.

The second is fraught with difficulty given the depth of the GOP’s ideological deterioration. It is not even clear at this time if a more moderate Republican candidate could survive the party’s primary process, which in today’s political climate would seem to reward those with the most ideological bent. Already early in the campaign, supposedly moderate Republican candidates, such as former Governors Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, have been required to pander to the Republican right-wing.[3]

Faced with these difficulties, the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie have little choice but to attempt to implement both options simultaneously, deferring the final selection of a strategy for 2012 until after the Republican primary has been sorted out. Thus, the U.S. domestic political situation has been characterized by a wild roller coaster ride over the last eight months, with dramatic swings in momentum back and forth between President Obama and the insurgent Republican right wing. In November, the mid-term elections were a clear victory for the Republican Party; Obama emerged badly wounded with the pundits openly suggesting a one-term Presidency.

However, a string of legislative victories in the lame duck Congress; followed by months of uncertainty regarding the Republicans’ Presidential field saw momentum shift back in Obama’s favor. The President’s skillful release of his long-form birth certificate at the culmination of a shameless media circus seemed to spell the demise of the most ludicrous forms of conspiracy theory surrounding the Presidents’ legitimacy. However, the seeming coup de grace came on May 2nd with the announcement of the assassination and burial at sea of America’s archenemy Osama Bin Laden. Although perhaps a bit earlier in the election cycle than the White House would have liked, in one fell swoop the President seemed to have finally established himself as a genuine American warrior who accomplished the ultimate victory over the terrorism that had frustratingly eluded his Republican predecessor.

While the post 9/11 patriotic celebrations were a genuine tragedy, this time they were pure face. Ultimately, the morbid celebration of the brutal death of an abstract enemy in a far off land proved to be no consolation for the economic and social pain gripping the American working class.

Already, barely a month after the event, whatever political boost the President thought he was getting from having “slain the beast” has largely evaporated. Obama’s approval rating has now dropped below its pre-Osama assassination level, as the economy stubbornly fails to show any signs of improving. Even bourgeois economists have been forced to admit the likelihood of a double dip recession as unemployment remains stubbornly high, the housing market heads for Hades once again and the pain of inflation begins to take hold. The political consequences of all this has been that in a hypothetical Presidential race, some polls now show Romney defeating Obama.[4]

Of course, it is not even clear that the U.S. bourgeoisie will be able to engineer an Obama-Romney (or another moderate Republican) race for 2012. Romney still has to run the gauntlet of the Republican primaries in which there will be a strong temptation to nominate a right wing ideologue. His previous support for the individual health insurance mandate, his Mormon religion and his acceptance of the reality of man-made global warming will not sit well with many Republican primary voters.[5]

With people like the bizarre, yet immensely popular, Michelle Bachman already in the race, Sarah Palin still not ruling out a run despite strong pressure from Republican insiders to stay on the sidelines, and the neo-Confederate Texas Governor Rick Perry pondering a campaign, there remains a real threat that a candidate totally unacceptable to the main factions of the national bourgeoisie will ultimately win the Republican nomination.[6]

It is for this reason that the national bourgeoisie realizes it must develop a strategy for managing a growing class response to the crisis in a situation in which a traditional left in opposition arrangement is not possible. In some ways, the increasingly belligerent and tactically clumsy approach to politics of the Republican right wing—in particular by Republican Governors at the state level—has helped in this endeavor. The bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of the movements in Wisconsin and elsewhere to attempt to energize a new “people’s movement” around the unions and the left wing of the Democratic Party (the so-called “progressives”).[7]

This movement, although still unable to match the right wing Tea Party in organization or fanaticism, can serve several functions for the main factions of the national bourgeoisie in the period ahead. First, it can serve to deflect class anger at the crisis into the dead ends of the unions and the defense of bourgeois “democracy” as Republican governors show few signs of slowing their assault on the public employee unions. Second, this movement could help President Obama’s re-election efforts against a right wing Republican candidate by channeling the populace’s disgust with the state of the nation into a “lesser of two evils” campaign. Another possibility is that votes to this left wing of the Dem. Party can attract the votes of those dissatisfied with Obama, thereby creating the terrain for a republican victory which would then put the Democrats into opposition. The Democratic Party may see this as necessary depending on the development of the crisis, and manipulate accordingly, without the electoral results expressing an agreed-upon strategy between the two parties. The larger question is really what the ruling class will be forced to do to confront the crisis, but it is not united on the ideological level.

However, perhaps most importantly, this so-called people’s movement could ultimately form the skeleton of a left in opposition to a centrist Obama who has little option but to enact open austerity in his second term. We have seen a possible preview of this strategy in the near revolt of rank and file Democrats in Congress against the President’s deal to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in the lame duck session. It is not for nothing that there has been a consistent campaign on the left attacking the Obama administration for being too close to Wall Street and the banks.

Nevertheless, all this could ultimately come to naught given the degree of ideological hardening that has taken place in U.S. society in the last two decades—a reality that is contributing greatly to the increasing difficulty the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie are having controlling the outcome of its electoral circus. There are not many persuadable voters anymore, so the bourgeoisie has to rely on manipulating voter turnout in order to try to achieve its electoral objectives. High turnout is generally better for Democrats, as was the case with Obama’s “historic” election in 2008, while fewer voters at the polls favors the Republicans, as witnessed by the 2010 midterms.

Given this reality, Obama will face many challenges in the 2012 campaign, whether or not he is the choice candidate of the main factions of the bourgeoisie and regardless of his opponent. Already, Obama staffers have admitted that his margin for victory in the Electoral College will be slimmer this time around, conceding several key swing states he won in 2008 to the eventual Republican nominee.[8]

The lesson in all this for the working-class is clear. The rot that eats away at capitalist society has advanced to such a stage that it now infects the very political apparatus of the ruling class itself. The unique flavor of decomposition in the United States, which is marked by a progressive ideological hardening of intellectual and political discourse, are combining with the specific features of the U.S. state (the Electoral College, a Senate weighted in favor in the most backward states, etc.) to produce a grave political crisis that poses the distinct possibility a candidate unacceptable to the main factions of the national bourgeoisie could win a Presidential election. The most “responsible” elements of the U.S. political class will work to try to prevent this outcome, even if it risks complicating the ideological division of labor in the class struggle. Whatever the outcome in 2012, it is clear that there is no electoral result that serves the proletariat’s class interest in a society marked by such profound social and intellectual decay.

The Bourgeoisie Struggles to Manage the Economic Crisis In the Midst of Political Rancor

Of course, the political crisis of the U.S. ruling class is not transpiring in a social or economic vacuum. On the contrary, it is taking place in the midst of the worst economic crisis of the capitalist system since at least the Great Depression. It is in this context that the ideological meltdown of certain factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie has been most keenly felt.

In the face of massive unemployment, rock bottom wages, a real estate crisis that many analysts fear will soon suffer a second downturn and an enormous national deficit, all the Republican Party can do is scream for more tax cuts, fewer regulations and the gutting of the federal government bureaucracy and the social safety net. This is not just true for the Tea Party inspired Republicans elected in 2010; on the contrary, the mantra that massive cuts, lower taxes on “job creators” and less government oversight of business are the only policies possible is proudly proclaimed by the highest tenured leaders of the Republican Party in the Capitol. The dogma that business always knows best and government is always bad has become so ingrained in the Republican Party that it now seems to be the GOP’s very raison d’être.

Moreover, although the Republican Party only controls one house of Congress at the present time, the current political realities of U.S. politics have allowed it to exert an incommensurate weight on the overall direction of U.S. state capitalism’s policies in the face of the economic crisis. Although now even many bourgeois economists recognize that the U.S. economy suffers from a grave “demand deficit” caused by the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of an increasingly small elite and the resulting inability of the working class to consume much of anything, there is no political possibility at the present time of any additional demand-stimulus emerging from Washington. All policy attention is now focused on the massive federal budget deficit; with the political debate defined only as an opposition between those who would cut a lot (Republicans) and those who would cut slightly less (Democrats).

In this vein, the Republican Party has defined the debate in Washington on economic policy over the several months, primarily through the cruel austerity budget proposal put forward by the GOP’s new wonder boy, Congressman Paul Ryan from Indiana. Chief among his proposals has been the audacious plan to replace Medicare with a system of vouchers for seniors so they can buy their health insurance on the open market. While applauded for his “bravery” and “boldness” by pundits in the bourgeois media, the Ryan budget has been met with strong hostility from the American working class, with polls showing almost universal rejection of this idea. Clearly, just the hint of an attack on the modest centerpiece of the minimum social wage offered in the United States has stoked a class instinct, with even many workers who vote Republican rejecting this proposal as a step too far. As a result, while many Republicans in Congress continue to defend the Ryan plan, the GOPs most serious Presidential contenders, including Romney, have remained non-committal.

Although the Ryan Medicare plan has been revealed, for the moment, as a bridge too far in the class war, this has not stopped the forward march of austerity on all fronts from all factions of the bourgeoisie, both Republicans and Democrats. The drama building over the looming congressional vote to extend the U.S.’ “debt ceiling” has been used as a cynical cover for negotiations between the parties on extensive cuts to the federal budget: cuts that will ultimately hurt the working class and erode its purchasing power even further. Nevertheless, in this game, the Democrats have been all too willing to let their Republican rivals take the lead allowing their own party to play the card of the “smaller bully” on the playground.

Still, among the bourgeoisie’s more serious economists the sense grows that the political dynamic in Washington has broken down to the point where the U.S. state is incapable of acting in the best interests of the national capital. Paul Krugman has written of “The Mistake of 2010,” comparing it to the years 1936-37 when the New Deal slowed and the Depression deepened. For Krugman, U.S. state capitalism’s attempts to stimulate the economy and create jobs have been meager at best. The political focus on reducing the deficit over job creation is a huge blunder that will only deepen the demand crisis in the economy and grow the federal deficit in the long run as tax receipts decline even further. Meanwhile, Robert Reich openly wonders whether the Republican Party is deliberately sabotaging the economy for political gain, as the Obama administration willingly cuts its own throat—happy to fight the economic policy debate on the GOP’s chosen rhetorical terrain.

These controversies are reflective of the overall impasse of state capitalism today faced with an economic crisis without precedent. Krugman and Reich may be right that the U.S. political class’ obsession with deficit reduction will only deepen the economic and fiscal crisis. However, while the massive Keynesian stimulus these “responsible economists” call for may alleviate the immediate pressure on the economy by providing a brief steroid-like boost, the Republican Party is not totally mistaken either when it argues that further deficit spending only serves to add more debt that in all likelihood will never be repaid. However, this debate is moot; as even Krugman admits, there is no chance of another serious stimulus in the foreseeable future.

In short, the U.S. bourgeoisie now finds itself faced with a real Kafkaesque dilemma from which there is no escape. In this world, all options are bad; all answers are ultimately wrong answers; all doors lead to nowhere. While the ideological deterioration of the Republican Party likely does pose the most acute threat to U.S. state capitalism, this does not mean that the Democrats have the “correct” approach that will solve the persistent economic crisis. On the contrary, its preferred policies—while perhaps less immediately damaging, less overtly contradictory, less immediately provocative of social chaos—are ultimately no less futile faced with a global capitalist system that is, at this juncture, utterly beyond repair. At the end of the day, however, it is still up to the working class to send this rusting wreck of a system to the historic junkyard where it belongs.

Henk, 06/09/11.

Over the past decades we have observed a multiplication of violent phenomena that ‘experts’ pay-rolled by the bourgeoisie describe as ‘natural disasters’. They encompass a wide range: from wildfires, to floods, earthquakes and tsunamis. The bourgeois media peddle the lie that there is nothing humanity can do to protect itself against nature’s whims and that we should just resign ourselves to fate. We remember how they cynically painted the Japanese population’s prostration in the face of the horrific sequence of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear devastation as a serene Zen attitude in the face of adversity. That’s how the ruling class would want us to be: prostrated. In the US, a winter with record snowfalls, wildfires, a monster flood of the Mississippi river, and, more recently, one of the deadliest tornado seasons on record have left thousands of people homeless, hundreds dead, and caused inestimable suffering. This is reason enough to feel disheartened. But revolutionaries must help the working class see through the thickness of bourgeois deceptions the truth that capitalism is at the root of these environmental abnormalities and that the working class, through its struggle to overthrow this dying system, is the sole force in society that can offer real answers to the problems posed by capitalism’s ravaging of the planet. As we behold the massive destruction and human suffering left behind, we need to pose the questions: What is happening to the environment? What really accounts for the devastation wracked by these violent weather phenomena?

An outbreak of dozens of tornadoes killed 314 people in five states on April 27 and a massive twister killed 138 in Joplin, Missouri on May 22, not to mention scores others before the two deadly dates. 2011 now ranks as the fifth deadliest year in US tornado history. And the tornado season is not even over yet. President Obama, visiting Joplin, Missouri, one week after an EF-5 tornado touched down, had barely declared the state of emergency for the area, when more tornadoes struck California and Massachusetts. These two states are far from Tornado Alley, a term used to describe a swath of land from the Deep South, through the southern plains and into the upper Midwest. The unusually destructive violence of these storms is now coupled with their widening and highly unpredictable pathway. It has to be affirmed very clearly that this east and north-ward spreading of tornado activity in recent years, the tornadoes’ abnormal size and utter violence, are explained by global warming, and that capitalism is completely implicated. La Niña, a cyclical system of trade winds that cools the waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, made a sudden exit about three months ago even though we were in the grip of one of the most powerful Las Niñas on record. It is very possible that if La Niña had maintained its strength there would not have been so many or such violent tornadoes due to La Nina’s stabilizing effect on the jet stream, a high speed air current that acts as an atmospheric ‘fence’ where cool and dry air meets up with warm, moist air –two of the main ingredients for severe storms. Without La Niña around, the jet stream, which by this time of the year should be farther north, has gone rogue. Instead of moving north, in April and May the jet stream hung around the middle of the country, where it has the chance to violently mix cool, dry northern air with warm, moist southern air. It is no longer a secret that surface water temperatures are rising as a result of global warming, and the sea surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico is between 1.8 and 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.0 to 1.5 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. If there’s more moisture and the atmosphere is warmer, it is more unstable, so, there’s more potential for severe thunderstorms to develop.

As we can see, there is nothing fatalistic about ‘natural disasters’, and these events can be traced to the anarchistic and reckless mode of production under which we live, a system that has more regard for quick profit than for man or nature. When, in the face of this shift in tornadoes’ path the weather ‘specialist’ and ‘scientists’ paid by the ruling class ask questions such as: “Is there a new Tornado Alley?” it is not to answer that capitalism has caused global warming, a manifestation of which is the changing directions and speeds of air currents such as the jet stream. This question is futile because the ruling class would not use that knowledge to plan for a different distribution of the population, one that will keep it out of harm’s way. Nor will it develop different types of dwellings which can provide greater protection against extreme weather conditions. Indeed, as at the time of hurricane Katrina, the bourgeois state and its various agencies set up with the purpose of responding to emergencies, proves once again its utter uselessness, inefficiency, and corruption. It is not these various agencies who organized rescue, provided comfort, and prepared for repairs in the immediate aftermath of the storm. It is the local population who, in many cases risking their own lives, threw their weight selflessly where they saw the urgent need to intervene. We can expect that the population who has been left homeless will remain so for an indefinite time.

The ruling class is keen on assembling weather forecasters and ‘specialists’ who can soothe the population’s anxiety over the large issues of the generalized degradation of the environment and global warming by trivializing questions such as “Is there a new Tornado Alley?” The ruling class knows that there are lingering, deeper questions about the short and long term consequences of climatic change on humanity and nature and the responsibility of capitalism. It fears that the greater the devastation wracked by what the ruling class calls   ‘natural disasters,’ the more apparent its inability to offer prevention, a minimum of protection and restoration of the environment, and support for the populations affected by these ‘disasters.’ Indeed, it is clear that the louder their bleats about how sorry they feel for the deaths and losses suffered, the cheaper their ‘reconstruction’ efforts are shown to be. In order to distort the truth about global warming and thereby protect its image, the ruling class insists on attributing the multiplication of ‘natural’ disasters to improvements in observations, reporting, documentation and record keeping. These improvements are certainly true, but it is not a statistical account that can explain either the apparent shift in weather pattern or the impact this is having on human life. As to this last point, in examining tornado fatalities from 1950-2005 we see that the majority of fatal tornado events occurred mainly outside of the traditional Tornado Alley region, into the lower-Arkansas, Tennessee, and lower-Mississippi River valleys. This distribution is not to be attributed to a shift in tornado occurrences, but instead a combination of climate and non-climate related factors.

We have seen how global warming is related to the shift in tornado pathway above. Within the non-climate factors, it is noticeable that a larger percentage of mobile homes and lower-stock housing materials are used in this region than any other region in the US. From 1985 to 2005 mobile home fatalities accounted for 44% of all fatalities, when in the southeast the percentage of mobile homes averages over 20% in most counties. The overall population density in the southeast is greater than in the traditional Tornado Alley. A higher percentage of elderly and impoverished persons live in this area, which enhances this region’s vulnerability. This is further aggravated by the population shift to the area resulting from unemployment, which pushes this vulnerable sector of the population to move to areas where housing is cheaper, and poorer. Hence, the increased number of tornado fatalities in that area.   It is not by changing the geographical mapping of what constitutes a Tornado Alley today that we can explain global warming or address the issues of poverty and unemployment. This is an exercise presently occupying a great number of meteorologists, a trick employed to ‘explain’ the increased number in tornado fatalities. The responsibility of the ruling class in the tornado fatalities regardless of a tornado pathway is obvious when we hear the answer to the question of why there were never building codes in the traditional Tornado Alley area.

According to Tim Reinhold, senior vice president for research and chief engineer at the Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) in Tampa, Fla., it comes down to something called the “return period” -- the interval between two disaster events in a given location. Although major tornadoes happen every year, the likelihood they’ll happen twice in the same place is very low. “With tornadoes,” Mr. Reinhold says, “because they’re relatively small and don’t cover very much ground, the chances that a particular building in Tornado Alley would be hit is 1 in 5,000 per year. And within that, the chance that the tornado will be F4 or F5 is even lower. So to make everyone build houses to stand up to that level would be a huge cost increase.” This idea, besides revealing a delirious state of a mind out of touch with reality, underscores the ruling class’ attitude: human life –that of the exploited class, to be precise- is a matter of statistical calculations, and, above all cost-efficiency! This is why under decadent capitalism scientific knowledge is concealed, distorted, and prostituted: to serve profit. In order to see the flourishing of science at the service of humanity, science which can be put to use to restore nature and man’s relationship with it, the working class must destroy capital.

Ana, 4/6/11.

This article has already been published on our site here [149].

In less than a month at the time of writing, a second border clash left at least 14 dead and scores of wounded as Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd of Palestinian protesters trying to break into the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights from Syria. Barely one month before, hundreds of people broke through a border fence and clashed with thousands of Israeli troops mobilized in anticipation of possible unrest as Palestinians prepared to protest the anniversary of the Arab defeat in the 1967 Mideast war. This is just a ‘skirmish’ compared to the history of violence and bloodletting that stains the region, the latest eruption of confrontations in an age-old conflict that has pitted the Israeli and Palestinian populations against each other as each sinks deeper and deeper in their ruling classes’ respective nationalist ideologies: Palestinian “liberation” and Israel Zionism. For more than 60 years since the establishment of the Israeli state, these nationalist ideologies, fueled by the dominant classes on each side and aggravated by the opposing interests in the area of all the major Western powers, have caused immeasurable suffering and destruction, with no perspective for peace.

US Shifts Policies to Adapt to Its Weakened Position

Already back in the early 90’s the US had to adapt to the disappearance of the influence of the USSR in the Middle East as it became clear that countries which had been supported by the USSR during the Cold war, such as Syria, looked for a new ‘sponsor,’ while others, such as Iraq, threw their weight around in search of a greater imperialist position in the region. A ‘peace accord’ between Israel and the PLO became the centerpiece of US policy as it attempted to orientate the future shaping of alliances in the region and ensure a predominant role for the US. This led to the Oslo accords of 1992, where the US sponsored an agreement between Israel and the PLO in which the latter would recognize Israel’s right of existence and Israel would agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West bank. The Oslo accords however floundered in the early 2000’s, as Israel, emboldened by the Bush administration’s ‘war on terrorism’ following the attacks of September 11, and its acquiescence with Israel’s policy of building Jewish settlements in the West bank, played its own card and tried to strengthen its imperialist position in the area. The US went along with Israel’s withdrawal of its compromise on the Palestinian question. In this way, it hoped to both soothe Israel’s growing attempts to play its own card, and reaffirm and strengthen the US position of dominance. The ‘war on terror’ may have given the US and Israel a sense of cockishness for a while, but it proved incapable of restoring the position of hegemony of the US. Instead, it multiplied the animosity and challenges against it, created fissures within once stable nations, and encouraged all imperialisms, big and small, to take advantage of the weakened US position to gain influence in the wake of US failure. This is what is at the root of the present intolerable and unpredictable situation of ‘each nation for themselves.’

In the face of this apparent loss of control over the inter-imperialist scenario, the US bourgeoisie became increasingly alarmed. In 2008, it succeeded for a time in gaining some control over its election campaign (see article in the present issue on the difficulties of the US bourgeoisie vis-à-vis its own political strategy) and put at the head of its state a democratic-led team who developed a foreign policy with the rhetoric of cooperation and ‘peace,’ rather than war. This was done in order to reverse eight years of disastrous foreign policies implemented by a Bush administration hell-bent in flexing US military muscle in the face of the multiplication of challenges against its hegemony even at the cost of increased isolation. But restoring the US’ position of world power, a daunting task for the Bush administration, is proving impossible for the Obama administration, which is faced today by increasingly difficult and multiplying challenges.   Even the US gendarme in the Middle East, Israel, its staunchest ally in the region, repeatedly challenges US authority with acts of insubordination against it. While the US needs the cooperation of Israel to impose its control over the region—which lies at the core of the Obama administration’s attempts at bringing Israel and Palestine back to the negotiating table--, Israel constantly defies any attempt by the US to bring about a settlement between the two parts. President Obama’s speech on May 19 aimed at sending a message to Israel that it intended to be the one to ‘run the show’ as to the prospects of a new round of ‘peace negotiations’ between Israel and Palestine. This attempt however turned into a diplomatic embarrassment for the US, as Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu fired back with vehement assertions that clearly showed he was not going to follow US diktats. President Obama had to renege on his earlier statement on May 19 about the necessity for Israel to accept two states on the basis of the ’67 borders and grant Netanyahu a grand platform before a joint meeting of Congress, where he was warmly applauded. Netanyahu was rebuked again on May 26, when the US announced sanctions against an Israeli company for its role in a September 2010 transaction that provided a tanker valued at $8.65 million to…The Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines!

 The US desperately needs to show that it has the ability to force Israel to toe in line so as to discourage other powers in the region, i.e. Syria and Iran from playing their own imperialist cards. The US is also very concerned that Israel’s hard stance about the Palestinian question risks fuelling even greater anti-American sentiments in the area, in which case the US would have to side with Israel and lose the little diplomatic credibility it is trying to win The US’ desperate need to maintain order in the area to prove its status as world power leads it to take increasingly contradictory steps. In the relationship with Syria and Iran, in particular, the US walks a dangerously fine line. If it cannot convince Syria of the advantage of siding with it, and with the advent of a nuclear Iran, the US will lose all diplomatic credibility. Its overtures to Syria, exemplified by the US present reluctance to take a stronger stance against President Abbas in the wake of the bloody repression he is leading against the Syrians protesting for his ousting, can only frighten and irritate Israel, who sees Syria as a dangerous prey and ally of Iran. The stakes are high, as it is clear that without progress in the Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ the Europeans will take full advantage of US weakness and endorse Palestinian statehood at the United Nations in September. While the US wages this as a stick in front of Israel’s nose, it has no carrots to offer. Indeed France, most notably among the European nations, has already suggested that endorsement of Palestinian statehood is what it intends to give. 

The chaos and destabilization that have ravaged the planet since the collapse of the ex-Soviet bloc at the end of the 80’s, resulted in the weakening of the world’s remaining superpower—the US.   The ensuing constant reshuffling of ad-hoc alliances has been the hallmark of life in the last two decades, and a mere foretaste of more and worse to come.   The latest ‘historic’ speech delivered by President Barack Obama on May 19 has to be understood against this backdrop of aggravating political instability and imperialist rivalries. The quarrels with the Israeli state and the disagreements with the European counterparts–most notably France-over the future contours of a Palestinian state are a manifestation of the weakened hegemonic position of the US and a stark confirmation of the impossibility of peace under capitalism.

Ana, 6/6/11

On May 2nd, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party won its first ever majority government, upping its margin in the House of Commons from 143 seats to 166. As a result of the election, the Liberal Party’s tally of seats (34) has been reduced to an historic low, while the Bloc Québécois (BQ) has been virtually wiped out as player in federal politics, holding on to only 4 seats. However, for the bourgeois media the real story of this “historic election” was the rise of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), which took the most seats in its history (103) and now forms the official opposition in Ottawa for the first time ever.

As a result of the election, the Conservatives now have the power to enact whatever legislation they want—no longer threatened by possible opposition non-confidence votes. However, although they now control a majority of seats in the House of Commons, only 37 percent of voters actually voted for a Conservative MP. In large measure, the Conservative majority was built by “splits on the left,” as an insurgent NDP competed strongly with Liberals in a number of key ridings, throwing the race to the Conservatives. The Canadian bourgeoisie is now stuck with a scandal ridden Conservative government for the next four years boasting a ruling team that has shown bold contempt for the “democratic process” in the past, even though it only formed a minority government. The fear of what the Harper Conservatives will do in a majority government to further damage the democratic illusion must be a real concern for the Canadian bourgeoisie at the present time. So far, the Conservatives would appear to be taking pains not to rock the boat too far, too fast having waged a campaign around “stability.”

Clearly, this was not the optimal election result for revitalizing democratic and electoral illusions among a populace that has grown increasingly cynical and disengaged from its state over the last decade and half. Nevertheless, given the structure of the Canadian state, it became evident fairly early on in the campaign that another Conservative government would be the outcome of the election. Therefore, in order to attempt to salvage the situation—the Canadian bourgeoisie—after a period of hesitancy at the beginning of the campaign — moved to build up the candidacy of NDP leader Jack Layton, legitimating his party as a viable option to the Liberals. (See “The Canadian Bourgeois Attempts to Revive its Democratic Illusion Once Again” in Internationalism #158). Playing on the historic volatility of the electorate in Quebec, the NDP shot past the Liberals and the BQ there, winning seat after seat in a province where it had previously been virtually absent. Whether or not the Conservatives would have formed a majority government without a strong showing by the NDP is a matter of some debate, but a Conservative government was inevitable given the near total ineptitude of the Liberal campaign.

As the result of the election, the Canadian state is now characterized by a sharp polarization between a right-wing party in power and a social democratic left in opposition. Although the continued presence of the Harper Conservatives in power is not the optimal situation for the Canadian bourgeoisie; this is assuaged to some degree by the revitalization of a left opposition in the NDP. With the historic defeat of the Liberal Party and the near total destruction of the BQ, the Canadian state is moving—for the moment at least—towards a more stable two party opposition in the political system. This will allow the Canadian bourgeoisie to more effectively operate the ideological division of labor between the right in power/left in opposition in anticipation of future class confrontations in the offing, once a still buoyant Canadian economy succumbs to the shoals of the global economic crisis.

Nevertheless, the current arrangement is still fraught with difficulties for the Canadian bourgeoisie. First, the brazen, often callous, Harper Government—whom over 60 percent of voters rejected—remains in power. By the time its “mandate” is done in 2015, it will have been in power for nine years. This follows a thirteen-year period of corruption laden Liberal Party rule, which was largely built on “splits on the right,” before the unification of the Conservative Party in 2003. Despite its image as a more flexible multi-party democracy vis a vis its neighbor to the south, the Canadian state is currently unable to produce a ruling team other than the same old corrupt Liberals or Conservatives. The recent attempt to give the Liberal Party a new face by bringing in Harvard History professor Michael Ignatieff as party leader fell flat on its face, with Conservative attack ads painting him as something less than a true Canadian for having lived so long in the United States. Ignatieff himself was unable to win his own suburban Toronto riding. As it currently stands, in order to give the state a new veneer, the Canadian bourgeoisie would have to bring the NDP to power, a prospect that would risk upsetting the ideological division of labor, and a result that seems unlikely anytime in the near future given the electoral map of Canadian politics.

Moreover, in order to make the NDP the official opposition, the Canadian bourgeoisie had to so by “going the Québec route”, destroying the officially separatist federal party (BQ) in the process. Now, the NDP is indebted to its base in Québec and will be forced to adopt rhetoric more sensitive to the majority francophone province’s nationalist aspirations—complicating its relationship with the rest of Canada. Yes, the Canadian bourgeoisie was able to salvage this election to some degree with the elevation of the NDP, but the situation it finds itself in today remains fraught with danger for the legitimacy of the democratic and electoral illusion. Despite all the talk of an historic election, voter participation remained quite low at 61 percent, just slightly higher than 2008’s historic low (59 percent.)

For now, although the right/left division of labor between the Conservatives and the NDP is useful to the Canadian bourgeoisie given the threat of future class confrontations, the current arrangement seems unlikely to offer more than a modest boost to the state’s legitimacy. While it is not possible to predict the future evolution of Canadian politics with precision, it seems likely that the Canadian state will need to try to revitalize the Liberal Party as a viable party of government in the period ahead—most likely by appointing a young and appealing new face as party leader: Justin Trudeau, Liberal MP from Montreal and son of the late enigmatic Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, would seem to fit this bill to the tee. Although, the Liberal Party suffered an historic defeat in May, it was not decimated completely. As quick as the NDP was built up, it can be brought down again, most likely through the desertion of voters in Québec. In order to eventually replace the Conservatives as the ruling party should the situation call for it, the Canadian state needs a party capable of winning votes in both Québec and the rest of Canada in order to counteract strong Conservative party strength in the West. It is not clear if the NDP is capable of doing this, nor is it likely that the Canadian bourgeoisie wants to burden its social democratic party with national power at this time.

Already there are signs of discontent brewing within the Canadian working class that would be most effectively neutralized through a left opposition in close cooperation with the unions. On June 2nd, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers called a series of rotating strikes as contract negotiations with the Crown Corporation broke down. Although the current series of rotating strikes in different cities on different days remains firmly union-controlled, there is a real discontent brewing among postal workers over pay, deteriorating job conditions, safety issues and disciplinary policies. Unlike its neighbor to the south, the Canadian state will be able to respond to this growing discontent among the working class through the use of a political shell game featuring bold sounding rhetoric by the left party in opposition, which is frustrated by the right in power. Moreover, the Canadian state will be able to call on its still functioning union apparatus to control the workers’ anger. In this sense, despite the fact that Canada can perhaps claim a more consistent history of class struggle than the U.S., the Canadian bourgeoisie might now be much better placed to divert struggle when it arises than its southern neighbor currently is. Witness the difference in approach of the Canadian bourgeoisie in handling the Canada Post strike, compared with the attempts to virtually destroy public employee unions in Republican controlled states in the U.S. For the bourgeoisie, it pays to have a left party with credentials and a capable union apparatus to call on in time of need!

For the working class the lessons of this election are clear. There exists no bourgeois political party that is capable of defending our interests in the context of the global bankruptcy of the capitalist system. While Canada may have been spared the worst of this crisis up until now, the writing is on the wall that it will not be spared forever. Sky-high housing costs, spiraling consumer debt loads and tenuous employment are our future under any government of the bourgeoisie regardless of its partisan badge. Workers will have to take up the struggle on its own class terrain against parliament and all the parties of the bourgeois class.

Henk, 06/07/11.

This article has already been published on our site here [153].

The events of July and August all came in such rapid succession that the ruling class seemed dizzied by their speed and depth: the debt-ceiling crisis, the downgrading of the U.S. creditworthiness from AAA to AA+ by Standard & Poor, the plunges and volatility on the stock markets, the news of the insolvencies of countries like Spain and Italy and the impasse at the IMF over what to do, the flight of capital away from U.S. Treasury bonds to gold. The ruling class is running out of arguments with which to reassure an ever more uncertain working class with hopes for a better future. To add insult to injury, its options about how to address an ever-aggravating economic crisis are also wearing thin. What is going on?

The credit crunch that followed the housing bubble burst of 2008 threatened the freezing of economic activity so seriously that the bourgeoisie was obliged to bring in recovery plans in the form of the ‘economic stimulus package’ and shore up the financial industry by absorbing the banks’ toxic assets and bailing them out. The little respite these measures offered are at the root of the so-called ‘recovery’ flaunted for the last two years. From the point of view of the working class, as it continues to suffer the brunt of the crisis, it is obvious there has been no ending or solution to its worsening living and working conditions. As capitalism is reaching the end of its tether, and the measures used by the ruling class to slow down the worst effects of the crisis wear out, the working class can only expect more brutal attacks against it.

How is the working class faring?

On Friday, September 2 the government reported on hiring as the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its figures for the month of August. The New York Times wrote the following headline on the front page of its Saturday, September 3 edition: “Zero Job Growth Latest Bleak Sign for U.S. Economy”. The dismal realization at reading the figures is that new people entering the labor market will not be absorbed and that the unemployed will continue to stay unemployed for the foreseeable future: the first time this has happened since the 1940s. It is important to recall that the official unemployment rate, steady at 9.1%, is based on the number of people who have been actively looking for a job in the previous four weeks. It does not include discouraged workers who have given up looking for a job, and those who are employed part time but would be working full time. Adding these, the unemployment rate immediately jumps to 16.1%, and even this is a very conservative figure, because it counts as employed the non-civilian population absorbed in the military.

What is also very worrisome is the long term characteristic of unemployment in the present recession. Job losses have not only been worse since the beginning of the last recession than in previous ones. It is taking much longer to find a job. The ‘zero growth’ figure just released confirms the chronic state of malaise the economy is in. Taking a look at the composition of the working class in America, the brunt of unemployment is carried by the Black population, who experienced an increase in unemployment from 16.2% to 16.7%, once again confirming the chronic illness of capitalism, utterly incapable of lifting the sectors of the population that historically have been disadvantaged out of their bleakness. Hispanics follow suit, with 11.3% unemployment rate. The other very telling demographic figure is that regarding youth unemployment, standing at 25.4%. In the context of an economy that has stalled and is not hiring, this creates the unprecedented condition in which employed parents who still rely on a pension or social security check will have to worry about the financial stability of their children as their parents move into retirement.

The economy continued to shed jobs in the government sector, and manufacturing and retail, which benefited from a little respite last year, also started to shed jobs. This trend will continue, as the only sector that added jobs is agriculture and the harvesting season is drawing to an end. These figures are disheartening enough, but as to the ‘lucky’ ones who still hold a job, going to work is becoming more and more an activity bearing resemblance to torture, with intolerable conditions of oppression, control, and intensification of exploitation. Teachers have especially been victimized and blamed for their ‘privileged’ wages and benefit packages, but their conditions of work have particularly deteriorated since the start of the crisis. It is no surprise that we find in the statistics released by the Bureau of Labor this figure: the number of quits almost equals the number of layoffs, with quits highest in education! This suggests that the conditions of work can be so extenuating that a worker may rather choose the prospect of financial instability over unbearable oppression at work! Faced with the reality of the crisis, bourgeois economists are now projecting downward their growth figures.

How is capitalism faring, and what will the ruling class do?

These convulsions of the economy are neither the result of corporate greed or stock market speculation, as we were told in 2008, when they first emerged to the surface. Their roots are not to be found in ‘consumers’ recklessness in contracting debts they could not repay. Neither are they the cause of the incessant squabbles in Washington between factions of the U.S. ruling class divided by the dilemma of what to do in face of the most serious recession in U.S. history. These factors certainly aggravate the situation, but rather than being the cause, they are a symptom of a malaise for which the ruling class has no cure. As we wrote in International Review 133: “For the last four decades …the overall economy has only kept a semblance of functionality thanks to systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies…During these decades of crisis the economy has accumulated so many contradictions that today there is a real threat of an economic catastrophe.” (‘The United States - locomotive of the world economy... toward the abyss [157]’, 2nd Quarter 2008.)

The monstrous public debt of states, the federal budget deficit, the private national debt, the huge trade deficit are all the result of the capitalist state intervention over the course of the last four decades to shore up its ailing economy. They have now brought capitalism to the point where it has exceeded its ability to sustain its indebtedness. The multiplicity of the contradictions accumulated over the last four decades have come to a head all at once and the ruling class is incapable of coming up with a coherent plan. Austerity plans risk to aggravate an already weakened economy, causing consumption to further become restricted, and exacerbating the risk of bankruptcies. Pumping money into the financial markets –the central bank’s policy called Quantitative Easing of flooding the financial system with cash through direct purchases of Treasury debt, to the tune of $600 billion as of the latest such action—will cause a depreciation of the value of money in circulation, and inflation. Yet, the ruling class will have to continue to rely on the state apparatus to massively intervene in the economy and apply more of the same medicine, already a veritable poison. But more financial and monetary manipulation will only postpone the day of reckoning for a little longer. The central bank, for instance, may start selling off United States Treasury securities set to mature soon and buy the ones that mature later in an attempt to increase demand for longer- term issues. In this way, their price would rise and the interest rates on those securities fall, making it cheaper for the U.S. to finance its debt. But this can only encourage speculation in riskier assets as investors seek higher returns in the stock markets as long-term Treasuries wouldn’t offer a great return.

The growing incoherence the American ruling class finds itself in is also exemplified by the speech made by the central bank’s chairman, Ben Bernanke on August 26, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming when he said that the present state of the economy had not deteriorated to the point where a third round of Quantitative Easing was granted. A few days later, the statistics released by the Bureau of Labor once again are increasing pressure on American capitalism to go to the press and print more of the green back. But this will not cure this terminally ill patient, moribund capitalism in its death throes. Why not?

As we wrote in the International Review 144: “…capitalism suffers genetically from a lack of outlets because the exploitation of labor power leads to a creation of a value greater than the outlay in wages, because the working class consumes much less than what it produces.” (‘Capitalism has no way out of its crisis [158]’, 1st Quarter 2011.) Workers and capitalists cannot constitute enough of a market for capitalism to restart its process of production. And a market is necessary in order to valorize the part of surplus value extracted through the exploitation of the working class and destined to reproduction. Exchanging value among capitalists loses sight of the fact that capital must expand, not consume, its value. As to the workers constituting a solvent market, the most powerful –and mortal-- contradiction of capitalism is the fact that as capital struggles against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as a result of competition, it improves technology, thus displacing workers and increasing productivity without a corresponding rise in wages. This results in a contraction of demand, as the workers’ ability to consume becomes more and more restricted. The current talks about anaemic spending, lack of investments, decrease in productivity express this fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Under these conditions, capitalism does not, and cannot have a solution to its crisis. As it imposes its oppression and its brutal austerity plans against the working class, the bourgeoisie risks to accelerate the time when the workers of the world take capitalism head on and consign it to the dustbin of history.

Ana, 09/04/11.

The strike at Verizon in August, involving 45,000 workers at one of the largest companies in the US in the industrial Northeast, is the largest of its kind since the 2008 financial crash, and follows on the heels of a long development of class struggle in the U.S. For all its difficulties, the US working class is returning to the class struggle and will continue to do so as the crisis deepens. On August 7 Verizon workers across the Mid-Atlantic region struck against savage attacks on their living and working conditions, picketing outside company headquarters in from Boston to Pittsburgh and down to Richmond. Despite the blackmail of the ruling class, with even the apologists of the ruling class are again forecasting more increases in unemployment (already officially at 9%), Verizon workers’ determination to struggle has given an inspiration to their entire class, which is more and more looking for ways to give voice to its grievances and fight back against the sacrifices this rotten system continues to demand.

Verizon’s proposed contract demanded 100 different concessions including a complete pension freeze and the elimination of pensions for new hires, as well as eliminating all job security provisions, tying all pay increases to performance, and ending night, weekend, and double-time pay. In addition, the company offered only to pay a fixed amount for all medical premiums with workers paying the difference. The new contract also proposed that the company be able to force transfers anywhere in the US for any employee at any time. This was clearly a provocation on the part of the company to force the CWA and IBEW, who represent the unionized workers at Verizon mostly in the landline and FiOS divisions, to call a strike.

From the beginning of the strike the sole demand was that the company “bargain in good faith” over the proposed concessions with the unions who said they were ready to stay out as long as it took to achieve this. After wearing out the workers with isolated pickets and almost two weeks without pay and court injunctions in each state limiting pickets either at a maximum of six, or proportional to the number of replacement workers at each location, the unions announced they had reached an agreement with Verizon about how to proceed with the negotiations (although everything is still on the table at press time) and ordered a return to work under the old contract for another 30 days. As a condition of “negotiating seriously” the company was given full discretion over reinstating almost 80 workers who were suspended during the strike without the usual arbitration proceedings. The first day back workers were given $260 of strike pay for their two weeks out.

Despite the union mostly having a free hand to exhaust sabotage the struggle, presenting it as a union-busting campaign aimed at cutting the union out of negotiations like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had attempted last spring and calling on workers to focus on defending the idea of “negotiating in good faith” rather than any specific demands, many workers were on strike for different reasons. Picketers with whom Internationalism spoke when distributing our leaflet (published in the August ICConline section of our website and discussed below) said very clearly that they were on strike to prevent pension freezes, the elimination of job security provisions, the maintenance of their health care costs, and other class demands. Passing motorists honked in support of picketers and even accepted leaflets. While the perspective was not towards self-organization, many workers were very willing to discuss, and agreed with a number of our criticisms of the union’s demands and strategy. Since the strikes’ end, the union sponsored Facebook page has seen a number of comments from workers calling the deal a betrayal and even wondering why they are paying dues, and a rank-and-file forum called Rebuild 1101 online has seen debate about the role the CWA plays with one poster calling for its destruction and others recommending the road of reform.

The dispute at Verizon is in continuity with struggles that have emerged over the past year or so. In the spring of 2010, students across California and in parts of New York staged occupations and strikes in the universities against drastic hikes in tuition and fees which posed many political questions about the crisis and the future of capitalism and includes attempts by minorities to link up with the rest of the working class in California. After that, serious strikes by nurses in Philadelphia and Minneapolis, a major construction strike in Chicago, and a month-long struggle by Mott’s workers in New York confirmed the working class’ willingness to fight despite the extreme risk involved and the blackmail of the bourgeoisie.

That summer ended with a strike at Boeing, numerous teachers’ strikes, and a two-day wildcat up and down the East Coast among dockworkers. November saw GM workers in Indianapolis thrice reject a 50 percent pay cut pushed by the UAW and attempts at coordination with other GM plants to refuse the UAW’s contract, which ended in the closure of the plant. Each of these strikes was actively contained by the unions, and the working class suffered a series of defeats (often dressed up as victories), but the desire of the working class to struggle, and the refusal to accept sacrifices any longer has been growing in the US working class.

Last February in Wisconsin, a brief unofficial sick-out coordinated between students and teachers, combined with an occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol building with obvious echoes of events in Egypt and Tunisia seemed to herald a new phase in the class struggle. But after the first week, the unions (who from the beginning agreed to every economic concession so long as their role as negotiators was respected) and the Democratic Party mobilized a gigantic campaign for the defense of collective bargaining, completely sidelining the class demands of that struggle related to the living conditions of Wisconsin state employees. While efforts were made by some groups to popularize the idea of a general strike, much of this was attempted to be done through the very unions who had already ruled out any strike action, and many workers got sucked up in the defense of the unions and the subsequent recall campaign against Republican state senators in Wisconsin.

In the Verizon strike, the CWA and IBEW have both presented the Verizon strike as one against “union-busting” and with the only demand that the company “bargain in good faith,” attempting to chain the strike to the same mystifications used in Wisconsin, despite it’s very different character. At the same time, they have insisted that the concessions being demanded are simply “corporate greed” despite the very obvious fact that their union busting precedent comes from a state government pushing austerity on the public sector. The unions and the left have publicized Verizon’s new willingness to “bargain” as a major victory, despite the fact that ever concession is still on the table, as in the “victory” won by Democrats with the debt ceiling feud in Washington (see our article, “U.S. Debt Ceiling Crisis: Political Wrangling While the Global Economy Burns [159]” in this issue).

This mystification of defending the unions as a way to defend the working class is likely to be milked by the left of capitalism for a long time, especially after the publicity of the mobilizations “in defense of collective bargaining” in Wisconsin. The descent of the bourgeois right into more and more ideologically-based irrationality has only added to the impact of these campaigns in building this stumbling block for class consciousness in the US. After a record low in strikes in 2009, and with so many ideological campaigns aimed against it since the end of the 1980s about the end of the class struggle, the narrative provided by the media of a victimized left attempting to cautiously but courageously resist the onslaught of Tea Party ideology and the dismantling of the social wage is a difficult one to move beyond. Only the deepening and multiplication of struggles can provide a situation in which these illusions give way on a massive scale to the realities and needs of the struggles the working class is forced to undertake

JJ 9/9/11

Here we are publishing an exchange that occurred between the comrades who were engaged in the intervention toward the striking Verizon workers, some of them ICC militants, some of them sympathizers. They worked in close collaboration from the early tossing around of ideas about what to write in the leaflet that was to be distributed, to the actual distribution of the leaflet and several discussions held with the striking workers, and to the post-intervention reflection, which is what is published here. We cannot stress enough the importance of the collective nature of this work. It is important for the sympathizers as they get a ‘hands-on’ experience of actually intervening in the class struggle with a collective framework that is the product of open discussions. It is important for the ICC as it continues to listen to and learn from the insights of the young –and not so young—generation of elements and groups in search of a political direction new and creative ways of approaching different issues.

Cde H: When we denounce the unions, we can sound very much like the bourgeois right-wing attacks against them. It can be difficult for people who have not heard the unions attacked from the left before to make the distinction. In fact, we often do end up saying the same things as the right-wing (unions just take your dues money; but do nothing for you; they only advance their own interests, etc.) Perhaps then, given the balance of class forces in the U.S., we could not feature our attacks on the union as much—or at the least not make them centerpiece of intervention - and instead focus on developing class demands. Yes, the unions will sabotage them, but perhaps the workers have to learn this in the course of the struggle. Perhaps, too heavy a denunciation of the unions only strengthens the tendency to identify with them. Workers still fail to see the difference between the unions and themselves. When they hear the unions attacked, they think they are being attacked. Maybe there isn’t an immediate perspective in the U.S. for workers to take control of their own struggles? In this sense, maybe Wisconsin was a true exception and we saw how quickly the unions got control of the situation there. Maybe the more important thing is that workers are actually trying to struggle; maybe we should focus on building the will to struggle, rather than denouncing the unions? This doesn’t mean giving the unions a pass; but we shouldn’t sound like our chief goal is to destroy the unions.

Cde A: I personally have a really hard time understanding how to exactly intervene in a way that, on the one hand, helps/promotes/fosters class consciousness and also steers away from what is indeed a denunciation of the unions that overwhelmingly the workers don’t understand yet. I also do not know how workers can agree to doing the above without questioning why all of this has to be done outside of the union framework. This is the conundrum I always find myself in at my workplace, where many colleagues agree with the ideas and proposals, but then always end up saying something like: well, let’s go and propose this to the union... ultimately, workers need to feel that they can do any of the above without the union. It’s this sense of powerlessness and also a still undeveloped sense of class identity that, I think, the working class has not overcome/ developed yet. And this, as we know, happens through the struggles themselves. I wonder whether the leaflet would not have had an altogether different impact if the first three paragraphs had not been there at all, or if they had been written at the end, after the presentation on what workers could actually do under the circumstances...

Cde H: These are all valid concerns and feelings. Often I think, our intervention boils down to the following: workers need to come together to decide for themselves what to do. Other than some very general things and a lot of what not to do, we can’t really on principle tell the workers what to do or really how to struggle outside of a few basic lessons from history. This is really the entire left communist predicament. Workers have to figure it out for themselves. As such, our intervention can often appear quite negative, i.e.: “We don’t know exactly what the answer is, but the unions sure don’t have it, why don’t you guys go and discuss what to do while the union isn’t looking.” Meanwhile, the unions appear to have concrete answers, which are only shown to be illusions very slowly. It will take time and experience for the workers to break the union stranglehold. Right now, the absurd attempts by elements of the bourgeoisie to destroy the unions seems only to be reinforcing this myth of the unions. The unions are able to play the victim card; it’s not an optimal time to make an intervention condemning the unions in such stark terms. In Europe and elsewhere the story may be different. I hear A’s frustration over the agreement workers seem to have with some basic concepts of ours, yet they think they can achieve them through the union. It’s like when you have a list of grievances against society and some smarty pants tells you to write your Congressman. It’s as if they don’t get the fundamentally different framework you are posing. In fact, they don’t. It’s only experience that will teach. We can really only hope to plant a seed of doubt, the kernel of a different paradigm among the more farsighted and open elements so as to prepare the ground for the next struggle. We are still at a very early stage in the return to struggle, a return that is only very slowly locating the class terrain.

Cde J: I very much appreciate your help with the intervention. I think I learned a lot and I was also surprised by the openness to discuss and encouraged by the solidarity other workers showed. At the same time, I very much agree with what H. is saying. At the moment, the workers are still thinking in terms of the union fighting “for” them. I think that 10 years of indoctrination can erode what most workers learned from the last strike especially when the bulk of the class is not struggling and that despite the appreciation of solidarity we saw-- the working class is still very fearful and conservative about all of its attempts to defend itself, and until struggles are happening more frequently it’s probably unlikely that we will convince many of our position on the unions, but we can probably convince workers that a) the crisis isn’t going anywhere and there will be more fights in the near future, b) every worker deserves to and should take an active role in these struggles and discuss exactly what the demands are and how to fight them, c) other workers are interested in your struggle and want to help you so you should discuss with them as well, d) what the union is doing will not work in the long term and what we need to do with this struggle is discuss it, think outside the box, discuss it with other workers, and discuss other workers’ struggles--to build some kind of class identity and e) it is not this or that boss but the whole system of capitalism which attacks not just Verizon workers (or whomever) but the whole working class and we have to fight back as a class.

Cde A: There are a lot of things we can say to workers and J points some of them out here, but I agree that we should not feature the denunciation of the unions when approaching workers on the picket line, or at a rally or whatever. I don’t think we should hide or lie about our positions, but this shouldn’t be the first thing out of our mouth. It shouldn’t be the first line of a leaflet. I think in our press it is a different story. The audience is different. When we intervene at a picket, we are going to the workers. However, when someone buys a newspaper or takes the time to go to the webpage, they are taking the initiative to find out more about our positions. In theory, our press is only ever going to be read by the more advanced elements of the class, whereas a leaflet has a much broader distribution. I agree with J that at this stage it is probably more important to intervene on the question of the crisis, putting forward the perspective of Marxism that says there is no solution to this mess within capitalism; whatever workers are doing in the unions, they do not go beyond the horizon of bourgeois alternatives, which are really no alternative at all. Workers need to see that reform is not possible, no faction of the bourgeoisie has an answer: the future is bleak without their own independent action. In theory, the questioning of union hegemony over the struggle should follow.

ICC 9/24/11

Throughout the month of July and into the early days of August, the bourgeois media inundated us with discussion and analysis of a veritable existential crisis for the entire global capitalist system, should the U.S. political class fail to resolve its differences and agree to an extension of the legal limit the U.S. government is allowed to borrow.

In the end, the U.S. bourgeoisie—in a classic display of brinkmanship—was able to finalize an agreement just one day before the deadline. This agreement allows for the extension of the debt ceiling to 2013, removing the immediate threat of default for the rest of President Obama’s first term, in exchange for federal budget cuts that will see 1 trillion dollars slashed from the federal budget immediately. This is to be followed by the establishment of a bi-partisan commission of Congress tasked with identifying another $1.5 trillion in additional cuts, under the threat that a failure to agree on specific deficit reduction measures would lead to automatic cuts across the federal budget—including defense spending. In one fell swoop; the U.S. state has gone from the last defenders of Keynesian stimulus faced with the global economic crisis, to the architect of massive austerity.

Nevertheless, the U.S. bourgeoisie’s debt-deal has ultimately proven too-little, too late for at least one bond rating agency, with Standards and Poor downgrading U.S. government debt from AAA rating to AA+, just days after the agreement was reached. The downgrade, coming around the same time as a massive sell-off on Wall Street, confirms that the global markets now recognize political instability in Washington as a fact. [1]

Much of the analysis of this crisis in the bourgeois media, has focused on the role played in the debt-ceiling negotiations by the freshman Tea Party Congressman elected in the 2010 mid-term elections. According to this narrative, the Tea Party bears ultimate responsibility for the crisis, as they approached the debt-ceiling negotiations with a no-holds barred, take no prisoners, reach no compromise approach that would refuse to allow the debt ceiling to be raised without corresponding budget cuts.[2] Against the “balanced approach” to budget deficit reduction pursued by Obama and the Democrats—and tacitly acquiesced to by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner—that combined targeted budget cuts with certain “new revenue” [3], the Tea Party Congressmen refused to budge on their promise to balance the federal budget without raising any taxes. Slash and cut was the only method to fiscal sustainability the Tea Party would accept, as they proposed a “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan that included the passage of a Constitutional Amendment requiring the U.S. federal government to run a balanced budget. This plan was roundly ridiculed in the bourgeois media as politically impossible, with even Republican Senator John McCain labeling those who take a balanced budget amendment seriously as emanating from “bizzaro land.”

The bourgeois media charged the Tea Party with willingness to send the country into default and economic calamity in order to achieve its ideological aims. Clearly, a party—or a faction of one—that is willing to do such damage to the national capital in order to fulfill an ideological pipe dream is not a credible party of government. The problem for the U.S. bourgeoisie, as the media never cease to point out, was that the Tea Party now has a stranglehold on the GOP itself, threatening to render the entire Republican apparatus politically obsolete. With Vice President Biden stating that the Tea Party acted like “terrorists” [4] and Democratic Senator from Iowa Tom Harkin bemoaning the destruction of the U.S. two-party system as the Republican Party morphs into a “kind of cult,”[5] the ideological meltdown of a significant faction of the U.S. political class is now an acknowledged fact in Washington, just as the main factions of the bourgeoisie struggle to control the damage they seem intent to do to the national capital. As one commentator noted [163], “the Tea Party movement did not come to Washington to govern and compromise in the traditional spirit of American politics; they came to demand and threaten.”

However, the Tea Party is not the only faction of the bourgeoisie that has come in for harsh criticism in the media over the debt-ceiling debacle. President Obama himself has come under fire from all sides. The right continues its relentless crusade against the man they consider “the worst President in American history,” while the left grows increasingly frustrated with his willingness to sell-out his base in every negotiation with Republicans, giving away the store to a political faction that poll after poll shows most Americans now reject. [6]

Most importantly, however, a consensus has begun to emerge among bourgeois opinion makers that Obama is simply not able to deal with the threat to the national capital posed by the Tea Party faction. Accusations of “weakness,” of valuing compromise itself over substance and giving in to the Tea Party’s economic terrorism now haunt the President as he prepares for his 2012 re-election campaign. On the debt-ceiling deal, it is widely acknowledged that the President suffered a grave political defeat, his only saving grace being the fact he avoided an unthinkable default. However, by acquiescing to the Tea Party’s “terrorism,” he has failed to comprehend one of the cardinal lessons of bourgeois politics from the 20th century: “negotiating with terrorists, only begets more terrorism.” Now that the Tea Party has learned they can get a lot of what they want by threatening to tank the entire global economy, there is no reason to believe they won’t do it again. [7]

So how should the working class and its revolutionary minorities make sense of this crisis that has forced the political difficulties of the U.S. bourgeoisie to the surface in such a dramatic way? What is the likely trajectory of the U.S. political class in the aftermath of this conflagration, faced with the 2012 Presidential election? What does this crisis say about the ability—or willingness—of the U.S. bourgeoisie to manage the economic crisis that continues to eat away at U.S. global hegemony? What political tactic might the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie attempt to employ in order to confront the twin threats to the national capital of the class struggle and the ideological decomposition of parts of its own political apparatus? How might the U.S. bourgeoisie attempt to make use of this crisis to impede the development of the class struggle in an environment where the attacks on the working class’s living and working conditions can only be expected to worsen?

While the full implications of this crisis—on the political, economic and social level—are not yet clear, we will attempt to give some preliminary analysis here to what is perhaps the most serious manifestation yet of the trend towards the political decomposition of the U.S. bourgeoisie—a trend Internationalism has been tracking since at least the disputed the Gore/Bush Presidential election over one decade ago.

Confirmation of Our Analysis of Political Decomposition

In our opinion, the U.S. debt-ceiling crisis stands as a remarkable confirmation of the analysis Internationalism has been developing of the insidious effects of social decomposition on the political life of the U.S. bourgeoisie itself. In particular, this crisis confirms our analysis of the difficulties of the U.S. political class since Obama’s election in 2008.

As we analyzed at the time, in 2008 the U.S. bourgeoisie was able to achieve a major success by organizing a massive electoral circus around Obama’s historic candidacy as the first African-American President. The Obama campaign successfully blunted the full appreciation of the developing economic crisis and successfully integrated scores of young people and minorities into the dead-end of bourgeois electoral politics for the first time in their lives. On that level, the Obama campaign marked a momentary brake on the tendency for the U.S. bourgeoisie to lose control of its electoral circus, as it succeeded in reviving the electoral illusion for the time being, after 8 years of the disastrous Bush administration.

However, simultaneous with Obama’s historic victory, a parallel movement was taking place within the American political class in direct opposition to the President. Starting with the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s Vice Presidential candidate, Obama’s candidacy was to prove as polarizing as it was inspiring. Decades of repressed racist impulses, paranoid fantasies and wild conspiracies theories surged to the surface, as the new President faced constant challenges to his legitimacy from an emboldened right-wing. A new Tea Party movement emerged early in 2009. Claiming the legitimacy of grass roots energy, it was quickly endorsed by many mainstream Republicans gearing up for the divisive health care reform debate, in order to exploit it for political advantage.

The situation reached a head in the 2010 mid-term elections, as the Republican Party gained control of the House of Representatives largely on the back of Tea Party based enthusiasm within the smaller and more conservative mid-term electorate. Now it has greater influence over the government, the Tea Party has revealed its true nature as the party of extreme austerity. While the racist rhetoric concerning the President’s ethnic origins has been downplayed, the radical ideology of economic libertarianism has surged to the surface. Backed by long standing anti-tax think tanks like Grover Norquist’s “Citizens for Tax Reform,” most Republican/Tea Party legislators have signed a pledge to never vote to raise taxes under any circumstances ever. The only method to fiscal sustainability they accept is to dramatically cut back the size and scope of the federal government.

Clearly, when one party in a two party system has become so ideologically rigid, this seriously impacts the state’s flexibility to arrive at the best policies for managing the economic crisis for a given political and social moment. This difficulty was played out in dramatic fashion in the debt ceiling crisis, with Republican and Tea Party legislators refusing to vote for any deficit reduction plan that included any tax increases, including the closing of so-called “tax loopholes.” As a result, in order to avoid a catastrophic debt default, President Obama was forced to agree to a debt reduction plan that currently contains not one cent in tax increases, despite the fact that virtually every poll of the American public has shown a strong willingness to raise taxes on the wealthy. 

Clearly, the debt ceiling deal was not the resolution to this crisis that the main factions of the bourgeoisie would have preferred. While it is clear that all sides recognized the need for the U.S. state to take strong measures to tackle its enormous debt load, the passage of a deal which accomplishes this through budget cuts alone is totally out of step with the American public, serving to further alienate it from the state. Moreover, the totally ham fisted and botched negotiation process has itself served to rile the American public’s anger at their elected officials, with some commentators beginning to talk of a crisis of the American democratic system itself. Meanwhile, many foreign observers look in horror at political events in Washington, realizing that in a world marked by global interconnectedness, their own economic and political fates are just as much subject to Republican/Tea Party fanaticism as is the U.S. credit rating. The response of the Chinese was particularly strong, calling on the US to protect the value of the $1tn China has invested in the US by cutting military and social spending, and even suggesting that a new global reserve currency may be necessary, adding that, “It should also stop its old practice of letting its domestic electoral politics take the global economy hostage and rely on the deep pockets of major surplus countries to make up for its perennial deficits.”

Clearly, the growing influence of the Tea Party has not made the task of managing the economic crisis any easier for the main factions of the bourgeoisie and has only served to accelerate the process of the decomposition of the U.S. state. Of course, in line with their extreme libertarian ideology, this has been the Tea Party’s goal along. Is it any surprise that in an age marked by social decomposition, the bourgeoisie coughs up a political movement whose very goal is furthering the political decomposition of the state? Dialectics has come back to haunt the bourgeoisie in menacing fashion.

However, we should be careful not to exempt other factions from the U.S. bourgeoisie from our analysis of political decomposition. There is an element on the bourgeois left that continues to argue that in an economy marked by stagnation, unemployment and a “demand deficit” that the only recourse is more government spending. This faction is as wedded to its Keynesian ideology as the Tea Party is to their Lockean individualism. It is between these two opposed positions, that continue to hardened around its flanks, that the main factions of the bourgeoisie—headed up by the Obama administration—attempt to steer the ship of state, hoping to find some way out of the morass that avoids the pitfalls of both extremes and that keeps the American public believing in the myth of the democratic state.

Still, while we shouldn’t let left-wing Keynesian myopia off the hook in terms of demonstrating the increasing inanity of bourgeois politics, we should not make the mistake of equating it with the extremely irresponsible and immediately deleterious approach of the Tea Party. The Tea Party may have a point when it says the U.S. is addicted to spending, but there is a difference after all between the addict who, faced with the pains of withdrawal, searches out another hit of the drug, and the one who decides the only appropriate way to deal with addiction is to slit one’s own throat. [8]

The arrival of the Tea Party marks a major moment in the ideological decomposition of the U.S. state. Is there a way out of this mess for the U.S. bourgeoisie? While we cannot predict with certainty the future evolution of U.S. politics, it seems likely that despite whatever temporary reprieve it may win through the machinations of its electoral circus, the ideological deterioration of the bourgeoisie is an inescapable feature of the overall period of capitalist social decomposition that is likely here to stay.

All of this does not bode well for the U.S. bourgeoisie heading into next year’s Presidential election. The danger of giving control of the government over to the Republican Party is very real. Yet, Obama himself has proven to be a real lightning rod, emboldening the most ideologically hardened elements of the Republican Party. Moreover, his conciliatory style of governance has not stood up well to the challenge of Republican/Tea Party intransigence, and many bourgeois commentators have openly spoken of a “crisis of leadership” in Washington. While it is unlikely the main factions of the bourgeoisie would move to dump Obama if his opponent is a radical Tea Party Republican, the prospect of a more moderate Republican President, who can enact austerity, while at the same time cooling the Tea Party insurgency, is probably the best hope of the U.S. bourgeoisie at the moment. However, given their overall political difficulties and the dynamics within the Republican Party, it is uncertain they will be able to obtain this. [9]

What Policy In Face of the Crisis?

The debt-ceiling debacle stands as a clear demonstration of the stark economic policy contradictions facing the U.S. bourgeoisie as it attempts to manage the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. On the one hand, two years after the official end of the post-2008 financial crisis recession, growth remains abysmal, business investment is low (despite the facts that businesses supposedly sit on mounds of cash) and unemployment is still sky high. Liberal economists, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, continue to call for more government stimulus in order to get the economy moving again and put people back to work. More and more their calls are beginning to be echoed in the mainstream media as talk of a “demand crisis” in the economy is heard more frequently on the Sunday morning talk shows and cable news outlets.

However, on the other hand, the deficit hawks—backed up by Republican/Tea Party anti-government rhetoric—see the federal government’s enormous debt as the main threat to the country’s economic well being, weakening the U.S.’s long-term position in the bond markets. For this faction, only massive government budget cuts and austerity measures can improve the nation’s attractiveness to investors, free businesses’ creative potential and put people back work. In this view, tax increases on “job creators” are to be avoided at all costs, as they can only serve to kill jobs.

In short, these two contrasting policy alternatives highlight the fundamental contradictions dogging state capitalism in the United States and elsewhere in the face of the global economic crisis. While government stimulus may serve as a momentary shot in the arm to an ailing economy, it only serves to worsen the overall debt picture. If austerity and government contraction might momentarily reassure investors, it only serves to worsen the underlying economic contraction and threatens to increase unemployment and possibly provoke a genuine social crisis.

As has been pointed out in the bourgeois media, the debt ceiling deal reached by the U.S. political class falls squarely into the camp of cruel austerity and government contraction. Cutting trillions of dollars out of the federal budget, while failing to include any stimulative measures, threatens to send the nation deeper into a double-dip recession, increase already high unemployment numbers, putting the U.S. closer to the brink perhaps sooner than would have otherwise happened.

All of this begs the question of the fundamental ability of the U.S. state to manage the economic crisis that has now beset it for the last three years. Given the content of the debt deal, one could be forgiven for concluding that the U.S. bourgeoisie has just given up attempting to solve the economic crisis, choosing instead to run headlong into the fury of a permanent slow growth/low wage/high unemployment economy. In a world that requires choosing between on the one hand the wrath of millions of unemployed workers and millions more who hang on to their jobs by a thread and on the other the scorn of the bond markets and rating agencies, the U.S. political class appears to have decided to take its chances with the class struggle.

Herein lies the real social danger for the bourgeoisie of the debt ceiling deal Obama agreed to with the Republicans: It is all stick and no carrot. While Democrats may boast that the deal does not, for the moment, include cuts to Social Security or Medicare, Congress’ bipartisan Super Committee now has a mandate to propose cuts to whatever federal programs it sees fit, under the threat of across board the cuts to the federal budget. As Obama has said, “everything is now on the table.” The President himself has come out in favor of making “modest changes” to Medicare, as a way to bring the federal deficit under control.

Statements from the President like this, taken together with his history of caving into Republican demands time and again, have caused many on the bourgeois left to wonder out loud if, rather than being played like a fool in the debt ceiling negotiations, Obama didn’t get just what he was looking for all along. After all, it was the President himself who originally proposed a much larger 4 trillion dollar deficit reduction package. The difference of course with Obama’s plan was that at least it contained a series of “revenue increases” that might have been sold to the American public as a “balanced plan” of “shared sacrifice.”

Nobody should doubt that Obama and the Democrats wanted to make cuts, they only sought a package that would be more politically marketable to the population at large; something that contained new forms of tax revenue that could presented as part of a plan to “make the rich pay” part of the cost of balancing the budget. The fact that Obama was unable to secure a deficit reduction plan that contained some carrot along with the stick is likely a central reason behind the recent questioning of his leadership by many bourgeois pundits.

Regardless of whatever new revenues the Democrats may be able to secure in the future, this likely won’t lessen the burden on the U.S. working class as the state struggles to get its fiscal house in order. In the end, it will be the proletariat that feels the real pain from the state’s debt problem and the resulting downgrading by the rating agencies. More unemployment, less secure work when it can be found, attacks on retirement conditions, higher interest rates on consumer debt, reduction in unemployment benefits fewer government services (particularly at the state and local level), more tainted food and unsafe products, etc. are all likely outcomes of this drama for those who work to make a living.

With so much social pain sure to follow, the U.S. bourgeoisie finds itself in a very difficult position in its confrontation with the working class. With each cave in to Republican demands, with each political crisis that sees Obama and the Democrats appear feckless and without a backbone against Republican/Tea Party intransigence, the U.S. two-party system loses more of its legitimacy in the eyes of the population as a whole. The ideological division of labor between the Democrats and Republicans ceases to function. Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibi expressed this developing sentiment well, labeling the Democratic Party, “a bunch of hired stooges put in office to lend an air of democratic legitimacy to what has essentially become a bureaucratic-oligarchic state.” [10]

A state that does not have a political entity that can do a credible job appearing to fight for the interests of the common-man is ultimately a state in trouble. Such is the fate of the U.S. political class at the moment. The longer they have to rely on the Democratic Party to enact the austerity the historical moment requires—appearing in the process to be doing the bidding of Wall Street, while ignoring “Main Street”—the more it weakens the democratic mystification itself. Unfortunately for the U.S. bourgeoisie at the moment, a Republican administration might be out of the question.

Political Decomposition Against the Class Struggle

Whatever the U.S. bourgeoisie’s political difficulties at the moment, we should expect nothing less than for it to attempt to use its own political decomposition against the working class to the best of its abilities. Primarily, this will take the form of a series of ideological campaigns around the national debt, debt reduction, the economic crisis and the role of the various political parties, as the bourgeoisie attempts to manipulate the outcome of the 2012 Presidential election.

On the one hand, Obama and the centrist Democrats will utilize the debt ceiling crisis as a way of terrorizing the populace into supporting them over the radical Republican/Tea Party right, who have clearly lost all semblance of credibility as a governing party. The spectre of further “economic hostage taking,” the stoppage of Social Security checks, drastic cutbacks to Medicare—or to put it in terms used by some Democrats “the repeal of the 20th century itself”—will be used to fuel an electoral campaign to stop the Tea Party insurgency in its tracks. The themes of this campaign will be “shared sacrifice,” a “balanced approach” to deficit reduction as well as the endorsement of modest stimulus programs such as a further extension of unemployment benefits that have long since run out for millions of unemployed workers and which will expire for millions more at the end of the year.[11]

Meanwhile, the left of the Democratic Party—angered over Obama’s perceived spinelessness—will likely launch a parallel campaign, urging support for “progressive candidates” who will stand up to the corporations, make the rich pay for the crisis and protect valued social programs. This campaign will endorse heavy taxation of the rich, massive Keynesian infrastructure investments and a national jobs program, all of which have little chance of ever coming to fruition. While sharply critical of Obama, in the hopes of playing a kind of left in opposition from within the Democratic Party, this faction will still ultimately endorse his re-election against the menace of Republican/Tea Party revanchism.

Finally, the Republican Party, depending upon its ultimate Presidential nominee, will conduct a campaign blaming Obama’s lack of leadership for the country’s economic woes, citing the need to free business from government regulation and unleash the country’s stunted entrepreneurial spirit. This campaign will talk tough on the deficit, scolding the federal government for its profligate ways and reminding everyone that it must accept pain now in order not to leave the fiscal mess to our children and grandchildren.

However, ultimately the real threat to the working class from the debt ceiling crisis and the resulting deficit reduction mania lies in the further brutalization of social life that will inevitably result. In a country already marked by a “no excuses” mentality, the further attacks on the social safety net are likely to add fuel to the fire of the one society among the major powers that has always come closest to the libertarian ideal of “everyman for himself.” Its not surprising that the breakdown of social solidarity that characterizes the epoch of capitalist decomposition has, in the U.S., thrown up a political movement that takes social solidarity—even its corrupted representation in the capitalist state—as its chief enemy.

For the working class, there is only one remedy to this downward spiral into the abyss—autonomous struggles on our own class terrain, outside the unions and all bourgeois political parties. We must reject the rhetoric coming from all sides of the bourgeois political spectrum. Against “belt-tightening,” against “shared sacrifice” and against “make the rich the pay,” we must pose the alternative of a different society beyond all these slogans that do not transcend the bourgeois horizon. Only the united action of workers coming together as a class in the struggle for a different world can provide a counterweight to the assembling forces of capitalist barbarism, which now expresses itself so clearly in the continuing dramas of the U.S. political class.

--Henk

08/19/2011

We are re-publishing here the first part of an article written in 1998 for the Russian journal 'Proletarian Tribune', the aim of which was to give a brief history of the Communist Left for those who may not be well acquanted with the political tradition the ICC draws its heritage from. The full version can be found here [168]

1. Since the defeat of the international revolutionary feat of the international revolutionary wave in the middle of the 1920s, no terms have been more distorted or abused than those of socialism, communism, and marxism. The idea that the Stalinist regimes of the former eastern bloc, or countries like China, Cuba and North Korea today, are expressions of communism or marxism is indeed the Great Lie of the 20th century, one deliberately perpetuated by all factions of the ruling class, from the extreme right to the extreme left. During the imperialist world war of 1939-45, the myth of the "defence of the socialist fatherland" was used, along with "anti-fascism" and the "defence of democracy" to mobilise workers both inside and outside Russia for the greatest slaughter in human history.

During the period from 1945-89, dominated by the rivalries between the two gigantic imperialist blocs under American and Russian leadership, the lie was used even more extensively: in the east, to justify the imperialist ambitions of Russian capital; in the west, both as an ideological cover for imperialist conflict ("defence of democracy against soviet totalitarianism") and as a means of poisoning the consciousness of the working class: pointing to the Russian labour camp and hammering home the message - if that is socialism, wouldn’t you rather have capitalism, for all its faults? And this theme became even more deafening when the collapse of the eastern bloc was said to signify the "death of communism", the "bankruptcy of marxism", and even the end of the working class itself. Further grist to this bourgeois mill was added by the "extreme" left of capitalism, Trotskyists in particular, who, although critical of its "bureaucratic deformations", continued to see a working class foundation in the Stalinist edifice.

2. This huge pile of ideological distortions has also served to obscure the real continuity and development of marxism in the 20th century. The false defenders of marxism - the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, all sorts of academic "marxologists", modernisers and philosophers - have occupied the limelight, while its real defenders have been banished to the sidelines, dismissed as irrelevant sects and, increasingly, as fossils from a lost world, when not being more directly repressed and silenced. To reconstruct the authentic continuity of marxism in this century, therefore, it is necessary to begin with a definition of what marxism is. From its first great declarations in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, marxism defined itself not as the product of isolated "thinkers" of genius, but as the theoretical expression of the real movement of the proletariat.

As such, it can only be a fighting theory, one which proves its adherence to the cause of the exploited class by the intransigent defence of the latter’s immediate and historic interests. This defence, while based on a capacity to remain loyal to fundamental and unalterable principles such as proletarian internationalism, also involves the constant enrichment of marxist theory in direct and living relationship with the experience of the working class. Furthermore, as the product of a class which embodies collective work and struggle, marxism itself can only develop through organised collectivities - through revolutionary fractions and parties. Thus the Communist Manifesto appeared as the programme of the first marxist organisation in history - the Communist League.

3. In the 19th century, when capitalism was still an expanding, ascendant system, the bourgeoisie had less need to hide the exploitative nature of its rule by pretending that black was white and capitalism was really socialism. Ideological perversions of this type are above all typical of capitalism’s historic decadence, and are most clearly expressed by the efforts of the bourgeoisie to use "marxism" itself as a tool of mystification. But even in capitalism’s ascendant phase, the unrelenting pressure of the dominant ideology frequently took the form of false versions of socialism being smuggled into the workers’ movement. It was for this reason that the Communist Manifesto was obliged to distinguish itself from "feudal", "bourgeois" and "petty bourgeois" socialism, and that the marxist fraction within the First International had to fight a two-pronged battle against Bakuninism on the one hand, and Lassallean "state socialism" on the other.

4. The parties of the Second International were founded on the basis of marxism, and in this sense represented a considerable step forward from the First International, which had been a coalition of different tendencies within the workers’ movement. But since they operated in a period of tremendous capitalist growth, when the struggle for reforms was a key focus for the energies of the working class, the social democratic parties were particularly vulnerable to the pressures towards integration into the capitalist system. These pressures expressed themselves within these parties through the development of the reformist currents who began to argue that marxism’s predictions about the inevitable downfall of capitalism had to be "revised" and that it would be possible to evolve peacefully towards socialism without any revolutionary interruptions.

During this period - particularly in the late 1890s and early 1900s - the continuity of marxism was upheld by the "left" currents who were both the most uncompromising in the defence of basic marxist principles, and the first to see the new conditions for the proletarian struggle that were arising as capitalism reached the limits of its ascendant epoch. The names which embody the left wing of the social democracy are well-known - Lenin in Russia, Luxemburg in Germany, Pannekoek in Holland, Bordiga in Italy - but it is also important to remember that none of these militants functioned in isolation. Increasingly, as the gangrene of opportunism spread through the International, they were obliged to work as organised fractions - the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Tribune group in Holland, and so on, both within their respective parties and internationally.

5. The imperialist war of 1914 and the Russian revolution of 1917 both confirmed the marxist vision that capitalism would inevitably enter its "epoch of social revolution", and precipitated a fundamental split in the workers’ movement. For the first time, organisations which both referred to Marx and Engels found themselves on different sides of the barricades: the official social democratic parties, the majority of which had fallen into the hands of the erstwhile "reformists", supported the imperialist war by invoking Marx’s writings of an earlier period, and denounced the October revolution by arguing that Russia still had to pass through a bourgeois phase of development. But in doing so, they passed irrevocably into the camp of the bourgeoisie, becoming recruiting sergeants for the war in 1914 and the bloodhounds of the counter-revolution in 1918.

This demonstrated quite conclusively that adherence to marxism is vindicated not by pious declarations or party labels but in living practice. It was the left wing currents who alone kept the banner of proletarian internationalism flying during the imperialist holocaust, who rallied to the defence of the proletarian revolution in Russia, and who led the strikes and uprisings which broke out in numerous countries in the wake of the war. And it was these same currents who provided the core of the new Communist International founded in 1919.

6. 1919 was the highpoint of the post-war revolutionary wave and the positions of the Communist International in its founding congress expressed the most advanced positions of the proletarian movement: for a total break with the social-patriotic traitors, for the methods of mass action demanded by the new period of capitalist decadence, for the destruction of the capitalist state and for the international dictatorship of the workers’ soviets. This programmatic clarity reflected the enormous impetus of the revolutionary wave, but it had also been prepared in advance by the political and theoretical contributions of the left fractions inside the old parties: thus, against Kautsky’s legalist and gradualist vision of the road to power, Luxemburg and Pannekoek had elaborated the conception of the mass strike as the soil of the revolution; against Kautsky’s parliamentary cretinism, Pannekoek, Bukharin and Lenin had revived and refined Marx’s insistence on the necessity of destroying the bourgeois state and creating the "state of the Commune". These theoretical developments were to become matters of practical politics when the hour of revolution dawned.

7. The retreat of the revolutionary wave and the isolation of the Russian revolution gave rise to a process of degeneration within both the Communist International and the soviet power in Russia. The Bolshevik party had more and more fused with a bureaucratic state apparatus which grew in inverse proportion to the proletariat’s own organs of power and participation - the soviets, factory committees and red guards. Within the International, the attempts to win mass support in a phase of declining mass activity engendered opportunist "solutions" - increasing emphasis on working within parliament and the trade unions, the appeal to the "peoples of the east" to rise up against imperialism, and above all, the policy of the United Front which threw out all the hard-won clarity about the capitalist nature of the social patriots.

But just as the growth of opportunism in the Second International provoked a proletarian response in the form of the left currents, so the tide of opportunism in the Third International was resisted by the currents of the communist left - many of whose spokesmen, such as Pannekoek and Bordiga, had already proved themselves as the best defenders of marxism in the old International. The communist left was essentially an international current and had expressions in many different countries, from Bulgaria to Britain and from the USA to South Africa. But its most important representatives were to be found precisely in those countries where the marxist tradition was at its strongest: Germany, Italy, and Russia.

8. In Germany, the depth of the marxist tradition coupled with the huge impetus coming from the actual movement of the proletarian masses had already, in the height of the revolutionary wave, engendered some of the most advanced political positions, particularly on the parliamentary and trade union questions. But left communism as such appeared as a response to the first signs of opportunism in the German Communist party and the International, and was spearheaded by the KAPD, formed in 1920 when the left opposition within the KPD was expelled by an unprincipled manoeuvre. Though criticised by the CI leadership as "infantile" and "anarcho-syndicalist", the KAPD’s rejection of the old parliamentary and trade union tactics were based on a profound marxist analysis of the decadence of capitalism, which rendered these tactics obsolete and demanded new forms of class organisation - the factory committees and workers’ councils; the same can be said for its clear rejection of the old "mass party" conception of social democracy in favour of the notion of the party as a programmatically clear nucleus - a notion directly inherited from Bolshevism. The KAPD’s intransigent defence of these acquisitions against a return to the old social democratic tactics made it the core of an international current which had expressions in a number of countries, particularly in Holland, whose revolutionary movement was closely linked to Germany through the work of Pannekoek and Gorter.

This is not to say that left communism in Germany in the early 20s didn’t suffer from important weaknesses. Its tendency to see the decline of capitalism in the form of a final "death crisis" rather than a long drawn out process made it hard for it to see the retreat of the revolutionary wave and exposed it to the danger of voluntarism; linked to this were weaknesses on the organisation question which led it to a premature break with the Communist International and the ill-fated effort to set up a new International in 1922. These chinks in its armour were to hinder it from resisting the tide of counter-revolution that set in during the 1920s and resulted in a disastrous process of fragmentation, theorised in many cases by the ideology of "councilism" which denied the necessity for a distinct political organisation.

9. In Italy, on the other hand, the communist left - which initially occupied a majority position within the Communist Party of Italy - was particularly clear on the organisation question and this enabled it not only to wage a courageous battle against opportunism within the degenerating International, but also to engender a communist fraction that was able to survive the shipwreck of the revolutionary movement and develop marxist theory during the night of the counter-revolution. But during the early 1920s, its arguments in favour of abstentionism from bourgeois parliaments, against merging the communist vanguard with large centrist parties in order to give an illusion of "mass influence", against the slogans of the United Front and the "workers’ government" were also based on a profound grasp of the marxist method.

The same applies to its analysis of the new phenomenon of fascism and its consequent rejection of any anti-fascist fronts with the parties of the "democratic" bourgeoisie. The name of Bordiga is irrevocably associated with this phase in the history of the Italian communist left, but despite the huge importance of this militant’s contribution, the Italian left is no more reducible to Bordiga than Bolshevism was to Lenin: both were organic products of the proletarian political movement.

This September 11th marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Preparations for the the 10-year milestone were subdued. There was no concerted effort to whip-up a patriotic campaign as in years past. One gets the impression that if it could, the bourgeoisie would rather just skip the ceremonies altogether. There was of course a memorial service at Ground Zero. However, the assembled political leaders only read somber poetry, as the 9/11 Victims Memorial was finally unveiled at Ground Zero. While families of the dead were permitted to attend the ceremony, survivors of the attacks and First Responders were told there wasn’t room for them that day.

On the day of the attacks itself, panic and worry engulfed the population. The media reported numerous unconfirmed rumors. Sheer pandemonium and confusion were the only consistent things about that day. But soon after the population began to react with a profound sense of grief and solidarity for the dead and a desire to help the injured. The first impulse from the population was not anger and revenge, it was solidarity for those who were killed or injured. Ordinary people lined up to donate blood for the wounded. Firefighters, construction workers, public servants of all kinds and ordinary workers ignored the perils of smoke, fire and toxic debris to rush to the disaster site to aid in the rescue efforts.

Nevertheless, the US bourgeoisie wasted no time transforming the tremendous upsurge of empathy within the population into the false solidarity of a patriotic war psychosis. In the span of a few days, President Bush was transformed from an incompetent bumbler to the courageous leader of an aggrieved nation ready to seek revenge on its attackers and all who harbored them. Within hours, the US state declared Al Qaeda unilaterally responsible for the attacks. The media parroted this story across the airwaves without so much as raising an eyebrow. Anyone who questioned the official narrative was immediately dismissed as a quack conspiracy theorist or a traitor. As Bush himself said in the days after the attacks, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

These ominous words were meant as a warning to all parties—foreign and domestic—that the United States meant business. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc ten years earlier the US was experiencing the collapse of its own bloc. The ‘New World Order’ saw the first war in Iraq, where the US was able to rally around it a sizeable coalition of allies, but the disciplinary effect was short lived. Differences between the great powers became clear in the mid 90s during the collapse of ex-Yugoslavia and the conflict in Bosnia. The US increasingly used NATO to bypass the UN. In the absence of bloc discipline, it was increasingly ‘every man for themselves’.

War was in the offing. Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime was said to harbor Bin Laden, was sized up to feel the wrath of American bombs and cruise missiles, but almost immediately suspicion became rampant that the administration’s real target was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. At any rate, the United States was going to war and it wouldn’t be the kind of limited operation we had gotten used to from U.S. imperialism in the years since the Vietnam War. Any mobilization for a major war demands the acquiescence of the working class. As Condoleezza Rice said in her testimony to the 9/11 Commission in 2004, “The U.S. government did not act against the growing threat from Imperial Japan until the threat became all too evident at Pearl Harbor. And, tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11, this country simply was not on a war footing. ...Bold and comprehensive changes are sometimes only possible in the wake of catastrophic events -- events which create a new consensus that allows us to transcend old ways of thinking and acting.” (CNN, 04/08/04). 

If nothing else, the US state took full advantage of the horror over the first attack on the continental United States since the British burned Washington in the War of 1812, to announce a new global “War on Terror”, continuing its inglorious legacy of launching wars after historic ‘incidents’ have taken place: the annexation of Texas in 1845, the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, that attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964.    

Bush: The “Worst President” in American History?

In the months after 9/11, NATO invoked Article 5 of its statues for the first time in history, declaring that an attack on one was an attack on all. Remarkably, it was the leaders of France who led this move. The questioning of American imperialist leadership by the other major powers seemed to be over. On the domestic front, the bourgeoisie drummed up the patriotic fervor. Congress quickly passed sweeping legislation limiting civil liberties and authorizing domestic spying in ways not seen since the Red Scare.[1]

So, what then is behind the U.S. bourgeoisie’s apparent reluctance to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 in a more bellicose and dramatic fashion? The image of the US bourgeoisie marking the anniversary amidst the clutter of the still incomplete Freedom Tower at Ground Zero stands as a stark symbol of the incomplete and ultimately failed imperialist projext. Although the United States was able to reap an immediate benefit from the attacks in terms of rallying the population behind its war aims and forcing the other major powers to acquiesce to its military campaign in Afghanistan, the Bush administration’s efforts to carry the war to Iraq were doomed to squander this momentum.

The Bush administration’s callous diplomatic policies and cowboy mentality made it easy for the other major powers to challenge its desire to take the war to Iraq. Among the great powers, the Bush administration was only able to gain the participation of the UK in its invasion and occupation of Iraq. In particular, France, Germany and Russia stood as consistent critics of the US’s military adventure in Iraq. Although they were unable to prevent the US from carrying out its invasion, their ability to put the US’s purported rationale for the war into question—Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction—forced the US into a particularly embarrassing display of diplomatic deception and outright lying, evidenced by Colin Powel’s pathetic presentation to the UN Security Council in the Spring of 2003.

Failing to gain any international sanction for its war efforts in Iraq, the US was forced into a mostly unilateral action, despite putting together a dubious “coalition of the willing.” Relations between the US and France fell to a low point in modern history. The US would enter the Iraq war mostly isolated and with international public opinion squarely against it. The world’s super power could no longer credibly claim to be acting in the name of peace and democracy. It was now the aggressor in a preemptive war against an enemy that had nothing to do with 9/11. The post invasion revelation that Iraq in fact had no weapons of mass destruction only reinforced the negative image of the United States that the Bush administration’s policies had largely created. Moreover, the Bush Administration’s aggressive prosecution during this period of the so-called “War on Terror” gave the lie to any attempt to paint itself as a benevolent power guided by the rule of law.

Militarily, the Iraq occupation proved to be a complete quagmire for the better part of the decade. The fateful decision by the US occupation authorities to destroy the Bathist bureaucracy, led to a brutal insurgency by the Sunni minority against the US occupation and the Shiite majority. Soon, Iraq descended into utter chaos with sectarian violence tearing the country apart. American casualties, fairly low in the initial invasion, climbed steadily upwards as it seemed the US had only turned a relatively stable country under the iron hand of a cruel dictator into a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism and terrorism.

Within the US bourgeoisie, the sense that the invasion of Iraq had been a mistake, or at the very least was being badly mismanaged, became more prevalent. However, the attempt to replace Bush with the much statelier warrior John Kerry the 2004 was a miserable failure. The main factions of the US bourgeoisie failed to rally to his candidacy in time and a skillful Karl Rove was able to manipulate domestic wedge issues to ensure Bush’s reelection. Stuck with the insufferable Bush for the next four years, the main factions of the bourgeoisie launched a media campaign to pressure him once again to change course in Iraq.[2] The Bush administration doubled down. The neo-conservative Wolfowitz was out, but Rumsfeld remained. Secretary of State Powell would leave the administration in disgust. Violence continued to dominate the scene in Iraq, and by the time of the 2006 mid-term elections the US really seemed to be bogged down in with no end in sight. Public opinion turned dramatically against the Iraq War and the Bush administration itself. A change in ruling team was sorely needed, but how to accomplish this?

The 2006 mid-term elections were a groundswell for the Democrats. Winning control of both houses of Congress, they pressed the Bush administration to do something to remake the US’s imperialist image. Bush was forced to dump Rumsfeld, replacing him with a figure more acceptable across the political spectrum: Robert Gates. However, this was only the prelude to the ultimate coup d’gras: the replacement of the Republican President with a Democratic one in the 2008 Presidential election. Before this could be accomplished, the military situation in Iraq had to be brought under some measure of control. The “Surge” strategy implemented from 2007 onwards did encounter some success, but the US population was growing increasingly tired of the war and the President’s approval ratings continued to nosedive. Only a dramatic outcome to the 2008 Presidential election could restore some level of credibility to the US political system, which had suffered two terms of what many historians begin to openly call “the worst President in US history.”

Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan, had only deteriorated during the years US imperialism was distracted in Iraq. The Taliban had never been completely eliminated, Osama Bin Laden remained at large and the government of Hamid Karzai was riddled with corruption, incompetence and frustrating eccentricity. Afghanistan’s neighbor, nuclear-armed Pakistan, was itself slipping into instability, as US military brass bemoaned the ability of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters to find sanctuary across the Af-Pak border. As the 2008 Presidential campaign got underway, Obama rose to prominence as the consensus candidate of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie, promising to refocus US imperialism’s efforts on Afghanistan and take a harder line with Pakistan.

On the domestic level, the evolution of US society under Bush was marked by the inflation of a massive real estate bubble, which saw home prices spiral over the course of the first half of the decade. Fueled by the Federal Reserve’s easy money, low interest rate policies, Americans were able to borrow massive sums of money, using their homes as virtual ATM machines to fuel consumer driven demand. Under the aegis of so-called “liar loans” the real estate frenzy penetrated American society, as even those without jobs, undocumented immigrants and college students were able to qualify for adjustable rate mortgages to buy newly built McMansions in the US’s rapidly expanding suburbs and exurbs. The phenomenon of families running up credit card bills to buy daily necessities, only to refinance them into new real estate loans every six months or so was a common feature of this period. This process of the hyper-leveraging of the US working class was aided and abetted by Wall Street, who created new exotic mortgage-backed financial products. These products were ostensibly designed to “spread the risk” and “share the wealth,” but in reality only created a Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire global economy—what came to be known after the fact in the economics literature as “systemic risk.”

Although these policies allowed the American working-class a temporary respite to fulfill Bush’s call to consume the economy back to health, it became increasingly apparent that the real estate bubble could not last. When the interest rates on many so-called “sub-prime” loans finally reset in mid-2007, millions of American “homeowners” suddenly found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments. It wasn’t long before consumer credit dried up, millions of houses went underwater and the American working class found itself without any money to spend. Soon, the financial repercussions were felt on Wall Street itself as systemic risk asserted itself in dramatic ways. In the midst of the 2008 Presidential campaign, the US bourgeoisie found itself gripped by the greatest financial debacle in its history, with a President who had already checked out of office! The failure of Lehman Brothers in the Fall of 2008 nearly brought the entire global economy to a halt, necessitating Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury Paulson and current Fed Chairman Bernanke to put together a massive financial rescue package for the giant banking and insurance concerns. Overnight the world’s staunchest proponents of “trickle-down economics” became its most fervent Keynesian state capitalists. However, the Wall Street bailout proved extremely unpopular among the population. With millions of Americans facing foreclosure, eviction and unemployment, the idea that the state would come to Wall Street’s rescue, but leave Main Street to stew in its own juice was a step too far. The population’s distaste for their political leaders became generalized beyond the Bush administration and many in Congress were forced to actually vote against the bail-out on its first pass, causing the stock markets to plummet and provoking a general panic on the business news networks of historic proportion. The sense that the nation was on the verge of another catastrophe was widespread. 

Obama: A Temporary Respite

It was in this context that the US bourgeoisie was able to pull off its one crowning success of the post-9/11 period: the election of President Barack Obama. Through an intense media barrage surrounding the historic candidacy of the first African-American to run for President, the US bourgeoisie was able to whip-up a frenzied energy among the youth and minorities to come out to the polls to vote for Obama—many participating in the bourgeois electoral circus for the first time in their lives. For much of the Fall of 2008, the looming economic catastrophe was put on the back burner as Obama’s election fulfilled the main factions of the US bourgeoisie’s desire to replace Bush with an President who could repair its image abroad, revitalize the democratic mystification, give the American working class hope in the electoral arena and distract it from the economic crisis.

Nevertheless, events since Obama’s election have proven that the bourgeoisie’s hope was misplaced. As President, Obama has proven even more divisive of the population than Bush was. The attacks against him from opposing Republican and Tea Party politicians are twice as vicious as anything meted out to Bush by Democrats. For all the electoral energy Obama was able to create among the youth as a candidate, as President he has created even more energy among the Republican Party and its constituency in pursuit of his defeat in 2012. While the electoral energy Obama created in support of the democratic mystification was doomed to fade; the hatred, paranoia and outright lunacy his Presidency has engendered among Republicans has proven stubbornly intractable.

The divisions, recriminations and maneuvers taking place today within the US bourgeoisie are so deep and so severe as to call into question the signature ideological division of labor between the Democratic and Republican Parties and even the legitimacy of the democratic illusion itself among large sectors of the population. Whatever boost the US’s democratic illusion received from Obama’s election—which itself was only a corrective to the damage done by Bush—has, only three years later, been totally lost. On the domestic socio-economic level, the Obama administration has proven completely impotent in the face of the “Great Recession.” With his economic team consisting mostly of recycled Clinton era economists and Wall Street insiders, it was unable to lower unemployment through the rather weak stimulus measures it pursued early on. Instead, Obama has now conceded the political ground to an insurgent right-wing and pursued austerity and deficit reduction.

On the social level, the American working class is living through the most severe attack on its living and working conditions since the Great Depression. Home foreclosures continue apace as everywhere the state abandons any pretense to the rule of law permitting banks with dubious title to seize the homes of workers too beaten down to even attempt to fight back on the terrain of bourgeois legalism. Unemployment benefits have run out for millions of long-term workers, with millions more facing cut off at the end of the year. Ten years after 9/11, the much hoped for social peace has been transformed into a veritable social powder keg with little indication of the direction popular anger over the crisis will take.[3]

On the imperialist level, Obama has met with some success in repairing the US’s image abroad, undoing the worst of the damage the Bush administration did. On this level, the main factions of the bourgeoisie have mostly supported the Obama administration. However, on the signature foreign policy issue of his campaign—the successful conclusion of the war in Afghanistan—Obama has not met with the same success. On the contrary, Afghanistan remains a total quagmire, even after the brutal dispatch of Bin Laden earlier this year. So intractable is the situation in Afghanistan, that the US suffered its greatest one-day loss of life in the now ten-year long war just last month, when the Taliban were able to down a US military helicopter with a primitive rocket propelled grenade.[4]

The recent US involvement in the Libya campaign has been a mixed bag for US imperialism. While it was able to achieve its stated goal of toppling the Gadaffi regime without the loss of a single US life, it did this by “leading from behind,” relying on other NATO powers to carry out the bulk of the five month air campaign in support of a disparate group of rebels nobody is certain can be trusted. Although the US was able to achieve its immediate objectives behind a multi-lateral veneer this time, this has allowed France and the UK to flex some credible military muscle of their own for the first time in years. Moreover, the strategy of leading from behind has proven fodder for domestic political bashing of Obama by Republicans desperate to paint him as a failure for allowing other countries to take the lead and failing to bring the full force of US military might to bear.

With such a record the past decade, its no wonder the US bourgeoisie has downplayed the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The hopes of a seamless continuation of the American imperial project into the twenty-first century have proven to be a real chimera. The disaster of the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, its total incompetence in managing the domestic economy, its ultimate inability to lead society in a credible fashion has wrought irreparable damage to US hegemony and squandered whatever benefit that the US accrued in the immediate aftermath of the attack on its own soil.

Moreover, the Obama administration has proven unable to reverse the totality of the Bush administration’s many failures, just as his own Presidency has proven to be an important moment in the historic political crisis of American state capitalism. It’s not surprising then that at this time, the US bourgeoisie would like to keep the 10th anniversary memorial ceremonies low key.

Henk, 09/03/2011

This article was originally published in World Revolution no.350 [174]

This article was originally published in World Revolution no.351 [175].

As the Republican primary elections dominate the media, the battle for the White House next fall is finally beginning to take shape. It’s pretty clear that the main factions of the U.S. ruling class are pushing for an Obama vs. Romney presidential election contest. After months of a chaotic Republican primary contest in which a series of conservative and Tea Party inspired candidates dominated the polls only to fall to one of their many rivals in short order, the field of candidates has finally narrowed. Currently, Romney’s only serious challenger for the Republican nomination is Newt Gingrich, the disgraced former Speaker of the House of Representatives who is seemingly poised to emerge as the consensus candidate of Republican right wing. Although the Catholic conservative Rick Santorum and the extreme libertarian Ron Paul continue to complicate the race, with the Republican establishment lining up behind Romney, it appears that the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie will likely get the presidential election match-up they want. Nevertheless, the race remains highly volatile and the unpredictable Republican electorate may yet throw a wrench into the works, forcing the Republican Party to take drastic measures in order to make the presidential election competitive.

Behind all this drama over the Republican primaries stands the much deeper political crisis facing the U.S. bourgeoisie, a crisis that has only deepened in its gravity since the debt-ceiling debacle of last summer. Readers of Internationalism will recall the series of articles we have published since the mid-term elections of 2010 analyzing this crisis. This series builds on the analysis we have developed since the contested Bush/Gore presidential election of 2000, according to which the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie have been facing growing difficulties manipulating the outcome of the electoral process in order to bring the best possible ruling team to power for the historical moment and reinforce the democratic myth among the population. Although the U.S. bourgeoisie was able to obtain a temporary reversal of this trend in producing the “historic” election of Barack Obama in 2008, the political crisis has only deepened since his election, threatening to destabilize the two-party ideological division of labor and the entire democratic-electoral apparatus of U.S. state capitalism along with it. In our view, the evolution of the internal life of the U.S. bourgeoisie since the 2010 mid-term elections has confirmed this analysis.

In this article, we will review the main developments in this political crisis since the debt-ceiling debacle and show how they are narrowing the bourgeoisie’s room for maneuver in an historic moment in which the grave economic crisis it faces stubbornly refuses to go away and the working class is becoming increasingly restless.

The Aftermath of the Debt Ceiling Debacle: Obama Turns to the Left

The debt-ceiling debacle of last summer was an absolute catastrophe for the entire U.S. bourgeoisie (1). The nation and the entire world beyond was treated to a weeks long spectacle of brinkmanship in which the full faith and credit of the United States was put into question. If the debt ceiling was not raised, the U.S. government could have failed to meet its payments to creditors, social security checks might not have been mailed and even U.S. military personnel might have gone without paychecks. The prospect of a global economic calamity threatened, as the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives vowed to vote against any deal to raise the debt ceiling.

While public opinion polls consistently showed the population believed the Republican Party to be most at fault for the debacle, President Obama took his lumps too. He was roundly criticized within his own Democratic Party base for failing to be tougher in his negotiations with the Republican and Tea Party obstructionists and for appearing far too quick to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block to appease the right-wing desire for drastic spending cuts. Media pundits began to talk about a crisis of the American democratic system itself. Clearly, the population was fed up with both parties and just about all the institutions of government. More and more, the American state appeared to be completely unresponsive to its citizens, its agenda determined by ideological hacks on the one hand and corporate stooges on the other. Nobody – not President Obama, not Speaker Boehner, neither Democrat, nor Republican – seemed to have the interests of the ordinary American in mind.

In many ways, the debt-ceiling debacle was the logical conclusion of the unleashing of the Tea Party insurgency on the U.S. political system. Hell bent on reducing the federal government to a shell and taking orders from ideologues obsessed with the free market fundamentalist meme of “starving the state,” the Tea Party has proven itself to be just as destructive as its opponents feared. So far, the trappings of power and the lure of incumbency have not tamed the Tea Party in any significant way. Having ridden the Tea Party insurgency to victory in the 2010 mid-term elections, the Republican Party – already having made a major turn to the right – is now largely beholden to it. Committed to opposing President Obama at every turn – a man whose Presidency many in the Tea Party constituency believe is illegitimate – they have made it virtually impossible for the U.S. state to get anything done. As long as the Tea Party Republicans control Congress, there would appear to be no hope of passing comprehensive immigration reform, no new revenues with which to pay down the deficit and appease the population’s growing class for tax fairness, and no legislation of any real significance that does not cow toe to their extreme ideology. In the aftermath of the debt-ceiling debacle, it appears to have finally donned on the Obama administration that the current situation is unworkable. Something would have to be done to bring the Tea Party insurgency into line and revitalize the image of the U.S. state or risk the rapid decay of the institutions of American state capitalism itself and the further discrediting of the democratic illusion in the eyes of a population beginning to stir.

It has been in this context that the Obama administration has made a serious tack to the left in the aftermath of the debt ceiling crisis. If the Republican Party has largely discredited itself in the eyes of a large swathe of the population as a party of ideological bankruptcy, Obama’s rather tepid approach to the economic crisis and his closeness to Wall Street were having a similar effect of calling the Democratic Party into question as well – thus threatening the traditional ideological division of labor between the two parties. Since the debt-ceiling debacle, the Obama administration has set about attempting to repair the Democratic Party’s image and revitalize his own persona in preparation for the fall presidential election.

In November, the much-vaunted “Super Committee,” set-up to find additional spending cuts in the aftermath of the debt-ceiling debacle, came to naught and was revealed for the political farce it always was. However, the Democrats were allowed to trumpet the fact that major cuts to Social Security and Medicare have for now been avoided. Later, faced with the threat of a Republican initiated government shut down, Obama took a much harder stance with the House Republicans refusing to back down and forcing them to agree to continue funding the government. Obama then followed this up with a dramatic showdown over the payroll tax exemption – forcing the Republican Party, the party of “no new taxes,” to come out in favor of a tax hike on the working-class at Christmastime. Next, the President utilized Congress’ holiday break to appoint Ohio Attorney General Richard Corday to run a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) and appoint several “labor friendly” figures to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Attempting to consolidate his turn to the left and revitalize the image of his administration as an agent of the common man, Obama used his annual State of the Union address in January to announce his support for raising the capital gains tax, ensuring that the richest American who make their money off of investment income and carried interest pay a tax rate similar to their working class employees – a move clearly aimed at his most likely Republican challenger, billionaire Mitt Romney. Currently, Obama – without explicitly endorsing the movement—is taking up the language of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), seeking to give his presidency a new gloss of legitimacy, and paint his second term as one in which he will fight for “fundamental fairness” in the economy.

It is beginning to appear that faced on the one hand with a Tea Party insurgency that is making it almost impossible to govern and with a growingly restive population on the other – a restiveness that exploded in the Occupy Movement during the fall – the main factions of the U.S. ruling class would prefer to maintain the Obama administration in power for another term. Although historically in times of rising class struggle the ruling class has usually opted for a policy of putting the left-wing of its political apparatus in opposition so as to better control the rising militancy of the working-class, these are not ordinary times. In today’s chaotic environment, it appears that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are counting on a more progressive appearing Obama administration to play the game of the left opposition from within the state itself, in order to give the population the illusion that there is a party within the state that is fighting for the common man against the sheer insanity emanating from the right-wing.

Faced with a choice between trying to enact a more traditional ideological division of labor and attempting to revitalize the image of the state in the context of Occupy Movement, the main factions of the ruling class appear to be moving towards a decision to maintain Obama in power. A second Obama term will be used to try to convince the population that they have a friend in power, even if he is besieged by the right wing on all sides, and thus a stake in the bourgeois state. This rather unorthodox tactic stands as stark evidence of the gravity of the political crisis the U.S. bourgeoisie now faces.

The Presidential Campaign: The Fragility of the Ideological Division of Labor in the Midst of Electoral Chaos

Even as it emerges that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are moving towards a preference for a second Obama term, this doesn’t mean they will get it. As we have analyzed since the disputed Bush/Gore election, as a result of the centrifugal weight of social decomposition on the political system, the main factions of the bourgeoisie are having increasing difficulty manipulating the electoral system to achieve the desired outcome. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that Obama’s Republican opponent be a candidate that the main factions of the bourgeoisie could live with, if the election does not go the way they want it to.

Whatever maneuvers are put into place, regardless of the media campaigns launched on his behalf, the main factions of the bourgeoisie know full well that there is no guarantee Obama will be re-elected. Despite a growing media campaign around a supposed “economic recovery,” unemployment remains very high with young people (Obama’s electoral base) bearing the brunt of the much discussed “jobs crisis.” In addition, a highly politicized, strongly motivated, Tea Party-oriented faction of the electorate wants Obama out at all costs. This constituency promises to be among the most die-hard voters in the fall and they most certainly won’t vote for the President. However, the biggest wildcard in the Presidential campaign remains the highly volatile world economy with the threat that a European meltdown and/or Middle East volatility could send shockwaves through the U.S. economy in the summer and fall making it incredibly difficult for the President to win reelection. In such circumstances, the main factions of the bourgeoisie need a viable Republican candidate, who can govern with at least a veneer of competence and flexibility, should they find themselves in office in January 2013. Currently, there is only one candidate in the Republican race who fits this bill: Mitt Romney. It is not surprising, then, that by and large the Republican establishment has been lining up behind Romney in an attempt to make sure he is the Republican nominee.

However, unfortunately for the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie, this has not proven to be such an easy task. Despite all his advantages in campaign money, name recognition and the backing of the main figures of the Republican establishment, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters despise Romney. Poll after poll has consistently shown less than one-third of Republican voters support Romney’s candidacy. All throughout the summer and fall, the Republican primary campaign resembled a three ring circus with a series of conservative and Tea Party backed candidates rising to the top of the polls as the anti-Romney candidate, only to suffer a dramatic fall from grace. So far, Romney’s best ally in his campaign for the Presidency has been the erratic and unpredictable behavior of the Republican Party’s right wing, as it struggles to coalesce around a single candidate to unseat Romney as the party’s presumptive nominee. Nevertheless, despite the media’s unabashed attempt to build an aura of inevitability around Romney’s campaign following his eight vote victory in the Iowa caucuses and first place finish in the much more moderate New Hampshire primary, the Republican electoral base has proven stubborn. The day before the South Carolina primary, in which Gingrich trounced him, it was announced that Romney had actually lost Iowa to Rick Santorum! This set off widespread panic in the Republican establishment as Romney’s coronation was postponed out of growing fear that the caustic and erratic Gingrich might actually win the nomination.

Currently, although Romney won over Gingrich in the crucial primary state of Florida, several national polls continue to show the former House Speaker leading the Republican field. While a Romney nomination continues to be the most likely outcome of the Republican primaries, this remains far from certain. It is indeed a worrisome time for the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie as a Newt Gingrich (or Rick Santorum) Presidency would simply be imponderable. Some pundits have hinted that should Romney fail to win the nomination through the primary process, the Republican Party establishment would have to intervene at the party convention this summer to install their own candidate. Clearly, these are not the best of days for the U.S. democratic mystification!

If the Republican primary chaos has served to give the main factions of the bourgeoisie pause, they have also probably worked to strengthen their commitment to Obama’s re-election this fall. For all the cynical race baiting, Dickensian rhetoric and downright crazy talk coming from Gingrich and Santorum (2) on the campaign stump, the fierce primary campaign has only served to push Romney to the right, calling his image as a moderate, sensible and flexible Republican into sharp question. Moreover, his rivals have taken advantage of his enormous wealth to paint him as an out of touch billionaire, tax cheat and “vulture capitalist.” In the course of the campaign, Romney has become the virtual embodiment of the “one-percent” itself, making the prospect of his Presidency that much less attractive. In this context, it appears more and more likely that the main factions of the bourgeoisie would prefer to take their chances rehabilitating the image of the Obama administration than risk a direct provocation to the growing revolt of the population against the unfairness of the system and the possibility that this revolt could radicalize into a more direct response to capitalism itself on the working class terrain.

While the main factions of the bourgeoisie may very well get the Presidential election match-up they want in the end, this will not put an end to the seemingly interminable political crisis that further complicates its ability to manage the economic crisis and advance the interests of the overall national capital. Even if Obama is re-elected in the fall, he will most likely still have to deal with an obstructionist Congress that will resist his attempts to govern. Will the Tea Party representatives be more likely to compromise with the President in his second term? It is not possible to say at this time, but it is difficult to envision this taking place in an environment where they will remain beholden to right-wing interests backed by billionaire benefactors like the Koch brothers, hell-bent on advancing the most revanchist agenda. These moneyed interests have now been given free reign by the Supreme Court to flood the political process with money, qualitatively worsening the unpredictability of the electoral process (3).

On the other hand, if Romney wins the election, this would put the bourgeoisie in a perhaps more precarious position. How would a moderate Republican President deal with the ideologues in his own party? Would he be able to resist their calls to indiscriminately slash and burn the federal government bureaucracy and annihilate the remaining vestiges of the social wage, perhaps provoking an even stronger reaction from the working class than we have seen with the Occupy Movement? If he were to try and govern in a more centrist manner, could this risk the definitive break-up of the Republican Party itself and send the two party system into a definitive crisis? We do not have the answers to these questions at the moment, but, frankly, neither do the main factions of the bourgeoisie. Their developing anxiety over the increasingly tenuous state of the two-party system and the democratic illusion itself is well grounded.

So what is the working-class to make of all this chaos, all this electoral maneuvering? In the end, regardless of the outcome of the elections, the imperatives facing the winning party will be the same: austerity, scaling back of the remaining social wage and the general management of the historic decline of the U.S. national capital. While it may be true today that, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie as a whole, the Democrats would likely be able to carry out these tasks with better practical acumen, and they are therefore better capable of serving as the governing party, this does not put them into a fundamental opposition with the Republicans as far as the working class is concerned. While its true that the Republican Party has been largely taken over by a deeply regressive faction of the bourgeoisie with little sense of the overall interest of the national capital, this does not mean that the Democrats will govern in the interests of the working-class. On the contrary, neither party has a solution to the economic crisis. Neither has an alternative to the ultimate imperative for further austerity. In this regard, it is quite telling that whatever the steps the Obama has taken to turn to the left and give itself the aura of populism, he has never backed down on his willingness to put Social Security and Medicare on the table in his quest to work out a deficit reduction deal with his Republican rivals. There is no reason to think this will change in his second term.

In response to the bourgeoisie’ ongoing, and now permanent, electoral campaigns, the working-class can only oppose its own autonomous struggles to defend its living and working conditions. The Occupy Movement was an important step in developing this struggle, but we will have to go much further in the period ahead as the attacks against our class continue to mount. In the meanwhile, we must refuse to be taken in to by these incessant election campaigns and recognize that whatever their differences, in the end both parties are obliged to carry out the attacks the capitalist system’s historic crisis demands.

Henk, 01/28/2012

In this two-part series of articles about the employed and unemployed workers’ struggle of the 1930’s we have looked at what seem to us to have been the strengths and weaknesses of that movement. We think that this kind of assessment is important in the context of the present economic crisis and the struggles that it has given birth to, especially regarding the development of protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street. In this first part we will look at the present attacks against the working class, and especially the unemployed. Then we will start the examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the movement of the 1930’s. In the next article, we will focus more in detail on its weaknesses and broach the question of what lessons to draw for the present and future struggles of the class.

Unemployment in the XXI century - the bourgeoisie hides the reality

The ruling class finds reason to believe that the recent release of statistics regarding unemployment can give its lie about the economic ‘recovery’ a boost: apparently, the unemployment rate has dropped from hovering above a stubborn 9% national average to 8.6%. The working class, by contrast, has every reason to continue to feel skeptical of the ruling class’ reassurances as to the ‘recovery’ which supposedly started two years ago, and of any rosy perspectives for the future. Such drop does nothing to quell the uncertainty and anxiety about the future of one’s employment and it does nothing to console the throngs of those who are still collecting unemployment benefits, have given up looking for a job altogether, are currently working part-time jobs for lack of anything better, or are about to enter the labor force, either as young college graduates, returning war veterans, or retirees whose pension or social security checks cannot keep pace with the rate of inflation or need to help pay for their unemployed children’s student loan or credit card debt or mortgage. Behind the rhetoric that peddles the lie about the ‘recovery’ there are several calculated manipulations of the statistics. For example, it is not a secret that the method used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate the official unemployment rate is bogus. There was a time when 3% unemployment rate was considered ‘acceptable’, but with the explosion of the economic crisis in the 70’s that number was pushed up to 5%, which was then called ‘natural unemployment’. It is not unlikely that, as the present recession seems to be taking on a permanent character, that figure will be ‘adjusted’ once again. Already, states whose unemployment rate currently drops to 6.5% no longer qualify for benefits, demonstrating how the ruling class has started de facto to regard that rate as ‘natural unemployment’. The current rate calculation excludes those who have stopped seeking work, those who settle for part-time work when they would rather work full-time, and the military. By an alternative measure of unemployment that the same Bureau produces, the unemployment rate jumped to 15.6% as of last November 2011 when those who have looked for work in the past 12 months and those who work part-time even though they would like full-time jobs are included. We can rest assured that even that estimate is conservative. The picture becomes all the more grimy when we add that 43% of all unemployed – 5.7 million people – have been out of work for more than 27 weeks.

Congress has passed extensions on the limit of unemployment coverage several times since the onset of the economic crisis, amidst bitter disputes between Democrats and Republicans. Over the last two years, members of Congress repeatedly have clashed over continuing the current 99 weeks of extended benefits. Although Congressional leaders relented in December to a two-month extension of the current 99 weeks of benefits, there has been no support for providing additional help for those who have exhausted their aid. As part of its ongoing campaign about the ‘recovery’, the ruling class also has to justify the cuts to benefits it is forced to pass. The bourgeoisie has fashioned a venomous attack against the jobless by portraying them as ‘loafers’, shiftless people who “live off other people’s money”, and who rely on government’s handouts because they do not want to take the ‘opportunity’ of the ‘new jobs’ that have supposedly been created during the ‘recovery’. Clearly, for the ruling class there must be joy to be drawn from the humiliating and dehumanizing situation of dire economic need which forces millions to stand in the unemployment lines and welfare offices, once the handouts afforded to them by the capitalist state are over. This demagogy aims at dividing the jobless from the employed, and scapegoats the former for the huge deficits of the federal and states’ governments. It also reveals the racism of the ruling class, which it uses as a dividing tactic to pit black and while workers against each other. But behind their quite blunt racism we find the rabid scorn the bourgeoisie has for the entire working class, for fear that one day it will unite against its rule. This reactionary ideology is the other side of the same coin. While the reactionary faction openly advocates draconian cuts to benefits, the more ‘liberal’ faction of the ruling class score points on the issue of tying the workers to the state by posing as the champions of the exploited, who are unable to do more for them because of their reactionary brothers, and not because capitalism is rotting on its feet.

Behind this shameful posturing and mud-slinging, the necessity to reduce benefits in the face of the economic crisis, the need to divide the workers among themselves, and the necessity to keep them mystified as to the reality of unemployment are very real. In the words of an unemployed worker, “The recently passed two-month extension to unemployment benefits (UE) is a maneuver to further manipulate the statistics regarding the real number of unemployed people. Since the extension does not apply to people that have used the maximum 99 weeks allowed under the present extension program, many of those unemployed people will not be counted as unemployed, and will simply… disappear” (www.unemployed-friends2.org [180]). This is clearly an attempt at further manipulating the statistics regarding the true numbers of jobless workers. At the end of February, when the current two-month extension expires, it is certain that if any other extension is passed, it will be with all sorts of strings attached. Proposals are made ranging from requiring unemployed workers to have a high school diploma in order to be eligible for benefits, or meet with caseworkers for “re-employment assessments”, to making permanent changes to the structure of the program. These changes would loosen federal restrictions on how states administer the benefits. Under a Republican proposal, states could opt to use federal unemployment insurance funds for something other than benefits. As the two-month extension is passed, a number of states, strapped with cash after several cuts to their budgets, look for ways by which they can avoid or restrict the amount of money the unemployed could collect. Here are a few examples:

• In South Carolina unemployment rate is 9,9 percent and has not been below 9 percent in three years. The average unemployment benefit payment there is $235, ranking 45th nationwide. The maximum someone can receive is $326 weekly, which equates to a salary of less than $17.000. Under a new policy, the longer someone is unemployed, the lower the salary they must accept in a job offer. After four weeks, they must take a job offering 90 percent of what they were making. The percentage drops every four weeks, to 70 percent after 16. After federally paid extensions kick in at 20 weeks, it would eventually drop to minimum wage. Another policy change cuts length of benefits for employees let go for absenteeism, poor attitude, violating policies or poor work quality. Yet, Maj. Gen. Abraham Turner, the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce’s director, said, “We’re trying to prohibit that person drawing unemployment from sitting back and not aggressively going after the jobs. The jobs are there.” In his view, continued benefits just discourage people from looking for jobs, and two years of jobless benefits should be enough for someone to find a job. Never mind the unemployment rate and the fact that there are, on average, four workers looking for any job advertised nationwide.

• In Minnesota soon it will no longer be possible to be eligible for 13 weeks of extended jobless benefits. The loss of benefits has to do with the state’s unemployment rate. The state’s three-month unemployment rate dipped below 6,5 percent making it no longer eligible for the Federal-State Extended Benefits. Minnesota is among nine other states that no longer qualify. Statewide, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development estimates 7.000 Minnesotans will be impacted by the change. Locally, Southeastern Minnesota Building and Construction Trades President Mike Krahn said an estimated 30 to 40 percent of his union’s members are unemployed.
• In California, the number of jobless workers who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits is approaching 600.000, the state Employment Development Department reports. By EDD’s latest count, more than 599.000 had been booted off the unemployment rolls as of Jan. 10.

From the point of view of the working class, it is necessary to openly denounce the recently released statistics about the ‘drop’ in unemployment, the continued mystification around the economic ‘recovery’, the latest two-month extension of unemployment benefits, and the revolting racist demagogy of the ruling class for what they are: attempts to fog the rising consciousness of the exploited regarding the obsolescence of capitalism, its inability to offer any perspectives for the future, and the urgency to do away with this moribund social system and build a new world. It is vital for the working class to go back to its own history and draw the lessons from its past struggles and clearly understand how and why they were defeated. What were the weaknesses and strengths of those struggles? What did the ruling class do to confront the militancy of the working class? What can the working class do today to avoid the traps of the past and forge a more coherent, better prepared way forward in the context of the present economic crisis and the attacks against the unemployed and unemployment benefits?

The last time the ruling class was faced with mass unemployment, during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the workers and unemployed waged courageous and very militant battles in defense of their economic interests. However, as we will see, the historic moment and situation were not in favor of a development of a strongly politicized movement which could put in question the continued existence of the capitalist mode of production. To a large extent, the struggles of the 1930’s limited themselves to a call for relief. This is the fundamental reason why the state was able to blunt the class struggle through the creation of programs and unemployment benefits, until then non-existent. Today the perspective is no longer toward the establishment of programs such as the Works Progress Administration or National Recovery Act, but rather toward a drastic reduction of existing benefits, no matter what the present campaign by the liberal faction of the bourgeoisie wants us to believe. The struggles of the unemployed and employed workers of the 1930’s were fatefully impaired by the world-wide failure of the revolutionary wave that had started in Russia in 1917 and the ensuing counterrevolution. We cannot get into an explanation of this here, but the ICC has written extensively on the Russian Revolution, the causes of its failure and the international repercussions on the working class and its struggles. Our readers may want to refer to our articles on our website. The ruling class today looks back at those times to draw the lessons of how to deal with possible or contingent social unrest, but it cannot ‘invent’ a historical defeat of the proletariat such as this had experienced in the 30’s. This historic fact can potentially play in favor of the working class. However, the ruling class’ weapons will be strongly ideological. Its preferred weapon will be that of divide and conquer, a tactic that the U.S. ruling class has great experience with. It will also try to strengthen the presence of the unions within the ranks of the workers, as it did in the 1930’s. We cannot here write about why we think that the unions are the ruling class’ shop-floor police and the working class’ hangman, notwithstanding the idiosyncratic tendency of certain factions of the bourgeoisie to be at times vehemently against the unions. We invite our readers to read the many articles we have published on this issue. These are not the only obstacles the workers are confronted with. It is then of the utmost importance that, as the working class looks back at its own history and struggles, it draws all the lessons to make it powerful to confront the traps its exploiters lay. The fact that the working class has not suffered an ideological and historical defeat as in the years following the failure of the revolutionary wave that had started in Russia in 1917 certainly makes it more difficult for the ruling class to manipulate the consciousness of the workers with nationalist ideology. But this will not help the working class much unless it will be able to surpass the other wrenches the ruling class throws in the works of the class struggle and the development of consciousness that can result from it, and unless the workers learn from their own past shortcomings.

The historic background to the struggles of the 1930’s: the role of the American workers’ movement

While it isn’t the aim nor the scope of this article to show the historic origins of the workers movement in the U.S., or to develop an in-depth analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, familiarity with it is indispensible to place the struggles of the 1930’s in their proper perspective. We then invite our readers to read our series of articles on the history of the workers movement in the U.S. which we published in International Reviews 124 and 125. Here we will merely summarize some important points to help us better understand the historic context in which the struggles of the 1930’s developed.

First and foremost, we recognize the IWW of the years between its founding in 1905 and its disbanding in 1921 as the most important and serious organization of the workers movement in the U.S. The historic context of the founding of the IWW in 1905 is discussed in the International Reviews afore mentioned. Here, we want to draw attention to the international context of the time, which placed the formation of the IWW at the watershed between capitalism’s ascendance and decadence. In large part, its internal debates, divergences, and sometimes contradictory positions were the reflection of the effort to understand the implications of how the change in historic periods impacted the political positions and forms of a revolutionary organization. Its response to these changes was its practice of revolutionary syndicalism. (See our series of articles on revolutionary syndicalism in International Reviews 118 and 120). It was a reaction to the opportunism of the socialist parties and the unions which had infected Social Democracy abroad and the AfoL here.

Certain historical ‘specificities’ of the development of capitalism in America must be taken into account. For example:

• the Frontier, which provided opportunities for the ruling class to diffuse social discontent about the conditions of exploitation by dispersing the working class over a vast geographical area
• the immigration and racial questions, which the ruling class used from very early on to divide the exploited among themselves
• the particularly vicious and brutal use of repression by the ruling class against the working class’ mobilizations and struggles, which led the IWW to regard political action futile and subordinate it to the economic.

These conditions help explain the difficulties of the birth of a unified working class in America and accompanied the IWW’s reluctance toward political action and its theorization that the form of class organization should be revolutionary syndicalism, i.e. the idea that the industrial union should be one with the unitary organization of the workers and that of the revolutionary militants and agitators – or the party. Fundamentally, the IWW’s conception of itself as a mass unitary organization, and not a political party, made it vulnerable in the face of the repressive onslaught the U.S. ruling class unleashed as it prepared to enter World War I. Instead of focusing on closing ranks and preparing for clandestine work, the view of a majority of the General Executive Board in the voice of Haywood, was that the war was a distraction from the important work of union building. Its focus on union-building to the detriment of the theoretical development of political principles and organizational forms and practices left it unprepared and hesitant as to the direction to take in the face of WWI at a time when other revolutionary organizations abroad were drawing the theoretical implications of the entry of capitalism in its decadent phase, taking a clear internationalist position against the war, and helping the class wage its most daring attempt to date at seizing power. The American working class was left virtually leaderless and without clear orientations during the revolutionary wave that was sweeping Europe and Russia in the first part of the century and in the face of the terrible counterrevolution that was to follow the failure of the revolutionary attempts of 1917 in Russia and 1919 in Germany. When the massive wave of unrest and struggles by the unemployed and employed struck in the 1930’s, the working class was to pay the price of the workers’ movement weaknesses. The weaknesses of the workers’ movement in America and the defeat, at the international level, of the great revolutionary wave that had started with the Russian Revolution, help us understand why, notwithstanding the tremendous militancy which the American working class displayed in the struggles of the 1930’s, it could not properly confront the reformist and democratic traps that the Roosevelt administration laid in front of it. Without a clear political orientation, the working class could not assert its own historic project of overthrowing capitalism by seizing political power and only got petty reforms which were immediately wiped out at the slightest relaxation of workers’ militancy.

The unemployed and workers struggles of the 1930’s – their power

The years of the Great Depression saw the largest mobilization of the unemployed in the history of the U.S. The first step in this mobilization was overcoming the ideological and demagogic weight of the bourgeois credo according to which there is shame in being jobless. In this view, joblessness is itself a condition born of one’s own deficiency or laziness, not of the anarchy of capitalist production, the competition that drives this mode of production, and the crises that it inevitably engenders. At the time of the Great Depression, there was no unified or centralized structure or program to provide relief to the indigent. Whatever handouts were given, mostly provided by charities, ‘philanthropists’, or in any case in a very fragmented manner, they were difficult to qualify for – only orphaned, widowed, and the crippled could get it – and were very meager. If one happened not to be orphaned or widowed or crippled, but plain and simple destitute, in most cases one would be incarcerated in almshouses and workhouses. It was not rare that orphans would be indentured on condition of providing whatever labor they could in exchange for being fed. These practices are no longer in place today, but as the examples offered above of proposals to restrict access to jobless benefits suggest, the bourgeoisie is still concerned with both: 1. How to mystify the workers as to the real reasons for their poverty, and 2. How to make use of the indigence created by the capitalist mode of production and the humiliation meted out by capitalism’s mode of relief to terrorize the rest of the working class into submission to the barbaric laws of laboring under capitalist exploitation. Indeed, while it is true that the prospect of joblessness can be a disincentive to enter open struggle, it is also true that a continued, persistent economic crisis lays the foundation for mass unemployment, which makes it difficult today for the bourgeoisie to legitimize its continued existence. This is why it has to resort to demagogy, mystification, and the tactic of divide and conquer. This was true in the 1930’s as well. The exceptional hardship created by the Depression was bound, inevitably, to cause social unrest. This possibility was echoed many times by several politicians and union leaders. In September 1931, the American Legion announced that “...the crisis could not be promptly and efficiently met by existing political methods” (1). The idea that communist ideas were getting a hold of the masses was widespread. The Republican governor of Washington declared, “We cannot endure another winter of hardship such as we are now passing through” (2). Edwrad F. McGrady of the AFL told the Seante Subcommittee on Manufacturers, “ I say to you gentlemen, advisedly, that if something is not done… the doors of revolt in this country are going to be thrown open” (3) and John L. Lewis even pronounced, “The political stability of the Republic is imperiled” (4). The social situation was indeed explosive. In all major cities of the U.S., from Chicago to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland… the earliest uprisings occurred among the unemployed. As unemployment rose, many families found it impossible to pay their rent. In New York City some 186.000 families were served dispossess notices during eight months ending in June 1932. In Philadelphia in 1933, 63% of the white families and 66% of the black were in arrears. San Francisco did not fare better, and in five industrial cities in Ohio eviction orders were issued against nearly 100.000 families between January 1930 and June 1932 (5). This explosive social situation was happening at a time when the ruling class had not yet had a need to mobilize the capitalist state through a myriad of programs, bureaucratic practices, and, above all, the unions apparatus to contain social unrest. In other words, the capitalist state was not prepared to confront this novel situation. This helped create the conditions for the birth of unemployed councils which formed more often than not on the spur of the need of the moment and which had the aim of preventing marshals from putting furniture of evicted families on the streets, or going to the relief offices to request immediate release of cash. This ad-hoc, spontaneous form of the struggle, as we know, is the embryonic form of the workers’ councils, which were formed in 1905 and then again in 1917 in Russia and elsewhere during the revolutionary wave. These forms of organization are the living proof of the fact that, as we shall see in the next part of the article, the formation of permanent mass organizations in the current period is always the prelude to their incorporation in the state or the democratist ideology of the state. The state repression which was often unleashed on the committees and demonstrations or marches, was a burning reminder of the necessity to maintain the ad-hoc form of organization.

In the beginning, rather than discouraging the unemployed from creating their councils, state repression inflamed them even more, resulting in ever wider protests. From the onset, the earliest expressions of unemployed unrest took on a mass character, with marches and demonstrations at times so threatening that the mayors of some cities were forced to promise the collection of funds to be distributed to the unemployed. Unemployed groups also supported and united with striking workers, whose numbers also were swelling under the pressures of the economic crisis. The most well-remembered examples of this tendency toward unifying the struggles of the working class are the Toledo Auto-Lite strike and the Milwaukee Streetcar strike of 1934. In both instances, the support of thousands of unemployed was crucial in breaking the bosses’ resistance. In Toledo it was A.J. Muste’s radical Unemployed League who helped reinforced the employed workers picket lines with large numbers of unemployed. When the auto parts company obtained a court injunction limiting picketing and barring the League from picketing, the League, along with some local Communists, violated the court order and instead called for mass picketing. The striking workers were inspired by the solidarity and militancy shown by their jobless brothers and sisters, and their numbers started to grow. Auto-Lite hired 1.500 strikebreakers and Toledo police, unwilling to have a direct showdown with the workers because of the great sympathy for the strikers even among the police ranks, deputized special police paid for by Auto-Lite. The resistance was so fierce that, the Ohio National Guard was called in to evacuate the strikebreakers from inside the factory, which had been surrounded by 10.000 workers and their sympathizer. Notwithstanding the intervention of the Ohio National Guard with machine guns and bayonetted rifles, the killing of two people and the wounding of scores , resistance continued, with workers gathering again and coming back the next day for a pitched battle against the National Guard. The crowd, armed with bricks and bottles would not disperse. Workers started to threaten a general strike, and finally Auto-Lite agreed to a 22 percent wage increase and limited recognition for the union.

(…to be continued)

Ana, January 2012

Although a ruling is not expected until June, the large measure of support shown by the Supreme Court in the initial Arizona v. the United States hearings for the state’s independent enacting of immigration policy, the political difficulties facing the ruling class in the United States have reached a new level.  Despite US state capitalism’s serious need for comprehensive federal immigration reform (which hasn’t been enacted since 1986, despite drawn-out attempts made in 2007 and again in 2010), no faction of the ruling class has been able to unite the others around a federal immigration reform policy—and a growing segment are engaging in out-and-out obstructionism for purely political and ideological reasons.  In the absence of federal action, states have begun enacting their own immigration policies, Arizona being the first of five so far.  From the perspective of state capitalism, matters so closely affecting the health of the national economy as immigration policy cannot be decided differently across different states.  Yet the difficulties of rationalizing the system, and the increasingly ideological motivations of a part of the ruling class, have not yet allowed for the passage of any comprehensive reforms. 

Until recently, the ruling class had opted for a somewhat porous border policy, separating the different enforcement duties between the state and federal governments to allow a stream of illegal immigration into the country and maintain the flow of cheap labor whilst partially enforcing immigration policy for the purposes of repression and the fear it creates amongst these laborers.[1]  This of course has become increasingly chaotic over the years, as the population of undocumented immigrants living in the United States swelled to 12 million in 2007, and was still estimated at 11.2 million as of March 2010.[2]  For state capitalism it is completely unacceptable to have such a large portion of the population totally unaccounted for, unable to vote, fearful of cooperating with law enforcement, and totally alienated from the state.  Furthermore, in the context of the crisis, states see the need to streamline health care costs, regulate the costs of social programs, and strengthen the border to control the influx of more immigrants.  While Arizona’s SB 1070 law effectively exacerbates many of these problems, it presents itself as complementary to existing federal law—which is specifically what was challenged by the Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona.  SB 1070 explicitly criminalizes the obstruction of information sharing about immigration statuses but also mandates that any “reasonable” suspicion that someone is in the country illegally be “reasonably” investigated.[3]  These more controversial parts of the law, which even allow unwarranted arrest of persons suspected of offenses making them eligible for deportation, and have correctly been criticized as encouraging racial profiling, were explicitly left un-discussed in the Supreme Court hearings.[4]  But even the administration’s argument that Arizona was overstepping its jurisdiction was, according to Justice Sonia Sotomayor “not selling very well.”[5]

While net immigration from Mexico has effectively flat-lined with the collapse of the job and housing construction markets, increased repression, and a spike in deportations (in fact, record numbers have been deported each subsequent year under the current administration), the deepening of the crisis means the issue of immigration reform is not going to disappear.[6]  The challenge for the bourgeoisie is to balance their need to integrate 11 million undocumented immigrants into US society, while maintaining their ideological campaigns to create a culture of resentment and scapegoating among the working class in order to have a freer hand in pushing through the cuts in social spending and other austerity measures the crisis will demand, one demographic at a time.  As we wrote in Internationalism 155:

“It would be even better for the bourgeoisie if they could keep this group of people in their current condition--cowed, desperate, and afraid to struggle--as well as countable and regulated. This reflects the need of the bourgeois state to bring all social life under its oversight. …to turn a useful and exploitable group into a useful, exploitable, and controllable group, is at the heart of any bourgeois immigration strategy.”

However it is proposed, there can be no gain for the working class as a whole from any immigration reform.  The myriad ideological campaigns about immigrants taking jobs from “native” workers and the attempts to integrate this population into state structures must be carried out together with a strategy that keeps the working class divided and fighting amongst itself as separate demographic units begging for ever-shrinking crumbs from the ruling class’ table.  The increasing irrationality of extremely reactionary factions of the ruling class which demonize ‘illegal’ immigrants and scapegoats them for the social decomposition and deepening economic crisis of capitalism, may well further fracture the attempts at regulating and systematizing the immigration law, while also risking to create a ‘mob’ mentality among the least conscious sectors of the population.  This could ultimately lead to a situation of intolerable and difficult-to-control social chaos.

The systematization of what was intentionally left nebulous in the past, on the federal level, has proved increasingly difficult as a part of the bourgeois right continues to act increasingly out of ideological rather than political or economic concerns, taking their own demagoguery at face value.7  What is novel about Arizona v. The United States is the degree to which the Supreme Court seems to be prepared to uphold the state-level initiatives around immigration law, regardless of the consequences to national capitalism and the ability of the federal government to assert its authority over the states in matters of dire consequence for national capitalism.  With more than 5 states already taking up Arizona’s example and pushing through their own immigration policy, the ruling class’ lack of perspective and inability to take united action can only push toward more and more problems for state capitalism in the US further down the road.

-JJ

Almost exactly two years after Mr. Obama signed his signature health care reform legislation into federal law, the acrimonious dispute between Republicans (who nearly unanimously oppose this legislation) and the Democrats (who generally support the President’s health care reform efforts, even if they are much less enthusiastic in their support than Republicans are in their condemnation) offers a glimpse into the current state of the political crisis of the U.S. bourgeoisie. From the point of view of the need of the U.S. national capital to tackle the rampant waste, inefficiency and general high costs in the nation’s health care system, the law promises to do little more than move some expenses off the federal government’s books. Depending on which “expert” one believes, so-called “Obamacare” will have only a modest positive impact on the federal budget deficit at best. However, even in this rosiest of scenarios, this only happen if all the provisions of the law are fully implemented, something that is in serious doubt at the moment given the political fall-out over the law. This has manifested itself in a very skeptical Supreme Court, which recently heard arguments about the law’s constitutionality from the Obama administration’s lawyers on one side and a coalition of conservative Republican state Attorney Generals on the other.

Prior to the Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments, most pundits strongly expected the justices would uphold the law on the grounds of the constitution’s commerce clause, which gives the federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. However, after an almost unprecedented three days of oral arguments in front of the court, the expectations from legal analysts had changed dramatically. Most now expect the court—in a sharp rebuke of the Obama administration—to throw out the law’s central mechanism for “reform”—the so-called “individual mandate,” which would require everyone to buy health insurance or pay a fine collected at tax time through the Internal Revenue Service. Some analysts expect that the Supreme Court may throw out the entire law, dealing a devastating blow to Obama as he gears up for his reelection campaign this summer. As we write, a decision from the Supreme Court is due to be released sometime in June, promising to be a moment of high political drama, regardless of how the court ultimately rules.

So what is all this political fuss about? Why are the Republicans so universally opposed to this law? Why do so many claim to see it as a form of “government run socialist health care”? After all the law is fairly mild in its attempts to “reform” the U.S. health care system. This is clearly nothing like the nationalization of health care delivery that exists in other advanced countries. It isn’t even a single payer system. Obama and the Democrats long ago stopped talking about a public health insurance option to compete with private insurance companies. So what is going on here exactly?

In fact, the law is so mild that it won’t do very much at all to address the underlying irrationality of health care delivery in the U.S. From the perspective of the national capital, the “reform” of the health care industry is necessary to help it maintain a competitive edge on the world market and shrink its enormous federal budget deficit. It is a well-known fact that among the advanced countries, the U.S. has the most inefficient health care system. Health care is much more expensive in the U.S. than in any other advanced country, yet health outcomes are much worse. According to Fareed Zakaria in a recent article in Time, an MRI that costs $281 in France, costs more than $1000 in the U.S.[1] Despite having the most expensive health care in the world, the U.S. has the highest rates of chronic disease, such as Type 2 Diabetes, which only aggravate the cost pressures on the national capital. So irrational is the health care system in the U.S., that chronically ill indigent patients can often only receive treatment in hospitals where care is much more expensive than at other heath care facilities. A recent episode of the documentary news show Rock Center, highlighted the case of a indigent stroke victim who has been hospitalized for two years at the cost of 2.4 million dollars, despite the fact that her care could be achieved 17 times less expensively at a long term care facility. However, because she has no insurance, and because only hospitals and not long term care facilities are mandated by law to care for indigent patients, she has remained hospitalized. Other well-know anecdotes include the fact that many U.S. companies prefer to locate factories in Canada, where they are not directly responsible for the health care costs of their workers and retirees. Thus, the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector—something that certain elements of the U.S. bourgeoisie have been complaining loudly about since 2008—is due in some part to the country’s inefficient, expensive and Byzantine health care system.

All of this is well known to the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie. It is a problem that has been contemplated many times in the past. Yet, it seems the U.S. national capital missed the boat on the setting up of a single payer health care system, when other advanced countries were doing so in the decades following World War Two. Although, the U.S. bourgeoisie set-up Medicare as a single payer health care system for seniors and some disabled people in the 1960s, the U.S. political system has not been able to go past this stage since then. Previous attempts to reform the health care system, such as the ill-fated “Hillarycare” in President Clinton’s first-term, have crashed on the shoals of U.S. politics. Still, the problem remains and it has gotten so damaging to the competiveness of the U.S. national capital that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are finally getting serious about the necessity to do something about the inefficiency and waste in the system, even if that “something” is not a full nationalization of the health care system or the establishment of a single payer model. Steps must be taken to reign in health care costs and get more people to pay into the system.

However, the ongoing in-fighting within the bourgeoisie are making these tasks more and more difficult to accomplish.  This situation is not novel.  As we have pointed out several times in our analyses of the political situation of the American bourgeoisie, the economic crisis has for some time fueled the development of deep and growing fractures within the bourgeoisie as to which policies to put in place to best protect the competitive position of the national capital.  However, it seems these fractures themselves are more and more taking on a life of their own, whereby they no longer express real disputes as to which policies are more rational to implement from the point of view of the national capital and do not offer real and viable policy alternatives around which the ruling class as a whole can unify.  One example of this in the current ongoing dispute between Republicans and Democrats is that “Obamacare” was originally the Republican answer to “Hillarycare,” and it was first adopted by Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts and proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 in California.[2]  However, no sooner had Obama himself adopted it on the national level, as a supposedly politically viable “compromise” proposal, than the Republicans started to call these plans “government run socialist health care.” So far, the only proposal the Republicans have put forward, through the so-called “Ryan budget,” for reducing the cost of the health care system is to completely dismantle Medicare, giving seniors and the disabled a modest voucher to buy health insurance on the open market. Congressman Ryan has also proposed making Medicaid—the complex federal/state program that provides meager care for the indigent—a so-called “block grant to the states,” meaning that states can do whatever they want with the money.

It is true that neither “alternative”—Democratic or Republican—would do anything to address the underlying issue of the irrationality of care delivery and the skyrocketing costs of it, since neither addresses the underlying issue of the fragmented private insurance industry, each charging increasingly astronomical fees to offset their health care costs by shifting this burden onto hospitals, who in turn shift it onto insurance policy rate payers and the federal and state governments.  However, the Republicans’ proposal could also potentially stoke social unrest by eliminating one of the remaining elements of the U.S. social wage that continues to be supported by wide swathes of the U.S. working-class. Even many Tea Party supporters defend Medicare as a system they paid into during their working lives and which they feel should be there for them when they retire or if they become disabled. Moreover, the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie recognize that the Ryan proposals would likely only worsen the problem in the long run. By kicking more and more people out of the health care system costs would likely only rise as people are unable to get preventive care and adequate treatment for chronic conditions until they show up very sick in the emergency room. It is for this reason that some of the more extreme elements in the Republican Party have suggested eliminating the legal requirement to provide basic care. But the main factions of the bourgeoisie likely recognize the social powder keg such a proposal represents.

Nevertheless, the entire idea that the Republicans would sink a plan that was originally their own seems to be motivated more by an ideological hatred of the President and the developing tendency of “each for themselves” than by any real concern to address the needs of the national capital.  In this sense, the health care crisis has two meanings: one for the ruling class, and another for the working class.  For the ruling class it is taking on the seriousness of a political crisis in which it once again fails to act in the overall interests of the national capital.  For the working class, it is the expression of the increased pauperization of its conditions of life under decomposing capitalism and the fact the ruling class has no real alternatives to offer it that can ameliorate the growing attacks on its living and working conditions. These attacks are in part manifesting themselves in a highly irrational health care system under which workers face increasing out-of-pocket costs, a declining quality of care and the ever present fear of financial ruin should they get sick or losing access to care altogether if they lose their job and thus their insurance.

What will the law do for the working class?

The working class needs to see what is lying behind the revolting rhetoric of the two contending bourgeois factions’ ideological diatribe.  The Republicans do not hesitate in their proposal for even deeper and more hurtful cuts under the pretense that they would protect Americans against the government’s encroachment on their “private lives” and the supposed “freedom” offered by the American constitution.  They claim Obamacare is an attack on “individual freedom,” specifically targeting the law’s provision establishing an individual mandate, which would force individuals who do not receive employer based health care, Medicare or Medicaid to purchase private heath insurance regardless of whether they wanted it or not.  In their view, “individual freedom” means having the choice to refuse purchasing a product from a private company, even if that means tax payers will pick up the bill if you show up in the emergency room suffering from a grave injury or a terrible illness.

The Democrats, being more subtle and sophisticated, find it necessary to lace their attacks with the grace of a few crumbs thrown here and there in order to better sell the legitimacy and “humaneness” of the law.  Herein is the meaning of parts of the legislation that may appear on the surface to be “true reforms,” such as the elimination of denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions, the ability of parents to carry their children on their health insurance until age 26 (but, of course they’ll have to pay for this in the form of higher insurance premiums), or the expansion of coverage to a large number of presently uninsured Americans, either through a modest expansion of eligibility for Medicaid or through the individual mandate.   But these, rather than accounting for real reforms, are actually cuts and measures of austerity against the workers, and will do little to improve the quality of health care for workers and their families. 

In fact, from the point of view of the working class, the Obamacare promises to be a major austerity attack against its already severely eroded and precarious standard of living.  The ruling class’ rhetorical posturing needs to be placed in a historic perspective.  As we wrote in Internationalism #153,  “For the working class, the attack on medical benefits has been a central feature in virtually every contract struggle in the past decade. Large companies routinely used to cover 100 percent of insurance premiums, but management increasingly forces workers to pay for a percentage of the costs and once they pierce the barrier of getting workers to pay, in each subsequent contract management pushes to increase the worker contribution. At the same time, workers and their families face skyrocketing co-payments, fees and deductibles and declining quality of medical care as the government grants doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies exemptions from liability for malpractice, incompetence, and defective drugs with disastrous side effects. Recent court rulings permit unions and companies to drop retirees from existing insurance plans, forcing them to rely solely on Medicare and the purchase of their own supplemental coverage. And this doesn't even include the nearly 50 million who have no health care insurance at all. “

The aim of the current health care legislation is in continuity with this policy of pushing the cost of health care onto the working class by making those who have no coverage purchase their own private policies. The architects of “Obamacare” claim that they are doing this in order to get more people paying into the system and to prevent “free riding.” After all, they argue, there is no such thing as a “free lunch”—either you pay for health care by buying insruance, or as in most other advanced countries, you pay for it through increased taxation. In a sense, this is in fact a rationalization of the system by getting more people to pay into it, but politically it has proved a tough sell. Whereas the other advanced countries tend to finance their systems through general taxation, where the cost of care is hidden in a myriad of different taxes paid throughout the year—Obamacare would see people pay up front for insurance to a private insurance company that would continue to play the same old games of denying coverage, raising premiums, etc. as they do now. Either that, or Americans will have to pay a fine to the IRS! The rather clumsy and unwieldy mechanisms undergriding Obamacare seem to have doomed it politcally from the start, as polls continue to show a majority of Americans opposing it, even as they support indivdual aspects of the law, such as the elimination of denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions and the ability of parent’s to keep their kids on their insurance plans untill age 26. The pundits tell us that, “Americans seem to want universal health care, they just don’t want to pay for it.” Hmm, and they tell us Americans will never go for communism!

However, we should make no mistake about it, the U.S. capitalist state’s concern in regard to health care reform is not to improve the quality of working people’s lives, its to regulate the impact of the uninsured on the coffers of the state and get the irrationally high cost of health care in the U.S. under control.  Notwithstanding, the measures contained in the various provisions of the Affordable Care Act will not be able to address the issue of the insurance companies charging astronomical fees because doctors and hospitals do the same thing to offset the cost of caring for the uninsured.  In fact, it is important to point out that of the fifty million people currently uninsured, only about half of them would obtain coverage under the law. Care will not delivered at all to the ones who will continue to be uninsured.  In addition, the cost of litigation, medical tools, and pharmaceuticals also is not addressed by the law.  It is a known practice by doctors and hospitals, for example, that more diagnostic tests than necessary are often prescribed in order to avoid the risk of being sued.  It is also a well known practice of the insurance companies that they shift the cost of hospital bills for the uninsured onto the premiums and fees of insured workers.  This will not change significantly because, as already pointed out, about thirty million people will continue to be uninsured.

In the end, the law ultimately fails in its reticence to challegne the existence of private health insurance companies in the U.S and its inbaility to agressively counteract the “fee for service” delivery model that characterizes U.S. health care. Although, it is true that the law contains certain provisions that would work to counter some of the more egregious billing practices of doctors, hospitals and the insurance companies—such as promotion of a “bundled care” model, under which doctors and hospitals receive one payment for a specific condition, rather than charging for each various and sundry service and consultation—these will likely only amount to half measures that will keep the fundamental ineffeciencies in place.  Moreover, its not hard to see what a “bundled care” model would do to the quality of care you receive. Under captialism, the old adage, “you get what you pay for” applies to health care as much as any other commodity, regardless of the percentage of the population who think access to health care should be a human right. And yet, even this “reform,” as modest as it is, is on life support after its day in the Supreme Court, a victim of the increasingly bizzare world of U.S. politics.

Is this law a “reform” for the working class? The clear answer is “NO”.

So, what will this “reform” do?  The first obvious thing to note is that the Congressional Budget Office projects that the legislation would reduce the federal budget deficit by $143 billion over the first ten years, and by $1.2 trillion dollars in the second ten years.  With the claims that the cost of the law would be $940 billion over ten years and that coverage would be expanded to 32 million Americans who are currently uninsured (the actual number is closer to 50 million) one is right to ask: how are the savings possible?   Essentially, the cost will be shifted to the working class through a combination of increased out of pocket expenses and cuts to benefits.  All the talk about how insurance companies face fines if they don’t reduce their overhead costs, or how pharmaceutical companies and medical tool manufacturers face a 2.3 percent tax, or how in 2013 individuals who make more than $200,000 a year can expect a tax hike, do not represent a significant shifting of the cost of care onto the wealthy or the propertied class. Mostly, these are measures put in place in order to try and quell the sense of indignation that an overt attack against the working class may raise.  The fact of the matter is that the major provisions of the law will roll out in 2014, with the expansion of Medicaid and the enforcement of the “Individual Mandate”, and in 2018, with the establishment of the excise tax.  Each one of these provisions constitutes a lowering of the standard of care, or a cut in benefits, or an increase in out of pocket expenses, or any combination thereof.

The hurt inflicted on the working class in the form of cuts to benefits and increased out-of-pocket expenses will be painful.  Shifting the cost burden to the working class at a time when its wages and benefits are already spread thin will result in a further impoverishment of the working class’ standard of living as many people will not be able to afford buying insurance while not qualifying for federal subsidies under the individual mandate provision of the law, while others will simply be dropped by their employer-sponsored health care.   This is because the provision requires employers with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance or pay a fine of $2000 per worker each year if any worker receives federal subsidies to purchase health insurance required through the individual mandate.  But the health care provided by an employer will be subject to a 40 percent excise tax as of 2018 if it is worth over $27,500 for families or $10,200 for individuals.  According to a conservative estimate, 5,000,000 workers will lose their present employer-sponsored insurance under this provision as their employers gross up their salaries for them to be able to purchase coverage through an exchange, a cost less than providing health care insurance.  For others, their employers will simply provide an inferior, cheaper health care package as they try to bring the cost below the threshold amount.  This is certain to backfire in the long run in the form of inferior coverage which won’t be able to address medical needs adequately. It is possible to envision the increased reliance on emergency room care as a direct result of the urge to reduce health coverage.

Medicaid will be “expanded” to cover most low-income people—defined as a family of four making $30,657 or less each year—under age 65.  But the expansion of Medicaid will result in a poorer standard of care as well, which, in the long run, can only lead to increased health problems both in terms of the numbers of the sick and the seriousness of their sickness.  It is already difficult to find doctors and hospitals that want to treat Medicaid patients because Medicaid does not pay doctors and hospitals very well.  Spreading thin an already-strained program will likely make the care provided inferior. Since the law does not meaningfully address the issues of the continued existence of uninsured people and the added numbers in this category as employers likely drop employees from their coverage, it is not likely that the federal subsidies given to the states in the wake of the law will adequately fund the states’ added financial needs. This is why, while appearing to be an “expansion” of an existing federal program, the measure amounts to a straining of the program, which will in all likelihood lead to a lowering of the quality of care. What the provision will “expand” is not health care, but its impoverishment.  In the long run, this will backfire against the present efforts to contain health care costs.  Already, anticipating having to care for many more patients who do not have adequate funding either from subsidies or in the form of personal income or a decent health insurance policy, hospitals and doctors are producing lists of diagnostic tests that they say they will no longer provide.  The criteria for the decision are a matter of budgetary concerns, and are not based on what is medically necessary to do for the sick.     

The capitalist state will fund the “expansion” of health coverage largely through the individual mandate.  This requires that every uninsured person that does not qualify for federal subsidies for the purchase of health care, purchase it or face a $695 annual fine or a fine of up to 2.5 percent of their taxable income, whichever is greater, starting in 2014.  Anyone on a low income will rather pay the penalty than pay for health care out of pocket, which is much more expensive.  In this case, not only will the person continue not to be insured and therefore rely on emergency room care, but the penalty will punch another hole in their pocket. 

The Democrats like to make a a lot of hay about how many additional people will receive health care coverage under this law. What they don’t like to talk about is that most of them will have to pay for it out of their own pocket or with only marginal help in the form of some government subsidies. What they also fail to mention is that they will be paying for health care from a private insurance company, in business to make a profit the only way they know how: raising premiums, deductibles and co-pays, cutting benefits and denying claims. Hmm, no wonder so many people are skeptical of this law! Perhaps, people aren’t as stupid as the media would have us believe? Maybe they see this law for what it is—a giant attack on the working class? Of course, for some of the people who see through this law, the Republican Party is there with their rhetoric about individual liberty and faux indgnation over being forced by the government to buy a product from a private company—companies whose bidding Republicans are, on a normal day, more than willing to perform. [3]

Of course, for those who see the Republican clap trap for what it is, there is always the far left of the Democratic Party, with their vision of “Medicare for all.” Of course, what proponents of this idea fail to mention is that the much vaunted Medicare program—along with Social Security part of of the so-called “third rail” of American politics—is under serious threat of insolvency. Moreover, as those on Medicare will tell you, it hardly constitutes free health care. Medicare beneficaires generally have to pay a monthly premium for coverage, are subject to annual deductibles and a 20% co-insurance. Many Medicare beneficiaries find health care simply unaffordable without purchasing an additional supplementary insurance plan from a private company!  Even with these “cost sharing” features in place, many doctors and hospitals grumble about treating Medicare patients due to the program’s low-reimbursement rates—rates which are seemingly held political hostage in every confrontation between Democrats and Republicans over the federal budget, as legislators struggle to pass laws maintaining current Medicare reimbursement rates to doctors and hosptials. So frustrated has one world-renowned medical center—the Mayo Clinic—become with Medicare, that they no longer accept Medicare assignment and have stopped seeing Medicare patients altogether at their Arizona facility.

Nonetheless, from the point of view of what is beneficial to the national capital, something must be done, and “Obamacare” is an attempt in that direction.   But the Republicans’ opposition is so hell-bent in their quest to undermine the present administration that they are willing to jeopardize its only selling points for this reform and strip it of the already tenuous veil of legitimacy the law might have with the public: the filling of the “donut hole” in the Medicare prescription drug coverage, children covered by their parents’ insurance until they are 26, the extension of Medicaid to 32 million people currently uninsured and the elimination of denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions.  The Republicans’ intentions seem to aim at undermining Obama’s re-election, which could be more difficult to accomplish if his signature domestic policy acomplishment is tossed out as “unconstitutional.”

Some conclusions

Republicans hotly contest Obamacare, but their contestation is not based on considerations of what is good health care for us.  Their protestations have nothing to do with any sense of worry for the fate of the working class and the more vulnerable sectors of the population.  They claim that their consternation is the result of what they see as the inability of the federal government to reign in the cost of care and address the federal and state budget problems.  But, their “counterproposals” are nothing but a set of drastic austerity measures which would accelerate the already existing tendency toward a poorer standard of care with its attendant  problems of an ever greater pool of sick people who don’t get treated before their ailments become too costly.  This alternative is simply unacceptable from the point of view of the national capital since it does nothing to address the fundamental problems of having to reign in the cost of health care and, not insignificantly, it may stoke social unrest.  While their concerns may well be based in the perceived increasing fragility of the capitalist state’s financial health, their “alternatives” are really nothing more than a war against their enemy faction rather than serious attempts at unifying the ruling class around a set of rational and viable policies.   This is the first time in the 47-year history of the Medicaid program that the Supreme Court, under the pressure of the Republican faction, has had to deliberate on whether the expansion projected in the new law is unconstitutional, while in the past the program was extended to women, children, and the disabled without opposition. 

The legalistic posturing of the various bourgeois factions, and the continuous mudslinging across party lines is an expression of the growing political decomposition of the American ruling class. As the rather unexpected debate over the health care law in the Supreme Court showed, the increasing “politicization” of the judiciary amounts to a challenge to dominance over the state by the executive and thus a challenge to the very foundations of the state capitalist apparatus itself. By all measures, in a more or less healthy state capitalism, the Supreme Court should defer to the expertise of the executive branch in proposing legislation and policies that are designed to protected the overall interests of the national capital. The judiciary should be subordinated to the executive.

Although the Supreme Court resisted some aspects of FDR’s attempts to build American state capitalism as a response to the Great Depression, since then the court has generally deferred to the policy aims of the main factions of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the Supreme Court has often taken a direct role in pushing through certain policies in the overall interests of the national capital that have been resisted by recalcitrant factions of the bourgeoisie, such as desegregation in the 1950s and the 1960s. However, as the recent Citizens United case showed, today’s Supreme Court, with a majority of conservative justices, tends to act as an agent of political reaction rather than a venue to give the policy preferences of the main factions of the bourgeoisie a veil of constitutional legitimacy. The spectre of the Supreme Court throwing out Obamacare AND upholding Arizona’s punitive anti-immigration law (see article in this issue) must be of great concern to the main factions of the U.S. bourgeoisie.

On purely ideological grounds, the Supreme Court has a clear opening to uphold Obamacare. It could accept the “free-rider” argument put forward by the administration and decide that the state can force people to buy a private product as to not do so corrupts the health care market as people would wait until they became sick to buy insurance. However, from the transcripts of the oral arguments released, it appears that the conservative justices on the court are not happy with this argument and some appear to have simply gone over to right-wing ideological rigidity, citing simplistic Republican talking points in opposition to the law from the bench. Its not only the politicization of the judiciary that is a threat to U.S. state capitalism, but also the decreasing level of intellectual rigor on the part of the justices, many appointed to the bench not because they are great legal minds or flexible adjudicators willing to apply the law to fit the concrete challenges facing the national capital, but because they fit narrow political and ideological criteria or make a certain constituency happy. This is not the Warren court that overturned school segregation and legitimated the attempts by the main factions of the bourgeoisie to mitigate the overtly racist image of the nation. In the era of Thomas, Scalia and Alito corporations are people, money is speech, and forcing people to buy health insurance is the same as forcing them to eat broccoli, regardless of the implications for the ability of state capitalism to govern in the interests of the national capital.

This situation of political decomposition has been in operation for a number of years already, and the present economic crisis is aggravating it, making it more and more difficult for the ruling class to strategize on what policies best suit the needs of the national capital, and agree on which political team can best carry them out.  These divisions make the orderly, disciplined functioning of government more and more fragile and have turned the political landscape into a turf war littered with the most ugly ideological landmines.  In the context of the health care law, this situation has created so much conflict that it even threatens to undermine whatever legitimacy the public continues to have in government by contributing to its disaffection and doubts as to the vaunted benefits of either the reform or its repeal.  The law is so extremely confusing and complicated to understand as a result of the many tweaks that have already been made to it that it is difficult for anyone without an advanced degree in public policy to know exactly what it will do. The law have already been changed over the course of the last two years, leaving the public puzzled and suspicious as to which parts of the law that may look “progressive” today, will be rescinded to leave the most vulnerable people out in the cold later.  The present economic crisis is lacerating the unity of the ruling class, pushing the two parties to confront each other instead of forming a coherent and unified strategy in face of the crisis. 

The political crisis of the ruling class is reaching the point of paralysis: it is making it more and more difficult to pursue state capitalist policies that may at least afford a little respite to an ailing capitalism.  This should make it clearer for the working class that preserving any more illusions about the viability of capitalism or its ability to bring about real, durable reforms amounts to giving in to the most brutal conditions of impoverishment and de-humanization. 

Ana 4/7/12

It has now been just over one year since the Conservative Party won a majority government in the last federal election, marking the first time in almost two decades that the right wing of the Canadian bourgeoisie has held free reign over the ship of state at the federal level. As we analyzed at the time,[1] a Conservative majority government was not the preferred electoral outcome for the main factions of the bourgeoisie. The Conservative Party—under the stewardship of Prime Minister Stephen Harper—had suffered a long string of political scandals that threatened to undermine the population’s illusions in Canadian democracy and further depress the enrollment of the younger generations behind electoral politics. However, we also pointed out that despite failing to produce a new ruling team, the Canadian bourgeoisie nevertheless emerged from the elections poised to enact the classic ideological division of labor in times of rising working class unrest by engendering a vocal “left in opposition” through the rise of the New Democratic Party (NDP) to official opposition status for the first time in history.

Almost as if the Canadian bourgeoisie had anticipated what was to come, Canada has been hit by a veritable wave of working class struggles and social unrest over the past year. Beginning in the summer of 2011, with tensions at Air Canada and the Canada Post strike and lockout, Canada has witnessed a series of strikes and job actions affecting a number of central industries at the national, provincial and local level. Moreover, although the Occupy Movement in Canada was much less dramatic than elsewhere, students in Québec have been engaged in a fierce and protracted struggle over the debt burdened provincial government’s plans to raise tuition fees, shutting down traffic flow through Montreal on several occasions and forcing the repressive apparatus of the Québec state to show its ugly teeth once again (see separate article on www.internationalism.org [190]).

While the Québec student movement seems to be motivated by many of the same factors that have moved the younger generations of workers to launch similar protest movements across the world over the last several years, the development of the overall class struggle in Canada has been greatly hampered by the Canadian bourgeoisie’s skillful use of the tactic of the left in opposition, which has allowed the NDP—and the unions it is closely intertwined with—to play the role of an “alternative within the state” to the cruel austerity and blatantly anti-working class politics of the ruling Tories.

Thus, although the Conservative’s ascension to majority government status in the May 2011 federal elections was a clear set-back for the Canadian bourgeoisie’s desire to give its state a new image, it has in many ways been able to “make lemonade out of lemons,” by using the rise of the NDP to enact a policy of the “left in opposition” allowing it to control and manage a series of working class struggles that have broken out across the country over the past year. Although the Tories have not ceased their scandal prone ways, the rise of the NDP has been able to serve as a counterweight by giving all those angered by the Conservatives’ apparent disregard for “democracy” an alternative to look forward to in the next federal election.

Undoubtedly, the rise of the NDP has acted as a block on the development of the class struggle in Canada, largely trapping it behind the unions and the opposition’s aggressive verbiage against the Tories’ attacks on the “right to strike.” In a way, the cover the NDP gives to electoral democracy and “struggling through the unions” initially allowed the Conservative government to be more aggressive than it otherwise might be. They know that their rivals on the other side of the House of Commons will work to make sure workers’ struggles do not escape their control and that of their union friends.

Although Canada has certainly seen its share of electoral instability—due in large measure to the increasing pressure on the political system brought by the tendencies of social decomposition, the situation has not reached the depths of that in the United States. The Canadian bourgeoisie has been largely successful—so far—in enacting the policy of the left in opposition allowing it a much greater flexibility in enacting austerity as it attempts to protect the Canadian economy in a chaotic international environment. For example, the Harper government has recently announced a series of changes to Old Age Security, planning to raise the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. Would it have pursued such a policy without an empowered NDP opposition to capture the dissent such a move would provoke? We can’t say for certain, but it is clear that over the past year, the Canadian bourgeoisie has used the tactic of the left in opposition to pursue an overall agenda of seeking to insulate the national economy from the potential shocks emanating from a chaotic international environment—a situation that the Canadian bourgeoisie seems to expect will negatively impact its own economy in due course. Moreover, the existence of the NDP opposition has allowed it to compensate for the continuing political difficulties of the ruling Conservative Party, which has a very hard time avoiding scandal. These various scandals only become one more moment in the overall tactic of empowering the left opposition.

Nevertheless, it is unclear for how long the Canadian bourgeoisie will be able to play this game. The next federal election is a long three years away. Will the NDP be able to continue to mute working class unrest for such an extended period of time? Will the Conservative Party’s continued political clumsiness and scandal prone ways force some kind of political change that might endanger the ideological division of labor? Will the increasingly restlessness of the younger generations of workers—mainly around the question of the increasing burden of rising tuition costs—serve to radicalize the social situation in general? These remain open questions that pose an ever-present threat to the Canadian bourgeoisie and its state.

The Canada Post Strike and Lock-Out (June 2011):

Just one month after the Conservatives won their majority government, labour tensions at Canada Post broke out in a series of rotating strikes across the country. Angered by management’s intransigent approach to contract talks, concern over their pension security and deteriorating work and safety conditions, militancy had been building among the postal workers for some time, obliging the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) to launch rotating strikes in early June of 2011. Canadian postal workers have traditionally been among the country’s most militant sectors obliging its unions to take a more radical line towards industrial action.

Among Canada Post’s contract demands were requiring workers to work an extra five years before qualifying for benefits, establishing a two tiered wage structure with new workers receiving lower pay and rejection of the union’s position on staffing levels. Canada Post claimed these moves were necessary to close a $3.2 billion dollar gap in pension funding and compensate for the decline in business resulting from increased competition from private couriers (UPS, Fedex, Purolator, etc.) and internet bill payment services.[2]

After twelve days of rotating strikes in various cities across the country, Canada Post responded by locking out all 48,000 of its unionized workers in mid-June, completely shutting down mail delivery across the country. Unable to ignore such an event, the bourgeois media jumped into full gear with an intense discussion around the “technological obsolescence” of the post office, with those further to the left expressing the need to “protect vital public services.” The media cried crocodile tears for senior citizens who wouldn’t be able to mail in their bill payments in time, while little sympathy was shown for “overpaid” postal workers whose services weren’t as vital to the national economy as they once were. “Why should taxpayers subsidize postal workers, when the same job can be accomplished by private companies for much less?”, was a frequent question put forward on the talk shows and Internet forums.

Canada Post management complained that the lockout was necessary as the rotating strikes were costing it mail volume and had caused it to lose $103 million in revenue to that point already. How locking out its workers and bringing mail delivery to a complete halt was supposed to remedy this was never made clear. However, no sooner had the lockout been announced that the Tory government began to make noise about introducing back-to-work legislation in the House of Commons—the same tact it had taken in response to the simultaneous strike of customer service agents at Air Canada (see below). Clearly, Canada Post management had federal government intervention in mind when it announced the lock-out. Its tactic was clear: lockout the workers, create a “national crisis” and wait for the federal government to intervene and end the impasse in management’s favor. And this is exactly what the federal government did, mandating the postal workers to return to work on terms less favorable to them than management’s last offer.

According to Conservative Labour Minister Lisa Raitt, the legislation was necessary to “protect Canada’s economic recovery.” This set-off a veritable campaign on the left against the back-to-work legislation, with several NDP MPs doing their best to hold-up the legislation in Parliament with an ill-fated attempt at an American style filibuster. Pundits supposedly favorable to the postal workers lamented the collapse of “Canadian democracy” and the undermining of collective bargaining. According to this view, from now on employers would have no incentive to negotiate in good faith, expecting the government to step in on their side eventually. Soon to be NDP party leader Thomas Mulcair mused the following: "It is the government itself, through a Crown corporation that caused the lockout of the employees. This same government is now turning around and criticizing a situation that it created itself.” [3]

In the end, the NDP and the CUPW proved powerless to stop the back-to-work legislation. Whatever their histrionics on the floor of the House of Commons, they could not prevent the Tory majority government from getting its way. With the legislation passed, the workers returned to their jobs on the terms mandated by the government. Mobilized behind the unions and the NDP, the postal workers had no idea of how to resist the government’s mandated settlement. The thought of further resistance likely came with fear of an even grander defeat should they attempt to keep the struggle alive. Under the union straitjacket, no thought was ever given to uniting the postal workers’ on strike with the simultaneous struggle of Air Canada workers also under threat of a government imposed back-to-work law. Under the unions, every struggle is kept in its own corner, in its own sector of the economy. The idea of uniting the working class across sectors is an anathema and thus every struggle behind the unions is doomed to defeat. Clearly, this was the fate of Canada Post workers in June 2011.

Tensions at Air Canada (Spring 2011 to April 2012):

Air Canada was the second major national concern to be hit by labour tensions over the past year. Just as the rotating strikes at Canada Post entered their second week in mind-June 2011, customer service agents at the national airline went on strike angered by the company’s insistence on pension changes that would switch them from a defined benefit to a defined contribution plan. The customer service agent strike was only the first in a series of struggles to hit Air Canada over the course of the year.

Air Canada workers’ frustration had been building since at least 2003 when the company sought bankruptcy protection under which many of the various unions representing its employees agreed to a series of concessions.  In order to “keep the company in business” unions agreed to wage cuts, changes to work rules and a number of layoffs. Customer service agents were particularly hard hit as their union agreed to a 10 percent wage cut, giving up one week of vacation, paid lunch breaks and sick days. In both 2004 and 2005 the union agreed to additional 2.5 percent wage cuts. Although they received modest increases from 2006 to 2008, by 2009 Air Canada was already threatening further restructuring that meant a wage freeze for 2009 and 2010.[4]  The company’s plans to launch a new “low cost” airline appear to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for many workers, who see this plan as a way to drive down their own wages and benefits.

On June 14th, 2011—unable to reach an agreement with management and with the pension issue a key sticking point—some 3800 Air Canada customer service agents walked off the job. In response, the Harper Government did not wait long to start issuing threats of back to work legislation. Citing the need to “protect Canada’s fragile economic recovery,” Labour Minister Raitt indicated that although she would give the two parties time to reach an agreement, she would not stand idly by while flights were disrupted across the country. Faced with the threat of back to work legislation, the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union (CAW)—the union that represents customer service agents—quickly ended the strike after a mere three days by agreeing to binding arbitration on the most contentious issues. Referring to the company’s plan to start new hires on a defined contribution retirement plan, all CAW President Ken Lewenza could say after apologizing to new employees was, “We could not settle this issue in collective bargaining.”[5] How about attempting to settle issue by linking up the struggle with the Canada Post workers on strike at the same time? Of course, such things never occur to union bureaucrats, except as something that must be avoided at all costs!

However, the end of the customer service agent strike was far from the beginning of labour peace at Air Canada. In October, Air Canada flight attendants rejected a tentative deal with the company for the second time in three months, posing the threat of another strike that could disrupt air travel across the country. Despite what Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) negotiators called a “breakthrough” in negotiations on the contentious issue of work rules involving the calculation of paid time during stopovers, flight attendants were in no mood for an agreement. The sentiment in favor of a strike was high, forcing a CUPE official to concede, “The rejection of this second tentative agreement shows how frustrated the membership is with the company, after years and years of concessions.” [6]

Nevertheless, the Harper government had even less inclination to allow a strike to go forward this time around, signaling that it would introduce back-to-work legislation immediately. As it turned out, Labour Minister Raitt didn’t even wait for the House of Commons to debate any legislation, unilaterally referring the dispute to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board for arbitration—a move that made any strike by flight attendants illegal. As academics lamented the Tories’ attack on collective bargaining—something supposedly integral to the healthy functioning of a “democratic society”—CUPE officials stressed to the membership that any strike action would be illegal. In a memo to its over 6,800 members, CUPE wrote, “Our strike is suspended indefinitely. Therefore, the union advises you that you cannot strike.”  However, just to make sure it still held the workers’ confidence, CUPE negotiators lashed out at the Harper Government. In a separate memo it wrote, “Let’s call a spade a spade. This government is not your friend. It is trying to take away your right to strike and it will use whatever tools and tricks it can.” [7]

By now the pattern had been set, workers frustrated by years of concessions respond to stalled contract negotiations or inadequate tentative agreements with a strike posture, management digs in, the federal government threatens intervention, the union caves in all the while crying foul about the government’s attacks on “democratic rights of collective bargaining.” The idea that workers might go on strike anyway—regardless of what the government and unions do, regardless of the strike’s legality—was not acknowledged by the union, the leftist politicians, the academics and certainly not by the bourgeois media.

Moreover, these forces never countenanced the notion that workers in one sector or industry might join forces with those in another under similar threats of austerity. In the case of the Air Canada flight attendants, this could have meant joining up with airport security screeners, who simultaneously to their own strike, had launched a coordinated work slow down at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, causing massive travel delays for three days in early October. Surely, someone in the union hierarchy must have noticed the coincidental timing of these events? All the more evidence that the union’s job is not to spread the struggle, but to keep workers isolated in their own sectoral bunkers and behind the veil of bourgeois legalism.

Of course, in some instances in some countries, it is possible the unions might call for a “general strike.” As had been the case in Europe recently, it is possible that faced with a national mood of resistance to austerity, the unions and left parties might see the need to draw workers out on the streets across industries. But this is only in order to better control them and demoralize them by leading the struggle into nothing beyond symbolism, while the austerity attacks keep raining down. However, over the past year, the Canadian unions have avoided such a tactic, preferring to bury simultaneous struggles in their own sectoral dead-ends.

The next time workers at Air Canada went on strike tensions could not be contained so easily with the threat of government intervention. In late March 2012, Air Canada ground crew launched a wildcat strike at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. Although lasting only 12 hours on a Friday morning, the wildcat caused 84 flight cancellations and up to 80 flight delays. Unrest quickly spread to airports in Montreal, Québec City and Vancouver. The wildcat by 150 ground crew workers at Pearson was a response to Air Canada’s decision to suspend three workers who had allegedly heckled Labour Minister Raitt as she walked through the airport the day before. Raitt’s press secretary reported that the Minister had been followed through the airport and “harassed” by workers. In response to the “illegal strike,” Air Canada fired 37 workers who had walked off the job. An independent arbitrator—already working on contract issues between Air Canada and its machinists and pilots at the bequest of Raitt after the House of Commons had passed legislation barring strikes and lock-outs—issued an injunction ordering the strikers back to work. [8]

Nevertheless, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) tried to claim victory by stating that they only agreed to end the “job action” after receiving assurances from Air Canada that nobody would lose their job and all fired workers would be reinstated. Still, IAMAW spokesperson Bill Trbovich was forced to admit that his union might not have total control over the striking workers stating, “We want everyone to go back to work. Whether they will or not remains to be seen.”[9] For her part, Raitt didn’t miss the opportunity to remind workers that they could be punished for illegal job actions by a fine of up to $1000 a day.

In response to the wildcat strike, the media went into full attack mode, stoking the public’s anger at Air Canada and its workers. The call to end all government subsidies to Air Canada and to fly private competitors instead dominated the talk shows and blogs. A campaign was under way to make sure the public had had enough of labour stoppages at Canada’s national airline. However, the bourgeois left was also vocal with Newfoundland and Labrador MHA Gerry Rogers—whose flight has been delayed on the tarmac at Pearson—publicly supporting the workers. Rogers stated, “We can’t continue to have government interfering in these ways and breaking the backs of unions. This is about workers’ rights and I totally support this. If I have to wait in this airport for 10 hours for my luggage, so be it.” [10] Industrial Relations Professor C.B. Smith of Queen’s University (a former employee relations director at Air Canada) was more direct in his criticism of the Harper Government’s approach to labour relations, stating: “There’s a huge trust that traditionally exists between employers and employees and when that trust is broken, this is one of the potential outcomes (…) This is the part that minister Raitt doesn’t understand. And this is the part the Harper government doesn’t understand, is that you can superficially get this off the table and you sweep it way, but there are some issues that have to be dealt with. And these employees are not going to accept how this has been dealt with.”[11]

Clearly, a sense is beginning to emerge in some quarters of the Canadian ruling class that the Harper government may be overplaying is hand. While its direct attack on collective bargaining may have initially had the effect of strengthening the image of the bourgeois left, in particular the NDP and the unions, the federal government may be going to the well too often, provoking the threat of a working class response outside of the ability of the unions to control. Although only lasting hours, the wildcat strike by Air Canada ground crews is clear mounting evidence of a developing will to resist and a growing sense of alienation from the structures put in place to control working class struggle.

The example set by Air Canada’s ground crew was quickly followed by its pilots, when they launched what the media termed an “illegal strike” in mid-April. With their contract dispute with the airline already subject to a parliamentary order establishing binding arbitration (the same order that applied to ground crew) preventing any strikes or lock-outs, pilots launched a Friday “sick-out” that forced the cancellation of some 75 flights across the country, with delays extending into the weekend. Air Canada quickly won an order from the arbitrator forcing the pilots back to work, but the sense of shear frustration among the pilots brought them close to a confrontation with their own union. Air Canada Pilots Association (ACPA) President Paul Strachan was forced to admit the growing sense of anger gripping his membership when he stated, “We all need to be very cognizant of the real risk that, at some point, the pilots will feel so beaten down and so helpless that they’re going to lash back and not even this organization will be able to control the outcome of events.” [12]

The best the ACPA could do was ensure its members it was fighting the law mandating binding arbitration in the courts, but until such time as they prevailed through legal channels no strike was possible. In a memo to members, the ACPA stated, “It is our duty to advise all pilots that the ACPA’s right to strike and Air Canada’s right to lock-out it employees are suspended until a new collective agreement takes effect. (…) Until the law is struck down, we must all comply with it.” Bourgeois legalism triumphs again! According to the union, no strike can take place until permission is granted from the state! Who would have thought that a “right” so fundamental as the right to bargain over the price you receive for your labour time could be suspended? What type of democracy is this? One in which the “right to strike” is returned only after an agreement has been reached! The Harper government may have been taking a heavy hand with the working class, but the unions were clearly the ones enforcing the no strike laws on the shop floor level.

Over the last year, Air Canada has been a focal point for labour tensions across the country.[13] For the most part these have remained within the union fold, as workers have succumbed to the pressure from their unions to obey the various no strike laws passed by the House of Commons. However, a distinct possibility remains that the Harper government may be overplaying its hand. The continued use of back-to-work legislation and binding arbitration may have initially worked to shore up the image of the unions and give legitimacy to the NDP. However, as the examples of the Air Canada ground crew workers and pilots showed, combativeness has been building within the working-class threatening to escape union control. While for now these instances have been contained, the threat of a revived working class militancy that challenges the framework of the unions and bourgeois legalism cannot be ruled out in the period ahead.

Will the Harper government recognize that its methods may be producing an undesired radicalization and start to back off? Or have the Tories, like their Republican counterparts in the United States, gone over to a hardcore ideological drive to smash the unions—the best buffer the bourgeoisie has against the class struggle? This is difficult to determine at this point. But as the examples at Air Canada show, the Canadian bourgeoisie has still been able to reap the benefits of a functioning and credible union apparatus over the past year.

Other Struggles:

While the strikes at Canada Post and Air Canada have been the most notable events on the national level, a number of others struggles have taken place over the past year showing that the working-class in Canada has developed a certain combativeness that the unions have been obliged to control by agreeing to strike action. While we cannot discuss every one of these strikes in detail, some of the more important ones were:

• A fierce contract dispute between British Columbia teachers and the Liberal party provincial government that saw teachers launch a “limited job action” in September 2011 wherein they refused to write report cards, attend staff meetings, supervise extracurricular activity, communicate with principals or perform administrative work. Proving that its not just Tories who can pass back-to-work legislation, the Liberal provincial government passed the now infamous Bill 22 in March 2012—that ordered a six month cooling off period and which made any strike action by teachers illegal on pain of a $475 a day fine for any teacher participating in job action.

The passing of Bill 22 sparked a campaign of resistance among teachers that while it remained mostly within union boundaries, included talk of a possible wildcat strike and led to increasing tensions within the bureaucracy of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF).

• An intense weeks long strike by faculty at Brandon University in Manitoba, marking the second time in four years that faculty at the university were on strike. Faculty went out in October and did not return to work until late November virtually cancelling the fall semester at the university. This strike was marked by a divisive ideological campaign by the university administration and the media to pit students who were effectively locked out of classes against the striking faculty. 

The importance of this strike—albeit at small university on the prairies—should not be underestimated. With the threat of student unrest spreading out from Québec, the Canadian bourgeoisie must be fearful of any possible unification of student struggles with those of faculty members.

• A series of strikes and threatened job actions by workers on a number of commuter bus lines in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that snarled commutes in Canada’s largest metropolitan area.

For the most part, these various actions remained under the union fold, but the fact that so many contract disputes have resulted in strikes or threatened job actions is testament to the growing combativity within the working class after years of talk about the fragility of “Canada’s economic recovery” or the need to “protect the recovery,” which dampened the working class’s response to the recession that begin in 2008. While workers have generally struggled to escape the grasp of the unions and have had little success linking up with other protest movements, such as the Québec student movement or the (albeit subdued) expressions of the Occupy Movement in Canada, there is a growing sense among the workers that strikes and other job actions are necessary to advance their interests in a political climate dominated by an intransigent state that has dropped any pretense of social neutrality and now appears to be in full league with management and administration.

While for now unions have been able to contain the struggle by making sure the various sectors and bargaining units struggle separately and never unite their efforts (thereby also leading to the workers usually losing the battle for public opinion), revolutionaries need to continue to monitor the situation in Canada closely for signs of further radicalization. The possibility that the Tories could actually screw up and radicalize the workers’ struggle by making the unions look impotent in the face of back-to-work legislation is real.

The Class Struggle and the Canadian Political Situation:

Clearly, the Canadian state has emerged from the federal elections of May 2011 with an unexpected strength in the face of the class struggle. Although the Harper Government was re-elected with a majority, the elections produced an NDP official opposition that has allowed the Canadian state to play the card of the left in opposition with a good deal of success over the past year.

Each time a particularly threatening struggle arose, the Tory government was able to suppress it with draconian back-to-work legislation, while the NDP and the unions cried fowl from the left, convincing the workers that they had a friend in the House of Commons. As their argument went, “If the anti-working class Harper government was in power today, perhaps this wouldn’t be the case in a few years when workers could rally around the NDP and elect a truly worker friendly government if they choose.”

Every scandal involving the Conservative government—from the robo call scandal to the accusations of misleading parliament over the true costs of F-35 fighter jets and announcing plans to raise the age of eligibility for old age pensions in Davos, Switzerland—has for now only played into the overall political tactic of the left in opposition.

However, as the wildcat strikes at Air Canada have shown, the possibility remains that the Tories may have overplayed their hand. Their consistent use of back-to-work legislation has demonstrated a complete disregard of the culture of collective bargaining just as bad as anything enacted by Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, USA. Whether or not this reflects a similar ideological decay of the Conservative party under the weight of its erstwhile Reform Party/Alberta faction or whether it is a simple political miscalculation is difficult to judge at the moment.  What is clear is that despite being able to salvage the result of the 2011 federal election, the danger of allowing the Conservative Party to remain in power beyond the current term is something that the main factions of the Canadian ruling class must be wrestling with at the moment. This likely factored into the selection of Montreal MP Thomas Mulcair to follow the popular Jack Layton as NDP Leader in March 2012.  The popular and charismatic Layton, who had reaped praise for leading his party to official opposition status in the May 2011 elections, announced just a short time later that he was suffering from another bout of cancer that finally took his life in August. While this has been a clear set-back for the NDP; they have reacted to it by selecting Mulcair as party leader, someone who they hope can shore up their support in Québec and attract enough votes in the rest of Canada and make a future election competitive.

For the working class, the lessons of the past year are clear. While it is true that the Harper Government has been particularly aggressive in its approach to the class struggle, this does not mean that the NDP or any other bourgeois party is our friend. Moreover, the past year has shown us that struggling behind the unions always leads to defeat. We must pick-up where the Air Canada workers left off and begin to take our struggles outside of the union straitjacket. It is only when we take struggles into our own hands and unite across sector and bargaining unit that we have a chance to resist capitalism’s attacks. Moreover, it is also true that in today’s climate we must also look to unite our struggles with other protest movements that are resisting the effects of the economic crisis on the conditions of life, such as the resistance by Québec students to tuition increases and the growing burden of student debt. We are all being made to pay for the bourgeoisie’s self-inflicted crisis, but it is only our own autonomous struggles that can finally put an end to the politics of austerity once and for all.

Henk 23/05/12