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 [1], "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 [8])

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 [9]," 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 [15])

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 [16] 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 [20]

[2] .- www2.calstate.edu [21]

[3] .- www.cccco.edu/Portals/4/News/press_releases/2009/Enrollment_Surge_CCCs_%... [22]

[4].- www.cpec.ca.gov/Agendas/Agenda0709/Item_14.pdf [23]

[5].- news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8546589.stm [24]

[6].-  https://oaklandnorth.net/2010/03/04/oakland-students-and-teachers-turn-out-for-march-4-pickets-disaster-drills/ [25]

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 [36]. 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 [37]

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

[4]    Advance the Struggle, https://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com [38]

[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/ [39]

[9] See the ICC's ‘Theses on the spring 2006 students' movement in France'  [40]

[10]  See ICC's article: "The youth revolts in Greece confirm the development of the class struggle [41]," International Review no. 136 - 1st quarter 2009

[11] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/334/reflections-on-struggles-in-greece [42]

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/ [44]

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] [48]

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 [53]

[2] www.archivomagon.net/Periodico/Regeneracion/CuartaEpoca/PDF/e4n56.pdf [54]

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”