At the end of 1998 a pamphlet was brought out by an anarchist publishing house, entitled Council Communism and Autonomous Workers' Struggles. It was dedicated to Cajo Brendel, the last living representative of the German-Dutch left (1). As well as an interview, a bibliography, and several extracts from texts written by Brendel, the collection also contains a number of short extracts from 'basic texts of council communism' by Anton Pannekoek, Otto Ruhle, Hank Canne Meijer and Paul Mattick, as well as a short historical introduction on the origins of this curron on the origins of this current. Furthermore, this pamphlet is in continuity with a previous one published in 1990 by the same publishers, containing 'libertarian texts' by Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek and Henriette Roland Holst.
Behind an apparently benign interest in the council communist current, or in the 'councilist' personality Cajo Brendel, the real aim of these pamphlets can be seen clearly in the first words of the introduction:
"The history of anarchism contains a number of sometimes quite important splits with the marxists. There is at least one exception however. In the 1920s we saw the appearance of council communism as a response to Bolshevik state capitalism. Council communist positions developed in direct relation to the autonomous class struggle and the formation of workers' councils outside the state, party, or leaders. They seem to present important points of convergence with anarchism" .
Council communism is thus presented as a libertarian break with the marxist tradition. In fact, by means of the commentaries that appear throughout these collections, and of a skilful selection of the extracts which mix up the authors mentioned above with 'libertarians' like Lehning and Reeves, the following ideas are sold to the reader:
The German-Dutch left was an integral part of the international revolutionary movement
The central aim of this tendentious selection of short extracts, removed from their real context, is above all to convince the reader that these 'prophets' of council communism had made a total break with the rest of the 'old' revolutionary movement, particularly Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In fact nothing could be more false and it is no accident that the historical introduction, which brings in the combat against opportunism and reformism within the Second International, moves rapidly through the period of war and revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. The events of this period are clear witness to the fact that the militants of the German-Dutch left (such as Gorter, Pannekoek and Roland Holst) were, like the Bolsheviks, an integral part of the marxist wing of the workers' movement which was in the vanguard of the gigantic struggle waged by the working class and its political organisations in this period:
in the struggle against the barbarism of war and the betrayal of the social-chauvinists in 1914. Faced with the unleashing of generalised imperialist war and the treason of the main socialand the treason of the main social democratic parties which voted for war credits and called for a 'Sacred Union' with their own bourgeoisies, the marxist left within these parties organised the resistance. From 1914 onwards the positions adopted by Gorter and Pannekoek went in exactly the same direction as the analyses developed by the Bolsheviks, in particular in the definition of the war as imperialist and in the proclamation of the death of the International and of the need for a new one. Very soon, the terrible sacrifices demanded of the workers provoked a wider resistance. In March 1915 Otto Ruhle and Karl Liebknecht voted against war credits in the Reichstag; in September 1915 the Zimmerwald conference took place, with the full support of Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek, and attended by Roland Holst. Through its writings, through its struggle both in Holland and Germany and on the international level, the German-Dutch marxist left was, alongside the Bolsheviks, one of the first currents to engage in a merciless struggle against the opportunists and conciliators, to work actively towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces. Alongside figures like Lenin, Bukharin and Radek, Luxemburg, Pannekoek and Gorter drew out the practical implications of the situation in order to preon in order to prepare the revolutionary struggle ahead;
in the struggle to extend the international revolutionary wave and to constitute the Communist International after 1917. The German-Dutch left unreservedly supported the revolutionary character of Soviet Russia and the internationalism of the Bolsheviks. The Dutch left in particular was foremost in introducing and propagating Lenin's conceptions in western Europe, via Herman Gorter's pamphlet The World Revolution, which appeared in 1918. Fully convinced of the international character of the revolutionary wave that began in Russia, the German-Dutch left took an active part in the insurrectionary movement in Germany and the rest of Europe, as well as in the constitution of the Communist International; "The world war and the revolution it has engendered have shown clearly that there is only one tendency in the workers' movement which is really leading the workers towards communism. Only the extreme left of the social democratic parties, the marxist fractions, the party of Lenin in Russia, of Bela Kun in Hungary, of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, have found this path" (Gorter, The Victory of Marxism, 1920);
in the resistance against the development of opportunism within the CI at the beginning of the 1920s. With the retreat in the revolutionary wave, which was marked in particular by the defeat of the insurrectionary movement in Germany between 1919 and 1923, and the resulting isolation of the Russian fortress, opportunist tendencies took root in the Russian Communist party and the International, along with a growing propensity to subordinate the policies of the CI to the interests of the Russian state. Against this process of degeneration, which was to end in the death of the CI as a proletarian instrument when it adopted the thesis of 'socialism in one country', a bitter resistance developed within the International, and then increasingly outside it as expulsions from the CI and its parties multiplied. Again, while the German-Dutch left undoubtedly played a leading role in this combat, as witness Gorter's Reply To Lenin, which was largely inspired by Pannekoek's World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920), it was by no means the only current fighting against the degeneration. The whole marxist left, in Russia, Britain, Bulgaria and above Italy around Bordiga, tenaciously defended the acquisitaciously defended the acquisitions of the revolution.
In the 1930s and afterwards, these communist lefts continued their determined opposition to the triumphant Stalinist counter-revolution, seeking to keep alive the political lessons of the revolutionary struggle lessons about parliamentary and trade union tactics, the role of the party and its relationship with the councils. These tiny revolutionary minorities, working in an extremely difficult situation marked by the domination of Stalinism, fascism and democracy, held onto internationalist positions. This was particularly the case with the groups from the German-Dutch left tradition, like the Group of International Communists (GIC) around Canne Meijer, Paul Mattick's group in the US, or the Communistenbond Spartacus after the second world war (of which Brendel was a member). But once again this was in no way a specificity of the German-Dutch left because other proletarian currents also stayed loyal to internationalist positions, for example the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s or the Gauche Communiste de France at the end of the second world war.
Faced with all the attempts to divide the different marxist fractions of the workers' movement, to set them against each other, we insiset them against each other, we insist on their fundamental unity as an active part of the dynamic of the class struggle. Against the abstract and mechanical opposition put forward in extracts taken out of their context, we aim to re-state the real conditions in which polemics and debates took place in the workers' movement, i.e. within one single camp the camp of the proletariat and of communism, to which belonged both the marxist left within the Second International and all the left fractions of the CI which fought against the Stalinist counter-revolution and remained faithful to internationalist principles. This is the method that marxism has always tried to apply and it is in total contrast to the abstract and timeless approach of the anarchists.
The development of revolutionary marxism in opposition to anarchism
The attempt to connect these revolutionaries with anarchism can only be accomplished through an ahistorical conjuring trick. The real development of the class struggle reveals the absurdity of this 'anti-dogmatic' cocktail that mixes Marx with Bakunin.
The development of the Socialist parties and the creation of the Second International was an important step forward for the workers' movement. When reformism took an increasing hold over these parties, anarcho-syndicalism was certainly the expression of a proletarian reaction against it, but its attachment to the old ' revolution at any time' approach made it incapable of understanding the historic origins of the opportunist gangrene in the workers' movement, while its traditional opposition to 'politics' prevented it from defending the political organisations of the proletariat and encouraged illusions in a purely 'economic' revolution led by the unions, by-passing the necessity for the working class to take political power. During this period the really fruitful work of opposition to the development of opportunism within the workers' movement was carried out by the revolutionary left around Lenin, Luxemburg and Pannekoek, who remained loyal to the marxist tradition.
In this context, the outbreak of the first world war was more than ever a test of truth, not only for the right wing of social democracy which betrayed the working class, but also for a good number of anarchist organisations which, like Kropotkin and the French CGT, fell into 'anarcho-chauvinism'. As for those who opposed the war, like Monatte and Rosmer in France, they were only able to develop a consistent struggle against the war by linking up with the vigorous internationalist action of the marxistionalist action of the marxist left and by rallying to the Russian revolution.
Thus, in Holland, faced among other things with the anti-militarism tinged with pacifism of the current around the anarchist Domela Niewenhuis, the left intransigently defended internationalist positions against any idea of pacifism, insisting that the primary task of the SDP (the socialist left which has been excluded from the main social democratic party, the SDAP, in 1909) was the struggle for revolution (resolution proposed by Gorter in the name of the Bussum section at the Utrecht congress in June 1915): "If one day the workers have the power in their hands, they must defend it with arms in their hand as well" And in an article from De Tribune on 19 June 1915 Pannekoek underlined that "it is only as part of the general struggle against capitalism that the struggle against militarism can lead anywhere".
Finally, faced with the tragic degeneration of the Russian revolution and the emergence of the Stalinist nightmare, it wasn't anarchism that was able to explain what had happened and draw the lessons for the struggles of the future, but once again the marxist left: the Italian left around the review Bilan but also the German-Dutch left. And it did so by clearlytch left. And it did so by clearly demarcating itself from anarchism, in particular during the events in Spain which saw the anarchists openly offering their services to the bourgeois state. Far from providing a libertarian socialist cocktail, the GIC, like Bilan, showed throughout the war in Spain how this new ordeal by fire had led the anarchists into the camp of the bourgeoisie. The 'anti-statists' became government parties, "playing the same role in Spain that the left social democrats, the 'Independents' had played in Germany" (PIC no 12, organ of the GIC, 1937).
And in response to certain anarchists 'criticisms' of the actions of the CNT, the GIC underlined how much this was not a betrayal of anarchist principles but their logical outcome:
"the reproaches made by foreign anarchists that the CNT has betrayed its principles is not valid. The CNT could do nothing else with principles that are detached from reality; it had to join one or other of the forces present" (Rate-Korrepondenz no. 22, 1937).
What must be said is that leaving aside the fact that although this or that anarchist may have defended correct positions, and marxist groups may have made this or that error of analysis, what fundamentally distinguishes marxism from ally distinguishes marxism from anarchism is that the former is able to apply a historical and dynamic analysis which makes it possible to grasp the real movement of the proletarian struggle and to draw all its lessons, as opposed to the abstract, timeless and idealist principles of the anarchist approach.
A combat within the proletarian camp
Does this mean that there were no divergences between these great figures and organisations of the revolutionary movement? Of course not. Does it mean that there is nothing to criticise in the positions of the German-Dutch left? Again no.
The ICC has never avoided criticising the opportunist tendencies within council communism, particularly in its later forms (see 'The bankruptcy of councilism' in IR 37). Thus, it has shown how, under the terrible pressure of the counter-revolution, within the German-Dutch left more and more concessions were made on the political role of the proletarian party. Concretely this expressed itself in a retreat towards working in isolated circles and in the retrospective assimilation of the Bolshevism of 1917 with the Stalinism of 1927; concessions were also made to economism, reducing the revolutionary process to a question of forms of economic organisation for the workers, and of the management of the factories by these forms. The ICC has also never abstained from denouncing the patent opportunism of the group Daad en Gedachte which, by putting into question the importance of theoretical reflection as an instrument for defining the perspectives of the proletarian struggle, has sunk more and more into a total denial of the role of revolutionaries, and now is at risk of disappearing definitively into the void since it has suspended publication of its review.
But in order to deal with these ambiguities and opportunist tendencies, it is necessary to know who we are criticising and to understand our common political heritage. Because what unites us is a common class combat, an internationalist combat against all the forces of the bourgeoisie. Council communism is a current within the workers' movement. This is why we say 'hands off!' to all those who are seeking to recuperate the heritage of the German-Dutch left.
Jos
(1) On Cajo Brendel, see the article in WR 228 (and the rectification in this issue).
In the nineteenth century, when capitalism was still developing, creating the basis for a world economy and the possibility of communism, there were instances when revolutionaries such as Marx supported national struggles. For example, the struggle for an independent Poland was backed as a way of creating a check on Russian tsarist reaction. The struggle for German unificationtruggle for German unification and against the domination of Prussian militarism was also supported by marxists. Marx and Engels also supported the movement for Irish independence, seeing it as a way of weakening the power of what was then the dominant capitalist nation, Britain, and its use of the Irish question as a means of controlling its own proletariat.
The experience of the working class in the twentieth century, with the global dominance of decaying capitalism, has shown that 'national liberation' struggles are now fought only in the interests of what is now a reactionary capitalist class. The attempt to mobilise the working class behind nationalist slogans is nothing more than an attempt to get workers to die in the service of their class enemies.
Sinn Finn: reactionary from the start
The left pretend that there is no continuity between today's 'ministers of the crown' and the 'honourable' paramilitaries of the past. In Ireland there have been countless examples over the last hundred years of how nationalism, in all its guises, has been used against the working class.
Sinn Fein was founded in 1905.Its initial programme involved the retention of the monarch the retention of the monarchy, import controls to protect Irish capitalism, and opposition to higher wages for, or strikes by workers as they would harm the interests of businesses in Ireland. Its founder, Arthur Griffith, called for strikers involved in the Dublin Lockout of 1913 to be bayoneted. How could it be any other way when,
"Sinn Fein was heavily dependent upon shopkeepers, employers and large farmers for income and [later] Republican county councils for their rates." (Politics and Irish Life 1913-21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution, David Fitzpatrick 1977)
The Easter Rising of 1916 would only have achieved its nationalist aims if it had gained the backing of German imperialism, which was sought, but did not materialise. As Trotsky said at the time "an 'independent' Ireland could exist only as an outpost of an imperialist state hostile to Britain" (Nashe Slovo 4th July 1916). This has been the fundamental reality behind the Irish national 'liberation' struggle ever since.
In 1919 the IRA was founded. This nationalist body started life while the working class had embarked on a wave of struggles (including Ireland) which profoundly expressed iich profoundly expressed its internationalist nature. There was a
"growing number of strikes, strikers and strike days that Ireland saw between 1917 and the slump which set in at the end of 1920." (The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA, Henry Patterson 1997).
These strikes were often accompanied "by well-organised picketing, sympathetic action and even active sabotage, and adopting the iconography of 1917, with red flags and even detachments of 'Red Guards'" (ibid) this helped to "strike fear into the heart of republicans" (Fitzpatrick op cit).
"Workers in Cork and Limerick took over some factories ... and set up 'Soviets', so-called in imitation of the Russian ones. These were crushed by local units of the IRA ... and ousted owners were handed back their plants at the points of IRA guns" (Revolutionary Perspectives first series, no.15)
In June 1920 the illegal Irish parliament Dail Eireann, set up by Sinn Fein, issued a proclamation against the class struggle, saying that it was "ill chosen for the stirring up of strife among our fellow countrymen"ong our fellow countrymen". The secretary of the Dail wrote "the mind of the people was being diverted from the struggle for freedom by class war" (quoted in Ireland's Permanent Revolution Chris Bambery). Not surprisingly, workers' struggles come up against the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Sinn Fein: basis for all Irish bourgeois politics
If the early days of Sinn Fein and the IRA established them as part of the capitalist class and against the workers' struggle then nothing has happened subsequently to alter that. Over the years there have been many splits in Republicanism, but nothing that deviated from the defence of Irish capitalism.
For example, take Fianna Fail, the largest Irish political party since the early 1930s. In power for some 50 of the years since then, it has presided over a regime equally as repressive as that in Northern Ireland, and defended the economy with as rigourous austerity measures as any other bourgeoisie. Massive unemployment has only been avoided because of the massive extent of sustained emigration.
Fianna Fail was created by those Sinn Fein members that opposed the 1921 treaty that introduced the 1921 treaty that introduced the partition of Ireland. Among the most important Fianna Fail Prime Ministers were Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass (serving 28 years between them), both veterans of the Easter Rising and the Civil War. As leaders of the 'liberated' 26 counties they were acting in continuity with their Sinn Fein origins.
The other, most obvious, example of a Sinn Fein split was Cumann Na nGaedheal, made up of those Sinn Fein members who supported the 1921 Treaty. They were the governing party from 1922 until 1932, and, subsequently, one of the main constituents, with the fascist Blueshirts, among others, of Fine Gael, which has, ever since, been Ireland's second largest political party.
Whether based on pro- or anti-treaty Sinn Fein members the two main political parties in Ireland share the same heritage. It could hardly be otherwise. For a small economy with its relatively powerful British neighbour, nationalism is bound to continue to be one of the main strands of the ideology of the Irish ruling class.
IRA: force for capital
Turning to the 'troubles' of the last 30 years, there has been no change in the nature of Republicanism. For example, in Republicanism. For example, in another split, in 1970, the Official IRA was portrayed as 'marxist', but 'reformist', while the Provisionals were 'Catholic', but 'revolutionary'. In fact they both retained programmes for Irish capitalism, two paragons of nationalism. The only practical difference lies in the propaganda they used to mobilise for the nationalist cause. It is true that the Officials were loyal to the Russian-dominated Eastern bloc, while the Provisionals were reliant on American support, but this was not initially important. The Officials were soon eclipsed and went through a number of transformations, while the Provisionals links with US imperialism were not to become important until the break up of the blocs after 1989.
On the estates dominated by either version of the IRA, any differences were irrelevant as their activities were indistinguishable from the loyalist paramilitaries. One of the most important functions of all the paramilitary forces over the last 30 years has been their actions as an auxiliary policing force, providing 'law and order', in the form of beatings, kneecappings, expulsions and executions. The protection rackets, drug-dealing and other businesses are common to all the paramilitaries. As for the 'protection' of the oppressed, in 1988 John Hume was able to point out that Republe to point out that Republicans had killed twice as many Irish Catholics as the security forces.
Hume has, in the past, called Sinn Fein 'Fascists'. For revolutionaries republicanism is a particular weapon of the capitalist class and stands condemned, not just for its indiscriminate terrorism, but as a pillar of the exploitation of workers, and opponents of the class struggle. The leftists who pretend that Sinn Fein or the IRA were ever anything else stand condemned as accomplices of nationalism.
Not only that. In the period since the break up of the American bloc, the US has tried its best to deal with signs of independence from its former allies. In the case of Britain there has been, for example, the backing of different sides in the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia. Closer to home, the actions of Sinn Fein and the IRA over the last decade have been determined by the needs of US imperialism to put pressure on Britain. This has been more pronounced at some times than others. For example, during the final negotiations that preceded the Good Friday agreement the Sinn Fein delegation, as described in a speech by Martin McGuinness, was in constant, often hourly, contact with leading figures in the US administration, from the White House downwards. It was no surprise todownwards. It was no surprise to find the new Sinn Fein Minister of Education rushing off to the US to consult with Secretary of Education Richard Riley. "Riley spent most of the day with McGuinness, an unusual and very generous allocation of time" boasted Sinn Fein's An Phoblacht (20/1/00). Such contacts by Sinn Fein with leading figures in the American capitalist state have not just started because of the new Executive; they've been going on for years.
So, whether Republicans are bombing Canary Wharf or Manchester, or sitting round the table with leading unionists, they are still serving the same cause. In the case of Sinn Fein we are not just dealing with nationalism, but an arm of US imperialism. Revolutionaries oppose such forces in the same way that they stand against the loyalist terrorists that act in the interests of British imperialism. When the leftists pretend that somehow there can be, or was, in the twentieth century, an 'authentic' national 'liberation' struggle that can break away from the imperialist framework of global capitalism, they have the historical experience of the working class against them.
Tracey 26/01/00
SWPSWP echoes propaganda about 'peace process'
No treatment of the role of leftism in Britain would be complete without a few words on the largest group, the Socialist Workers Party. Their response to the new Executive was distinctive.
"The new Assembly in Northern Ireland has been welcomed by nearly everyone except a tiny minority of hardline Unionists gathered around Ian Paisley. Millions of people are hoping the new Assembly will mean the dawn of a new era of peace in Northern Ireland." (Socialist Worker 4/12/99).
'Millions' might be hopeful, but that's only because the capitalist media has put a lot of effort into trying to give the impression that there's the possibility of a "new era". Politicians of all colours have presented the new Executive as another step forward in the democratic process. However, the Unionists (who extend rather further than Paisley's gang) are fulfilling their familiar role as a potential fly in the ointment. If they should bring the Executive down no one will blame their backers, the British government, because the Unionists are well established as "hard line bigots" with their "obstacles to"obstacles to [the] peace process" (ibid).
Having shown their commitment to capitalist democracy (against the 'bigots') the SWP give it a left-wing twist. They criticise the fact that "Sinn Fein calls for cutting taxes on big corporations, so they match the low levels of Southern Ireland" (ibid). This is not much of a criticism, but it helps to establish the SWP as a left-wing voice, supposedly above 'communal politics'. In practice, they'll always find a faction of the bourgeoisie that they want workers to support. They always say 'vote Labour' at elections in Britain, for example. And they've never been shy of supporting Sinn Fein or the IRA when it suited them in the past. But when there is a "rejection of sectarianism and the desire for wider change among working class people" the SWP are there because it "opens up the possibility of the re-emergence of class politics." And wherever such a possibility exists, left-wingers like the SWP will be there to divert workers' struggles into trade union actions and campaigns which sabotage the development of the class struggle.
And what a victory it was. Who would have thought, even a year ago, that sixty thousand people would turn up to greet delegates of the World Trade Organisation. Who'd have thought that trade unionists would be marching with environmentalists people dressed as turtles marching with sacked steelworkers, the topless lesbian avengers mingling with farmers. Churchgoers with the anarchist black-block. The mass protests helped focus world-wide attention on what the WTO really stands for and it crumbled under the pressure. Forget all their talk about 'free trade', the WTO is nothing more than a nasty little organisation fighting for the rights of multinational organisations to dismantle every country's labour and environmental laws" SchNEWS website bulletin, 10.12.99
This vision of the Seattle events last December is common to many who see mobilisations of this kind like the June 18 'Carnival against Capitalism' in London or the various events timed to coincide witous events timed to coincide with the Seattle demonstration, including a protest against the privatisation of the tubes in London as a new and effective way of fighting against capitalism. We don't doubt that of many of those who take part in these actions are motivated by a sincere and increasingly widespread disgust with what capitalism is doing to this planet. But those who actually want to get rid of this system need to consider why this view is also being broadcast by the big guns of the bourgeois media. The latter have given enormous publicity to the events in Seattle (and London) and have unfailingly described them as a new form of anti-capitalism, either as a dangerously subversive movement or as a refreshing response of ordinary citizens and of small countries to the monster of 'globalisation', and furthermore, as a movement that can win significant victories even faced with the massive presence of the police. In short, it is time to sniff out the presence of a vast manipulation by the ruling class.
The mythology of globalisation
For a start, the theory of 'globalisation' is basically a product of the huge bourgeois campaigns about the 'death of communism' which followed the collapse of the eastern bloc at the end of the 80s. Essential to this theory is the idea tl to this theory is the idea that with the disappearance of the old 'Communist' bloc, capitalism has become a truly global system. Its more open ideologists those who were already singing the praises of liberalism and free trade in the 80s argued that now the last barriers to the free movement of capital had been removed, and with the generous assistance of the 'computer revolution' and the world-wide web the entire system could look forward to an unprecedented period of growth and prosperity.
The whole theory was deeply anti-marxist, not only because it made the usual false amalgam between Stalinism and communism, but also because it aimed to strike a blow against the marxist conception of the decadence of capitalism, which holds that capitalism is a system in historic decline and has been since the first world war. For marxism capitalism effectively became 'globalised' not at the end but at the beginning of the 20th century, and it was for this very reason that the system reached the end of its progressive function for mankind and became a giant barrier to further development, dragging humanity down in the coils of its mortal crisis. Capital has created a world economy, but because of its inherent contradictions, this can only be the basis for a really unified world through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
But just as the bourgeois drug of fascism engenders the equally bourgeois side-effect of anti-fascism, so globalisation ideology gives rise to a bourgeois anti-globalisation ideology. This latter points to the undoubted ravages of capitalism especially the accelerating destruction of the environment and the savage exploitation of workers in the poorest countries and then erects a wholly false alternative between, on the one hand, global corporations owing allegiance only to their own profit margins, and, on the other hand, the national rights of peoples and small countries (and even big ones). A radical version of this ideology is provided by the Schnews report mentioned at the beginning:
"We want a new millennium based on economic democracy, not economic totalitarianism. The future is possible for humans and other species only if the principles of competition, organised greed, commodification of all life, monoculture, monopolies and centralised corporate control of our daily lives enshrined in the WTO are replaced by the principles of protection of people and nature, the obligation of giving and sharing diversity, and the decentralisation and self-organisation enshrined in our diverse cultures and national constitutions" (Vandana Shiva).
/i> (Vandana Shiva).
The key to this statement isn't the parts that are true like how capitalism turns everything into commodities, goods for sale, but the part at the end about preserving "our national constitutions". This same commitment to defending the rights of the nation against unpatriotic international capitalism was emphasised by Clinton who said that he was in deep sympathy with the Seattle protesters, and by the US trade unions who shared his abiding concern about the vicious exploitation of children in the poorer countries as a pretext for advocating US trade embargoes on the products of such exploitation and thus protecting the American economy and American jobs. But it was also demonstrated by the French delegation at the WTO which distinguished itself with its anti-American rhetoric on issues such as GM foods and ecology, and by the French 'peasant leader' Jose Bove who was filmed by the French media promoting French cheese outside MacDonalds Seattle. This is bourgeois anti-globalisation in a nutshell.
The real reasons for the failure of the Seattle WTO conference
These apparently absurd contradictions are a perfect expression of the fact that while global capital is indeed a real power, it exists only as the al power, it exists only as the product of the clash between national economies, between what the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin once described as the national "state capitalists trusts" which dominate the planet. The so-called 'multinationals' do not constitute another power standing over all the national economies in the final analysis these companies are merely a subordinate expression of the state capitalist and imperialist leviathans. Neither are the different countries divided into a protectionist camp and a free trade camp: those who advocate free trade for their own products abroad are the most fervent defenders of protectionism for their own domestic economies. And it's this ceaseless rivalry between the great national capitalist predators, not the protests on the Seattle streets, that is the real reason for the failure of the latest WTO talks.
In fact, from the beginning the WTO was itself a spawn of these very rivalries. Its predecessor, the GATT, created in 1947, had been an instrument of the USA, its function being to express and strengthen America's commercial domination of its imperialist bloc through preferential customs duties. After the break-up of the Russian bloc it was the European states, now striving to escape US hegemony, which took the initiative of replacing the GATT with a more 'flexible' and morT with a more 'flexible' and more 'equal' structure. This led to the formation of the WTO in 1994. What the 1999 WTO summit showed was the sharpening of the trade war between the USA and the European states: its failure to adopt new rules of functioning at this conference expressed the fact that the conflicts of interests it seeks to regulate are becoming more and more irreconcilable.
The only movement against capitalism is proletarian and communist
The bourgeoisie has every reason to hide the real reasons for the failure of the Seattle conference, because they show the impossibility of capitalism ever overcoming its anarchic and dismembered nature. At the same time, the exploiters in every country have a common interest in selling the idea that capitalism can be tamed or even threatened to the core by a 'movement' made up of any number of different classes, categories and causes in which the working class appears as just one pressure group among many, duly identified with the trade unions, a 'movement' which propagates the notion that national interests are somehow a more democratic and human alternative to the impersonal global power of capital. A real 'anti-capitalism' would have to turn this inverted logic right side up: moribund capitalism cannot be reformed or tamed, and it can only be threatened and overthrown by an international movement of the internationally exploited class, the proletariat, which has rediscovered its programme of constituting a world-wide communist society.
Amos
Exceptionally strong cyclones (250km per hour) on the Indian coast in October; flood rains in western Africa between July and October, and in Venezuela in December; drought in the Middle East and Australia; storms hitting western Europe in late December. The list of meteorological calamities in 1999 was endless and has to be added to all the others of the past few years (Hurricane Mitch in central America, floods in China and Bangla Desh, etc etc). The year 2000 has begun in the same way with cyclones and floods wreaking havoc in southern Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people have made homeless, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and above all Mozambique.
The death toll has yet to be established, but in addition to the hundreds and perhaps thousands swept away by the floods, many more will die from the disease and malnutrition that follow. As usual it is the proletariat and the oppressed who pay the heaviest price for these ‘natural’ disasters, in deaths, injuries, and homes destroyed. The bourgeoisie limits itself to counting up the damage and pouring out crocodile tears. Just consider, for example, Britain’s contribution to the flood relief work in Mozambique. Its a drop iwork in Mozambique. Its a drop in the ocean compared to what the British government poured into the ‘humanitarian’ job of reducing Serbia to rubble.
Is all this unavoidable? The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation has for years been issuing warnings about the evolution of global climate. In France, after the December storms, the press was filled with popularised explanations about the greenhouse effect and global warming. The boldest journalists humbly begged our government’s - because we know how concerned they with the common good – to find new policies in order to reduce the build-up of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, CFCs, methane. It’s all a lot of noise for nothing: things just go on until the next catastrophe.
The total responsibility of irresponsible capitalism
We are not trying to deny the complexity of climatic phenomena: indeed, developing a better understanding and finding a clearer model for them is still one of the great scientific goals that humanity must strive for. We don’t claim to be able to offer the formal proof that there is a single connecting link between all these exceptional climatic events. Nevertheless it remainc events. Nevertheless it remains the case that:
The natural catastrophes are thus not quite so ‘natural’ after all. For the first time in the history of humanity, man has been influencing the global evolution of climate at a stupefying pace. But the bourgeoisie does not want to know and above all it doesn’t want to give itself the means to know. It cannot afford to establish an irrefutable link between the destructive activities of capitalism (such as industrial pollution, but also the irrationality of transport in the megacities or the massive deforestation of the Amazon) and the climatic irregularities. But for over twenty years now the scientific community has been ringing the alarm bells about the greenhouse effect, the risks posed by the deforestation of the Amazon, etc.
At the most, the bourgeoisie will agree to take these links into account as one hypothesis in a debate of ideas, taking refuge in the argument that the scientists, in the present state of their knowledge, cannot pronounce categorically on the subject; furthermore they are rather fond of the thesis that global w of the thesis that global warming is the result of a climatic cycle that takes place on a very long term basis, i.e. longer than human history. This ‘alternative theory’ of long climatic cycles is however less credible given that following this logic, we are more likely to be heading towards a new ice age! Here we can see the irresponsibility and arrogance of a bourgeoisie which doesn’t have any ‘scientific certainty’.
But what the bourgeoisie is also trying to hide is the total responsibility of the capitalist system as regards the consequences of natural catastrophes. Whether we’re talking about storms, cyclones, floods, droughts or earthquakes, the frightful scale of material damage and loss of life derives entirely from the laws of capitalist profit: crazy rates of urbanisation (50% of the world’s population are squeezed into urban agglomerations); jerry-building of all kinds (as in Turkey where the housing hit by the earthquake turned out to have been constructed with cement that lacked enough sand); modification or destruction of natural hydraulic networks; deforestation leading to soil erosion and floods; uncontrolled demographic growth, etc. To this can be added the deficiency of the systems of prediction and aid (1).
It’s also true that capitalism doesn’t have to call on Mother Nature to provide catastrophes: it’s quite capable of producing them itself. In the space of a month, as well as the Erika, two other oil spillages have devastated coastal regions in Turkey and Brazil. Then there are the various nuclear accidents, from Three Mile Island in the US to Tokaimura in Japan via Chernobyl, the Seveso dioxin leak, numerous rail and air accidents, air pollution (causing among other things a considerable increase in allergic and infectious diseases), massive or gradual food poisoning resulting from the uncontrolled use of pesticides, herbicides, inappropriate animal feed, etc. Even in the industrialised countries, drinking tap water is becoming increasingly risky.
You could go on and on with this criminal indictment of the system. The basic point is that capitalism is totally incapable of avoiding these catastrophic scenarios. And this is because the phenomena of pollution or the various accidents are a pure product of the logic of a system based on profit at the expense of human lives.
Ecology: a reformist illusion
Those who are convinceace="Arial">Those who are convinced of the contrary have all sorts of ideas about reforming capitalism, which they label as ‘ultra-liberal’ or ‘globalised’ in order to hide the real nature of the system. The advocates of the ecological movement never stop calling on the different states – the ones who bear the main responsibility for pollution in all its forms – to become aware of the threat to the planet and to apply the resolutions adopted at the various international conferences on the environment.
This is the old reformist fairy tale about the ogre who becomes a vegetarian out of his love for children. These conferences are invariably forums where the competing capitalist states spout a lot of fine rhetoric about their concern for the planet while making absolutely sure that their own national interests come first. The bourgeoisie has yet to apply the measures voted at the Rio Convention in 1992. The conferences in Kyoto (1997), Buenos Aires (1998) and recently in Bonn (1999) merely provided the occasion for the settling of scores between the USA and the European Union over the ‘market’ of polluting emissions, over the national ceilings of emissions. But how could it be otherwise in the epoch of imperialism, of every man for himself, exacerbated by the mortal crisis of capated by the mortal crisis of capitalism?
Old tankers regularly spill their loads into the ocean. This is not a result of statistical laws, or even of ‘globalisation’, but of the laws of capitalism, which dictate that you have to exploit men and materials at the cheapest possible cost. The French state, which is happy to denounce Malta or Panama for getting around the law by sailing under different flags, is quiet about its own use of similar devises, such as the TAAF (Terres Australes et Antarctiques Francais) which enable it to get round its own legislation and carry on using floating wrecks like the Erika. The big industrial powers all use these tricks thanks to a mafia-like network of intermediaries.
The fuel being carried by the Erika was the scrapings of the bottom of the barrel, not for consumption in France according to its own rules. According to the Canard Enchaine of 5.1.00 it was going to be sold to power stations in Somalia or Ethiopia, contributing just a little more to the global pollution of the atmosphere. The French state and Total were perfectly well aware of this. The peripheral countries are in such a terrible mess that they more and more serve as dustbins for the big powers.
This shows up the hypocrisy of the measures announced by the Jospin government, typical of this class of gangsters whose concern for ecology was demonstrated by the bombing of Serbia. The much-vaunted ‘ecotax’ is a clear expression of capitalism’s total inability to fight against pollution: when it was finally authorised, it could be set against fines! And, in line with the Kyoto and Bonn conferences, the rich states can also buy their ‘quota’ of pollution form the poor ones, who anyway continue to pollute heavily because their technology is so obsolescent.
But what else can you expect from an economic system which from its very beginnings has crushed men and destroyed nature in the name of accumulating profit?
Capitalism: a story of ‘muck and blood’
Ecology is the ideology of a desperate petty bourgeoisie when it’s not a mere cover for the ruling class itself. Either way it is quite unable to understand the real source of what it sees as the ‘abuses’ of capitalism (2).
Marxism, the revolutionary theory of the only class which has a futthe only class which has a future to offer humanity, is alone able to understand capitalism in its historic dimension and not in the light of moral imperatives which either serve to perpetuate the myth of capitalism as eternal progress, or which fall into the nostalgia for the natural economies which preceded capitalism. In comparison to the latter, capitalism, in which all production is geared towards the market and in which accumulation for accumulation is the motor of economic activity, is an extraordinarily dynamic system which has developed the productive forces as never before, making it possible for mankind to go beyond it and live in a society of abundance. In its inexorable march forwards, capitalism always saw nature as a commodity to be used at will, as it did with men from its first period of primitive accumulation – as Marx put it in Capital, it came into the world "oozing muck and blood from its very pores".
And as Rosa Luxemburg added,
"it wasn’t only at its birth that capitalism ‘oozed muck and blood from its very pores’, but throughout its march across the world" (Accumulation of Capital). Everything operates as if "at the same time that mankind masters nature, man seems to become ensature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy…All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force" (Marx, Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper, April 1856).
The planet-wide domination of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century and its entry into decadence with its procession of wars, famines, massacres and misery has only accentuated this tendency.
This has been an epoch in which
"all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a saturated world market; an epoch, therefore, of as permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, by the desperate pillaging of national resources by each nation as it tries to survive in the pitiless rat-race of the world market. The consequences of all this for the environment are now becoming crystal clear; the intensification of ecological problems can be measured according to the different phases of capitalist decadence" (‘It’s c>" (‘It’s capitalism that’s poisoning the earth’, IR 63).
Capitalism’s further slide into its phase of decomposition in the last decade of the 20th century has only exacerbated these features.
We cannot have any illusion that capitalism and its ruling class will find any escape from the suicidal path it is now on. Only the working class, through the development of its struggles, can put forward the perspective of a society of harmony between man and his environment.
BTD
NOTES
(1) the Venezuelan president Chavez, who was warned on the eve of 16 December (the day of the catastrophe) of the critical situation in the state of Varga didn’t bother to raise a finger as he was more concerned with electoral preparations (see WR 231) .
(2) For a more developed analysis see ‘It’s capitalism that’s poisoning the earth’ in International Review 63
The Austrian Freedom Party is one of those populist parties which are emerging all over Europe in response to a general discontent. Fuelled by the crisis and social decomposition, their whole programme boils down to racist and xenophobic hysteria and the rejection of the traditional party machines. In Andalusia (against the Moroccans), in France with Le Pen, we h), in France with Le Pen, we have seen similar xenophobic mobilisations. In Austria this fear of being ‘swamped by foreigners’ has been reinforced by the projected opening up of western Europe to the eastern European countries. Similarly the rejection of the ‘establishment’ has been common to all the right wing parties in Europe, since this enables them to present themselves as a new tendency free from the sleaze and personal ambitions of the regular politicians. When you bear in mind that to be a state employee in Austria you have to hold the card of one or other of the two main parties, you can see easily why part of the population feels excluded by these big apparatuses which have shared power for over 30 years.
But none of this makes Haider, any more than Le Pen, a 'new Hitler'. What brought Hitler to power in the 1930s was not the popular pressure of the anti-semitic masses (as the bourgeoisie would like us to think) but the very real needs of German capital. Faced with a violent economic crisis, it was vital for the German bourgeoisie to organise the state in a disciplined manner around a single objective: war. Hitler had a programme for German capital. This involved the concentration of capital, the strengthening of the executive and a clear orientation towards building a war economy. This was a specr economy. This was a specific, original programme which represented a break with previous policies.
Haider’s Freedom Party doesn’t have a specific programme; you could say it doesn’t have a programme at all. Apart from the populist propaganda, once it arrived in power, it simply took up the programme of the Conservative Party, acting as a mere buttress for the latter. What’s more, this programme is no different from that of the previous coalition between the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, which governed the country up to the last elections. At the beginning of 2000 Austria unveiled its third ‘budget of rigour’. Before the last election all the parties were promising economic growth and an increase in public spending. In fact, even before the elections took place, the policies of the future government were already fixed, in continuity with that of its predecessors: it would adopt a policy of austerity, dictated by the European Union. The same European Union which has waxed so indignant about this new government and wants us to believe that its austerity programme is the result of its fascist tendencies, whereas it is only following the EU’s directives on attacking the working class.
By accepting the extreme right in its government, the Austrian stategovernment, the Austrian state knew quite well what it was doing. These populist parties, whose job is basically to rally those who are disgusted with the political process and channel their anger behind demagogic slogans, can be a certain inconvenience. The rise of their influence as opposition parties, nourished by social decomposition, can become an embarrassment for the normal operation of the bourgeois political game. This is exactly what happened with the National Front in France, or the MSI in Italy. In such situations, it becomes necessary to deflate these parties and render them a bit more reasonable.
The French bourgeoisie, having initially done everything it could to inflate the influence of the NF, then contrived to split it in two when it became too much of an encumbrance. The Austrian bourgeoisie, for its part, seems to be following the example of its Italian cousins, who chose to recycle the MSI by absorbing it into the Berlusconi government. Today the MSI has become a ‘presentable’ and better controlled right wing party. Tomorrow, having carried out policies no different from that of previous governments, the Freedom Party will also probably find its popularity has been eroded. In the meantime, Austrian social democracy will have had a rest-cure in opposition; having fought against the ‘fascistsagainst the ‘fascists’ it would have regained its lost virginity and this will help it to obscure the memory of its blows against the working class.
If the freedom party really was a fascist party, it wouldn’t be in power today. For a fascist party to come to power, the social conditions have to be in place. Fascism was the product of a particular historical situation which made it both possible and necessary. Thus, in the 1930s, it was because the world proletariat had been defeated (and not least in Germany where social democracy drowned the revolution in blood between 1918 and 1923), and because the crisis imposed the march towards a new world war, that fascism was called upon to take control. Today, the proletariat is not defeated, and thus, despite the crisis, world war is not on the agenda. Therefore the bourgeoisie has no need, and no possibility, to exert its dictatorship in the form of fascism. It has at its disposal a much more effective instrument in today’s conditions: democracy.
Chaining the proletariat to bourgeois democracy
Here lies the essential reason for all this barrage. If the bourgeoisie is working so hard to present the Freedom Party as a fascist menace, it’s because these events provide it with an ideal oppnts provide it with an ideal opportunity to stoke up it ideological campaigns about the defence of democracy, which are so necessary at a time when it is forced to hammer working class living conditions (1).
This campaign is in full continuity with all the others which, since the collapse of the eastern bloc, have called upon the workers to defend the democratic state against dictators of all kinds (the noise about Pinochet being one of the most recent examples).
In fact, while it can have different faces, capitalist rule is always a dictatorship. Today, in the countries of western Europe, it’s not fascist governments which are throwing the workers onto the dole and cutting wages. It’s not fascist states which are imposing work flexibility and making working conditions more and more dangerous and difficult.
In the present historical situation, which holds out the perspective of massive class confrontations, democracy is the best mask for the domination of capital. In the present strategy of the left in government in the central countries of capitalism, Haider is a godsend for the bourgeoisie. It uses him to increase the credit ratings of the left, which is presented as the best rampart against fascism, unlike the right which capitulates and even shaich capitulates and even shares government with it.
The workers must refuse to be caught up in the false alternative between fascism and democracy, which are only two sides of the same coin. Today the real historical alternative posed to the proletariat is more than ever socialism or barbarism, and by far the greater danger to the proletariat becoming conscious of this alternative is the mystification of democracy.
H 25.2.2000
(1) Apart from this campaign against the working class, the Haider affair is also being used as a tool of inter-imperialist rivalries, particularly by the French and American bourgeoisies. At a time when the German bourgeoisie is trying to expunge its past in order to develop its global power, its rivals can hardly fail to miss the opportunity to throw the memory of Nazism in its face again.
Contrast this slow penny-pinching response with the rush to give ‘humanitarian assistance’ to the population of Kosovo last spring. Although the repression of the Kosovans had been going on for some time under the eyes of the great powers, it was not until NATO decided to intervene in the situation that billions were spent that billions were spent - on reducing Serbia’s infrastructure to rubble. The war in Kosovo created a humanitarian disaster, forcing hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee the NATO bombing and resulting offensive and ethnic cleansing by the Serbian army. When it comes to spending money on war the bourgeoisie has no problems at all.
This was true with regards to Mozambique during its civil war which ended in 1992. The major imperialist powers backed one side or other, FRELIMO or RENAMO, in a vicious conflict that left many thousands dead. In an dark reminder of this war, the floods have churned up old minefields and scattered them across the land, creating further dangers for the flood victims when they come to rebuild their shattered lives.
During the last decade the number of wars in Africa has continued to grow. The war in the Congo is a stark example. Zimbabwe has sent 11,000 troops to prop up the Kabila regime even though its own economy faces collapse. "Inflation at over 60% hurts everybody...70% of the population are deemed to be living in dire poverty. The country is in the grip of a two-month fuel shortage [while] large quantities of Zimbabwe’s scarce fuel are going to the war in Congo..." (The Economist, 19/2/00). The country is on the verge of bankruptcy, i on the verge of bankruptcy, importing only what it can pay for in cash..
The floods that have hit Mozambique have affected its neighbour Zimbabwe as well. The Zimbabwe Air force allocated 3 helicopters to rescue flood victims while "Most of the 24 serviceable air force helicopters are on military service in the Congo" (Times, 1/3/00). The physical damage caused by the floods will inevitably further shatter the economy as well.
And let us not forget how the Blair government quietly decided to honour its agreement to supply Zimbabwe with the attack helicopters it requires to carry on with its intervention in Congo. This is no isolated breech of New Labour’s ‘ethical’ principles, because Labour’s ethics are precisely those of imperialism. Even ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ aid serves imperialist purposes, as shown by Clare Short, international development secretary, who invited Uganda, Rwanda, Colombia and Indonesia, among others, to a conference to review military spending: "Ms Short insists that her department will not necessarily be reducing the size of poorer nations’ armies. In the past she admits, ‘military expenditure was seen as bad ... something to be cut ruthlessly, without regard for the very real securgard for the very real security threats that countries might face.’" (The Guardian, 17.2.00).
What this boils down to is that as far as capitalism is concerned, the proper use of helicopters is not to save flood victims, but to defend your country’s ‘security’, ie, its ability to compete in the imperialist free for all.
Trevor
Last year, the humanitarian organisation ‘Medecins sans Frontiers’ (MSF) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Twenty years before, the illustrious pioneer of ‘non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs), Amnesty International, had already received this supreme distinction. When it hands out such rewards, the world bourgeoisie always recognises its most faithful servants, as can be seen from the long list of warmongers who have been converted into doves of peace, such as Begin and Sadat.
The NGOs were originally an ideological response of the western bloc to the eastern bloc, around the theme of the ‘rights of man’ which took off under the Carter presidency. Although some of them were set up before the 1970s, their success and expansion coincided with the beginning of the decline of the Stalinist bloc. They thus served as an ideological pillar of the western bloc against its eastern rival, and thus an essential pillar of imperialist war.
The first NGO to find a place in the strategy of the western bloc was Amnesty International (AI), an organisation founded in 1961. Paradion founded in 1961. Paradoxically it was built from the remains of the pacifist movements that had been animated, financed, and used throughout the 1960s by the different Stalinist parties, and in the service of the propaganda of the Russian bloc. AI was to become the model for other NGOs created in the ensuing decades: it claimed to be independent, it worked against arbitrary arrest and torture, it worked on behalf of political prisoners. It launched campaigns against torture and no doubt saved a few unfortunate people. But above all, in the 1980s, AI was to become an extremely important tool in President Reagan’s arms race, in the campaigns against the ‘Evil Empire’ in the east. Of course, AI also denounced the excesses of the western bloc and its annual reports would always be a slight irritant for the big western powers.
But this was only the necessary background to ensure the effectiveness of its main job, which was to point the finger at the eastern bloc (through the condemnation of repression and prison camps in the USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia). What came out of AI’s reports was always the idea that there are such things as countries where the law is respected, even though they are not perfect. Along with others, AI played the role of spreading the notion that the horrors of the on that the horrors of the world are the fault of ‘dictators’ of various kinds, and never of a decadent system whose mode of operation resides principally in the development of militarism and war.
An example of AI’s way of operating: the Bokassa affair. In the 1970s, as in other countries of its sphere of influence, France was directly implicated in the rise to power of Bokassa in the Central African Republic. Giscard’s France even paid for the farce of Bokassa’s coronation as ‘Emperor’. But Bokassa had too much of a tendency to mix up his personal interests with those of his sponsoring power. And he made an error in the way he dealt with the rebellious schoolchildren in his country. The repression of the revolt was bloody, as was his reign in general. France denied it, but its secret services organised the fall of the Emperor with the aid of the Central African Republic’s ambassador in France, who in turn informed AI. The campaign by this ‘non-governmental’ organisation justified an intervention by France, which sent in the paras to install a new president. AI’s campaign consisted in claiming that, thanks to its work, Africa had rid itself of a bloody dictator. In fact France had rid itself of one embarrassing clown and replaced him with another. The populaced him with another. The population, of course, gained nothing.
Denouncing repression, expressing solidarity with the oppressed, is a basic task for revolutionaries. And at the time we indeed denounced this African bourgeoisie which had ably imitated the brutality of its protectors. But the denunciations voiced by AI had a different aim: to enable France to get a grip in a strategic country, to deal with the dangers posed by a monster of its own making. AI cannot work in any other way. It reports on and exposes many of the world’s horrors. But even though this work is often done by people who are genuinely indignant about it, its net result is to provide an ideological cover for the ‘democratic’ powers, to justify their armed interventions.
From the so-called ‘humanisation’ of war to openly calling for war
While Amnesty International was mainly effective during the cold war, other NGOs, also posing as ‘independent’, have developed over the last couple of decades with the same aims. This is particularly the case with the NGOs which go by the label ‘sans frontiers’ (without frontiers).
The objective of these NGOs is, first of all, of these NGOs is, first of all, to ‘humanise’ war. The Red Cross already existed last century; its aim was to establish norms that would supposedly put limits to barbarism. Since its creation, the Red Cross always laid claim to ‘neutrality’. In fact, never in human history have so many ‘humanitarian’ conventions been signed and never has there been so much barbarism.
Pre-capitalist societies saw cruelty and bestiality in human relations as an ordeal to which the gods subjected mankind. The bourgeoisie see it as a fact of human nature, a fact of war. However, bourgeois law does establish this separation: war is a professional, political matter. The ‘punishment’ of the enemy must be separated from the act of war. The enemy must be treated with humanity. In fact, the more this separation has been made, the more barbarism and humanitarianism have complemented each other. This ‘complementary separation’ has reached the level of caricature with the NGOs, which, as their name suggests, claim not to be attached to any particular camp.
In order to prove their ‘independence’ these ‘humanitarian’ NGOs, like Medecins sans Frontiers have gone through their own ‘split’. It’s no accident that t146;. It’s no accident that the MSF originated in a split with the ‘neutral’ style of the Red Cross in the Biafran war in 1968. This was a very bloody war which set the federal Nigerian government against the Biafran separatists. This conflict did not correspond directly to the confrontation between the two blocs, since both America and Russia supported the unity of Nigeria. In fact it expressed an attempt by second rank powers to escape their protector’s grip. Biafra was firmly supported by Gaullist France, which was trying to establish its ‘independence’ from NATO, while at the same time putting a spanner in the works of its British ally. Biafra was also supported by China which was trying to play an ‘independent’ role in Africa. The MSF no doubt brought some aid to the suffering in Biafra, but they were there above all as an ideological expression of the French bourgeoisie in Africa. The population of Nigeria were dragged down into a real hell, and out of this misery we saw the birth of a new form of ‘humanitarianism’. Under the cover of autonomy and of emergency aid, this was a new ideological spearhead for imperialist war. Its gospel was ‘the right to intervene’, and the TV was the witness to its exploits.
At the end of the 1970s MSF made it quite clear that itSF made it quite clear that it was an instrument of the western bloc when it carried out the heavily symbolic operations around the Vietnamese refugees. In the same ‘boat for Vietnam’ there was the pro-western Aron and the Stalinist intellectual, recycled into a Maoist and re-recycled into a ‘humanitarian’, Jean Paul Sartre. In the 1980s, these ‘humanitarians without frontiers’ (a whole pack of organisations with similar names appeared during this time) provided precious ideological assistance to the American action against the Russians in Afghanistan. The brutes who now govern this country, the Taliban, have not been very grateful because they have kicked MSF out of the country.
‘Humanitarians’ in the service of militarism
The ideology of the ‘rights of man’ developed by the western bloc, and the more recent doctrine of ‘the right to humanitarian intervention’, which has been elaborated, among others by one of the most cynical of all bourgeois politicians, Francois Mitterand, were to become the pretext for all the imperialist interventions of the great powers after the fall of the Stalinist bloc. Whether with the UN or with NATO, with the USA on its own or with alliances (at least the facade of als (at least the facade of alliances), the great powers have based all their murderous interventions on the ideology of humanitarianism. Who better to support these actions than the NGOs who had already won their humanitarian spurs and demonstrated their ‘autonomy’?
The operations in Iraq carried out by the USA around the Kurds are a good example of this combination of humanitarianism and militarism. Operation ‘Provide Comfort’ in Kurdistan in 1991 reached the very summit of hypocrisy. Saddam Hussein had brutally repressed the Kurdish opposition, which had been led to believe at the end of the Gulf war that it would be supported by the great powers. The USA did a remake of the coup it had carried off the year before, reinforcing the ‘safety’ zones in the north of Iraq; the other powers followed in their footsteps; the humanitarian NGOs came out with their propaganda against the evil Saddam; and all this on the back of the Kurdish poor, who were forced to flee into the mountains. It was tragically symbolic: Saddam killed them by bombing them as they fled; the ‘humanitarian-military’ forces killed them by dropping aid packages on their heads.
Since then a regular feature of preparations for military intervention has been themilitary intervention has been the pressing demands placed on ‘democratic governments’ by the various humanitarian organisations. In this stage-show, the democratic powers, defenders of the ‘rights of man’, too slow in their reactions, intervene under the media pressure exerted by the NGOs, which are now the model of everything that is best in humanity. In reality, the NGOs, acting on behalf of the most aggressive militarism, are the petrels that announce the storms of war. This can even involve masquerades like operation ‘Restore Hope’ in Somalia, with the huge media coverage of the American intervention, with the sacks of rice donated by French schoolchildren, with the inevitable Kouchner (later to become administrator general of Kosovo) transporting these sacks in front of the cameras. All this ended up in a fiasco. Somalia is now forgotten.
Sometimes – and this is going to happen more and more often – the NGOs come into direct conflict with each other depending on the imperialist powers they serve. This was the case in Rwanda, where we could see the French bourgeoisie, which was directly responsible for the genocide, using the NGO humanitarians to ‘protect’ the populations from the war – in fact, to protect their own proteges, in other words, those who had orga other words, those who had organised the massacres. This operation was a caricature of ‘humanitarian militarism’, with the French legionnaires and the MSF standing side by side. Obviously the new masters of Rwanda, who are pro-American, weren’t duped about France’s intentions. Thus the US has launched a parallel humanitarian operation ‘Support Hope’. Humanitarianism has become an indispensable weapon of war.
It was in the war in ex-Yugoslavia that this complicity between the NGOs and the military forces was most evident.
The NGOs were directly involved in setting up all the military actions by the western powers in ex-Yugoslavia, as for example when the USA entered into the Bosnian conflict in 1993, which was preceded by a demand by the NGOs for the parachuting of food and medicine into eastern Bosnia. The NGOs were the ones who called loudest for the intervention of the great powers to help the two-and-a-half million people who had been displaced by the war; they provided the pretext for the deployment of the Franco-British Rapid Reaction Force in the spring of 1995, then of SFOR under the aegis of the UN. But it was above all in Kosovo that we saw an intense agitation by the NGOs, campaigning against Milosevic’s treatment of the Albanic’s treatment of the Albanian population. It was they in particular who drew the media’s attention to massacres like the one at Racak in January 1999, which was a key moment in the preparation of the NATO bombing of Serbia. The NGOs therefore actively participated in the lead-up to the NATO intervention in March 1999. The exodus of the Kosovo Albanians, which was the fault both of Milosevic’s soldiers and of the western powers and their allies in the KLA, was exploited to the hilt to justify the NATO action. This conflict was the most hideous expression of the way that ‘humanitarian’ sentiments are used to justify war. Did the action of the NGOs, and of the military powers, improve the lot of the refugees? What we can be sure of is that the sufferings of the Kosovo populations was used as an excuse for militarism.
To understand the role of the NGOs in the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie, the best thing is to let them speak for themselves. The report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on the NATO actions in ex-Yugoslavia is revealing: it says that the allies "violated the rights of war" (by killing civilians), but "they didn’t commit any war crimes" (Le Monde, 10.2.2000). All the Jesuitical cynicism of the humanitarians is in this report. An NGO s is in this report. An NGO like HRW can’t say "The allies did a really good job in killing 500 civilians". No, they "violated the rights of war". But, "they didn’t commit any war crimes".
It’s with this kind of reasoning that the NGOs attract honest people, people who pose questions. After all the NGOs denounce all abuses, wherever they come from, but, there are some abuses which are ‘understandable’, which fall into the category of ‘inevitable collateral damage’, which violate the rights of war; and then there are the ‘real war criminals’, genocidal tyrants like Milosevic. All the justifications for military action by the great powers in the last ten years have followed this kind of reasoning. The NGOs denounce injustice, come to the aid of the unfortunate, are vigilant against all abuses – the better to play their role of drumming up support for war. The current war in Chechnya is the latest episode in this devil’s dance. Here again we are hearing the NGOs and the humanitarians denouncing the crimes of the Russian army. But it’s not at the same volume as in Kosovo. Then the tone was triumphalist; now its an ‘impotent’ denunciation, because they know quite well that the western powers are lettin the western powers are letting Russia do its work; because the NGOs also have the role of dissipating energy in dead-end protests, in powerless despair.
Our aim here isn’t to point the finger at those who get drawn into these humanitarian adventures, often at considerable risk to themselves. Our aim is to denounce the real function of these organisations, which lead many people to say: ‘OK, they have their faults, but at least they’re doing something’. To which we say: what they do serves the interests of imperialism perfectly.
Kouchner wrote somewhere that "the great adventure of the 20th century was called marxism. The great adventure of the 21st century is beginning and it’s called the humanitarian movement". We say that if marxism ceases to be the great adventure of humanity in the 21st century, this will be the century of the triumph of humanitarian militarism – of the destruction of humanity.
Pto
The circus of the elections for London mayor and the Greater London Assembly has rumbled on for months. From the controversies over the choice of candidates by the Labour and Tory Party to the interventions of Malcolm McLaren as a candidate and Chris Evans with his £200,000 for Ken Livingstone, there has been a constant attempt to keep this innovation in local democracy in the news. Jeffrey Archer was originally selected because he was supposed to be some sort of ‘character’. His replacement, Stephen Norris, was more famous for his mistresses than his political standing. With the Labour Party the saga that finally lead to the election of Frank Dobson over Glenda Jackson (significantly an ex-film star) and Livingstone, and the subsequent decision of the latter to stand as an ‘independent’, was dragged out longer than even the worst soap opera would ever have dared.
But why?
Most people don’t know the name of their local parish, district or borough councillor, or even their MP. Yet for months, the whole country, 85% of which neither lives nor works in London, has been treated to the endless twists and d to the endless twists and turns of this particular local election - from the question of the candidates to the intricacies of how to finance the tube, and the history of the GLC.
The reason for all this attention is not because there is the possibility of a massive change in living or working conditions in the capital. Trains are not going to start running on time and stop being cancelled. Buses are still going to be caught in traffic jams. The wait in casualty departments will still be measured in hours, while wards and hospitals still face closure. There will still be people sleeping rough on the streets. Anything the new Mayor or GLA can change will be marginal, and, with the explicit commitment of all the candidates to business and the capitalist economy, the police and repression, it is clear that any changes will not be undertaken with any concern for the interests of the working class.
All the candidates have commented on the great wealth in London and implied that somehow this makes the problems faced in the capital capable of an easy solution. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no way that capitalism would redirect any of its resources away from the pursuit of profits.
What has been happening with the t has been happening with the elections and all their build-up is a prolonged campaign for the ‘democratic process’ itself - the lie that somehow workers (or any part of the non-exploiting population) can have an effect on how capitalism runs our lives.
The revolutionary position
The understanding that communists have developed about capitalist democracy, its elections, councils and parliaments is based on the historic experience of the working class. In the Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship presented by Lenin to the First Congress of the Communist International in March 1919 (see International Review 100 for the full text) this is clearly summarised. "All socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists."
The specific attitude of communists toward parliament has changed since the nineteenth century because of "the change in the role of parliament itself. In the preceding rliament itself. In the preceding historical epoch parliament was an instrument of the developing capitalist system, and as such played a role that was in a certain sense progressive. In the modern conditions of unbridled imperialism parliament has become a weapon of falsehood, deception and violence, a place of enervating chatter" (The Communist Party and Parliament, presented to the Second Congress of the CI, August 1920). In 1871 Marx summarised the decision to be made in elections as "which member of the ruling class was to represent and repress the people in parliament" (The Civil War in France). In 1917 Lenin showed how the institution had continued to function: "parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the ‘common people’" (State and Revolution).
In a word, capitalist democracy is a con-trick. The real power of the ruling class lies behind closed doors, in the boardrooms, in the corridors of Whitehall, in the armed forces. The job of capitalist ‘democracy’ is to try and convince us we have a stake in our own exploitation.
With the elections for the London mayor the ruling class is showing that it knows there are suspicions about what the Labour government has the Labour government has done, but telling us that there’s always the ballot box, the lie that we can change the way we live and work within capitalism.
Livingstone is no alternative
In every election there will usually be one party or candidate that pretends that they’re different, that they can be trusted, that they have the interests of workers at heart. In the GLA election the London Socialist Alliance claims to "speak up for the workers, the jobless, pensioners and students, and against the bankers, the bosses and the profiteers" (see our article on page 2 which shows how the LSA plays its part in the electoral charade). More importantly Ken Livingstone is being hyped as the man who really has Londoners’ interests at heart, with much being made of the myth of the GLC.
The first thing we should recall is that Livingstone has declared his support for "95%" of what the Labour government has done. When you look at the Labour record over the last three years, its attacks on working and living conditions, the decline in the social wage, the increase in the rate of exploitation, the strengthening of the state apparatus of repression, the military actions of British iitary actions of British imperialism against Iraq and Yugoslavia - then a 5% difference doesn’t amount to much.
As for Livingstone’s specific proposals for London, whether he’s proposing more private investment or strengthening the state, liaising with the police or helping business, he’s still defending the basic programme of the Labour Party.
What Livingstone has to offer that is ‘different’ is his past role as leader of the GLC from 1981-85, and the image of someone who opposed Thatcher. In practice, the GLC received a lot of publicity for getting into conflict with the Conservative government, as did other local councils including Lambeth, Liverpool and Sheffield. Although all these councils said they weren’t going to give in to Tory ratecapping and make cuts in services, or put up rates or rents, they all did in the end. However, that didn’t stop them insisting that workers should defend the local state against central government.
Nearly 20 years on Livingstone is trying to pull the same trick, trying to pretend that having him in office will mean some protection from the Labour government. It was a lie with the GLC under the Tories, and it’s a lie today. Both then 46;s a lie today. Both then and now Livingstone has played an invaluable role in providing a democratic cover for capitalist rule.
Workers cannot defend themselves by standing alone in a polling booth marking an ‘X’ or a ‘1-2-3’ on a piece of paper. The struggle of the working class means the holding of mass meetings, the election of recallable delegates, the sending of delegations to other groups of workers. It means discussion on how best to fight for workers’ interests. In London, as elsewhere, these interests can’t be separated from those of the rest of the working class. In a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, there are constant reminders that the struggle of the working class is, above all, international.
Car 31/03/00
Following on from J18 and Seattle, MayDay 2000 promises a global day of action against capitalism. From New York to Paris, from Auckland to London, thousands of people will be involved in actions aimed at protesting against the effects of capitalism. These events promise to build up a strong grass-roots movement for social change, a better environment and even an end to exploitation.
But can events such as MayDay 2000 really contribute to any radical social change? Can tactics like ‘guerilla gardening’, bike rides, co-operatives, or even ritualised riots in the financial centers really shake the power of the capitalist class?
Capitalism can destroy humanity
There is no doubt that if things stay as they are then humanity and the planet are doomed to destruction. This century has been the worst in history. Tens of millions have died in two World Wars and a long list of local conflicts. Famine and disease stalk the globe. Economic crises lay waste to whole regions ly waste to whole regions leaving poverty and unemployment in their wake. Inequality inreases every day. Environmental destruction reaches new depths. The capitalist system is rotting on its feet.
Its decomposition is tearing away at the social fabric, causing despair, hopelessness and an attitude of ‘every-man for himself’. There is no doubt then that the present system needs to be replaced if humanity is to survive into the next millenium.
Which social force can destroy capitalism?
For this to happen it is obvious that society will have to go through massive convulsions. The forces of the capitalist state will surely meet any radical social change with stiff resistance. They will defend their wealth and power with all the means of repression at their disposal.
Let no-one think that this change can be peaceful or take place through the ballot-box. But which social force is capable of leading the fight against the dictatorship of the rich and powerful? Which social force contains within it the perspective of a new society? An alliance of environmental groups, students, small farmers, t, students, small farmers, trade unions, anarchists, and any number of well-meaning individuals? No. Capitalism is the last class society in history, and it requires the action of a revolutionary social class to get rid of it.
The working class is the only revolutionary force
After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in ’89 the ruling class proclaimed the ‘death of communism’ and the definitive victory of capitalism. They shamelessly spread the greatest lie of the century - that the horrors of Stalinist state capitalism were the direct result of the October revolution, and that any future attempt to oppose capitalism was bound to end in the same nightmare. In effect they announced the death of their mortal enemy, the working class.
Since ’89 these lies and ideological campaigns have indeed caused much confusion within the working class and it has to some extent disappeared from the social scene. But it is not defeated. This is the class that in 1917 rose up to establish the power of the workers’ councils in Russia and forced the warring states to stop the First World War.
This is mall>This is the class that from the end of the ’60s, and until ’89, launched waves of struggles at the international level. This is the only class in society that produces real wealth, that stands at the point of production and is capable of crippling the capitalist economy.
Through its collective activity and struggles in the workplace and the streets it is the only class that can become conscious of itself as a social force and lead the struggle against capitalism.
Communism is the only alternative to capitalism
There can be no ‘anti-capitalism’ which is not at the same time for communism. It’s not enough to be ‘anti-capitalist’ if that means being ‘against the multinationals’ but in favour of more ‘responsible’ and ‘democratic’ behaviour on the part of the capitalist state, which remains the focus of capitalist power, despite all the talk of globalisation.
It’s not enough to be ‘anti-capitalist’ if that means appealing to nationalist prejudices against ‘foreign’ capitalism, as the unoreign’ capitalism, as the unions are currently doing in the Rover affair.
To get rid of capitalism you can’t reform the capitalist state; it has to be demolished. To get rid of the capitalist economy, you have to strike at its roots - the whole set-up of wage labour, the world market, nation states. You have to create a world-wide community where all production is geared towards human needs. You need, in short, to create communism. Only a world-wide working class revolution can do that.
The need for communist organisations
Throughout its history the working class has created political organisations to point the way towards the communist goal, from the three Internationals to the left fractions who fought the degeneration of the Communist Parties to the groups of the communist left that exist today.
The International Communist Current is part of this tradition which, throughout the terrible crises and wars of the 20th century, has remained loyal to the genuine programme of communism against those who have betrayed and crossed the class line.
We are convinced that it’s impossible to by-pass the left communist tradition if you want to have a meaningful discussion about capitalism and its alternative.
WR, 28/4/00.
The threatened massive redundancies at Rover would destroy up to 50,000 jobs in the West Midlands. The threat to cut car assembly at Dagenham (or even close it altogether) would cause similar devastation, on a smaller scale, in East London and Essex. Tens of thousands of workers face the misery of unemployment and poverty.
Neither Phoenix nor nationalisation can guarantee jobs
We cannot rely on the Phoenix bid. It is true that the Towers plan involves only about 2,000 redundancies at Longbrige and 8,000 in the supply industries, as opposed to the much larger numbers of jobs that will be lost if Rover had gone to Alchemy or is shut altogether. But no boss, new or old, private or state, can guarantee jobs, whatever improvements are made in productivity, whatever concessions are made on wages.
We cannot rely on the government to help private businesses keep Rover going. Tony Blair may have promised to work "night and day" but the DTI has made it clear they will not do any more than facilitate negotiation, and investigate the role of English Partnership in a leaseback schish Partnership in a leaseback scheme. They have made clear that they do not intend to bail out car production.
Calling for nationalisation, for the state to become the new boss, is not the answer, particularly when the government has made clear it will not put a lot of money in. Nationalisation has been used in the past, but it certainly didn't benefit workers. Every time Rover has changed hands (and name) there have been job losses and increases in productivity, but the 54,000 redundancies when Leyland was nationalised in 1975 were among the worst ever.
Nationalisation didn't prevent massive job losses in the coal and steel industries or on the railways.
None of these proposals, the Towers bid, government intervention or nationalisation, can overcome the overproduction in the car industry. Every year it is producing around 21 million more cars than it can sell, meaning that about 80 assembly plants are redundant world-wide. This is why it is not just Rover that is threatened, but also Dagenham, and Honda is cutting its production. It is not only the car industry that is hit by overproduction, but the whole world capitalist economy.
The problem is not that it is "easier toot that it is "easier to get rid of jobs here than anywhere else in Europe" as Bill Morris of the TGWU says. A low Euro and the EU Directive on Information and Consultation haven't prevented unemployment in France and Germany. When the unions say things like this they are trying to tie us up in nationalism, to get us to identify with British capitalists rather than our class brothers across the Channel, to wave the Union Jack instead of defending our interests as workers. Workers in all countries are being hit by the crisis. British, German, ‘native’, ‘immigrant’, all workers have the same interest – to defend ourselves against capitalism’s attacks on our living standards.
How not to fight back
The demonstration organised by the unions on April 1st showed that workers want to resist this attack on their jobs. But it was like the large demonstrations against pit closures in 1992, when even Tory MPs pretended to support the miners. And still the mines were closed. On 1st April it was not just workers who demonstrated behind the unions. Local businesses were also in evidence: for instance, the Evening Mail produced posters saying "Don't let Rover die", Union Jacks were given out. It ended up being given out. It ended up being a celebration of British industry instead of a defence of workers' interests.
Demonstrations can be a place to meet other workers - from other plants, from other industries, or unemployed - to discuss, share experiences and gain a sense of our strength as a class. But this is not why the unions call demonstrations – they do it as a safety valve for discontent. If it looks as though a demo may become a real meeting place for workers, the unions do their best to sabotage it. So the demonstration on 1st May, which could have brought workers from Longbridge and Dagenham together, and also many others showing their solidarity, was sabotaged by the unions. In contrast to the well publicised Mayday 2000 riot, there were no adverts for it, hardly anyone knew it was going on.
An occupation of Longbridge will not save jobs if the focus is to prevent the company moving the Mini production line. There were many occupations in the 1970s, such as at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, where the focus was to keep working and look for another boss. This caused the workers to become locked up in the yard, isolated from other workers who wanted to show solidarity. An occupation of Longbridge in the union framework of keeping the production line in place for a neroduction line in place for a new boss would have the same dangers today.
How can we fight back?
In order to fight back we have to understand the scale of the attack. Huge as the attack on car workers is today it is not the whole story. Many workers in other industries, especially manufacturing, are facing redundancy. Unemployed workers, single parents and disabled people are under attack through the 'New Deal'. Schools and hospitals are more and more inadequate to workers' needs. It is the whole working class that is under attack.
First of all we have to fight back as workers. Not as supporters of this or that industry - Rover was not broken up in 1998, but that didn't help the 2,500 workers made redundant. Not as 'British' people, or residents of Birmingham or Dagenham, alongside local shopkeepers. Not even as trade unionists, since the unions today support management not the workers.
Secondly, we must not let ourselves get locked up in Longbridge or Dagenham. In the factory earmarked for massive redundancies we are in a very weak position. But when workers get together across trade and industrial divisions we are strong.
Those workers who signed a petition for a mass meeting at Longbridge to discuss how to resist the attack had the right idea, getting together as workers. We cannot rely on the unions to organise workers' meetings - the TGWU binned the petition and refused the meeting. But we can and must get together and discuss, even if at first we can only do it on a small scale.
Workers outside Rover and Dagenham can show solidarity. When on the demonstrations it is important to discuss with each other as much as possible, break out of the isolation. And remember that the best solidarity of all is to defend your own interests, by struggling in your own workplaces, by taking up common demands with other workers. This will start to rebuild a movement which can change the balance of forces in favour of the working class.
The only future capitalism can offer is growing poverty, unemployment and collapse. But by recovering their identity and confidence as a class, workers can begin to offer a different future – a world communist society where production is geared towards human need and not the profits of capital.
International Communist Current, 6/5/00.
BMW’s decision to break up the Rover Group is a massive blow to the working class, with some 9,000 job losses expected at the Longbridge plant and up to 50,000 jobs to be lost throughout the region. Since BMW bought Rover in 1994 it has pumped in £3bn into the group, but the losses have only mounted, totalling £647m in 1998. In response the bosses announced more investment, measures to improve productivity and 2,500 redundancies. BMW also managed to squeeze a £1.5m pledge of support from the government, while the unions bent over backwards to successfully push through the deal. Sir Ken Jackson, of the AEEU, said at the time, "This excellent result puts Rover on course for success and the workforce on course for stability" and Roger Lyons, of the MSF, said "This is a vote of confidence in the future of the car industry and shows that partnership is now the central focus of British industrial relations." (BBC Online, 11/12/98). Far from defending the interests of the workers, the unions again revealed their real role as the servants of the bosses and the interests of capitalism.
Last year, Rover’s losses continued Rover’s losses continued to mount, up to a staggering £1m a day, and another 9,000 jobs were axed as further improvements in productivity were made. The European Union has blocked the government’s support package and sales have dropped 7%, hit by the high value of the pound. The owners of BMW began to get concerned as the ‘English Patient’ dragged down the group’s profits. They held secret talks to off-load Rover onto the Alchemy group. The Labour government must have been aware of these plans. Its anger and shock at the sale are a complete bluff. It knew the writing was on the wall for Rover and has stood aside, saying that it can’t stand in the way of ‘global forces’.
The problems at Rover are common to the whole of the manufacturing industry, symptoms of the broader world economic crisis and increased competition on the world market. Ford have announced 1,500 losses at Dagenham, which itself is earmarked for closure, as is the Halewood plant in Merseyside. Honda plan to halve car production at its Swindon plant. In the steel sector, Corus (the former British Steel) is considering further plant closures and massive job losses. Up to 6,000 jobs are under threat at Port Talbot and Llanwern. At Belfast’s Harland and Wolff yard almost 1,800 workers are working on redundan workers are working on redundancy notices due to expire in June. All this comes on top of the programme of pit closures in the ‘90s that saw 160,000 jobs destroyed and entire communities devastated.
Neither nationalism nor nationalisation
On hearing of the sale of Rover, the unions changed their tune with regards to BMW. The same union leaders, who during the last two years have eagerly organised over 11,500 redundancies, are now saying, "We are not going to keel over and accept 50,000 job losses that this sale could lead to" (Tony Woodley of MSF, BBC Online, 20/3/00). Union leaders and MPs have called for a nationalistic consumer boycott of BMW cars. This hides the fact that BMW workers in Germany are also under constant attack and have exactly the same interests as workers everywhere. The German engineering unions have just accepted a meagre two year pay deal of 3% for 2000 and 2.1% for 2001, leading one German economist to say that, "the employers were the clear winners" (Financial Times, 29/3/00). A boycott of BMW is not the way workers can resist the attacks upon them.
The leftists and the union shop stewards are more sophisticated. They reject the idea of a ated. They reject the idea of a boycott, and have taken a more ‘radical’ stance, calling for state intervention to rescue Rover, "We want Rover back in public ownership. We want re-nationalisation. BMW has still got massive assets in this country...The government should seize them now, without compensation" (Socialist Worker, 25/3/00). Although the SWP admit that re-nationalisation is no answer to over-production, they say that, "it could begin to challenge the power of the corporations which wreck workers’ lives everywhere" (ibid.). While it is true that the capitalist state intervenes in the economy every day, to think that state ownership could guarantee jobs and improve working conditions is mistaken. Workers in the NHS and education face increasing exploitation and are leaving in their thousands. When British Leyland was nationalised in 1975 54,000 workers were sacked. So much for job security!
Class struggle is the only way to defend ourselves
The union organised demonstration on 1st April attracted 80,000 people from all over the country, who are quite rightly angry and worried for the future of the region. But these demonstrations, like the one against the pit-closures in 1992, won’t push back then 1992, won’t push back the attacks on the working class. They are tightly controlled by the unions whose role is to keep discontent within the union prison. The leftist demands for the union leaders to call mass strikes will fall on deaf ears. They know this. When the anger of the workers reaches a certain point then strikes may well take place. But the unions will make sure the workers remain isolated in their own sector in demoralising, drawn out, dispersed actions as has happened on the London Underground and Connex. The role of the unions is to sabotage the class struggle, not to lead it!
Calls for factory occupations from the leftists are a trap as well. They are raised in order to attract workers who are losing faith in the unions and looking for an alternative to the Labour Party. The role of the leftists today is to divert discontent back into campaigns to put pressure on the union leaders and the government. The SWP also uses these campaigns to bolster the defence of capitalist democracy (see article on the LSA p.2). The SWP, and the other leftist outfits, are not socialists and represent the left-wing of capitalism and are, like the unions, the enemies of the working class.
Behind the leftist calls for nationalisation is the idea that it’s a stthe idea that it’s a step towards socialism. This is a lie. Socialism is the only perspective for the working class and humanity. But calls for nationalisation only tie the working class into the framework of capitalism and the nation.
The working class must begin to discuss amongst itself the best ways to take control of its struggles, to recognise its ‘false friends’ for what they are and reject them. Through the daily defence of basic living and working conditions, even if these struggles do not escape union control, workers can begin to regain their confidence, forge their identity as a social force, and gain political experience. Then the balance of class forces can begin to swing in their favour. This will take some time and there are no simple solutions. The working class is not defeated, and levels of class combativity are slowly but surely recovering internationally. The capitalist economic crisis will continue to worsen and the future holds many more attacks like those seen at Rover, but also the perspective of wider class conflicts.
WR (1/4/00)
In WR 231 and IR 100 we published a sticker distributed in Moscow by a group of internationalists opposing the war in Chechnya. In this issue we are publishing an article written by other proletarian elements elsewhere in Russia. Although we don’t agree with all its formulations, we warmly welcome this text as further proof that, despite the Russian bourgeoisie’s efforts to flatten all criticism of its bloody imperialist adventure in the Caucasus under a steamroller of nationalist hysteria, the voices of working class internationalism continue to make themselves heard. The comrades in Russia have asked us to ‘re-translate’ their own hand-written English translation and we apologise in advance for any misreadings and mistakes, especially where Russian names are concerned.
New imperialist war and proletarian class politics
The war in Chechnya is a war of aggression by Russian imperialism. Its goals are to re-establish Russian control over the Northern Caucasus with its links to oil reserves, and, by creating nationalist hysteria, to draw the Russian proletariat into the trap of national unity and so strengthen the bourgeois state in Russia. ourgeois state in Russia.
The terroristic, bandit-like actions of the Russian army and airforce have destroyed Chechen villages, murdered tens of thousands and forced hundreds of thousands of men and women to flee their homes. All attempts to portray these actions as being a response to terrorism and the Moscow explosions are false. They can only increase contempt for these cowardly gangsters and especially for the rapacious, patriotic Russian government which doesn’t even have the courage to rob openly without concocting some provocation. It’s enough to ask who profits from the explosions in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk to know who their author was. How can nationalist terrorists profit from blowing up the houses of poor people in Russia? For the Russian bourgeoisie, on the other hand, huge profit can be made because they provide an ideal pretext for the new war in Chechnya. The atmosphere of nationalist panic removed all obstacles to unleashing the war in Chechnya.
It is a mistake to think the war was unleashed only by the Yeltsin regime, by the clique in the Kremlin, an idea common not only in the bourgeois opposition but also among people who see themselves as marxists (see the article by A Lokh, ‘Small victorious war’ in Workers’ous war’ in Workers’ Democracy no. 11, the paper of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers’ Party, linked to the Militant tendency in Britain). The main motivation for the war comes not just from the Yeltsin regime, although this clique does make large dividends from the war; it corresponds to the interests of the whole Russian bourgeoisie. This is illustrated by the fact that in contrast to the 1994-6 war, today all serious factions of the Russian bourgeoisie support the war – from the liberals to the fascists, and including the ‘Communists’ who are ever-faithful to the bourgeois fatherland. Even those like the bloc around Moscow’s mayor Lushkov are just annoyed by the fact that the ruling clique has outdone them in patriotic phrasemongering. They merely criticise this or that detail of the war, and they propose as an alternative a more ‘civilised’ version of the war, while calling for new repression against immigrants from Chechnya and the North Caucasus, against workers and small traders from elsewhere in the CIS.
The Russian bourgeoisie has economic and political interests in the war:
- to control the oil pipelines that pass through the North Caucasus, transporting oil from the world’s biggest oil reserves in the 6;s biggest oil reserves in the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus; to preserve these pipelines from the encroachments of foreign competition;
- to create an orgy of nationalist hysteria, to lure workers away from the path of the class struggle and onto the path of national, inter-class unity, under the patronage of a state which pretends to be above classes; to use the war to sharpen repression against the workers’ movement and strengthen the bourgeois state, its army and police.
The class interests of the Russian bourgeoisie, dressed up as national interests, are at the origins of the war. And as long as the bourgeoisie stays in power, as long as the proletarians, united by the world party of proletarian revolution, have not overthrown capitalism, destroyed the bourgeois state, and established the international dictatorship of the proletariat, wars will be inevitable, and millions will continue to die for oil profits and the fat salaries of secret police generals.
Unlike the war of 1994-96, when there was in Chechnya a partisan movement of the petty bourgeois and proletarian masses, to a large extent uncontrolled by the Chechen bourgeoisie, in this new war only professional soldiers are taking paional soldiers are taking part. The lower classes of Chechen society are not participating in the war. The main reason for this is that bourgeois national liberation movements have lost their progressive character. At the end of the 20th century they are unable to provide any kind of sustainable improvement in the conditions of the masses; they are also incapable of creating independent, progressive bourgeois states. In the 1994-6 war, the lower classes of Chechnya attained an apparent victory – de facto independence for Chechnya. But all the real fruits of this victory went to the upper classes of Chechnya; independence turned out to be in their interests alone. The disillusionment of the lower classes with Chechen independence, at a time when there is no proletarian class movement in the world able to point the way out of this nationalist dead-end and towards the path of proletarian revolution, has led to demoralisation and apathy.
The position proletarian revolutionaries should take towards the Chechen war is the only possible one for revolutionaries towards inter-imperialist conflicts since 1914: revolutionary defeatism on both sides, the call to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, for Russian and Chechen soldiers to tuian and Chechen soldiers to turn their guns on their oppressors. Since the main enemy of the proletariat is the bourgeoisie of its own country, and since in imperialist conflicts the defeat of the strongest imperialism is more beneficial for the struggle of the proletariat, Russian proletarian revolutionaries must view the defeat of the Russian army as a lesser evil compared to its victory.
An appeal to turn the imperialist war into a civil war does not mean aiming at immediate success. The beginning of an imperialist war is always accompanied by a nationalist frenzy. But the longer the war lasts, the stronger will be the feeling of sobering up to all the tricks about the ‘national idea’; the greater will be the abyss between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The guns that replace butter won’t feed the hungry. The bourgeois state, whether it has Yeltsin, Zuganov, Putin or Primakov at its head is and will remain a servant of the masters and enemies of the oppressed. The current change from liberal policies to national-patriotic policies does not and cannot possibly give the proletariat anything but more bloodshed, tears and deprivation. With every new day of war all this will only get worse, provoking hatred, indignation and determination in the proletariat. 1914 was followed by 1917. The agwas followed by 1917. The aggressive war of predatory bourgeois gangs will be replaced by the only just and holy war – the war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
Capitalism brings war just like clouds bring thunderstorms. War is the final means for settling scores between the different bourgeois gangs that call themselves states, and for controlling the class on whose labour and deprivation the capitalist system is based – the proletariat. Only by organising itself into an independent class power, hostile towards all factions of the bourgeoisie, only by dethroning the power of capital and establishing its own worldwide dictatorship can the proletariat finally put an end to wars and their cause – capitalism. Capitalism is a criminal system that has destroyed tens of millions of people in the world wars and local wars of the 20th century, a system that hides its unstoppable, monstrous greed behind the sugar coated facade of ‘democracy’ and ‘humanism’.
The Labour government’s decision to intervene in Sierra Leone marks the largest mobilisation of British forces since the Gulf war in 1991. Under the cover of its ‘ethical foreign policy’, and in the name of ‘morality’, New Labour promise to rescue the innocent population from the terror of the marauding gangs high on drugs. The truth is that British imperialism’s role is not that of peace maker, but of actively fuelling the war in Sierra Leone. It is also flexing its muscles to show its imperialist rivals that it’s a force to be reckoned with on the international stage and in future conflicts.
Sierra Leone gained independence from Britain in 1961 and was relatively stable until the present civil war broke out in 1991. The African ‘peace-keeping’ force Ecomog, largely made up of Nigerian troops, failed to stop the war and in 1997 the Kabbah government was overthrown by the army general Koroma with the support of the RUF. The UN imposed an arms embargo but with the help of British mercenaries working for Sandline, who broke the arms embargo, the Nigerian forces drove the RUF from Freetown in 1998, committing many atrocities themselves. The Britishrocities themselves. The British government was ‘cleared’ of any involvement in the Sandline affair and forced Sandline to end their contracts with Kabbah.
But the facts show that British imperialism itself took up the baton and pumped military aid into the country to back its local pawn Kabbah, in order to maintain a firm foothold in this strategically important region of West Africa.
"More money, more aid per head of population and more political action has been directed at the former British colony than any other African country. The Labour Government has committed more than £65m since March 1998" (BBC Online, 11/5/00).
After the UN dropped its embargo on arms supplies to Kabbah’s forces, "Britain shipped £10m worth of weapons to Freetown last year. They included machine-guns with 2 million rounds of ammunition, more than 2,000 mortars, and 7,500 rifles" (Guardian, 25/5/00).
There have also been reports that the Marines and SAS have been training the Sierra Leone Army since 1998. This military aid strengthened the Kabbah regime to the point where its former enemies in the army rejoined its ranks and in July 1999its ranks and in July 1999, faced with the scaling down of the Nigerian forces, Kabbah signed a peace agreement with the RUF which brought them into the government. The Nigerian forces were decreased and the UN took control of the disarmament of the RUF.
Faced with the humiliating collapse of the UN mission, the British government decided once again to directly intervene and take advantage of this great opportunity. Tony Blair said that, "Whilst the days of being a global policeman are long gone, it does not mean you can’t show leadership and do what you can to help" (Guardian, 16/5/00).
The rapid deployment of the British troops and naval back-up has been seen as a great success for British imperialism. While certain parts of the British media have warned of the threat of ‘mission creep’, and that the politicians are being pushed around by the military commanders on the ground in Sierra Leone, the government was not surprised by the turn of events. Its ability to rapidly send advance troops by air and a naval task force of 4 ships, including an aircraft carrier, is an example of how Britain is trying to ‘punch above its weight’ and show its rivals that it is still a force to be reckoned with.
The government also intend this intervention to be a long term commitment with the aim being nothing short of the complete reconstruction of the state in Sierra Leone. Robin Cook has made it clear that, "Britain will not abandon its commitment to Sierra Leone" (Telegraph, 9/5/00).
In effect this means that as well as the military aid, "administratively, Britons have been seconded to most major government ministries in an attempt to establish a functioning state...Key positions are held by the British under a bureaucratic form of re-colonisation" (Telegraph, 21/5/00).
The poor need food, Britain gives them guns
British imperialism has once again made use of the ideology of ‘humanitarianism’ to justify its latest intervention. The scenes of mutilated children are indeed shocking but it is rarely explained in the media that many of the pro-government forces that Britain is backing have carried out and continue to carry out such atrocities. There has also been much use made of the ‘child soldiers’ which Britain says must be taken out of the conflict. This hypocrisy was fully exposed when it was revealed that ted when it was revealed that the British government had decided to give 10,000 rifles to the Sierra Leone Army at the end of May. The fact that these weapons have already fallen into the hands of child soldiers was brushed aside by British officials. Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries on the planet with an adult life expectancy rate of just 36 years. This explains why there are an estimated 15,000 child soldiers in Sierra Leone – a large percentage of the adult population is already dead by the age of 40!
A French film director who went to Sierra Leone to make a film about the link between charity and politics was so sickened by the UN’s and Britain’s complicity in the atrocities carried out in the civil war that he documented this instead! The reviewer of this film said, "What passes for the UN in this part of the world...doesn’t just allow cold blooded murder, but actively takes part" (‘New World Order (Somewhere in Africa)’, Guardian, 25/5/00).
Imperialist rivalries in West Africa
For the moment those major powers with vested interests in West Africa - the US and France - have kept a certain distance from the chaos in Sierra Leone. But thiaos in Sierra Leone. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t watching the situation carefully. The US has sent its envoy Jesse Jackson to the region; in contrast to Britain’s vilification of the rebels, he compared the RUF leader Foday Sankoh to Nelson Mandela. The RUF has close links with Liberia which it uses as a conduit for the sale of diamonds in exchange for weapons. The president of Liberia, Charles Taylor, is supported by the US and the French, so they presumably aren’t too happy that Sankoh is being held by the British.
The US does have one other card to play. The BBC have reported that, "Because of the successful experience of the Nigerian-led Ecomog forces the US is discussing the possibility of financing the return of Nigerian battalions to the country to take on the RUF again." (BBC Online, 10/5/00). This would cause problems for the British who have muscled in on the terrain once held by the Nigerians.
The bourgeois media have always portrayed the civil war in Sierra Leone as a conflict about who controls the fabulous prize of the country’s diamond mines. The diamond trade is indeed a lucrative trade for whoever controls it, but it is not the basic cause of the war. When we covered the civil war in Liberia, Sierd the civil war in Liberia, Sierra Leone’s neighbour, in 1996 we pointed out that, "The war in Liberia, like the wars and civil conflicts ravaging Somalia, Sudan, Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere is a striking expression of the decomposition of capitalist society…The economic disaster then accelerates the social collapse, as different factions battle over diminishing spoils, and the whole of society right down to its children is sucked into a vortex of looting and gang massacres" (WR 195, June ’96).
The British bourgeoisie want us to believe that by propping up the ‘democratic’ government in Sierra Leone it can hold out against this tide, the historical collapse of the capitalist system. In reality Britain and the other major imperialist powers are doing the opposite, exacerbating the social collapse in Africa by arming its local clients and literally giving them ammunition to fight more wars.
Trevor 3/6/00.
In the USA, the country always cited as an example of unstoppable growth and of an economy which has almost ‘wiped out unemployment’, 18% of the population, around 36 million people, live below the poverty line. Insecure, part-time and underpaid jobs have become the norm and there has been a continuous fall in workers’ living standards for ten years. In Britain, the industrial heart of the economy is more and more diseased, as can be seen with the crises at Rover, Ford and Harland and Wolff. All the official blather about how the ‘Internet economy’ will create loads of alternative jobs can’t change this.
Obviously, our rulers don’t forget to supplement their claims about the ‘end of the crisis’ with a mention of the ‘inequalities’ that still unfortunately weigh on society, stemming perhaps from the excesses of ‘liberalism’ or ‘globalisation’, or from the wars and dictatorships that seem to be so hard to get rid of, especially in the world’s poorest regions, like Sierra Leone. But not to wor like Sierra Leone. But not to worry: we are regularly told that the solution to all this lies in the citizens of the world calling for more democracy, more ethical foreign policies, more restrictions on the World Trade Organisation, the cancellation of third world debt, etc etc. Amid all these noble causes the workers’ struggle against lay-offs, wage cuts or speed-ups is mentioned – if it is mentioned – as just one protest among many.
In this way, the ruling class, its state, its media, its humanitarian ideologues, do all they can to hide the central contradiction in this society, i.e. the fundamental conflict between capital and labour, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The struggle of the working class is replaced by a ‘citizens’ movement’ in which all different classes and interests are mixed up. The struggle against capitalism and its state is replaced by a form of protest that supports the state, that politely asks it to be more democratic in the face of the world’s injustices.
But there is a reason why the bourgeoisie spends so much time telling us that the class war is over, insisting that the working class has disappeared, or calling on it to dilute itself in the inter-classist mass of the ‘citizens’. The reason is that the ruling class is well aware that the greatest threat to the capt the greatest threat to the capitalist order is still posed by the working class when it struggles for its own interests.
Despite all the drivel about the ‘new economy’, ‘post-industrial society’, and the rest, not only does the working class still exist, but it remains the class which produces the essential of all social wealth. It’s the exploitation of workers’ labour power that generates capital. And since capitalism is in a state of advanced decay, it can only keep itself going by constantly driving down the living and working conditions of the working class. The absolutely inescapable contradiction between the survival of capitalism and the interests of the working class can only get deeper.
This contradiction is being expressed today through a gradual development of workers’ struggles. Even if these movements are still dispersed, even if they are normally controlled and defeated by the unions and the political forces of the left, they correspond to a growing discontent. In Germany, in Britain, in France, we have seen a number of such struggles. In the USA, the demonstrations by the New York transit workers in November-December 1999 (see Internationalism no. 111, the ICC’s paper in the USA) was a typical expression of the strengths and weaknesses of the working class today: on the one hand, a r today: on the one hand, a real militancy, a refusal to accept sacrifices without any reaction, a will to gather together and discuss the needs and methods of the struggle, and a certain distrust towards union manoeuvres; on the other hand, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of determination in overcoming the union obstacle, in coming out in open struggle and trying to organise its extension to other sectors.
The mobilisations in Norway at the beginning of May saw 88,000 workers in transport, building, food, hotels and ports come out on strike to defend wage levels as the left-wing government attacked social budgets. In this case, the bourgeoisie was well able to control the rising discontent, particularly through a division between a union hierarchy which signed an agreement with the government and a union base which, at first, challenged it, only to sign a new version slightly less unfavourable to the workers, but still a real attack. Nevertheless, what was significant about this movement is that, despite its much-vaunted oil reserves, the Norwegian bourgeoisie is still forced to attack the working class head on, provoking a real militancy in the class and the biggest strike movement since 1986.
The workers’ struggles we are seeing today are still a long way from forming a significant barrier to the attacks of the bourgeoisie. The failurs of the bourgeoisie. The failure of the Rover and Ford workers to react on their own class terrain to the threat of devastating factory closures underlines the current difficulties confronting the working class. But workers’ struggles are like the old mole; they prepare the ground for the outbreak of much more massive movements in the future. What’s at stake in the development of the class struggle is the capacity of the working class not only to defend itself, but also to become conscious of the force it represents in society, of its historic responsibility to overthrow capitalism and begin society anew.
The death in April of Tony Cliff, leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party, and, before that, the International Socialists (1962-76) and the Socialist Review Group (1950-62), was greeted with expressions of solidarity and criticism from his fellow Trotskyists. For the SWP it was an opportunity to declare that "his unique intellectual contribution was to describe, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union as state capitalist, and therefore imperialist" (Paul Foot in the Guardian 11/4/00). In his autobiography Cliff says that he thought about the question for two months and then "One early morning I jumped out of bed" and told his wife "‘Russia is not a workers’ state but state capitalist’".
The class nature of the Russian state
Revolutionaries (a category which does not include Cliff) have developed an understanding of the nature of the state in Russia as an integral part of their defence of working class interests. As early as 1918 the Russian communist left were warning of the dangers of state capitalism. In the 1930s, while the degenerating Trotskyists used the idea of a ‘proletarian’ sof a ‘proletarian’ state as grounds for the unconditional defence of the USSR, other revolutionaries wrestled seriously with this fundamental issue. For the German and Dutch Left there was state capitalism, but a tendency to put into question the proletarian nature of the 1917 revolution. For the Treint group in France there was state capitalism, but they were going toward the idea that it was a new form of system, neither proletarian nor bourgeois. The comrades of the Italian Left were more cautious. They saw the state in Russia as proletarian, because of its origins in the revolution of 1917, but increasingly becoming part of international capitalism - as it was recognised by the US, and "Russia’s entry into the League of Nations immediately poses the question of Russia’s participation in one of the imperialist blocs for the next war" (Bilan no 2, December 1933). While the Italian Left grappled with the Russian question they were quite clear on the rejection of any defence of the USSR.
Russia’s participation in the Second World War settled the question. The ex-Trotskyists of the Revolutionare Kommunisten Deutschlands (RKD), for example, dropped their defence of the USSR and, influenced by Ciliga’s book The Russian Enigma, defined Russia as state capital defined Russia as state capitalist. G Munis broke from Trotskyism over the defence of any imperialist camp and denounced Russia as state capitalist. The majority of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left broke from "the great lie of the ‘proletarian nature’ of the Russian state and to show it for what it is, to reveal its counter-revolutionary, capitalist and imperialist nature and function. It is enough to note that the goal of production remains the extraction of surplus value, to affirm the capitalist character of the economy" (Bulletin International de Discussion no 6, June 1944).
Trotskyism’s defence of imperialist war
While revolutionaries in the Second World War took an internationalist position against both ‘democratic’ and ‘fascist’ camps, the Trotskyist movement defended Allied imperialism. In defending the imperialisms of the democracies and Stalinist Russia (and some Trotskyists in France and Belgium sided with German imperialism) they became part of capitalism’s political apparatus. Just as Social Democracy went over to capitalism during the First World War, so it was with the Trotskyists and the Second. Their activity ever since has been determined by the needs of the bourgeoisie.
This, then, is the context of Cliff’s ‘ground-breaking’ work in the late 1940s. Cliff arrived in Britain in September 1946. He joined the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Trotskyist organisation made up of the merger of a number of groups that had all shown their loyalty to British imperialism. They had all, for example, called for a Labour government during the war, a period when Labour was a major constituent of the coalition government, with a particular commitment to the repression of the struggles of the working class. Cliff and his various groups always defended Trotskyism’s participation in the war "It was not possible to simply call for the defeat of one’s ruling class ... It was necessary to defend democracy against fascism" (Socialist Review May 1995).
Cliff had come to Britain from Palestine via Paris. It was here that he had been briefed by the Trotskyist Fourth International on the latest discussions in the RCP. A majority, who had previously been ardent defenders of Russian imperialism, had come round to the idea that Russia was state capitalist. Cliff, as an orthodox defender of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’ idea apparently said "The Old Man [Trotsky] iot;The Old Man [Trotsky] is not yet cold in his grave and already they want to renege on his teachings. ... I will destroy them!" (Charlie van Gelderen in Socialist Outlook, May 2000). By some time in 1947 Cliff was saying that Russia was ‘state capitalist’ and the leadership of the RCP that it was a ‘Bonapartist workers state.’
The fact that these Trotskyists swapped positions is certainly a curiosity. It did not change the nature of their politics. Those who defended the ‘state capitalist’ line were expelled or resigned from the RCP. The RCP dissolved itself in 1949 to enter the Labour Party. The first meeting of Cliff’s Socialist Review Group was in 1950. It was also in the Labour Party. Before the 1951 General Election the membership was directed to get known "as the most energetic and anti-Tory Labour Party workers" (document quoted in a 1981 SWP ‘official’ history). Cliff’s groups remained part of the Labour Party until at least 1967. They have never subsequently deviated from their support for the Labour Party - all, of course, in the name of ‘anti-Toryism’.
The Trotskyist view of the Labour government of 1945-51 is ‘critical’ of its austerity regime, its re of its austerity regime, its repression and its constant military mobilisations in the interests of British imperialism. However, the nationalisation of several major industries is always seen as cause for celebration. In fact the intervention of the capitalist state in the face of the ravages of a economic crisis is the dominant tendency within decadent capitalism. Far from being something for workers to cheer, it is integral to the bourgeoisie’s organisation of its system. Regardless of the different Trotskyist ‘theories’ about Russia, they all defend state capitalism at home.
Danger of the SWP
The political history of Cliff’s tendency is little different from the rest of British Trotskyism. Throughout the Vietnam war it supported North Vietnamese capitalism, backed by Russian imperialism. In contrast to other leftists the IS supported Labour when it sent troops to Northern Ireland in 1969. In Afghanistan it defended the US-backed guerrillas against the Russian-backed government. In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, in which more than half a million people died, the SWP took the side of Iran. However, they switched to defence of Iraqi capitalism during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Last year in ex-Yugoslavia they defended Serbian repression of ded Serbian repression of Kosovo. Yet, in the recent election for London mayor they called for a vote for Ken Livingstone, the keenest supporter for NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The fact that the SWP appears to be inconsistent in bestowing its favours is not important. Its basic loyalty will always be to British capitalism, particularly as a left cover for the Labour Party.
The one thing that marks the SWP out is its size; it’s far and away the biggest Trotskyist group in Britain. A lot of the reason for this can be put down to the SWP’s ‘theory’ of ‘state capitalism.’ During the whole period of the Cold War they were the most anti-Stalinist organisation, which fitted in with the dominant anti-Russian ideology in the West. With the collapse of the Russian-dominated eastern bloc they had their alibi waiting.
One of the reasons that the SWP is such a pernicious organisation is that it talks about ‘state capitalism’ - a key understanding of the working class - while providing a cover for the capitalist state. Tony Cliff has died, but, unfortunately, the SWP’s influence lives on.
Car
The surprise retreat of the Israeli army from southern Lebanon, which it had been occupying since March 1978, has modified the balance of imperialist forces in the Middle East.
The evolution of the balance of forces
For Israel, this retreat was unavoidable, even though it had actually been planned for 7 July. The occupation of southern Lebanon, which is strategically much less significant than the Golan Heights, had become a thorn in the side for the Israeli state. For months now the Israeli army had been under constant pressure from the pro-Iranian Shi’ite Hizbollah forces. This situation was aggravated by the increasing disintegration of the Christian-dominated Southern Lebanese Army, which was Israel’s only ally in the region. But at the same time the Israeli government has had to deal with the growing unpopularity of this war, which had more and more been seen as a dirty war and a total dead-end (1). This feeling is now quite widespread in the Israeli population, which has become more and more fed up with the useless sacrifice of its youth in almost daily ambushes (the situation is not unlike the involvement of the US in Vietnam 2ent of the US in Vietnam 25 years ago).
On the other hand, Israel’s retreat offers it a number of advantages. It will undoubtedly weaken the position of the Syrian bourgeoisie, which, a couple of weeks before losing its Supreme Leader Hafez-el-Assad to a heart attack, had already lost one of its principal cards in the Lebanon. This is because it had been Syria’s intention to use the Hizbollah guerrilla struggle against the Israeli army in southern Lebanon as a means of putting pressure on the forthcoming Israel-Syria talks about the Golan Heights.
Today, it’s Hizbollah which has the image of the great victor and ‘liberator’ of the populations of southern Lebanon, which it will now rule over in competition with the pro-Syrian Amal party. Freed from its confrontation with Israel and strengthened by its ‘victory’, Hizbollah may well start posing problems for its Syrian protector. In the longer term, Syria’s occupation of Lebanon could be put in question.
Thus, Israel’s retreat from the Lebanon is not the expression of any ‘new desire for peace’ on the part of this state. In capitalism, ‘acts of peace’ are simply a means by which the bourgeoisie defans by which the bourgeoisie defends its imperialist interests and prepares itself for new wars. Thus at the same moment that the Israeli army was withdrawing from Lebanon, the Hebrew state was hardening its stance towards the Palestinians. Israel’s refusal to free Palestinian prisoners has led to riots and disorders on the West Bank and the Gaza strip, reminiscent of the Intifada. This has given Israel the opportunity to suspend negotiations with Arafat’s ‘Palestinian Authority’ at a time when the talks were already getting bogged down over the status of Jerusalem and the question of Palestinian refugees, since Israel had refused to make any more concessions.
But Israel doesn’t have a monopoly on imperialist ambition and duplicity in this region. The French bourgeoisie is also up to its neck in it. Thus even before the decision to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, the deterioration of the situation had obliged the UN Security Council to almost double the numbers of its FINUL force on the Israel-Syria border from 4500 to 8000. The redeployment of this force, which up to now has been made up of 9 contingents from countries of minor importance (except for France and Italy) expresses France’s aim to regain a real foothold in the Middle East. Not only will France now provide the biggwill France now provide the biggest portion of the new troops (increasing its contribution from 250 to 2000 men), it will also take most of FINUL’s positions of command. This strategy is fully in line with France’s efforts to return in force to the Middle East after being virtually ejected from the region ten years ago, when its ally Aoun was booted out of the Lebanon. Chirac also confirmed France’s desire to reassert its traditional influence over Lebanon and Syria (which were part of the French protectorate in the inter-war period) when he was the only leader of an important western state to attend Assad’s funeral. France is thus affirming itself as the direct imperialist rival to Uncle Sam in the Middle East.
British imperialism has long had an interest in this part of the world: Palestine after all was a British ‘protectorate’ and both in 1948, in Israel’s war of independence, and 1956, in the Suez crisis, Britain clashed with the US in attempting to defend its traditional role in the area. But it is also in competition with France in this region, which is one of the reasons why it generally aligns itself with the US over Middle East policy. For the moment Britain is maintaining a very quiet presence in the ‘peace process’, generally acting as Washington’s go-g as Washington’s go-between. But this does not mean it has renounced all efforts to have an independent influence in the current negotiations, as witness Robin Cook’s controversial tour of the area soon after the Blair government was elected.
As for the USA, its ‘peace policy’ is no less based on its own imperialist interests. What it is trying to enforce is a ‘Pax Americana’ which will allow it to pull all the regional protagonists under its umbrella, at a time when its hegemony over the Middle East is being questioned more and more openly, as has its overall world leadership since the disappearance of the imperialist blocs at the beginning of the 90s. This is why the US has been trying to re-launch the ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinians and to take the initiative in the negotiations. This is a step towards restoring its control over Israeli policy, a process which began with the election of Barak instead of the less docile Netanyahu last year, despite the fragility of the new governing team and all the squabbling in the Knesset.
The USA has also been trying to renew its dialogue with Iran, via its support for the most ‘reformist’ factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie. The Americans know thatgeoisie. The Americans know that they have to move fast because they dispose of a reduced margin of manoeuvre in the region. This is why the White House is trying to profit from Syria’s current situation of fragility and weakness and increase the pressure on it, in the first place by re-launching the ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinian micro-state. For Washington, the urgency is all the greater in that the victory of Hizbollah’s ‘fighting forces’ could cast discredit on the ‘moderate’ faction led by Arafat, and increase the popularity, in all the Arab countries, of cliques who are in favour of armed struggle against Israel. Madeleine Albright’s trip to the Middle East has been followed by an ‘official invitation’ to Arafat to come to Washington along with emissaries of Israel. At the same time, in the wake of the failure of Clinton’s talks with representatives of Hafez-el-Hassad in March last year, the US is getting ready to renew negotiations on the Golan with the heir to the Syrian leadership, Bachar-el-Hassad, as soon as he is invested.
The situation is as explosive as ever
In this context, future negotiations and promises of peace are just a snare. Today Israel and its most intransigay Israel and its most intransigent enemy, Hizbollah, which represents the most fanatical wing of pro-Iranian Muslim fundamentalism, are now facing each other directly. The only buffer is provided by the UN forces, and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan has expressed loud and clear his very justified concern that they will serve as a "punch ball" to be struck from all sides. The situation is guaranteed to sharpen the rivalries between all the local imperialist powers (Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt), with the bigger imperialist powers lurking in the background. Despite all the hypocritical speeches, this explosive region of the globe is not heading towards peace but towards further and more dangerous imperialist conflicts.
CBF´
(1) We should remember some of the massacres that resulted from previous ‘punitive expeditions’ by Israel in the Lebanon: Operation ‘Justice Done’ in July 1993, 132 deaths; Operation ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in April 1996, 175 deaths and 350 wounded.
The 58 young Chinese found dead in the back of a lorry at Dover are among 300 illegal immigrants found dead in similar circumstances world wide in the last two years. Fourteen others are known, by the forged documents they carried, to have been heading for Britain. These horrific deaths have stimulated politicians to decry the evil gangs who traffic in human beings, with scant regard for human life. What hypocrisy! For most of this year, both Labour government and Tory opposition, particularly Jack Straw, William Hague and Ann Widdecombe, have been competing to be toughest on ‘bogus asylum seekers’. So virulent has this campaign been that Nick Griffin of the openly racist British National Party, noted "government ministers play the race card in far cruder terms than we would ever use".
Suddenly Blair and co have noticed that people fleeing war, repression or poverty are victims and not just ‘bogus’ or ‘beggars’. However, they do not want anyone to recognise that they are victims of capitalism in decomposition, but put all the blame on the gangs who transport them. But most of all their hypocrisy is shown by the fact that they are still toughening up the measures to keep them out of the country.
Government attacks on refugees
The government has tightened up border controls since it came into power 3 years ago. Resources are put into detecting illegals at Kent ports, and X-ray detectors are proposed; lorry drivers are fined £2,000 for every one detected on board; increased policing of the Eurostar has been announced. Those who do get in and claim asylum are getting worse and worse treatment. No longer can they get income support, but a sum worth only 70% of this, some of which is in vouchers. They are being dispersed around the country, deprived of the necessary translation and community support, in appalling conditions in buildings identified as housing refugees, making them a sitting target for racist attacks. Applications are being processed more quickly; only one appeal is now allowed instead of two; and detention is being used to ensure that those denied asylum really do get kicked out of the country as quickly as possible. Both Tory and Labour are agreed that these ‘bogus’ asylum seekers should be put in detention centres to hold men, women and children - in other words, concentration camps.
It is no accident that immigration controls are being tightened up at this time as all the miser at this time as all the misery that drives people to flee their homes is worsening across the globe. The economic crisis leaves millions with no adequate means to support themselves - from Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the Russian bloc, to the Asian ‘tigers’ so badly hit in 1997 and 1998, to Africa where huge areas are simply left to rot. War and genocide is destroying the Balkans (ex-Yugoslavia) and large parts of Africa. These are the circumstances that led to an exponential increase in illegal immigrants being discovered at British ports from 61 in 1991, to 661 in 1996, to 16,000 last year (The Sunday Times, 25.6.00). Since the beginning of the twentieth century Britain, like all other great powers, has always responded to an increase in refugees by increasing border controls. The first immigration law was brought in 1905 to keep out ‘aliens’ fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. In 1938 new controls were brought in to keep out Jews and anyone else fleeing Nazi Germany. Jack Straw’s 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act simply follows this great British tradition. Clearly the state and the members of the government do not care one jot for the lives of refugees and others whose lives are being destroyed by capitalism, whatever outcry it makes when refugees die trying to get into the country.
Governments have not always been keen to keep immigrants out. In the 1950s they were encouraged to come here from the Commonwealth, particularly the Caribbean, to provide cheap labour for the post-war reconstruction. The difference between government policy then and now is not a question of left or right, racism or anti-racism, but quite simply the needs of national capital. When it needs labour, immigrants are allowed in; when it is in crisis, when there are huge numbers of refugees abroad and growing unemployment at home, they are a ‘menace’ to be controlled if not kept out at all costs.
Fairness and humanitarianism simply do not come into the government’s calculations. Any appeal to the government on these grounds or according to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees simply covers this brutal reality of capitalism.
Labour and Tories use ‘asylum seekers’
Before the 58 people were found dead ‘asylum seekers’ had provided both government and opposition with a scapegoat for the problems faced by British capital. In a campaign vigorously supported by the tabloid press, immigrants have all become ‘bogus asylum seekers’, w45;bogus asylum seekers’, who have been blamed for inner city lawlessness because some are forced into begging; and for the soaring cost of supporting them which has risen ... to £900million, a tiny sum compared to that spent by Britain on imperialist adventures abroad. Finding a scapegoat is extremely important at the present time as the crisis is leading to greatly increased attacks on the working class, with massive redundancies as in the steel and car industries, and increased pressure on those at work (see ‘The reality of economic attacks’ on page 2).
The inevitable result of this campaign has been the doubling of serious and often murderous racist attacks, randomly targetting anyone who looks ‘foreign’. It is difficult to believe that our ruling class, with its spin doctors and focus groups to predict and manage the response to every change in propaganda and policy, did not expect and count on this increase in attacks. It is certainly something the government will gain from.
The increase in racist attacks, the increased activity of the far right, openly racist organisations, like the BNP, which are legitimised by government attacks on asylum seekers, also provides a cover for the government. For those not convinced by the scapegoating t convinced by the scapegoating of refugees and immigrants, another scapegoat is provided, the far right and racism. In the end, while the Labour government has played a decisive part in whipping up the racism, it gains from the involvement of left Labour MPs and its more leftist supporters in anti-racist campaigns. This was true in the 1970s with the growth of the National Front and the Anti-Nazi League. Similarly, Mitterand gained from the success of Le Pen in France in the 1980s.
Left cover for the government
The demonstration to ‘defend asylum seekers’ on 24th June was a clear example of the way the left and ‘anti-racist’ campaigns provide a left cover for the anti-immigration policies of the Labour government. First of all it counted the Labour MP, Tony Benn, as one of its organisers, alongside Socialist Worker and ‘civil rights’ and immigrant organisations. Similarly, the Asylum Rights Campaign meeting on 29th June announced Diane Abbott, another Labour MP, as its chair. This is followed up with a range of excuses that are constantly made for government attacks: "New Labour is bowing down to the Tories and stepping up its attacks on refugees" (Socialist Worker 17.6.00); "New Labour no doubt set out to make ‘old fashioned’ racism against blacks, Asians and others a thing of the past.." (Socialist Review June 2000) or "...a New Labour team that has learned nothing from the failures of past Labour governments." (Socialist Outlook June 2000). The reality is that the class that developed Machiavellianism does not choose well-meaning bunglers to run its state, but cynical manipulators who knew exactly what they were doing when they whipped up racism with the campaign against ‘bogus asylum seekers’. Just as the Trotskyist organisations which cynically told us to vote Labour ‘with no illusions’ three years ago knew exactly what sort of government they were supporting.
The slogans on the recent demonstration made no effort to challenge the government campaign’s division between ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘economic migrants’ but, instead, focussed exclusively on the issue of ‘asylum seekers’ and the Geneva Convention.
In other words, they fostered illusions in the British ‘democratic’ state and its Labour government.
For as long as capitalism exists people will be forced to migrate, to flee the imperialist conflagrations or to leave the areas devastated by the worst ravages of the economic crisis. At the same time the ruling class will use the deaths if its victims to strengthen repression and border controls. Such is the old-fashioned hypocrisy of ‘New’ Labour.
Alex
It seems that the crisis is over. At least that’s what the bourgeoisie and its media are telling us. Economic growth is charting an unlimited upward course and unemployment is about to be completely done away with. The ruling class, in short, has overcome the contradictions of its system and put an end to 30 years of crisis.
This happy outcome, we are told, is all down to a totally new phenomenon: the "new economy". The technology of the Internet and its generalised use by enterprises and individuals are creating a "technological revolution" comparable in scope to the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The explosion of the Net and all that goes with it (in particular the extremely rapid circulation of information and money around the world) is playing a similar role to that played by the railways in the 19th century; it can even be compared to the invention of the steam engine. As a result, the proletariat should rejoice and have confidence in the bright future that capitalism offers us.
Of course, all this is a vast lie. The bourgeoisie can talk to itself all it likes about how the Internet is a technical breakthrough on the level of the railways, but it won’t do away with the crisis. This is for the simple reason that it can in no way remove the real cause of the crisis: the overproduction of commodities and the growing difficulty in finding adequate outlets for them. The railways were only the source of a leap forward in the expansion of capitalism to the extent that they were one of the main instruments for the conquest of new markets in a period when the capitalist mode of production had not yet invaded the entire planet. Today capital has been a world system for a very long time and the markets are glutted, ie it is harder and harder to realise the surplus value extorted from wage labour.
For the last 30 years the open crisis has been wiping out whole swathes of what the bourgeoisie calls "the real economy", notably in the manufacturing industries, and has cast millions of workers onto the streets all over the world. This crisis can’t be explained by talking about some technological deficit. On the contrary it is the result of the fact that there is too much technology, too many commodities, too many productive forces for the relationuctive forces for the relations of capitalist production which have become too narrow to contain them.
A speculative bubble which is just one more expression of the crisis
To see through the fraud of the "new economy", you only have to look at the totally irrational flight into speculation that it has given rise to. Over the last two or three years, the explosion of new stock market shares specialising in "dot.com" projects, like those in NASDAQ in New York, has been presented as the proof that the "new economy" is about to replace the old. In fact, all this is just another addition to the huge speculative bubble which has nothing to do with real economic activity, and whose very existence is a classic expression of the crisis. The delirious stock exchange investment in dot.com enterprises of the last period is now already resulting in huge losses, which shows that all the talk about the new economy is just hot air. The fact that huge masses of finance capital are leaving the "old" economy, ie the one that actually produces means of production and consumption, and are flying towards companies that produce nothing and which exist for the sole purpose of speculation, is a striking confirmation of the impasse that capitaliion of the impasse that capitalism has reached. The billions of dollars invested in this sector represent no real social wealth and are artificially inflated; they also regularly go up in smoke, through "mini-crashes" of the kind we saw in the spring, when doubts begin to lay hold of the "new" investors.
All the different phenomena of the speculative bubble are simply expressions of the crisis, of the difficulty capitalists face in finding profitable investment opportunities in the sphere of production. The capital that is invested in all the dot.com enterprises is not really creating a "new economy" in the sense of a new process of capital accumulation with an enlarged production of commodities and with new markets to absorb them. All this investment is totally unproductive and seeks only to cream off surplus value that has already been created.
Behind the "new economy", new attacks on the working class
Certainly the Internet helps to circulate capital very quickly; certainly, for many enterprises taken in isolation, it can lead to a gain in productivity at the level of administration and distribution. But what it brings at this level is not very different from the el is not very different from the computerisation of enterprises in the 1980s, which resulted in thousands of lay-offs.
In this sense, the Internet is just a weapon in the intensification of the trade war in which each capital is caught up in a frenzied race, not to be first to grab new markets but to get its claws on its rivals’ markets. It’s as instruments of commerce, especially in the area of advertising and marketing, that the "new technologies" are making the bourgeoisie’s saliva flow. In the bitter trade war between the different capitals, he who is quickest to take control of the virtual shop-windows of the Web is he who has the best chance of eliminating his competitors.
In decadent capitalism technological progress only serves to aggravate overproduction and make the system’s contradictions even more explosive. This has been recognised by the bourgeoisie itself through the mouth of the boss of Cisco, a company that produces Internet equipment: he was boasting in the press of having suppressed 3000 jobs and said that companies that didn’t follow suit were bound to disappear.
The myth of the "new economy" is not only fuelled by the bourgeoisie’s need to by the bourgeoisie’s need to reassure itself about the good health of its system. It is also part of a discourse directed at the working class. What the bourgeoisie wants us to believe is that the price we have to pay for the "new economy" is the generalisation of flexibility, increasingly precarious conditions of employment, and lower and lower wages. In other words, in order to enter the promised land of prosperity, the working class will have to accept a profound deterioration in its living and working conditions. Above all it must give up fighting on its own class terrain, it must admit that there is no point trying to resist the logic of capitalist exploitation, because all that is just a rear-guard struggle that belongs to the obsolete world of the "old economy". And all this is accompanied by an insidious, permanent propaganda about the so-called "disappearance of the working class". With nauseating cheek the bourgeoisie even uses images of Marx and Lenin to concoct adverts extolling the glories of the "Internet revolution" - a revolution in which it’s no longer labour that produces wealth, but a stock-market casino that is accessible to all in a world without workers…
No! If anything is obsolete today, it’s certainly not labour: it’s capital, tnot labour: it’s capital, this capitalist system in utter decomposition, which is subjecting the whole of humanity to more and more poverty and barbarism. The future belongs to labour, which is the only producer of wealth and material goods. The future belongs to the class which works and whose struggle is the only force that can lead to the definitive overthrow of the domination of capital.
PE
The EU observer mission sent to watch the election in Zimbabwe were not happy about the "climate of fear" and that the "Zanu-PF leaders seemed to sanction the use of violence and intimidation". However, as the Movement for Democratic Change, lead by Morgan Tsvangirai, won 57 seats, despite being only able to safely campaign in 25 of the 120 at stake, political parties in Europe declared their satisfaction. In Britain, Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat all appreciated the work of Tsvangirai, a leading trade unionist often called a ‘British puppet’ by Zanu-PF. Such accusations are based on the reality that he was in constant contact with the British government throughout the campaign, and all British coverage of the Zimbabwe election campaign was devoted to the denunciation of violence and the demonisation of Mugabe.
Looked at from the point of view of the working class revolutionaries have three essential points to make.
1. Zanu-PF has always been a force for capitalism and against the working class. Back in the early 80s, when everyone from Thatcher to the SWP was praising Mugabe, the ICC showed that Mugabe and the Zanu-PF government was installed with the backing of all the major imperialisms as a force for capitalist stability. The reason that Britain, the old colonial power, has turned against Mugabe is not because of the Zimbabwean state’s massacres of the 1980s, but because of Zimbabwe’s slide into chaos and the potential dangers it poses in the region. Mugabe’s favourite slogan was "Zimbabwe will never be a colony again". In practice, in a country like Zimbabwe, the big powers, using all the means at their disposal, not least the IMF, will do their best to ensure that the local state fits in with their imperialist needs.
Zanu-PF has tried to mobilise the black population outside the cities against white farmers. But, ultimately, whether the land is controlled by the state or divided into peasant small-holdings, it will not mean any improvement in the conditions of life in rural Zimbabwe.
2. Multi-party democracy in Zimbabwe expresses the dictatorship of capital just as much as the one-party state. All commentators, from right to left, have been overjoyed at the prospect of a more democratic Zimbabwe. In the words of the ANC: "the election process has underscored the fact that democracy is taking root not only in Zimbabwe but in the sub-region and, indeed, in the whole of Africa." It is appropriate that the ANC should make such remarks, because the democratic South African state has kept the working class in the same conditions, and opposed workers’ struggles just as much as its predecessor, the apartheid regime. All that has changed are some of the faces in parliament. In Zimbabwe, as in South Africa, the needs of capital remain the sole concern of the state. Democracy is used to disarm the working class, to try and make it identify with the very state which enforces capitalist exploitation.
The democratic campaign shows no sign of ending with the counting of votes. Various issues will be taken up: the MPs appointed directly by the President; the challenge to results in seats where there was a great deal of intimidation; the question of the ‘escape route’ for white farmers.
3. The MDC is a faction of the Zimbabwean ruling class, currently favoured by British imperialism. While criticising Zanu-PF, and the state of the economy it has presided over, the MDC has some modest proposals for Zimbabwean capitalism. "The MDC would cut the budget deficit and withdraw from the Congo war, creating a new economic climate and delivering new jobs" (Guardian 12/6/00). The withdrawal from the Congo is proposed on basic economic grounds: it costs the equivalent of $1m a day. The budget deficit at £2bn is some 15% of GDP and growing, debt servicing takes up half of national income, unemployment is at 55%, inflation is expected to reach 85% by the end of the year, and fuel and electricity rationing is imminent. And the problems facing Zimbabwe are not just ‘economic’. People in the country have one of the lowest rates of life expectancy in the world. Among the many health problems is the prevalence of HIV: a quarter of the population affected, 200 die every day of AIDS, current expenditure $1m a month.
The economic policy undertaken by any future government will be dependent on IMF or British assistance, and the conditions that go with it - much as Mugabe was until recently, when IMF aid was suspended. The MDC, backed by British imperialism, wants to persuade foreign governments that Zimbabwe can be a viable proposition for capital investment.
As a footnote, it is interesting to discover that a member of Socialist Worker’s sister organisation in Zimbabwe, Munyaradzi Gwisai, has become an MP after standing as an MDC candidate. With calls for nationalisations, price controls, subsidies on basic goods etc, there is the usual leftist appeal for the intervention of the capitalist state. Also wheeled out were slogans such as "Tax the rich to fund the poor" and "Forward to socialism" to give the illusion of defending working class interests. In reality the new MP shows complete loyalty to the capitalist state and its democracy.
The working class in Zimbabwe has shown its capacity for struggle, for example in the struggles in the public sector in 1996 and in January 1998 when troops were sent into Harare to crush the discontent (see WR 234). However, its inability to resist the recent orgy of bourgeois democracy, is a setback from which it can only re-emerge through independent class struggle.
Kelly 28/06/00
Globally there is a productive capacity to feed everyone, and yet 16 million people in the Horn of Africa face starvation. The effects of drought in parts of northern India have meant millions more facing the same prospect.
Whether explained by the effects of global warming or deforestation - both results of capitalist production - there have been devastating floods this year in a number of countries. In Mozambique hundreds died and 300,000 were forced to leave their homes. In Bhutan, Bangladesh and India, floods have caused the deaths of hundreds and at least 5 million homes have been destroyed. There have also been lethal floods over the past year in China, Brazil and Russia.
In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch hit central America, 10,000 died and 2 million were made homeless. Last year, when cyclone Orissa hit eastern India 10.000 died t eastern India 10.000 died or disappeared. The far more limited effects of hurricanes when they hit the east coast of the US show that they’re not inevitably catastrophic. In July in the Philippines heavy rains caused the collapse of huge mounds of rubbish in one of the shanty town areas of Quezon City. Hundreds died because poverty forces them to earn a ‘living’ by camping next to this toxic mountain and rummaging through it for scraps to sell. In Venezuela mudslides caused a similar disaster. In Nigeria 300 people died after an oil pipeline explosion: here again it was poverty which has led people to try to syphon off oil for sale on the black market. People don’t die just because it rains or there’s a strong wind, it’s because of the conditions they live in, and the desperate need to be near any available source of income or water. Christian Aid have estimated that within 20 years 75% of the world’s population (mostly in the poorest countries) will be at risk from drought or floods.
In the wake of such disasters, and also the experience of refugees from imperialist wars, comes disease - typically cholera, malaria or dengue fever. The possibility of epidemics is exacerbated by population movements, poor sanitation, water contamination and the disruption of an already poor infrastructure. In thedy poor infrastructure. In the case of Hurricane Mitch there was already a cholera epidemic in parts of the region when it struck. As for AIDS, the fact that 11 million people, 80% of those who have died, have come from Africa almost speaks for itself. A virus, like the wind or the rain, is neutral, but the conditions in which people subsist have an enormous weight in determining whether you live or die.
But it’s not just in the ‘underdeveloped world’ that the lethal nature of capitalist society takes its toll. The seriousness of ‘global warming’ has been emphasised by the appearance of a mile-wide stretch of water at the North Pole. In the summer a heatwave with previously unheard-of temperatures hit parts of the Middle East and the Balkans. In Rumania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Turkey and Greece dozens of people died. Certainly, the heat was exceptional - contributing to record numbers of forest fires across the region, and states of emergency declared in many parts of Greece, for example. But the reason the heatwave was fatal for so many is attributable to conditions in the cities, the extent of pollution and living in low-cost buildings erected with no consideration for the climate. Earthquakes in Turkey have also demonstrated the inadequacy of accommodation built on the cheap.
The US has also been affected by forest fires this summer - the worst for 50 years, with some 11 states in the west affected and 6 million acres destroyed. Even with 20,000 civilian and 2,000 military firefighters, with 150 aircraft, in an operation costing $15 million a day, there are some fires that they just can’t put out and are relying on the snow that will come later in the year. A particularly alarming demonstration of the potential for the damage to escalate occurred when fire raced through Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington. Hanford, a former site for the production of nuclear weapons, has the largest store of nuclear and hazardous waste in the US. The fires got dangerously close to stores of waste from plutonium production for nuclear weapons. An emergency was declared until the wind changed and the flames went in a different direction.
Above all, when you look at the state of the capitalist world, it is the proliferation of wars which shows the system’s fundamental nature. The wars in Angola, in the Congo (where half a dozen countries are involved), the wars between impoverished Ethiopia and Eritrea, in Sierra Leone and many other parts of Africa, in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and across Asia (where both India and Pakistan now have nuclear weapstan now have nuclear weapons), in the Middle East, against the Kurds in several countries, in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus - these are just some of the multiplicity of current wars, places where ‘peace’ is only a pause between conflicts. The big powers, far from being neutral or ‘humanitarian’ forces, are often caught red-handed at the heart of the barbarity. In Iraq, over the last decade over 1.5 million have died as a result of the imposition of sanctions. Since December 1998 the US and Britain have continued to bomb Iraq on an almost daily basis. Britain alone has averaged 10 tonnes of bombs a week over that period. The results of the ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Kosovo are also plain to see: an economic and ecological calamity in ex-Yugoslavia and beyond, and no end to the mutual slaughter between ‘ethnic’ gangs, each one backed openly or secretly by the different occupying forces vying to impose their influence in the strategically important Balkans area.
A society falling apart
These, then are aspects of the current state of capitalist society. Capitalism does not just mean the buying and selling of commodities, but all the social relationships that flow from a system of production based on the exploitation of wage on the exploitation of wage labour. Once a factor of progress and unification of the world economy, capitalism has been historically obsolete since the early part of the 20th century. Its historical senility has been demonstrated by the replacement of the old business cycle of boom and bust with the devastating spiral of world economic crises and world wars that began in 1914.
After the period of reconstruction that began in 1945, capitalism plunged into a new global economic crisis at the end of the 1960s. This crisis has been deepening inexorably for decade after decade, posing once again the historical alternative between war or revolution. With the ruling class unable to impose its final solution, a mobilisation for world-wide inter-imperialist war, and the working class not yet able to mount a revolutionary offensive against capitalism, there is a social stalemate, which has pushed capitalism into a state of decomposition. It is this falling apart of capitalist society, this descent into chaos, that lies behind the increase in imperialist antagonisms, and the greater frequency and more debilitating effects of each successive disaster.
The state is the main enemy
Capitalism, therefore, has not just passed its sell-by date - the assed its sell-by date - the stench of its decomposition is becoming noxious. In this process the capitalist state acts as a force to try and maintain the rule of the exploiting class. It is the state which is at the centre of all economic, social and military questions.
In the name of ‘anti-capitalism’ and the ‘campaign against globalisation’, people all over the world, in Seattle last November, internationally on May Day and on September 24 in Prague, have been encouraged to protest against institutions such as the World Trade Organisation or the International Monetary Fund. These bodies undeniably have their place in the network of bodies in which the ruling class defend their system of exploitation and fight among themselves for the spoils. But the fundamental weapon of their domination remains the capitalist state. Supposedly ‘supranational’ bodies like the WTO or IMF function either as tools of the biggest capitalist states or as battle grounds for their rivalries.
In opposition to capitalist class rule there is only one potential force - the working class. And the power of the working class lies in its position at the heart of the capitalist system, as the class which creates the vast bulk of value in society. When workers strike they take away the labour power ey take away the labour power that capitalism depends on for its very existence. When workers struggle they immediately come up against the state power of the bourgeoisie. When workers discuss their struggles and how to take them forward there are the beginnings of an independent class consciousness. The campaign against ‘globalisation’ is a protest by a variety of different forces, with a range of different class interests - including some for whom ‘anti-capitalism’ really means support for the nation state and bourgeois democracy against ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘undemocratic’ bodies like the WTO. The working class, by contrast, has no country, no nation state to defend, and it is the only social force which has a direct interest in destroying the capitalist state, throwing down all borders and creating a world-wide human community. In this issue of WR there is an article on the mass strikes in Poland 20 years ago. Such struggles give a glimpse of the potential power of the working class. As an example it is still absolutely valid today, and for the future.
WR
Revolutionaries are anything but indifferent to the atrocious end of these young conscripts, trapped in a steel coffin at the bottom of the sea, just as they are not indifferent to the tragedies which are unfolding all over the planet, the massacres and famines, the death of refugees by drowning or asphyxiation, or all the other manifestations of the barbarity of dying capitalism. But they are also required to keep a cool head in order to understand the messages which the bourgeois media try to instil in the minds of the exploited, messages aimed at getting them to accept this barbarity. In particular, they have to denounce the attempt to convince the workers of the most advanced countries that they are in many ways lucky because "it’s much worse elsewhere, and above all in the former ‘socialist paradises’".
Here are just some of the messages they have broadcast this ages they have broadcast this time.
First message: "The Russian fleet constitutes a huge threat to the environment. This is further proof of the chaotic and criminal character of the ‘socialist’ regime which used to run Russia".
Quite so, but it’s not just the Russian navy that’s falling apart. The British navy has at least 11 nuclear submarines waiting to be decommissioned, rusting away in the Rosyth and Devonport dockyards. It must wish it could use the old method of decommissioning used in the 50s and 60s - that of scuttling them off the coast of Japan and leaving them to rot on the ocean floor! Indeed, the whole nuclear industry internationally has been one disaster after another, from Three Mile Island in the US, to Sellafield in Britain, to the recent accident in Tokaimura in Japan. There can be no greater testament to the destructive and wasteful nature of decadent capitalism than the use of nuclear technology.
However, these nuclear submarines, stuffed with radioactive materials and falling into decay, are just a caricature of a system which is incapable of averting catastrophes. Russia has indeed had its fair share of disasters, from Chernobyl to the recent fire in the Moscow TV tower, but the long-term damage to the but the long-term damage to the environment, in particular the greenhouse effect and the hole in the ozone layer, is largely down to the most advanced countries, beginning with the USA. We can see how concerned the advanced countries are about the effects of their military adventures on the Iraqi or Yugoslav populations who ‘benefited’ from their bombs and their low-grade uranium shells in 1991 and 1999. The NATO bombing of Yugoslav oil-refineries and chemical plants has left the river Danube as one of the most polluted in the world, constituting a menace to many other Eastern European countries.
Second message: "The inability of the Russian authorities to rescue the sailors trapped in the submarine shows how little they care for human life. It’s different over here".
To support this idea, there was much stress on the fact that it was Western divers who succeeded where the Russians failed – in entering the Kursk. On French television there was an interview with a French submariner who explained how he and his comrades would have been able to save themselves if the same accident had happened in their ship.
It’s true that the Russian authorities don’t care a jot about the lives of the young workers in uniform mobf the young workers in uniform mobilised to ‘defend the motherland’. The example of Chechnya illustrates this quite clearly. But they are by no means alone in this. After all, the British and Norwegian divers who went down there are not military men specialising in looking after the safety of the sailors of the war fleet, but employees of an enterprise which specialises in the maintenance of oil platforms, an enterprise which equips and trains them in the interests of profit. For their part, the French authorities didn’t express a great deal of compassion when in January 1968 and March 1970 the sinking of the submarines Minerva and Eurydice left a total of 108 dead.
Third message: "The Russian authorities have shown in this affair that they are having a hard time breaking with the methods of secrets and lies inherited from the ‘Communist’ period. It’s totally different in the truly democratic countries".
On British television there was an interview with a member the British rescue team who explained how they could have saved lives if it wasn’t for the delays caused by the secrecy of the Russian military. This takes the biscuit. The culture of secrecy is not at all exclusive to the Russian leadership or the former ‘Red Armyor the former ‘Red Army’. It won’t be until 2018 that the results of the inquiries into the above two French submarine disasters will be released! This secrecy is typical of all military institutions, whether they belong to ‘totalitarian’ or ‘democratic’ states. Do we have to be reminded of the flood of lies which washed over us at the time of the Gulf war in 1991? This was supposed to be a ‘clean war’ with its ‘surgical strikes’, but in fact this was a very dirty war in which thousands of Iraqi soldiers were buried alive, a war which experimented with weapons even more cruel than the gas used by Saddam against the Kurds. This time it was the turn of the NATO military to experiment on their own troops as well. The investigations into ‘Gulf War syndrome’ have also come up against military secrecy and so far the cause of the syndrome still remains a mystery.
On the question of military ‘accidents’ we give the floor to a NATO general following the bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999: "For the cock-ups, we had a rather efficient tactic. Most often, we knew the exact causes and consequences of these errors. But in order to anaesthetise opinion, we said that we would carry out an inquiry and we only revealed the truth 15 days later, when they no lo15 days later, when they no longer interested anybody. Opinion can be worked upon like anything else" (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1/7/99). What the Russian authorities have shown is that they have a lot to learn from the leaders of the great democracies, who are specialists in the manipulation of public opinion.
The cynicism, cruelty and barbarity revealed by the Kursk affair are not the monopoly of the regime which presently governs Russia, which is indeed a worthy heir of the one which ran the USSR before 1990. They are characteristics of the whole of present-day capitalist society, a society in open decomposition, subject to growing chaos and posing an ever-greater threat to the survival of humanity. Fabienne.
After the announcement of increases in meat prices workers responded in many plants with spontaneous strikes. On July 1st the workers of Tczew near Gdansk and the Warsaw suburb of Ursus downed tools. At Ursus, general assemblies were held, a strike committee was elected and common demands were put forward. During the following days the strikes continued to spread: Warsaw, Lodz, Gdansk...
By making quick concessions through pay increases the government tried to prevent a further extension of the movement. In mid-July the workers of Lublin went on strike. Lublin is located on the railway line which links Russia to East Germany. In 1980 this was a vital supply line for the Russian troops in East Germany. The workers’ demands were: no repression against striking workers, withdrawal of theing workers, withdrawal of the police from the factories, wage increases and free elections of trade unions.
While in some places the workers resumed work, in other enterprises more workers joined the strikes. At the end of July the government hoped to extinguish the strikes by using the tactic of negotiating with the workers factory by factory. But on August 14th the movement was on the rise again: the tram drivers of Warsaw and the shipbuilders of Gdansk came out on strike. And in other towns many more workers joined the movement.
What made the workers strong ...
The workers had drawn the lessons of the struggles of 1970-71 and 1976. They saw that the official trade union apparatus was part of the stalinist state and always took sides with the government whenever the workers came forward with their demands. This is why it was vital that the workers in the mass strikes of 1980 took the initiatives themselves. They did not wait for any instructions from above, but came together and held meetings in order to decide themselves about the time and focus of their struggles. This could be seen clearest at Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot, i.e. the industrial beltopot, i.e. the industrial belt on the Baltic Sea. At the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk alone, some 20,000 were employed.
Common demands were put forward at mass meetings. A strike committee was formed. At the beginning, economic demands were put into the foreground. The workers were determined: they did not want a repetition of the bloody crushing of the struggles as had happened in 1970 and 1976. In an industrial centre such as Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot it was obvious that all the workers would have to unite in order to make the balance of forces tip in their favour. An inter-factory strike committee (MKS) was formed, which was composed of 400 members, two delegates for each factory. During the second half of August some 800-1000 delegates met. By forming an inter-factory strike committee the usual dispersal of forces was overcome.
Now the workers could face capital in a united way. Every day there were mass meetings at the Lenin shipyards. Loudspeakers were installed to allow the workers to follow the discussions of the strike committees and the negotiations with the government delegation. Shortly afterwards microphones were installed outside of the meeting room of the MKS, so that workers attending the mass meetings could directly intervene in the discussions of the MKS. In the evenings the delegates . In the evenings the delegates – mostly equipped with cassette recorders to record the debates – went back to their plants and presented the discussions and the situation to factory assemblies, giving back their mandate to the general assemblies.
This allowed for the largest number of workers to participate in the struggles. The delegates had to hand back their mandate, they were recallable at any time, and the general assemblies were always sovereign. All of these practices are in total opposition to the way unions function.
As soon as the workers from Gdansk-Gynia and Zopot joined, the movement spread to other cities. In order to sabotage contact between workers, the government cut the telephone lines on August 16th. The workers immediately threatened further extension of the movement, if the government did not re-establish phone lines immediately. The government gave in.
The general assembly of the workers decided to set up a workers’ militia. Previously consumption of alcohol was widespread with workers, it was collectively decided to prohibit alcohol consumption. Workers were aware that they needed a clear head to confront the governmentar head to confront the government.
A government delegation met the workers in order to negotiate. They met in front of the entire general assembly and not behind closed doors. The workers demanded a new composition of the government delegation because their leaders were only from the lower ranks. The government gave in.
When the government threatened the workers of Gdansk with repression, the railway workers of Lublin declared that if any of the workers in Gdansk were physically attacked or hurt in any way, they would paralyse the strategically important railway line between Russia and East Germany. The government grasped what was at stake. Its war machine would have been hit at a most sensitive spot – and during the Cold War this would have been fatal.
In almost all the major cities workers were mobilised. More than half a million workers, they were the only force in the country capable of confronting the government. What gave them their strength was:
The extension of the movement was the best weapon of solidarity – instead of only making declarations, the workers were going into the struggles themselves. This made it possible for a different balance of forces to develop. Since the workers struggled so massively, the government could not impose its repression. During the strikes in the summer, when the workers were confronting the government in a united manner head on, not a single worker got beaten up, let alone killed. The Polish bourgeoisie realised that it would have to weaken the workers from inside the movement.
The workers at Gdansk demanded that the concessions the government had granted to them would apply to workers in the rest of the country. They wanted to oppose any divisions and offered their solidarity to the other workers.
The working class acted as a central point of reference. Apart from other workers who went to Gdansk in order to establish a direct contact with the striking worontact with the striking workers, both farmers and students came to the factory gates in order to receive the strike bulletins and other information. The working class was the leading force in society.
The reaction of the bourgeoisie – isolation
The danger that the struggles in Poland constituted for the bourgeoisie could be seen in their reactions in the neighbouring countries.
The borders between Poland and East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the USSR were sealed off immediately. Previously Polish workers had travelled every day to East Germany, above all to Berlin, to go shopping (in Poland there were even fewer goods in the shops than in East Germany). But the bourgeoisie wanted to isolate the working class. Direct contact between the workers of different countries was to be prevented at all costs. And there was every reason to take such a measure! In the neighbouring Czech coal mining area of Ostrava the miners also went on strike – following the Polish example. In the Romanian mining districts, in Russian Togliattigrad the workers also followed the Polish road. Even if there were no direct strikes as a reaction to the Polish workers’ struggles, the workers in many countries in the west took up the slogans of their class be slogans of their class brothers and sisters in Poland. In Turin in September 1980 the workers shouted: "Let’s struggle as the Polish workers did".
Because of its scope and its methods the mass strikes in Poland had a massive impact on workers in other countries. Through their mass strikes the workers showed – as they had already done in 1953 in East Germany, in 1956 in Poland and Hungary, 1970 and 1976 in Poland again – that the so-called ‘socialist’ countries were in reality state capitalist governments, enemies of the working class. Despite the isolation imposed around the Polish borders, despite the Iron Curtain, the Polish working class, as soon as it took action, functioned as a massive pole of reference with a world wide impact. Precisely at the height of the cold war, during the war in Afghanistan, the workers in Poland sent an important signal: they opposed the arms race and the war economy by their class struggle. The question of the unification of the workers between East and West, even if it was not yet concretely posed, resurfaced as a perspective.
How the movement was sabotaged
The movement was able to develop such a strength because it spread quickly and because the workers themsel and because the workers themselves took the initiative. Extension beyond the confines of individual factories, general assemblies, revocability of delegates – all these measures contributed to their strength. While, in the beginning, there was no union influence in the movement, the members of the newly founded ‘free and independent’ trade union, ‘Solidarnosc’, soon started to hold back the movement.
Initially the negotiations took place in the open, but it was soon proposed that ‘experts’ were needed in order to work out the details with the government. Step by step the workers could no longer follow and participate in the negotiations. The loud speakers in the halls and in the ship yards, which transmitted the negotiations, no longer worked because of some ‘technical’ problems. Lech Walesa was crowned as leader of the new movement. Solidarnosc (1), the new enemy of the workers, had managed to infiltrate the movement and started its job of sabotage. Solidarnosc completely distorted the workers’ demands. Whereas initially economic and political demands were in the forefront, they now pushed for the recognition of the ‘free’ trade unions, with economic and political demands only to be second on the list. They followed the old tactics: defence of the trade unions, insteaence of the trade unions, instead of defence of the workers interests.
Previously workers in Poland had been clear that the official unions took sides with the state, but now many workers believed that the 10 million strong Solidarnosc was not corrupt and would defend their interests. The workers in Poland had not yet gone through the experience of the workers in the west in dealing with ‘free trade unions’.
Walesa promised that "we want to create a second Japan and establish prosperity for everyone" and many workers, due to their inexperience with the reality of capitalism in the west, had illusions in such a possibility. Solidarnosc, with Walesa at its head, quickly took over the role of playing the fireman for capitalism, trying to extinguish workers struggles. In autumn 1980, workers, protesting against the Gdansk agreement, went on strike again. They had seen that, with a ‘free’ trade union on their side, their material situation was getting even worse. Solidarnosc was already beginning to show its true face. Soon after the end of the mass strikes Lech Walesa was being flown around in an army helicopter, taken to striking workers to urge them to abandon their strikes: "We don’t need any more strikes because they push our country into acause they push our country into an abyss, we need calm".
From the very beginning Solidarnosc sabotaged the movement. Whenever possible it snatched away the initiative from the workers, prevented them from starting new strikes. In the summer of 1980 the mass strike movement could reach such proportions because the Polish bourgeoisie, as well as the stalinist regimes in the rest of Eastern Europe, were ill equipped politically for confronting the class other than with repression. This was unlike the west, where trade unions and bourgeois democracy play the role of a buffer. In the context of political backwardness in the capitalist class in Eastern Europe, and in the context of the Cold War, the Polish bourgeoisie was very suspicious of Solidarnosc. However, it was not their subjective feeling, but the objective role which Solidarnosc was to play against the workers, that was decisive. Thus, in 1981 there was a growing recognition in the stalinist government that Solidarnosc – albeit an ‘alien’ body in the stalinist set-up – could play a useful role.
The balance of forces was changing.
In December 1981 the Polish bourgeoisie could finally start repression against the workers. Solidarnosc had done its best to disarm the worone its best to disarm the workers politically – preparing their defeat. While, during the summer of 1980, the workers had not been attacked because of the self-initiative and the extension of the struggles, and because there was no union to disarm the workers, in December 1981 more than 1,200 workers were killed, and thousands of workers were imprisoned or driven into exile. This military repression took place following an intensive co-ordination between the ruling class in the East and the West.
After the strikes in 1980 the western bourgeoisie offered Solidarnosc all sorts of assistance, in order to strengthen them against the workers. Campaigns of ‘assistance for Poland’ were started, and cheap credits from the IMF were granted, in order to prevent the idea spreading that workers in the west could follow the Polish example. On Dec. 13th 1981, the day when repression was unleashed, the West German social-democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the arch-stalinist GDR leader Erich Honecker met outside Berlin and pretended not to know anything about what was going on. However, in reality, not only had they given their backing to repression, they had also passed on their own experience of confronting the working class to the ruting the working class to the ruling class in the East.
In the summer of 1980 it was not possible for revolutionaries to intervene within Poland due to the sealing off of the borders. But in September 1980 the ICC distributed an international leaflet in more than a dozen countries, which also circulated in Poland thanks to the help of some contacts. In our later interventions in Poland, the ICC always criticised the illusions of the Polish workers. As revolutionaries, we saw that our job was not to share the illusions of the workers, but to warn workers in Poland about their lack of experience in confronting ‘radical’ unions, telling them about the experience of the workers in the west. Even if our positions on the union question was not very popular in Poland, forcing us to ‘swim against the tide’, events proved us to be right.
One year later, in December 1981, Solidarnosc showed what a terrible defeat it had been able to impose on the workers. Subsequently, Lech Walesa became President of Poland. This was an expression of the confidence he enjoyed from the church and the western countries. He had already been an excellent defender of the interests of the Polish state in his capacity as leader of Solidarnosc.
The historical significance of the struggles
In the 20 years that have since passed, many of the workers who took part in the strike movement have retired, become unemployed or been forced into emigration. But their experience is of inestimable value for the whole working class. The ICC wrote in 1980 that "the struggles in Poland represent a great step forward in the world wide struggle of the proletariat, which is why these struggles are the most important for half a century." (Resolution on the Class Struggle, 4th Congress of the ICC, 1980, International Review 26). They were the highpoint of an international wave of struggles, the lessons of which we underlined in our report on the class struggle in 1999 at our 13th congress: "Historic events on this scale have long term consequences. The mass strike in Poland provided definitive proof that the class struggle is the only force that can compel the bourgeoisie to set aside its imperialist rivalries. In particular, it showed that the Russian bloc – historically condemned, by its weakened position, to be the ‘aggressor’ in any war – was incapable of respon– was incapable of responding to its growing economic crisis with a policy of military expansion. Clearly the workers of the Eastern bloc countries (and of Russia itself) were totally unreliable as cannon fodder in any future war for the glory of ‘socialism’. Thus the mass strike in Poland was a potent factor in the eventual implosion of the Russian imperialist bloc." (IR 99). David.
(1) Even if the foundation of a ‘free’ trade union can only be explained by the illusions and the lack of experience of the workers in Poland itself, there is no doubt that organised efforts by the KOR (a partially pro-western oppositional group) were only possible because of help from the west for the systematic construction of Solidarnosc. Despite the enmity between the two imperialist blocs, there was a unity against the working class.
In Britain, during the recent protests over taxes on petrol it was interesting to see how papers such as the Sun and Daily Mail became quite keen on the ‘direct action’ undertaken by hauliers, farmers, and cab drivers. When a man appeared on TV saying, "I’ve never been on a picket line before, mind you, I’ve driven through plenty", there was a hint as to why the right-wing press liked such ‘militancy’, and why Tory leader, William Hague saluted them as "fine, upstanding citizens."
Workers always foot the bill
As with any other social question, the fuel protests can only be understood in the framework of the struggle between different classes trying to defend their different interests. When it comes to the fuel blockade, the first idea to knock on the head is that those involved were ‘workers’ (an idea most notably put forward by the Sun). Although engaged in different parts of the economy, the one thing that the protesters had in common was that they did not depend on waged labour but were self-employed, the owners of small businesses, what marxists call the petit-bourgeoisie. They are not part of the ruling bourgeoisie, not part of the exploited proletariat, but also not capable of acting independently of the two main classes in capitalist society, except for impotent actions such as terrorism.
It has been well established that the oil companies made no effort to distribute petrol. This is despite their past records where they have made every effort to keep petrol stations supplied during any circumstances, particularly during workers’ struggles. The example of the miners’ strike of 1984-5 is the best known of many. In the present case the refinery bosses didn’t seek police help; they didn’t sue or press injunctions against anyone. On the contrary, the fuel protesters were actually allowed to use buildings in refineries to hold meetings. Such courtesy is, of course, never extended to workers in struggle!
The reason that the oil companies were happy for the protests to take place is that a reduction in duty on petrol would potentially be a boost for their profits, either through increases in sales at a lower price, or sales at the same price where a higher proportion goes to the oil company.
Fuel protests have taken place in many parts of Europe, regardless of the different levels of petrol tax. There have also been a variety of different responses by the different governments. Some have made concessions, some delayed taking action and some refused to acknowledge any demands. For workers it is important to recognise that there is no government response that can be in workers interests. Every government wants revenue. If it cuts one tax it will either have to find the funds elsewhere, or cut services somewhere. Either way it is the working class that will suffer, either through the loss of a state-funded service, or through a new tax arrangement that will fall on workers one way or another. It’s the same with oil prices. Small businesses might complain at their fuel costs, but increases always get passed onto the consumer, most of whom are workers. As with taxes, when prices fluctuate, it is always the working class, which has to play the bill, as capitalists, big or small, defend their interests.
The working class still exists
The fuel crisis has brought to the surface some real tensions between different parts of the bourgeoisie, but what they all have in common is the desire to mystify the working class.
In opposition to all the propaganda about the ‘fine upstanding’ protesters, some of the unions and the left have all but labelled them as agents of fascism. John Monks of the TUC gave the example of the truckers in Chile in 1973 who, as he saw it, had played their role in ushering in the Pinochet regime. The reason for such talk of ‘right wing plots’ is to try and get workers to rally round the Labour government and the British capitalist state. Bill Morris of the TGWU gave valid examples of collusion between fuel protesters and the oil companies, and then proceeded to complain that the police hadn’t done enough to break up blockades or prevent slow moving convoys. Again, here is the attempt to get workers to identify with the repressive capitalist state of their class enemies.
Also participating in the hymns of praise for the state have been the various leftist groups. Typically demanding that the oil companies be nationalised, so that the profits of the oil companies can be used for cheap, decent transport, they are asking workers to put their confidence in the capitalist state that is the central instrument of the ruling class’s domination.
What all the elements in the fuel protests campaign had in common was the way they attempted to convince the working class that it doesn’t exist. The farmers and hauliers were presented as heroic figures that could bring the country to a halt, and maybe even get cheaper petrol for everyone. The protests were put forward as though they were a real force, in comparison to the workers’ strikes in the past that had ‘never achieved anything’. The working class was asked to see itself as just a lot of consumers, who take their place in queues for petrol, as individuals alongside members of the petit-bourgeoisie and other social strata.
While the right champions the petit-bourgeoisie, as a way of hiding the role of the oil companies, the left champions the state, whether Bill Morris and its repressive arm, or the leftists and their proposals for an increased role for the state in the economy. While divided in their rhetoric, they are united in their concern that workers should never have a consciousness of their class position within capitalism, and that the working class can only advance its interests with a struggle that is independent of other classes. When workers fight they will find that hauliers will try to get through workers’ picket lines, and that the capitalist state has police and an army to defend the interests of the exploiters against the struggle of the working class.
Car, 25/09/00.
What is a marxist party like the German Communist Workers Party of the 1920s (the KAPD), a sympathising party of the Third International, doing on an anarchist family tree? "The positive legacy of the left/council communists must be their theoretical breakthroughs in their analysis of the Trade Unions and parliamentary democracy and in their understanding of the centrality of working class self-organisation in the revolutionary project." ('In the tradition, Part 1', Organise 52, Winter '99/'00)
We read this in a continuing history by an English anarchist group, the Anarchist Federation, which includes the Communist Left (1), amongst others, in an attempt to trace its roots. It may seem strange that anarchists, who, particularly over the last ten years, have been joining in the deafening media chorus that equates Stalinism with communism, and marxism with the gulag, are now finding marxists to identify with. But anarchist attempts to associate itself with marxism, or, claims to have married marxism with the eternal ideals of anarchism have been going on for the past 150 years of the workers movement. When Bakunin declared himself a disciple of Marx and the Ist International (before stabbing both in the back), he was not the last of an ignoble tradition.
More recently, with the current vogue for a ‘new revolutionary movement’, syntheses of anarchism and marxism are being proclaimed anew (see International Review 102 [31] ‘Is it possible to reconcile anarchism and marxism?’) Some might say that we left communists should be grateful for these anarchist compliments to our political ancestors, and encourage reconciliation between all those who are against the capitalist system.
Without wanting to seem bad mannered, we don’t believe it is possible to defend the political positions and activity of left communism within an anarchist perspective.
Of course these anarchists don’t defend the left communists as part of the marxist tradition, within which the left communists saw and still see themselves. Nor do they defend all of the left communists (no mention is made of the Italian Communist Party led by the left around Amadeo Bordiga in the 1920s). They rather defend the minority of ‘good’ marxists against the majority of ‘bad’ ones: "The vast majority of marxists (social democrats, Leninists) have paid lip service to the motto of the First International." (Organise, 52).
In fact the conviction that communism is the self-liberation of the working class emerges with marxism, not with anarchism. While Marx and Engels and the Communist League were elaborating the historical and economic existence and objectives of the working class in the 1840s, one of the forefathers of anarchism, Max Stirner, would only recognise the self-liberation of the ego. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, another early figure of anarchism, counselled against strikes and political action by workers. While Bakunin declared himself for collective action and class struggle, his real level of adherence to the motto of the Ist International was limited as, in practice, he fostered a conspiracy of a hierarchical elite, and tried to destroy the International.
The AF follow in these illustrious footsteps, because, for them, in reality, the working class as a historic class with common political aims doesn’t exist, it is instead a vehicle along with others of the eternal principles of anarchism: "If we as Anarchist Communists still see the working class movement as decisive it is not because of its supposed capacities as an emancipatory class but because workers are those who produce the wealth and are at the heart of the mechanism of production of capital." How can the working class emancipate itself if it is not an ‘emancipatory class’: a class with brawn but no brain?
We can agree with AF that the anarchists have never betrayed the motto of the 1st International, because they only ever understood it as a code for the unlimited freedom of the individual. Loyalty to this abstraction poses no problem because it can never have any contact with reality. Kropotkin, the ‘anarcho-trenchist’, or the French anarchist CGT could support the proletarian slaughter in the First World War, the Spanish CNT could join a capitalist government in 1936, but the principles remain inviolate.
Anarchism can’t defend the left communist legacy
The political positions that the AF supposedly admire in the left communists therefore could only come from the marxist movement, its acquisitions and the lessons of its mistakes.
Dictatorship of the proletariat
The AF say that they prefer the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to the dictatorship of the party. But, seeing as this fundamental understanding of the workers’ movement does not appear in the AF’s ‘Aims and Principles’ or in their ‘Manifesto for the Millennium’, it is reasonable to suppose that this is ‘lip service’ and that, in reality, they retain basic anarchist prejudices against this essential political action. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is an expression that encapsulates the main objective of the working class on its road to liberation: the seizing of political power and the smashing of the old state machine and the political suppression of the bourgeoisie.
Substitutionism and parliamentarism
The KAPD made a critique of the substitutionist conception of the party. If they criticised ‘leadership politics’ it wasn’t out of anti-authoritarianism, but because at the time in the early 1920s this phrase meant the parliamentarism of the Social Democracy and the subjection of the membership and the workers to the opportunism of the parliamentary caucus. The KAPD were for the proletarian political party acting as a vanguard of the working class. Not in parliament: but in the workers’ councils. They argued that the historical conditions and the experience of the working class demanded a revision of the social democratic conception of the party, and a rejection of the fight for reforms through parliament that in an earlier time could strengthen the proletariat (which anarchists abstained from).
The anarchist objection to parliament and substitutionism is a moral and eternal one, related to their anxiety over ‘authority’, although in practice, as we will see below, anarchists have often fallen into electoralism. But they are also against any party, which includes the KAPD, that intends to be the vanguard of the working class.
But if, according to the AF, the working class is not ‘emancipatory’ by itself, then revolutionary consciousness must of necessity come from outside this class and act in its place. Anarchism is no stranger to substitutionism as the history of ‘propaganda by the deed’ demonstrates.
Trade unions
Nor have the AF based themselves on the theoretical breakthroughs of the KAPD on the unions. After stating that the unions can’t be revolutionary organs, the seventh AF principle of its ‘Aims and Principles’ reads: "....we do not argue for people to leave unions until they are made irrelevant by the revolutionary event. The union is a common point of departure for many workers. Rank and file initiatives may strengthen us in the battle for anarchist-communism. What’s important is that we organise ourselves collectively, arguing for workers to control struggles themselves."
The KAPD was implacably opposed to the existing unions (and called for workers to leave them) not because they were non-revolutionary, which was true in the 19th century, but because the decadence of capitalism had turned them into counter-revolutionary weapons of the state against working class struggle. The trade unions could say of AF’s ‘opposition’ to them: ‘who needs friends when you have ‘enemies’ like this?’.
Organisation
The theoretical coherence of left communism can only be defended by a coherent unified organisation. In contrast this is the anarchist view of organisation taken from a statement by the ACF (forerunner of the AF) in a dispute with others about prisoner support: "as a non-hierarchical federation of anarchist communists we work together in solidarity but we cannot order what our members do like a Leninist party would. So, if on the one hand an individual member wants to give unconditional support to a prisoner while another gives other prisoners higher priority or refuses to support a particular prisoner that is up to them....[x]’s fight for freedom ....and neither you nor we can compel them to say why. Freedom not to speak is as much a basic tenet of the free society as intimidation and coercion to tell all is of the police state." (Organise, 51).
On that basis a member of the ACF is free to state that they are not supporting. In other words every one does what they want. Not only that: everyone has the right not to justify it to their comrades. No solidarity can be constructed in such an organisation, no one can rely on anyone else: there are no obligatory rules that everyone voluntarily adheres to. The abstract principle of individual freedom is used against the collective solidarity that unity demands. The demand for transparency, without which real common action and clarity is impossible, is equated with the repression of the police state.
The only glue that can keep such an organisation together is that of friendship, which creates an informal hierarchy of its own and reduces the platform to window dressing.
AF’s real roots are not in left communism, or even partially in it, but in leftism, the radical wing of the capitalist left. They describe it themselves in an earlier history of the origins of their organisation. (Organise! No. 42, Spring 1996). They emerged from the debacle of the various anarchist communist organisations of the 1970s, who entered almost en masse into Trotskyist groups. In 1974 most of the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists "ended up in the horrific authoritarian Healyite outfit, the Workers Revolutionary Party, whilst others joined IS (the precursor of the Socialist Workers Party)" (p17).
The remains of the ORA then formed the Anarchist Workers Association in 1975, but in 1977 an overtly leftist tendency expelled the others and reformed as the Libertarian Communist Group which later entered an electoral front with the Trotskyist International Marxist Group called Socialist Unity. The latter put forward the slogan: ‘Vote Labour, but Build a Socialist Alternative’. Eventually the LCG fused with another leftist group Big Flame in 1980, which dissolved when its members entered the Labour Party. The AF was formed from veterans of the ORA/AWA/LCG and a split from the SWP that produced the magazine ‘Virus’.
The degree to which the AF has broken with its leftist past can be measured by their position on the trade unions that is virtually indistinguishable from the typical leftist approach.
The degree to which it really adheres to left communist traditions, and the sincerity of its motives for claiming to do so, can be understood by its implacable hostility to left communist organisations. In the case of the ICC, for example, the ACF once wrote to us to say that we were not ‘welcome’ at their meetings. So while they claim that "theoretical diversity has been a strength in our movement" and "we believe debate is vital" (Beyond Resistance) (2), this does not include the threat of left communists intervening at their meetings.
Anarchism doesn’t have any independent history. Its eternal principles - liberty, equality, fraternity - originally borrowed from the bourgeoisie, recognise no historical context, and no grounding in the maturation of an historic class. It originally expresses the instability of the radical petit-bourgeoisie that looks uncertainly to an imaginary future, while harking back to a nostalgic golden age.
The history of the twentieth century shows that anarchism is quite capable of reconciling itself with the left wing of capital, but organically incapable of recognising the theoretical acquisitions of the workers’ movement that are defended by the marxists of the communist left. The AF tries to claim the KAPD as part of the heritage of anarchism. This attempt at misrepresenting the contribution of part of the communist left marks out the parasitism of the AF in relation to the revolutionary political organisations of the working class.
Como
Note
1) The term Communist Left comes from the 1920s when this trend was part of a larger movement: the Communist International. Today the rest of this movement has long since passed into the camp of capital, but the historical name remains to identify our current.
2) Beyond Resistance, a Revolutionary Manifesto for the Millennium. "The emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.", whilst acting to negate it in practice. "Despite all manner of confusions, tactical dead-ends and betrayals, the revolutionary anarchists have remained loyal to it...[the KAPD] rejected the idea of ‘leadership politics’, called for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the party, and opposed the idea of ‘injecting’ consciousness into the working class from the outside...." (Organise! No. 52)
The crisis of capitalism is making living conditions worse for virtually everyone, causing a great deal of anger among workers and other sections of the population. This growing discontent has been channelled into a number of protest demonstrations. In particular we have seen the ‘anti-capitalist’ demonstrations outside the World Economic Forum in Melbourne and the World Bank and IMF in Prague; the opposition protests against Milosevic in Serbia; and the blockades of oil refineries in Britain and various European countries.
These are the images of struggle presented to the working class for the 21st century. Socialist Worker, other Trotskyist organisations and some left wing Labour figures are particularly enthusiastic about the Prague anti-globalisation protests. But how do they measure up to the real needs of the class struggle in the coming period?
‘Anti-globalisation’: an ideology that serves national capitalism
The Melbourne and Prague protests, with their echo in cities around the world, claim to be internationalist and anti-capitalist. The rationale of these demonstrations is the myth of globalisation, which blames multinational companies and organisations such as the IMF for all the effects of the capitalist crisis today. The truth is that capitalism - which actually became a global system around a hundred years ago - is fundamentally based on competition between national units. The strongest economic powers, particularly the US, but also Japan and the most industrialised European states, are able to impose trade tariffs on imports and demand free trade for their exports, getting the best for themselves and pushing the worst effects of the crisis onto their weaker competitors. The IMF and WTO are among the forums in which this takes place, functioning either as tools of the most powerful capitalist states or as battle grounds for their rivalries.
To focus anger at the effects of capitalism onto the IMF, WTO and World Bank, or onto the multinational companies, inevitably means turning to the nation state for protection, in other words turning to the most important weapon of capitalist rule. For instance when Naomi Klein, author of ‘No Logo’ told the counter-summit in Prague "the directors of the IMF want governments to slash taxes, to privatise and to deregulate in the interests of the multinational corporations" (Socialist Worker 30 Sept) she was asking us to support national government and nationalised industry against foreign private capital. But all capitalist bosses, local or multinational, private or state, exploit the working class. And they all do so according to the conditions imposed by the world market.
Support for bourgeois democracy
Last November, the running battles with the police in Seattle were held up as the example of ‘anti-capitalist’ struggle. This time there has been much more concentration on the need for democracy.
The power of the multinationals and of the IMF and World Bank comes in for much criticism because these bodies are unelected. We even read denunciations of "corporate tyrannies" (Socialist Review October 2000).
The implication of this is that we should rely on our elected governments to protect us from these expressions of global capitalism. But government policy is based on the needs of national capital, not ‘public opinion’.
Democracy is also the main issue in the Serb opposition demonstrations for Milosevic to go, after Kostunica won the majority of votes in the election. After ten years of war and crisis the reasons for the discontent are obvious, but the situation of the working class in Serbia will not be determined by the removal of one man, but by the development of the world crisis and particularly of the imperialist conflicts in the Balkans.
In other words, whether in a ‘democracy’, like Britain, or an ‘authoritarian’ regime like Serbia, government policy cannot depend on ‘public opinion’ and the result of elections. In the sophisticated democracies the state has many means of manipulating public opinion through media, polls and focus groups in order not to leave the results of elections to chance. This is much more effective than Milosevic’s crude vote-rigging.
The issue of democracy is key to the integration of ‘anti-globalisation’ and ‘anti-capitalism’ into the service of the capitalist state. Tony Benn, is worried that "people who looked to the Labour and trade union movement for an alternative now find there is no alternative offered through the party system." He goes on to make globalisation an alibi for this: "The leaders of all parties have recognised that the power of international capital is so great that if you are going to be re-elected you have to come to terms with it." (Socialist Review October 2000). Anti-globalisation can revitalise the democratic mystification, for instance in the activities of Ralph Nader, a former consumer spokesman, in the current US elections, or the ‘Socialist Alliances’ of various leftist groups: "the protest movement must acquire an electoral dimension. That has begun to happen - with the Nader campaign in the US and Socialist Alliances in Britain" (Mike Marqusee of the London Socialist Alliance, Socialist Review October 2000).
The attempt to pull the working class into this campaign
The campaigns about globalisation and reviving democracy are also aimed at dissolving the working class into atomised citizens, divorced from their position as a class collectively exploited at the heart of production. This is where the working class is strongest, and where its struggles can never be eradicated. Even today, when the working class struggle is in an extremely difficult situation, the ruling class knows the imp ruling class knows the importance of developing campaigns that try to weaken that struggle.
It is making every effort to confuse the working class with campaigns about the various ‘popular protests’ going on, and where possible to associate workers to them.
The media thus portrayed the fuel blockades, really a protest by small bosses, as part of the tradition of British protest, mixing everything up from the peasants’ revolt to the miners’ strike (see p.3). Socialist Worker had already called on workers in Britain to follow the example set by the French fishermen.
Various leftist writers are portraying the struggle of the working class as some sort of appendage to the anti-globalisation protests, with Socialist Worker enthusing about support for the Prague demonstrations by a UNISON delegation and various local union branches. Workers’ Liberty explicitly wants campaigns "geared to specific workers’ struggles" and welcomes the American union federation, the AFL-CIO, jumping on the bandwagon (July 2000).
Yet despite all these attempts to tie the working class to these campaigns, ‘popular protests’ do not express the interests of the working class. They leave it on the side-lines, create confusion and decrease its confidence in itself and in its ability to struggle.
The working class can only become a real force when it stands up for its own independent interests, distinct from those of other classes. And this is the only way it can provide a perspective for all the social layers which are oppressed by capitalism, but which cannot wage an autonomous struggle against it.
Above all, the workers, who, as Marx said, have no country, can have no interest whatever in defending ‘our’ country’s national interests against a supposedly ‘supranational’ capitalism. On the contrary, the struggle against capitalism begins with the struggle against ‘our own’ bosses; it develops as a struggle for workers’ interests against the sacrifices demanded by the ‘national interest’; and it ends in the overthrow of the nation state and the creation of a world wide communist society.
WR, 30/9/00.
Following the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire at the end of the 19th century, the Middle East, the meeting point of two seas and crossroads of three continents, has ever since been the constant object of imperialist rivalries. In particular, the First World War led to the region being divided up between France and Britain, with Palestine becoming a British protectorate in 1916 and Syria and Lebanon falling under French control. Later on, the necessities of the Cold War and America’s grip over the Mediterranean led the US to support the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 (this also had the advantage of weakening Britain’s hold over the region). While backing Israel at all levels, the US also fought against Russia’s attempts to gain influence over the Arab states who were hostile to Israel. During this period there were three major Arab-Israeli wars: 1956, 1967 and 1973, and behind each one of them could be discerned the deadly competition between the eastern and western blocs.
With the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, the perspective of a third world war contained in this competition gave way to a new imperialist dynamic characterised by a battle of each against all. The efforts of the US to counter-act this dynamic resulted in the huge demonstration of US power in 1991 - Operation Desert Storm - in the Gulf. The real target of this slaughter was not so much Iraq as the USA’s former great power allies, who were forced to line up behind Washington and rein in their independent ambitions. But this action was still not enough to hold back the dissolution of the old bloc discipline. America’s former lieutenants continued to advance their own interests through this or that local state or clique. The wars in ex-Yugoslavia demonstrated this and recent events in the Middle East also confirm it.
America’s difficulty in maintaining control of the situation
The Middle East ‘peace process’ has above all been the work of the US, which has every interest in presenting itself as the only possible mediator in the region. Certainly America has made real gains through this process, in particular in domesticating the PLO. Whereas the PLO was once an agent of the Russian bloc, Arafat’s new ‘Palestinian Authority’ was created essentially to act as an auxiliary force of repression for the Israeli army. But the Pax Americana was never quite completed, not least because both the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies have more and more been following their own local interests at the expense of the USA. In Israel, Sharon’s role in provoking the conflict - and the fact that he was then offered a government post by the ‘peacemaker’ Barak - shows the increasing weight of openly pro-war factions, who are profiting from the growing feelings of isolation and encirclement within the country.
This situation is exacerbated by the scale of the ‘Intifada’, which has now spread to Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the Israeli population. Meanwhile Arafat, also pushed by the more ‘radical’ wings of Palestinian nationalism, has been calling for the support of the Arab nations against Israel, as at the Arab summit of 22-23 October. But he has also been appealing to the European Union to make a more active intervention in the conflict. The patent failure of the US to bring about a ceasefire at the Paris conference (where Madeleine Albright had to run after Arafat to stop him walking out of the negotiations), then at the Sharm-el-Sheikh summit, demonstrate all the difficulties of the White House in keeping control of the situation.
The other powers are trying to take advantage of this situation to strengthen their own position. This is particularly the case with France, which is seeking to destabilise the US by using its traditional links with countries like Lebanon and by making numerous declarations aimed at gaining sympathy in the Arab countries. It supported the idea of an international inquiry into the events, which had been categorically rejected by Israel. Barak even accused France of supporting and encouraging the "Palestinian terrorists" at the Paris summit on October 5.
Naturally, all the imperialist powers present themselves as advocates of peace and reconciliation, but, in fact, their main aim is to slip banana skins under their rivals’ feet. Their intervention in the Middle East situation, far from bringing peace to the tortured populations, is a powerful accelerator of the slide towards even wider and more destructive wars.
CB/Amos
Once again, the Middle East is ablaze, although in truth there has been no real pause in bloody conflicts in this region for over fifty years.
Peace is not possible under capitalism. The ICC has always said this loud and clear. Thus, in October 1993, after the first ‘historic’ handshake between Arafat and Rabin, we wrote:
"there will never be peace in this society…the promises being made to us now in the Middle East will end up the same way as the ‘New World Order’ that the Gulf war was supposed to bring into being: with massacres like the ones in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Georgia, and all the rest" (Revolution Internationale, ICC paper in France, no. 227).
The media are telling us that all this violence is the result of religious fanaticism and the climate of mutual intolerance between two communities; the big powers, we are being led to believe, are doing all they can to bring about peace. What hypocrisy! Under capitalis hypocrisy! Under capitalism, peace is a lie and a fraud, in the Middle East as anywhere else. What the USA is after isn’t peace, but to preserve its imperialist domination over this region. The other big powers aren’t after peace, but the defence of their imperialist interests, which means challenging America’s positions. Once again, it’s the local populations, like in the Balkans or in Africa, who are being taken hostage by the settling of scores between different bourgeoisies. It’s they who are not only the first victims of these killings but are being enrolled into the monstrous machinery of war by the different imperialist and nationalist cliques, and these populations contain important fractions of the working class.
In the Middle East, a tragic lot has been reserved for millions of proletarians. Among these, the workers living in the occupied territories of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip have been subjected to particularly frightful conditions of exploitation in a region where unemployment stands at around 50%. To escape from hunger and keep their families alive, they have to work as migrant workers for derisory wages, and on top of this they are the first to fall victim to the guns of the Israeli soldiers, of the regular sealing off of the territories, of checkpoint controls which compel them to hang around for ages, so that in addition to long hours of travelling and labouring their working day often mounts up to 16 hours, and that’s if they don’t arrive too late to get paid at all. But they are also subjected to exploitation and repression by their own national bourgeoisie in the shape of the Palestinian Authority, which watches over their misery and above all uses them as cannon fodder. From the age of ten the children of these workers are as often as not dying a precocious death after being pulled into the street protests or the armed Palestinian gangs.
These proletarians have absolutely nothing to gain by being mobilised behind their national bourgeoisie for the creation of a Palestinian state that will keep them in the same conditions of ferocious exploitation and repression, and use them again and again as cannon fodder. The struggle for ‘national liberation’ or the ‘Arab cause’ is not their struggle. As for the Israeli proletarians, they must also reject the sacred union with their own bourgeoisie.
Despite the difficulties of this situation, the only way these proletarians can express class solidarity is to reject the capitalist war machine, to refuse to defend one nationalist camp against another. Instead of being led into the slaughter they need to fight tooth and nail for the defence of their living conditions wherever they can.
War has become decadent capitalism’s mode of life and the only future it can offer is one in which more and more regions and populations are plunged into bloody chaos and the barbarity of war. Capitalism has no other way out. Only the proletarian struggle – because it has no country to defend, and has to develop on an international scale – can lead to the abolition of the bourgeois framework of nations and frontiers. It alone can offer a solution to capitalism’s insurmountable contradictions and put an end to national conflicts.
But this perspective will only see the light of day if there is a decisive intervention by the proletariat in the central countries of capitalism. These fractions of the working class have the responsibility of showing the way forward for the proletariat of the whole world, by fighting against the economic attacks being rained on them by their own national bourgeoisies and governments. More than ever the future of humanity depends on the international development of the workers’ struggle.
ICC
In addition to its breadth, an extremely important feature of this movement was that many of the strikes broke out spontaneously, and in some cases there were signs of direct conflict between workers and the trade unions, whose job it is to control the working class on behalf of the capitalist state:
- many of the strikes began without going through the legal palaver of ballots and warnings;
- workers frequently left the confines of the factory or depot to demonstrate in the street and even call on other workers to join the struggle. This is how the urban t. This is how the urban transport strike spread outwards from Charleroi, an extension which encouraged other sectors to come out;
- workers began to raise demands that could be taken up by all categories. This was particularly the case with the demand for a 10,000 franc flat wage increase, which the Charleroi urban transport workers raised and which was then echoed by other sectors and in demonstrations, generally without union approval (for the transport workers and others this would have meant a 20% increase in wages);
- where the unions did call for actions, they were often surprised by the scale of the response. Thus on October 3rd they had envisaged a rally of union delegates in Brussels, but 20,000 workers turned up to march in the streets.
On a more limited scale, there were also cases where workers directly challenged the authority of the unions. At the STIB, the workers had taken up the demand for a 10,000 franc increase, but were dissatisfied by the unions’ handling of the negotiations, so they sent the union negotiators away and called for direct talks between the management and the strikers’ assembly. The unions refused to recognise the strike and the state had to respond with direct repression – judicial injunctions and police dispersal of pickets.
This was however only an embryo of workers’ self-organisation and overall the unions retained control of the movement. They used all their usual manoeuvres to keep the workers divided – emphasising sectional interests, differences between unions and between the French and Flemish speaking parts of the country. They also used another tactic which had the appearance of ‘unifying’ the movement but that in reality aimed at diluting it. In contrast to the unions in Britain, who mainly expressed support for the government against the fuel protesters, the Belgian unions tried to confuse the workers by calling on them to join the fuel protests which had taken place around the same time as the strike movement. They tried to get workers to focus on the demand for linking fuel costs to the price index, and sent them to join the hauliers’ blockades in a demonstration of ‘solidarity’. Not surprisingly, the media outside Belgium gave publicity to the fuel blockade and the workers’ participation in it, but passed in silence over the actual strike movement.
In the struggles of the ‘80s workers had begun to draw many lessons about the real role of the unions and the need to take charge of their own struggles. Many of these lessons have receded from the consciousness of the class as a result of the reflux of struggles that followed the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. But the movement that has just taken place in Belgium reminds us that these lessons have not been totally lost. The working class everywhere is becoming more willing to fight openly against capitalism’s attacks, and it’s through the development of this resistance that workers will be able to become more conscious of the real aims and methods of their struggle.
Adam
We are publishing here a contribution from a comrade who describes it as "an attempt to clarify to myself why I broke with anarchism (or more specifically libertarian communism, having been a member of the Anarchist Federation)". We think that the text speaks for itself and will be very useful for many others who are currently seeking a way towards the clarity of communist positions.
Since the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 it would seem that the world has at last changed for the better. We can now look forward to a positive future free from the ideology of the past. It is as if a new morality has been born. ‘Democracy’ has replaced ‘tyranny’ in the old ‘Communist’ states with ‘humanitarian aid’ taking the place of imperialism on an international level. Involvement in foreign wars is justifiable when those involved are labelled fascists or terrorists and there are ‘neutral’ non-government organisations (e.g. Medecins Sans Frontiers) to mop up afterwards. Even the economy has been changed and modified with the introduction of e-commerce. In fact it is claimed that the "technology of the Internet and its generalised use by enterprises and individuals" is &rises and individuals" is "creating a technological revolution comparable in scope to the industrial revolution of the 18th century" (World Revolution 236 p.1). Some have put so much faith in the importance of the Internet that "it is even being compared to the invention of the steam engine" (World Revolution 236 p.1). With all this ‘progress’ in only eleven years it is unsurprising that the bourgeoisie’s claims about the ‘death of Communism’ and the victory of capitalism appear completely justified. In fact anyone questioning the current apparent optimism would have to be mad, wouldn’t they?
The simple answer is no. For those who are seeking to look beyond the current gloss, in which cracks are already beginning to appear, there are many examples of the continuing bankruptcy of capitalism. Whether it’s the on-going imperialist wars, the increasing number of ‘natural’ disasters or the continued attacks on workers’ living standards, it’s clear, to some at least, that capitalism’s crisis is still with us. For a better description of the new century and what capitalism has in store for us we can turn to the words of Trotsky. This is how he described the start of the 20th century "Hatred and murder, famine and blood... It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism [...] - Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvoes of fire and in the rumbling of guns." (from an article on 'Optimism and pessimism', cited in Deutscher's The Prophet Armed). Sound familiar? Essentially we face the same choice faced by revolutionaries at the beginning of the last century: socialism or barbarism. Either we accept that communism is dead and there will be no new society, or we remain optimistic and accept that the opportunity to create a truly human society is not dead but remains alive in the international working class, the gravediggers of capitalism.
The ideas and questions put forward above (and those that will follow) don’t exist in a vacuum and unfortunately many would disagree with them. While this is unfortunate it is also boringly predictable as the majority of those who consider themselves revolutionaries disagree with each other about the problems posed by capitalism. Whether it’s how the working class will create the social revolution if indeed they think this is required (some even question the existence of the working class!) or how capitalism itself ‘works’, confusion reigns among what passes for the revolutionary ‘movement’. This in turn creates an enormous amount of confusion among those younger militants and those unfamiliar with the ‘maddening’ world of so-called ‘revolutionary’ groups, who are seeking a clear explanation of the current situation.
While the bourgeoisie’s campaign around the ‘death of Communism’ has added to this confusion, the collapse of the eastern bloc had an even more fundamental effect on the ‘leftists’ (those groups who despite claiming to be ‘revolutionary’ represent the left wing of the bourgeoisie). The remaining ‘Stalinist’ groups have either collapsed or are in a state of terminal inertia unable to break with an ideology which was the negation of communism. The last ten years has also seen the Trotskyists (in Britain at least) ‘visibly’ move to the centre, joining the bourgeoisie in the parliamentary circus while continuing with their usual tactics of tail-ending single issue campaigns, constantly calling for the unions to act, or for ‘democracy’ to be defended, while all the time espousing their revolutionary credentials. Even the bourgeoisie’s most reliable friend, Social Democracy, has moved further to the right (or perhaps ceased to exist in any real sense?), this being most obvious in Britain with the emergence of ‘New Labour’. All of this may go some way to explaining why the working class seems to have deserted the organisations that claimed to defend its interests, either for the ‘joys’ of the consumer society or the ‘safety’ of religion (1).
Anarchism on the other hand has benefited from the ‘death of Communism’, with anarchist ideas and ‘organisations’ becoming fashionable once again. From Seattle to Prague the black flag of ‘revolution’ may have been raised but the same old lie is repeated "Marx, Lenin, Stalin – all the same enemy" (International Review 102 p.22). Why do anarchists echo the lies of the bourgeoisie and support consciously or unconsciously their campaign that the bankruptcy of ‘soviet’ Russia highlights the bankruptcy of marxism (and by default any other idea that questions capitalism’s authority)? Firstly we must ask those who identify themselves as anarchists what they mean by the term. Do they "mean an anarchist like Proudhon?" (World Revolution 170 p.6) Or are they a primitivist, syndicalist or anarcho-capitalist? Rather than define itself "in relation to historic currents on the vital questions which have faced the working class at important moments" (World Revolution 170 p.6), anarchism is made up of a range of different and often contradictory ideas which leads to confusion rather than clarification.
This incoherence is a consequence of anarchism’s origins. While anarchism may have borrowed ideas from other schools of socialism, it differs from these (and in particular marxism) ultimately as it was based from its beginnings on ‘abstract eternal principles’ (2) like ‘individual freedom’ and ‘absolute liberty’ (due to the influence of petit-bourgeois ideology). This characterised Proudhon’s theory and activity and, with more disastrous effects, Bakunin’s relationship with the 1st International and his criticism of the ‘authoritarian’ Marx. These ideas are the bedrock of anarchist thought and can still be found at the heart of ‘programmes’ (for want of a better phrase) put forward by today’s anarchists (see the article on Anarchism and Marxism in the current issue of Direct Action produced by the Solidarity Federation for an example of this) whether or not they have tried to distance themselves from ‘classical’ anarchism. Ahistorical idealism is always preferred to a more rigorous historical materialism and therefore confusion reigns.
The effect of this confusion is an inability to defend political positions while being able to dodge answering the difficult questions which arise from this vacillation. The evidence for the betrayal of class positions by anarchists is all too clear in the history of the workers’ movement. The real tests for revolutionaries arise during times of war and revolution, and anarchists have been found wanting on both occasions. Kropotkin’s support, along with the syndicalist CGT for the imperialist war in 1914, the CNT’s role in the popular front government during the Spanish ‘civil war’, and the general confusion amongst anarchists over the October revolution in 1917 are perhaps the most obvious examples of this betrayal. These examples also show how close anarchism is to its supposed enemy' leftism. While anarchists may claim to be the most ‘radical’ alternative to capitalism, they often fall into the same traps as leftist organisations. This is evident in their support for single-issue campaigns and their on and off relationship with the trade unions. There are groups and individuals that find all of this a bit difficult to defend and look to groups like the ‘Friends of Durruti’ for examples of how anarchism has remained loyal to the working class. Surely the failure of the Friends of Durruti group to break free from anarchism and the CNT lead to its ultimate fate?
Other groups (e.g. in Britain the Anarchist Federation (AF) and Class War (CW), in France Gauche Communiste Libertaire), faced with anarchism’s betrayal, have tried to form a syntheses between anarchism and marxism, to create a ‘libertarian communism’. In practice this involves plucking out ‘acceptable’ (i.e. not ‘Leninist’ as that would be ‘authoritarian’ and therefore unacceptable) political currents (in the case of the AF, Dutch and German ‘left communists’ like Pannekoek and the KAPD) from their historical context and adopting them as their own. The most obvious problem with this approach is that it is ‘sloppy’ history. But more importantly this is a dishonest attempt to pass off the theoretical breakthroughs of the communist left (those groups and individuals who broke with the 3rd International) on for, example, trade unions and national liberation as having something in common with the anarchist tradition. The "conviction that communism is the self-liberation of the working class emerges with marxism not with anarchism" (World Revolution 238) and left communism can never be part of the anarchist tradition. If it were, surely Bordiga would be worthy of a mention? Perhworthy of a mention? Perhaps because of his commitment to the party he is unacceptable? Anarchism’s real commitment is to ‘self liberation’ its "eternal principles liberty, equality and fraternity", as mentioned above, "originally borrowed from the bourgeoisie" (World Revolution 238). It is these principles which guide anarchist theory and practice and why particularly in the form of ‘libertarian communism’ anarchism can only add to the confusion already in the workers’ movement following the collapse of the eastern bloc (3).
There is of course an alternative to all of this confusion and this alternative has been hinted at above. Marxism and the organisations it has created (the first three Internationals and, in particular, those ‘left communists’ who broke from the decaying 3rd International) offer a clear and coherent explanation of capitalism in crisis, communist organisation and the history of the workers’ movement. It would be foolish to pretend that communists are infallible. Marxism is not a religion to be passed down to enlightened members of the class. That said it is the ability of communists, using marxism as a tool, to learn from their mistakes and through discussion to build on theoretical ‘lessons’ that differentiates them from the anarchists. The best examples of this are the left communists like, for example, Bordiga or the Bilan group, who were able to identify the capitalist nature of Soviet Russia while remaining in the tradition of the October revolution. This is a political current which has never deserted the working class and always stuck to its internationalist principles whatever the consequence. This leads us to the conclusion that communism unlike anarchism is not a utopian dream but a living movement and perhaps the only perspective for humanity (4).
So what’s to be done? Firstly we must combat the ‘greatest lie of the 20th century’ that the collapse of the eastern bloc lead to the death of communism. The current ‘anti-capitalist’ demonstrations prove that many are not happy with capitalism in terminal crisis and are looking for an alternative. Unfortunately most of these protests have concentrated on the spectre of globalisation and in particular the IMF and WTO. This identification with one aspect of capitalism (capitalism became a global system a very long time ago) has meant that many of the protesters find themselves turning to the nation state and its ‘democratic systems’ for protection (the role of the US unions in the demonstrations in Seattle is an example of this), rather than realising that it is these national units not ‘multinationals’ that call the shots on the world money markets. The IMF and WTO act as forums for each nation, large or small, to fight it out with their competitors. Revolutionaries have nothing to gain by defending national interests. The fight begins with the battle against our own bosses and develops as workers begin to control their own struggles until eventually we are at a position where we can overthrow the state. This battle can only be won by the working class not by an ‘alliance’ of well-meaning do-gooders (e.g. greens, Christians, environmentalists) who represent the left wing of capitalism. The task for those revolutionaries who have not deserted the communist project or the working class (i.e. the communist left) is to intervene in this movement (especially with younger militants) and fight bourgeois mystification at every level. The working class has not gone away and neither has capitalism’s crisis. The ‘death of communism’ was an attempt at finally destroying the working class, which failed. The small but growing number of strikes (including an increasing number of wildcat and ‘unofficial’ ones ) proves this. The ultimate task is clear – Workers of all countries, Unite! Capitalism is dying, long live the communist revolution!
R (September/October 2000)
1). Perhaps the most alarming example of this is the growth in popularity, particularly among the young, of Islam and in particular the suggestion that it is a ‘revolutionary’ alternative to capitalism. Superstition and ‘tradition’ offer the working class nothing and revolutionaries must fight this return to medievalism.
2). While I realise that this statement doesn’t go very far in explaining all the differences between anarchism and marxism it does highlight the ‘moralism’ which is at the heart of all anarchist currents. The purpose of this ‘essay’ was to clarify to myself why I had broken from anarchism, not to provide an in-depth thesis. For a more detailed analysis of the argument see ‘Anarchism or Communism?’ in International Review 79 or the articles on anarchism in International Review 102, both of which I found useful when forced to re-evaluate my ideas.
3). Again I realise that this is not the whole story. What about organisation, substitutionism or dead-end activism? As I said above this ‘essay’ is an attempt to clarify to myself why I broke with anarchism (or more specifically libertarian communism having been a member of the AF) and I feel it is the commitment to ‘self liberation’ (which breeds an unhealthy moralism) which influences the rest of anarchist theory. The article in World Revolution 238 which deals with the AF points out the theoretical problems faced by an organisation trying to force two opposing ideas together. When this is tried the only outcome is incoherence. The other main problem is the question of organisation. Federalism is preferred because it avoids the ‘authoritarianism’ of the party. In reality an unofficial hierarchy of friends is created which has all the elements of the most undemocratic organisations while pretending to be ‘free’ and ‘democratic’. This effectively stifles debate and allows for only the most basic agreement on political positions. This perhaps explains why Anarchists prefer dead-end activism to more rigorous debate.
4). Once again I realise this is only a brief explanation. Any issue of World Revolution, International Review, Revolutionary Perspectives, Internationalist Communist or Communist Left will expand on these ideas.
The farce around the election of the US president has allowed the rulers of Europe, increasingly anxious to assert their independence from the US, to mount a campaign about how much more efficient ‘our’ dgn about how much more efficient ‘our’ democratic institutions are over here. It’s true that the election stalemate has been a real embarrassment for the US ruling class, and the comrades of our US section analyse the reasons for the mess in the article below. But the article also shows that there are in any case no fundamental differences between Gore and Bush. And this applies to ‘democratic’ elections everywhere. However they are managed, parliamentary elections are always used against the consciousness of the working class. ‘Democracy’ is a mask hiding the real dictatorship of capitalism, and workers can only fight against this dictatorship by struggling for their own interests as a class.
At the time of writing, the outcome of the presidential electoral circus is still unknown. The electoral stalemate was clearly an unplanned accident for the US ruling class, a tremendous embarrassment creating a confusing political dilemma. The political strategy of the bourgeoisie going into the election appeared to reaffirm a commitment to maintain the left, the Democratic Party, in power in the White House. No significant domestic political, economic or imperialist factors existed to call into question the continuation of the strategy of the left in power, which has worked so effectively since 1992 for the effectively since 1992 for the bourgeoisie, not only in the US, but internationally (See International Review 98, ‘Why are the left parties in government in the majority of European countries today?’, 3rd quarter 1999). This strategy permitted the bourgeoisie to use the Clinton administration to maintain a continuous implementation of austerity and the dismantling of the New Deal welfare state, to intervene frequently and effectively on the military level around the world under the ideological cover of ‘humanitarianism’, and to maintain the disorientation of the working class. At the same time, the ruling class was able to revamp and strengthen the union apparatus in order to confront future working class struggles.
If there were no conjunctural factors pressuring the bourgeoisie to abandon the left in power strategy, neither was there any necessity to resort to an alternation in power to revitalize the democratic mystification. The left has only been in power for eight years, and the Republicans have controlled congress and a majority of state governorships, so there was no monopolizing of political power for an overly long period of time to wear out the democratic mystification. After all, the right had held power for 12 years under Reagan/Bush, and was removed from office not to revitalize demfice not to revitalize democracy, but rather because of imperialist preoccupations, following Bush’s indecisiveness to intervene in the Balkans and consequent squandering of American imperialist advantage built up by the Gulf War in 1991.
Consequently, a Gore victory seemed most sensible for the bourgeoisie. As we noted in Internationalism 114, at the same time, to protect themselves against an ‘accident’ the bourgeoisie installed the younger Bush as the candidate of the Republicans on the right. Despite all the campaign rhetoric, and despite their different party affiliations, both Gore and Bush adhere to the same, identical faction of the bourgeoisie, with no significant divergences on imperialist policy, and essentially identical positions on all significant domestic policy questions. Whoever won, the bourgeoisie was assured that basically the same orientation on domestic and international policy would be pursued.
The bourgeoisie tries to counter ‘voter apathy’
The campaign was manipulated to generate interest and enthusiasm in the election, to present it as ‘close’ in order to bolster participation by largely apathetic electorate, to rrgely apathetic electorate, to rejuvenate the electoral mystification. The propaganda stressed over and over that the campaign was too close to call, that every vote would count, etc. etc. The polls portrayed Gore as trailing even until the very eve of the election, prodding working class and liberal voters to come out to the poll to prevent the triumph of the right.
So, what happened? In large measure the strategy prevailed. Despite being portrayed as trailing in all but one of the national polls by three to five points, Gore won the popular vote, achieving 49% of the vote, a greater percentage than the vastly more popular Clinton received in 1992 or 1996. In fact, Gore received more actual votes than Reagan did in his landslide victories over Carter and Mondale, respectively in 1980 and 1984. The political accident that threw the electoral circus into turmoil was due to two factors. First, the loose cannon actions of the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader. Second, the fact that for the first time since 1888, indeed for the first time in the epoch of capitalist decadence, the results in the popular vote were contradicted by the results in the anachronistic Electoral College, which appeared to give the election victory to the candidate who came in second place.
The Nader Factor
Unlike the Perot campaigns of ’92 and ’96, which were designed to siphon off votes from the Republicans and facilitate the victory of the left in those elections, the Nader candidacy was not designed to impact on the current election. The script called for the Green Party to develop a political presence so that it might prepare to play a crucial role in the future as a means to control radicalized workers and petty bourgeois elements, as the crisis deepens and working class discontent becomes more pronounced. In this sense the Nader campaign was designed as a electoral reference point for the Seattle-type anti-globalisation movement, as well as traditional environmentalists and ‘progressives’. The immediate goal was to achieve 5% in the popular vote, which would qualify the Greens for federal campaign funds in the future. However, Nader made a deal with the established environmental groups and the Democratic Party that he would not seek to alter the result of the election, and promised not to campaign in states where it might affect the outcome. For whatever reason – some of his critics in the left of the Democratic party and the environmental movement charge egomania – Nader reneged on this agreement Nader reneged on this agreement and concentrated his campaign in key battleground states that were crucial to a Gore victory. These states were also most receptive to Nader’s ‘progressive message’ attacking big business. Realizing that Nader was poised to threaten the Gore victory, about two weeks before the election the environmentalists and the left of the Democratic Party began an all-out campaign against Nader for reneging on the deal, urging him to withdraw from the election, and calling upon his supporters not to ‘waste’ their votes and help elect Bush. The New York Times joined this campaign, denouncing Nader for ‘electoral mischief’, and TV journalists joined the chorus as well. This campaign was in sharp contrast to the situation with Perot, who never received such criticism and was never asked to withdraw in ’92 and ’96 – precisely because his campaign was designed to affect the election results in the Clinton races.
Even though the bourgeoisie was successful in scaring off more than fifty percent of the people who were supposedly intending to vote for Nader, and achieved a Gore victory in the popular vote, the Green party candidate managed to screw up the Electoral College vote on the state level in at least three states: New Hampshire, Oregon and the all Hampshire, Oregon and the all important Florida, with its 25 electoral votes. For example, in Florida, where Bush had a 1,700 vote margin on election day (before the first recount which brought him down to 330), Nader got 96,000 votes. While undoubtedly a good number of the voters who cast ballots for Nader were people who were so alienated from the mainstream parties that they probably wouldn’t have participated in the election had Nader not been a candidate, if only 3 percent of the 96,000 had voted for Gore, Bush would have been easily defeated on election day.
The anachronistic Electoral College
The unforeseen accident that produced a situation in which the electoral vote did not match the popular vote was caused by Nader’s reneging on the deal, and aggravated by the Electoral College, an anachronistic, anti-democratic - even by bourgeois standards - historical relic created in 1787 as a check against ‘popular passions’. In today’s conditions this institution is weighted disproportionately in favor of rural, small population states, and it was these states that Bush won heavily.
The bourgeoisie’s strategy provided protection against an vided protection against an accidental defeat at the polls, but not against a contradictory and indecisive result at the polls. For the American bourgeoisie, no matter how much they pay homage to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the constitution they created over 200 years ago, an election in which the guy who lost the election is declared the winner is a tremendous political embarrassment and liability. All the rhetoric about the ‘will of the people’ and ‘the people decide’ rings empty. Despite the fact that the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie could certainly live with either Gore or Bush as president with no problem, each of the candidates, and their entourages, genuinely want to be president, and this has led to never-ending political soap opera since election day. All the bickering, posturing and rancor by the two candidates camps is in complete contrast to the normal unifying, mutual support and coming together that normally marks the conclusion an American electoral circuses.
The goal of the current recount, and the legal challenges by the Gore staff, is designed not simply to satisfy Gore’s real personal ambitions, but also to produce an election result in Florida so that the final Electoral College results will coincide with the popular vote, though the final outcome is stillugh the final outcome is still in doubt. The ruling class is trying to put the best ‘spin’ possible on the current situation, stressing how this election proves that every vote counts, and that the melodrama we are witnessing is a simply a stupendous civics lesson for the American public. But in reality both sides expose the pettiness and corruption of the highly touted American electoral political system, in which each side is shamelessly trying to cheat and manipulate the vote counts in their favor. Senior ‘statesmen’ in both parties, including former presidents Carter and Ford, are already pushing for a resolution that will somehow salvage the authority and legitimacy of the presidency and American democracy following the settlement of the current stalemate.
Indeed, the current squabbling in no way threatens the stability of American society. Whatever jitters there are on Wall Street have been there for over a year and are not caused by the inconclusive election. The working class is not engaged in open struggle, and the imperialist strategy of American imperialism is not in question. In this sense the so-called ‘sharp political division’ in the American electorate couldn’t come at a better time for the bourgeoisie, even if it is unplanned. While having the left in opposition m having the left in opposition might create certain problems for the ruling class in terms of justifying overseas military interventions, or in potentially provoking oppositional actions by the unions and the Jesse Jackson/Ted Kennedy wing of the Democrats, the situation will not be insurmountable.
Once the election is decided the bourgeoisie will try to foster reconciliation, and a strongly divided Congress and White House will somehow find the statesmanlike wherewithal to rise above partisan divisiveness to continue to attack the standard of living of the working class, and begin to repair the tarnished image of the democratic mystification.
Internationalism, ICC section in the US, 11/18/00.
Day after day, the list of the dead and wounded, in Israel and the occupied territories, grows longer.
In a region which has already been through five out-and-out wars since the end of the second world slaughter (not counting all the ‘peacetime’ military operations), a new war is hatching, without being officially started, and has already killed hundreds of people, especially children and young people.
Officially, everyone talks about ‘peace’ – the Israeli leaders, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, and all the governments of the developed countries, whether European or American.
In fact, despite all the conferences that have succeeded each other since last summer (Camp David in July, Paris on October 4, Sharm-el-Sheikh later on that month) the situation has got worse and worse: stone-throwing, bomb attacks, Israelis lynched by Palestinians, the use of live bullets by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian demonstrators, attacks on civilians populations by rockets, shells and helicopters.
Depending on which country we live in, or on which country we live in, or the political colour of the government, we are being called on to side with one camp or another in this conflict:
"Defend Israel against the threat of all these fanatical Arabs who surround the country"
"Support the just cause of the Palestinians against Israeli atrocities".
But no one is posing the real question: where are the interests of the working class in all this, whether Jewish or Arab, whether in Israel or Palestine, or in other countries?
The Middle East: war without end
The 20th century has been a century of wars, the most atrocious wars in human history, and not one of them has served the interests of the workers. It’s always the workers who are called upon to go and kill each other in their millions for the interests of their exploiters, under the banner of ‘defending the country’, or fighting for ‘civilisation’, ‘democracy’, or even the ‘socialist fatherland’ (which is how certain people described the USSR of Stalin and the gulag).
And after these terrible wars, particularly after the second world war, those who lived through them were again asked to make new sacrifices to reconstruct the national (i.e. capitalist) economy.
Today there is a new war in the Middle East, even if it hasn’t been officially declared.
On both sides, the ruling cliques call on the workers to ‘defend the country’ whether Jewish or Palestinian. The Jewish workers, who in Israel are exploited by Jewish capitalists, the Palestinian workers who are exploited by Jewish capitalists or Arab capitalists (and often more ferociously by the latter than by the Jewish capitalists because in the Palestinian enterprises, working rights are no different from what they were in the old Ottoman empire).
The Jewish workers have already paid a heavy tribute to the war madness of the bourgeoisie during the course of the five wars they have been through since 1948. As soon as they were taken out of the concentration camps and the ghettos of a Europe ravaged by world war, the grandparents of those who today wear the uniform of the Israeli defence Forces were dragged into the war between Israel and the Arab countries. Then their parents paid the blood-price in the wars of 67, 73 and 82. These soldiers are not frightful brutes who think of nothing but killing Palestinian children. They are young conscripts, most of them workers, constantly bombarded with propaganda about the ‘barbarity’ of the Arabs and yet many of them full of doubt and disgust at being forced to act as cops.
The Palestinian workers have already paid the blood-price. Kicked out of their homes in a war that their leaders wanted, they have spent the major part of their lives in refugee camps, enrolled into the various Palestinian militias (Fatah, PFLP, Hamas, etc). Frequently they have suffered the worst massacres not at the hand of the Israeli army but of the armies of the countries where they were in exile, like Jordan and Lebanon. In September 1970 (Black September), King Hussein exterminated them en masse, to the point where some of them had to flee to Israel to escape death. In September 1982 it was the Arab militias (albeit Christian, and allied to Israel) who butchered them in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Lebanon.
Nationalism and religion: poison for the exploited
Today, in the name of ‘Palestine’, they want to once again mobilise Arab workers against the Israelis, the majority of whom are workers, just as the latter are being asked to get themselves killed for the defence of the ‘Promised Land’, Eretz Yisroael.
Both sides are being drenched with nationalist propaganda, which seeks to turn human beings into ravening beasts. The Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies have been aggravating these nationalist feelings for more than half a century. Both Israeli and Arab workers are told that they must defend the land of their ancestors. With the first, a systematic militarisation of society has been developed alongside a siege mentality in order to make everyone into good soldiers. With the second, the idea has been that if they can settle accounts with Israel, they will ‘get their land back’. And in order to achieve this, the leaders of the Arab countries have kept them for decades in concentration camps, subjecting them to intolerable living conditions and preventing them from integrating themselves into the ‘host’ country.
Nationalism is one of the worst ideologies that the bourgeoisie has ever invented. It makes it possible for the ruling class to hide the antagonisms between exploiters and the exploited, to rally them all behind the same flag, to get the exploited to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their exploiters.
And to cap it all, this war is also being fuelled by the poison of religious propaganda, which leads to the development of the most irrational forms of fanaticism. The Jews are called upon to defend the Wailing Wall, the remains of Solomon’s Temple. The Muslims are told to give their lives for the Mosque of Omar and the holy places of Islam. What is happening today in Israel and Palestine clearly confirms what revolutionaries said last century: religion is the opium of the people. Its aim is to console the exploited and the oppressed. Those whose lives on earth is a hell are told that they will be happy after their deaths as long as they know how to find salvation. And the road to salvation passes through sacrifice, submission, and offering your life for the ‘holy war’
The fact that, at the beginning of the 21st century, ideologies and superstitions that go back to antiquity or the Middle Ages are still being stirred up in abundance in order to get human beings to sacrifice their lives says a great deal about the depth of the barbarism stalking the Middle East and many other parts of the world.
The great powers are responsible for the war
As for the ‘developed’ countries, the ‘great democracies’ of Europe and the USA, which are today so keen to announce their compassion for the suffering of the people in the Middle East, their revolting hypocrisy deserves to be denounced from beginning to end.
It is the leaders of these same powers which have created the infernal situation facing the exploited of this region.
It was the European bourgeoisies, particularly the English bourgeoisie with its Balfour declaration in 1917, which, with its policy of divide and rule, permitted the formation of a "Jewish Homeland" in Palestine, opening the door to the chauvinist utopia of Zionism. It was the same bourgeoisies who, at the end of the second world war, arranged for the transportation to Palestine of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and concentration camp victims. This made sure that all these refugees were kept well away from their countries. It was the same bourgeoisies, first the British and the French, then the American, who armed the state of Israel to the teeth in order to make it the spearhead of the western bloc in the region during the cold war. The USSR, on the other hand, poured weapons into its Arab allies. Without these big ‘patrons’, the wars of 1956, 67, 73 and 82 wouldn’t have been able to take place.
With the collapse of the eastern bloc we were promised a new era of peace. This lie was immediately exposed by the Gulf war in 1991. But after that, illusions about peace were spread far and wide by the politicians and the media. It was the period of the Madrid conference of October 91 and the ‘Oslo accords’ signed at the White House in September 1993.
But there can be no peace in capitalism. This was demonstrated by the horrible massacres going on in Yugoslavia at the same moment. As for the Middle East, peace meant a ‘Pax Americana’, a still more powerful presence of the US in the region. This is something that the other bourgeoisies did not want at a time when the disappearance of the ‘Soviet’ threat was leading them to affirm their own imperialist ambitions.
Today all the bourgeoisies claim they want peace. What they really want is to get their foot in the door, or strengthen further their position in the Middle East, one of the most coveted regions of the world because of its economic and strategic importance.
To end war, you have to end capitalism
This is why, in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, we find the US backing Israel while other powers, such as France (as we saw at the Paris meeting in October) are lining up behind the Palestinians.
Even after the disappearance of the USSR, the great powers are there to throw oil on the fire, as they have been doing in Yugoslavia over the past 10 years.
This is also why the workers of these countries, the ‘great democracies’, whose leaders talk about nothing but ‘peace’ and ‘human rights’, must refuse to take sides with either camp. Above all they must refuse to be taken in by the speeches of those parties which claim to be part of the working class – the parties of the left and the extreme left, who are calling on workers to show their ‘solidarity with the Palestinian masses’, to support their ‘right to a homeland’. A Palestinian homeland will never be anything but a bourgeois state in the service of the exploiters, oppressing the same Palestinian masses with its police and its prisons. The solidarity of the workers of the most advanced capitalist countries does not go out to the ‘Palestinians’ or to the ‘Israelis’, among whom you will find both exploiters and exploited. It goes out to the workers and the unemployed of Israel and of Palestine, who have their own struggles against their exploiters despite the constant brainwashing they are subjected to, as it goes out to the workers of all other countries. And showing solidarity certainly doesn’t consist in encouraging their nationalist illusions.
This solidarity means above all developing their own struggle against their own bourgeoisies, against the capitalist system which is responsible for all wars.
In the Middle East as in many other regions of the world ravaged by war today, there is no ‘lasting peace’ possible under capitalism. Even if the present crisis is not leading to an open war, even if the different protagonists arrive at some temporary truce, this region will remain a powderkeg ready to explode.
Peace can only be won when tha">Peace can only be won when the working class overthrows capitalism on a world scale. And the working class can only move in that direction by developing its struggles on its own class terrain, against the increasingly brutal economic attacks demanded by the insurmountable crisis of the system.
Against nationalism, against the wars our exploiters want to drag us into:
WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
November 2000
Links
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[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
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[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/45/austria
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-fascismracism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/mozambique
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/20/parliamentary-sham
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/socialist-workers-party
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/elections
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/chechnya
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/135/internationalism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/sierra-leone
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/25/fake-workers-parties
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/trotskyism
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/289/lebanon
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/africa
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1980-mass-strike-poland
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/mobilisations-people
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/node/15
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anarchist-federation
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/57/israel
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/40/belgium
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/official-anarchism
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/253/us-elections