Nine months after the earthquake which ravaged Haiti, leaving hundreds of thousands dead[1], the shady practices of the ruling class seem to have no limit. Despite all the fine promises of financial aid, millions of victims are still stuck in overcrowded camps. There have been around 10,000 NGO personnel on the island, plus thousands of well-armed troops from different countries, not to mention all the reporters looking for scoops and the politicians seeking a bit of publicity. But despite all the hypocritical tears of the world’s leaders[2], very little has been done. This is a population of little real interest as a source of profit, although it is still subject to the worst kind of banditry on the ground. But while all the world specialists were announcing as early as April that the worst was still to come with the arrival of the rainy season in an already catastrophic sanitary situation – a combination guaranteed to bring epidemic diseases – the world bourgeoisie did no more than wait for the rain.

The endless laments of the ‘international community’ are at the moment a bit more discreet than the disgusting media show organised at the time of the earthquake. And for good reason! There would be a lot more explaining to do because it is now more obvious than ever that the bourgeoisie is directly responsible for this disaster.

Cholera is a disease linked to insalubrious living conditions, which is what the Haitians are living in. It is transmitted through a bacterium that lives in water contaminated by faecal matter. In a country where less than 3% of the ruins caused by the earthquake have been evacuated, you can imagine the state of the water supply that the population is forced to use. The reconstruction of this country requires material and financial means. They were promised by various bourgeoisies looking to boost their influence and find a few new markets but they have not been forthcoming: more than 70% of the loans that were announced have not actually been handed over.

Furthermore, the diffusion of the bacterium is also facilitated by the chaotic movement of the population and by the thousands of evictions by property owners impatient to get back the land now occupied by the camps.

The law of profit will always make the bourgeoisie a class of unscrupulous murderers.

V, November 2010.

 From the website of the Daily Mail (22/11/10):

Student militants to picket school gates over tuition fees
 “Student militants have joined forces with French communists to picket England’s secondary schools urging pupils as young as 15 to stage a walkout over university tuition fees.

Supporters of using ‘legitimate force’ to try to stop the rise in fees have been joined by members of the International Communist Current (ICC) to mobilise school children.

Activists want to leaflet schools across the country in the latest day of action, planned for Wednesday.

More than 20,000 young people have signed up to take part in a ‘national walkout’ on Wednesday. The majority are school pupils and further education students.

Campaign group Education Activist Network held a protest planning meeting on Saturday at Birkbeck College, London.

This was attended by at least one member of the ICC.

The ICC has a long tradition of direct action dating from the student protests in 1968 which paralysed France.

The EAN’s ringleader is Mark Bergfeld, 23, who has supported the use of ‘legitimate force’ to bring down the Government and called for ‘barricaded schools’.

Mr Bergfeld, who attends Essex University, said at Saturday’s meeting: ‘What you can do is, between now and the 24th, give out leaflets outside the schools so they know what we’re doing. Then on the day, they can join you.’

Also present were town hall and Health Service workers, school teachers and university lecturers”.

Our first response to this article in the Daily Mail was general hilarity. The second thought was 'no publicity is bad publicity'. But the third thought was: 'what’s behind this?'

The conspiracy-mongering of bourgeois journalism, which can never envisage a genuine movement of revolt from below, but must always trace it back to some devilishly cunning Moriaty spinning his webs in the shadows, has a long history, certainly going back to the days of Marx and the First International. The capitalist press habitually blamed the International Workingmen’s Association, to give it its actual title, for stirring up every act of resistance to the bourgeois order from the smallest local strike to the mighty Paris Commune of 1871. The International had a certain influence in those days, of course, but it was nothing compared to the inflated version conjured up by the servants of the ruling class.

We are a tiny group. We participate in the class struggle as best as our forces allow, and we have been active in a number of the discussions, meetings and demonstrations that are part of the present movement of the students against tuition fees and the abolition of EMA payments. We were indeed present at the EAN meeting described. We are proud to be an international organisation (which is different to being a purely French one, of course) and we can indeed trace our origins to the tremendous strike wave that shook France in May 1968.

But we make no pretence to being the organisers of the present movement – we don’t even see that as our role. There’s little point arguing this with the Daily Mail, however, because it’s irrelevant whether or not their hacks believe that they have really uncovered the secret power behind the current rebellion of working class youth in the UK.

The real aim of this and similar articles lies elsewhere. And there have indeed been a number of similar articles recently: anarchist groups like Solidarity Federation and the Anarchist Federation have been identified as the organisers of the occupation and trashing of Tory HQ on November 10, and after the same event a particularly vicious article was published in the Daily Telegraph which fingered a regular poster on the libcom internet forum, naming him and his father and again insinuating without any proof whatever that he was directly responsible for the damage done at Millbank.

‘Exposés’ of this kind are aimed at discrediting revolutionaries and revolutionary organisations, at making them sound as sinister and unattractive as possible, and ultimately at creating an atmosphere where they can be attacked directly by the forces of order. After all we advocate “legitimate force” and - hint hint – are prepared even to drag innocent schoolchildren into our evil schemes. And of course we are foreigners, so why should we even be allowed here?

The kettling of the 24 November London student demonstration was a blatant display of force aimed at intimidating a movement which the bourgeoisie is not yet certain that it can contain, not least because it is not obeying the usual rules of engagement which the trade unions and the left can normally be entrusted to impose. The insinuations against anarchists and communists are another expression of the same kind of reaction from the ruling class. They correspond to its need to block an emerging process of politicisation among young people – a politicisation which threatens to go well beyond the false opposition offered by the capitalist left.

No need to envisage a conspiracy here: these kinds of reaction are almost as ‘spontaneous’ to the ruling class as a demonstration organised on Facebook. But there is consciousness involved too: our rulers learn from what’s happened before and what’s happening elsewhere. They have in front of them the image of Greece and France, for example, where within the recent movements against austerity we saw small but visible minorities posing some very political questions: the self-organisation and extension of the struggles, and the future that capitalist society has in store for us. The students in Britain are also raising the issue of the future and the ruling class would rather that they weren't encouraged to see the possibility of becoming part of a movement leading in the direction of revolution.

WR, 27/11/10.

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331892/Tuition-fee-militants-picket-school-gates.html#ixzz16OoPiMUH [3]

The toxic red sludge coming from the bauxite-aluminium plant close to the village of Aika[1], fouling the Danube and flooding the neighbouring water courses and the villages of Devecser and Kolontar (the worst affected), can only generate a feeling of dread. It is the most serious incident of pollution in Hungary’s history! Thousands of cubic metres of poisoned sludge have been released into the environment and the repeated televised pictures of a bucket attached to a rope being thrown into it every hour to take samples for chemical analysis only added to the feelings of unease.

However, beyond the spectacular images of the desolated countryside in the first televised reports, another reality, just as shocking but much less reported on, is evident outside of the official comments: the deaths this has already caused. The horror generated by the dozens of immediate victims (including a 14-month old girl), the people gone missing, the more than a hundred wounded, affected by serious injuries, is added to today by the many who are still undergoing real suffering. This corrosive red sludge, composed of heavy metals and mildly radioactive, induces deep burns and attacks the eyes. The chemical component of this infamous mixture turns out to be carcinogenic. Thousands of villagers have decided to flee their homes in order to avoid putting their health in peril.

All the human drama of this catastrophe has been intentionally drowned out in the few commentaries that journalists have given. As usual, the dominant class has minimised the disaster: “The risk of the pollution of the Danube by the toxic red mud has been eliminated”. This is the lamentable announcement of the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban during a press conference in Sofia only a few days after the incident. Without turning a hair, he added that: “The Hungarian authorities are in control of the situation”[2]. At the same time, journalists were turning attention and reflection away from the tragic consequences of this incident, showing just spectacular images to frighten the population and thus avoiding any real explanation[3]. In any case, industrial accidents linked to “technological risks”[4] are “the price to pay”, the “inevitable price of progress”. In other words, the fact that there are victims must be accepted as a fatality. This is something “normal”!

We can only angrily and indignantly denounce this nauseous ideology and above all the attempt to hide what are effectively murders by an unscrupulous capitalist class. We can only firmly highlight the barbarity that obliges populations to live in a dangerous environment and then coldly displaces the villagers after the event as if they were battery hens, whereas they had been deliberately exposed to danger with a total contempt for their lives.

It was a long time ago that the seepage of the red sludge coming from the defective reservoir was discovered and that the risks of direct contamination of the neighbouring villages were known. The exposure of the population was an open secret among the local bosses and politicians! But because prevention is not a profitable activity, the bourgeoisie prefers to make economies and play Russian roulette with a part of the population. And they are still playing the same game!

The “experts”, the politicians, bosses and journalists know perfectly well that the industrial rim of the Danube is a gigantic open-air rubbish tip and that the unsafe, decrepit installations – due to lack of investment – along it, can only give rise to new, similar catastrophes. From the first seepages, they have done everything to minimise the impact of the disaster. Then, faced with the evidence, they have affected surprise at the conditions of this new catastrophe, pointing a finger at the past, “vestiges” inherited from the period of so-called “communism” in order to absolve their system and avoid responsibility[5].

If today the media has gone onto other things, if the event no longer makes the newspapers, the catastrophe and the sufferings are from finished!

This devastating event is neither natural nor the product of fate. It is a clear expression of the destructive madness generated by the frenetic search for profits. Exacerbated competition in a world where markets are reducing little by little obliges all industries and states to take more and more risks, to constantly cut back on safety measures in order to make economies. At the same time, natural resources are everywhere subject to a real pillage and are suffering accelerated destruction. The catastrophe in Hungary is already there. Not only is the Danube, the second-largest river in Europe polluted, but some water courses belonging to its hydrographical network have had their ecosystems completely destroyed. This is the case for the river Marcel (which flows into the Raab, a direct tributary of the Danube) where inert fish float on top of the rusty coloured water. It will be a long time, decades even, before life can return here; this is without counting the damage produced in all the surrounding land and in the percolating water and streams that eventually end up in the water table. More than a thousand contaminated hectares will henceforth affect agricultural activity and the food chain of this polluted space. In the long term what are the consequences of the dust from the dried-up sludge, because it turns out that as long as it stays liquid it is less dangerous?

Once again, the bourgeoisie displays its negligence and total contempt for human life. And not only is its instinct driven by its thirst for immediate profits, but its blindness is such that bit by bit it is sawing away at the branch on which it sits. Of course some bourgeois call on the rest of their class to slow down this collapse into catastrophe, but it’s a lost cause. The general logic of capitalism’s hunt for rapid profits, linked to the present decline of the economy as a whole and to the collapse of whole segments of it, can only sharpen the rapaciousness of industry and the financial sector as they seek to suck the marrow dry of those areas of the planet where a profit can still be made. In exploiting the proletariat worse than beasts the bosses turn their noses up at “too costly” safety measures. So they are doing away with them without reflecting for one second on the consequences for the rest of humanity.

WH (14th October)

The leaflet below was given out at the large meeting held at King's College on Monday 15th November, under the auspices of the left wing of the unions (Education Activists Network). We would welcome comments, criticisms, and above all, offers to distribute it or improve and update it in this period leading up to next week's Day of Action. A comrade from the ICC's section in Toulouse, which has been very active in the movement for struggle committees and assemblies,  was able to speak at the meeting; and despite a frontal attack on the French union strategies, was widely applauded. We will try to piece together more elements about this meeting.

For a long time, it has seemed that the working class in Britain has been stunned into silence by the brutality of the attacks being launched by the new government: forcing the disabled back to work, forcing the jobless to work for nothing, raising the pension age, savage spending cuts in the education sector, hundreds of thousands of jobs to go throughout the public sector, trebling of university tuition fees and scrapping Education Maintenance Allowance bonuses for 16-18 year old students...the list is endless. The workers’ struggles that have taken place recently – BA, tube, fire service - have all been kept in strict isolation.

But we are an international class and the crisis of this system is also international. In Greece, Spain, and most recently France there have been massive struggles against the new austerity drives. In France the reaction against the pension ‘reforms’ provided a focus for growing discontent throughout society, but especially among the youth.

The huge demonstration in London of 10 November showed that the same potential for resistance exists in the UK. The sheer size of the demo, the involvement of both students and education workers, the refusal to be limited to a tame march from A to B, all this expresses a widespread feeling that we cannot accept the logic behind the state’s assault on living conditions. The temporary occupation of Tory HQ was not the result of a conspiracy by a handful of anarchists but the product of a far wider anger, and the vast majority of students and workers supporting the demo refused to go along with the condemnation of this action by the NUS leadership and the media.

Many have said it: this demonstration was just the beginning. Already a second day of action and demonstration is being organised for the 24th November. For the moment such actions are being organised by the ‘official’ organisations like the NUS who have already shown that they are part of the forces of order. But that is no reason for not participating massively in the demonstrations. On the contrary, coming together in large numbers is the best basis for creating new forms of organisation that can express the real needs of the struggle.

Before such demonstrations or days of action, how do we move forward? We need to call for meetings and general assemblies in the universities, colleges and schools, open to all students and workers, both to build support for the demonstrations and discuss their aims.

The initiative by some comrades to form ‘radical student and worker blocs’ on the demonstrations should be supported – but wherever possible they should meet in advance to discuss exactly how they intend to express their independence from the official organisers.      

We need to learn from recent experiences in Greece – where occupations (including the occupation of union HQ) – were used to create a space where general assemblies could be held. And what was the experience in France? We saw an important minority of students and workers in many towns holding street assemblies not only at the end of the demos but on a regular basis while the movement was going forward.

We also need to be clear that in future the forces of order will not keep to the softly softly approach of 10 November. They will be tooled up and looking to provoke us into premature clashes to give them a pretext for displays of force– this has been a common tactic in France. The organisation of self-defence and solidarity against the forces of repression needs to come out of collective discussion and decision.

The struggle is not just in the education sector. The entire working class is under attack and the resistance needs to be spread consciously to both public and private sectors. Controlling our own struggles is the only way to extend them.

International Communist Current, 15/10/10.

The tour

The Discussions

What remains?

Below is a translation of the statement of a witness to the police repression meted out against students, youth and workers at a demonstration last month in Lyon, France against the pension “reform” and the attacks of the French ruling class. The French police have also picked up on their British counterpart’s tactic of “kettling”, particularly using it to prevent any collective reflection on the best means of struggle that is emerging in minorities of the working class fed up with being marched up and down and then sent home by the unions.

The British police were strongly criticised for their illegal kettling at the G20 protest and the killing of Ian Tomlinson. But following the overwhelming of the police (deliberately allowed or not) by demonstrators at Millbank on November 10, there was little doubt that the kettling tactic would be used again in the UK, especially after the activist wing of the NUS and other leftists had announced their intention of marching towards Lib Dem HQ on 24 November. And so the 24 November demo was led into the cynical trap laid for them a few hundred yards after leaving the meeting point at Trafalgar Square.

At Lyon, the violence of a handful of demonstrators was possibly manipulated by the police, but was anyway used by them to prevent any coming together and discussion between students and workers at the end of the demonstration. What the bourgeoisie fears above all is that students will join up with other elements of their class under similar attacks: young, old, employed or unemployed. It is these general assemblies, however much a minority they start off with, that can discuss how to take the struggle forward and that were so effective in avoiding police provocations and joining up with workers in the struggles against the CPE in France in 2006. It was precisely the growing threat of this unification that forced the French state to withdraw its immediate assault on students’ and young workers’ conditions.

Lyon, Tuesday October 19, another demonstration against the changes to retirement. More than 45,000 are present, including thousands of schoolchildren. The latter met up in the morning in front of schools and joined up with the main demonstration. The omnipresent police laid into any “outbursts” from the beginning from various points, outbursts that they largely helped to provoke through their aggressive presence.

In the Place Bellecour, right in the heart of Lyon, where a good part of the demonstrators had come and were still arriving, the forces of order were collecting in numbers. Some dozens of youths faced up to them. The police reacted immediately and violently in the middle of thousands of demonstrators; firing tear gas and with loaded flash-balls in hands. All the repressive forces were mobilised – cops, civil forces, GIPN... They used orange markers to stain the demonstrators. Police helicopters hovered overhead to take photographs and to report to and direct the forces below. River police were also posted on the Rhone. In sum all efforts were made to brutally attack the youngsters present and, at the same time, sabotage the end of the demonstration.

Confrontations lasted up to the evening and it wasn’t only with the youths. A number of demonstrators responded to this police provocation and physically prevented heavier attacks.

The question is immediately posed: why such a level of repression, such a disproportionate use of the police faced with this situation. Who profits from the crime?

Obviously, the ruling class didn’t “just let this happen”. In unleashing this deliberately provoked violence it wanted to send a clear message:

- To spread fear among the youth who wanted to join the struggle but did not want to suffer from such repression.

- To frighten parents, demonstrators or not, in an attempt to dissuade them from joining in with the next demonstration.

- To provoke the high school and university students already involved and turn their discontent onto the single issue of repression and physical conflict. And in this way to try to obscure all the lessons of the CPE in 2006 where, rightly, the youngsters refused to respond to police provocation.

-To pervert any questioning during this social movement against the retirement changes and fixate it on the “irresponsibility” of Sarkozy alone; to attempt to wipe out the basis of our anger faced with the crisis that the whole of capitalism imposes on us.

But the unleashing of such violence was aimed above all at preventing hundreds of workers and demonstrators, large numbers of whom remained at the end of the demonstration on the Place Bellecour, from meeting up, discussing, looking to the next stage of struggle and asking, collectively, how to struggle.

Up to this demonstration it had been the unions’ loudspeakers with their deafening noise which had contributed to preventing any real collective discussions or any real massive General Assemblies. All of the unions had openly blocked such gatherings since the beginning of the movement. But today, there have been dozens of arrests and of wounded amongst the young.

Make no mistake about this repression. This violence of the state is directly addressed to the whole of the working class! Order must reign! This is the clear message from the state.

- We must respond but not on the terrain dictated by the cops

- We must first of all affirm our complete solidarity with the school and university students who were attacked and beaten.

- We must then reflect on why this violence took place and directly discuss it in all the General Assemblies held in Lyon and elsewhere!

A direct witness of events at Lyon, 20/10/10.