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

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

How Did It Start?

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

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

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

Workers Overrun Union Strategies

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

Workers Assert Their Own Class Perspectives

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

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

Lessons For Today

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

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

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

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

JZ  12/12/10

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

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

A year of mounting tensions

Tensions on the Peninsula

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

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

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

So what does all this mean for the working class? As we pointed out in the last issue of Internationalism[1] [12]the proletariat has no stake in the outcome of bourgeois elections. Elections are moments in the life of the bourgeoisie through which it attempts to tie the working class to the state through the electoral circus, settle internal disputes within its ranks and manipulate the machinery of the state and media to bring the best ruling team to state power for a given historical juncture. However, the working class does have a vital need to understand the political strategy of the bourgeois class as it attempts to utilize the state to manage the permanent economic crisis and suppress the mortal threat to its existence that emanates from the class struggle. As we have argued in Internationalism for some time now, the deadening weight of social decomposition on the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus has resulted in a growing difficulty for the ruling class to manage its political and electoral system to achieve the best possible results from the point of view of the national capital as a whole. The increasing tendency for “everyman for himself” in the arena of bourgeois politics, the growing number of factions, and movements and the increasing unpredictability of bourgeois elections are weighing heavily on the U.S. bourgeoisie at the moment. What depth has the political crisis of the bourgeoisie reached? This is the vital question facing the working class movement when it comes to analyzing bourgeois elections.

The Contradictions of Bourgeois Economic Policy: Austerity or Stimulus?

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

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

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

Nevertheless, we should not interpret the debate between these two policy positions as evidence of any real difference within the U.S. bourgeoisie over the need to enact austerity against the working class’ living and working conditions. All bourgeois factions recognize that the fiscal crisis of the state is real and will eventually need to be dealt with by making “painful sacrifices.” The policy debates within the bourgeoisie at the moment concern only the timing of austerity and the question of whether or not another round of stimulus—given the long term risks—will actually help the economy recover. Despite a concerted media campaign directed towards the working class around the threat to the nation posed by the national debt, a strong faction within the U.S. bourgeoisie believes that greater stimulus is needed. At the moment, this faction appears to have the ear of the Obama administration.[2] [13] The recent extension of the Bush era tax cuts, combined with another extension of the federal emergency unemployment compensation program and a cut in the Social Security payroll tax has been marketed by the administration as a “stimulus program” that they believe will add up to 1.3 million jobs in the next two years.[3] [14] Of course, all of the tax cuts and the extension of unemployment benefits will have to be charged on the national credit card.

The working class should not be fooled by the Obama administration’s continued resort to Keynesian policies. Behind these short-term policies, all factions of the bourgeoisie know that the day of reckoning is coming when the Scylla of debt and fiscal crisis will outweigh the Charybdis of unemployment and economic stagnation.[4] [15] The question facing the bourgeoisie at the moment is what political faction should hold state power when the assault on the social wage begins?

From the perspective of history, it would appear likely that the U.S. bourgeoisie would attempt to move the Democratic Party out of power so it could play the traditional role of the left in opposition when the Republicans preside over enacting the tough austerity measures that lie ahead. However, given the amount of turmoil that has occurred in the U.S. political system over the last decade; this is no longer either a straightforward decision or such a simple maneuver for the bourgeoisie to accomplish. While social decomposition has affected the entire bourgeois political spectrum over the last ten years, it has not affected both American political parties equally. Over the last decade the Republican Party has become increasingly penetrated by factions of the bourgeoisie that do not necessarily have the capacity to act in the overall interests of the national capital. The Republicans current coalition includes the obscurantist Christian Right, ideological libertarians who want to abolish the Federal Reserve, free-market fundamentalists, the most belligerent anti-immigrant factions the bourgeoisie has to offer and those who relish the legacy of Cowboy diplomacy from the Bush era. On top of this, we now have to add the Tea Party, many of whom are true ideologues who really believe the extreme philosophies they preach.[5] [16] While “mainstream Republicans” wise to the ways of Washington still control the levers of power in the Republican Party; they are under increasing assault from the right-wing insurgency in their ranks, causing them to pander to this constituency at the same time they manipulate it to improve their electoral position.

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

The 2012 Presidential Campaign

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

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

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

For the better part of the week, left-wing blogs and the MSNBC network were ripe with calls for a 2012 primary challenge to Obama or the launching of a third party challenge from the left.[7] [18] Congressional Democrats vowed to vote against the tax compromise, while Bernie Sanders—the self-professed Socialist Senator from Vermont—grandstanded on the Senate floor with a mock filibuster against the tax compromise, railing against the decline in living standards of the American working-class, while the richest Americans keep on lining their pockets.[8] [19] During this period, a sense of shock and disbelief emanated from the base of the Democratic Party as they appeared to form an angry left opposition to their own President.

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

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

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

In the final analysis, the U.S. political situation is currently characterized by the instability wrought by decomposition. All responsible factions of the bourgeoisie recognize the eventual imperative to enact austerity. However, there is little consensus at the moment about how to accomplish this at the political level. While history tells us that the bourgeoisie would seek to move the Democratic Party into opposition, so the Republicans can enact the needed cuts while the Democrats work with the unions to control the working class’ response; the current situation of decomposition makes this somewhat less than straightforward for the bourgeoisie. The ruling class could opt to try to enact these cuts with a center-right Democratic President in league with the Republican establishment, with the Congressional Democratic caucus, along with the unions[9] [20], playing the role of the left opposition. This course of action would come with the serious risk of upsetting the traditional ideological division of labor between the Democrats and Republicans. However, given the ideological deterioration of the Republican Party and the potential for a dangerous Presidential candidate emerging from its ranks, the bourgeoisie may have no other choice than to opt for such a policy.

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

Henk 12/25/10
 

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

The Necessity of Historical Perspective

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

Who is to be the judge, jury and executioner?

The bourgeoisie only speaks in lies

There is no freedom in bourgeois democracy

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

What was all this excitement about?

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

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

But what really is WikiLeaks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henk   3/4/2011

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

Imperialism is a necessity for the world bourgeoisie

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

Why the US bourgeoisie’s divisions and hesitancy?

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

What perspectives ahead?

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

Ana, 4/12/11.

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

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

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

The Public Sector in the U.S.

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

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

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

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

The Movement in Wisconsin

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

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

The ‘General Strike’ Slogan

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

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

The Union Obstacle

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

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

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

JJ 4/10/11.

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

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

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

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

Intensification of work

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

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

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

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

Absorption of youth into the workforce

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

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

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

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

Tax the rich?

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

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

Nothing for the working class in capitalist recovery

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

AS 4/9/11

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

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

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

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

•         The extension of the struggle

•         The spontaneity of the struggle

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

•         The tendency toward walk outs and work stoppages

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

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

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

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

Ana. 26/3/11          

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind the Canadian “Miracle”: Economic Fragility

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crisis of the Canadian Political Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henk 4/7/11.

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

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

The Importance of a Historical Method

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

1968: The Return of the Class on the Historic Scene

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

-       Violent confrontations in pitched battles with police

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

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

-       Mass picketing

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

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

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

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

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

In another article [75] (on page 4) we present an analysis of the recent developments of the class struggle. Those developments too, need to be placed in the larger, historic motion of ebbs and flows as the class struggles to conquer its own class identity and class consciousness. The benefit of this approach is that it allows us to understand the dynamic of the class struggle. This, in turn, helps us forge a long-term perspective and a materially based confidence in the class and in its potential and ability to carry out its historic revolutionary task.

Ana, 7/4/11.

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

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

The Dilemma of the 2012 Presidential Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henk, 06/09/11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ana, 4/6/11.

This article has already been published on our site here [88].

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

US Shifts Policies to Adapt to Its Weakened Position

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

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

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

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

Ana, 6/6/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henk, 06/07/11.

This article has already been published on our site here [92].

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

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

How is the working class faring?

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

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

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

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

These convulsions of the economy are neither the result of corporate greed or stock market speculation, as we were told in 2008, when they first emerged to the surface. Their roots are not to be found in ‘consumers’ recklessness in contracting debts they could not repay. Neither are they the cause of the incessant squabbles in Washington between factions of the U.S. ruling class divided by the dilemma of what to do in face of the most serious recession in U.S. history. These factors certainly aggravate the situation, but rather than being the cause, they are a symptom of a malaise for which the ruling class has no cure. As we wrote in International Review 133: “For the last four decades …the overall economy has only kept a semblance of functionality thanks to systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies…During these decades of crisis the economy has accumulated so many contradictions that today there is a real threat of an economic catastrophe.” (‘The United States - locomotive of the world economy... toward the abyss [96]’, 2nd Quarter 2008.)

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

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

As we wrote in the International Review 144: “…capitalism suffers genetically from a lack of outlets because the exploitation of labor power leads to a creation of a value greater than the outlay in wages, because the working class consumes much less than what it produces.” (‘Capitalism has no way out of its crisis [97]’, 1st Quarter 2011.) Workers and capitalists cannot constitute enough of a market for capitalism to restart its process of production. And a market is necessary in order to valorize the part of surplus value extracted through the exploitation of the working class and destined to reproduction. Exchanging value among capitalists loses sight of the fact that capital must expand, not consume, its value. As to the workers constituting a solvent market, the most powerful –and mortal-- contradiction of capitalism is the fact that as capital struggles against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as a result of competition, it improves technology, thus displacing workers and increasing productivity without a corresponding rise in wages. This results in a contraction of demand, as the workers’ ability to consume becomes more and more restricted. The current talks about anaemic spending, lack of investments, decrease in productivity express this fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Under these conditions, capitalism does not, and cannot have a solution to its crisis. As it imposes its oppression and its brutal austerity plans against the working class, the bourgeoisie risks to accelerate the time when the workers of the world take capitalism head on and consign it to the dustbin of history.

Ana, 09/04/11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Verizon strike, the CWA and IBEW have both presented the Verizon strike as one against “union-busting” and with the only demand that the company “bargain in good faith,” attempting to chain the strike to the same mystifications used in Wisconsin, despite it’s very different character. At the same time, they have insisted that the concessions being demanded are simply “corporate greed” despite the very obvious fact that their union busting precedent comes from a state government pushing austerity on the public sector. The unions and the left have publicized Verizon’s new willingness to “bargain” as a major victory, despite the fact that ever concession is still on the table, as in the “victory” won by Democrats with the debt ceiling feud in Washington (see our article, “U.S. Debt Ceiling Crisis: Political Wrangling While the Global Economy Burns [98]” in this issue).

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

JJ 9/9/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICC 9/24/11

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

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

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

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

The bourgeois media charged the Tea Party with willingness to send the country into default and economic calamity in order to achieve its ideological aims. Clearly, a party—or a faction of one—that is willing to do such damage to the national capital in order to fulfill an ideological pipe dream is not a credible party of government. The problem for the U.S. bourgeoisie, as the media never cease to point out, was that the Tea Party now has a stranglehold on the GOP itself, threatening to render the entire Republican apparatus politically obsolete. With Vice President Biden stating that the Tea Party acted like “terrorists” [4] and Democratic Senator from Iowa Tom Harkin bemoaning the destruction of the U.S. two-party system as the Republican Party morphs into a “kind of cult,”[5] the ideological meltdown of a significant faction of the U.S. political class is now an acknowledged fact in Washington, just as the main factions of the bourgeoisie struggle to control the damage they seem intent to do to the national capital. As one commentator noted [102], “the Tea Party movement did not come to Washington to govern and compromise in the traditional spirit of American politics; they came to demand and threaten.”

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

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

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

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

Confirmation of Our Analysis of Political Decomposition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Policy In Face of the Crisis?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political Decomposition Against the Class Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Henk

08/19/2011

We are re-publishing here the first part of an article written in 1998 for the Russian journal 'Proletarian Tribune', the aim of which was to give a brief history of the Communist Left for those who may not be well acquanted with the political tradition the ICC draws its heritage from. The full version can be found here [107]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bush: The “Worst President” in American History?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama: A Temporary Respite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henk, 09/03/2011