The ruthless slaughter of thousands of civilians in New York and Washington, the majority of them workers, in the very heart of the USA, of capitalism's number one economic and military machine, was not only an abominable war crime. It also marks a giant step in the decomposition of the existing social order.

For this was not, as the propaganda merchants tell us, an attack on civilisation 'from the outside'. It was further confirmation that this capitalist civilisation, which not only reigns in the 'west' but over the whole planet, is a civilisation in decay which threatens the very future of humanity.

The events in the USA show that the free-for all military tensions which have racked the globe since the fall of the blocs a decade ago can no longer be kept to the margins of the system. From the Gulf in 1991 to the Bosnian war, then the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the reality that 'capitalism means war' has been written in blood in one of its main nerve centres.

And how is the US ruling class - supported by Blair and the 'democratic allies' - exploiting the natural solidarity that millions have felt for those who died so horribly in the hi-jacked planes, or amidst the rubble of the World Trade Centre? By using it to drum up support for slaughter on an even bigger scale - for massive military action aimed at defending the most sordid imperialist interests.

There is much talk about a 'second Pearl Harbour' and the comparison is accurate. In 1941 the US state - which had been informed of the Japanese plans well in advance, and did nothing to stop them - used the attack to drag a reluctant population into the second world holocaust. Today the US ruling class will cynically use these events to try to stop the decline in its global 'leadership' (i.e., imperialist domination).

It's also the Gulf war replayed, on an even bigger scale: then Saddam was used as the whipping boy, but the USA's real motive was to make a huge display of military power, aimed at persuading all other countries in the world that it is the boss, the world cop. Prior to the terrorist assault on the US, America was facing increasing hostility from its former allies in Europe, over the Kyoto agreement, 'Son of Star Wars', and all the rest. Today America is using the crusade against 'international terrorism' to build a new coalition where countries like France, Britain, Germany and Japan will have no alternative but to fall in line behind the US.

And once again, as the US and NATO prepare a new round of carnage, the exploited and the oppressed of the world will be asked to take sides: for 'civilisation', for 'democracy', for 'national security'; or, if they live in the so-called 'Muslim' countries, they will be asked to support the 'holy war' of Bin Laden, or Saddam, or Hamas.

But Bush, Blair and Bin Laden are all cut from the same cloth. The only difference between them is that those who run the major states of the globe have much more firepower. The terrorists who attacked America killed thousands; the 'democracies' which bombed Baghdad and Belgrade killed hundreds of thousands, and have been doing the same thing all over the world, for almost a hundred years, from World War I to Hiroshima and Dresden, and from Vietnam and Cambodia to all the massacres of the past decade.

To understand the sickening hypocrisy of the 'anti-terrorist' democracies, you only have to look at Afghanistan, which is likely to be the main target of the USA's military response. This poverty-stricken country has already been through over 20 years of war. Bin Laden, the current devil incarnate, was set up by the CIA to fight Russian imperialism; and the Taliban regime which now shields him was also supported by the US against other Islamic factions when it first came to power. Furthermore, the extensive military action that the US and NATO are now planning for Afghanistan, and probably other parts of the Middle East, will only deepen the chaos in this war-torn region, just as it did in the Gulf and the Balkans. And once again, the victims of this 'punishment' won't be Bin Laden or Saddam, but the vast mass of an already desperate population.

But the fact that the US and the 'democracies' are the world's most powerful terrorists is no reason to support the Saddams and Bin Ladens of this world. They are not fighting capitalism and imperialism; they are part of it. Capitalism can only be only fought when the working class struggles for its own interests, which are the same in all countries.

The workers of the world have no state or country to defend. Against the war cries of their exploiters, our only interest is to revive the class war against exploitation, and finally to put an end to a 'civilisation' which is pushing humanity towards barbarism. 13.9.01

In Genoa, during the meeting of the G8 in July, Carlo Giuliani was shot and then run over by a police vehicle. Following the shooting of protesters at June's EU summit in Gothenburg - the first time since 1931 that the Swedish police have used live ammunition against demonstrators - Giuliani's death was the first fatality in 'anti-globalisation' protests.

As had been anticipated, the Italian state was prepared for massive repression, with the acknowledged force of thousands of riot police, the paramilitary carabinieri, snipers, satellite surveillance, a missile defence system, helicopters, planes, boats (including at least one submarine), tear gas, water cannon and 200 body bags, with no doubt other unpublicised weapons and tactics. Alongside the one death more than 500 people were injured, many of them hospitalised. When the police made their raid on the Genoa Social Forum more than 60 people were injured. In custody scores were beaten up or tortured.

Among the protesters there were differences of opinion about what had happened. Many Trotskyists said that some of the 'black bloc' anarchists had been allowed to do what they wanted by the police, had been filmed discussing with the police, were seen getting out of police vans, and were, at least in part, classic provocateurs stirring up the situation. Some leftists criticised the Tute Bianche protestors for being non-violent, or just plain 'clowns'. Stalinists had cast doubt on the credentials of 'Anti-Fascist Action' in Gothenburg; Genoa witnessed further criticisms by the 'conventional' left of the 'anti-capitalist' demonstrators. Meanwhile, a lot of anarchists were suspicious of the left, accusing it of just jumping on the bandwagon.

Seattle, Prague, Nice, Gothenburg, Genoa... the processions continue

Many of the observations from demonstrators were accurate. For example, the role of the 'black block' was suspicious, and the evidence for its links with the state is strong, not least the fact that the police actually acknowledged their infiltration. On another level the activity of pacifists like the Tute Bianche in Italy (or the Wombles in Britain) is futile in the face of state repression. As for the leftists, it is no surprise to see them at 'anti-globalisation' actions, as wherever they go, they always try to direct militant energies up blind alleys, and into the defence of bourgeois democracy.

The media said that the confrontations between police and demonstrators were predictable and not spontaneous. This is not said because the bourgeoisie wants to see unpredictable spontaneous struggles, far from it. The intention is to imply that there's a conspiracy behind every demo, but, more importantly, there's an attempt to portray the demonstrations as alien to the norms of bourgeois democracy. The implicit lesson is 'throwing stones never changed anything - when you're older you'll realise that the only real change comes through the ballot box.' In Genoa the likes of Blair and co. made a point of saying that those inside the conference rooms had been democratically elected. Outside the halls many demonstrators fell into disputing whether the forces of the state could really be called 'democratic', as if Genoa and Gothenburg were a new trend, rather than being typical of the attacks of the bourgeois state.

To really understand what's been happening at the 'anti-globalisation' demonstrations, as with any other question in class society, you have to look at the social forces, the classes and ideas involved. A demonstration can be staged to further the cause of any class. Workers can stage marches as a way of linking up with other workers, or to protest against repressive or other actions from the capitalist state, or, for unemployed workers, it can be a means of struggle when the workplace has been denied. On the other hand, demonstrations by the Countryside Alliance, the BNP and any number of nationalist campaigns show that any bourgeois cause can mount a demo if required.

For those involved in the skirmishes at each successive summit, whatever their motivation or social origin, the spectacular showdowns with the police have been futile confrontations. If there are people who are seriously trying to come to grips with the nature of capitalist society and how it can be overthrown, then any drive they have for understanding will be diverted by the ritual battles.

This is actually celebrated by Roger Burbach, Director of the Centre for the Study of the Americas, in Berkeley, California. He is an advocate of the "carnival of life" against the "opulent and grotesque world that has been foisted on us by the new corporate robber-barons". He says that "Most importantly, the anarchists and the anti-globalisation protests provide an outlet for the pent-up frustrations and the sense of alienation of a new generation" (in Anti-capitalism: a guide to the movement). This is crude stuff, but at least it's honest. When there are 'frustrations' and 'alienation' in 'a new generation' then opportunities to let off steam, without making any threat to social order, are valued by the ruling class. When you're only concerned with the next campaign, the next demonstration, the next battle with the police, then political reflection will not be your main priority. At Genoa the state intended that there should be violent confrontations, to provoke either disgust, pacifism or terrorism - all false alternatives.

The intervention of revolutionary organisations like the ICC, based on the historic experience of the workers' movement, insists that the violence of the modern capitalist state is no exception to some abstract democratic norm. The rule of the bourgeoisie can really only ever be a dictatorship over the exploited class, however democratic the fa�ade in front of it. For those who want to participate in the real struggle against this class rule, there is no substitute for serious political discussion about the nature of this rotting society and how it can be destroyed. The 'anti-globalisation' parades tend to hinder the possibility of such discussion; indeed they consistently march under the banners of the very democratic myths that are such an obstacle to the development of class consciousness.

Barrow, 30/8/01.

When the CBI announced recently that Britain would escape recession, this was hardly enough to inspire confidence, particularly once we take into account the fact that manufacturing in Britain is in recession, with a 2% slump in output last quarter. This was followed by the news that the US economy is also just staying out of recession but with a growth rate close to zero. It has cut its forecast growth rate severely and its forecast budget surplus by 50%.

The world's other major economies are no better off. Japan, after a decade of recession, has seen its Nikkei stock exchange fall to a 17 year low at the end of August. The Euro zone cut interest rates after the ECB announced it had underestimated the effects of the global and US slowdown. Clearly the economic problems we are talking about are global in nature.

The ruling class and its media have changed their tune. We are no longer hearing about the success of the economy, based on globalisation or the dot com companies, as we did at the end of the 90s. But even that 'success' was not all it was cracked up to be. If the USA enjoyed a decade of continuous growth in the 90s, the average growth rate was significantly lower than in the 80s, which was lower than growth in the 70s. Furthermore, this growth was largely based on the massive resort to debt, another fact that the ruling class is no longer able to conceal. The potential disasters contained in debt-fuelled growth were demonstrated at the end of the 90s, which saw the crash of the Asian 'tiger' economies in 1997, followed by further international economic convulsions as other second rank economies, such as Russia, defaulted on repayments. The 'boom' of the 1990s was nothing but a part of the global crisis of capitalism that has been developing slowly but surely since the end of the 1960s, with massive unemployment and economic convulsions that the ruling class claimed to have overcome 30 or 40 years ago.

The long slow decline in the economy world wide is not the result of any mismanagement or stupidity on the part of our rulers, but due to the fact that for a almost a century the capitalist system has been in decay. That is to say that it has no way out of its historic crisis, can only continue on the basis of increasingly massive debt, and can only reinvigorate its cycle of production on the basis of a bloody redivision of the world market, as occurred in 1914-18 and 1939-45. Since the end of the post-second world war reconstruction in the 60s, there has been a continuing escalation in imperialist conflicts, and things have getting worse since the cold war ended in 1989, as witness the wars in the Gulf, ex-Yugoslavia, Africa or the Middle East (see p3). The plans for the 'Son of Star Wars' defence system show the USA trying aggressively to maintain its status as the world's only remaining super-power (see p8).

While the arms industry does indeed employ workers, this does not mean it is in any way positive for the economy. Its products cannot be eaten or worn or make new products, but can only be used to destroy. Yet the vast resources eaten up by this industry must be taken from somewhere, particularly from social spending. The choice 'guns or butter' remains as relevant today as in the 1930s, and the bourgeoisie will always choose guns over the living conditions of the working class unless it is forced to do otherwise.

Job losses and other attacks on working class living standards

If the 'boom' of the 90s did not mean any respite for the working class, today's slowdown is definitely the signal for new attacks. In fact two recent surveys of consumer confidence, in the USA and in the UK, have shown a fall in confidence to levels similar to those in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its repayments, or 1992 after 'Black Wednesday'. One of the main concerns expressed was the fear of rising unemployment. The reality of this concern is illustrated in Japan where unemployment has now risen to the highest level since records began in the 1950s. And we also see massive job losses being announced.

Some of these job losses have been announced internationally, as with the 16,000 due to go from Fujitsu, some of which will be in Britain, to follow the 850 jobs already lost over here in the past year. Hitachi and Toshiba will axe 20,000 jobs, as will NEC.

Home grown companies are also shedding jobs. Postal sorting offices are being closed and the work moved out of London with over 2,000 jobs to be cut, and 6,000 jobs to go at BT, to take just two examples.

Job losses are always accompanied by worse conditions and increased exploitation for those remaining in work. And we must not forget the attacks on health services, with fewer services available on the NHS after increased state control through the National Institute of Clinical Excellence and the Primary Care Trusts. Nor the long process of cutting entitlement to social security payments.

There is a great deal of anger in the working class against the effects of the crisis and the attacks on it, which will force it to respond. In doing so it faces great difficulties. There are no important struggles to provide a beacon for the working class as there were with Poland in 1980 or the miners in 1984. The working class lacks confidence in its ability not just to change society, but even to defend itself on a day to day level. This gives much more scope for the trade unions and the left to pose as defenders of the working class through campaigns against privatisation (see p4) or within the anti-globalisation campaign (see p1 and 4). These are both used by the bourgeoisie to pretend it is not capitalism, but only this or that aspect of it (private ownership, multinationals etc) that is responsible for the crisis, and so to divert workers from struggling for their own needs into a dead end that is harmless to the ruling class.

However slow and difficult the development of workers' struggles will be in these conditions, this is the only way for the class to regain confidence in its own strength and to remember the lessons of the great struggles it has already engaged in. Faced with the impasse of capitalism today that is the only way out for humanity. WR 1/9/01.

The world wide success of the film Gladiator has generated a renewed interested in Ancient Rome and the role of gladiators. Any inquiry into this question has to raise the spectre of the slave war between 73 and 71 BC, which was lead by the gladiator Spartacus. Unlike the fictional Gladiator which opposes the central character and his small band of gladiators to the truly wicked emperor Commodus, the real slave revolt saw 100,000 or more slaves waging war on their Roman oppressors and defeating the seeming invincible legions time and time again. This revolt, though bloodily crushed, has inspired revolutionary movements. The main grouping of revolutionaries in Germany who opposed World War 1 adopted the name of the Spartacus League to express their determination to wage war on the ruling class; and like Spartacus and the slave army the revolutionary struggle of the workers in Germany was drowned in blood. Thus the name Spartacus became synonymous with the revolutionary aspirations of the exploited. Whereas Gladiator is about the hero and his small band of gladiators standing up for an empire based on 'justice' (no mention of the exploitation of slaves) against the oh-so-wicked Commodus: in short for democracy against dictatorship.

The aim of this article is not to make a critique of Gladiator or to produce a detailed history of Spartacus, but to show why the Spartacus revolt, though carried out by a different exploited class, can really only be understood and claimed by the movement of the exploited class in this society, the modern proletariat. By the same token we will show how the modern class of 'slave-owners', the bourgeoisie, has tried to distort the history of Spartacus and tried to use it for its own ends.

The Slave Wars

The rising of the slaves between 73-71 BC did not come out of nowhere. It reflected the wider social turmoil rocking the Roman Republic. By the second century BC the Roman army had conquered the Mediterranean and was extending itself throughout Europe. These ever-expanding conquests brought with them an increasing supply of slave labour, which was used to replace the peasantry that had been the bedrock of the Roman Empire. Instead of the old system of peasant smallholdings, there was a growth of huge estates that used slave labour to extract raw materials and produce agricultural goods. In the cities the artisans were increasingly being replaced by slave labour. At the same time, a very small minority of the ruling class was able to take over the control of the exploitation of the resources of the newly conquered territories. This produced powerful social tensions: between the ruling class and those driven into unemployment in the cities or to the cities from the countryside, and also between the different interests within the ruling class. We do not have space here to go into a detailed analysis, but would recommend readers to consult Karl Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity. These tensions lead to a series of bloody civil wars from 130 BC. During that period the Gracchus brothers led movements of the dispossessed, particularly the former legionaries who had once received parcels of land for their years of service, against the state: "The private soldiers fight and die to advance the wealth and luxury of the great; and they are classed the masters of the world, while they have not a foot of ground in their possession" (Tiberius Gracchus, quoted by Plutarch, cited in M Beer's The General History of Socialism and Social Struggles. Russell & Russell, 1957). In 132 BC Tiberius and his supporters were slaughtered by the ruling party, and in 121 BC his brother Caius and his supporters met a similar fate. In the following years, massacre and bloody civil war became the norm as tens of thousands were killed as different fractions of the ruling class fought each other for control of the state.

It was in the middle of this turmoil that the slave war led by Spartacus broke out. But again this has to been seen in the context of the two previous slave wars that had taken place in Sicily (BC 134-32, 104-101). In these wars tens of thousands of slaves on the massive estates that covered the island rose up and defeated their Roman masters, and then fought wars against Roman legions until being crushed with great violence. At the time of the first war, in Asia Minor in the Kingdom of Pergamum, Aristonikos, the half-brother of the former king, faced with the Romans, freed the slaves and set up the Sun State, which was taken to mean a 'communist' order. There was "complete political democracy; the whole of the inhabitants, native and foreign, property-owning and disinherited, received the franchise and the independent administration of their State" (Beer, ibid, p153). From 133 to 129 the Romans waged war against the Sun State until they finally crushed it

Against this background of social turmoil and a succession of bloody slave wars, the 3rd great slave war broke out.

The course of the revolt

The information that we have on Spartacus and the slave war is very limited - a few thousand words, written by ancient historians from the ruling class: Sallust, a Roman Senator (1st century BC), Plutarch and Appian were wealthy aristocrats (2nd century AD). The very fact that these members of the ruling class felt the need to deal with this revolt demonstrates how important it was.

As we have said, our aim is not to give a historical account, but it is necessary to lay out the main aspects. Initially, Spartacus and 70 odd other gladiators broke out of their gladiatorial school in Capua, after their plan for a bigger break-out had been discovered. The fact that such a group of gladiators from different ethnic backgrounds, trained to kill each other, could have formed such a plan, testifies to a real solidarity between them. Once free they fled to mount Vesuvius. Here Appian says many slaves and some freemen joined them "Since Spartacus divided the profits of his raiding into equal shares, he soon attracted a very large number of followers" (Appian, in Spartacus and the Slave Wars, a Brief History with Documents, by Brent D. Shaw, p140). Such proto-communist measures marked Spartacus's leadership: "Spartacus did not permit merchants to import gold and silver, and he forbade his own men to acquire any. For the most part, he purchased iron and copper and did not censure those who imported these metals" (Appian, ibid, p 142). These measures must have been a very important feature of the slave war because the Roman Historian Pliny compares it to the greed of the Empire: "We know," says Pliny in the thirty-third book of his Natural History, "that Spartacus did not allow gold or silver in his camp. How our runaway slaves tower above us in largeness of spirit!" (quoted in Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity). These actions cannot have been imposed on the mass of the slave army by Spartacus but must have reflected the desire of the majority for a more equal society. Spartacus was also against the wanton plunder carried out by sections of his army, particularly those under the command of the Gaul Crixus. "Spartacus himself was powerless to stop them, even though he repeatedly entreated them to stop them and even attempted by sending on ahead a messenger" to warn other towns (Shaw, p148).

It was these divisions within the slave army that appear to have been one of the main reasons for them not escaping Italy, even though the army reached the Alps twice. However, Florus (2nd century AD) said that after obliterating the army led by Lentulus in the Apennine Mountains and then attacking the camp of Gaius Crassus, Spartacus thought of attacking Rome itself.

In the end, after being forced into the very south of Italy by Crassus and with the arrival of more legions from abroad, Spartacus and the slaves were faced with either capture or making a last stand. The slave army chose the latter. They turned in full battle ranks and marched on the pursuing legions. 36,000 died on the battlefield and many more after, as the ruling class relentlessly hunted down all those that had had the audacity to defeat their legions, to kill their generals and nobles, and to stand up to the ruling class. As a warning to all other rebels, the ruling class crucified 6,000 survivors of the slave army along the main road to Rome.

The eventual defeat of the slave army was not simply the results of internal divisions or tactical errors. It reflected the historical limitations of the epoch: despite being the most advanced civilisation the world had yet seen, Roman slavery could never have developed the productive forces to the point where a truly universal communist society could have come out of it. The downfall of slavery could only have been replaced by a more progressive system of exploitation (thus, following its decline, there was the development of feudalism in Europe). Within this framework, it has to be understood that the slaves were not a revolutionary class in the sense of carrying within their struggle the foundations of a new social system, still less a conscious programme for its realisation. Their hopes for a society where private property would no longer exist were doomed to remain dreams, based on memories of a lost tribal order and on myths of a primordial golden age. This does not mean that marxists look down on the revolts or the communistic dreams of previous exploited classes: on the contrary, these revolts have rightly inspired generations of proletarians, and these dreams remain indispensable stepping stones towards the scientific communist outlook of the modern working class

The response of the bourgeoisie to Spartacus

The development of the bourgeoisie's response to the slave war is very enlightening. In 18th century France the revolutionary bourgeoisie held Spartacus as a hero and expression of their own struggle against feudalism; in 19th century Italy he was also adopted by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. However, once the bourgeoisie had established its undisputed supremacy, Spartacus became a dreaded figure, because the slave war was uncomfortably close to the class war now beginning to take shape between the bourgeoisie and its deadly enemy, the working class. This horror became manifest with the revolutionary struggles between 1917 and 27 when "Spartacism" became synonymous with Bolshevism and world revolution: "the name 'Spartacist' now adopted by the German Communists, the only party in Germany which is really fighting against the yoke of capitalism, was adopted by them because Spartacus was one of the most outstanding heroes of one of the very greatest slave insurrections, which took place two thousand years ago" (V. I Lenin, The State, in Collected Works no 29). Echoing Rome's bloody suppression of the original Spartacus movement, the Germany bourgeoisie crushed the modern day slave war with great brutality.

In the years of counter-revolution which followed, the ruling class felt less threatened by the spectre of class war, and by the 1950s, felt confident enough to recruit Spartacus for the cold war.

To this end the American ruling class used the vehicle of Hollywood and Stanley Kubrick's film Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas. This is not to deny the artistic merit of the film, which is vastly superior to the 'up-to-date' glut of special effects in Gladiator; indeed, it contains moments which beautifully convey the liberating power of solidarity, as in the portrayal of the original break-out from the gladiator school and above all in the immortal scene when the Roman victors are trying to identify Spartacus and thousands of captured slaves step forward proclaiming "I am Spartacus". Nonetheless the ideological intent of the film is never far from the surface. Spartacus himself is turned into a Christ-like figure leading the slaves to freedom. This is made clear at the end of the film when he is crucified. This is a deliberate lie used to pacify the memory of the slave war. Spartacus did not die on the cross but fighting his way towards Crassus, the very symbol of the Roman ruling class - he was the richest and most powerful man in Rome - in the final battle. "When his horse was brought to him, Spartacus drew his sword and shouted that if he won the battle, he would have many fine horses, but if he lost, he would have no need of a horse. With that, he killed the animal. Then, driving through weapons and the wounded, Spartacus rushed at Crassus. He never reached the Roman, although he killed two centurions, who fell with him" (Plutarch, ibid 136).

The film is used to boost the values of the "West" against dictatorship. The film drove home the message that dictatorship could only be opposed by freedom, democracy and Christianity. At the beginning of the film the voice-over says that whilst the war of Spartacus and the slaves was defeated, it was Christianity that eventually freed the slaves (while not mentioning that Christianity was a pillar of European slavery from the 16th to the 19th centuries). Slavery itself is presented as a 'stain' on Roman civilisation, rather than as its foundation.

It was also part of the US's drive to win the markets of the former British colonies. Kirk Douglas says in his autobiography The Ragman's Son that he insisted that all the main Roman ruling class characters were played by British actors whilst the slaves were Americans or others.

Stalinism also contributed to distorting the meaning of the Spartacus revolt. The film's screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, a Stalinist, equated Spartacus with Stalin and the hot headed Crixus, who in the film breaks away from Spartacus to attack Rome, as Trotsky.

The film is based on the novel by Howard Fast. In the film the slaves are shown as following Spartacus to the bitter end, but in the book the slaves are held responsible for the failure of the war. Fast, as a good Stalinist, had nothing but contempt for the working class. This is reflected in the book where the slaves are portrayed as not being up to Spartacus's revolutionary ideals. This is also the message driven home in Arthur Koestler's novel The Gladiators. Koestler had been a Stalinist in the 30s but had become openly disillusioned with the revolution and the proletariat. For him, as for Fast, Spartacus is the revolutionary leader leading a rabble not up to his ideals.

A more vicious recent attack is made by Alan Baker in his book The Gladiator: the Secret History of Rome's Warrior Slaves, a book that rides on the back of the success of the film. In a chapter on Spartacus Baker affirms the opinion of the historian Christian Meir that he was "a robber chief on the grand scale". This shows the low level the bourgeoisie will fall to in order to attack a movement that challenged their ancestors. The ancient historians had more dignity and, though hating Spartacus and all he stood for, still acknowledge his strength of personality. "Spartacus was a Thracian, born among a pastoral nomadic people. He not only possessed great spirit and bodily strength, but he was more intelligent and nobler than his fate, and he was more Greek than his (Thracian) background might indicate" (Plutarch, op cit p131-2).

At the beginning of the year Channel 4 had a programme on Spartacus. Again, although the programme was more balanced, it still showed Spartacus as not being up to his revolutionary image, because, on one occasion, he made captured Romans fight in gladiatorial games and even crucified a captured Roman. Perhaps more significant is that the documentary was made by a former military man and concentrated on Spartacus's extraordinary strategic and tactical abilities. It said nothing about the social ideals of the movement and still less about how such a huge mass of slaves and other oppressed strata managed to organise for the struggle (indeed, this remains almost completely obscure to this day).

The ruling class will certainly continue to make whatever use it can of the great class warriors of the past. But as for Spartacus, we will end with Marx's assessment, written in a letter to Engels: "Spartacus emerges as one of the best characters in the whole of ancient history. A great general, a noble character, a genuine representative of the ancient proletariat".

For Marx the greatness of Spartacus, in the final analysis, stems from the fact that he was "a genuine representative of the ancient proletariat": in other words, he was a product of the struggle of an exploited class which dared to challenge its exploiters. In a world still based on the exploitation of one class by another, Spartacus remains a potent symbol for the modern proletariat, which has the capacity to end all forms of slavery once and for all.

Phil, 17/7/01.

The range of issues raised at each 'anti-capitalist' demonstration is wide. The state of the environment, climate change, free trade, the role of big corporations, privatisation, Third World debt, economic policies of the G8, the role of the World Trade Organisation, the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and the World Bank - these are all targets of the leftists, anarchists, greens, religious groups and non-governmental organisations that turn out for the 'anti-globalisation' protests.

If you take any item from the 'anti-globalisers' agenda you'll find something where neither diagnoses nor solution call capitalism into question. A currently popular example is the fact that, of the top 100 economic entities in the world, 49 are big corporations and 51 are national economies. What's implied is that if the big companies were not so big then we could all enjoy exclusive exploitation by an array of oppressive nation states. Many even say that poverty is caused by privatisation, while ignoring the reality of state-enforced austerity programmes. When workers struggle they take no account of the formal status of their employer - workers in Poland in 1980-81 staged massive strikes against a whole range of state-run enterprises, the miners in Britain in 1984-85 fought against the nationalised Coal Board, and today, when postal workers across the country fight, it's not against a private boss, but against the conditions enforced by the state-run Post Office.

The campaign against the big corporations is typical - and behind every other issue is raised the question of the nature of capitalism, its crises, competition and inability to satisfy the needs of humanity. While there are those who are beginning to make connections between the various aspects of capitalist society, the 'anti-globalisation movement' reduces all concerns to campaigns for changes within capitalism.

The perspective of revolution

In protests such as those at Genoa and Gothenburg, the religious groups, the charities and non-governmental organisations don't pretend to be anti-capitalist. Their actions are intended to put pressure on the ruling class to make its system of exploitation work for the benefit of its victims. Any 'concessions' made to such groups will be for propaganda purposes.

However, the description of 'anti-capitalist' doesn't apply to the leftists and most of the anarchists either. Trotskyists (and the remnants of Stalinism) are defenders of state capitalism. With anarchists there are many varieties of ideology (some indistinguishable from leftism) but what they have in common is a commitment to protest in itself. They have no perspective, and certainly no recognition of the conscious working class as the only force capable of overthrowing the dictatorship of capital. At the London May Day 2001 protests there was a banner reading "Overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer". Another popular motto is "Our world is not for sale" - which is plainly untrue, as everything in the world, in particular labour power, has become a commodity with a price, and the world is clearly not 'ours', as it is dominated by the ruling capitalist class. In Genoa one of the major catchphrases was "a different world is possible". Against the vague whimsy of such useless slogans marxism has always had a clear critique rooted in material reality.

Take the concept of 'globalisation'. Time magazine, on July 23, before the Genoa protest, approvingly quoted from the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "Modern industry has established the world market. All old-established national industries have been destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries whose products are consumed in every corner of the globe. In place of the old wants, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes ... All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air." The Time writer implies that this describes the vibrant nature of capitalism over the last 150 years. In fact Marx and Engels saw the bourgeoisie's sweeping away of feudal and other pre-capitalist modes of production, and the establishment of a global economy, as being the historic task of capitalism. With this achieved the international revolution of the working class became a possibility. But, in the absence of workers' revolution, with capitalism having penetrated every corner of the globe for roughly the last hundred years, the bourgeois economy has not been a dynamic system that merely trades commodities. On the contrary, capitalism has long been an obstacle to the real development of the productive forces, which is the fundamental material cause of all the wars and catastrophes that have been plaguing humanity since the early 20th century. The global capitalist economy was a step on from pre-capitalist production, because it created the bases for an international workers' revolution and the creation of a communist society; but if this possibility is not realised, capitalism's continuation can only spell disaster for humanity.

A class for communism

One of the leading advocates of 'anti-globalisation', George Monbiot, has said that it is "in numerical terms, the biggest protest movement in the history of the world" (Guardian 24/7/1). He comes to this conclusion by affirming that "almost everyone agrees that the world would be a better place" without the activities of the big corporations, and that "most people would be .. happy to see the headquarters of Balfour Beatty or Monsanto dismantled by non-violent action". The 'protest movement' in Monbiot's mind is only 'big' because it includes just about anyone who's unhappy about an aspect of modern life. It includes everyone from people who are a bit worried about 'global warming', to those that donate to Oxfam or Christian Aid, to the leftists who want the role of the state in capitalism to be further strengthened, but also it includes those who are beginning to sense that the only real 'anti-capitalism' is one that involves the mobilisation of millions against the rule of the bourgeois state.

Better candidates for 'biggest protest movement' come from the history of the working class struggle. Every workers' struggle is a protest against the conditions of proletarian existence. Between 1917 and 23, for example, the working class took power in Russia, staged mass insurrections in Germany, shook Italy, Hungary and Austria to their foundations, and engaged in bitter struggles in Britain, Spain, the US, Argentina and Brazil. Or, more recently, between 1983 and 1989 there were significant, often massive struggles in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, the US, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, India, Tunisia, Morocco, Columbia, Bolivia, Greece, Israel, Rumania, Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, Yugoslavia, Japan, and the Dominican Republic, to cite only the main examples. Not only far bigger 'numerically' than Monbiot's 'protest movement', the actual significance of international waves of workers' struggle is greater because the working class, at the heart of the capitalist economy, has the capacity to destroy capitalism and build a society based on relations of solidarity. The struggle of the working class has the ultimate perspective of the establishment of a world human community. Because organisation and consciousness are the only weapons the working class has, the struggles and discussions of today are already important steps in making that perspective a reality. Barrow 30/8/1