Against Morsi, against the military: for class struggle!

In our previous article analysing the situation in Egypt, we wrote in our conclusion:

“capitalism has accumulated the means to destroy all human life on the planet. The collapse of social life and the rule of murderous armed gangs – that’s the road of barbarism indicated by what’s happening right now in Syria. The revolt of the exploited and the oppressed, their massive struggle in defence of human dignity, of a real future – that’s the promise of the revolts in Turkey and Brazil. Egypt stands at the crossroads of these two diametrically opposed choices, and in this sense it is a symbol of the dilemma facing the whole human species”[1].

The tragic events which have taken place and accelerated during the month of August in Egypt following the reactions to the army coup against former president Morsi, in particular the bloody repression of the Muslim Brotherhood which peaked on the 14th August, bear witness to the whole gravity of this historic situation and confirm this idea of a “crossroads” for the whole of humanity.

Getting caught up in the logic of civil war

The quagmire of decomposition, of economic and social crisis, the corruption and disastrous policies of the Morsi government (elected in June 2012) led the population back to the streets to express their discontent with growing poverty and insecurity. It was this deteriorating situation, aggravated by the political irrationality and endless provocations of the Muslim Brotherhood, which pushed the Egyptian army to carry out the coup of 3 July, deposing president Morsi from office. Parallel to this, the social agitation continued, stoking up very dangerous tensions and some bloody confrontations. This was nothing less than a juggernaut heading towards civil war. The only force capable of holding society together, the army, was compelled to step in and prevent it from breaking apart. The strongman of the hour is therefore the head of the army, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi. The latter was obliged to impose a policy of brutal repression, mainly using the civil police against the Muslim Brothers and the pro-Morsi forces. Throughout the summer, there was a growing number of clashes between the pro and anti- Morsi elements, resulting in a number of deaths, particularly among the Muslim Brotherhood. The pro-Morsi demonstrations and sit-ins, which gathered together men, women and children, were dispersed in a violent manner. The army assaults left over a thousand dead. Martial law, in the shape of a state of emergency and a curfew, was imposed in Cairo and 13 provinces. A number of Muslim Brotherhood leaders and activists  (over 2000) were arrested, including the ‘supreme leader’ Mohammed Badie and many others, some of whom died in prison after an escape attempt.

Since then, the demonstrations, targets for the bullets of the police and the army,  have become less numerous. In maintaining order in this manner, the army and the police have won the support of the majority of the population who see the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists. This support for the army and the state, mixed up with a growing anti-Islamist feeling, but tainted with nationalism, can only weaken the proletariat, which risks being caught up in the negative logic of the situation. This is all the more true in that the rejection of religious fundamentalism is fed by the democratic mystification which still retains a great deal of strength.

Unlike the great demonstrations in Tahrir Square which led to the downfall of Mubarak and where the political presence of women was tolerated and where they were relatively protected, the terror reigning today has led to a spectacular moral regression, such as the collective rape of women in the middle of demonstrations, and the pogrom atmosphere against the Copts (hundreds of churches have been burned and a number of Copts have been killed).

As we wrote in our previous article:

“The working class in Egypt is a much more formidable force than it is in Libya or Syria. It has a long tradition of militant struggle against the state and its official trade union tentacles, going back at least as far as the 1970s. In 2006 and 2007 massive strikes radiated out from the highly concentrated textile sector, and this experience of open defiance of the regime subsequently fed into the movement of 2011, which was marked by a strong working class imprint, both in the tendencies towards self-organisation which appeared in Tahrir Square and the neighbourhoods, and in the wave of strikes which eventually convinced the ruling class to dump Mubarak. The Egyptian working class is by no means immune from the illusions in democracy which pervade the entire social movement, but neither will it be an easy task for the different cliques of the ruling class to persuade it to abandon its own interests and drag it into the cesspit of imperialist war”.

It’s also true that there have been some new expressions of the class struggle, notably in Mahalla where 24,000 workers came out on strike after half their wages were not paid[2]. There have also been strikes in Suez. And while some demonstrators have held up banners proclaiming ‘Neither Morsi nor the military’. But these rare voices have been stifled more and more, just as the courageous struggles of the workers have been increasingly isolated and thus weakened. While the situation has not reached the tragic level it has in Syria, it is becoming more and more difficult to break out of the deadly logic leading towards such barbaric outcomes.

The threat of violent chaos and instability in the region

The internal instability that has been aggravated by recent events is not taking shape in a secondary country of the region. Egypt is a turning point between North Africa and the Middle East, between Africa and Asia. It is the most populous country of the Muslim world and Africa and its capital, Cairo, the biggest metropolis of the continent. The country is part of a Sunni arc opposed to the Shiite countries, notably Syria-Lebanon and Iran, the sworn enemy of the US and Israel in the region. From the geographical point of view Egypt therefore occupies a major strategic position, in particular with regard to the interests of the USA, the world’s leading, but declining, imperialist power. During the Cold War, Egypt was an essential pawn guaranteeing the stability of the region to the benefit of the US. This advantage was consolidated with the Camp David Accords of 1979, sealing the rapprochement between Egypt and Israel and the US. The relative stability linked to the balance between the rival military blocs of east and west made it possible contain and tolerate the Muslim Brotherhood even though they were kept under constant state surveillance – in the epoch of Nasser they had been banned outright. Today the disappearance of the bloc discipline  and the development of every man for himself, of social decomposition, is accentuating centrifugal tendencies and especially the rise of radicalised factions like the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood, which Mubarak had already seen as a ‘state with the state’[3].

The international context, above all the free for all between the big global powers, is now serving to exacerbate all these inherent tensions. In the Middle East itself, the growing cleavage between Qatar and Saudi Arabia on the one hand, which are close to the US despite their extreme Wahabite ideology, and Egypt on the other, is pouring oil on the fire. This is why the US can’t draw back from financing the Egyptian army (to the tune of at least 80%), even though it can see that the situation is getting more and more out of its control.

Capitalism has nothing to offer but poverty and chaos. Whatever bourgeois gang is in power, the situation of the mass of the population can only get worse. But contrary to what the bourgeoisie and its media would have us believe – that the failure in Egypt is indubitable proof that any uprising can only end up in religious obscurantism or in dictatorship - the historic perspective of the proletarian revolution, even if it’s not an immediate one, is the one and only alternative to barbarism. It is the responsibility of the proletariat to become aware of this and to express its class solidarity in order to offer a real perspective for all the struggles going on in the world. Only the decisive intervention of the world proletariat, above all its most experienced fractions in the old European industrial centres, can open the road to the future – world revolution

WH 28/8/13

The alternative to capitalism is published by Theory and Practice [6] whose website contains a broad range of texts from political currents such as the SPGB, left communism and situationism. The book contains essays by Adam Buick and John Crump which were first published in 1986 and 1987. It’s not presented as an official publication of the SPGB, although the book was sent to us for review by comrades who are members of the organisation. In any case, while Adam Buick is a longstanding member, John Crump left the SPGB in the 1970s, criticising the party’s parliamentary conception of revolution and arguing – as we shall see – that the SPGB was by no means the only authentically socialist organisation in the world, in opposition to the ‘hostility clause’ contained in its 1904 statement of principles[1]. Despite these criticisms, relations between Crump and the SPGB seem to have remained fraternal until his death in 2005, and it would also seem that one of the reasons why the Socialist Studies group split from the party (or as it sees it ‘reconstituted the SPGB’) in 1991[2] was the influence of Crump’s efforts to push the SPGB in certain untraditional directions.

The first part of the book is a straightforward account of what capitalism actually is, a task that it is as necessary as ever given the immense sea of confusion which surrounds the term. The idea that capitalism can be defined as individual enterprise or ownership, a conception shared both by the openly capitalist right and the allegedly anti-capitalist left, still has to be confronted and rejected: it was central to the ideology pervading the ‘Occupy’ movements of 2011, where notions of making the rich pay their taxes, abolishing bankers’ bonuses, defending public ownership etc were extremely tenacious despite the waning influence of the established organisations of the left within these movements. The essay was originally published as ‘State capitalism: the wages system under new management’ and the central aim of this return to basics is to show that state capitalism, whether in its Stalinist, social democratic or other political forms, remains capitalism because capitalism is not at root a form of property but a social relation, where the mass of producers are compelled to sell their labour power, and a capitalist minority (private or state) accumulate the value extracted from this inherently exploitative relationship. It then goes on to do what the SPGB has been doing for over a hundred years now: defend the fundamental principle that socialism (or communism, it rightly sees the terms as interchangeable) can only be based on the abolition of the wage relationship, and is a stateless, moneyless world community.

We have few criticisms of this section of the book, except to say that it has a somewhat timeless approach which doesn’t really explain why state capitalism has become the most important form of capitalist ‘management’ for the entire period of the SPGB’s history. For us, this can only be understood with reference to the passage of the capitalist mode of production from its ascendant to its decadent phase: in a system faced with near permanent war and economic crisis, and dangerous outbreaks of revolutionary class struggle, state capitalism - the state’s totalitarian grip on social and economic life - becomes a condition for ensuring the survival of the system. Although the SPGB has always rejected our conception of decadence, it holds some conceptions which are not far from it in practice, such as the idea that from the beginning of the 20th century capitalism had created the material conditions for abundance and thus for the socialist transformation, rendering capitalism ‘obsolete’. But the full implications of the system becoming a barrier to human progress have never been drawn by the SPGB, even if in conversations with individual members there is obviously a serious interest in this question.[3]

It also seems evident to us that there are many comrades in the SPGB who feel somewhat embarrassed by the idea that ‘electing a socialist majority’ to parliament could be at least part of the revolutionary process. We will come back to this, but for now we want to turn to two of the ideas contained in the essay by John Crump, who was, as we have already noted, a critic of the parliamentary road: the idea of the ’thin red line’, and the idea that socialism could be achieved without an intervening period of transition.  

The essay ‘The thin red line and non-market socialism in the 20th century’[4] complements the essay by Adam Buick in the sense that it shows that most of the officially accepted varieties of ‘socialism’ are actually proponents of state capitalism and can thus be seen as a left wing of capitalism. Crump terms them ‘social democratic’ and ‘Leninist’, the latter referring mainly to the Stalinist regimes of the eastern bloc which were still in existence at the time of writing. We reject the term Leninist to describe these regimes, since this equates the Stalinist parties which managed them with the revolutionary Bolshevik party of 1917, but we don’t intend to enter into that debate right now.

Overall, we find this essay to be based on a positive and constructive premise: that throughout the 20th century, a genuine vision of socialism has been maintained by a number of political currents which have shared five key points in opposition to the false conception of socialism propagated by the left wing of capital:  production for use; distribution according to need; voluntary labour; a human community; opposition to  capitalism as it manifests itself in all existing countries. He categorises these currents as follows: anarcho-communism; impossibilism (groups like the SPGB) ; council communism; Bordigism; situationism. These groups make up the real socialist tradition of the 20th century.

We could object to the categories or see the need to update them: there are plenty of anarcho-syndicalists today who fulfil the criteria; there’s no space for left communist groups like the ICC and ICT which are neither council communist nor Bordigist; situationism is hardly a political movement these days while on the other hand there are a number of groups which belong to the ‘communisation’ current which certainly fit the overall category. And we could add various other political animals to the ark.

We could also say that the criteria for marking off a genuine socialist/communist movement from the left wing of capital should lay much more emphasis on the last point, which seems to be added as an afterthought. This is essentially the question of internationalism, and it’s the only one which actually refers to present day political issues rather than the programme for the future. And we have seen in the past how this criterion, above all when concretised by the question of imperialist war, has been a true dividing line between loyalty to and betrayal of the socialist cause. 

However, as we said, the basic approach is a fruitful one. In opposition to the sectarianism of the ‘hostility’ clause, Crump is arguing that there something like a ‘proletarian political camp’ which shares certain common principles despite their many differences (such as the parliamentary question, the role of the vanguard party, etc). Crump even defends the Bordigists against the charge that their position on the party makes them indistinguishable from leftist groups like the Trotskyists. We don’t know where the SPGB officially stands on this idea of the ‘thin red line’. We do know that the Socialist Studies group specifically cited Crump’s views on this issue as a revision of the SPGB’s principles. The SPGB has always been prepared to debate with anyone, irrespective of their class nature. But this recognition of a wider milieu than the party itself demands something a bit more: it demands a recognition that we are comrades who should have an attitude of mutual solidarity towards each other, an attitude that is sadly missing in today’s proletarian political movement.

At the end of the essay Crump speculates that it might in future be necessary to add a sixth criterion: opposition to any notion of a transitional society. In his view socialism must be introduced straight away or not at all:

“One feature which capitalism and socialism have in common is their all-or-nothing quality, their inability to coexist in today's highly integrated world, which can provide an environment for only one or other of these rival global systems. In the circumstances of the twentieth century, the means of production must either function as capital throughout the world (in which case wage labour and capitalism persist internationally) or they must be commonly owned and democratically controlled at a global level (in which case they would be used to produce wealth for free, worldwide distribution). No halfway house between these two starkly opposed alternatives exists, and it is the impossibility of discovering any viable 'transitional' structures which ensures that the changeover from world capitalism to world socialism will have to take the form of a short, sharp rupture (a revolution), rather than an extended process of cumulative transformation....”

 Here Crump is very much on the same lines as the SPGB (and others such as the communisation tendency).

We agree with Crump and the SPGB that state capitalism is not a transitional stage towards socialism, and that the economic programme of a victorious working class does not consist of ‘accumulating’ value to the point where here is a sufficient level of productive capacity to make abundance possible. Capitalism has already developed a huge overcapacity and what is required is the transformation of the productive apparatus rather than its ‘development’ in any capitalist sense.

But what strikes one is how superficially optimistic Crump’s vision is. He admits that capitalism has bequeathed us a bit of a mess which will have to be cleared up, and that some temporary measures may be needed to deal with shortages, but at the same time we will almost overnight (a few months, or at most a few years) have eliminated markets, nations, and all the rest of it, and be living in a world of free access communism.

It seems like a vast underestimation:

-          Of the dire material consequences of capitalism surviving a hundred years into its epoch of senility, at the level of ecological damage, the waste and irrationality of a productive apparatus geared to competition and war;

-          Of the inevitable brutal reaction of the ruling class which will not recognise any legal niceties in attempting to suppress a revolutionary movement;

-          Of the near impossibility of the revolution being simultaneous in all countries at once, and thus the necessity to subordinate any economic measures taken in the area controlled by the working class to the number one priority of spreading the revolution internationally;

-          Of the ideological poison distilled not only by a hundred years of barbarism but also of thousands of years of class society, of alienated social relations which will constantly hold back humanity’s efforts to become self-aware and self-organised[5];

-          Of the inability of capitalism to create a world limited to bourgeoisie and proletarians, which means that the proletarian revolution will be faced with the task of integrating millions of individuals who belong to other non-exploiting strata and who will not have the same material interest in communism. Exchange will still exist with small property owners for example, hence the law of value will not vanish until all these social layers have been incorporated into the working class.

It’s of course true that to make the revolution in the first place the working class will have to confront and overcome many of the ideological obstacles which hold it down, as well as the physical barriers erected by the bourgeois state. But class consciousness is not something that is downloaded for good - it evolves through advances and retreats and there is no guarantee that even after the first victories of the revolution, initial difficulties in taking the communist programme forward will not result in regressions and even counter-revolutionary moods. The struggle for communist ideas will be every bit as intense after the revolution as before it. For all these reasons, a phase of transition between capitalism and communism will be inevitable.

This is a major discussion and we can’t hope to take it very far here[6]. But one thing does need to be said. Crump considers that the rejection of a transition period could be a sixth key point demarcating real socialists from apologists for capital, but we would suggest that some of the other differences among the ‘non-market socialists’ could become much more crucial well before the working class had assumed political power: in particular, we would expect that communists would be involved in a real political struggle against organisations and tendencies who argued that the councils should submit to this or that party ‘by right’ – or against those who argued that instead of being diametrically opposed to each other , councils and parliament can co-exist, a fatal error that helped bury the German revolution (and thus the Russian revolution as well) in 1918-19.

Amos

In this article, one of our sympathisers (who posts as "Fred" on the ICC forum), makes an analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein [17] and relates the symbolism of this classic novel to the struggles of the working class of the time and their impact on bourgeois ideology.

Everyone has heard of Frankenstein. He is an ugly and destructive monster, concocted by his mad -scientist creator from bits of dead bodies, and beloved by Hollywood film-makers and audiences alike. Anything nasty and unpleasant, like nuclear bombs, can be referred to as "frankensteinian" ; AIDS could appropriately have been called as such.   But there's a flaw in all of this. Frankenstein, in Mary Shelley's novel published in 1818, is not the name of the monster, or "the creature" as she preferred to name it, but of the rich bourgeois medical student who manufactured  it,  after bouts of grave robbing, and whose name was Victor Frankenstein. 

A recent viewing of the film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein gave this viewer a shock. The "creature" is played by an unrecognisable ......... so ugly is his face with its stitches.   In one scene, in the depths of a very hard winter, he secretly assists a poor peasant family in whose barn he  is hiding, by pulling turnips out of the frozen ground,  which they can no longer manage themselves so hard is the frost. The creature himself has a massive strength and great reserves of energy. He leaves the turnips by their door.  They in turn place food for "the spirit of the forest".  And then it struck me. The "creature", the product of the bourgeois Victor Frankenstein's efforts, is none other than the working class.  And the whole story can be read as a myth about the creation by the bourgeoisie of the labouring class, on whom it depends, and of which it is so fearful and sees as something necessary, yes, but unpleasant, ugly, frightening and uncivilized.  Have things changed since then? (NB. A little research on the web confirms that this "Marxist" interpretation of the story has been around for some time.) 

But, if this is the case, and i think it must be, the question arises as to whether Mary Shelley knew what she  was doing, or whether the imagery of the story emerged from a subconscious response.  Well we don't know of course.  The story is set significantly in a revolutionary age at the time of the French Revolution, which was before Mary's birth.   But there were certain dramatic events nearer home during the years leading up to her story (1812-1817) that might well have put an awareness of the emergence and growing strength of the working class into her mind.  These events involved the Luddites, who doubtless struck fear into the hearts of the bourgeoisie with their machine breaking, potential for rioting, burning down buildings, and even dressing up as women in the streets. What monstrous horror it all was! What was happening to respectable society?  Did the lower classes no longer know their place?  

The bourgeoisie’s fear of the lower orders

The historian Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out that Britain had more troops fighting against the Luddites than it had fighting Napoleon in the Iberian peninsula. Parliament in Britain had a law imposing death on machine breakers, so seriously were the Luddites taken.  Byron, the poet and friend of both  Mary and Percy Shelley, in whose house they had been staying when the question of writing a horror story had first come up (Byron producing a draft of a story about Vampires - to be developed later by others into the Dracula and Vampire film industry) was moved to sympathize with the Luddites, saying they deserved pity not punishment, so miserable was their plight  as their jobs were taken over by cheaper unskilled labour using the new machine technology.  

Communists today may regret that the Luddites resorted to rioting and destruction, as not being best the way forward for the growth of proletarian solidarity and consciousness. But as Hobsbawm has also noted: there was no question of hostility to machines as such.  "Wrecking was simply a technique of trade unionism in the period before and during the early phases of the industrial revolution."   Yet such a technique may not have augured well for the development of the movement.   And then there is the question of revenge.   To lose your job is no fun, and to lose it to machinery and cheap labour an insult needing a vengeful act. Or so it can seem.  The Luddites took revenge.  The "creature", Frankenstein's monster, also takes savage revenge,on his creator and his creator's relatives.  It is truly a horror story.  But then everything involving the bourgeoisie is a horror story is it not, and even more so today? 

In The Luddites 1811-1816  Marjie Bloy writes: 

“Stocking knitting was predominantly a domestic industry, the stockinger renting his frame from the master and working in his own 'shop' using thread given to him by the master; the finished items were handed back to the master to sell.  The frames were therefore scattered round the villages; it was easy for the Luddites to smash a frame and then disappear. Between March 1811 and February 1812 they smashed about a thousand machines at the cost of between £6,000 and £10,000. In April 1812 the Luddites burned the West Houghton mill in Lancashire. Samuel Whitbread, an MP, said of the event ‘As to the persons who had blackened their faces, and disfigured themselves for the purposes of concealment, and had attended the meeting on Deanmoor, near Manchester, it turned out that ten of them were spies sent out by the magistrates... These spies were the very ringleaders of the mischief, and incited the people to acts which they would not otherwise have thought of’. [Parliamentary Debates, lst Series, Vol. 23, Col.1000, (l8l2)] The authorities were incapable of stopping the attacks so the government felt obliged to put in place special legislation.  Machine-breaking had been made a capital offence in 1721; in 1811 a special Act was passed to secure the peace of Nottingham.  At the Nottingham Assizes in March 1812, seven Luddites were sentenced to transportation for life; two others were acquitted”.

It's worth noting here that "the blackened faces" contained government spies, an historic confirmation of the great duplicity of the ruling class and their penchant for Machiavellian strategies, even at the beginnings of the workers' movement. Did they dress as women too? 

So, to return to Mary Shelley and her frankensteinian creature. Given the public activities of the Luddites, she may well have seen in her "scientifically" produced creature at least a reflection  of the emerging and if-it-did-but-know-it all powerful working class.  As the author of the novel, or perhaps as a woman, she does not find her "creature" as obnoxious as do most of the other characters in the story.  As one commentator has said: the monster is the nicest person in the book. But then if he is "the working class" and most everyone else in it is bourgeois, and pursuing somewhat selfish interests as they do, then this is no surprise.  In the middle of the novel Shelley undertakes to educate her creature, allowing him to learn to speak and then undergo a ferocious course of reading, centered largely on Milton's Paradise Lost which introduces the idea of the creature being an Adam who really requires an Eve. Perhaps what he really required was an Edward had he but known it.  But this is a complication I will not be taking up here. The story ends in the frozen Arctic wastes, where both master and slave are cremated on the same funeral pyre. The creature by choice burned alive. 

Working class, or capital itself?

You might of course interpret this story in a different manner, and see the creature not as the embodiment of the working class but as the materialized form of capitalism itself: ugly, frightening and immensely powerful. Yet even in this latter understanding the creature remains the product, the creation of the bourgeois Frankenstein; as is capitalism itself the uncontrollable and unwitting creation of the bourgeoisie as a class.  Is such ambiguity the sign of good story? 

But why is the tale so full of fear?  The creature himself is fearsome to behold; strong and inclined to violence if frustrated.  What he seeks is love and understanding; a very human requirement, and not one we would associate with unfeeling and relentless capitalism the system.  Then there is science and the scientific endeavour. It is Frankenstein's ill-considered attitude to science which allows him to invent something he comes very much to regret.  Rather like later scientific inventions such as the nuclear bomb and chemical and biological weaponry.  Is science, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, another matter to be feared?  Is the bourgeoisie always an irresponsible and immature class only capable of acting responsibly in the realm of profit pursuit where of course anything goes?  

And then there are the Luddites.  Not mentioned as such in the novel, but then neither are the bourgeoisie or working class.   Is it from the Luddites that the initial fear underpinning  the story originated?  I speculate of course.  But the Luddites were not typically working class as we understand that class now. They were an early manifestation of working class protest.  You might even see them as having aspects of terrorism in their behaviour.  They blackened their faces, cross dressed, smashed machinery and burned down factories. They doubtless instilled fear in the bourgeoisie.  Who exactly were they? What did they want? Why did they behave in such a frightening and theatrical manner?  We might compare them in some ways in their activity, to the Mau Mau in Kenya, using fear, secrecy and terrorism in pursuit of their aims, and installing an  inexpressible anxiety in their bourgeois suppressors.  But the example doesn't properly hold - the Mau Mau being an aspect of the bourgeoisie themselves, looking for national liberation, which the Luddites were certainly not - only the form of protest may be compared. 

That the creature represents Napoleon, as seen by the English bourgeoisie, is not I think one we can go along with.  Pulling turnips, living with peasants, learning to read surreptitiously, these are not things easily associated with Bony, though he was of course, through and through, a manufactured creature of the  bourgeoisie himself! 

Fred

The rise in the use of food banks has reached huge proportions. The food banks, originally intended for the most destitute within society, are starting to be used across all sectors of the working class, often including those parts who might have previously seen themselves as belonging to the ‘middle class’. The figures produced by the Trussel Trust (a charitable organisation) are revealing: in Britain in every town and city we have seen the opening up of food banks, and the number of people needing the banks to feed themselves and their families has gone up as follows:

It’s not just in Britain where we’ve seen populations resorting to food banks. Over this past year in Greece and Spain we have seen the same situation: workers being forced into queuing for food hand-outs in order to live. However, these are economies which are openly bankrupt and these are emergency measures, are they not? But even in a much more prosperous country and economy such as Canada we are seeing the same thing:

 “Last year Mr. De Schutter (a UN official) completed an 11 day mission to Canada, his first to a developed country. He reported ‘very desperate conditions’ in a country where 850,000 rely on food banks and condemned the Canadian government’s ‘self-righteous’ failure to acknowledge the scale of the problem on its doorstep” (‘UN Official alarmed by Food Banks in UK’, Independent 17.02.13) 

Chronic and society-wide hunger used to be associated with the countries of the ‘Third World’, but it’s now spreading in the bastions of the ‘Rich World’ as well. It’s the same the whole world over under austerity.

Melmoth 1/9/2013

We publish below an appeal by the Hungarian bookshop Gondolkodó Autonóm Antikvárium that we received with the request to support them and to spread the appeal. The ICC has known and appreciated this bookshop for more than 15 years. Our press is available at this address, as well as a lot of other internationalist publications in different languages. We have also been able to take part in different discussions organised in Budapest by the bookshop.[1] In fact it is one of the rare bookshops with this proletarian (and not left bourgeois) focus in the East Central European region, even though we don’t know if it is the only one which has been functioning continuously for many years as the comrades write in their appeal.

A bookshop can be a place for distributing revolutionary positions and – even more important – for discussions about them in search for political clarification and theoretical coherence. The comrades of Gondolkodó Autonomous Bookshop and the ICC agree on the necessity to overcome the capitalist mode of production and national states, even if we have divergences about other issues, namely about the role of the revolutionaries and how to organize as such. However this is not an impediment to spreading this solidarity appeal but a stimulus for further debate – in Budapest or elsewhere, on the internet or in personal meetings.

ICC, 26/07/13

Solidarity appeal for the renovation of Gondolkodó Autonóm Antikvárium (Gondolkodó Autonomous Bookshop) 2013 Summer.

The Gondolkodó Autonomous Bookshop is the only workers’ movement distribution place, library and meeting-place in the East Central European region (namely in Hungary) which has been functioning continuously for many years (now for 20 years). Now this place must be renovated because the walls are wet and mouldy, the mortar has been falling, the sets of shelves are rickety, the drainpipe is often clogged up etc. The condition of the library has been worsening gradually and also the distribution of publications is harder under these circumstances.

Since we can not pay for all the costs of the general renovation we ask for your financial help in order that we could do the renovation during the summer. Please support this aim according to your possibilities (if you can send 10 Euros then do it, but if you have more money you can send a bigger amount).

Comrades, activists and sympathisers, please spread our solidarity appeal and support us!

Thanks for your help in the name of internationalist proletarian solidarity!

GONDOLKODÓ AUTONOMOUS BOOKSHOP

Hungary- Bp-1012 . Logodi Utca 51

website : gondolkodo.mypressonline.com [21]

e-mail: gondolkodo@citromail.hu [22]

https://www.facebook.com/gondolkodo.antikvarium [23]

Raiffeisen BANK

Name : Tütö László 

Iban : HU 3912 0101 5401 3152 1900 2000 06 

Swift code : UBRTHUHB

The closeness of the vote expressed just how deeply conflicted the British ruling class is, and not only over Syria but its whole imperialist strategy.

Once British imperialism had its empire. Following the loss of Empire as the result of two world wars, it became the USA's loyal lieutenant during the Cold War. This meant that despite being a second rate military power it could have a place at the top table, or as parts of the ruling class like to say: punch above its weight.

With the disappearance of the old bloc system British imperialism has been faced with the increasingly complex problem of how best to defend its own interests. Should it simply remain loyal to the USA? Move more towards Europe, or somehow try to maintain an independent course adapting itself to challenges as they arrived? This strategic choice has become increasingly problematic as the world has sunk deeper and deeper into evermore chaotic international relations. In 1991 it was a pretty easy decision for the British ruling class to go along with the USA in attacking Iraq. There were parts of the ruling class that warned about the dangers of the new world order. British imperialism however did not come out of this war too badly. Only 12 years later however the decision to back the US in the 2nd Gulf war was more problematic because parts of the ruling class feared the chaos that would follow and the danger of linking the national interest so closely to that of the US. Blair and the pro-US fraction that he represented drove through the decision however, using every devious trick in the book to get support. However, far from furthering the national interest it suffered a bitter humiliation as Iraq, and Afghanistan, sunk into chaos and British armed forces were exposed as being dependent upon the US. Blair, and thus the British ruling class, became linked with George W Bush and a visibly declining US imperialism. Supporting the US has become extremely costly.

On the other hand, not supporting US military action means accepting not being able to punch above one’s weight, and being a secondary power. Also where do you turn for alliances? There are those who say closer relations with Europe are the way forwards, but this increasingly means a complex game of alliances against the rising power of German imperialism. The Cameron team with the backing of much of the ruling class had been pursuing a policy of seeking to build relations with the growing powers such as India, Brazil, Turkey, as well as commercial relations with China.

However, all the relations that the British bourgeoisie build in Europe and beyond are increasingly unstable because of its increasing inability to use its close relations with the US to counter-weigh the actions of its rivals.

It is in this context that we have to understand the events around the vote on Syria. The divisions went across party lines and reflected the deeper division in the whole ruling class.

To go along meant being pulled further into the consequences of the US declining status ie desperate military action in Syria in order to try and display US military superiority but at the possible cost of being sucked into another war. Former military leaders openly stated their opposition to becoming involved: “A former head of the navy, Lord West, and a former head of the army, Lord Dannatt, reflected widespread criticism within the military and defence circles by pouring scorn on claims by ministers that military strikes did not mean the UK or the US were taking sides in the civil war. ‘As regards a limited strike, this was always an impossible notion,’ said Dannatt. ‘Any use of explosive ordnance by the west, for whatever purpose, would have committed us to participation in the Syrian civil war irrevocably’.” (The Guardian, 31.8.2013). The historical significance of not supporting the US was clearly stated by a former adviser to the Foreign and Defence secretaries, Crispin Blunt, who said “he hoped the vote would relieve Britain of its ‘imperial pretension’ and stop it trying to punch above its weight on the world stage” (ibid).

It was the loss of this role on the world stage that concerned those in favour of supporting the US’s action. This was made clear by Michael Clarke, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute (one of the British imperialism’s main think tanks): “...there is a danger it could become a tipping point where the UK falls into strategic irrelevance in US eyes. We can all be friendly, well respected, kith and kin, etc -like the Dutch- but just not be taken seriously as a strategically significant player in security matters” (ibid).

The events around the US’s announcement that it was going to strike Syria have thus placed the British ruling class on the rack.

The US however, also suffered through these events. Its international authority was further undermined by its inability to get the support of its partner in the ‘special relationship’. French imperialism may now be the US’s “oldest ally” but it is clear to everyone that John Kerry only said that to insult the British ruling class. For US imperialism having to rely on a country which only a few years ago it was pouring scorn on for not supporting the 2nd Gulf War, is not a sign of strength but historical weakness.

The US will not forgive British imperialism easily. Obama’s refusal to hold a meeting with Cameron at the G20 meeting in Russia was a very public snub, which very visibly demonstrated the price of not supporting them. The other major imperialist powers will also take note of this.

This decision not to back the US whilst being fundamentally a matter of how best to defend the national interest, also reflected a self-inflicted wound. The blatant manipulation of public opinion over the 2nd Gulf war, Blair’s talk about Weapons of Mass Destruction etc, and the trouble and tragedy that unfolded in Iraq afterwards, badly dented confidence in politicians. This meant that the public was highly sceptical of any claims made by the government. The vote against military action has certainly boosted the idea that parliament has some power, and thus strengthened democratic illusions. If the most powerful parts of the ruling class had wanted to support the US, they would have done so but it would have been at the cost of a further weakening of any confidence in the ruling class.

Cameron et al may have wanted to use the US insistence on action as a means to push the rest of the ruling class to support such action and thus the special relationship, but it is clear that important parts of the ruling class refused to go along with this. This is an event of historical importance because it expresses a further step in the decline of British imperialism. A decline that will exacerbate the divisions in the ruling class, and push it to take up more military actions where it can in order to make a display of its power, no matter how limited. There may be a resurgence of the pro-US fractions as this historical weakness becomes clearer, but the US will be extremely wary of the British ruling class. British imperialism is being pushed further onto the side lines. 

Phil, 6.9.13

The hideous spectacle of the children’s bodies exhibited after the chemical attacks of 21 August on the outskirts of Damascus didn’t truly move the world leaders, whose hypocritical reactions were dictated solely by their imperialist interests. The use of gas by both sides during the First World War, the unleashing of chemical agents in Vietnam and of the atomic bomb against Japan are all proof that our wonderful democracies have never hesitated to resort to the most murderous weapons. The declarations coming from the government offices are all the more hypocritical because the bombing and massacre of the Syrian population, the over 100,000 deaths since the war began, the flight of millions of refugees fleeing the carnage have, up till now, not been a ‘red line’ as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned. 

An aggravation of imperialist tensions

It’s possible that the use of chemical weapons was a Syrian/Russian provocation (Assad had been warned several times by Obama in 2012 that he must not cross this ‘red line’) in the direction of rival powers, principally the USA and France. But in any case the ‘red line’ was never more than more than a highly mediatised pretext to prepare ‘public opinion’ for an eventual military intervention. In the face of the growing tragedy, all the comings and goings between the various states are no more than a jockeying for imperialist interests in which the populations on the ground are of no importance . And it’s precisely the relations between the rival powers which explain the length of the conflict and the atrocious suffering of the populations: by comparison, other regimes swept away by the ‘Arab spring’, like Libya, didn’t last anything as long because it was less crucial as a focus for inter-imperialist rivalries.

Russia scored a diplomatic coup when it proposed placing Syria’s chemical weapons under “international control”; this produced a flurry of further diplomatic initiatives by its rivals, which have not hidden the impotence of the latter, and of the USA in particular. But whatever the outcome of this latest crisis and the decisions taken in government ministries, and whether or not there is a direct military intervention in Syria, we are seeing a spectacular rise in warlike tensions against a background of mounting chaos, of an increasingly uncontrollable situation which has made the clash of arms more and more widespread. The use of chemical weapons on several occasions already, the extension of the conflict to Lebanon, the presence of all kinds of vultures in the region, from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to Turkey and Iran, whose involvement in the conflict is a particular source of anxiety for Israel, are all evidence that the conflict reaches well beyond the borders of Syria. Even more significant is the presence of the bigger imperialist powers, which illustrates the level reached by imperialist rivalries since the end of the Cold War. Thus, for the first time since 1989, we are seeing a major political confrontation between the old bloc leaders, the USA and Russia. Although very much weakened by the disintegration of the eastern bloc and of the USSR, Russia has been going through a revival, after carrying out a scorched earth policy in Chechnya, Georgia and the Caucasus during the 1990s. For Russia, Syria is vital for ensuring its presence in the region, holding on to its strategic links with Iran, restricting the influence of the Sunni Muslim republics on Russia’s southern borders, and maintaining a port to the Mediterranean.

This sharpening of tensions can also be measured by the fact that China is much more openly opposing the US than in the past. Although during the period of the blocs China moved very far from Russian influence, having been neutralised by the American camp following the bargain struck with Nixon over the war in Vietnam, it is now becoming a major opponent which is worrying the USA more and more. With its meteoric rise on the economic level, China has also been advancing its imperialist interests in Africa, the Far East, and Iran, a primary aim being to ensure its access to energy. As a late arrival on the scene it is a major factor in the further destabilisation of imperialist relations.

The strengthening of these two powers has been possible, above all, because of the increasingly evident weakening and isolation of the USA, whose attempts to play the role of world cop have met with utter failure in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can get some idea of how difficult things have become for the US by comparing its ‘intervention’ in Syria with the role it played in the first war against Iraq, back in 1991. Using Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait as a pretext for a huge display of its military superiority, it succeeded in building a military ‘Coalition’ involving not only a number of Arab countries, but also the principal members of the western bloc which were already tempted to break free of the USA’s grip following the disintegration of the eastern bloc. Germany and Japan, though not involved militarily, bankrolled the adventure while Britain and France were directly ‘called up’ for the fighting. Gorbachev’s ailing USSR did nothing to stand in America’s path. Just over a decade later, with the second invasion of Iraq, America had to deal with active diplomatic opposition from Germany, France and Russia.   And while in both in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, America could count on the loyal support, diplomatic and military, of Britain, the latter’s defection from the planned military intervention in Syria was key to the Obama administration’s decision to call off the intervention and to listen to the diplomatic option put forward by Moscow. The vote in the Commons against Cameron’s proposal to support military intervention is testimony to deep divisions in the British bourgeoisie resulting from the country’s involvement in the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq[1], but above all it is a measure of the weakening of US influence. The sudden discovery that France, which continued to support the push to intervene, is America’s “oldest ally” should not give rise to any illusion that France is going to take on the role of loyal lieutenant which Britain has (notwithstanding its own ambitions to seek a more independent role) played in most of the USA’s imperialist enterprises since the end of the Cold War.  The alliance between the US and France is much more circumstantial and thus unreliable as far as the US is concerned. To this we can add the discretely discordant notes coming from Germany, whose quiet rapprochement with Russia is another concern for Washington. 

At the time of the first Gulf war in 1991, President George Bush Senior promised a New World Order, with the US Marshall keeping things nice and peaceful. What we have actually seen is a growing imperialist free for all, dragging the world towards barbarism and chaos.   

The strategic importance of Syria

In the context of this new battleground, Syria is a very important strategic prize. Modern Syria emerged early in the 20th century with the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. During the First World War, Britain mobilised Syrian troops with the promise that the country would be granted independence after the war was won. Britain’s aim was of course to maintain its control of the region. But already in 1916, following the secret Sykes/Picot accords, Britain ceded control of Syria to France. The main aim of this agreement was to block the ambitions of Germany, which had already envisaged the construction of the Baghdad railway in order to “bring Constantinople and the military strongholds of the Turkish Empire in Asia Minor into direct connection with Syria and the provinces on the Euphrates and on the Tigris”[2]  Today, because of the instability of the traditional maritime routes through the Persian Gulf, Syria has become one of the terrestrial routes for the transport of hydrocarbons. Opening onto the Mediterranean through a corridor on the Levant (which is also used for the transfer of weapons from Russia) and to the east towards the oil-producing countries, this will be an increasingly important factor in the politics of the region.

The tensions developing today are this to a large extent linked to Syria’s historic importance in the region. They are also fuelled by the role played by Israel, whose threats against Syria and Iran[3] are a further source of disquiet for the large imperialist powers. Regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Qatar are deeply involved, being the main purveyors of arms to the ‘rebels’, while Turkey is also seeking to defend its interests by playing on the presence of a Kurdish minority in northern Syria.

And there is also a major polarisation around the Shia regime in Iran, which controls the strategic oil route through the Straits of Hormuz. This is intimately linked to the naval build up in the area, particularly of the US fleet. It also explains Iran’s commitment to its nuclear programme, which Putin provocatively supports, calling for “aid for the construction of a nuclear power station”.

Towards unprecedented chaos

Up till now, the blood-soaked Assad regime has been seen by all the imperialist powers as one that ensures a certain stability and predictability, as something less worse than what might take its place. Today, if the Syrian opposition ended up on top, there’s no doubt that there would be a chain reaction leading to incredible chaos and all kinds of unpredictable scenarios. The Free Syrian Army is a real patchwork and there is no truly united opposition. This weak political conglomeration, despite the discrete support of pro-American and pro-European forces, who have been ensuring the flow of arms without any ability to control their circulation, has been infiltrated, or at perhaps flanked by jihadi terrorist groups, many of whom have come from outside Syria and are acting for their own interests like the warlords who flourish in Africa today. There is more or less zero possibility of the western powers being able to rely on a real opposition that can offer an alternative to the regime.

This is a wider phenomenon which we can see in all the other Arab countries that were faced with similar events during the Arab Spring: no real bourgeois opposition able to offer a ‘democratic alternative’ and a minimum of stability. All these regimes have only been able to survive thanks to the strength of the army, which has tried to hold together the numerous clans of the ruling class and prevent society from falling apart. We saw it in Libya and more recently in Egypt following the army coup d’État against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. All this is the expression of a real impasse, typical of capitalist decadence and especially of its final phase of decomposition, where all that can be offered during an economic crisis is poverty, the brute force of the army, repression and bloodletting.

And this situation is all the more disquieting because it is feeding religious divisions which in this part of the world are among the sharpest: divisions between Christians and Muslims, Shia and Sunni Muslims, between Muslims and Jews, between Muslims and Druze, etc. Without being directly at the root of the conflicts in the region, these fractures are deepening the hatreds and hostilities of a society which has no future. This is also a region which in past has been marked by numerous genocides, as in Armenia, by the expulsion of populations, by colonial massacres which have left a legacy of hatred that in turn serves as the source of new massacres. Syria in particular is a focus for these divisions (Alawite/Sunni, Muslim/Christian, etc) and under the cover of war there have been innumerable cases of pogroms against this or that community, with the influx of fanatical jihadis, some backed by Saudi Arabia, making the situation worse than ever.

The catastrophe is all the more serious in that the US, a military super-power in decline, has been spearheading the descent into chaos. It has gone from world cop to pyromaniac fireman. In 2008, when Obama triumphed over Bush, it was in no small measure due to his image as an alternative to the unpopular warmonger Bush. But now the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Obama has shown himself to be no less of a warmonger, despite his talents as a politician, something his predecessor didn’t possess. Obama is more and more losing credibility. He has to deal with public opinion which is increasingly opposed to war, increasingly affected by the Vietnam syndrome, while at the same time facing an unbearable economic crisis which makes it more and more difficult to lavish money on military crusades. For the moment, the USA’s retreat from punishing the Assad regime with military strikes can be explained by invoking very real geo-strategic difficulties, but this has also led Washington into resorting to new contortions, such as the hypocritical and ridiculous distinction between “chemical weapons” and “weapons which only use chemical components”. Some nuance!

With the increasing number of quagmires, the mystifications which served their purpose in justifying the military crusades of the 90s – “clean war”, “humanitarian intervention” etc  - have lost their impact. The USA is facing a real dilemma which is undermining its credibility with its allies, especially Israel, which has become more and critical of the Americans. The dilemma is this: either the US does nothing, and this can only embolden its rivals and encourage new provocations on their part; or they strike out and his only increases hostility and resentment towards them. What is certain is that like all the other imperialist powers, they can’t escape the logic of militarism. Sooner or later, they can’t keep out of new military campaigns.

The only alternative: socialism or barbarism

The infernal spiral of these military conflicts once again highlights the responsibility of the international proletariat: even if it is not in a position to have an immediate effect on the growing military barbarism, it is still the only historic force that can put an end to his barbarism through its revolutionary struggle. Since the beginning of the events, and above all from the moment when the open armed conflict began to overwhelm it, the weakness of the proletariat in Syria has meant that it is not able to respond to the war on its own class terrain.  As we have already pointed out,    “the fact that the manifestation of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Syria has resulted not in the least gain for the exploited and oppressed masses but in a war which has left over 100,000 dead is a sinister illustration of the weakness of the working class in this country – the only force which can form a barrier to military barbarism. And this situation also applies, even if in less tragic forms, to the other Arab countries where the fall of the old dictators has resulted in the seizure of power by the most retrograde sectors of the bourgeoisie, represented by the Islamists in Egypt or Turkey, or in utter chaos, as in Libya”[4]. 

Today, the course of events fully confirms the perspective which Rosa Luxemburg put forward in The Junius Pamphlet:

“Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ What does “regression into barbarism” mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales”.

WH, September 2013

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Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Syria, the massacres keep spreading. The horror of capitalism accelerates, deaths pile up. A continuous carnage that no one seems able to stop. Capitalism in utter decomposition is dragging the world into generalised barbarism. The use of chemical weapons as in Syria today is unfortunately only one of the instruments of death among many others. But there is nothing inevitable about this perspective, which left to itself will result in the destruction of humanity. The world proletariat cannot remain indifferent in the face of all these wars and massacres. Only the proletariat, the revolutionary class of our epoch, can put an end to this nightmare. More than ever humanity is faced with one choice: communism or barbarism.

The Syrian population is being sacrificed on the altar of imperialism

On Monday 21 August an attack with chemical weapons left hundreds dead in an area close to Damascus. On the internet, on TV screens and the newspapers there were unbearable images of men, women and children in agony. The bourgeoisie, without any scruple, has seized on this human tragedy to advance its sordid interests. The regime of Bashar al Assad, a butcher among butchers, has, we are told, crossed a red line: you can use any weapons to slaughter people, but not chemical ones. These are ‘dirty’ weapons, as opposed to the ‘clean’ ones like conventional bombs and mortars or even the atomic bombs the Americans dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945. But the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie has no limits. Since the First World War of 1914-18 where poison gas was used massively for the first time, killing several hundred thousand people, chemical weapons have been continuously perfected and used. The superficial agreements about their non-utilisation, especially after the two world wars and in the 1980s, were just empty declarations, which were not meant to be applied[1]. And many theatres of war since this time have seen these kinds of weapons being used. In North Yemen between 1962 and 1967, Egypt used mustard gas without restraint. In the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, towns like Hallabja were bombarded with chemical weapons, leaving over 5000 dead, under the benevolent gaze of the ‘international community’ of the US, France and all the members of the UN! But they are not just the speciality of small imperialist countries or dictators like Assad or Saddam Hussein, as the bourgeoisie would like us to believe. The most massive use of chemical weapons, alongside napalm, was carried out by the USA during the Vietnam war. Vast amounts of herbicide contaminated with dioxin were used to destroy rice plantations and forests in order to reduce the population and the Vietcong to famine. This scorched earth policy, this deliberate desertification, was the work of American capital in Vietnam, the same which today, alongside supporters like France, is getting ready to intervene in Syria, allegedly to defend the population. Since the start of this war in Syria, there have been over 100,000 deaths and at least a million refugees fleeing to surrounding countries. Looking past the discourse being poured out by the bourgeois media, the working class has to know the real causes behind this imperialist war in Syria.

Syria: it’s decadent capitalism which is responsible

Syria is currently at the heart of the imperialist tensions and conflicts which are extending from North Africa to Pakistan. If the Syrian bourgeoisie is tearing itself apart inside a country which is now in ruins, it has been able to rely on the insatiable appetites of a whole number of imperialist powers. In this region, Iran, Hezbollah from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey are all more or less directly involved in this bloody conflict. The most powerful imperialisms in the world are also defending their squalid interests. Russia, China, France, Britain and the USA are playing their part in the continuation of this war and its extension across the region. Faced with their growing incapacity to control the situation, they are more and more just sowing death and destruction, according to the old scorched earth policy (‘if I can’t dominate this region, I will set it on fire’).

During the Cold War, the period which went officially from 1947 to 1991 and the fall of the USSR, two blocs confronted each other, led by Russia and the USA respectively. These two superpowers directed their ‘allies’ or ‘satellites’ with an iron hand, forcing them to fall in line in the face of the enemy ogre. This ‘world order’ was based on the discipline of the bloc. It was a historical period that was full of danger for humanity, because if the working class had not been able to resist, even passively, the ideological march towards war, a third world conflagration would have been possible. Since the collapse of the USSR, there are no longer two blocs, no more threat of a third world war. The discipline of the blocs is in pieces. Each nation is playing its own card; imperialist alliances are increasingly ephemeral and circumstantial. As a result conflicts are multiplying and in the end no bourgeoisie can control it. This is chaos, the growing decomposition of society.

Thus the accelerating weakness of the world’s leading imperialist power, the US, is an active factor in the whole Middle East plunging into barbarism. Immediately afterthe chemical attack on the suburbs of Damascus, the British and French bourgeoisie, followed much more timidly by the American bourgeoisie, declared loudly that such a crime could not go unpunished. A military response was imminent and it would be proportionate to the crime. The problem is that the American bourgeoisie and other western bourgeoisies have been through a serious reverse in Afghanistan and Iraq, countries which are also in a total mess. How could they intervene in Syria without finding themselves in the same situation? This has resulted in some very significant foreign policy differences within the ruling class, and the recent rejection of Cameron’s call for military action in the UK parliament was a graphic expression of these divisions. On top of this, these bourgeoisies also had to deal with what they call public opinion. The population of the west doesn’t want this intervention. The majority no longer believe the lies of their own bourgeoisies. The unpopularity of this proposed intervention, even in the form of limited bombings, has posed a problem for the ruling class in the west.

The British bourgeoisie has thus had to renounce its initial bellicose declarations and move away from the path of military intervention. This expressesthe fact that all the bourgeoisie’s solutions are bad ones: either it doesn’t intervene (as Britain has just decided to do) and this is then a big statement of weakness; or it does intervene (as the US and France are still planning to do) and they risk stirring up more chaos, more instability and incontrollable imperialist tensions.

Only the proletariat can put an end to this barbarism

The proletariat cannot remain indifferent to all this barbarism. It is the exploited who are the main victims of the imperialist cliques. Whether it’s Shia, Sunni, secular, or Christian being massacred, it makes no difference. There is a natural and healthy human reaction to want to do something about this right away, to stop these abominable crimes. It is this sentiment which the grand democracies are trying to exploit, justifying their warlike adventures in the name of ‘humanitarian’ causes. And each time the world situationgets worse. This is clearly a trap.

The only way that we can express real solidarity towards all the victims of decaying capitalism is to overthrow the system which produces all these horrors. Such a change can’t happen overnight. But if the road towards it is long and difficult, it’s the only one that can lead to a world without wars and countries, without poverty and exploitation.

The working class has no national flag to defend. The country where it lives is the place of its exploitation, and in some parts of the world, the place of its death at the hands of imperialism. The working class has a responsibility to oppose bourgeois nationalism with its own internationalism. This is not an impossibility. We have to remember that the First World War was brought to an end not by the good will of the belligerents, or by the defeat of Germany. It was ended by the proletarian revolution.

Tino 31/8/2013

For several weeks there has been such a torrent of unexpected good news about the British economy that our rulers have become quite excited. It has given a shot in the arm to the markets, because of an expectation of an earlier than predicted rise in interest rates. And it has helped push the IMF to a humbling re-appraisal of the criticisms it has previously made of the British government’s economic policy. In fact the IMF is now praising the British government’s approach to economic management as the light of the world, replacing the old fashioned idea that China and the other emerging countries offered hope to us all.

The bourgeois media’s commentary on this alleged recovery has been quite informative, and we can largely let them tell the story in their own words. Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, it’s a recovery that turns out not to have lasted very long. 

When Cameron and Osborne came to power, they gave the impression that a short but severe bout of austerity measures would be sufficient to rein in the deficit and pave the way to recovery in fairly short order. Therefore, although austerity is not enjoyable in itself, the rewards would soon be available and effectively cancel out the necessary reductions in living standards. As the bourgeoisie themselves admit, the reality has been that they have not managed to steer the economy even back to the level of economic output that prevailed prior to the financial crisis of 2007. An important consideration that partially accounts for the governing team in particular now talking confidently about ‘recovery’ is that they could foresee getting back to that level of output prior to the next election. That would have given them enough to suggest that the original promises of the government were not completely hollow.

Except during the admittedly extended periods when it was actually in recession, there has not been an absolute lack of good news about the British economy since the outbreak of the financial crisis. The difficulty for the bourgeoisie in creating a convincing story of good news about the economy is that each piece of good news has been followed almost straight away by bad news. If industrial output was up, services were down, and vice versa. If exports were up, consumer demand was down. If employment was up, unemployment (surprisingly) was not down. And so on, along those lines, the evidence has gone for years.

The difference over recent weeks was a series of reports on different aspects of the economic situation that all tended to exceed the rather cautious expectations of forecasters who were used to getting their fingers burnt by over-optimistic predictions. As the Financial Times said on September 5th:

“Expert economic opinion regularly bends with the wind. Rarely has it been blown so far so quickly. Talk of a ‘flatlining’ economy was universal until the spring, when fears of a ‘triple-dip’ (recession) disappeared. But after a string of good economic figures and the release of an extraordinarily strong services sector business survey yesterday, economists rushed to judge that growth was running at boom-time rates. …

If the economy is growing at 1 per cent this quarter  ... that rate of growth is roughly the pace of former rapid recoveries from recession. If sustained, output would finally climb back above the level of its previous peak (before the financial crash) in spring 2014, a year before the general election.…

Civil servants and central bankers know that the speed of recovery says little about its breadth or durability and are still struggling to explain the turnaround. Before they swap caution for confidence, they will want to take stock of the wider picture which remains mixed.”

Without going through the FT’s retailing of the mixed evidence, we can skip to the following day, September 6th when the run of good headline news fell apart:

“A damper was put on rapid recovery hopes today with disappointing industrial production figures and a widening of Britain’s stubbornly high trade deficit in July.

Industrial output was flat over the month after a healthy 1.1% expansion in June. Economists had expected production to edge up slightly. The trade in goods deficit rose to £9.8 billion, considerably larger than City traders’ forecasts of 8.15 billion.

The monthly gap was higher than the £7.3 billion deficit recorded in July 2012. There were also signs of problems in emerging markets beginning to affect British firms, with export to non-European countries plunging by almost 16%.” (from The Evening Standard)

The fact that “problems in emerging markets” are affecting the hopes of the bourgeoisie for a broadly based recovery in the British economy should give the International Monetary Fund pause for thought. Again we can refer to an article in the FT of September 5th:

“Turmoil in emerging markets this summer has forced the IMF into a humbling series of U-turns over its global assessments.

In a confidential note seen by The Financial Times, the IMF has dropped its view of emerging economies as the dynamic engine of the world economy, instead noting that ‘momentum is projected to come mainly from advanced economies where output is expected to accelerate’.”

This is very sound, except for the last point. Presumably we are due to hear much less, at least from the IMF, about China, the Brics and ‘globalisation’ being the light of the world in economic terms. That’s a relief! As the ICC has always pointed out, the basic foundations of globalisation, of a world economy, had already been achieved by the end of the ascendant period of capitalism, i.e. by the beginning of the twentieth century, and it was precisely at this point that the system entered into its historic crisis. 

The bourgeoisie have essentially come to use the term globalisation to express their (ill-founded) hope that huge dynamic growth in emerging economies and China in particular will somehow succour the stagnating economies of the west. But since the rise of China, in particular, underlines precisely how uncompetitive the western economies are, it is difficult to follow this line of reasoning. Of course, the west has sold huge volumes of raw materials to China and also sophisticated engineering (even Britain sells in the latter category to China).  But the overall trade deficit of the west with China shows the real balance of economic power and the decline of the older industrial economies.

At the same time, countries like China are highly dependent on the western countries as markets for the mass of commodities that they have been churning out at a frenetic rate thanks to the brutal exploitation of their workforce. With the recession in the west, China and the other Brics are now beginning to falter in their turn.

Faced with this rather worrying scenario, the IMF is proposing now to institute British economic management as the new beacon of the world to replace China! This is quite a turnaround:

“In April, Olivier Blanchard, IMF chief economist, singled out the UK as a country that should lighten up on austerity, but the fund now recommends that countries follow the British policy of ‘achieving structural fiscal targets and allowing automatic stabilisers to play freely’.” (FT)

But, as The Evening Standard commentators note, discussing the retardation in Britain’s export performance, the “problems in emerging markets” are very likely to undermine the objective of the British bourgeoisie to achieve a balanced and durable recovery. The fact that the world economy is indeed interconnected is not some kind of automatic solution to the crisis as so many bourgeois commentators placidly assume. On the contrary, it is the guarantee that all the components of the capitalist system are doomed to sink together. 

Hardin, 6.9.13

There is nothing really new about revelations that our rulers are a ruthless, murderous, Machiavellian, conspiratorial class. It would be naive for revolutionaries to think otherwise because this would directly lead to fostering illusions in the democratic state and the idea that this state would abide by the rules or operate fairly. In general, throughout history, the workers’ movement has tended to underestimate the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie and it has paid a great price for doing so. The enormous reach and depth of state surveillance that has recently been unmasked is thus not an exception and not really a scandal, but the true face of a capitalist society which is driven by the cancers of militarism, terrorism (for the most part fostered directly and indirectly by the major powers) and competition as well as the imperative need to use its spies, police and secret agencies as weapons of repression and oppression against the working class or any elements that come up against the system. This is just as true of the velvet-glove democracies as of the iron-fist totalitarian regimes - they are all expressions of the dictatorship of capital and they provide themselves with the tools to maintain that dictatorship, of which spying is just a part. Behind all the fuss about state surveillance, despite all the outrage and protest from left to right, these are the very principles of capitalist society being put to work and the outrage tends to cover up this reality. Spying has always been an important tool in class societies, all the more so in capitalist society and particularly a capitalist society in its decadent phase where the size and intensity of the state’s espionage machine reaches new extents and depths.

The basis and continuity of capitalism’s spying game

There are at least three factors that underlie the spying activities of the capitalist state:

- the economic competition which breeds industrial espionage - the more frantic and desperate the competition, the more so the spying around it. The recent revelations showed that this includes the NSA spying on embassies and other institutions of its so-called allies (such as France and Germany) as well as its more traditional imperialist foes;

- military confrontations and the developments of imperialism. These are unthinkable without ‘intelligence’, spying, undercover agencies at work;

- the maintenance of class domination. Class society compels the ruling class to use repression, secret police, undercover agents, all kinds of observations and spying on the working class and on any oppositions or protests. This is particularly the case with the working class, the revolutionary class in capitalist society. Here the spying had to become systematic.

To express outrage that governments, the US in the case of the NSA, or Britain in the case of GCHQ, use their spying agencies against economic or military rivals, or populations at large, is just hypocritical. The same British media outlets and liberals today bleating about a “free press” and censorship are the same ones that joined in the vilification and demonisation of the miners during their pivotal strike of 1984/5, and the same ones that repeated the state’s lying propaganda about WMD in Iraq in 2003. All countries are forced to spy and lie and there is no state, no ruling class without its secret services, machines of surveillance and undercover operations. The democratic New Zealand government has just passed a new spying bill giving the state more power over its population (Guardian, August 20), and its police and intelligence services have direct access to US surveillance networks such as PRISM; meanwhile a ‘national liberation’ organisation such as the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank has 7 different police/security bodies. This hypocrisy is also endemic to the system itself with the call from the White House last year for an international convention to regularise “consumer data privacy in a networked world” (Guardian, 27.4.13). This was just another weapon in the USA’s cyber-warfare, particularly involving China. Scandal after scandal has emerged in the countries that the US and Britain were spying on but all of them are at it. Germany’s BND intelligence agency has used “massive amounts” of daily intercepts from the NSA (Der Spiegel, 7.8.13) and they have been working closely together for decades. It’s a similar story from France whose politicians like to boast about the independence of their country. And while they are cooperating at one level, at another they are all spying on each other.

While they existed during capitalism’s rise as a dynamic system, while they even pre-date capitalism itself, spying activities take on a new dimension in capitalism’s decadence. This is because of permanent war and imperialist conflict; increased commercial rivalry and competition which also tend to overflow into the realms of military developments; and, above all, because of the need to keep a tight watch and control over the working class. Those are the main reasons why we see such a strong growth in these parasitic bodies and their activities. Even in the period of counter-revolution when the working class was more or less absent as a fighting force - indeed arising from it - came the most developed means for permanent surveillance. The totalitarian regimes of the Nazis and the Stalinists built the most secret and fearsome apparatus for spying and repression: the Gestapo and the Russian GPU. From the Second World War, where the spying activities of all the belligerents were vital for victory or defeat, these machines developed further during the Cold War where they were again intensified by technological means along with a considerable growth of the CIA and other such organisations. There are also developments in the closeness between the head of the state and the secret services. In Russia every president bar one, Boris Yeltsin (who was close to them), came directly from the KGB or their predecessors; President  Bush Senior was previously the head of the CIA and Klaus Kinkel, the former German Foreign Minister, was head of the German secret services In 1981, the Thatcher clique, which had links to the secret services, set up the shadowy MISC 57 unit, three years before taking on the miners, and secret service bosses in many Middle East countries are very close to the head of government and the forces of direct repression.

1917: Revolution

There’s an idea among some revolutionary elements, an idea that sits side-by-side with the rejection of an analysis that the bourgeoisie is an intelligent and conspiratorial class, that the police “won’t bother with the likes of us - we’re too small, too insignificant”. Such ideas are concessions to democracy which also underestimate the fact that the bourgeoisie has often been clearer about the crucial role of revolutionary organisations than the working class (See the article in WR 252 ‘Revolutionary organisations struggle against provocation and slander’[1]). Mussolini’s secret police maintained a spy in the very small left communist group Bilan in the 1930’s and the nascent group of the ICC in France in the early 70’s was watched over by the police. These are things that we know.

Just one time in history have the real details and methods of the political police been examined and exposed by revolutionaries. This was when the archives of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, fell into the hand of the Bolsheviks and were analysed by the revolutionary Victor Serge, which resulted in his book What everyone should know about repression (first published in 1926)[2]. In it he is clear that the state apparatus is not just a war machine for competing groups, but a machine for the repression of the exploited. This is an incredible read for what Serge describes as the “prototype of the modern political police”. By 1900, the Okhrana was organised internationally and by 1905 it was engaging in highly sophisticated levels of espionage across Russia with extensive spying networks. To keep track of all this, spies would spy on spies and spies would spy on them, and informers, secret agents, provocateurs, police spies were everywhere in Russia: “The police had to see everything, know, understand and have power over everything. The strength and perfection of their machinery appears all the more terrible because of the unsuspected forces they dragged up from the depth of the human soul”. You can see from reading the book how paranoid the bourgeoisie was about the working class, and we have had a hundred years of state capitalism since then to reinforce and refine their fears and their machines of repression.

Serge denounces “legality” and the respect for it as an element of class collaboration in much the same way as “accountability” and “transparency” - and indeed “legality” - are used around the NSA issue today. This naivety “ignores the real role of the state and the deceptive nature of democracy; in short, the first principles of class struggle”. He doesn’t at all underestimate the “powerful and cunning adversary” and from this denounces the idea of the “idyllic revolution”. In respect of the undercover forces at work today, Serge gives some considerable insight: “Police provocation is above all the weapon - or the curse - of decomposing regimes. Conscious of their impotence to prevent what is going on, the police incite initiatives which they can then repress. Provocation is also a spontaneous, elementary action resulting from the demoralisation of a police force at its wits’ end, overtaken by events, which cannot perform tasks infinitely above its capacities, and nonetheless wants to justify the expectations and expenditure of its masters”. And finally on Serge, in line with our position above: “There is no force in the world which can hold back the revolutionary tide when it rises and all the police forces, however Machiavellian, scientific or criminal, are virtually impotent against it”.

“1984”: Counter-revolution...

There’s been lots of talk in the media about these leaked secrets showing how we have arrived at George Orwell’s nightmare vision of 1984 and “Big Brother is Watching You”; with some saying that we have gone well beyond it. Orwell’s 1949 book, with its story of the state overlooking every aspect of one’s life, every corner of it, was a horror story of the counter-revolution. It’s a story of perpetual warfare generated to keep the population behind the state, of the national socialism of Big Brother and the hopelessness of rebellion. The rebel hero, Winston Smith, eventually has all the spark of revolt snuffed out of him and any hope of a different society is completely extinguished. This book was a reflection of the counter-revolution, of the dark days leading up to and coming out of the Second World War when the working class seemed totally helpless, impotent and atomised vis-a-vis the state. But, in reality, even in the depths of this period of counter-revolution, even in places like Nazi Germany or the police states of the eastern bloc and the militarised democracies, there were still acts of revolt, compassion, solidarity, protests and strikes, some major, some very minor in character but all the more significant given the period that they took place in.

It’s true that today Orwell’s nightmare vision of a citizen’s every step being followed by the state is very much a reality. But we have more than enough evidence that all the state’s surveillance and all the state’s bloodhounds cannot control a population in revolt and particularly the working class. The recent demonstrations and protests across the world, even if greatly facilitated by an electronic field that can be switched off, show the potential difficulties for the ruling class. There were very strong strikes in the eastern bloc countries, Hungary, Poland, Russia in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, despite the all-pervasive nature of the state apparatus, particularly their interior ministries and their trade union spying networks. In East Germany the 1953 workers’ strikes knocked the repressive apparatus of the state, including the unions, sideways, despite its reliance on one of the biggest bodies of secret police in the world, the Stasi - an organisation that went to the extent of collecting sweat samples from people and storing them in tubes in order to identify them later. The workers’ self-organisation in the MKS in Poland, 1980, shows even more clearly how to fight state repression: the ruling class, consisting of the army, party, security services and the official trade unions, wanted to cut off the phone-line between the MKS in Gdansk and the rest of the country, i.e. the other workers’ assemblies. But the workers met up and responded with a force that pushed back the arm of repression. It was the general assemblies - where workers of several cities and towns were united and debated and decided together - which held the forces of repression at bay. The elected strike committees also used the company/union PA address system to broadcast talks between the workers and the politicians directly to the workers. This is a question of the historic course, of an undefeated working class and we have the more recent example of the self-organisation of the proletariat in China in the face of formidable state repression. Unlike the vision of “1984”, today a massive and widespread mobilisation of the working class cannot easily be contained. Thousands, millions of protesting workers, especially if centralised through general assemblies or even at well-organised and pointed demonstrations, cannot easily be corralled, let alone overcome. From this perspective we begin to understand a bit more here about the unions being the state’s police of the working class.

But if we can take heart from the actions of our class we mustn’t console ourselves with a false sense of security. In relation to the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities, there can be no doubt about the determination, ruthlessness and cold-bloodiness of the ruling class in wanting to destroy and eliminate their threat and this inevitably leads to harassment, imprisonment and assassinations, as we saw even in the heights of class struggle in Germany during the revolutionary wave of 1918/19. Deportations, the kidnapping of thousands of opponents by innumerable regimes, the pogromist campaigns against revolutionaries all bear witness to the consciousness of the ruling class. The bourgeoisie has never been nice to the working class when it dares to raise its head against capitalism in any effective manner.

The next part of this series can be read here [36].

Baboon 6.9.2013 (This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

We are publishing here an article by our comrades in Brazil, analysing the major social movement that took place there in June.

The crisis of capital and austerity unleash the indignation of the masses

A ‘spectre is haunting the world’: the spectre of indignation. Just over two years after the ‘Arab Spring’ which shook and surprised the countries of North Africa, and whose effects are still being felt; two years after the movement of the Indignados in Spain and Occupy in the USA; and at exactly the same time as the movement in Turkey, the wave of demonstrations in Brazil has mobilised millions of people in over a hundred cities and shown characteristics which are unprecedented for this country.

These movements, taking place in very different countries and very far apart geographically, nevertheless share some key common features: their spontaneity; their origins as a reaction brutal repression by the state; their massive nature; the fact that the majority of the participants are young people, especially via social networks. But the most important common element is the powerful feeling of indignation about the deterioration of living conditions provoked by a profound crisis which is sapping the bases of the capitalist system and which has significantly accelerated since 2007. This deterioration has taken the form of a growing level of precariousness throughout the proletariat and enormous uncertainty about the future among young people who have become proletarian or are in the process of proletarianisation. It is no accident that the movement in Spain took the name of ‘Indignados’ and that in this wave of massive social movements this was the one which went furthest in questioning the capitalist system and in its forms of organisation through massive general assemblies[1] .

A proletarian movement

The social movements of last June in Brazil, which we welcomed and in which we intervened as far as our means allowed, have a particular significance for the proletariat of Brazil, Latin America and the rest of the world, and a large extent went beyond the traditional regionalism of the country. These massive movements were radically different from the ‘social movements’ controlled by the state, by the PT (Workers’ Party) and other political parties, such as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST); similarly, it is different from other movements which have arisen in various countries of the region in the last decade or so, like the one in Argentina at the beginning of the century , the ‘indigenous’ movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, the Zapatista movement in Mexico or Chavism in Venezuela, which were the result of confrontations between bourgeois or petty bourgeois factions, disputing control of the state and the defence of national capital.

In this sense, the June mobilisations in Brazil represent the most important spontaneous expression of the masses in this country and in Latin America over the past 30 years. This is why it’s crucial to draw the lessons of this movement from a class standpoint.

It is undeniable that this movement surprised the Brazilian and world bourgeoisie as well as revolutionary organisations[2] inside and outside Brazil and the groups and organisations which had initially facilitated it. The struggle against the public transport price rises (which are negotiated each year between the transport chiefs and the state ) was just the detonator of the movement. It crystallised all the indignation which had been brewing for some time in Brazilian society[3] and which took shape in 2012 with the struggles in public administration and in the universities, mainly in São Paulo and the big building sites in the programme for accelerating growth (PAC). There were also a number of strikes against wage cuts and insecure working conditions and against health and education cuts over the last few years.

Unlike the massive social movements in various countries since 2011, the one in Brazil was engendered and unified around a concrete demand, which made it possible for there to be a spontaneous mobilisation of wide sectors of the proletariat: against the rise in public transport fares[4]. The movement took on a massive character at the national level from the 13th June, when the demonstration in São Paulo against the fare increases called by the Movimento Passe Livre – Movement for Free Access to Transport[5] - was violently repressed by the police. However, for five weeks, as well as in São Paulo, there were demonstrations in many different towns and cities across the country, to the point where, in Porto Alegre, Goiãnia and other towns, this pressure forced the local governments to give in over the fare increases, after hard struggles and heavy state repression.

This was expressed clearly through the social movement in Goiãnia on 19.6.13:

“In Goiãnia after five weeks of demonstrations, and one day before the sixth big gathering, which confirmed the presence of tens of thousands of people on the street, the Prefecture directed by Paulo Gracia (of the PT) and the governor Marconi Perillo (of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, the PSDB – centre right) held a joint meeting and decided to revoke the fare increases. We know that this decision was the product of the pressure of over a month of mobilisation and of the fear that things would escape the control of the provincial government and the contractual enterprises”[6]

The movement straight away situated itself on a proletarian terrain. This was expressed through the extension and breadth of the movement and, although on a minority scale, by taking a distance from nationalist slogans. In the first place, we should underline that the majority of the participants belong to the working class, mainly young workers and students, mainly coming out of proletarian families or those undergoing proletarianisation. The bourgeois press has presented the movement as an expression of the ‘middle classes’, with the clear intention of creating a division among workers. In reality, the majority of those catalogued as middle class are workers who often receive lower wages than skilled workers in the country’s industrial zones. This explains the success of and the widespread sympathy with the movement against the transport increases, which represented a direct attack on the income of working class families. This also explains why this initial demand rapidly turned into the questioning of the state, given the dilapidation of sectors such as health, education and social assistance, and increasing protests against the colossal sums of public money invested in organising next year’s World Cup and in the 2016 Olympics[7]. For these events the Brazilian bourgeoisie has not hesitated to resort to the forced expulsion of people living near the stadia: at the Aldeia Maracanã in Rio in the first part of the year; in the zones chosen by construction firms in São Paulo, who have been burning down favelas in the way of their plans. This situation was expressed clearly by the Bloco de Lutas Pelo Transporte 100% in Porto Alegre on 20.6.13:

“The struggle is not just for a few centimes and is not only about Porto Alegre since the mobilisation has taken on a national dimension and goes beyond the demand about the fare increases. Today over ten cities have announced a reduction in transport fares. Now there are hundreds of thousands of us in the streets of Brazil, fighting for our rights. The theme of the World Cup is already present in the demonstrations. The same popular mass which is questioning the transport system is also questioning the investment of millions of public money in the stadia, in displacing families by urban planners for the needs of the World Cup, the power of FIFA and the state of emergency which is going to restrain the rights of the population”[8]       

It is very significant that the movement organised demonstrations around the football stadia where Confederation Cup were being played, in order to get a lot of media attention and to reject the spectacle prepared by the Brazilian bourgeoisie; and also in response to the brutal repression of the demonstrations around the stadia, which resulted in a number of deaths. In a country where football is the national sport, which the bourgeoisie has obviously used as a safety valve for keeping society under control, the demonstrations of the Brazilian proletariat are an example for the world proletariat. The population of Brazil is known for its love of football, but this didn’t prevent it from rejecting austerity imposed to finance the sumptuous expenses devoted to the organisation of these sporting events, which the Brazilian bourgeoisie is using to show the world that it is capable of playing in the premier league of the world economy. The demonstrators demanded public services with a ‘FIFA type’ quality. The movements of June spoiled the party of the Brazilian bourgeoisie.

With regard to the demands, the movement showed its indignation about the effects of decomposition on the Brazilian bourgeoisie, attacking the most representative expressions of its corruption, indolence and arrogance: in Brasilia, the capital, they took over the installations of congress and attempted to enter the Itamaraty palace, the symbol of the state’s foreign policy; in Rio de Janeiro, they tried to enter the legislative assembly, and residents of the favelas, such as Rocinha, protested in front of the residence of the governor of Rio; in São Paulo, they tried to enter the Prefecture and the provincial legislative assembly and in Curitiba they tried to get into the seat of the provincial government. An extremely significant fact was that there was a massive rejection of the political parties (especially the PT) and union and student organisations that support the power: in São Paulo a number of their members were excluded from the demonstrations because they held up banners showing that they belonged to the PT or the CUT, or to other organisations and parties of the left, electoral or not, like the PSTU (Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificados), the PSOL (Partido Socialismo o Liberdade) , the Brazilian CP and various unions.

Other expressions of the class character of the movement were shown, even though in a minority. There were a number of assemblies held in the heat of the movement, although they were not the same as the ones in Spain. For example the one in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, which were called ‘popular and egalitarian assemblies’ which proposed to create a “new spontaneous, open and egalitarian space for debate”, in which over 1000 people took part.

These assemblies, although they demonstrated the vitality of the movement and the necessity for the self-organisation of the masses to impose their demands, revealed a number of weaknesses:

• Even if several other groups and collectives took part in organising them, they were animated by the capitalist left, who mainly kept their activity to the periphery of the cities
• Their mean aim was to be organs of pressure on and negotiation with the state, for particular demands for improvements in this or that community or town. They also tended to see themselves as permanent organs;
• They claimed to be independent of the state and the parties, but they were very well infiltrated by the pro-government or leftist organisations which annihilated any spontaneous expressions;
• They put forward a localist or national vision, struggling against the effects of problems rather than their causes, without questioning capitalism.

In the movement there were also explicit references to the social movements in other countries, especially Turkey, which also referred to Brazil. Despite the minority character of these expressions, they were still revealing about what was felt to be shared by the two movements.

In different demonstrations, you could also see banners proclaiming “We are Greeks, Turks, Mexicans, we have no country, we are revolutionaries” or placards saying “It’s not Turkey, it’s not Greece, it’s Brazil coming out of its inertia”.

In Goiãnia, the Frente de Luta Contra o Aumento, which regrouped various base organisations, underlined the need for solidarity and for debate between the different components of the movement:

“WE MUST NOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE CRIMINALISATION AND PACIFICATION OF THE MOVEMENT! WE MUST REMAIN FIRM AND UNITED! Despite disagreements, we must maintain our solidarity, our resistance, our fighting spirit, and deepen our organisation and our discussions. In the same way as in Turkey, peaceful and militant elements can co-exist and struggle together, we must follow this example”[9]       

The great indignation which animated the Brazilian proletariat was concretised in the following reflections by the Rede Extremo Sul, a network of social movements on the outskirts of São Paulo:

“For these possibilities to become a reality, we can’t allow the indignation being expressed on the streets to be diverted into nationalist, conservative and moralist objectives; we can’t allow these struggles to be captured by the state and by the elites in order to empty them of their political content. The struggle against the fare increases and the deplorable state of services is directly linked to the struggle against the state and the big economic corporations, against the exploitation and humiliation of the workers, and against this form of life where money is everything and people are nothing”[10]

The political re-organisation of Brazilian capital

The Brazilian bourgeoisie, like all national bourgeoisies, has for decades been hoping that Brazil could become a continental or world power. To achieve this, it’s not enough to dispose of an immense territory which covers almost half of South America, or to count on its important natural resources. It has also been necessary to maintain social order, above all control over the workers, less through the military yoke than through the more sophisticated mechanisms of democracy. Thus in the 1980s it carried out a relatively smooth transition from military dictatorship to republican democracy. This objective was attained on the political level with the formation of two poles: one regrouping the forces of the right, formed by two parties set up in the 80s: the PSDB composed of intellectuals from the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and right wing groups linked to the dictatorship (PMDB, DEM, etc); the other of the centre left, structured round the PT, with an important popular influence, mainly among workers and peasants. In this way a kind of alternation between right and centre left governments was established, based on ‘free and democratic’ elections. All this was indispensable for strengthening Brazilian capital on the world arena.

The Brazilian bourgeoisie was thus better place to reinforce its productive apparatus and face up to the worst of the economic crisis of the 90s, while on the political level, it succeeded in creating a political force around the PT, which because of its youth as a party, was able to integrate union organisations and leaders, members of the Catholic church adept at ‘liberation theology’, Trotskyists who see the PT as a mass revolutionary party, intellectuals, artists and democrats. The PT was the response of the left wing of the Brazilian bourgeoisie after the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 which had weakened the left of capital on a global scale. It was able to do something which was the envy of the other bourgeoisies of the region: create a political force which could control the impoverished masses, but above all maintain social peace among the work force. This situation was consolidated with the accession of the PT to power in 2002, making use of the charisma and ‘working class’ image of Lula.

In this way, during the first decade of the new century, the Brazilian economy raised itself to seventh place on the world ladder, according to the World Bank. Today it is part of the ‘cream’ of the so-called ‘group of emerging countries’, the so-called BRICS[11]. The world bourgeoisie has hailed the ‘Brazilian miracle’ carried out under Lula’s presidency, which has supposedly pulled millions of Brazilians out of poverty and allowed more millions to enter this famous ‘middle class’. What no one ever mentions, neither the PT, nor Lula, nor the rest of the bourgeoisie, is that this ‘great success’ has been achieved by distributing a part of the surplus value as crumbs to the most impoverished, while at the same time the situation of the mass of workers has become ever more insecure.

The crisis at the roots

The acceleration of the economic crisis became evident in 2007 and this is still affecting the world economy six years later. Lula, like other regional leaders, declared that the Brazilian economy was ‘armoured’ against it. While the other economic powers faltered, the Brazilian economy was satisfied with its performance. But while Brazil is not at the eye of the economic storm, it is undeniable that given the interdependence of the world economy, no country can escape its effects, still less Brazil which is highly dependent on exports of its raw materials and services. We see the proof of this with China, Brazil’s great partner among the BRICS: the Chinese economy is now strongly affected by the world crisis.

The crisis still remains at the root of the situation in Brazil. To try to attenuate its effects, the Brazilian bourgeoisie has been stimulating the internal economy through a policy of major works, provoking a construction boom in both the public and private sectors, extending to the renovations and new builds of the sporting infrastructure for 2014 and 2016. At the same time it has been facilitating credit and debt among families to stimulate internal consumption, especially in the area of housing and electronic goods. This policy has led to an increase in public expenditure and a rise in taxes.

The limits of this are already tangible at the level of economic indicators: a balance of payments deficit estimated at 3 billion US dollars in the first quarter of this year – the worst result since 1995 – and a slow-down in growth (predicted at 6.7% in 2013). But it can be felt above all in the deterioration of the buying power and living conditions of the working class as a result of the rising prices of consumer goods and of services (including transport). There has also been a strong tendency towards the reduction of jobs and an increase in unemployment.

Thus, the protest movement in Brazil doesn’t come from nowhere. There are a whole number of causes which lie behind it, and they are being aggravated by the development of the economic crisis. As a result of the protests the state has been forced to augment social spending at a time when the economic crisis is obliging it to take measures to reduce such spending. President of the republic Dilma Rousseff has already declared that such spending has to be cut.

The traps of the bourgeoisie

As we might expect, the Brazilian bourgeoisie has not stood with its arms folded in the face of the social crisis which, although it has eased off, remains latent. The only result obtained by mass pressure was the suspension of the very elevated fare increases[12] which the state has made up for by using other means to finance the transport enterprises.

At the beginning of the wave of protests, to calm things down while the government worked out a strategy to control the movement, president Rousseff declared, via one of her mouthpieces, that she considered the population’s protests as “legitimate and compatible with democracy”. Lula meanwhile criticised the “excesses” of the police. But state repression didn’t stop, and neither have street demonstrations.

One of the most elaborate traps against the movement was the propagation of the myth of a right wing coup, a rumour spread not only by the PT and the Stalinist party, but also by the Trotskyists of the PSOL and the PSTU. This was a way of derailing the movement and turning it towards supporting the Rousseff government, which has been severely weakened and discredited. In reality the facts show precisely that the ferocious repression against the protests in June by the left government led by the PT was equally if not more brutal than that of the military regimes. The left and extreme left of Brazilian capital are trying to obscure this reality by identifying repression with fascism or right wing regimes. There is also the smokescreen of ‘political reform’ put forward by Rousseff, with the aim of combating corruption in the political parties and imprisoning the population on the democratic terrain by calling for a vote on the proposed reforms.

To try to regain an influence within the movement on the street, the political parties of the left of capital and the trade unions announced, several weeks in advance, a ‘National Day of Struggle’ for the 11 July, presented as a way of protesting against the failure of the collective labour agreements. In this simulated mobilisation, all the trade union organisations and those both close to government and opposition lent a helping hand.           

Similarly, Lula, showing his considerable anti-working class experience, called on 25 June for a meeting of the leaders of movements controlled by the PT and the Stalinist party, including youth and student organisations allied with the government, with the explicit aim neutralising the street protests.

The strengths and weaknesses of the movement

The great strength of the movement was that, from the beginning, it affirmed itself as a movement against the state, not only through the central demand against the fare increases but also as a mobilisation against the abandonment of public services and the orientation of spending towards the sporting spectacles. At the same time the breadth and determination of the protest forced the bourgeoisie to take a step back and annul the fare increases in a number of cities.

The crystallisation of the movement around a concrete demand, while being a strength of the movement, also put limits on it as soon as it was unable to go any further. Obtaining the suspension of the fare increases marked a step forward, but the movement did not on the whole see itself as challenging the capitalist order, something which was much more present in the Indignados movement in Spain.

The distrust towards the bourgeoisie’s main forces of social control took the form of the rejection of the political parties and the trade unions, and this represented a weakness for the bourgeoisie on the ideological level, the exhaustion of the political strategies which have emerged since the end of the dictatorship, the discrediting of the teams which have succeeded each other at the head of the state, in particular as a result of their notoriously corrupt character. However, behind this undifferentiated rejection of politics stands the danger of the apoliticism, which was an important weakness of the movement. Without political debate, there is no possibility of taking the struggle forward, since it can only grow in the soil of discussion which is aimed at understanding the roots of the problems you are fighting against, and which cannot evade a critique of the foundations of the capital.

It was thus no accident that one of the weaknesses of the movement was the absence of street assemblies open to all participants, where you could discuss the problems of society, the actions to carry out, the organisation of the movement, its balance sheet and its objectives. The social networks were an important means of mobilisation, a way of breaking out of isolation. But they can never replace open and living debate in the assemblies.

The poison of nationalism was not absent from the movement, as could be seen from the number of Brazilian flags displayed on the demonstrations and the raising of nationalist slogans. It was quite common to hear the national anthem in the processions. This was not the case with the Indignados in Spain. In this sense the June movement in Brazil presented the same weaknesses as the mobilisations in Greece and in the Arab countries, where the bourgeoisie succeeded in drowning the huge vitality of the movements in a national project for reforming and safeguarding the state. Nationalism is a dead-end for the proletarian struggle, a violation of international class solidarity. In this context, the focus on corruption in the last analysis also worked for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and its political parties, especially those in opposition, and gave a certain credibility to the perspective of the next elections..

Despite the majority of participants in the movement being proletarians, they were involved in an atomised way. The movement didn’t manage to mobilise the workers of the industrial centres who have an important weight, especially in the São Paulo region. It wasn’t even proposed. The working class, which certainly welcomed the movement and even identified with it, because it was struggling for a demand which it saw was in its interest, did not manage to mobilise as such. This question of class identity is not only a weakness at the level of the working class in Brazil, but on a world scale. It’s a characteristic of the period that the working class is finding it hard to affirm its class identity; in Brazil this has been aggravated by decades of immobility resulting from the action of the political parties and the unions, mainly the PT and the CUT.

This situation explains to some extent the emergence of social movements we have seen in Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Egypt etc, where new generations of proletarians, many of them without work, have revolted with the understanding that capitalism is shutting off any possibility of having a decent life, and feel in their bones the insecurity of their daily lives.

Nevertheless, the mobilisations in Brazil are a source of inspiration and contain many lessons for the future unity of the Brazilian and world proletariat. They show that there is no solution to our problems within capitalism and that the proletariat must assume its historic responsibility of struggling against capital; that the proletariat in Brazil must seek its class identity not only through solidarity at the level of the country, but worldwide. In this way its struggle will converge with that of all the young proletarians who are now mobilising against capital.

Revolução Internacional (ICC in Brazil) 9.8.13      

As austerity bites and capitalism shows its teeth in its relentless quest for profit and for ways to offset its crisis onto the working class, the recent revelations of the explosion in so-called zero hour contracts have filled the newspapers and our television screens. Signing up to a zero hours contract is a condition that can mean no wages or little wages at the end of the week. In the hope of gaining some employment many workers wait at the end of a phone for whatever an employer or an agency offers. This uncertainty, the knowledge that perhaps you won’t have a job next week or the week after, is profoundly demoralising for workers and isolates them into individual units competing on the job market. In many cases of the zero hours contract the national minimum wage applies but they are being applied across the board, both in the private and, increasingly, the public sector - social and care workers, in the NHS. Health authorities have introduced zero hours which have also affected professional higher paid staff. The employers or agencies offering these contracts are not obliged to offer sick pay or holiday pay and they can usually be terminated at will. There can be no doubt that there has been an explosion in all kinds of precarious work, including the phenomenal rise in part time and casual work at the minimum wage or lower, as well as zero hours. This is a huge attack on the living conditions of the working class.

Zero hours contracts are clearly one of a number of ways of making jobs more precarious and are greatly advantageous to the bourgeoisie in reducing the cost of labour. So why the huge media publicity? Why has Vince Cable announced a government review (even if Ian Binkley of the Work Foundation has pointed out that this review is totally inadequate)? Why has the Labour Party apologised for not spotting it sooner? Why has Edinburgh University felt ‘shamed’ into agreeing to end its 2,712 zero hours contracts? Reports don’t tell whether the new arrangements will be any better for the workers!

“The greater use of zero hours contracts is taking place against a background of falling real wages, high levels of workplace fear of the consequences of redundancy and unfair treatment for a significant minority, and an employment recovery where permanent employee jobs have been in a minority” (https://www.theworkfoundation.com [49]). Apart from the implication that capitalist employment is ‘fair’ for the majority, the Work Foundation report gives a good idea of the wider context of the increase in zero hours contracts. And also the motivation for all this publicity: while politicians hypocritically wax indignant about these contracts, they hope to divert our attention from the overall worsening of conditions for the whole working class. This issue also has the advantage of being one where we can be encouraged to demand the protection of the state through legislation against abuses by private employers, although this is an illusion as the situation of health and care workers shows. Meanwhile Vince Cable can bleat that - “well it’s not ideal, but at least it allows for ‘flexibility’” for employers and workers.

Damn lies and statistics

The official statistics on zero hours are rubbish, as we can see from the ONS (Office of National Statistics) estimate of 250,000 on such contracts which is less than the number affected in the care sector alone. The Work Foundation estimates there are one million, and Unite has now estimated 5.5 million based on a survey of 5,000 of its members. Whatever the true figure zero hours and other precarious and flexible work practices create a vast reserve pool of labour which nominally can appear as employed, allowing Cameron to boast of ‘creating’ thousands of new jobs.

One million or 5.5, the figures for the growth in zero hour contracts are definitely on the up. This has been the case for many years in the fast food industry. The opt out clause when there is criticism of the low pay and work precariousness in this industry is that they are ‘franchised ‘ out and the contracts have nothing to do with the major fast food chains. Even so, McDonald’s have admitted that 90% of their employees, that’s 82,200 staff, are on 2 hour contracts; Burger King (a franchised operator) employs all of its 20,000 workers on zero hour contracts. Likewise Domino Pizza - similarly a franchised operation - has 90% of its 23,000 staff on zero hours.

The rise in zero hours contracts has been particularly marked among care workers, with a majority now on zero hours, with an increase in the proportion of their contracts being zero hours “from 50% in 2008/09 to  60% last year. The government has estimated that there are 307,000 care workers on zero hour contracts, despite estimates from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) that Britain’s zero hour workforce is 250,000 people” (The Guardian: 27.08.13.).

This trend towards zero hours contracts has not just affected ancillary staff and primary care staff, who often work through bank agencies: many health care professionals such as radiologists, psychiatrists, and heart specialists are also being offered zero hour contracts by the Health Trusts.

The education sector has also seen implementation of zero hours:.

“More than half the 145 UK Universities and nearly two thirds of the 275 Further Education Colleges said that they used the contracts, which do not specify working hours and give limited guaranties on conditions” (Guardian: 05.09.13).

Bleats from the Labour Party

The Labour Party is shedding crocodile tears on the iniquities of the zero contracts. Chuka Umunna (the Shadow Business Secretary) has said, “Flexibility works for some, but the danger today is that too often insecurity at work becomes the norm”.  Ground-breaking stuff!  To show its seriousness the Labour Party brought together a conference of employers and unions: “This is why Labour has convened this important summit bringing together representatives of employees and employers to consider what action must be taken. In contrast this Tory led government has refused to have a proper and full consultation on the rise of zero hour contracts or to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves” (Guardian: 20.08.13).

Up until this statement and the occasional bleats from Andy Burnham, the Labour Party has remained extremely quiet on the issue of zero hour contracts. The Labour Party made much about introducing the minimum wage in its election manifesto of 1997 and indeed introduced the Minimum Wage Act of 1998. However, within this act was contained the retention of zero hour contracts. Legally, the Labour government had to retain the right for agencies to impose flexible work contracts. Firms and agencies have exploited this right from the last Labour government and of course the Tory and Lib-Dem government didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth!

The development of the recession and the austerity that has been imposed since the crisis of 2008 has seen a massive use not just of zero hour contracts but of part-time work, of firms and agencies using insecurity and precarious work to the hilt.

The fight back

We can see with the Hovis workers (Premier Foods) in Wigan the beginnings of a fight back. After 400 fellow workers at Hovis in London were given redundancies at the beginnings of this year, the Wigan bakery workers began a series of strikes at the beginning of August.

30 Wigan Hovis workers were given redundancies and management announced that hourly pay was being reduced from £13 per hour to £8.60 an hour and working hours cut, while management brought in agency staff to take up the short fall. In an interview with Socialist Worker (03.09.13) one worker said: “We’re not having it. They always want something from us - pensions, wages, conditions. It’s time to draw a line.”

The Wigan bakery workers have embarked on a series of one-day strikes. Their picketing had been positive, with lorry-drivers and other workers refusing to cross pickets. However, there are inherent dangers in this tactic of rolling strikes (as the last postal workers’ strike demonstrated). The union, Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) has demonstrated its ability to negotiate the 400 London redundancies and were quick to demand rolling strikes.

The use of agency staff at the same time as redundancies and other attacks has the potential to cause divisions among the workers to the benefit of the employers and unions. Therefore it is encouraging to read “Agency workers have joined the picket line” in the same Socialist Worker article. 

Other sectors have entered into struggle against the imposition of zero hour contracts. In Liverpool on the 9th of August we saw 400 council workers (street cleaners and road maintenance and ground staff) go on strike against imposed redundancies and new contracts. In London at the beginning of the year we saw London Underground Piccadilly line tube drivers’ strike against planned new contracts.

Workers today face widespread attacks through precarious work, falling real wages, reductions in benefits, reduced health and social care. In order to push these through the bosses and the state use all sorts of tricks to isolate and divide workers as much as possible. What workers need is unity, solidarity and confidence in our ability to fight. 

Melmoth, 7.9.13