The year of ‘commemorating’ the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War began with a controversy between Right and Left which illustrates rather well how both wings of the ruling class intend us to understand the significance of the 1914-18 war.

In an article in the Daily Mail (where else?), education secretary Michael Gove gave it to us straight. Denouncing “left wing academics”, TV shows like Blackadder and The Monocled Mutineer and the musical Oh What a Lovely War! for belittling Britain and denigrating patriotism, Gove insists that for all its attendant horrors, the Great War was “plainly a just war”[1]. Picking up the torch from a weighty tome by Max Hastings published last year[2], Gove insists that the real cause of the war was aggressive Prussian militarism and that it was right to resist it. Or as Hastings put it in an article in the Mail last summer, the purpose of the 1914 commemorations should be “to explain to a new generation that World War One was critical to the freedom of Western Europe”.

Gove’s article was criticised both in the lead and in an editorial in the Observer of 5 January, while in the same edition space was given to the shadow education spokesman Tristram Hunt, a cultured historian who has written a rather sympathetic biography of Engels. Hunt’s article was entitled ‘Using history for politicking is tawdry, Mr Gove’[3], and its central theme is that while Gove is sowing political divisions by attacking the Left, the commemorations should be a time for national reflection that will lead to an “understanding of the meaning and memory of the First World War”. Hunt insists that “contrary to the assertions of Michael Gove and the Daily Mail, the left needs no lessons on ‘the virtues of patriotism, honour and courage’”. He lays particular emphasis on the role of ordinary working class people in the conduct of the war:

“Appeals by trade union leaders to oppose German aggression, particularly against Belgium, led more than 250,000 of their members to enlist by Christmas 1914, with 25% of miners volunteering before conscription. Typical was John Ward, one of my predecessors as MP for Stoke-on-Trent and the leader of the Navvies’ Union. To ‘fight Prussianism’, he raised three pioneer battalions from his members and, commissioned as a colonel by Lord Kitchener, led them to battle in France, Italy and Russia”.

Hunt also reminds us of the important changes brought about by the war – the vote was extended to all working class men and to women over 30 in 1918, “culture and technology at all levels were transformed by the war and colonial frontiers redrawn, with Irish independence signposting the future decline of empire”.

Hunt doesn’t agree with Gove’s one-sided view that the war was all the fault of the Kaiser and “Prussianism”, citing other historians who have shown the rather sordid role played by Russia and Serbia in the outbreak of the conflict. Rather significantly, British imperialism’s equally sordid role is not analysed.  But Hunt does argue that it’s futile to play the “First World War blame game”. His main concern is not to look into the origins of the war but to contribute to a national commemoration that will “reflect and embrace the multiple histories that the war evinces – from the Royal British Legion to the National Union of Railwaymen to the Indian, Ethiopian and Australian servicemen fighting for the empire”.  No doubt there will be room in Hunt’s multicultural war effort for the pacifists and conscientious objectors too.

In sum, while the right sows divisions, what Hunt calls the Left stands for national unity. The working class has its role to play, but only as part of this patriotic union.

The working class against imperialist war

In an attempt to show that he’s not at all soft on Prussian aggression, Hunt provides us with a rather interesting quote from Kaiser Wilhelm, a word of advice to Chancellor von Bulow in 1905: “First cow the socialists, behead them and make them harmless, with a bloodbath if necessary, and then make war abroad. But not before and not both together”.

Hunt uses this quote to back up his argument about the patriotism of the left: “The British left responded to such fascism by largely supporting the war effort”. Leaving aside the sloppy characterisation of the Kaiser’s policy as “fascism”, what this quote reveals above all is the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie – its understanding that it could only go to war if the working class movement had first been “cowed” or “beheaded”. This applied to every national section of the ruling class, not only the German. But the Kaiser’s proposed bloodbath proved unnecessary precisely because the ancestors of today’s ‘left’ – the dominant right wing of the socialist parties of the day – were the product of a long period of internal degeneration in the workers’ movement, and when the call came in 1914 they proved to be no less patriotic than the official representatives of empire. And Hunt is quite right to highlight the crucial role played by the trade unions – again, in every country – in the mobilisation for war.

This insidious process of degeneration and ultimate betrayal by its own organisations left the working class totally disoriented at the outbreak of war and prey to the nationalist hysteria that made the mobilisation for war possible. The bloodbath of the trenches quickly followed. But the defeat was not total. A minority of the workers’ movement - such as the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Spartacists in Germany - kept the flag of internationalism flying against the national flags of the ruling class. And eventually the heightened exploitation in the factories, the spread of hunger and the pointless massacre on the battlefields gave rise to growing discontent, expressing itself from 1916 on in strikes, mutinies, the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils and revolution in Russia and Germany, which forced the ruling classes to bring the war to a hasty conclusion so that they could unite against the revolutionary menace.  

When the working class forgot its international interests and succumbed to the myth of national unity, it was led off to the slaughter. When it remembered that it has no country, that its enemy is capitalist exploitation in all countries, the war machine was paralysed and a window was opened on a new world where nations, states, and imperialist wars are a relic of the prehistoric past. That is the “understanding”, the fundamental lesson, that we should draw from 1914.  Amos 5/1/14

Postscript

After this article was written the Guardian published further articles about this controversy, both of them taking up positions well to the left of Tristram Hunt. In a spirited defence of the truth contained in the humour of Blackadder Goes Forth[4], Stuart Jeffries takes Hunt to task for being a bit of a wimp and having his eye on the next election, lamenting that he wasn’t enough of a “lion” to stick up for Blackadder’s view of the conduct of the war as a “toff-hobbled martial shambles” and for the arguments of various left wing historians who have shown the causes of the war in the imperial ambitions of all the Great Powers of the day, not just Germany. He also takes issue with Hunt’s assertion that the British left in the main supported the war, citing the case of Bertrand Russell who was a conscientious objector. But once again there’s not a word about the working class resistance to the war – the strikes on the Clyde, the internationalist stance adopted by revolutionaries like Sylvia Pankhurst or John Mclean. And in the end Jeffries’ alternative to Gove’s uncritical patriotism is a more conscious, considered patriotism: “What Gove doesn’t argue is the more interesting point that the very basis for British patriotism relies, not on accepting the historical narratives he believes in, but in part on the hard satirical work involved in undermining those myths. Let others take themselves seriously. Uncritical patriotism? Unreflective pride in the military? Unquestioning conviction that we’re a force for good? Flags on the front lawn? What are we now, American?”

Seamus Milne then weighed into the debate with a much more intransigent title: ‘First World War an imperial bloodbath that’s a warning, not a noble cause’[5]. The article is quite explicit about the nature of the 1914-18 war and in rejecting Gove’s apologetics about the war as a defence of western democracy:

“This is all preposterous nonsense. Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.

Germany was the rising industrial power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd.”

Any genuine marxist could endorse this view. Except for the brief phrase slipped into the first paragraph: “unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war”. But in this phrase is the fundamental dividing line between the mouthpieces of the left wing of the bourgeoisie and revolutionary internationalists, for whom, just like the first world war, the second world war was also “a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources”. Indeed, it was fought by the same powers who confronted each other in the first bloodbath, and this indicates that the war was in essence a resumption of the first, which had been ‘interrupted’ by the revolutions of 1917 and 1918. Once the ‘Bolshevik danger’ had been eliminated, once the world working class had been defeated by the combined forces of social democracy, Stalinism and fascism, the way was opened for the unfinished business of 1918 to be concluded, by even more horrible forms of barbarism than during the first, where the majority of victims were not soldiers but civilians, subjected to the multiple holocausts of Auschwitz, Stalingrad, Dresden and Hiroshima.

The idea that the Second World War was a just war unlike the first is a key element of ruling class ideology. The argument that the need to oppose Hitler meant that this was no longer an imperialist war, or that it had suddenly become permissible to fight for some of the contending imperialist powers against others, was above all the speciality of the left – the Labourites, Stalinists and Trotskyists – who played the same role of recruiting sergeants in 1939-45 as the right wing socialists in 1914-18.   Amos 11/1/14

ICC introduction

We are publishing a contribution from a comrade in the USA which takes a very critical stance on the recent ‘fast food strikes’. He provides a good deal of evidence that far from being a spontaneous expression of the workers ‘from below’, this was essentially a campaign waged by updated forms of trade unionism and popular frontism. We invite comments, especially from other comrades in the USA, in order to help place these developments in the broader context of the class struggle in the USA and internationally.

The recent campaigns among retail and food service workers in the United States are portrayed as a rank and file revolt in the new growth industries, a sense that it is the beginning of a second wave of the Popular Front, where unions grow by leaps and bounds and coalitions of progressive and left forces agitate for reforms. This spirit of the 1930’s is real in the media and at the upper echelons of the trade union apparatus, but in the workplaces around the country, the workers themselves are largely a backdrop rather than an active agent. It is important for Marxists to be aware of the organizations operating within the working class and the character of apparent struggles. Why various class reactions take the form that they do is central to understanding the social forces of capital. 

The sense that what is going on in America is a public relations campaign rather than a new viral spread of militant unionism can be seen in this admission from the left labor press:

“The Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which started OUR Walmart, says 30,000 participated in Black Friday actions last year. Most of those were supporters; 88 were strikers.” [1]

Out of a population of 1.2 million Wal-Mart workers in the United States, only 88 workers walked-out nationwide (not including supply chain, warehouse and production workers employed by Wal-Mart contractors and sub-contractors, which have been the site of traditional strikes in recent years). The social media campaign and media blitz in the lead up and following Black Friday 2012 focused on a map of the US with dots on every store where there was a planned or sanctioned protest. The number of strikers and actual Wal-Mart workers was dwarfed by the throngs of Popular Front-style coalitions and alliances of the bourgeois left and center (Workers World Party, Coalition for a Mass Party of Labor, OURWalmart, UFCW, clergy, activist groups, low level Democratic Party representatives) that made up the majority of bodies present at the store protests.  

This phenomenon of a media-centered narrative peddled by the unions with little connection to the shop floor is important for understanding the history and trajectory of the fast food struggles this past year and larger developments in American trade unionism as of late. Like the Wal-Mart Black Friday strikes template, another large service sector union is the main force behind the narrative in the fast food campaign: in the former case, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), in the latter the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). While UFCW announced at the end of August 2013 that they will be re-affiliating to the AFL-CIO federation, they have been a major force in the smaller Change to Win federation. Understanding the changing orientations of the largest unions in the country and a miraculous revival of nationwide organizing drives in growth industries has to begin with the origin of Change to Win. 

The Change to Win federation began as a coalition of discontented union leaders within the AFL-CIO: the 'New Unity Partnership' in 2003. Within 2 years, the 'New Unity Partnership' became an upper echelon reform movement rebranded as 'Change to Win'. Led by the Service Employees and animated by unions like the Teamsters, Food & Commercial workers, UNITE-HERE and the very small United Farm Workers, these unions represent a younger membership in the few growth areas of the domestic US economy. Leaving the AFL-CIO in 2005 saw the reform coalition morph into a new trade union federation, whose focus was a return to an 'organizing' model and greater resources devoted to industry-wide agitation and organizing. It was a move by growing unions to dominate the declining trade union center, the AFL-CIO, and focus on new frontiers rather than maintaining a rump union movement tied to long organized manufacturing and construction industries. These changes in the institutional foundations of American trade unionism have, for the last 8 years, led to a changing orientation that became apparent in the retail and food service industries this past year.

The announcement that UFCW was leaving Change to Win and re-joining the AFL-CIO, made on August 8th 2013, let some of the inner workings of the trade union bureaucracy seep into the narrative: the 'Strategic Organizing Center' of the Change to Win federation is credited with 'leading some of the best campaigns to give workers rights and dignity'; and that the UFCW desires to integrate the AFL-CIO unions into the SOC campaigns.[2] This is a vital part of understanding the origins and the content of the ongoing fast food and retail workers struggles. The rise of worker's centers, union fronts (or 'pop-up unions'), long-term corporate campaigns and Alinskyite activist groups, are all related to changes in the functioning of the trade unions in the midst of an existential crisis and declining memberships. Still in the Change to Win federation is the Service Employees International Union; which has done to fast food what the UFCW has done to Wal-Mart, directed and coordinated through the Strategic Organizing Center and allied inter-organizational efforts. The importance of the SOC cannot be overemphasized as it relates to these developments. The left labor press outlet In These Times noted, "Change to Win itself is small–only about 35 employees–and three-fourths of its $16 million budget goes to the Strategic Organizing Center."[3]

The fast food agitation and media narrative only makes sense in light of the changes at the top of the American trade union apparatus. Seemingly spontaneous waves of shop floor anger, described as strikes in the press, complete with matching signs and t-shirts, do not arise from nothing.

"While the farmworkers [Coalition of Immokalee Workers] have made progress by cajoling and boycotting highly advertised fast food brands, the restaurant workers have been employing a strategy of short strikes. Two hundred workers from dozens of different restaurants in New York struck for a day in November [2012], and then double that number walked out in early April from McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, Wendy’s, Domino’s, and Papa John’s." - Labor Notes, May 24 2013, Jenny Brown [4]

"After years of downplaying strikes, the union that’s funding fast food organizing is now embracing the tactic. The Service Employees have underwritten short strikes by fast food workers in seven cities in the last two months—including the largest, in Detroit, where 400 workers walked out of dozens of restaurants and completely shut down three." - Labor Notes, June 24 2013, Jenny Brown [5]

The national campaign is an amalgamation of city-based and local campaigns that operate in the same manner (directed and funded by SEIU). The national ‘Fight for 15’ campaign ($15 an hour and the right to union representation) manifests itself in local campaigns often made up of the same organizations or types of organizations who agitate among the working-class. As an example, picking any city that has seen strikes and protests by workers of multiple fast food employers demonstrates these national trends: for this article, we’ll start with Seattle, Washington:

May 30, 2013, workers from different fast food chains (Burger King, McDonalds, Jack InThe Box, etc.) walked off the job. The liberal magazine The Nation reported, "Like those cities’ strikes, Seattle’s is supported by a coalition of labor and community groups; in each case, the Service Employees International Union has been involved in supporting the organizing efforts. The Seattle campaign, Good Jobs Seattle, is backed by groups including Working Washington, the Washington Community Action Network and One America."[6]

The ‘Fight for 15’ campaign’s local component in Seattle is a coalition called ‘Good Jobs Seattle’, which is comprised of a social media presence online which is a cloned website (the same template as other local coalitions like Fast Food Forward in New York City and others that comprise the ‘Fight for 15’ campaign). On the ground, it depends on activists and staffers from several organizations:

• Washington Community Action Network: a local Saul Alinsky-style activist organization.
• One America: a civil rights organization that combines National Action Network type activities with those of a traditional ‘Beltway think-tank’, producing lobbying efforts and policy documents for elected officials.
• Service Employees International Union: the most telling part of this coalition is the ‘Working Washington’ component, which is how the SEIU center and efforts of the Change to Win Strategic Organizing Center express themselves on the local level and in the lives of rank and file workers in this targeted industry.

Working Washington, like the 'Good Jobs Seattle' title and website, appears at first to be an umbrella coordination and organizing center for the state of Washington; on its 'About Us' page, Working Washington says it is a "coalition of individuals, neighborhood associations, immigrant groups, civil rights organizations, people of faith, and labor united for good jobs and a fair economy," and references the slogans of the Occupy Movement (the 1% vs. 99%). However, the catch tag of the website is, "Fighting For A Fair Economy: Working Washington"[7].  Fighting For A Fair Economy is a campaign of the Service Employees International Union; like the various umbrella and coalition websites, searching for "Fighting For A Fair Economy" online turns up several results, such as this website which carries SEIU's trademark purple in the background and also references the language of Occupy Wall Street:

"The Fight for a Fair Economy (Ohio) is a collaboration of efforts between SEIU, labor allies, community partners and grassroots supporters to fight back against attacks on working people and their families all across Ohio."[8]

Affiliates of the SEIU as well as numerous local unions all make use of the same template in their internet-social media orientation and organizing; the same slogans, the same language, the same message. This discrepancy between the narrative promoted in the mainstream and liberal-progressive press and the obvious stamp of a national organizational apparatus (and lack of signs of traditional working-class struggle) on the whole phenomenon have led to rumblings in the left-labor press about what is truly going on. At first, unnamed union sources could be found quoted sporadically in press stories of a ‘PR blitz’ rather than a new union fever or grassroots demand for a return to Keynesian common sense taking place in the working-class. Recently, voices in the left-wing of American trade unionism have begun to publicly question the retail and food service campaigns. This is most clearly demonstrated in the article, “Fight for 15 Confidential,” originally published online in the left labor press outlets In These Times and Labor Notes. The article’s author (with greater resources compared to those of small revolutionary groups) was able to further verify the roots of the phenomenon and the true character of the ‘strikes’ and ‘minimum-wage rebellion’. The story contains numerous anecdotes and opinions from rank and file food service workers across the country.[9]

Pick any city where the campaign is underway (Fast Food Forward in New York City, Raise Up MKE in Milwaukee, etc.) and the template and organizations involved will largely be the same. A combination of SEIU, Jobs with Justice, clergy, national and regional civil rights and community activist organizations (descendants of ACORN), workers’ centers and the same social media-press release model are always present. Like the Wal-Mart Black Friday actions, which just took place again for the second year in a row, there are examples of traditional strike actions and relatively higher levels of workers’ participation depending on the local conditions. There have been arrests of retail and food service workers who refused to abide by the ‘protest rally’ tactics of the union representatives and leftist allies and instead attempted to demonstrate autonomous class action (such as obstructing customers from entering establishments that have striking workers) - but these were the extreme minority of an already small minority of workers involved. 

What it means for the class

In this era of high unemployment, particularly among minorities and young people, part-time and precarious work, the forms chosen by trade unions to enrol workers located in industries that are inherently resistant to traditional collective bargaining units are largely irrelevant. That a union drive takes place through a strong social media presence and with “alt-labor” forms like workers’ centers does not change the basic nature of what is happening. Campaigns which are tangential to the shop floor, such as municipal and statewide attempts to raise the minimum wage, combined with different forms of union membership give the appearance of a resurgent working-class movement demanding a return to the Keynesian consensus even if the militancy and workplace roots of past movements in class history (for the 8 hour day and unemployment insurance for example) are absent. In practice, the fast food and Wal-Mart campaigns are a phenomenon of reverse-base unionism. Unlike the experience in Europe in the 1970’s and 1980’s, where rank and filist and left-unionism tendencies absorb real class anger and turn class action back into the channels compatible with the labor relations regime of capital through unofficial base unions and workplace committees, these recent high profile phenomenon in the United States are almost exclusively the child of trade union bureaucrats and union war chests. The left labor press in America admits the role played by full-time union officials and union funds to prop up and direct nationwide agitation in targeted workplaces and regions through various forms [9]. The result is a media spectacle, a phantom class movement with only the most miniscule participation and involvement of regular workers. 

Communists can only ascertain the nature of what is unfolding, and question why there is such loud protest generated from a historically worn down section of their class. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and directives from paid staffers and activist volunteers create a situation not unlike the Tea Party linked groups who put on elaborate protests during the 2010 election under the pretense of a grassroots rebellion against big government. ‘Astro-turfing’, the art of orchestrating a media campaign to give the appearance of a movement that does not exist, was used to change the dominant political-social narrative in a bourgeois election season. Communists must view the pseudo-movement in retail and food service as a union organizing drive operating under the pretense of being something else. 

M.Lida

[1] https://www.labornotes.org/2013/11/walmart-workers-plan-raucous-black-friday [7]

[2] "[The SOC] is leading some of the best campaigns to give workers rights and dignity. While no longer an affiliate of CTW, we continue our strong relationships with the Teamsters, SEIU and the Farmworkers.  We will remain active in the SOC and bring our AFL-CIO partners into collaboration with private-sector unions in an effort to build more power for workers." UFCW Press Release 08/08/2013

[3] inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15366/fast_food_slow_burn

[4] https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2013/05/food-chain-workers-double-team-wendy%E2%80%99s?language=en [8]

[5] https://www.labornotes.org/2013/06/fast-food-strikes-whats-cooking?language=en [9]

[6] www.thenation.com/article/archive/fast-food-workers-striking-seattle [10]

[7] www.workingwa.org/about [11]

[8] fightforafaireconomy.org/about

[9] inthesetimes.com/article/15826/fight_for_15_confidential

At the beginning of January, outlining the coalition government’s Spending Review of 2016-17 and 2017-18, George Osborne ‘alarmed’ Iain Duncan Smith and ‘angered’ Nick Clegg by proposing that the initial £25 billion in spending reductions would include £12 billion in welfare cuts.

This in no way indicates that there are serious differences between these government politicians.  One senior government figure has described this as “a difference in narrative between George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith who both want to cut back the welfare state … There is the lopping off narrative of George Osborne and then there is the narrative of making people less reliant on the welfare state by making work pay. But that takes a long time”[1]. Nick Clegg has another narrative: while agreeing to the proposed £25 billion deficit reductions it is “lopsided and unbalanced” to take all this from spending and “the only people in society, the only section in society, which will bear the burden of further fiscal consolidation are the working-age poor”.

When we look at the reality behind these exchanges we will see that (a) all these politicians are accomplished bare-faced liars, even when they speak the language of harsh truths; (b) the cuts they envisage are every bit as vicious as described in Osborne’s announcement but will be much more widespread; and (c) the bourgeoisie and their government have no choice but to continue to attack the conditions of the working class in the defence of capitalism.

Dishonesty from all sides

Let us start with Clegg’s concern to balance benefit cuts with tax. The LibDems envisage 20% of the £25 billion will come from tax, and there is a definite proposal for a mansion tax on homes work £2million. This is nothing but a fig leaf to hide their support for the cuts, as they carefully publicise a proposal that will not impinge on the working class and the vast majority of the population, all the better to lull us into a false sense of security – and to get elected.

Iain Duncan Smith takes the medal for common or garden hypocrisy with the narrative that cutting benefit is good for you by making work pay. The only way to do that in the capitalist crisis is to cut benefits … but the majority of people receiving working age benefits are actually in work, getting working tax credits or housing benefit. Nor does he tell us where all the new jobs will come from.

If we look outside the present government to the Labour shadow chancellor, a comment by Simon Jenkins shows that there is no alternative on offer here. “Indeed, after listening to Balls evade every question put to him this week, I realised he would have done much the same as Osborne, mistakes and all. Balls never challenged Osborne’s subservience to the City and the Bank. He never questioned the liquidity squeeze or demanded risks be taken with inflation.”[2]

Harsh realities of the cuts

The political parties have no basic differences when it comes to attacking working class living standards, especially those of the most vulnerable sectors, such as the young and the pensioners. Take the removal of housing benefit from young people under 25. In large cities such as London it is usually not possible to obtain independent housing on a single average wage so those unable to live with parents, even among the employed, will be forced into appalling crowding or homelessness. The overall cost of housing benefit to those under 25 is currently £1.8 billion according to the Department of Work and Pension figure, but the measure will only save about half that, while those with children or fleeing domestic violence are exempted. The ‘balancing’ measure to means test social housing for those on £60,000 to £70,000 a year might save £40-£76million (see Guardian article, note 1). The article quotes a Whitehall source saying “It is laughable that you can get anywhere near £12bn in cuts this way”.

If we look at the figures of what Osborne’s policies will save we can see that he hasn’t told us the half or even the 90% of where £12 billion will be saved from benefits, let alone the full £25 billion is coming from. The blighted perspectives for young people today are real enough, but we should realise that if we accept the chancellor’s logic the attacks will have to encompass the whole working class: “Even for a budget as large as welfare, £12bn is not a trivial sum. It is the equivalent of freezing the value of all working-age welfare benefits for five years.”[3] In particular we can already see that the new rules for Universal Credit, which will cover tax credit and housing benefit in future, are making it impossible for many of those relying on housing benefit to get rented accommodation at all.

Except for pensioners – surely they’ll be OK with the Cameron’s promise of a ‘triple lock’ on the state pension to rise with the higher of prices, pay or 2.5%? Pensions are, in reality, also under attack, chiefly through the rise in the pension age. And the triple lock will not change a situation in which those reliant on the state pension are condemned to a life of poverty: the basic state pension of £110.15 a week, plus £200 winter fuel allowance, works out to less than £6,000 a year or about half the pay for a 40 hour week on the minimum wage. Like pensions, even the areas of the economy that are ‘protected’ or ‘ring fenced’ such as health or education are inadequate and feeling the squeeze.

With capitalism caught in an irresolvable crisis of overproduction, each business and each national economy is fighting to gain a share of a market that is too narrow to keep them all going. It is not a question of more or less state, but of how the state will manage to attack the living standards of the working class to make its economy more competitive. For workers it is a question of recognising that the whole working class is under attack and that we can only resist together. 

Melmoth/Alex  11.1.14

The food crises which mark the development of capitalist production have been accentuated with the system’s entry into decadence, and even more so in the present period of it rotting on its feet, of decomposition, often taking qualitatively different characteristics. And even if capitalism has always poisoned, starved and destroyed the environment, today, in seeking to exploit every last part of the world for its profit, its destructiveness has extended its ravages to the whole planet, which means that this system today threatens the very survival of the human race.

The absurdity of overproduction

By separating the use value of goods from their exchange value capitalism has historically cut humanity out of the very goal of productive activity. Does agriculture aim at the satisfaction of human needs? Well, in capitalism the answer is “no”! It is simply the production of commodities whose content and quality don’t matter so long as they find a place on the world market and allows the cheaper reproduction of labour power.

And with the decadence of capitalism production has been intensified to the detriment of quality. This is the harsh reality we observe in the development of agriculture since the Second World War until the present time. Following the war the watchword was: produce, produce and produce! In most of the developed countries agribusiness has seen its capacity to produce increase at an astonishing pace. The spread of agricultural machinery and chemical products was very great. In the decades 1960-1980 the intensification of agriculture was known by the misleading name of the “green revolution”. There was no consideration for ecology there! It was, in reality, a question of producing the maximum for the least cost, without much regard for the resulting quality, to face the sharper competition. But the contradictions of a system in decline could only accumulate and so increase overproduction. Produce, produce … but sell to whom? To the hungry? Certainly not! Lacking sufficient solvent markets the goods were very often destroyed or decayed where they lay.[1]

Millions of people die of starvation in Africa and Asia, growing masses have to depend on charities in the developed countries, while numerous producers are constrained to destroy part of their product to respect their “quotas” or artificially maintain their prices.

The descent of the capitalist system into its historic crisis makes the problem worse still. On the basis of the chronic economic crisis investors greedy for profit seek to place their capital into profitable food securities (like rice or cereal), speculating and playing the market like a casino without any scruples, leaving a growing part of the world population to starve: “To give a few particularly clear figures, the price of maize has quadrupled since summer 2007, the price of grain has doubled since the beginning of 2008, and in general food prices have increased by 60% in two years in the poorer countries”[2]. For populations in a precarious situation as in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Indonesia or the Philippines, this rise has become quite simply unbearable and has ended up provoking hunger riots at the time of what is today called the “2007-08 world food price crisis”[3]. In a cynical farce the same scenario, exacerbated by the high use of food crops for the production of biofuel (soya, corn, rapeseed, sugar cane), was repeated in 2010, dragging the poorest into even more extreme misery.

Capitalism poisons and kills

Alongside the tragedy that it reserves for the populations of the ‘third world’, capitalism has not forgotten the exploited in the ‘developed’ countries. While agricultural production has grown considerably over the last decades, allowing the global reduction in the percentage of malnourished people, we must look at the disastrous results. The extreme intensification of agriculture with massive and uncontrolled use of chemicals has considerably depleted the soils to the extent that the nutritional value of its products and their vitamin content has been equally depleted.[4] Recent studies tend to show a direct correlation between the utilisation of herbicides, pesticides and fungicides in crops and the obvious increase in the number of cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.[5] Furthermore the use of sweeteners like aspartame (E951 on the labels) or glutamate in the food industry, like the spread of food dyes, has shown itself to be very harmful to health. An experiment on rats showed that it destroys nerve cells.[6] We are not going to make a list of all the harmful substances present in our food, as that would take pages and pages.

“It is all a question of the dose”, we are told. But no study has made public or completed to show the cumulative effects of these different “doses” ingested in the same product day after day. We only have to note some of the effects of nuclear irradiation of our food: such as after the Chernobyl accident with the explosion of thyroid cancers, malformation in the population of the region following the ingestion of contaminated food. It is the same with sea food in Japan today since Fukushima. The murderous character of capitalism has well and truly taken a new dimension. To generate profit, capitalism can make its exploited swallow anything.

Echoing Engels’ approach in The condition of the working class in England, let us recall some facts which show the way present day capitalism shows its concern for the health of those it exploits: “In December 2002, the affair of the relabelling of boxes of infant formula milk that had reached its use by date. The multinational illegally imported the milk from Uruguay to put it on sale in Colombia…. El Tiempo, Saturday 7 December remarked that ‘to the 200 tons of milk seized, … can be added another 120 tons seized while in the process of relabelling to appear as if it had been produced inside the country and to hide the fact that it had passed the date fit for human consumption’.”[7]

Among the numerous adulterated products of capitalism we find for example Norwegian salmon which, like battery hens, is full of antibiotics and even dyes to respond to the demands of the market. The concentration of drugs in their bodies is enough to make farmed salmon into a monstrous mutant species with deformed heads or notched fins…. But because a minister in the country owns several farms and firmly holds the omerta code of silence, academics have been ousted for pointing out the carcinogenic danger, even the toxicity of farmed salmon. To this we should add the tons of pollutants which are found in the sea, the PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls, used as coolants) in the rivers, radioactive waste whether buried or not.[8] … This is without taking account of the harm from heavy metals, dioxins, asbestos carried in our food and on our tables. Water and the products of the sea, the air we breathe, the animal products we eat and cultivated land are deeply impregnated with all these sources of contamination.

There is plenty to be indignant about in this permanent food crisis across the planet, where some are starving and others are poisoned.

The anger of those who fight the aberrations of this system is profoundly justified. But, at the same time, “Controlling and reducing the level of wastage is frequently beyond the capability of the individual farmer, distributor or consumer, since it depends on market philosophies, security of power supply, quality of roads and the presence or absence of transport hubs.”[9] Ultimately this means that looking for solutions at the local and individual level leads, in the short or medium term, to an impasse. Acting as a responsible and well informed ‘citizen’, that’s to say as an individual, can never give a solution to the immense waste that capitalism generates. The search for ‘individual’ or ‘local’ solutions carries the illusion that there could be an immediate response to the contradictions of capitalism. As we have seen the reasons are profoundly historical and political. The real fight must be carried out at this level. “Now the propagandists of capital call on us to ‘improve our eating habits’, to ‘reduce weight’ in order to prevent, to eliminate the ‘junk food’ in the schools… Not a word on raising wages! Nothing to ameliorate the material conditions of the oppressed! They talk about habits, seasonal food, or congenital illness… But they hide the real cause of humanity’s worsening nutrition: the crisis of a system that exists only for profit.”[10]   

Enkidu, 25/10/13

In Germany right wingers said that immigrants who were only coming to the country for benefits should be deported. They call it ‘Armutsmigration’ – ‘poverty migration’. The Social Democratic Vice Chancellor of Germany put a ‘balanced’ point of view “We don’t need all-out discrimination against the Bulgarians and Romanians but nor should we ignore the problems some big German cities faced with the immigration of poor peoples.” Like the Labour Party in Britain, they say they’re against racism, but poor foreigners are a problem.

In Britain the government has made sure that new immigrants will not be automatically entitled to benefits, that they can be deported if begging or homeless. On the right, Boris Johnson (who says he’s pro-immigration) wants a two year clamp down on migrants receiving benefits, and for the state to get tough on illegal immigration. From UKIP Nigel Farage puts forward a five year halt to immigration as the way to solve all social and economic problems. The left say that immigration is good for the economy. Farage says that maybe it would be better to be poorer.

‘Benefits tourism’ is the catchphrase in Britain. However, it’s just the latest label used to stoke up prejudice and find new scapegoats. Ed Miliband and other leading figures in the Labour Party say that immigration got out of control under Blair and Brown and that there should be ‘sensible’ controls on immigrants. They agree that immigration can enrich culture and economy, but Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna thinks that there has been far too much “low-skill immigration” in the EU. He maintains that “the founders of the European Union had in mind free movement of workers not free movement of jobseekers.”

Ultimately, across the British bourgeoisie, there is agreement that Britain is a ‘small island’ country, that there’s only room for so many, and immigration has to be firmly under control, if not actually stopped. This ‘common sense’ view (like its equivalent in a big, non-island country like Germany) is used to back up the basic nationalist framework of capitalist ideology. With all the recent anti-immigrant propaganda it is hardly surprising that surveys in the UK are showing more people wanting a reduction in immigration, and more wanting a big rather than a small reduction. Labour says that cheap, unskilled foreign workers are taking jobs that could go to cheap, unskilled British workers. If you’re unemployed you could put your situation down to one of many causes. You might feel it’s because of some personal inadequacy, or you might listen to the media and politicians telling you that foreigners have taken all the jobs. Neither explanation gets close to understanding the roots of unemployment in the basic workings of the capitalist system.

The effects of the economic crisis, imperialist war, ecological disaster, social problems like urban overcrowding and rural desertion, cultural impoverishment – all these flow from the reality of capitalism, not from workers travelling to find work and other opportunities. On the contrary, the more capitalism sinks into crisis, the more the exploited will be forced to move from country to country in search of work, shelter or security. This is something built into the condition of the working class, which has always been a class of immigrants.  

Capitalism poses everything from a national standpoint. If workers’ wages are reduced the bourgeoisie wants workers to blame workers from other countries, not the bourgeoisie’s system of exploitation. Workers can’t let themselves go along with nationalist ideology, whether it’s of the right or the left. The most dramatic example of how nationalism can be used against us is in times of war when workers have been taken in by calls to sacrifice their lives in defence of the nation – in other words, the interests of the national capitalist class and its state. But any time that capitalism tries to divide workers, the only response can be by uniting to resist exploitation, by waging a common struggle of all proletarians, ‘native’ and ‘foreign’, employed and unemployed. Workers’ struggles ultimately have the potential to do away with all frontiers, all nation states, and to build on the rich cultural diversity of all humanity.  

Car 11/1/14

As capitalist society slowly unravels, its inner nature as a war of each against all comes openly to the surface, and takes on a particularly savage form in its weakest regions, where pogroms, inter-ethnic  and inter-religious violence threaten the basic social fabric. In the Middle East, in Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria, the divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims has been deepened by a series of suicide attacks by al-Qaida type groups on Shia mosques and gatherings. In Africa, the ‘world’s youngest state’, South Sudan, is collapsing into a horrific chaos marked by massacres between Nuer and Dinka tribal groups; in the Central African Republic, Muslim and Christian gangs vie with each other in brutality. But as this article written by our French comrades shows, these expressions of barbarism at the local level are exacerbated and even manipulated by the bigger imperialist powers who are seeking to defend their own interests at all costs. In Syria, for example, the forces on the ground are sustained by players on the global arena: Assad’s Shia/Alawite regime by Iran, Russia and China; the ‘moderate’ Sunni rebels by the US and Britain, and the radical (Sunni) Islamists by countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In the Central African Republic, France has been supporting Muslim militias against their own former pawn who had turned for help to the rival South African imperialism, which is in turn backed by China. The permutations and alliances change constantly, but what doesn’t go away is the way that imperialist powers will make use of any local dictator, army or armed gang in the never-ending struggle against their rivals.  WR, 11.1.14

Regarding Mali, contrary to the lying statements by François Hollande, there has been no “victory over the terrorist groups”. France has certainly obliged the Malian cliques to organise ‘free and democratic’ elections (presidential last August and legislative in November) in order to “restore the Malian state and ensure peace”, but this propaganda is at total variance with the facts.

Radio silence on the new war in Mali

“Why commit 1500 soldiers to this ‘reconquest’ of North Mali? Supplemented by some elements of the Malian army and the UN African force whose French officers deplore ‘their lack of fighting spirit and their mediocre equipment’. Finally, what a bizarre idea to have baptised this new French engagement ‘Operation Hydra’, referring to the seven-headed serpent whose heads grow back after being chopped off… In fact, combat planes have been intervening regularly and there have been some tough battles near Gao and the border with Niger… in Bamako, when Admiral Guillard (head of the French forces) talked shop with general Marc Fourcaud, commander of the French expeditionary force, he carefully avoided fixing a date for the end of their intervention: ‘ we need to increase our adaptability, imagination and vigilance in the face of an enemy that is willing to fight to the end’. That’s another way of saying that this is not ‘a simple counter-terrorist action’ as claimed by Jean-Yves Le Drian, minister of defence” (Le Canard enchaîné, 30.10.13).

“Despite the presence of thousands of French and African soldiers and the efforts to track them down, the terrorist groups have carried out three murderous attacks since September 2013. Particularly elaborate was the raid on 23 October at Tessalit in the north east of Mali, against the Chadian soldiers of the integrated UN mission for the stabilisation of Mali (Minusma); this tells us a great deal about the capacity for resistance of Aqmi and Mujao” (Courrier international 7-13.11.13)

To this can be added a series of murderous clashes between the Malian army and the nationalist forces of the NMLA over control of the town of Kidal, not counting the bloody hostage-taking and suicide bombings which regularly hit the civilian population.

All this confirms that in Mali there is still a brutal war going on between the Islamist gangs and the gangs acting in defence of order and democracy, all of them hungry for blood and economic gain, all of them cynically sowing death and desolation among the populations of the Sahel.

Hollande and French imperialism dive into the Central African quagmire

Since March 2013, the Central African Republic has been sinking into nightmarish disorder, following the military coup piloted by a coalition of rebels calling itself the Seleka, which ousted former president Francois Bozizé, who also came to power in a putsch. He was replaced by Michael Djotodia[2]. Once in power, the armed groups got down to murder, rape, pillage of resources like gold and diamonds and all kinds of rackets. To escape this monstrous carnage, hundreds of thousands of people have had to leave their homes and take refuge either in the forest or in neighbouring countries. But it’s not just the former rebels, now in power, who are sowing terror – the partisans of the former president are doing the same[3].  All this is happening under the indifferent gaze of hundreds of French soldiers who have limited themselves to counting the dead. No doubt haunted by the ‘Rwandan experience’, when it was accused of complicity in the genocide, French imperialism has launched itself into a new intervention in Central Africa.

“It’s just a matter of days; France will launch a military operation in the Central African Republic.  ‘A precise operation, limited in time, aimed at re-establishing order and allowing an improvement of the humanitarian situation’ indicated a source from the ministry of defence” (Le Monde 23.11.13)    

At the time of writing, the French government has announced that it will be sending another 1000 troops to reinforce the 400 already there.

The criminal responsibilities of France in Central Africa

“This is a country which Paris knows well, the best as well as the worst . It is almost a caricature of what used to be called ‘Françafrique’. A state where France made and unmade regimes, replacing dictators escaping its control with others more malleable. In recent months we have seen the mysterious visits to Bangui by Claude Guéant and Jean-Christophe Mitterand, two figures of a moribund ‘Françafrique’” (Le Monde 28.11.13)

The French gendarme has again set out on the road to Bangui to re-establish its neo-colonial order, but contrary to the big lies of the Hollande government, this is not to “allow an improvement of the humanitarian situation” or because of the “extraordinary exactions” going on there. Because just a year ago the French authorities were averting their eyes from some “abominable acts” in the CAR and there has been a grand media silence about them up to now. And for good reason. The French government is not at all at ease denouncing the massacres and mutilations being suffered by the population of the CAR. Let’s not forget that François Bozizé, who came to power in 2003 via a coup directed from afar by Paris, was overthrown at the end of March 2012 by a coalition of armed groups (the ‘Seleka’) covertly supported by France. In reality, French imperialism made use of these armed gangs to get rid of the former ‘dictator’ who had been getting away from their control:

“Jakob Zuma didn’t hesitate for a moment to rush to the aid of Central African president François Bozizé when the latter, threatened by an armed rebellion, appealed to him in December 2012. The fact that Bozizé has been abandoned by France and is supported in a rather ambiguous way by his Francophone neighbours – which are seen as so many neo-colonies by Pretoria – increased South Africa’s determination to intervene. In one week, 400 soldiers from the South African Defence Forces (SANDF) were transported to Bangui. Installed in local police stations but also in Bossembele and Bossangoa in the centre of the country, they have had no contact either with the multinational African forces on the spot, or with the UN, or with the French contingent. Jakob Zuma doesn’t have to report to anyone. And the big Chinese firms, who have been operating in secret in the north east of the CAR, where there are much-sought after oil reserves, are not complaining. They are counting on South African protection to make their first searches”. (Jeune Afrique, 10.03.13)

Here we see the real reason for the abandonment of ex-President Bozizé: he betrayed his French masters by getting into bed with South Africa, a declared rival of France behind whom, barely concealed, stands China, a redoubtable rival for the oil resources of the country. However, given the defence agreements between France and the CAR (which among other things allows a permanent French military presence in the CAR), Hollande should have supported Bozizé when he appealed to him. Instead of that, the French president decided to punis’ his former dictator friend by all possible means, which included permitting the advance of the blood-soaked Séléka gangs towards the presidential palace, which had previously been surrounded by hundreds of French troops.

We can measure the cynicism of Francois Hollande when he now says that “there have been some abominable actions in the Central African Republic. There’s chaos, serious and extraordinary exactions. We have to act”.

This is the hypocritical language aimed at camouflaging and justifying the abominable crimes which the former colonial power is ready to commit in the CAR, at masking its complicity with the various murderous gangs who are ravaging the country.

Clearly the Hollande government doesn’t give a damn about what happens to the populations of Central Africa, Mali, or elsewhere. What it does care about is defending the interests of the national capital in one of the last bastions of French imperialism, the Sahel, a highly strategic zone replete with raw materials, in the face of the other imperialist sharks challenging for influence in the region.  Amina 29.11.13

In part one of this article [28], we mentioned the existence of spying throughout civilisation and the way that it’s been perfected by the capitalist ruling class, the bourgeoisie, a class which is Machiavellian and conspiratorial par excellence. We looked at the factors which underlie the spying activities of this class: economic, military and class domination. We saw, from the archives of the Russian secret services, the Okhrana, ‘liberated’ by the Russian Revolution of 1917, just how pervasive and extensive was the spying of the capitalist state over a hundred years ago and how the development of technology has taken this forward in an entirely ‘natural’ fashion. Finally, without underestimating the ruthlessness and intelligence of the bourgeoisie, whose different factions will not hesitate to spy on each other and the working class and its revolutionary forces, we look at the limitations of the state’s spying and repressive apparatus in controlling populations in revolt, particularly the organised proletariat.

The actions of the bourgeoisie only make bad situations worse

After the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, security and spying went onto another level as the spread of terrorism reinforced the idea that societies, countries and ‘allies’ are besieged fortresses fearing attacks of one sort or another on the ‘homeland’. The result has been an increase in barbed and razor-wire, floodlit, concrete and steel checkpoints, patrolled by military, police and vigilantes, and in electronic and droned surveillance along European and American borders. All this is often accompanied by a constant campaign against asylum-seekers and refugees, against the threat of ‘penetration’ of one kind or another, from ‘alien’ foreigners to cyber-warfare. Never before has a ruling class been forced to develop and deploy such sophisticated arsenals of surveillance and repression. It’s been estimated that 6000 miles of walls have gone up in the last ten years alone[1], a sure expression of the decomposition of capitalism in this so-called ‘globalised and inclusive’ world. But no matter how much the authorities try to set up surveillance mechanisms aimed both externally and internally, no matter how much the US (and others) turn their countries into fortresses against migrants, instability, trafficking, or potential terrorists, the system cannot stop the descent into greater chaos and violence. On the contrary, it contributes to it. The strongest, most well-equipped power in the world, the USA, cannot stop the destabilisation of its borders.

In Mexico twenty-six thousand people were killed in 2012 alone in its border-related drug wars and Russian RT News has reported that Mexico has “the highest levels of US intelligence assistance outside Afghanistan” (22/12/13). On the Canadian border there’s a whole united nations of crime gangs trafficking humans, narcotics and weapons. US/Canadian border patrols have increased by 700% since 9/11 and there’s even talk of building a wall there! More and more areas of the globe are prone to flights of refugees and migrants, victims of war, crime and poverty, of defeated uprisings in the slums and townships. None of this can be stopped by barbed-wire and fences and certainly not by the most powerful computer spyware yet invented which, for the most part, just looks on cynically and helplessly. The recent heart-rending events covered by TV, showing Africans, Iraqis, Afghans and, increasingly Syrians fleeing from wars and poverty, often perishing in the attempt in deserts or at sea, reveal the inability of the European powers to stem this flow of human misery. Indeed, their wars directly contribute to it. The Italian island of Lampedusa alone has, according to The Guardian, 3/10/13, seen more than 8000 migrants land in the first 8 months of the year, with the same article quoting human rights organisations in Italy saying that the Mediterranean had “become a cemetery. And it will become even more so”. And this while the region and its sea are under surveillance like never before.

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”

One of the glib phrases used by the ruling class in order to justify its wholesale spying upon us is: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. It was used by British Foreign Secretary William Hague at the beginning of the National Security Agency (NSA) ‘scandal’ in the summer and has also been attributed to the Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Recent revelations (Newsnight, 18/12/13) show how there is not a whit of evidence that the NSA’s surveillance has prevented one terrorist attack. The ‘alert’ of August 3 and 4 last, which was based on the NSA’s uncovering of supposed planned attacks on western embassies in Arab countries, resulting in 19 diplomatic posts being shut down, shows how these completely unverifiable threats are used for political purposes, both to rally populations and intimidate them as well as to cover up or justify imperialist manoeuvring. And as for the excuses about ‘preventing another 9/11’, there’s plenty of publicly known evidence that the US security services knew quite a lot about the bombers before the event. All the major powers are now well on the way with drone technology which is used for both surveillance and attack - without your forces being hurt. China, for example, has recently deployed drones in the East China Sea, increasing its operational and strike capabilities. But these weapons used to strike ‘terrorist’ targets, with the majority of their victims being innocent civilians, are just oil on the fire, creating, from pools of disaffected, despondent unemployed youth, more suicide bombers, more jihadis. This in turn demands ever more sophisticated tools in the longer run to ‘contain and control’ ever more potential enemies. These latter, imbued with nationalism, religious fervour or just anger and a thirst for revenge are themselves just as much victims of capitalist decay. Yemen is an example of it, where Al-Qaeda is not “On the path to defeat” as President Obama put it, but is continually renewed and expanding, becoming increasingly dangerous and more difficult to track. And none of this whole range of surveillance does anything to counter the ‘home-grown’ terrorists from which there’s almost no protection. The 7/7 London bombers and the two deeply troubled Boston bombers, who had no links to Al Qaeda and who used an ordinary household appliance, a pressure cooker, to create carnage and havoc, are examples of this. And if the security forces, with all the money, technology and facilities thrown at them, can’t follow a couple of known potential terrorists how are they going to track the hundreds coming back to Europe from Syria, Somalia and elsewhere, let alone the ‘lone wolves’ already present?

Nevertheless, the fear of terrorist attacks ‘at home’, arising from the chaos spilling over from western-led wars in the Middle East, has sparked another push for the development of surveillance techniques and a mentality of ‘defend the state’ in those same western countries. This also applies to the increasing risk of world-wide cyber attacks, the latter being part of the same spiral. There are no innocent states here, and while the US is the strongest element, they are all at it against each other, France, Germany, Russia, China, etc. who all adapt their own national ideology to support their role as ‘victims’ and ‘protectors’. And democracy is strengthened particularly by those who object to this surveillance, the ‘whistleblowers’ like Edward Snowden and his ilk who want ‘transparency’ in order to boost the democratic state[2]. At the same time the ‘gap’ between the state and the general population has been growing with the former seeing the latter more and more as an element to be distrusted, tracked and spied upon. Technological developments have made this spying and surveillance easier and more extensive, as shown by the example of the US and Britain tapping directly into fibre optics at the bottom of ocean floors, which are a major part of everyone’s communications.

Alongside the development of spy technology there is also the cancerous growth of the forces of capitalist order. It has been estimated that up to 30,000 people are working directly for the NSA, with something like 200,000 employed by 13 different secret services and any number of contractors, and there’s nothing new about contract spies working for the state - several large private security agencies worked for the US state at the beginning of the 1900s. There are no figures for the British GCHQ but it must be many thousands, and it’s notable that they are all heavily unionised. There’s growing infiltration by an army of police/security agents in protest movements, mosques, drug cartels and mafias and none of it makes any impression, it is even counter-productive in the state’s own terms, and becomes an end to itself swelling the security aspect and deepening the murkiness of the state apparatus[3]. The secret services themselves take on a certain ‘autonomisation’ and tend to get out of control, involved in all sorts of manipulations and shady dealings. The most recent example of that is the CIA in and around Syria providing arms and money directly and indirectly to jihadi forces while reporting to Congress that only the Free Syrian Army was receiving aid, sending its FSA stooges to Washington to insist that this was the case and that the FSA was a strong force on the ground with the jihadis being a small minority[4]. This ‘autonomisation’ is also evidenced by the British ex-Cabinet minister, Chris Huhne, who was in this exalted position for two years up to 2012 and who said that the Cabinet was in “utter ignorance” of the two biggest covert operations undertaken by GCHQ, Prism and Tempora (The Guardian, 6/10/13).

Britain: you don’t need jackboots for a police state

‘Democratic Britain’, the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, has more CCTV cameras than anywhere in the world by a large margin. In 2011, Cheshire police came up with a number of 1.85 million, along with sharply improving facial recognition software. There’s also the development of internet-enabled computer chips which are increasingly going into many products and were even being put in litter bins on the streets of London, enabling them to ‘communicate’ with passing smart phones. Everywhere are spies: on workers (trackers, personalised computers for jobs, individual productivity targets, etc.), universities, schools, local authorities, companies, uniformed thugs at tube stations, social security informer lines, grass-up an immigrant adverts - all these outside the ‘official’ secret services, but no less part of the militarisation of society. Under the whip of competition and profits, companies establish ‘profiles’ of every single customer. Once you have bought a product via electronic means or with a store card then this technology is used to know the when and where of your buying habits. Although employee blacklists have existed since the working class was born, technology has vastly improved their reach. Police forces across the country supplied information on thousands of workers to a blacklist operation run by Britain’s biggest construction companies in a conspiracy of the state with its police and industry (The Observer, 13/10/13). Such talk had been dismissed by elements of the state as ‘a conspiracy theory’ but this is just the tip of the iceberg, going well beyond the construction industry.

When Tony Blair left office in 2007, his Labour government had built up a surveillance state that out-performed the Stasi in its scope and in the technology used. Parliament passed 45 criminal justice laws and created 3000 new criminal offences. Labour Prime Minister Brown, who followed Blair, extended this record and the Tories have further extended it since (The Guardian, 14/8/13).

In the 1984 miners’ strike six pickets were killed and eleven thousand arrests were made by the paramilitary police, who assaulted miners and their families with impunity, used snatch squads, set up illegal road blocks and vandalised cars and property belonging to miners and their supporters. No expense was spared by the state in this campaign, one that it was determined to win at all costs, and much of this was under the direction of the secret Whitehall group, MISC57, set up in 1981 for this very purpose. Also against the miners were the DHSS, which illegally stopped dole payments, the media of course with the BBC at its head showing it was not above some North Korean-style film manipulation. The Director-General of MI5 at the time, Stella Rimington, wrote in her 2001 biography about how MI5 used its counter-subversive agents against the miners. Stipendiary magistrates were leaned upon, legal rights for the miners were ignored, police evidence was crudely fabricated and tightly restrictive bail conditions were backed up by courts. All this could have been overcome, and many workers were being further radicalised by the repression, but the NUM with its nationalist and corporatist agenda was mainly responsible for isolating the strike.

The trade unions are now state structures whose role is to oversee, channel, even initiate the actions of workers in order to subsequently control the force of the working class. As state organisations representing the national interest, the trade unions rely on a regimen of information coming to the top through the union conduits that exist deep into any strike, discontent or actions by the workers. The union structures also lend themselves to infiltration by other parts of the state and the secret services in particular. A news report for the BBC, 24 October 2002, said that Joe Gormley, a past president of the National Union of Miners, was a Special Branch informant. Also, during the 70’s when more and more wildcat strikes were breaking out, the report said that more than 20 trade union leaders were talking to Special Branch. Files released under the Freedom of Information Act point to the use of secret service ‘moles’ within the NUM during the 1984 strike and the same report (The Guardian,16/5/05) details how MI5 and GCHQ eavesdropped on striking miners. It’s worth noting that only a tiny fraction of secret service and government documents relating to these events have been released because of “national security”. In relation to the role of the secret services in industrial relations, the same BBC report above details how the car company Ford only agreed to invest in Halewood on Merseyside because of a suspected secret deal with MI5 and Special Branch. According to a former SB officer, Tony Robinson, part of his responsibilities was “to make certain that the Ford factory is kept clear of subversives”. Also on the role of Special Branch, ex-agent Annie Machon in “Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers” writes about how this agency constantly spied on groups like the Socialist Workers’ Party, Militant Tendency and the CPGB. She adds that in the time before computerised spying took off, MI5 had more than a million personal files (PFs) on people some of them written in long-hand. A file was even made up for a school pupil who had written to the CPGB for information for his school project; he was labelled “a communist sympathiser”.

Arrogant and confident after their success over the miners, the police, from chief constables downwards, engineered a major conspiracy over their deadly role in the manslaughter of 96 people at Hillsborough football stadium in April 1989. The conspiracy extended across the whole state including the NHS, local councils, the media with its police-induced slanders and innuendo, local and national politicians, the Football Association and others. Then there’s the infiltration of police spies into mainly innocuous protests, again showing how fragile the state is, paranoid and intolerant of its citizens who think that they have democratic ‘rights’. The ruling class’ complete lack of scruples was shown in the way the police used the names of dead children in order to do their dirty work, including inciting provocations and having sex with the women that they duped - “raped by the state” indeed. And there are the death squads and the slanders of innocent victims and the conspiracies following their murders: the electrician Charles de Menezes and the paper-seller Ian Tomlinson. There are also what appear to be the cold-blooded killings of Azelle Rodney in April 2005, and Mark Duggan more recently. There are many more examples, too numerous to mention here, of how the police get away with murder. The state is everywhere and the police and security services are its main agents. And all this violence, violation and abuse is happening in democratic Britain where, increasingly, any form of protest is deemed illegal by the state and its police.

None of this is peculiar to Britain: spying and state repression are natural to the rule of capital, and they can only be strengthened by the descent of the system into crisis and chaos. In the face of this, calls for ‘transparency’ and the ‘right to know’ are just feeble attempts to shore up the democratic system. No amount of transparency can alter the general tendency to the fortress state. Only the class struggle of the exploited can obstruct the repressive power of the state and open the way to its ultimate destruction. 

Baboon 24/12/13 ((This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

Since 21 November, Ukraine has been going through a political crisis which looks a lot like the so-called ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004. As in 2004, the pro-Russian faction is at loggerheads with the opposition, the declared partisan of ‘opening up to the West’. There is the same sharpening of diplomatic tensions between Russia and the countries of the European Union and the USA.

However this remake is not a simple copy. In 2004 the rejection of an obviously rigged election lit the fuse; today it’s the rejection by President Viktor Yanukovych of the agreement on association proposed by the EU that’s at the origin of the crisis. This issue with the EU, a week before the date envisaged for the signing of the agreement, provoked a violent offensive against the government from the different pro-European factions of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, who have been shouting about “high treason” and demanding the resignation of the President. Following calls for “the whole people to respond to this as if it was a coup d’État, i.e. by coming out on the streets”[1], the demonstrators occupied the town centre of Kiev and camped out on Independence Square, the symbolic centre of the Orange Revolution. The brutal repression, the confrontations and large number of injuries led the prime minister Mykola Azarov to declare that “what’s happening has all the signs of a coup d’État” and to organise counter-demonstrations. As in 2004, the media in the big democratic countries made a lot of noise about the will of the Ukrainian people to free itself from the Moscow-backed clique in power. The photos and reporting didn’t so much put forward the perspective of democracy but the violent repression by the pro-Russian faction, the lies of Russia and the diktats of Putin. The hope of a better, freer life is no longer tied to the perspective of an electoral victory by the opposition, which today is in a minority, unlike in 2004 when Victor Yushchenko was a sure bet to win.

Ukraine: an imperialist prize

In 2005, with regard to the Orange Revolution, we wrote:

“Behind this barrage, the essential question has nothing to do with the struggle for democracy. The real issue is the ever growing confrontation among the great powers, in particular the US’s present offensive against Russia, which aims at getting Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence. It is important to note that Putin directed his anger essentially against the US. In fact, it is the US which is behind the candidate Yushchenko and his ‘orange’ movement. At the time of a conference in New Delhi on December 5, the leader of the Kremlin denounced the US for trying to “reshape the diversity of civilization through the principles of a unipolar world, the equivalent of a boot camp” and impose “a dictatorship in international affairs, made up of a pretty-sounding pseudo-democratic verbiage”. Putin has not been afraid of throwing in the face of the US the reality of its own situation in Iraq when, on December 7 in Moscow he pointed out to the Iraqi prime minister that he could not figure out “how it’s possible to organize elections in the context of a total occupation by foreign troops”! It is with the same logic that the Russian president opposed the declaration by the 55 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) countries in support of the process taking place in Ukraine and confirming the organization’s role in monitoring the unfolding of the third round of the presidential elections of December 26. The humiliation the ‘international community’ inflicted on Putin by refusing to acknowledge his own backyard is aggravated by the fact that several hundred observers from not only the US, but also from Great Britain and Germany, will be sent.

Ever since the collapse of the USSR and the catastrophic constitution of the Commonwealth of Independent States (which was meant to salvage the crumbs of its ex-empire), Russia’s borders have been relentlessly under threat, both because of the pressure from Germany and the US, and the permanent tendency toward exploding, inherent to it. The unleashing of the first Chechen war in 1992, then the second in 1996 under the pretext of the fight against terrorism, expresses the brutality of a power in decline trying to safeguard its strategically vital position in the Caucasus at all costs. For Moscow the war was a matter of opposing Washington’s imperialist schemes, which aim at destabilizing Russia, and those of Berlin, which developed an undeniable imperialist aggressiveness, as we had seen in the spring of 1991, when Germany played a major role in the explosion of the Yugoslav conflict.

The Caucasus question is therefore far from a solution, because the US resolutely continues to advance its own interests in the area. It is in this context that we can understand Shevardnadze’s eviction in 2003 by the ‘rose revolution’, which placed a pro-American clique in power. This has allowed the US to station its troops in the country, in addition to those already deployed in Kyrgyzstan and in Uzbekistan, north of Afghanistan. This strengthens the US’ military presence south of Russia and the threat to Russia of encirclement by the US. The Ukrainian question has always been a pivotal one, whether during tsarist Russia or Soviet Russia, but today the problems is posed in an even more crucial fashion. 

At the economic level, the partnership between Ukraine and Russia is of great importance to Moscow, but it is above all at the strategic and military levels that the control of Ukraine is to it of even greater importance than the Caucasus. This is because, to begin with, Ukraine is the third nuclear power in the world, thanks to the military atomic bases inherited from the ex-Eastern bloc. Moscow needs them in order to show, in the context of inter-imperialist blackmails, its capacity to have control over such great nuclear power. Secondly, if Moscow has lost all probability of gaining direct access to the Mediterranean, the loss of Ukraine would mean a weakening of the possibility to have access to the Black Sea as well. Behind the loss of access to the Black Sea, where Russia’s nuclear bases and fleet are found in Sebastopol, there is the weakening of the means to gain a link with Asia and Turkey. In addition, the loss of Ukraine would dramatically weaken the Russian position vis-à-vis the European powers, and particularly Germany, while at same time it would weaken its capacity to play a role in Europe’s future destiny and that of the Eastern countries, the majority of which are already pro-American. It is certain that a Ukraine turned toward the West, and therefore controlled by it and the US in particular, highlights the Russian power’s total inadequacy, and stimulates an acceleration of the phenomenon of explosion of the CIS, along with a sequel of horrors. It is more than probable that such a situation would only push whole regions of Russia itself to declare independence, encouraged by the great powers”[2].

The big difference between today and 2004 is a result of the weakening of the USA, which has been accelerated by its succession of military adventures, notably in the Middle East. Russia’s retreat on the international scene has on the other hand been attenuated, notably with the Russo-Georgian war in 2008. This conflict reversed the tendency towards rapprochement between Georgia and the EU, which Ukraine was also aspiring to. So while the first ‘revolution’ was an offensive by the USA against Russia, the second is by all the evidence a counter-offensive by Russia. It’s president Yanukovych who sparked the hostilities by annulling the association agreement with the EU in favour of a ‘Tripartite Commission’ including both the EU and Russia. The accord initially envisaged would have allowed the establishment of a free trade zone that would have seen Ukraine joining the EU by the back door and thus moving closer to NATO. These attempts at rapprochement with the EU were seen by Moscow as a provocation since the aim was to tear Ukraine away from its influence. The situation in Ukraine has been essentially determined by these imperialist conflicts.

The immediate origin of this new crisis can be traced to the pressure mounted by Russia and the western powers on the Ukrainian bourgeoisie since the pro-Russian faction came to power in the 2010 elections. From this time, Angela Merkel offered to act as an intermediary in the negotiations over the gas contracts signed with Moscow in 2009 by the former prime minister, Julia Timoshenko. But Moscow immediately declined the offer, thus preventing the Europeans from sticking their noses in Russo-Ukrainian affairs.

Three months before the Vilnius Summit which was to culminate in the signing of the agreement between Ukraine and the EU, Russia issued its first warning by closing its frontiers to Ukrainian exports. A number of sectors, including steel and turbines, suffered as a result. Ukraine lost 5 billion dollars in this business; 400,000 jobs were at stake, along with numerous enterprises that work solely towards the Russian market. Moscow also resorted to the following piece of blackmail: if Ukraine doesn’t join the Customs Union around Russia, the Kremlin would ask other members of this Union to close their frontiers as well[3].

The various cliques of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie have been deeply divided by all this pressure. Certain oligarchs, like Rinat Akhmetov, had been opposed to signing the Vilnius agreement. At the moment, everyone is waiting to see the outcome. The pro-EU oligarchs, but also those close to Russia, are fearful of any exclusive relationship with Moscow. They want to maintain for as long as possible Ukraine’s position of ‘neutrality’, to maintain stability until the next elections in order to postpone a confrontation with Russia. Ukraine’s exclusive alignment with Russia’s imperialist policies is thus not accepted, even by the pro-Russian faction.

On the other hand, the pressures from the EU are not without their own contradictions. The main outlets of Ukrainian industry and agriculture are the countries of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine exports next to nothing to the EU countries, which is on the verge of signing a free trade agreement for commodities which don’t actually exist! For Ukrainian commodities to meet with European standards, industry would have to invest around 160 billion dollars in the productive apparatus.

For the western powers, Ukraine is mainly of interest as a supplementary sphere of influence. Customs barriers between Ukraine and Russia are practically non-existent – there are few customs duties. Thus both from Moscow’s and the west’s points of view, the agreement with the EU boils down to opening Russia up to western commodities. Obviously, this is unacceptable for Russia.

The working class must not be taken in by the democratic lie

Ukraine is being hit by the contradictions between its economic interests and the pressures of imperialism. This impasse is undermining the coherence of its various bourgeois factions and pushing them into an irrational stance, notably the opposition. While the party in government is more or less for the ‘neutrality’ of the Ukraine, the opposition is trying to sell the Ukrainian population the illusion of a standard of living comparable to that of the Europeans if Ukraine would only sign the agreement with the EU. But its heterogeneous composition, which is a difference with 2004, shows the degree to which the advance of decomposition has put its mark on any political perspective. The most lucid European analyses[4], which are in principle in favour of Ukraine’s European orientation, don’t hide this:

“If this opposition takes power, I don’t see very well how it will turn out for an opposition led by a boxer who may be affable enough but isn’t up to running a government. Then the next personality is Timoshenko and her team, and everyone knows that this is a mafia team from the word go. There really are big questions about the financial honesty of this team – that’s why she’s in prison. Then the third component is the Nazis[5]. Thus Nazis plus mafia plus incompetent people – it would be a catastrophe. It would be a government like certain states in sub-Saharan Africa”. Here we see clear verification of the fact that “The area where the decomposition of capitalist society is expressed in the most spectacular way is that of military conflicts and international relations in general”[6]. 

The ideological grip of the different factions of the political apparatus is being undermined by the contradictions of the situation. The division of labour that is normal in the more developed democratic countries doesn’t work very well here. But this doesn’t stop the democratic mystification being used against the working class in Ukraine as much as at the international level. Here too we have the supposed struggle between democracy and dictatorship. The bourgeoisie is also well able to play on the nationalist strings which are so well kept up in Ukraine. The appeals to the interests of the ‘Ukrainian nation’ peddled by the pro-Russian faction are echoed by the many national flags carried in the demonstrations.

The ‘Orange Wave’ of 2004 was the result of divisions within the ruling class which weakened the position of Victor Yanukovych [7]. Control of the state apparatus began to escape him. The success of his rival, Yuchenko, was to a large extent due to the paralysis of the authority of the central state, but also to Yuchenko’s ability to make use of the official values of the regime of Leonid Kuchma, president between 1994 and 2005: nationalism, democracy, the market and the so-called ‘European option’. Yuchenko became the ‘saviour of the nation’ and the subject of a personality cult. The ideology of the ‘Orange’ movement was in no way different from the mystifications the bourgeoisie had used to brainwash the population for 14 years. The masses who supported Viktor Yuchenko or who backed Yanukovych were simply pawns manipulated by different bourgeois factions in the interest of this or that imperialist option. Today the situation is no different in this respect. The ‘democratic choice’ is just a trap.

We could add that Yuchenko, whose clan took power after the ‘Orange Revolution’, did not hesitate to impose repression and sacrifices on the working class when he was the prime minister and head banker of the government of his pro-Russian predecessor, Kuchma. The Yuchenko clan not only made use of the illusions of the Ukrainian population to get into power, but also considerably enriched itself on the back of the state, fully justifying its reputation as a mafia-like clique and resulting in the imprisonment of his accomplice, Julia Timoshenko.

But this same Timoshenko, heroine of democracy and the Orange Revolution, is at the origin of 15 billion dollars of credit from the IMF obtained through tough negotiating for three months. As an annex for this agreement, this is what she obtained for the working class in Ukraine: raising of the retirement age, increase in local taxes, in the price of electricity, water, etc.

In spite of their disagreements about imperialist options, the different political factions of the bourgeoisie, from right to left, have no other perspective than to force the working class into poverty. To take part in elections for this or that political clan will not slow down the attacks. Above all, by ranging itself behind a political faction of the bourgeoisie and behind democratic slogans, the workers lose their capacity to struggle on their own class ground.

Ukraine and all the sharks swimming around it express the reality of a capitalist system at the end of its tether. The working class is the only class radically opposed to this system. It must above all defend its own historic perspective and fight against all the campaigns aimed at mobilising it for the battles between competing bourgeois cliques, each one in a bigger dead end than the next one. The proletarian revolution is not opposed to a particular bourgeois clique and in favour of another, but is against their whole system – capitalism.  

Sam 22/12/13.

The British bourgeoisie have recently become more confident about declaring that there is an economic recovery underway – at long last – in Great Britain. Nonetheless, where more serious commentary is concerned, the sense of relief amongst bourgeois economists and commentators is still tempered with some reserve, even if it mainly concerns the length of time the recovery is taking. A Financial Times poll of economists at the beginning of the year gives a good sense of the current view of matters held by the bourgeoisie:

“After 3 grinding years of stagnation and almost seven after the financial crisis started, economists have finally regained their confidence that Britain’s economy is on the move.

A large majority believes the recovery will at least maintain its recent strength and households will begin to feel better off in 2014, as wages begin to grow faster than prices and unemployment continues to fall. Few think there are clouds on the horizon in 2014, although more worry about the longer term. …..” (Financial Times, 2/01/2014)

It should be noted that these expert commentators did not actually anticipate this much-praised upturn:

“Several quarters of strong growth have encouraged UK economists, largely caught out by the upturn’s strength, to become much more optimistic.” (ibid)

Well, quite! There is no reason, in other words, to suppose that these experts have somehow got the hang of where the economy is heading. Also we should note that the term ‘recovery’ is being used here in a specific and restricted sense. Seven years on from the start of the current financial crisis the economy is still well below the level prior to the crisis – 2 percentage points or so. In fact, therefore, there is no ‘recovery’ as yet, if recovery means (as it is often taken to mean) getting back to the level before the crash. If the present recovery, in the sense of a period of sustained growth, does indeed continue as the economists hope, then the economy might actually recover (in the sense of getting back to where it started) sometime before the next election. Some economists have actually noted that, in this respect, the performance of the economy is actually worse than during the Great Depression.

The global picture

It is necessary to see matters in a wider context. The British economy is not isolated from the rest of the world economy. The European economy, for example, was mired in recession for no less than 18 months and it is not really out of the woods yet:

“The [UK] was one of the few to beat expectations in the second half of 2013, when the recoveries in the euro area and Japan faltered.” (ibid)

It should be noted that it is only in the current period that Britain appears to be doing better than its rivals:

“Despite its strong performance over the past year, the UK economy has consistently lagged behind most rivals since the crash. Until last year it was among the worst performers of the Group of Seven economies.” (ibid)

It is also the case that China, India and Brazil – all members of the so-called BRIC group of countries – have been suffering severely recently at the economic level. In the case of Brazil this has had repercussions at the social level, showing the underlying instability that characterises all these countries. Indian growth has slowed significantly so that the rupee has weakened to the extent that it is causing serious worry to the Indian bourgeoisie. This is true even though the rate of growth looks very healthy compared with the advanced economies – this point also applies to China. China’s rate of growth is still over 7% (according to the official figures at least):

“‘From the overall situation we can predict that the future industrial growth rate will decline, the export growth rate may drop and economic growth is still under downward pressure,’ said Zhang Liqun, an economist, in a statement accompanying the release of [an official purchasing managers’ index].” (ibid)

The Chinese bourgeoisie is very conscious of the fact that the economic and social situation in China is very fragile, unlike most Western commentators who tend to be mesmerised by China’s growth rates. However, even these commentators have toned down their references to the glittering prospects offered by the process of ‘globalisation’. In general, all that the bourgeois commentators mean by talking about globalisation is that they are hoping that China (and India and Brazil) will grow with sufficient strength to make up for the lack of demand in the Western economies and supply a sufficiency of markets to keep them functioning. And we have arrived at a point where the prospects for that happening are clearly diminished very severely. This has been accepted by the bourgeoisie increasingly over the last months.

China responded to the global financial crisis with a rapid and very large extension of credit to keep its economy moving and now has to find a means of dealing with the overhang to keep its banking and shadow banking system intact, which sounds familiar[1].  China experiences the global crisis of capitalism just like any economy even if its growth rates are, for the present, still something for the developed economies to envy.

Similarly, in the case of Britain, the recovery that we have been discussing here seems, at least in part, to be the result of government interventions that have been made recently – notably its intervention in the housing market, which is widely credited with helping to restore consumer confidence. And consumer confidence is cited as a key factor in the recovery:

“Though many economists this year stick to that policy advice [to change the monetary policy remit to something more expansionary], they recognise that that they did not see the change of mood that persuaded households to spend, even with incomes still under pressure.” (ibid)

If this is the main factor that has caused the economists to be caught out, then that hardly suggests that this is a broad based, sustainable recovery such as the bourgeoisie are aiming for:

“Diane Coyle of Enlightenment Economics warned that the supply side of the economy was holding it back. ‘There are multiple and long-standing problems with the economy’s capacity to produce and export ….’”. (ibid) She cites skills gaps and lack of finance for growing companies, for example.

Undoubtedly, the steps that the government has taken to stimulate the housing market are the most striking ‘contribution’ it has made to this rather lop-sided recovery. Obviously, the government can pat itself on the back if it thinks this is a major component of the recovery, as many commentators do. The problem is that the bourgeoisie is in essence resorting to the same methods which got it into so much trouble in 2007. What the bourgeoisie mean by getting the housing market moving is that prices are rising as the conditions under which loans are given are eased – thus encouraging new buyers who have been locked out of the market. These easier conditions – which are government backed – exist alongside the bourgeoisie’s general policy of ‘easy money’ (quantitative easing and very low interest rates) that it has had in place since the financial crisis to sustain the economy. Just as the Chinese bourgeoisie are doing now, eventually the ruling class in Britain and elsewhere will have to pay a price for this in terms of restricting credit in order to avoid a new ‘debt crisis’.

In sum, the ruling class is trapped in a downward spiral because its financial machinations can’t overcome the basic contradictions of its system, which is perpetually driven to produce more than what Marx called the “restricted consumption of the masses” can absorb. This is not overproduction in relation to need, but overproduction in relation to demand backed by the ability to pay. The drug of easy credit may bring temporary relief to the patient but in the end the medicine only exacerbates the disease: giving the consumer money to pay for your own production is ultimately self-defeating unless it is accompanied by the possibility of opening up new markets, and this is severely limited in a world where capital already dominates almost every corner of human existence. 

Hardin, 10.1.14

We are publishing below the translation of an article from Accion Proletaria, the ICC's paper in Spain, which analyses the strike of rubbish collectors in Madrid of November 13 and which stresses an essential and vital factor for the class struggle: workers' solidarity.

November 17 last, general assemblies of the Highways Department of Madrid ended 13 days of strike by accepting an agreement which avoided job losses of close to 1200 workers as well as threats of wage cuts of up to 43%. Coming out of these assemblies the feeling among workers was one of relief, a feeling that they had gained something, at least temporarily, from the outcome of an interminable struggle against the incessant attacks from this system against our living conditions. That they had this feeling wasn't so much because of the tangible results of negotiations - because these workers had been forced to accept the freezing of wages up to 2017 as well as a temporary contract of work limited to 45 days a year up to this same date - as for the way that they had succeeded in resisting this latest blow: support from a rousing demonstration of workers' solidarity. A solidarity which was revealed to all the workers of the three sub-contracting firms responsible for the Madrid streets and which spread to the workers of the public firm TRAGSA, to the bars of the most populous districts of Madrid where "collection boxes of support" were placed as a spontaneous form of assistance in order to compensate from economic losses of the strikers or in the concentration of solidarity amongst them on the last night of the negotiations...

Solidarity builds the unity of the workers

The media and the TV channels particularly - themselves accustomed to "rubbish" programmes - focused attention on the sacks of garbage and on the protagonists who were shown as social rejects. Firstly, regarding the media, there wasn't a television programme that didn't take its cameras onto the streets in order to interrogate the population on "the inconvenience caused by the strike" (they didn't make the least enquiry about the inconvenience caused by the budget cuts of the highways services) or on their economic repercussions, except for business people, hotel owners, etc. It was really the launching of an ideological campaign being used to put the population up against the refuse workers. This kind of campaign has been used successfully on several occasions before, including with the complicity of the unions[1]. However this time, public opinion, above all in the workers' districts of Madrid, went to the side of the strikers. Thus for example in a "proclamation" of the Popular Assembly of Lavapies, one can read: "The men and women on unlimited strike is an example for us all. No sensible person can remain with folded arms looking at these events (...) What we are seeing today, is only a prefiguration of a Madrid filthy and left to rot which will hit our popular quarters; if the strike is defeated it will follow that there will be less workers and in worse conditions (...) If the workers who look after our streets and parks (and consequently, all of us) go on strike, we must support them to the end, we must be with them among the strike pickets and in demonstrations (...) If they imprison the strikers, we must be on the streets every day in greater numbers. The motives and the anger of strikers must not be reduced to silence by the police, judges, the bosses, the media and the union chiefs. If the strike ends it must be because we have won something and not because of agreements concluded on the backs of the men and women on strike..."[2].

When they tried to pass off the strikers as "blackmailers", the workers remembered that the origin of these job cuts was a cut in the budget of the highways municipality of Madrid and that the local firms - subsidiaries of the larger concerns - were being fattened up by building speculations and other gifts accorded by the administration while at the same time the latter was trying to lay the cost on the backs of the employees of these enterprises and the population of the workers' districts of Madrid.

It's true that the arrogant attitude of the mayor of Madrid, worthy spouse of the ex-President Aznar ("worthy" of him in any case...), served to heat up the atmosphere of support for the struggle somewhat. When she put forward an ultimatum calling for an agreement in the middle of the night of November 15, by threatening to call on the workers of the public concern TRAGSA to abort the strike, she met with a refusal of these same workers (who, in their turn, were threatened with job cuts) to play the role of scabs against their comrades. Trying to recruit 200 workers that she wanted immediately only appeared completely ridiculous. The same night, during which the mayor supervised the semblance of a minimum service dressed in a fur coat, the boss himself accepted replacing cuts in wages by a freeze up to 2017, and reported on the following night, going beyond the time of the ultimatum, the decision on job cuts. Among the workers a feeling spread that, this time, they had been able to put a brake on the attacks.

Why was this? Because our exploiters became more reasonable? Nothing could be further from the truth: a few days later the same protagonists - or almost - announced a very similar attack aimed this time against laundry workers of Madrid hospitals. And did the unions make a "volte-face" (as the PSOE repeated) in order to defend the workers? You can't say that when you can see that they signed agreements involving thousands of job cuts in the banks, at Panrico, RTVE and so on. During the night of Saturday November 16, when the unions of the highway workers of Madrid were ready to accept a deal on a reduced number of job cuts for hundreds of workers(in fact, the UGT stayed at the negotiating table and the Workers' Commissions quit, although they returned later). And this was not only in the highways sector but also others - who were meeting up around the building where these so-called negotiations were taking place and began to call for a demonstration on the following day. A few hours later, the companies withdrew the announced plan of job cuts, replacing them with technical measures of temporary unemployment.

The key factor in the course of this struggle - solidarity - has been the fruit of a change obscured by bourgeois propaganda which preferred to focus attention on the piles of rubbish bags, or on the declarations of the mayor who, recently, has reappeared among the media complaining of a permanent campaign aimed at her. For the exploited, on the contrary, the most important thing is the response given by an anonymous striker to a television reporter who asked him what was positive about the strike: "To discover that someone who works alongside me is a real comrade."

Class solidarity can't allow itself to be buried in a democratic or nationalist rubbish dump

The "basic" mechanism on which the capitalist system rests is one of relentless blackmail: the isolated worker can only obtain his or her means of existence if their labour power profits capital. The propaganda of our exploiters artfully insinuates that this is an "order" inherent to human nature, wanting to reduce our existence to that of a commodity, aiming by any means to let the "market value" of this commodity fall to the lowest possible price. But in reality the price of labour power is not determined on the blind laws of capitalist exchange (supply and demand, the law of profit and exchange value...) but also on moral parameters such as courage and anger faced with the inhumanity of the laws which regulate society, solidarity and the defence of the dignity of the workers. Here, two worlds oppose one another and are separated by an abyss: those of human need and those of the interests of capital.

All attempts to sacrifice the first to the second is presented as a defence of the "competitive edge" of the enterprise or to the profitability of the public service such as health or education. Whether the living conditions of the exploited are to be sacrificed to the demands of this or that firm, this or that local or regional industry, or even the interests of the nation, this very clearly implies the sabotage of the very principle of solidarity between the exploited in order to put in its place a fraudulent fraternity between exploiters and exploited. The most important contribution of the struggle of workers of the Madrid highways is not to have shown an infallible way of drawing concessions from the boss, but of having won a level of solidarity which serves to strengthen the unity of the class rather than further subjecting the workers to the logic of exploitation.

Again we're seeing today a deluge of thousands and thousands of redundancies and, among those workers that "keep" their jobs, brutal wage cuts. Everywhere the concern of workers is growing faced with the cynicism of the exploiters who are announcing the end of the crisis and a recovery for the Spanish economy while scapegoating those most hit by poverty becomes more commonplace and dramatic. This agitation has given rise to a number of protests and mobilisations. But we must be honest and not let ourselves be fooled. In the great majority of cases, this agitation among the ranks of the workers has been recuperated by the parties of the left of capital and the unions through a string of movements that have been dispersed and, above all, diverted onto a false version of solidarity, that of the defending democratic institutions.

We can use the example of Radio-Television Valenciana[3] where the anger faced with job cuts was channeled into the defending "television at the service of the public and the region". On this terrain, the unions had a free hand to justify the reduction of wages by proposing a so-called viability plan - all in the name, of course, of salvaging the "national heritage". On these grounds the workers of Canal 9 were forced to march alongside the deputies of the PSOE who, when they were in power, undertook the most massive plan of job cuts in Spanish radio and television!

On this rotten ground our exploiters present themselves to us as "allies" and workers of other firms, other sectors of production or other countries, are presented as competitors and enemies. It's what we've seen for example at Panrico or at FAGOR. In the first case, the workers at the firm of Santa Perpetua of Mogoda, who refused to accept redundancies and wage cuts, were exposed to a brutal offensive by the boss and the media, but also from the unions which told them that their intransigence and those of workers of other firms were putting the "future" in danger. Another case was the Mondragon Group, part of the FAGOR business and up to recently a model for the "rise of Basque industry" and the advantages of "cooperative systems". A "cooperative" which has now thrown onto the streets more than 5,000 workers who then found themselves caught up in an ideological battle about which units were the most "profitable" or whether they had the right to be relocated to other firms of the group...

Competition between workers[4] can deliver profits on capitalist investment but implies the ruin of the exploited. Class solidarity isn't sufficient to protect workers indefinitely from the attacks of capitalism in the period of decadence, but it does show the sense of a social alternative, another form of the understanding of relations between men that do not submit to the laws of the market. As the Communist Manifesto, written some 150 years ago, indicates: "Sometimes the workers triumph, but it is an ephemeral triumph. The real result of their struggles is less their immediate success than the growing union of all the workers".

Valerio (November 25, 2013)

“Tyranny is tyranny let it come from whom it may.” 1

The unprecedented response of the US state to the April 2013 bombings in Boston and more recent revelations about NSA spying on the entire population have inevitably struck at illusions in American liberal democracy and civil liberties. We’ve written about what lies behind the US state’s increasingly repressive activities today,2 but these illusions run deep and it’s also important to look at their historical roots.

Our series on the early class struggle in America has reached the ‘American Revolution’ of 1765-1783, which of course has a cherished place in bourgeois mythology as a brave struggle against tyranny by patriots who founded “the world’s oldest democracy”. The working class did indeed gain real and lasting reforms from this struggle, which took place in the epoch of capitalism’s progressive expansion across the globe. But as this article shows, these gains were limited and even at the moment of its birth American democracy clearly revealed its class character, proving that, even in ascendant capitalism, the most democratic republic served as a mask for the dictatorship of capital.

Violent uprisings and insurrectional struggles

As we saw in the first article, faced with the threat of a unified struggle by black and white slaves and labourers, the bourgeoisie in North America successfully adopted a strategy to divide the proletariat along racial lines. Nevertheless the class struggle continued to be characterized by violent uprisings and insurrectional struggles that posed a growing threat to the capitalist class and finally precipitated a crisis for the existing system of political rule:

• There were organised and violent struggles by sailors and labourers against impressment into the British navy. In the most serious of these, in 1747 a crowd of over 1,000 led by ‘‘Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and other Persons of mean and vile Condition’’ held control of the town of Boston for three days, seized naval officers as hostages and threatened to hang the Governor. Confrontations with the press gangs flared again in the 1760s.3

• A renewed wave of African slave plots and revolts erupted in the Caribbean which spread to North America and intensified after 1765 as slaves seized opportunities created by the growing crisis of the ruling class. This reached a high point in the 1770s with uprisings in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Boston (in which Irish workers also participated), New Jersey, New York and Maryland.4

• There was also increasing unrest and resistance among indentured servants – i.e. time-limited slaves. In 1768, in “the most serious insurrection of white workers in the history of the British colonies on the North American mainland”,5 300 Italian and Greek workers in Florida rebelled, seized arms and ammunition, captured a ship and prepared to set sail for Cuba. Troops had to be despatched before the rebels surrendered.

• There were almost continual struggles by small farmers along the eastern seaboard. In 1766 violence in the Hudson Valley erupted in a massive uprising with pitched battles involving 1,000 white tenant farmers. In the most significant pre-revolutionary struggle, in North Carolina from 1766 to 1771 a movement of over 6,000 poor farmers and labourers (‘Regulators’) waged a prolonged campaign against the corrupt local capitalist regime until eventually defeated by a militia army and artillery fire.

• There were increasingly violent struggles and spontaneous protests by the impoverished proletariat in the rapidly growing cities, in the context of a deepening economic depression. In 1765 a crowd led by seamen and labourers attacked Fort George, seat of royal authority in New York, attempting to burn it to the ground in protest against new British taxes on the sale and use of commodities, while as part of the same protests a Boston crowd vented its pent up fury on the houses and property of wealthy merchants and prominent loyalist officials.

The ruling class saw in these last struggles, not a protest against new taxes but “a War of Plunder, of general levelling and taking away the Distinction between rich and poor”, and feared they would lead to “an insurrection of the poor against the rich”.6

The American bourgeoisie’s fear of insurrection

The American bourgeoisie seized on this growing crisis as an opportunity to advance its own political and economic interests, but from the beginning it faced a dilemma: despite being haunted by the fear of an ‘insurrection against the rich’, it had to make use of direct action and illegal methods in order to give its own struggle the necessary political firepower against the British state. It therefore had no option but to try to harness the struggles of the poor urban proletariat – commonly dismissed as the ‘mob’ – while at the same time preventing them from developing into a more dangerous class struggle against capitalist society.

Caught unprepared for the violence of the early protests, which quickly threatened to escape the control of the conservative merchants and planters who led the opposition to British rule, the American bourgeoisie was forced to depend on more radical leaders who were closer to the struggles of the proletariat and better able to mobilise popular support for anti-British objectives. Revolutionary leaders like Samuel Adams in Boston defended a more radical democratic vision of the revolution but shared a deep suspicion of ‘the mob’ and actively worked to prevent the class struggle from escaping the confines of the bourgeois independence movement.

With the backing of radicals like Adams, organisations such as the Sons of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence came into being as a response to the “threatened anarchy” of the early protests. Their rank and file tended to be white artisans and skilled workers (women, indentured servants and of course slaves and free blacks were all excluded), but the leadership was in the hands of smaller merchants, master craftsmen and professional men, who acted to ensure order.

The artisans and skilled workers exerted enormous pressure for more radical action not only against British authority but also the domination of the merchants, which the leadership was forced to go along with in order to prevent being swept aside. But the American bourgeoisie was ultimately successful in isolating the most militant elements of the poor urban proletariat and in mobilising artisans and skilled workers behind its programme of nationalist and protectionist demands, so that by the time of the famous 1773 ‘Tea Party’, for example, the crowd in Boston acted as a political agent of the radical bourgeoisie, its struggles confined to exclusively anti-British actions.

National war or class war?

The American bourgeoisie had no option but to mobilise artisans, workers and small farmers to fight its war against Britain. Impressment into the American navy was taking place by 1779 despite the earlier struggles against the tyranny of the British press gangs.

There was no strong support for independence among the population and little enthusiasm for the war, which caused runaway inflation and increased poverty. There was inevitably a stark contrast between the suffering and sacrifice of the proletariat and the profits and privileges of the bourgeoisie. There were at least fifteen major mutinies involving large numbers of soldiers in the American army. In 1781 for example, 300 New Jersey troops defied their officers and marched on the state capital where they were quickly surrounded and disarmed and two leaders shot as “an example” on George Washington’s orders.

Some of the poorer artisans and workers were radicalised by being mobilised into the militia which, like the New Model Army in the English revolution, became a centre of intense political debate. In Philadelphia the militias seized the early initiative in rejecting British rule, demanding the right to vote and to elect their own officers. Backed by the radical bourgeoisie and small farmers, they overthrew the colonial government and elected a convention that produced the most democratic constitution of the American Revolution. During the war the militia’s Committee of Privates also took the lead in pressuring the bourgeoisie on behalf of “the midling and poor” and threatened violent action against profiteers. In 1779 a group marched into the city and attacked the house of a wealthy lawyer and prominent conservative republican who opposed price controls and the new democratic constitution (the ‘Fort Wilson Riot’).

In the South, the first priority of the American bourgeoisie throughout the war was to prevent a generalised slave insurrection. Fear of arming slaves led to a ban on their recruitment (although both free and enslaved Africans fought in many of the battles of the Revolution, especially in the north). After a cynical offer to free slaves if they joined the British army, this ban had to be reversed, but the prevention of a slave insurrection continued to trump American military strategy and manpower needs. Tens of thousands of slaves deserted the plantations to either join the British or liberate themselves in what amounted to a mobile slave revolt of immense proportions; in South Carolina as many as 20,000 deserted or 25 per cent of the entire slave population, and even more in Georgia. As soon as the British finally surrendered at Yorktown, Washington posted guards on the beaches to stop slaves escaping aboard British ships.7

Nor was it only slaves who posed a threat. Rural areas remained largely in the grip of right-wing political elites who were often viewed as more oppressive than British tyranny. Attempts to mobilise the population, especially in areas with a recent history of class struggles, met with varying degrees of resistance, fuelling ruling class fears that the war would unleash a generalised insurrection of the poor. In Maryland the militia spearheaded a local struggle for democratic rights, demanding the vote or they would lay down their arms. There were also attacks on members of the ruling class suspected of hoarding commodities. In the Carolinas, scene of major pre-war rural rebellions, many small farmers and labourers viewed their rulers’ calls for liberty and natural rights as rank hypocrisy and resisted all attempts to mobilise them. There were several large uprisings and in some parts of the South bourgeois rule collapsed completely: “With the fall of Charleston in the spring of 1780, a total civil war engulfed the Lower South. From that time until the war’s end, the region experienced social anarchy.”8

The American bourgeoisie crushes resistance to capitalist rule

The state to emerge from the war was a weak, decentralised Confederation with no standing army to enforce its rule. The victorious American bourgeoisie soon faced concerted resistance to its attempts to impose its authority.

Around 70 per cent of the population in the ex-British colonies were small independent farmers. The colonial regime had always faced difficulties in exerting control over this group, which resisted attempts to enforce land ownership claims and demands for rent. During the war the American bourgeoisie was able to win support by confiscating the holdings of British landowners and turning them over to freeholders, who became mortgagees, paying back loans from banks instead of rent to landlords. But at the end of the war the priority of the new American state was to repay its enormous war debt and re-establish the terms of American credit in the world economy. It began to squeeze the small farmers, taking them to court, imprisoning them, confiscating their land and selling it below value.

In 1786 4,000 small farmers in Massachusetts fought back, in what became known as ‘Shays’ Rebellion’. This began as a peaceful movement for reform but the state just imposed stricter laws and increased repression through the courts, leading one local farmer to argue, “The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.”9 Army veterans organised a disciplined force and burned down the courthouses. The movement achieved a high level of organisation, forming committees which in effect became an alternative government. Local militias sided with the insurgents and the local bourgeoisie itself had to fund an armed expedition to crush the rebellion. After a failed march on Boston the rebel army was defeated and dispersed and several leaders were hanged. The former radical Samuel Adams accused “British emissaries” of stirring up the farmers and helped to draw up a Riot Act and a resolution suspending habeas corpus to crush the rising. Against pleas for clemency for the convicted rebels, he argued: “the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”10

By forcing farmers into debt and then using the new federal state to crush resistance, the American bourgeoisie finally succeeded in imposing capitalist authority on these independent producers and brutally integrating them into commodity production, thus achieving its aim of creating a class of capitalist small farmers which would help provide a buffer against the struggles of the poor proletariat, slaves and frontier Indians.

Ultimately the struggle of the small farmers was to try to preserve their existence as independent producers and essentially looked backwards to a previous, idealised stage of capitalist development. In practice, due to the vast availability of land, many were able to temporarily escape their new status by re-locating to the frontier.

The counter-revolutionary aims of the US constitution

‘Shays’ Rebellion’ directly influenced the debate on a new US Constitution, finally convincing anti-federalist elements in the American bourgeoisie of the need for a strong central government fully equipped to suppress insurrections of the poor.

In the wake of the uprising the federalist wing of the bourgeoisie (Madison, Hamilton, Jay) argued for a strong republic as a “barrier against domestic faction and insurrection”, seeing clearly that given the inevitable division of society into “those who hold and those who are without property” the principal task of the state was to manage the resulting class conflicts. Far from being a weakness, as anti-federalists argued, the large size of the new republic would make it even more difficult for incipient rebellions to unify:

“The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. […] A rage for paper money, for the abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union…”11

The resulting Constitution was thus not only designed to protect the interests of the rich, but was part of a conscious strategy by the most far-sighted faction of the American bourgeoisie to prevent future internal threats to the rule of capital from “those without property”. (The railing of today’s ‘Tea Party’ movement against overweening federal government while demanding a return to ‘government as intended by the Founding Fathers’ shows just how far removed it is from the real history of American capitalism, let alone its real interests…).

When resistance from small farmers flared again in the so-called ‘whiskey rebellion’, a tax protest by farmers in Pennsylvania in 1794 that spread to Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, this time the federal government mobilised 10,000 militia under Washington to occupy the region and unleash a wave of repression.

The same Constitution protected the institution of slavery and the rights of slaveholders to pursue fugitive slaves. As the price of its support for the new state the southern slaveholding bourgeoisie was given a guarantee that the slave trade would continue for at least 20 more years, during which time slavery in the Lower South expanded massively: in 1800 there were many more enslaved Africans than there were in in 1776. Slavery in the northern states was progressively ended, but as late as 1810 almost a quarter of the black population of the North remained slaves.

The Revolution cemented the political rule of the slaveholding bourgeoisie, whose slave-based plantation economy was essential to the survival of the new republic. To justify why the ‘universal’ rights enshrined in the Constitution – supposedly the self-evident gift of God – could be denied to an entire section of the population, increasing use was made of racist, pseudo-scientific concepts of biological inferiority and white supremacy. The growth of such ideas, together with the sanctioning of slavery and constitutional guarantees to the slaveholders, further entrenched the deep racial divisions in the early American proletariat.

Conclusions

The American Revolution strengthened capitalist domination in North America and established a more effective state apparatus to enforce bourgeois rule.

The American bourgeoisie – one of the most intelligent fractions of the capitalist class in this epoch – was able to successfully harness the class struggles of artisans, labourers and small farmers to its own struggle for political power. In doing so it taught an invaluable lesson to the rest of its class in how to rule: the need for flexibility, compromise and above all for policies specifically designed to mobilise popular support and forge tactical alliances with sections of the working class. (The success of these policies at the time is shown, for example, in the enthusiastic demonstrations by white artisans and workers in New York City to celebrate the signing of the Constitution.) Having achieved its goal, the American bourgeoisie then abandoned all pretence of more radical social and economic change and ruthlessly asserted the need for capitalist order.

The American bourgeoisie fought its successful national liberation struggle in order to remove the obstacles placed in the way of its pursuit of profit by the mercantilist policies of the British capitalist state, which restricted the growth of American trade and industry in order to prevent a threat to domestic manufacture. The fact that this struggle led to the removal of this obstacle to the growth of capitalism – and hence to the growth of the proletariat, its ultimate gravedigger – is alone enough to give the American Revolution a progressive character from the perspective of the interests of the working class.

The American Revolution also triggered further bourgeois revolutions in Europe, especially the Great French Revolution of 1789, which weakened the grip of decayed feudal society and removed obstacles to the growth of the proletariat internationally, thus hastening the conditions for capitalism’s ultimate overthrow.

Before the war there was no industrial proletariat to speak of in North America. The needs of the war against Britain accelerated the process of industrialisation and by the mid-1790s we can see a growing polarisation of interests between capital and labour, with an increase in strikes followed by the formation of the first permanent trade unions, which heralded the emergence of the modern working class in American capitalist society.

Some sections of the American working class gained real and lasting reforms from the Revolution. Due to the pressure exerted particularly by the struggles of the artisans, skilled and unskilled workers, the right to vote was extended to most white male workers in many states (but by no means all and not without ruling class resistance). By 1832 property qualifications had been removed in all but four states. This meant that, unlike the British working class, for example, which was still fighting a protracted battle for basic democratic rights in the mid-19th century, in America many workers had the right to vote even before the emergence of the industrial proletariat and its own permanent organisations, trade unions and political parties. But these gains for parts of the proletariat need to be seen alongside the sanctioning of slavery and the deployment of racist ideologies which ensured that the American working class remained deeply divided.

Under the influence of the struggles of the American proletariat the radical political thinkers of the bourgeoisie (Paine, Jefferson, Samuel Adams) had developed revolutionary new ideas which justified violent resistance to colonial tyranny and oppression based on a recognition of “the natural rights of man”. These ideas represented a breakthrough in bourgeois political thought in this epoch. But once in power, America’s Founding Fathers ensured that their new state was equipped to prevent violent resistance to their own rule and they did not hesitate to use it to crush further struggles against home-grown tyranny and oppression.

Liberal democracy proved to be the perfect ideological cover for the American bourgeoisie’s struggle against the obstructions to its pursuit of profit while the Bill of Rights served not only to protect its class rule but also to prevent unjustified state interference in this pursuit. The noble sentiments of the Declaration of Independence sanctified a state which from the moment of its birth defended the sordid interests of a system based on oppression and exploitation.

The story of the American Revolution from the point of view of the proletariat amply confirms Lenin’s conclusion in State and Revolution that “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this […], it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.” This was the enemy that the American proletariat faced in the next phase of its historic struggle to emancipate itself from all forms of tyranny.

MH 27/01/2014

This article tries to get a better understanding of the present social situation in France, which has been marked by a retreat in the class struggle since 2010. But because, as it says in the article, “the proletariat has no country: everywhere it wages the same struggle, in all countries it is one and the same class. The defeats or the victories of one part of the proletariat in this or that corner of the globe are defeats or victories for the proletariat as a whole on world scale, and according to its outcome each struggle ends up either denting the confidence of the whole class or arousing its enthusiasm”. The dynamic of the class struggle is studied here in its historical and international dimension, with all the elements of interdependence that this implies. The social movement in France has an impact on the workers of all countries, just as the movement across the world influence the situation in France. As we will see, this international dimension of the proletarian struggle is well known to the bourgeoisie, which in the face of its mortal enemy, the proletariat, is capable of going beyond its national divisions in order to coordinate its efforts and come to each other’s aid.

Since the movement against pension reform in 2010, four years ago, there hasn’t been any struggle on the same scale in France. However, there is no lack of reasons to fight. Caught in the crossfire between the economic crisis and government attacks, living conditions have continued to deteriorate. Lay-offs, austerity plans and factory closures have hit new heights (63,100 enterprises closed in 2013, reaching the previous record of 2009); every worker has to carry out more tasks with less colleagues and deplorable resources, while being subject to an immense moral pressure making them feel guilty and harassed; social benefits are melting away like snow in the sunshine; thousands of unemployed workers are deprived of benefits on the smallest pretext; taxes of all kinds are shooting upwards. Even more than the material attacks on the proletariat, the bourgeoisie’s contempt for the workers which it treats like cattle is becoming unbearable. The situation is disgusting and should give rise to something much greater than anger: indignation! So why this dreary social landscape? And it’s even worse: for some months now, the only demonstrations in the headlines are those mobilising the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, calling for a retreat into regionalism and spitting hatred towards homosexuals, Jews, women who have abortions…

To try to understand this situation, without entertaining pretty illusions or falling into despair, to confront the real difficulties of the struggle against capitalism – that should be the attitude of all those who want to contribute to the dawn of a new world. The words of Rosa Luxemburg uttered in to the insurrectionary workers of Berlin in January 1919 should be a source of inspiration to us:

“I think it is healthy to have a clear sight of all he difficulties and complications of his revolution. Because i hope that, no more than it is for me, this description of the great difficulties and tasks mounting up will not have a paralysing effect on you: on the contrary, the greater the task, the more we will bring together all our forces!” 1

Stalinism’s second stab in the back

Stalinism was the gravedigger of the proletarian revolution of 1917. When the German government had drowned in blood the insurrections of 1919, 1921 and 1923, the proletariat in Russia was totally isolated: the counter-revolution could then advance inexorably towards complete victory. But his triumph for the bourgeoisie did not take the form of a military conquest by the white armies, like the Versaillais who crushed the Paris Commune in 1871. It came from the ‘inside’, behind the red mask of a Bolshevik party which had gradually degenerated and then betrayed the working class.

This was a real historical tragedy, not just because the victory of the counter-revolution meant the deportation or massacre of millions of fighters who had remained faithful to the combat of 1917, but also because these crimes were perpetrated in the name of communism. The greatest lie in history – Stalinism equals communisms- was a terrible ideological poison injected into the veins of the workers. It made it possible to create a monstrous deformation of the proletarian struggle for the emancipation of humanity. For all those taken in by this shameful lie, what did the choice seem to be? Either to carry on claiming adherence to communism by defending, either blindly or ‘critically’, the ‘fatherland of socialism’, the USSR, and all its crimes; or to reject the USSR, the Russian revolution and the whole history of the workers’ movement without distinction. This was Stalinism’s first stab in the back.

And the second? It was carried out when the USSR collapsed. An enormous campaign was mounted at the beginning of the 1990s: the death of communism and even the ‘end of history’ were declared2 The same message was dinned into people’s heads again and again: the revolutionary struggle of the working class leads to the most terrible barbarism. So, “to the dustbin with Marx, Engels and Lenin since they were just Stalin’s forebears! To the dustbin the lessons of the workers’ struggles throughout history because they could only give birth to a monster! Long live eternal capitalism!” The sociologists and other experts came along with their own little contribution to this by adding that, in any case, the working class no longer existed in Europe or the USA because industry had almost disappeared: blue collars and the 1848 Communist Manifesto were just relics.

We should never underestimate the huge destructive power of this ideology. The workers of this or that sector, the unemployed, the pensioners, young workers in insecure jobs....found themselves atomised in the 1990s because there was no visible working class with which to identify. They were without a future because the fight for a better world was officially impossible, and without a past because reading books about the history of the workers’ movement taught you only that class struggle leads to the horror of Stalinism. Despair, the feeling of ‘no future’, loneliness thus made a great leap forward, just as feelings of solidarity and militancy took a leap backwards. Lacking any perspective, the social fabric began to decompose and is still decomposing3.

Thus the dynamic of struggle that was born with the proletarian earthquake of May 1968 and which had spread across the whole world was broken in 1990-91. The bourgeoisie had managed to convince the proletariat that it didn’t exist, that there never had been a revolution and never would be4.

The Machiavellianism of the ruling class

The bourgeoisie is the most Machiavellian, manoeuvring ruling class in history. And if the Paris Commune of 1871 and above all the Russian revolution of 1917 have taught it one thing, it is that it needs to everything it can to prevent the proletariat from affirming its historic perspective. A brief summary of the manoeuvres and traps set up by the bourgeoisie towards the workers of France since the 1990s is very enlightening about the way this class is constantly preoccupied with blocking the development of consciousness in the proletariat by tirelessly exploiting its mortal enemy’s main weakness – not knowing what it is, the loss of its identity:

• In 1995, the French bourgeoisie took advantage of the disorientation among the workers in order to refurbish the image of its most loyal guard-dogs, the trade unions. Since it knew perfectly well that it was impossible at that point for the workers to take control of their own struggles given the weakness of class consciousness, the French bourgeoisie artificially created a massive movement by simultaneously launching two attacks: a very broad one that affected everyone (the Juppé plan on social security) and a specific one (against the ‘privileged’ status of the railway workers), which was very obviously a provocation. This was calculated to allow the unions to look as if they were, this time, united, militant and radical. To what end? Given the increasing wearing out of the unions and the defiance shown towards them by the workers after 35 years of sabotaging social movements from May 68 and the struggles which followed in the 70s and 80s, it was important for the bourgeoisie to provide a new and more positive image for its organs for controlling the working class, to restore the workers’ confidence in them. This is why, faced with this cardboard cut-out movement, the Juppé government pretended to be shaking in its shoes and officially withdrew the attacks. The trade unions had their victory and the message got through: struggle pays if and only if you follow your unions like sheep5. Because there is nothing more dangerous for the bourgeoisie than workers starting to think and organise for themselves.

• In 2003, the social atmosphere had changed. The bourgeoisie came up with the same trick: two simultaneous attacks, a general one (yet another reform of pensions) and a particular one (suppression of thousands of jobs in national education). But the government played it differently this time. The manoeuvre was a simple one: hide the attack on the retired, which affected the whole working class, by harassing a specific sector with a specific measure. And here the unions, whose credibility had been improved by the manoeuvre of 1995, came onto the scene. Pushing the question of pensions into the background, they put forward the particular demands of the workers in national education. Thus, the sector of the working class that was most directly affected, instead of being the locomotive of a wider movement, got stuck in the trap of corporatism. The teachers found themselves isolated and powerless. The unions managed to exhaust the most militant elements by dragging them into desperate and sterile actions like the boycott of the end of year exams. And in order to carry out this sabotage, the bourgeoisie took malign pleasure in announcing that not one strike day would be paid . The prime minister at the time, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, could thus come out with a message addressed to the whole working class: “it’s not the street that governs”.

• In 2006, the movement against the CPE had not been programmed in advance by the government. On the contrary, it came as a surprise. In its origins, the attack seemed to be a relatively minor one: it was a question of installing a new contract that would make employment for the under 25s a little less secure. However a large portion of the young future proletarians reacted in an unexpected way by taking things in hand through real general assemblies and by refusing to get trapped in a movement of ‘young people’. On the contrary they called for solidarity from other sectors – pensioners, the unemployed etc. This involved some clashes with the student unions who everywhere tried to undermine this push towards the self-organisation and extension of the movement. Demonstration after demonstration took place with more and more members of the working class joining in a completely disinterested way (since the intended reform didn’t affect them directly). They were drawn in by what cements our class together: the feeling of solidarity. The bourgeoisie was intelligent enough to see the danger and immediately withdrew its project in order to put a stop to this dangerous dynamic.

• In the following year, 2007, there was still a breath of enthusiasm from these events. The railway workers on the one hand, the high school students and university students on the other, were attacked separately in a targeted manner. Many high school students joined the movement on the railways, and the demonstrations pulled in quite a number of workers from other sectors, the pensioners and the unemployed. At the general assemblies, union leaders were booed and kicked out6. Having said this, because the drive towards solidarity in the working class was not as strong as it had been the year before and the general assemblies remained under the control of the unions, the government did not give in: the attacks went through and the struggle wore out. The price paid by the bourgeoisie to get through the message that ‘struggle doesn’t pay’ was a significant degree of discredit for the unions. But the defeat was not sufficiently bitter for the proletariat as far as the bourgeoisie was concerned. The ruling class could not stop there.

• In 2008 and 2009, in Guadeloupe, there was immense anger about the cost of living, The French bourgeoisie then used this militant but isolated proletariat, lacking experience and poisoned by racial divisions between white and black, as laboratory animals to test out its manoeuvres. There followed the biggest workers’ mobilisation in the island’s history, impressive on the quantitative level, but contained from start to finish by the local trade union federation, the LKP. The movement ended up with a few promises about price controls and some short-term assistance, but above all with a considerable exhaustion of militancy. The manoeuvre had worked and could then be tried out on the mainland.

• 2010 thus saw throughout the year a series of massive demonstrations. Here again here was huge anger over the question of accessing pensions, symbolising a future that looked more and more bleak. But right away the unions took things in hand. In fact, after a number of meetings with the government, their response had been planned well in advance. Month after month at first, and then week after week, they mobilised on a broad scale and got millions of works to turn out for ‘days of action’ each one more sterile than the one before. A very small minority reacted against this by holding general assemblies outside of union control, mobilising a few hundred people and calling for workers to organise themselves. But this call, profoundly correct for the future, could only be a pious wish in the immediate situation, which was marked by very strong union control. In the wake of these days of action, where discussions were forbidden by the union police, where encounters between different sectors of the exploited class was made impossible because of the way the unions split everyone up behind ‘their’ banner, ‘their’ colleagues, where general assemblies were restricted mainly to the union members and divided up sector by sector, enterprise by enterprise, department by department, the result was exhaustion and discouragement and above all a growing feeling of impotence. To complete this work of sabotage, and when the movement was in decline, the unions started getting radical and called for blocking the economy by occupying the supposedly strategic oil refining sector. The most militant workers thus found themselves isolated trying to defend the blockade of ‘their own’ oil refining unit. This manoeuvre, we should recognise, was a significant success for the bourgeoisie because four years later the feeling of impotence generated at the time was such that the social situation today is still marked y an atmosphere of depression.

The timing of this manoeuvre needs also to be looked at. Why this concern to exhaust the militancy of the workers in France at precisely this moment? In the summer of 2007, with the subprime crisis and above all in the autumn of 2008 with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank, the world economic crisis went through a sudden aggravation. In Europe, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain were hit hard, especially by the explosion of unemployment and cuts in public sector wages, while France was relatively spared. And yet it was in France that we saw the first ‘response’ by the trade unions. Why? Through the artificial movement in 2010 which went on to the point of exhaustion, it is quite possible that the bourgeoisie dug a kind of firebreak: feeling the anger and reflection that were developing in the countries hardest hit by the crisis, especially in Spain (a country which also has a long experience of workers’ struggles), it had to wear out this anger in a preventative manner and so discourage the struggle in France. To see a simultaneous struggle by these two neighbouring proletariats would have been very dangerous for the bourgeoisie. In any case, this union manoeuvre by the French bourgeoisie had the effective result of demoralising the workers just before the development of a major social movement on the other side of the Pyrenees. In 2011, when the movement of the Indignados emerged on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and spread throughout the world, even to Israel, or to the USA under the name of Occupy, it failed lamentably in France since the workers were already down in the dumps. The geographical extension of the Indignados movement towards its nearest class brothers and sisters was thus blocked and the Indignados ended up being isolated...which partly explains why in Spain as well the social situation is very bleak despite the incessant heavy blows of the economic crisis. The proletariat has no country: everywhere it wages the same struggle, in all countries it is one and the same class. The defeats or the victories of one part of the proletariat in this or that corner of the globe are defeats or victories for the proletariat as a whole on world scale, and according to its outcome each struggle ends up either denting the confidence of the whole class or arousing its enthusiasm. This is why the bourgeoisie’s success in preventing the movements in France and Spain from converging explains the retreat in struggle since the end of 2011 which goes well beyond the frontiers of these two countries; the isolation of the Indignados movement has also had repercussions on an international scale.

The other reason for this negative dynamic, which is something that was always inscribed in the process of decomposition and of loss of class identity since 1990, is the sinister turn taken by the ‘Arab spring’. The initial social movements in Tunisia and Egypt, with the symbol of the occupation of Tahir Square, even if they were from the start marked by the weakness of inter-classism, were also animated by a wave of indignation and, more concretely, by workers’ strikes. The Indignados movement saw in them a source of inspiration and courage: from the first days of the struggle in Madrid it raised the internationalist slogan ‘From Tahrir Square to Puerto del Sol!’. However, in Libya and Syria where a historically much weaker proletariat was not able to put its mark on the movement, we saw the horrors of civil war and the involvement of regional and international imperialist forces which ended up totally dominating the situation, turning it into a murderous confrontation between rival bourgeois gangs. Egypt in turn, though obviously to a lesser degree, fell into a situation of constant confrontation between bourgeois factions. The apparent message that came from this chain of events, widely broadcast by the media which was very generous with its horrible images, is that the social struggle, the aspiration for dignity and freedom, are dead ends which always end in chaos. And the most recent events in Ukraine confirm this feeling even more. The working class will have to undertake a real effort of reflection in order to understand the real reasons for this degeneration into civil war:

• The proletariat has nothing to gain from fighting for bourgeois democracy or a ‘more human capitalism’ because that means fighting to maintain a system of exploitation which can only be barbaric;

• It has everything to lose from allowing itself to be dragged behind the confrontation between cliques and gangs of the bourgeoisie;

• It has no local, regional, national, communitarian, ethnic or religious interests to defend;

• Its struggle is for the abolition of exploitation, of classes and frontiers on a world scale;

• Its strength lies through the development of its consciousness and its morality, its self-organisation and international solidarity.

The ideological manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie permanently distils a whole number of lies and subterfuges in order to undermine the capacity for thought and reflection. All the manoeuvres of the French bourgeoisie since the 90s provide evidence of this major weapon of the ruling class faced with its enemy: its intelligence and the strength of its ideological propaganda:

• The years which followed the collapse of the USSR were dominated by this ruthless ideological offensive on the death of communism and the ‘end of history’; years in which the lie that Stalinism equals communism was repeated ad nauseam. This was a terrible blow to the workers’ confidence in the struggle for a better world, as we have already seen;

• The demonstrations of 2003 as we have also said, showed that there had been a slight change in the social climate in comparison to the ambient despair of the 90s: not only was anger and militancy very strong but even more important people had begun thinking about the evolution of the world situation. The commodification of every human activity, the destruction of the planet and run-away job insecurity were all subjects of concern. The anti-globalisation movement of the 90s, which essentially stood for a nationalist orientation and a fear of the future, mutated into the idea that ‘another world is possible’, animated by a desire to fight against uniformity and standardisation. This evolution is interesting because it reveals a change in the state of mind within the working class. The bourgeoisie had been obliged to adapt, to develop its propaganda in order to keep the workers in its ideological grip and to divert their reflection from discovering the real roots of humanity’s ills: capitalism, exploitation of man by man, class society. Because anti-globalisation, like ‘alternative worldism’ are ideological traps laid by the bourgeoisie to dilute the workers in interclassism, to take them away from revolutionary thought and push them into battles for illusions like more democracy, a more human policy against neo-liberalism, fair trade etc7.

• A few years later, from the summer of 2007, the serious aggravation of the crisis pushed the bourgeoisie to adapt its language once again. Traditionally, the dominant discourse on the world economic situation was to deny the gravity of the situation. At the time of the failure of the Lehman Brothers bank in the autumn of 2008, by contrast, all the media, politicians and intellectuals started waving their arms about and shouting catastrophe: the world was facing the threat of no longer going round, the world economy could slide into the abyss of debts and the apocalypse was round the corner. Why this radical change of tone? Why stop hiding the real gravity of the world economic situation and suddenly start dramatising it without limit? Since the economic crisis could no longer be hidden, the bourgeoisie had decided to talk all day about it in order to prevent any independent thought. Above all this alarmist discourse was used in order to justify the “necessary sacrifices”. Here again we have to think about a possibility: the American government and its central bank, the FED, certainly had the financial resources to save Lehman Brothers, but they decided to declare it bankrupt. It is not to be excluded that this was done to unleash a media panic and justify those sacrifices. Increasing the profitability of the American and European national economies had become a vital necessity faced with the growing competition of the ‘emerging countries’, particularly China. In the name of the ‘struggle against the deficit’ a whole number of countries brought in polices based on a drastic reduction of social spending, wage cuts, suppression of jobs in the public sector etc8 . For example today Spain has effectively restored the competitive edge of its national economy and is again exporting.9

The French bourgeoisie has also played this card. Many state employees who have reached the retirement age are not being replaced, wages have been frozen, social assistance reduced, taxes increased. But unlike other neighbouring countries it has not carried out very broad attacks: promised reforms of social security, unemployment benefit, pensions, status of state employees etc have been put off again and again.

This is further proof of the intelligence of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat living in France is, like elsewhere, atomised and does not know that it exists. This said, and the movement of 2006 was a new proof of his, this is an experienced and historically militant proletariat. Even though its consciousness of itself has been terribly weakened, a massive and frontal attack by French capital would risk sparking off an equally massive and frontal social movement. Not only does the French bourgeoisie not want this, its neighbouring bourgeoisies are also afraid of such a thing.

Thus since 2010 and the manoeuvre which demoralised the workers, the ruling class has been trying to maintain this phase of social calm. It constantly attacks living and working conditions but in small packets here and there. While a lion, sure of its strength, hurls itself on a gazelle with one bound, the hyenas, who rely on intelligence and strategy, harass their prey, take small bites, wear it out with patience and precision. Even if each French president dreams of being a lion10, the French bourgeoisie really acts like the hyenas when it comes to the workers. It attacks this or that sector, reduces this or that benefit or increases this or that tax by a few euro, according to the old adage: divide and rule. The bourgeoisie makes the best of its enemy’s weaknesses: since the working class has lost its class identity, since it is living under the reign of social decomposition and of atomisation, it falls on the working class in small groups, and even individual by individual.

The left, which has been in power since the victory of the ‘socialist’ François Hollande in 2012, has once again shown itself to be particularly adept at playing this game, which requires hypocrisy, sneakiness and an ability to instrumentalise decomposition. Not only has it acquired the art of disguising its attacks but has done it under cover of a thick ideological fog. By putting forward its law legalising marriage for all, by making a very public show of opposition to the anti-Semitism of the ‘comedian’ Dieudonné, or by creating a tax which is aimed in particular at small industries, peasants, shopkeepers and artisans, it knows that it has been stirring up the most reactionary elements in society. And it has worked: demos against gays, against Jews, for the ‘defence of the regions’ which claim to unite small bosses and workers under the same ‘red caps’11, it’s all been thrown into the pot.

This is a very effective ideological trap. First it disseminates either these putrefying ideas, or a fear of a dynamic which looks like it is heading towards fascism. Then it creates the illusion that the left is progressive because it is facing up to the most openly reactionary elements. In either case, this increases the disorientation of the working class, its loss of sight of what it is and the social power it represents, by diluting the workers in these inter-classist movements, whether they are pro- or anti- the government.

The international solidarity of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat in France

The French bourgeoisie is thus particularly adroit in the way it undermines the consciousness of the proletariat and derails its thought into dead end. For example, it’s no accident that this was the birthplace of ‘alternative worldism’, which then spread across the globe12. This strength is the fruit of a long experience of confronting its enemy: 1848, 1871 and 1968, to take only a few examples which have in common the fact that they saw the proletariat in France in the forefront of the international struggle that provided an example to its class brothers and sisters the world over.

However, the presence in France of an experienced and militant exploited class also limits the bourgeoisie’s margin for manoeuvre. While it is intelligent enough to try to avoid massive and frontal attacks and to opt for a policy of harassment and a more gradual erosion of living conditions, French capital still needs some major structural reforms if it is to restore its competitive edge on the world market. France is on the verge of becoming the ‘sick man of Europe’, a title given to the UK after the Second World War and to Germany in the 1990s. But these countries have both improved their situation by carrying out deep and brutal attacks under Thatcher and Schröder respectively.

France’s inability to carry out similar attacks worries Germany in particular. It has no interest in seeing the French economy go under , because this would damage the European economic institutions. But more than this, a serious recession in France would imply more factory closures, an explosion of unemployment and drastic austerity, which could provoke a powerful response from the proletariat. There is clearly a dilemma facing French capital: attack massively, with the risk of provoking a revival of struggle, or wait and watch the economy deteriorate...at the risk of provoking a revival of struggle. This is why the German bourgeoisie is looking at how to help France to recover its competitive edge without creating any uncontrolled social movements. German advisers have been heading for the Élysée for months now (for example, the meeting between Hollande and Peter Harz, Schröder’s former adviser and the mind behind all the attack in Germany since 2000 that have been aimed at making jobs less secure and at reducing unemployment benefits). Germany is thus helping the French bourgeoisie to think about how to mount the necessary attacks. In particular, the two countries have to coordinate their planning in order not to make attacks too simultaneously and to avoid provoking anger at the same time on both sides of the Rhine. Just as the bourgeoisie did all it could to avoid potential link-up between the struggles in Spain and France, it is right now concerned about keeping the workers in France and Germany divided by staggering the attacks in a concerted manner. The German bourgeoisie’s support for the French state in its need to carry out attacks began as soon as Hollande won the presidential election: Germany was the first to spread the idea that Hollande was a bit soft and indecisive, a “Flamby”13...thus giving the impression that he would be unable to take bold measures and thus to attack the working class. This image was also consciously popularised by the French bourgeoisie because it will help the government carry out attacks without making its intentions too obvious.

This international solidarity of the bourgeoisie does have its limits. The bourgeoisie is still divided into nations and is engaged in bitter competition on the world market. This competition also takes military form and the tragic proof of this is the imperialist barbarity which has ravaged the planet since 1914. But history has shown one thing: this division ends when it comes to the proletariat. During the Paris Commune, the Prussian army which occupied a part of France was ready to help the Versailles to crush the Communards even though the corpses from the Franco-Prussian war were still warm. In 1917, all the powers came together to help the white armies against the Russian revolution even while the world war was still raging elsewhere. On another level, during the mass strike in Poland in 1980, the democratic bourgeoisies rushed to the aid of the Polish bourgeoisie to help it deal with the proletariat, not militarily, but ideologically: the French CFDT trade union, in particular, played a very important role, using its considerable experience in the sabotage of workers’ struggles to advise the newly formed Solidarnosc trade union to do the same.

The future belongs to the class struggle

To summarise: the proletariat faces a ruling class which is the most Machiavellian in history. Its ideological propaganda and its international unity against the exploited reveal the breadth of the difficulties facing the movement towards revolution. The bourgeoisie above all has the ability to turn the rottenness of its own system against the working class: capitalism has no future to offer, people fear for the future and this engenders the tendency towards irrational thinking or retreating into a corner. The bourgeoisie makes use of these fears, of this retreat, this irrationality to reinforce the atomisation of the workers, to cultivate the feeling of powerlessness and thus to be able to attack them one after the other.

However, the future belongs to the proletarian struggle! The obstacles are huge, but not insurmountable. The bourgeoisie will not stop dividing us, but the proletariat has already proved that the feeling of solidarity runs deep. This is why the movement against the CPE in 2006 was so precious. The government’s attack was aimed solely at those under 25 but hundreds of thousands of workers, pensioners, unemployed, joined the struggle. They were carried along by a strong sentiment of solidarity. This dynamic could come to light to the extent that the movement was organised outside of union control, through real autonomous general assemblies, animated by open debates which could express the real nature of the working class. This movement was a promise for the future, a small seed which can germinate and give rise to magnificent wild flowers. Thus, in order to be able to participate in the movements to come, it’s necessary to have our ears open, to be able to base ourselves on historical experience, on the great lessons of the past, without dogmas and rigid schemas. The destruction of the big industrial units of Europe and the USA, the creation in these areas of many jobs linked to research, administration, services, distribution; the multiplication of short term, intermediate contracts, the total job insecurity of young people and the explosion of unemployment, all this will have a string impact in the way that future struggles will develop and move forward despite all the traps laid by the bourgeoisie. When in New York young people involved in the Occupy movement in 2011 saw that gathering in the street, both to live together and to fight, gave them a feeling of engaging in new social relations, made them recognise that they had been suffering enormously from their isolation in different workplaces where they spent a few weeks, days or even hours, when they weren’t stuck at home without any job at all...without knowing it, they were pointing towards the future, to the importance of living and struggling as part of a social fabric animated by solidarity, by sharing, by real human encounters. The street, as a place to assemble will thus take on a growing importance, not to go on tame processions where we are divided up and deafened by union megaphones, but to debate frankly in autonomous, open general assemblies. In the same way the movement against the CPE in 2006 and of the Indignados in 2011 show just as clearly that ‘precarious’ young people, less scarred by the whole campaign about the death of Stalinism being the death of communism, and more indignant about the future that capitalism has in store for us, will play a decisive role with their enthusiasm, creativity and willingness to struggle. The older workers (retired or still at work) will have the possibility of forging solidarity between the generations and the particular responsibility of transmitting their experience, of helping to anticipate traps which they have experienced themselves in the past. These are just the “broad signposts”, to use Marx’s term, which have begun to appear in recent years, but the creativity of the masses will bring many changes and unexpected discoveries.

Pawel 6.3.14

On April 14, what's being called the biggest strike in recent memory in China began at one of the Yue Yuen factories in Dongguan, southern China. Depending on what reports one reads, the numbers on strike went from thirty to forty thousand, with  the South China Morning Post of April 18 reporting the number as 50,000[1]. The strike started at one of the 7 factories of the Taiwan-based Yue Yuen Industrial Holding Company, the world's largest branded shoemaker, which makes footwear for Nike, Adidas, Converse, Reebok, Timberland and dozens more. A woman just retired from one of the factories worked out her pension payments and discovered that they were well short of what she expected. A strike broke out at the factory and a couple of hundred workers walked out, only to be followed by tens of thousands more from the other 6 plants in the following days. A few days later, anything from two thousand to six thousand workers (depending on reports) walked out from the Yue Yuen plant in the neighbouring province of Jiangxi over the same issue of the underfunding of the social wage.

The underfunding of workers' benefits -  pensions, injury compensation, redundancy pay, sickness and unemployment pay - is becoming a big issue for the working class in China, particularly as factories close, relocate to cheaper locations abroad like Vietnam for example, or internally within China, as with from militant Shenzhen to more peaceful (for the moment) Huizhou Province for instance. This chronic underfunding is by no means a phenomenon linked to foreign-owned companies as some elements of the Chinese bourgeoisie have suggested - and have done so in the past in relation to Japanese-owned businesses - but is the general practice of Chinese capitalism along with all the capitalist states of the west as workers’ pensions, unemployment pay and social benefits are cut further and further back. It's also significant that the working class in China is raising the issue of pension provisions and other longer term benefits. It shows, just like the workers of the west, the great concern and unease that exists for the future and future generations of workers. Their actions are in a line with the struggle against pension cuts in France 2010 which mobilised workers of all ages onto the streets in a massive show of anger and protest. It's the same issue that mobilised the New York subway strike in December 2005 when the bosses attempted to cut future pensions payments and curtail medical benefits leading some 35000 workers to walk out. A similar concern for the future has contributed to mobilising workers and youth in mass demonstrations in Spain and Greece bringing tens of thousands onto the streets. And it took all the deviousness of the British trade unions to smother the concern and anger of workers in Britain against a brutal assault on pensions in both the private and public sector with the unions helping the bosses to facilitate cuts in pensions, while cutting the pensions and increasing the contributions of workers directly employed by them.

Another issue coming to the fore for the proletariat in China, raised by cuts in social benefits and the growing number of factory closures is that many jobs are now classified by the state as "temporary". This means great difficulty in obtaining education for children, health care and all the benefits listed above because one doesn't have a permanent residence permit. Workers here are not only fighting for a better cut of the "social wage" but in this strike are also demanding a 30% pay rise[2]. The company has made some sort of offer to the workers but, such as it is, this has clearly been rejected by them and what's lacking in the "People's Republic" is any effective trade union machinery trapping the workers in the negotiating fraud. As Yue Yuen spokesman and executive director George Lui, put it on April 22: "We are not quite sure who to deal with"[3]. This is a real problem for the Chinese ruling class and leads them to rely more on the short term and ultimately counter-productive solution of brute force against the subtlety of trade union sabotage carried out by those organisations in the west for example.

Despite the fighting spirit and the solidarity expressed by the working class in China, indeed because of it, there are also problems and obstacles that the workers need to confront, just like their class brothers in the west. Strikes in China are this year a third up on the same period last year which also saw significant increases in incidents of labour unrest; and we should remember that 99% of strikes in China are unofficial and illegal. Researchers this year have spoken of "a notable surge in the number of strikes and workers' protest since the Lunar New Year Holiday in February... the workers movement (i.e., strikes and protests) continues to be broad-based in a whole range of industries across the country"[4]. Underlining the repressive response from the Chinese state the research goes on to say that there is "a noticeable increase in both police involvement and arrests arising from workers' protests". With a weak and despised union apparatus there's no wonder that riot police have been liberally deployed here in Dongguan as they increasingly have been against workers' struggle in China. Clear information about the conduct and organisation of the strike by workers is not readily available for obvious reasons but there is some evidence that  the workers feel the need to organise assemblies and elect their own delegates (there was a call from workers at one Dongguan factory for the election of their own delegates and there is certainly a "leadership" to this strike). Still, we can't know the details here. What is clear is that shortly after the strike began around a thousand workers from one Yue Yuen plant started to march (possibly to another factory), the march was confronted by riot police and dogs and its leaders were arrested with some hospitalised[5]. There were also forays by riot police arresting some workers in and around the factory. It's quite possible that they were militants fingered by the ubiquitous All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) goons, 900,000 of whom, mostly Party members, exist across the country.

The strikes of the Yue Yuen workers are ongoing - as has been the general strike wave in China for some time - but similar issues have been raised in previous strikes this year: at IBM's Shenzhen factory and Walmart stores in late March. The ACFTU  was instrumental in setting up Walmart's 400 stores in China in 2006/7 amid a government-led drive to unionise private companies. Part of the deal was that all Walmart employees would have their compulsory subs to the union deducted straight from the workers’ wages. This is now normal for Chinese industry and is a very lucrative deal for the ACFTU given its 260 million members. British unions (and unions in the west generally) have been in on this scam for decades, enriching themselves directly from the workers' payroll with the agreement of the bosses and the law.

The protest by workers against the pathetic redundancy pay offered by Walmart with the closure of their store in the Hunan province city of Changde is interesting for the attempt to "radicalise" elements of the ACFTU. Leading the protest is one Huang Xingguo, the branch secretary and chairman of the union. It turns out that Huang, like many Chinese union leaders, has come from admin management and is now apparently devoting his cause to the workers[6]. The identification of unions with management is not at all an unfamiliar story to workers in the west, although in the latter there is more ideological obfuscation. Huang has gone a step further in following western unions by involving groups of lawyers and taking the road well-trod by British unions in looking for industrial harmony through the courts. This is an increasing tendency in China as this particular faction of the bourgeoisie looks for class peace through negotiation within the law. Other militants who have been involved in the initial strike have been arrested but unlike Huang, who is free to consort with cliques of lawyers, they have not been supported by the US union, ALF-CIO. Contrast this to one Wu Guijun, a real representative of the workers during their 3 week strike at the Hong-Kong based Diweixin furniture makers in Shenzhen[7]. Wu was among some 200 workers arrested, detained and is still in jail but he's had the unfortunate experience of being backed by letter-writing western liberals, academics, trade union executives, human rights lawyers and even, for their own imperialist interests no doubt, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (20.12.13), all bleating about the right to strike and protest which doesn't even exist in their own countries.

The ongoing Dongguan strikes, the whole continuing strike wave in China, shows the militant courage of large masses of the proletariat. But, like their comrades in the west, the working class in China has significant challenges to confront and overcome. The strike also shows the role of the trade unions who are everywhere mandated to protect the national interest of whatever country they are working in. The function of the trade unions, and this is clearly expressed in China, is to police the workers, along with the riot police, facilitate the attacks upon them and protect the state. This is happening in China with its specifics at the moment but these anti-working class activities are fundamental aspects of the trade unions everywhere.

Baboon, 24.4.14 (This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

The evolution of the situation in Venezuela after a month of sporadic confrontations and demonstrations in the streets has unfortunately not lived up to the potential originally contained in this uprising of young people rebelling against poverty, rising living costs (the official rate of inflation is 56%), precarious employment, insecurity, permanent terror and a future in total contradiction with the propaganda of the post-Chavez regime. While the level of repression has got a lot heavier (18 deaths and 260 wounded by 5 March) since the texts below were written, the bourgeoisie has managed to get control of this movement, mainly through the use of oppositional factions, both of the left and the right. The ruling class has got down to pushing this movement onto the ground of democratism and nationalism, as we can see from the immense national flags displayed in the demonstrations. The manipulations and manoeuvres of rival imperialist interests have overtaken the anger on the street and the Venezuelan student movement has shown that it has not overcome the weaknesses of 2007[1]. Once again it has fallen for the traps and lies of the democratic opposition, which has the function of smothering its explosive character, cutting it from its proletarian roots and handing it over to the politicians and other exploiters.

We are publishing a translation of the two statements already published on our Spanish website: a contribution by a close sympathiser of the ICC who wrote and distributed a leaflet in the days after the repression of young people on 12 February by the Maduro government and its agents. The other is a text presenting this leaflet written by our section in Venezuela. Both point to the real stakes in the situation: the necessary link between this revolt of the young and the more general resistance of the proletariat on its class terrain, even though this link has been sabotaged by all the forces of the bourgeoisie acting to derail and recuperate the movement.

These statements also have the merit of breaking the relative black-out in Europe over these events. The bourgeoisie has once again tried to hide the real point of departure of this massive youth rebellion against increasingly intolerable living conditions, placing all the emphasis on the fight between ‘Chavists’ and ‘anti-Chavists’, between the ruling power and the ‘democratic opposition’.

Presentation of the leaflet by Internacialismo, ICC publication in Venezuela

The leaflet below, written and distributed by a sympathiser of the ICC, takes a position on the brutal repression unleashed by the Chavist regime (currently led by Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro) against a massive mobilisation called by the students for 12 February in the centre of Caracas, calling for the release of four of their imprisoned comrades and protesting against scarcity, the rising cost of living and insecurity in the cities. The repressive actions of the ‘Bolivarian Socialist’ regime has left three dead and dozens of wounded and arrested.

The student mobilisation has detonated an immense wave of indignation which has been building up within the working masses and the population in general, who have been hit very hard by a grave economic crisis. Large sectors of the population at national level supported the determined actions of the young people, coming together in a movement of generalised protest against the regime and to show their rage and indignation against the high rate of inflation, which has not been countered by any wage increases; against the growing scarcity of basic goods (in particular food, medicine, hygiene); against the high level of public insecurity which has taken the sinister form of 200,000 murders in the lifetime of the Chavist regime; against the deterioration of health services, the casualisation of jobs and the grotesque propaganda of the Chavist regime which at both national and international level has been trying to sell the ‘benefits’ of ‘Bolivarian socialism’. In reality, this regime epitomises the barbarism and poverty which decomposing capitalism offers humanity.  

As we have seen with other social movements around the world, the Chavist bourgeoisie has resorted to its preferred methods of action: open and ruthless repression against the demonstrators, using not only the official state forces but also the civilian militias armed and paid by the state, the Bolivarian committees whose function is to intimidate, to create a climate of terror, which includes firing on unarmed demonstrators.  It is they who are directly responsible for the deaths and the injuries. But by allowing these para-police forces to act freely, the state has tried to hide its own responsibility in the repression. These actions by the ‘Bolivarian revolutionaries’ should not surprise us. Throughout its history the bourgeoisie has used declassed and lumpenised elements as its shock troops against the proletariat. We saw this with the fascist networks (Mussolini’s Blackshirts and the Nazi Brownshirts) as well as with the Stalinist regimes, like in Cuba with the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, or under the dictatorial regimes in the Arab countries (Libya, Syria, Egypt), or again more recently with countries allied to  ‘21st Century Socialism’ such as Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia...

The bourgeoisie is aware of the gravity of the country’s economic crisis, which in turn is an expression of the crisis of world capitalism. The economic methods of the regime have merely precipitated an imminent crisis. Despite the considerable income from oil, the Chavist regime can no longer cope with the vast levels of public expenditure needed to keep up the populist policies of almost 30 years, or continue providing cheap oil to buttress a geo-political strategy which is getting weaker and weaker. Thus the conditions for the emergence of the protests have been steadily ripening. To prevent any convergence between those who were previously supporters and opponents of the regime, the government has imposed a media and internet black-out to prevent the dissemination of information about the protests, while the state media tried to mobilise the pro-Chavez part of the population against the students and the demonstrations, criminalising the protesters and presenting itself as the only guarantor of social peace.    

Despite the obstacles set up by the state, given the economic, social and political situation, the new student movement has a potential which could enable it to go beyond its initial composition and to spread onto the national level.

To get to this, it will have to avoid falling into the same traps as the movement of 2007, which was weakened and derailed by all the false friends represented by the parties in opposition to the regime, who are just the other side of the same coin, part of the same political apparatus of capital. They offer no way out of the crisis. This is why we fully agree with our comrade when he writes in the leaflet that the only way forward for this movement is to unite with the working class sectors which, despite the repression and harassment of the trade unions, have remained standing and struggling over the last few years: the workers of the steel, oil and health sectors, the state employees, etc.

As we said in 2007, we salute the spontaneous upsurge of this new movement of student youth, whose confrontation with the state contains elements which make it part of the proletarian struggle against the capitalist system. These are the same elements which were present in the social movements which have shaken the world from the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 to the Indignados in Spain, Occupy in the US and the recent movements in Brazil and Turkey.

Leaflet: the bloody repression of 12 February 2014

The ‘highest achievement of 21st Century Socialism’ (according to those with a nostalgia for Stalinism) has been shaken recently by a wave of riots which has spread across the whole republic and whose main actor has been the mass of young people, who have come from different social strata, and who have concentrated in themselves the oppression of a population attacked by the decomposition of a social model based on the cruellest form of capitalism (a caricatured form  of state capitalism) and which has affected national life these past 15 years. The rage provoked by an infernal spiral marked by insecurity, by the scarcity of virtually everything you need to live more or less decently, by the absence of any basis of hope for an improvement, by a feeling of frustration produced by living in a social reality which has jettisoned the values which once motivated humanity to storm the heavens.

On 12 February, rather than joining in the patriotic hoopla of the Day of Youth, the young people, outside of the rotten framework of the politicians, called for a demonstration to demand the liberation of a group of students arrested in the province of Tachira, and held in a high security prison on charges of terrorism – an expression of the repressive escalade which ‘21st Century Socialism’ has unleashed against the protests which began to grow throughout 2013 and which have included  various sectors of the working class, in particular those of essential industries (Sidor, Venalum, Alcasa, Ferrominera, Bauxilium) and more recently workers of the oil industry in the Jose refineries, who were jailed on the pretext of being traitors to the country. The accusation of being traitors, terrorists, unpatriotic, Yankee’s lick-spittles, and agents of imperialism has been used by Chavism and its hired killers in the Committees against any expression of discontent or against any struggle by the workers for immediate demands, not only against the students.

On 12 February 2014, the young people involved in the protest found themselves on a ground mined in advance by Chavism and its capitalist opposition (the MUD[2] , Leopoldo Lopez and the de-frocked left Stalinists who worked hand in hand with right). This division of labour sterilised the rebellion, derailed it from paths that could have led to a convergence with the proletarian sectors who are on the same side of the barricade as the students and who could bring the political organisation and direction capable of standing up to the repression and exploitation of the Bolivarian capitalist state.   The regime fears the explosive nature of struggles animated by young proletarians and the student movements, who through recent experiences, especially those of 2007, have gained the capacity to draw strength from the general discontent of a population bombarded by a deluge of the mystifications of official propaganda.  

In 2007, the protest movement was pushed onto the sterile terrain of defending a television network (RCTV), a scenario dominated by rival visions of capitalism; in the end the movement was reduced to a caricature in which the leading role was given to mediatised ‘stars’ of protest. And then on 12 February 2014, the official speechmakers, having criminalised the youth protesters with their usual jargon,  set upthe following scenario: a division of labour with the opposition, aimed at leading the movement into an impasse. The Minister of Justice issued a warrant for the arrest of Leonardo Lopez while also threatening to abolish the parliamentary immunity of the oppositionist Corina Machado on charges of associating with the delinquents of the organised gangs. This was followed by the creation of a commission of criminal inquiry for having called on the young people to demonstrate.

Neither Lopez nor Machado had called for the slightest mobilisation and their fleeting presence at the demonstration was reduced to making rousing speeches and surfing on the militancy of the young people. But the moment the Chavist rabble began its bloody charge against the demonstrators, in concert with the Committees of death, the Bolivarian National Guard and the Bolivarian National Police, they disappeared: they and the other MUD cronies were nowhere to be seen. The difficult job of facing up to the Bolivarian state on the barricades and of collecting the dead was left to the young people. The MUD defenders of capitalism as well the Chavist leaders gave themselves the role of pontificating to the media.    

The protest movement must not repeat the errors of 2007 and develop the struggle on a terrain which is not its own – this will lead it to the precipice of frustration and resounding defeat. The only natural environment from which the current youth protests can draw any strength is the proletarian sectors of society which, throughout 2013, have stood up against the attacks of the capitalist state, and whose resistance can only advance by drawing on the potential for extension contained in the youth protests. These sectors contain the possibility of imbuing the current protests with a revolutionary content, of constructing a solid political and organisational platform, a class fortress that can overthrow this rotten capitalist system that Chavism and its acolytes are trying to keep upright. These are the workers are the essential industries n the region of Guayana, the oil workers spread across the whole national territory, the workers of the public sector who have broken their bridges with the trade unionism that has tried to tie them to Chavism. This is the ground on which we have to prepare the battle.

HS, 18.2.14

It's difficult to know where to begin in the face of the growing devastation throughout the world that is posed by the increased militarism and barbarism of the capitalist system. The confrontation between Ukraine and Russia has grabbed the headlines recently but it can only be understood in a more global context in which we are seeing a constant sharpening of military tensions and open conflicts across a very considerable portion of the planet.

In chapter one, "Bourgeoisie and Proletariat", of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx wrote about the need of capitalism to look for "a constantly expanding market for its products (which) chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere". If this was characteristic of capitalism's global expansion of commodity production accompanied by "blood and iron", then the characteristics of capitalism's fights over saturated markets and a world now carved up by the major powers are all the more intense, destructive and irrational. Even bourgeois commentators have noticed the similarities with the period prior to World War One to that of today: the arms races, the fights for resources, tensions within and between states, the growth of all sorts of nationalisms and xenophobia, etc. There are though many differences at many levels between the early 1900's and today but, fundamentally, we are confronting the same capitalism and the same question: socialism or barbarism. Nothing has really changed in the sense that capitalism still means war. What has changed in relation to war is the development of state capitalism over a century, the extension of militarism and the accumulation of the means of destruction, stored powers of massive destruction which, along with their ever-more sophisticated delivery systems, are nothing but sterilized, useless capital. Apart from being a threat to humanity, this is an absolute drain on the accumulation of capital overall, further exacerbating economic crisis. War and militarism today, in a word imperialism, take on a deadly life-force of their own that goes well beyond the rational and itself spawns further irrationality.

New scramble for Africa

We could start with Africa. In 1884, at the high point of capitalism’s imperialist expansion, the Berlin Conference divided up the African continent between the main European powers. But it was not long before this “scramble for Africa” turned into a source of direct conflict between those same powers. Throughout decadence the continent has been a theatre of war – in both world wars, in the ‘Cold War’, and above all as part of the slide into military chaos that succeeded the collapse of the old bloc system. The longest and bloodiest of these wars has probably been waged in the sickly-named Democratic Republic of Congo. Here war has raged since the early 90's, at the dawn of George Bush Senior's promised era of "peace and prosperity". Though largely ignored by the media, the war in the Congo shows many characteristics of the decomposition of capitalist society. Seven local countries and a number of the major powers are directly involved in a war that, according to the website War Child, Conflict in the Congo,1 has killed more than five-and-a-half million people, including 2.7 million children, many of whom have been recruited as child soldiers. Typical attributes of imperialism are expressed here in civilian massacres, mass rapes, a huge flight of internal refugees and the reign of warlords, clans and irrationality. This renewed scramble for Africa could be added to the list of pre-WWI similarities, with this time the additional presence of the imperialist appetites of the People's Republic of China.

In Libya, following David Cameron's and Sarkozy's "victory tour", the effects of this "just war" have caused devastation and spread vast swathes of instability across the whole of northern Africa. The reverberations have been felt in the heart of Africa's most populous nation and a so-called "emerging economy", Nigeria - a country whose bourgeoisie has recently played the China card against British and American influence. But this new “economic giant”, an accredited member of the so-called MINT club of the nouveau riche2, has not been spared from the region's underlying dysfunction: this has been expressed in religious pogroms between Muslim and Christian and the murderous activities of the fundamentalist faction Boko Haram. Meanwhile the Nigerian government has joined the new international trend to use gay people as a scapegoat for the world’s ills, passing laws that not only increase penalties for gay sex but require all citizens to rat on their gay neighbours.

Elsewhere in the region, Mali and Somalia are all unstable entities who affect the countries close to them, and throughout this region we see French, British and American militarism, sometimes working together, sometimes against one another . China, Russia, Israel and Germany are also becoming involved. The outbreak of war and of inter-religious slaughter between Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic has geographically extended and further deepened the war in the DRC3. Just to confirm this pall of capitalist decay over much of Africa, South Sudan, the world's newest nation, born a couple of years ago under pressure from US and British imperialism, has fractured and collapsed into a war that has initially involved over ten thousand deaths and a further million refugees in a region of so many refugees that the aid agencies are unable to cope (Independent, 20.1.13, for just one example). The war is now spreading to the already decimated Darfur region. As always, the media present this as war of ethnicities, an irrational war of savages or religion. It's irrational all right but this is an imperialist war with one South Sudanese gang backed by Washington and Britain and the other by Beijing. In other words, whatever the relative actions of countries or warlords on the ground, the weight of imperialist stresses is overwhelming. And the news coming from "the world's newest nation" (RTE, 25.2.14) is that South Sudan is among the world's most dangerous nations to give birth!

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria

From one capitalist hell-hole to another in Afghanistan where the AfPak war continues to rage, drawing in India in an attempt to stymie Pakistani interests. Both are involved in their own nuclear arms race and China is backing Pakistan for its own imperialist ends. The proposed withdrawal of ISAF troops under US control and the strengthening of the Taliban show both the weakening of the world's superpower and the continuation of misery for this long-suffering population. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost; billions, if not trillions of dollars have been spent by the west here - and Prime Minister Cameron has declared the Afghan war "Mission Accomplished!" (Daily Telegraph, 16.12.13). If the mission was to pave the way for the flourishing of warlords, produce record levels of opium and further hammer the condition of the population, particularly women and children, then indeed it’s mission accomplished. The AfPak war is yet another expression of the chaos and instability generated by decomposing capitalism.

Another "mission accomplished" was written on the banner behind George Bush as he made his victory speech about the 2003 war on Iraq on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Since then, like Libya, Iraq has gone from bad to worse with daily atrocities and bombings - with Fallujah, once devastated by America, now under bombardment by jihadists. The daily death toll in Iraq, on top of the hundreds of thousands killed already by American and British imperialism, has now reached Syrian proportions.

The rise of fundamentalists and opposing factions has been woven into the network of the war in Syria which has spilled over into Iraq and Lebanon and sent ripples to the Golan Heights and the border with Israel. Thousands of foreign jihadis are fighting in Syria and many pose a threat to their states "back home" and not least within Europe. As the Assad regime push on with its bloodbath, backed by Russia and China, there's a whole nest of Middle Eastern vipers - not least Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan - all involved in the Syrian war on different sides of the divide. The US, Britain and France - with their own differences between them - have been somewhat sidelined but continue to stir up this imperialist cauldron for their own ends. US Central Command, COMCOM, says that it is active in 20 countries in the Middle East and has a military presence in 22 countries in Africa4. These do not include "special operations" that have increased under the Obama administration. We can only wonder about the actual presence of the US, Britain and others and their implantations and manoeuvres in the Middle East.

Tensions in the Far East

From the devastated regions of Africa and the Middle East we "pivot", like US imperialism, to the East. Here we find more arms races and sharpened nationalisms with a faltering Chinese economy expressing its imperialist thrust "locally". Japan is rearming at a furious pace and regional powers are being sucked into this potential maelstrom, including South Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Australia and Indonesia, each with their own imperialist appetites within the framework of US influence. The Gulag of a nuclear-armed People's Republic of North Korea adds to the chaos and instability.

The expansive and destructive contradictions of the capitalist economy underpin the developments of imperialism both through its rise and fall. Economic considerations do play a role in the development of wars and tensions today: oil, gas, trade routes, raw materials and so on. But the economic rationale becomes more and more difficult to see and rather it's the reverse that's the case with capitalist war and militarism costing more and more for less and less or no return; and, more than that, spreading misery, atrocities, chaos and further instability. War and militarism are for capitalism today a global drain but - and this is a fundamental contradiction of capitalism - these factors are essential to the nation state on pain of death. Greater areas are devastated by imperialist war, from Africa, the birthplace of our species, to the cradles of civilisations in the Middle East and the "enlightened" empires of the East. All this amounts not just to the destruction of culture but the destruction of human beings on an unprecedented scale. There's little rationale and no post –war "reconstruction" in all this. We've seen that after recent wars: the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, all the bourgeoisie's talk of reconstruction has been nothing but cynical lies. Only the working class has the power to reconstruct, to construct a new society and to do this it must directly confront imperialism by confronting its own ruling class and its "national interest", particularly in its heartlands of darkness.

Baboon 11.3.14

We've just passed the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the miners' strike in Britain, a strike which began in March 1984, lasted nearly a year and involved some 120,000 workers; a strike moreover which had its roots in the whole period beforehand of international class struggle. Despite returning to this question over a couple of decades, and particularly on anniversaries, we make no apology for looking at this issue once again given that the lessons of this strike and its defeat, the role of the trade unions - particularly the National Union of Miners - are important not only for the working class in Britain but also for the proletariat internationally.

The strike itself broke out after a long period of rising international class struggle - a strike wave in Britain, strikes in Germany, Belgium, the USA, Italy and Poland, to name but a few - with the workers more and more tending towards self-organisation and, in this process, coming up against the constraints and diversions of the trade unions. If there are some revolutionary, anarchist or libertarian elements that are unaware of the fundamental role of the trade unions in policing and attacking the working class (indeed some of these elements actively work within the unions and bolster their ideology), then there are elements of the ruling class that are well aware that the trade unions belong to them and and know how to use them to the greatest effect. Such was the case with the 1984 miners' strike where the state used repression on the one hand and the National Union of Miners and its leader Arthur Scargill on the other, in order to crush the miners and deliver a message that "struggle doesn't pay" not only to the class in Britain but to the proletariat internationally.

Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the British bourgeoisie prepared well and carefully from the very early 80s in order to take on the miners. A shadowy Cabinet Office group, MISC 57, was set up in 1981 in order to lay the ground. This included buying up land next to power stations so that coal could be stockpiled and the group also identified the power, steel and rail workers as too dangerous to be involved. The watered down, sanitised 2001 memoirs of MI5 boss Stella Rimington show how MI5 used its agency not only against the NUM leadership (there is absolutely no contradiction with one element of the British state spying on another) but also on the ground against miners[1]. There was widespread bugging by GCHQ and the involvement of MI5 agents in the NUM leadership. Such infiltration is not at all unusual in the trade unions as these structures, ruled from the top with Byzantine rule-books, lend themselves, indeed offer themselves, to infiltration by the secret services. What many naive believers in "open democracy" on the left see as a "conspiracy theory" is the real activity of the state against the working class. Joe Gormley, for example, a president of the NUM was, like many union leaders, a Special Branch informant. An early proposal to use troops against the miners was rejected as too dangerous - a wise decision by the state given the number of soldiers on leave that eventually fought alongside the miners on the picket lines and in protests. Another key weapon in the repressive apparatus was the police who were given carte-blanche to crack down on the miners, the mining communities and other workers, and provided with bottomless funds to do so. The state was set up to go on the attack: a MI5 section - DS19 - was set up for directing the police, surveillance and providing agent-provocateurs; the courts dished out sentences against miners which went beyond their powers; there was similar lawbreaking from the DHSS which turned down legitimate claims of miners' families; and the media of course with the blatantly lying BBC heading the pack entirely at the service of the British state and against the working class.

But it was the trade unions, with the NUM at the forefront, that provided the real line of defence for the British state and the defence of the national interest. The miners were given decent pay rises in the early 80s (not least as a result of their struggles) and the Thatcher clique concluded secret deals with the ISTC steel union, the NUR rail union and the power workers union in order to keep their workers out of the strike - which they did using their union rule-books and union discipline. The GMBU, with workers in the rail and power industries, ordered its workers to cross miners' picket lines, as did other unions including the NUR. The NACODs pit-deputies' union ignored an overwhelming ballot by their members to join the strike and the dockers' union, whose workers struck in July, kept their workers and their strike isolated from the miners' actions. And of all the unions, all of them "scab" unions as all unions have been for decades, the great National Union of Miners clearly demonstrated its own scab nature at the end of the strike by leading the 60% of miners still out, "with heads held high" as the union put it, across picket lines of miners who had been sacked or were on bail. Despite acts of solidarity and support from individual workers or groups of workers, the whole of the trade union apparatus showed in practice its support for the state against the miners. To back up this formidable opposition to the miners, many of whom were being radicalised by the overt repression of the police and other state agencies, the whole gamut of leftism, whose concern is always in tandem with the unions for the national interest, was mobilised behind the NUM and other trade unions in order to maintain credibility in the fiction among workers that it was inside the union structures and in defence of the union that the miners had to be supported. And the unions, the NUM and the other major unions, supported the workers like the rope supports the hanged man. The overt repression of the police and the subtle divisive repression of the NUM and other unions worked hand in hand against the miners specifically and the working class in general. The defeat of the miners' strike was never a done deal and the bourgeoisie had some worrying moments when the strike threatened to extend and get out of control. But it was the NUM and the Scargill "factor" that kept the miners trapped in the union framework and it was this framework/prison that proved decisive in the defeat of the miners and their strike.

Scargill’s role

Arthur Scargill became president of the NUM in 1982. He was the perfect foil for the Thatcher clique, the other side of the coin in the left versus right game that the British bourgeoisie was getting down to a fine art. He was deliberately set up as a bogeyman and the more the bourgeoisie attacked him the more he drew the majority of the miners behind him This is an old trick of the ruling class and the modus operandi of the British bourgeoisie - particularly using its popular press and TV stations - in many important strikes through the 60's, 70's and into the 80's. Union leaders were labelled "socialist firebrands", "reds" and so on but many of these "wreckers" managed to get knighted, made Baronesses, or some other title that got them into the House of Lords. Others ended up with part-time plum jobs on various state bodies with some of them presumably getting a pension from the security services for whom they had worked. We saw a glimpse of this game recently with the appearance of the media's Bob Crow appreciation society on the occasion of his death. Not a lot of chance of this for Arthur because this was a very important strike for the bourgeoisie to win. He had to be elevated to supreme pantomime villain and he was just right for the role. Scargill started his political life as a Young Stalinist and this career bureaucrat knew all about rising through the union ranks from his position as a minor legal functionary of the NUM to become the leader at the top of the union. And today, the pathetic figure of Scargill is reduced to ongoing legal battles with his union. Despite his inestimable services to the state, there will be no knighthood for Arthur Scargill.

In 1981, a wildcat strike by tens of thousands of miners - which threatened to get even bigger - pushed the Thatcher government to withdraw its pit closure plans and severely dented the latter's credibility in the eyes of the ruling class. Thatcher was on her way out but the British victory in the Falklands War, facilitated by the US, gave renewed vigour to the British bourgeoisie and it turned to dealing with the "enemy within"  - the working class, the main battalion of which, due to their militancy and will to fight, was the miners. The repressive plans mentioned above were put in place and the ruling class relied on the NUM leadership, along with the other main unions, to play the role that it had consistently played in the past: isolating the miners and leading them into an ambush and subsequent defeat. Scargill and the NUM started this ball rolling with a ridiculous overtime ban began in November 1983, which gave the bosses all the warning they needed in order to build up coal stocks and their own repressive forces. None of Scargill's whining and evasions in his "memoirs" alters this or any of his and his union's role in the defeat that followed[2]. There were plenty of workers' initiatives that counter-posed a class dynamic particularly based on their self-organisation. This included the very effective 'flying pickets' when the strike started in March 1984, which the union tried to curtail. But the union had the misplaced confidence of a great number of the workers behind it and this reinforced the role of the NUM, with its nationalist demands for "British Coal" and "Defend the NUM". The union fixated the miners on the Notts collieries and set-piece battles, like the ones around the Orgreave coking plant that, in the face of repressive forces, the miners could only lose. While the only dynamic that will take a workers' struggle forward is self-organisation and extension to other workers, Scargill, the NUM and the other unions, turned this militancy back into warfare between the miners, growing isolation and unwinnable ritualised battles.

It's not a question of "bad leadership" or of the personality of Scargill. It was the whole union structure of the NUM and the other major unions that defeated the miners and delivered a blow to the rest of the class in Britain and internationally. We can see this more clearly in the correspondence between David Douglass, a rank-and-file NUM official and the ICC published a few years ago[3]. The strike says Douglass was "through the union and in defence of the union" which was one of the major problems as the miners were unable to break with this framework and involve other workers - many of whom were involved in their "own" struggles at the time. He insists on the importance of "the different levels and functions of the union", which again was a problem not only for other workers to get involved but were incomprehensible to many miners. Rule books, area divisions, branch ballots and all the rules around them, regional areas under distinct Stalinist-like leaderships in competition with other areas - the NUM had all these divisions within itself and they helped to strangle any initiative of the miners to cut through all this shit and move the direction of the strike towards a result.

There were many positives expressed in this strike from the actions of the workers themselves: the militancy and combative spirit of the working class; the solidarity and sacrifice of the miners and their families; the expressions of self-organisation and the active involvement of other workers and not a few serving soldiers. And the role of the women directly in the struggle who, while the "feminists" were demanding a bigger place at capitalism's table, were radicalised, took to the streets in their thousands and tens of thousands and continued supporting workers' strikes and protests long after the miners' strike was over[4]. But the overwhelming lesson of the miners' strike for the working class today is that not only are the trade unions useless for taking a struggle forward - they are prisons policed by officials and rules whose main function for the capitalist state is to keep workers isolated and divided. We can look back and see that that was exactly what the NUM and the other unions did in 1984/5.

Baboon, 13.5.14 (This article has been contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

In October 2013, a new ‘political group’ was born and gave itself the pompous name of ‘International Group of the Communist Left’ (IGCL). This new group doesn’t tell us much about its identity: it is in fact made up of the fusion between two elements of the group Klasbatalo in Montreal and elements from the so-called ‘Internal Fraction’ of the ICC (IFICC), who were excluded from the ICC in 2003 for behaviour unworthy of communist militants: as well as robbery, slander, and blackmail, these elements crossed the Rubicon with their deliberate behaviour as snitches, in particular by publishing in advance, on the internet, the date the conference of our section in Mexico and plastering up the real initials of one of our comrades, presented as the ‘leader of the ICC’. We refer our readers who are unaware of this to the articles published in our press at the time1.

In one of these articles, ‘The police-like methods of the IFICC’, we clearly showed that these elements were freely offering their good and loyal services to the bourgeois state. They spend the greater part of their time assiduously surveying the ICC’s website, trying to inform themselves about everything going on in our organisation, nourishing themselves with and spreading the most nauseating gossip dragged up from the sewers (especially about the couple Louise and Peter, two ICC militants, who have obsessed and excited them to the highest degree for more than 10 years!). Shortly after this article, they further aggravated their case by publishing a document of 114 pages, reproducing numerous extracts from the meetings of our international central organ, supposedly to demonstrate the truth of their accusations against the ICC. What this document really demonstrates is that these elements have a sickness of the mind, that they are totally blinded by hatred towards our organisation, and that they are consciously handing over to the police information that can only help them with their work.

Hardly was it born that this new abortion named the ‘International Group of the Communist Left’ uttered its first cry by unleashing some hysterical propaganda against the ICC, as we can see from the title page of their website: ‘A new (final?) internal crisis of the ICC!’, accompanied by an ‘Appeal to the proletarian camp and the militants of the ICC’.

For several days, this ‘international group’ made up of four individuals has been carrying out a frenzied activity, addressing letter after letter to the whole ‘proletarian milieu’, as well as to our militants and some of our sympathisers (those whose addresses they have got hold of) in order to save them from the claws of a so-called ‘liquidationist faction’ (a clan made up of Louise, Peter and Baruch).

The founding members of this new group, the two snitches of the ex-IFICC, have just taken a new step into ignominy by clearly revealing their police methods aimed at the destruction of the ICC. The so-called IGCL is ringing the alarm bells and crying at the top of its voice that it is in possession of the internal bulletins of the ICC. By showing off their war trophy and making such a racket, the message that these out and out informers want to get across is very clear: there is a ‘mole’ in the ICC who is working hand in hand with the ex-IFICC! This is clearly police work which has no other aim than to sow generalised suspicion, trouble and ill-feeling in our organisation. These are the same methods that were used by the GPU, Stalin’s political police, to destroy the Trotskyist movement from the inside during the 1930s. These are the same methods that the members of the ex-IFICC have already used (notably two of them, Juan and Jonas, founding members of the IGCL) when they made special trips to several sections of the ICC to organise secret meetings and circulate rumours that one of our comrades (the “wife of the ICC’s chief”, as they put it) is a “cop”. Today, it’s the same procedure to try to sow panic and destroy the ICC from the inside, but it’s even more abject: under the hypocritical pretext of wanting to “hold out a hand” to the militants of the ICC and save them from “demoralisation”, these professional telltales are really addressing the following message to all the militants of the ICC: “there is one (or several) traitors among you who are giving us your internal bulletins, but we won’t give you their name because it’s up to you to look for them!”. This is the terrible objective of all the feverish agitation of this new ‘international group’: to once again introduce the poison of suspicion and distrust within the ICC in order to undermine it from within. This is a real enterprise of destruction which is no less perverse than the methods of Stalin’s political police or of the Stasi.

As we have recalled several times in our press, Victor Serge, in his well-known book which is a reference point for the workers’ movement, What every revolutionary should know about repression, makes it clear that spreading suspicion and slander is the favourite weapon of the bourgeois state for destroying revolutionary organisations:

“confidence in the party is the cement of all revolutionary forces....the enemies of action, the cowards, the well-entrenched ones, the opportunists, are happy to assemble their arsenal – in the sewers! Suspicion and slander are their weapons for discrediting revolutionaries...This evil of suspicion and mistrust among us can only be reduced and isolated by a great effort of will. It is necessary, as the condition of any real struggle against provocation - and slanderous accusation of members is playing the game of provocation - that no-one should be accused lightly, and it should also be impossible for an accusation against a revolutionary to be accepted without being investigated. Each time that the least suspicion is aroused, a jury of comrades must pronounce and rule on the accusation or on the slander. Simple rules to observe with an inflexible rigour if one wants to preserve the moral health of revolutionary organisations”

The ICC is the only revolutionary organisation which has remained faithful to this tradition of the workers’ movement by defending the principle of Juries of Honour in the face of slander: only adventurers, dubious elements and cowards would refuse to render things clear in front of a Jury of Honour2.

Victor Serge also insists that the motives which lead certain revolutionaries to offer their services to the repressive forces of the bourgeois state don’t always come from material misery or cowardice:

“there are, much more dangerously, those dilettantes and adventurers who believe in nothing, indifferent to the ideal they have been serving, taken by the idea of danger, intrigue, conspiracy, a complicated game in which they can make fools of everyone. They may have talent, their role may be almost undetectable”

And as part of this profile of informers or agents provocateurs, you will find, according to Serge, ex-militants “wounded by the party”. Simple hurt pride, personal resentments (jealousy, frustration, disappointment...) can lead militants to develop an uncontrollable hatred towards the party (or against certain of its militants who they see as rivals) and so offer their services to the bourgeois state.

All the ringing ‘Appeals’ of this stuck-up agency of the bourgeois state which is the IGCL are nothing but calls for a pogrom against certain of our comrades (and we have already denounced in our press the threats made by a member of the ex-IFICC who said to one of our militants , “You, I will cut your throat!”). It’s no accident that this new ‘Appeal’ by the snitches of the IFICC was immediately relayed by one of their friends and accomplices, a certain Pierre Hempel, who publishes a ‘blog’ as indigestible as it is delirious, ‘Le Proletariat Universel [73]’, in which you can read stuff like “Peter and his floozy” (*cf note below). The “floozy” in question being none other than our comrade who has been harassed for over ten years by the snitches and potential killers of the ex-IFICC and their accomplices. This is the very ‘proletarian’ literature that circulates the ‘Appeal’ of the ‘IGCL’ which will pique the curiosity and voyeurism of the so-called ‘proletarian’ milieu. You get the friends you deserve.

But that’s not all. If you click on the links on the note below3, our readers who really do belong to the camp of the communist left can get a more precise idea of the pedigree of this new ‘International Group of the Communist left’: it has been sponsored for several years by a tendency within another office of the bourgeois state, the NPA (the ‘New Anticapitalist Party’ of Olivier Besancenot which stands at elections and is regularly invited to appear on the TV). This tendency in the NPA often makes loud publicity for the IGCL, putting it on the front page of its internet site! If a group of the extreme left of capital makes so much publicity for the IFICC and its new disguise as the IGCL, this is proof that the bourgeoisie recognises one of its faithful servants: it knows it can count on it to try to destroy the ICC. Thus the snitches of the IGCL would have every right to claim a decoration from the state (obviously from the hands of the Interior Minister), since they have rendered much more eminent services to it than most of those who have been graced with medals by the state.

The ICC will cast as much clarity as possible on all this and inform its readers about the follow-up to this affair. It is quite possible that we have been infiltrated by one (or several) dubious elements. It wouldn’t be for the first time and we have had a long experience of this type of problem going back as least as far as the Chenier affair. Chenier was an element excluded from the ICC in 1981 and a few months later was seen officially working for the Socialist party which was in government at the time. If this is the case them obviously we will apply our statutes as we have always done in the past.

But we can’t rule out another hypothesis: that one of our computers has been hacked by the services of the police (who have been surveying our activities for over 40 years). And it’s not impossible that it was the police itself (by passing themselves off as a ‘mole’, an anonymous ICC militant) which transmitted to the IFICC certain of our internal bulletins knowing quite well that these snitches (and especially the two founding members of the IGCL) would immediately put them to good use. This would not be at all surprising since the IFICC cowboys (who always shoot faster than their own shadows) have done the same thing before, in 2004, when they flirted with an ‘unknown’ element from a Stalinist agency in Argentina, the ‘Citizen B’ who hid himself behind a so-called ‘Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas’. This purely fictitious ‘Circulo’ had the great merit of publishing gross and ignoble lies against our organisation, lies which were complacently relayed by the IFICC. As soon as these lies were exposed, ‘Citizen B’ vanished, leaving the IFICC in consternation and disarray.

The IFICC/IGCL claims that “the proletariat needs its political organisations more than ever to orient it towards the proletarian revolution. A weakening of the ICC still means a weakening of the whole proletarian camp. And a weakening of the proletarian camp necessarily implies a weakening of the proletariat in the class struggle”. This is the most disgusting hypocrisy. The Stalinist parties declare themselves to be the defenders of the communist revolution when they are in fact its fiercest enemies. No one should be taken in: whatever the scenario – the presence in our ranks of a ‘mole’ of the IFICC or manipulation by the official forces of the state - this latest ‘coup’ by the IFICC/IGCL clear shows that its vocation is in no way to defend the positions of the communist left and work towards the proletarian revolution but to destroy the main organisation of the communist left today. This is a police agency of the capitalist state, whether it gets paid or not.

The ICC has always defended itself against the attacks of its enemies, notably against those who want to destroy it through campaigns of lies and slander. This time it will do the same. It will be neither destabilised or intimidated by this attack by the class enemy. All the proletarian organisations of the past have had to face up to attacks from the bourgeois state aimed at destroying them. They defended themselves ferociously and these attacks, far from weakening them, on the contrary strengthened their unity and the solidarity between militants. This is how the ICC and its militants have always reacted to the attacks and informing of the IFICC. Thus, as soon as the ignoble appeal of the IGCL was known about, all the sections and militants of the ICC immediately mobilised themselves to defend, with the utmost determination, our organisation and the comrades targeted in this ‘Appeal’.

International Communist Current. 4.5.14

For the last five years the population of northern Nigeria has been living in a state of terror. From its first call to jihad in 2009, Boko Haram has been carrying out the most horrible atrocities. The group simply massacres all those who don’t fit into its version of Islam and Sharia law – villagers, school students...Since the beginning of this year alone, Amnesty International estimated that their crimes have accounted for 1500 victims, to which should be added the 300 burned alive and machine gunned in the village of Gamboru Ngala.and probably the further 118 or more blown up by the bombings of a market place and a hospital in Jos on 20 May.

This group and its barbaric ideology is without doubt a caricature of capitalist decomposition, with its flight into irrationality and nihilism. In particular they are opposed to anything that is supposed to be linked to ‘modern’ or ‘western’ culture and education: their name literally means ‘Western education is forbidden’.

The attention of the world media has been especially focused their kidnapping of 276 high school girls from their dormitories in Chibok. A large number of the girls were later paraded in front of the cameras as ‘converts’ to Islam, but not before the Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekauhad been filmed ranting about how the girls would be sold as slaves in the market place.

From the legitimate indignation of proletarians....

Such a barbaric act has provoked a huge amount of indignation, as could be seen on the social media in many countries. The slogan ‘Bring back our girls’ appeared on 23 April and was spread on the internet by the millions. This was a healthy reaction, a refusal to remain indifferent to all the atrocities being committed every day, all over the world. The exploited class is in general more affected by the fate of other human beings who they may not know but with whom they feel connected. This instinctive feeling of belonging to one and the same humanity is a key element in the class struggles of the future

...to the cynicism of the bourgeoisie

However, the bourgeoisie, through its political mouthpieces, has rapidly leapt on this bandwagon and used it to make a big display of its emotion and ‘solidarity’. Thus we have for example Michelle Obama posing in front of the ‘Bring back our girls’ slogan, suitably hand-made for authenticity. This image went round the world as a symbol of the concern of the big powers for the threatened schoolchildren. What cynicism! What hypocrisy! It’s true that Boko Haram is a bunch of fanatical killers. But the big bourgeoisie is no less murderous. It runs a system of inhuman exploitation and will stop at nothing in the defence of its interests. It carries out massacres on a vast scale, and with cold calculation: two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, the Gulf war 0f 91, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s...there is no end to the list of imperialist slaughters. Meanwhile, while the media made all the noise, it was the parents of the schoolchildren themselves who got together to pay the cost of the petrol needed to search for the missing girls.

This whole media circus has one aim, to restore the image of the leaders of the big democratic countries. A few nice photos, a few fine words, a few clicks on the social media and a few crocodile tears in front of the cameras – what better way for these butchers to make us forget their own blood-soaked crusades?

This is how the bourgeoisie uses the barbarism of its own system to regenerate its democratic ideology, and to justify a new round of interventions in the region. The war launched by Boko Haram is mainly limited to the north of the country and is not yet having a big impact on the Nigerian economy – the main wealth of the country, its oil, its big cities, its centres of production are located in the south. But even if the campaigns of the big western powers are not linked to an immediate economic motive, they still have very important geo-strategic interests in the region and this is a new opportunity to gain a military foothold at each other’s expense. Thus on 6 May, the US announced that it was sending in its ‘technical experts’ to assist; the day after France followed suit by announcing that it would be dispatching a ‘specialised team’; soon after that Britain sent in its ‘special advisers’, and the Israelis have also got in on the act.

None of these powers care a jot about the schoolgirls. Experience has shown us what the humanitarian intentions of the bourgeoisie amount to: they are an alibi to advance their pawns in the merciless imperialist competition that they are all involved in.

DG, 15.5.14

More than 300 killed and dozens of serious injuries: the explosion which ripped through the Soma mine in the west of Turkey is the most murderous industrial disaster in the country’s history. This is in no way an ‘accident’, a product of sheer bad luck that we just have to accept like a fact of life. This is a crime – a crime of capital.

After the collapse of the mine, thousands of workers and students spontaneously came out onto the streets, not only in Soma and Izmir (a port close to Soma)but also in Turkey’s big cities, Ankara and Istanbul, and in the Kurdish regions. Braving ferocious repression, tear gas and truncheons, the demonstrations grew in size daily, nearly a year after the great social movement sparked off by the defence of Gezi Park in Istanbul.

The bourgeoisie and its tame media have kept very quiet about this anger. All the TV channels have concentrated on showing grieving families weeping for their dead, interspersed with speeches by Erdogan and the energy minister promising to compensate them - as if this could soften their pain or bring back the dead. And to calm the social tension, to put a lid on the anger of the miners, they are being promised other jobs after the mine is closed.

The media black-out on the street demos and the assemblies of students occupying the universities has been accompanied by heightened police control of the population. Very little information about what actually happened in Soma is getting through. The government has mobilised its imams to dose the workers with religious opium, to try to get them to prostrate themselves in the face of Fate, to resign themselves to the capitalist order.

In the demonstrations, solidarity with the families of the victims and indignation at the indifference of the government and the bosses has come up against the brutal repression of the police state. The photograph above of a young woman holding a placard saying “this wasn’t an accident, this is murder. The government is responsible” is very significant of the depth of the anger and the social discontent.

At the time of writing, general assemblies of workers and students are being held in the universities of Istanbul and Ankara, following the police attacks on the demonstrations.

Elections are a trap for the working class!

Alongside the imams, the Turkish bourgeoisie is also mobilising all its democratic forces, its ‘opposition’, to hold down the danger of a social explosion. The slogan ‘the government must resign’ has been raised by the all democratic forces involved in the demonstrations. The forces of democratic ‘progress’ (the left and extreme left parties, the trade unions, etc) are thus playing their own role in the preservation of capitalist order and national unity. Their ‘radical’ speeches against the Erdogan government have one aim: to dispose of the social time bomb and divert the anger of the workers and students into the election trap. The imams call on the workers to resort to prayer; the opposition forces call on them to disperse themselves in the polling booths and to call for a better management of the national capital by a more ‘competent’ bourgeois clique.

It so happens that the presidential elections will take place in August, for the first time on the basis of universal suffrage. All the trumpets of democracy will be calling on the exploited to act as mere ‘citizens’. It’s not by chance that Erdogan’s opponents insist so much on the ‘public power’s lack of attention to conditions in the workplace’, especially in the mines. And it’s no coincidence that the unions have proclaimed a day of general strike in order to ‘protest at the negligence of the authorities’. The unions and opposition parties are trying to focus attention on Erdogan, in order to sow the illusion that a different clique of exploiters could manage the exploitation of the proletarians in a more human way, and thus to prevent any reflection about the real causes of this catastrophe: the capitalist mode of production itself.

Obviously the provocative declarations by the prime minister can only serve to increase this feeling of revulsion for Erdogan’s unlimited cynicism. When he coldly asserted to the families involved that “accidents are in the very nature of mining”, this could only intensify the anger. And then we had the even more provocative spectacle of the cops beating up demonstrators and even of Erdogan and his bodyguards physically striking out at demonstrators.

Erdogan’s brutality and arrogance really shows the true face of the whole bourgeois class, a world class of exploiters and murderers. Capitalism ‘with a human face’ is a pure mystification because the bourgeoisie, whatever clique is in government, right wing or left wing, doesn’t give a toss about human lives. Its only concern is profit. And whether it is secular or religious, the state is always a police state, as we can see in the most developed democratic countries, where demonstrations are always well controlled by the forces of the opposition and the union stewards on the one hand, and by the forces of repression on the other.

Capitalism as a system spreads death

Akin Celik, the director of the Soma mine, told a Turkish newspaper in 2012 that they had managed to reduce production costs to $24 a ton as opposed to $130 before the privatisation of the mine. How had such a feat been achieved? Obviously by cutting corners wherever they could, especially in the area of safety. This was done with the blessing of the unions who are now denouncing the government’s negligence. You couldn’t be clearer than this Soma miner [87]: “there is no safety in this mine. The unions are just puppets and the bosses only think about money”.

But the greed of the bosses is not the fundamental cause of industrial disasters and ‘accidents’ at work. If costs have to be reduced again and again, it’s in order to maintain the productivity of the enterprise, its competitive edge. In other words, the very way that the capitalist mode of production operates, based on competition, on the world market, on production for profit, inexorably push the bosses, even the least ‘inhuman’ ones, to endanger the lives of those they exploit. For the bourgeois class, the wage labourer is just the source of a commodity, whose labour power has to be bought at the lowest possible price. And to lower the costs of production, the bourgeoisie has no choice but to economise on safety at the workplace. The exploiters can’t be too worried about the lives, safety and health of the exploited. The only thing that counts is the order book, the profit margin, the rate of surplus value.

According to a report published in 2003 by the International Labour Organisation, every year across the world, 270 million wage earners are the victims of accidents at work and 160 million contract ‘professional’ illnesses. The study reveals that every year two million people die while doing their job. That’s 5000 a day!

And this horror is not limited to the third world. In France, every year, according to the CNAM (Caisse National d’Assurance-Maladie – the national sickness l insurance organisation) 780 employees are killed by their work every year, over 2 every day. There are about 1,350,000 work accidents a year, which means 3,700 victims every day, or in an eight hour working day, 8 injured every minute.

Whether we cross frontiers or go back in time, capitalist exploitation has always spread death. As Engels showed in 1845 in his study on The Conditions of the Working Class in England:

“The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie. The hydrocarbon gas which develops so freely in these mines, forms, when combined with atmospheric air, an explosive which takes fire upon coming into contact with a flame, and kills everyone within its reach. Such explosions take place, in one mine or another, nearly every day; on September 28th, 1844, one killed 96 men in Haswell Colliery, Durham. The carbonic acid gas, which also develops in great quantities, accumulates in the deeper parts of the mine, frequently reaching the height of a man, and suffocates everyone who gets into it... A proper ventilation of the mines by means of fresh air-shafts could almost entirely remove the injurious effects of both these gases. But for this purpose the bourgeoisie has no money to spare, preferring to command the working-men to use the Davy lamp, which is wholly useless because of its dull light, and is, therefore, usually replaced by a candle. If an explosion occurs, the recklessness of the miner is blamed, though the bourgeois might have made the explosion well-nigh impossible by supplying good ventilation. Further, every few days the roof of a working falls in, and buries or mangles the workers employed in it. It is the interest of the bourgeois to have the seams worked out as completely as possible, and hence the accidents of this sort”. Chapter on ‘The mining proletariat’

Capitalism – there’s the murderer, there’s the enemy!

The deaths in Soma are our deaths. It’s our class brothers who have been killed by capitalism. It’s our class brothers and sisters being beaten up in the demonstrations in turkey. The exploited of the whole world must feel involved in this catastrophe because this whole system is a catastrophe for humanity.

Faced with the barbarism of this social order, which breeds death not only in military conflicts but also more and more in the workplace, the exploited must refuse to make any common cause with their exploiters. The only solidarity they can show with the bereaved families of Soma is the struggle on their own class terrain. Everywhere, in the workplaces, in the high schools and the universities, in assemblies and meetings, we have to discuss the real causes of this tragedy. We have to spring the traps of the reformist guard dogs of the bourgeois order who brandish the scarecrow of Erdogan to hide the real responsibility of world capital.

Against the sermons of the imams, ‘don’t fight, pray’, against the slogans of the democratic opposition, ‘don’t fight, vote’, we have to reply:

Solidarity with our class brothers and sisters in Turkey! Down with capitalism! Struggle against the exploiters of all countries!

Révolution Internationale, 16.5.14.

Our rulers just can’t get enough of war.

A whole year of ‘commemorations’ of World War One, with opinion divided among them about whether this was a Good War or a Bad War. The right wing tends to argue that this was a Good War. The Kaiser was Bad, and had to be stopped. And Britain’s empire was, on the whole, a Good Thing, which had to be defended. The left wing can then pose as very radical, and say, this was a Bad, Imperialist War.

A week or more of celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in 1944, with royals and presidents hob-nobbing in northern France on the big day. This time left and right are united: this was a Good War. The US and the British were definitely the Goodies, and the Germans were the Baddies. The Goodness of the war is proved by the fact that it made the world safe for Democracy.

When it comes to the First World War, the left can quote authentic revolutionaries like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and tell us that capitalism, at a certain stage in its historical development, inevitably turns to imperialism and war to prolong its survival past its sell-by date. But they mysteriously forget all this when it comes to the Second World War, which was to all intents and purposes the same war fought by the same imperialist powers as the conflict that ended only 20 years previously.  The magic of ‘anti-fascism’, of ‘Nazism is the greater evil’, wipes away what marxism tells us about the real nature of capitalism, and the barbarism of Auschwitz and Treblinka justifies the barbarism of the aerial obliteration of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   

In opposing the First World War on the basis of working class internationalism, the revolutionaries who went on to form the Communist International insisted that if capitalism in decay was not overthrown by proletarian revolution, it would drag humanity into a deadly spiral of wars which would threaten its very existence. History has proved them right: the Second World War – which revolutionaries opposed for the same reason – plumbed even greater depths of horror than the First. The “Cold War” that immediately followed wiped out millions in proxy wars between the two superpowers, with the sword of nuclear annihilation hanging over mankind’s head. The break-up of the two imperialist blocs after 1989 did not bring peace, but a growing war of each against all that has swept across Africa, the Middle East, and, with the war in ex-Yugoslavia, to the gates of Europe. The great powers, reacting to the break-up of their spheres of influence, have since 1989 intervened militarily even more often than during the Cold War, but as we can see in Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan, they have only accelerated the plunge into chaos.

Today the ruin that is Syria, the permanent massacre that is the Congo and Central Africa, the growing tensions between the USA and Japan and China in the Far East, the descent of Ukraine into an imperialist ‘civil war’ fuelled by both Russia and the western powers – all this is testimony to the fact that the rulers cannot have enough of war, that their system needs it, feeds on it, fuels it, even if this murderous addiction will also lead to capital’s own destruction. Hence all the efforts of all the ruling classes of the world to stir up the poison of patriotism, to make the exploited of the world identify with their exploiters and wave the national flag, which is always the flag of capitalism and war.

For the working class, to identify with our rulers, to march in their parades, leads to suicide. To understand our identity with all the exploited of the world, to unite in struggle against the capitalists’ call for sacrifice in the national interest, to carry on that struggle against the capitalists even when they go to war, to oppose the national flag with the flag of the international revolution – that is the only hope for a world without war.  

Amos, 8.6.14 

In Egypt, the army’s candidate Abdel al-Sisi has won a ‘landslide’ victory, polling between 93% and 96% of the votes. True, the elections were widely boycotted, and only 46% of the electorate went to the polls (government estimate) and the main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, was banned; true this election was in fact an out and out farce comparable to the one that Bashir Asad organised in war-shattered Syria on 3 June (and even Asad only polled 88.7% of the vote!). But just as the sectarian divisions in Syrian society have led many – such as Christians and members of the Alawite sect that the Asad family belongs to – to support Asad’s brutal regime out of fear of what would happen if he lost the civil war, so in Egypt the fact that many ordinary people continue to support the rule of the army is also a product of fear.

Fear of the repression and corruption incarnated by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government that came to power in the elections that followed the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011. Fear of the crime in the streets that has grown appreciably worse since the decline of the mass movement that ousted Mubarak. Fear of the jihadist version of Islam which was gaining influence under the cloak of the ‘moderately Islamist’ Muslim Brotherhood. It was this climate of fear which led even many of those who had participated in the 2011 movement – which had been directed against Mubarak’s army-based regime – to turn back to the army in the hope that it would guarantee a minimum of order.

This order, of course, is also based on the same ruthless repression which kept Mubarak in power for so long, and which sustained the brief rule of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. The clearest proof of this was the mass death sentence handed out last March to over 500 Brotherhood supporters who took part in a demonstration which resulted in attacks on people and property, and the death of one police officer.

Such blatant manipulation of the courts, whether or not the deaths sentences are carried out, is designed, like all forms of state terror, to drum home the message that any form of rebellion against the state will not be tolerated.

For the moment the message is getting home: the social revolts and the workers’ strikes of 2011 have fallen silent.

In 2011, these movements were seen as part of an  ‘Arab spring’, an outbreak of hope, where people could leave their fear behind and come together in their thousands in the streets, facing the forces of repression (not only the police and the army, but also the criminal gangs unleashed on the demonstrators by the regime). Massive strikes centred round the huge textile factories and other industrial concentrations affirmed the power of the working class and were a decisive factor in the decision of the ruling class to ditch Mubarak. The revolts centred in Tunisia and Egypt were an inspiration to a rebellion across the divide of war, in Israel, and to the ‘Indignation’ which motived the mass demonstrations and assemblies in Spain, the Occupy movement in the USA, and the street rebellions in Turkey and Brazil in 2013.

But these revolts never escaped the profound ideological illusions of those who took part in them. They were in essence the response of a new generation of the working class, faced with a capitalist system mired in an insoluble economic crisis and with a future of insecurity, unemployment and austerity. These revolts saw themselves as revolutions, even as part of a world revolution, but they were the product of a proletariat which has largely lost its sense of identity as a class, forgotten its real history and its traditions of struggle. The participants acted in their hundreds of thousands, but they still largely saw themselves as citizens, individuals, not as part of an associated class.

‘Democracy’ is the logical expression of this outlook of the atomised citizen: one man, one vote, enter what the French call the ‘isoloir’ the polling booth/isolator to elect a capitalist party to manage the capitalist state. And this was the great goal that was offered to, and largely accepted by, these movements, with only a small minority arguing that the assemblies where people came together to discuss and take decisions could be the basis of a new form of power, like the soviets of 1917 – one which left the ‘democracy’ of bourgeois parliaments in the dustbin. On the basis of this abdication to democracy, dictators like Morsi and al-Sisi may vie for government office, but the state power they serve remains intact.

Today the dreams of the Arab spring have been rudely shattered: in Egypt which has become a sordid contest between power-hungry factions, in Libya which is collapsing into the rule of local armed gangs, with the chaos spreading south into Chad, Mali and beyond; in Syria, above all, which has become an almost unimaginable nightmare, where Asad rules over a country that has been bombed to ruins, and where the ‘opposition’, increasingly torn between ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ Islamist factions, offers the grimmest possible alternative. In Ukraine, a series of events which were superficially modelled on the Arab spring was immediately engulfed in nationalism and integrated into the reviving imperialist rivalries between Russia and the western powers. In Europe and the USA as well, the struggles against the impact of the capitalist crisis have gone into retreat. Small wonder that so many have succumbed to despair, where the hope of changing the world is dismissed as a fairy tale.

But this is not the first time that the class war has gone underground.  The proletarian revolution takes its time. It does not obey an immediate calendar, or respond machine-like to a certain level of economic indicators. Those who stand for the genuine revolution against world capitalism have the task of drawing out the lessons of past defeats so that the revolts of the future do not repeat the same mistakes – not least, the fatal error of believing in the bourgeois sham of democracy. 

Amos, 6.6.14

As the results of May’s elections to the European Parliament became clear, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it was “more than a warning. It is a shock, an earthquake.”  The ‘seismic’ outcome was that about a quarter of the seats would be taken up by parties that are ‘malcontents’ when it comes to the European dream.

From the Right there were massive gains by the Front National in France, the UK Independence Party in the UK, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece and other ‘extremist’ parties in Hungary, Austria and Denmark. From the Left there was Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain. In Italy the Five Star Movement, difficult to categorise in left/right terms, also had an impact, coming second overall in the poll.

As has happened before, with only a 43% turnout across Europe, the majority of people didn’t vote at all. And of those who did, how many had any real concern with the European Parliament, how it functions and whatever it is it does? British Foreign Minister William Hague said “I think that people do know that in the European elections they can have a free vote, a free hit”. The Euro vote is seen as a focus for frustrations, an impotent means of expressing anger or unhappiness. This also applies to those who are elected. UKIP leader Nigel Farage said in a speech in February: “We can’t change a thing in Europe” and that while Eurosceptics could “have some fun” in the European Parliament trying to block legislation, it would “not last very long” (Guardian 27/2/14).

But if more than 200 million (out of 380 million) people didn’t bother to vote, what can be said of the illusions of those who did? Elections channel discontent into support for different factions of the bourgeoisie, but it is significant when new or revived forces come to the fore and support for long-established parties declines. In Greece, for example, there is a widespread conviction that European institutions are dominated by Germany and many parties, not just Syriza, see the re-structuring of the EU as essential if national economies are going to improve. But across Europe, nationalists of all hues blame the EU for economic and social problems: in short, the EU is a visible scapegoat for capitalism’s economic crisis, in a way not dissimilar to blaming the bankers for the crash of 2008.  

More sinister is the growing tendency of the ‘new’ political forces to focus the blame on immigrants and ethnic or religious minorities. Racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric are the common currency of bourgeois parties, but groups like Golden Dawn are not just anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant in words, they terrorise their victims, using physical violence without hesitation. The spirit of the pogrom lurks in the anti-immigrant nationalism of many parties.

In the propaganda of all the populists, left and right, there are simple answers. Everything’s the fault of the EU. It’s all because of German domination. It’s immigrants. It’s the Jews. Where once middle class voters would have confidence in their conservative or liberal choices, and workers would routinely support the parties of the left, there is now increasingly disorientation throughout society, because while the ruling class is increasingly incoherent and fragmented, the working class is not putting itself forward as a social force which can change society at its roots. In such a situation, discontent with the way things are does not easily lead to a questioning of the capitalist system that is at the root of material deprivation and cultural impoverishment; disillusionment with the ‘respectable’ parties that manage the various capitalist states can soon be replaced with illusions in ‘new’ parties that promise ‘radical’ alternatives or identify easily defined scapegoats.

The real power of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, does not lie in its parliaments, European or national, but in its position as the class which appropriates the surplus value created by the working class. Elections give an outlet for dissatisfaction, and, when traditional parties begin to become discredited, there are other forces waiting in the wings. But these forces are there solely to make sure that ‘the more it changes, the more it stays the same’.   

Car 8/6/14

City and media commentators think that things are definitely looking up for the British economy. The statistics that they are basing themselves on certainly show a vigour in the economy that has not been present for six long years, since the crash of 2008. The housing market is moving forward at a great pace, and not just in London. So much so, there is definite anxiety about an unsustainable bubble. Unemployment has fallen sharply – much faster than predicted by the Bank of England. The UK car industry has seen a long period of growth with sales rising for 27 months in a row (although presumably some of the demand is met by German output, for example). Some see exports doing well, but the UK’s trade deficit with the rest of the world widened by more than expected in April, because of weaker manufacturing exports, which were offset by the usual surplus in the services sector.

But British commentators do look for good news about the performance of the economy, and like to compare it with Europe where possible. As a commentator in the Evening Standard  (5/6/14) said: “Consider that the eurozone economy grew by just 0.2 per cent in the first quarter, missing targets, while Britain advanced at four times that rate. The European Commission forecasts 1.2 per cent growth for the economic bloc this year followed by 1.7 per cent next; it has pencilled in 2.7 per cent and 2.5 per cent for the UK over the same periods.”

A key reason why the commentators feel a little less restrained in talking up the performance of the British economy is that it has finally, at this point in time, arrived back at the level of output prior to the financial crash in 2008 (i.e. 6 years). Previously, even if, at times, the economy appeared to be on an overall growth track, everyone knew that there was no recovery in the formal sense: arrival back at the level of economic activity before the recession. Furthermore, the time taken to arrive back at the starting point for Britain is longer – much longer – than in the case of the Great Depression. In the Great Depression (in the 1930s) it took ‘only’ 4 years for the economy to arrive back at the level of output it had at the beginning of the recession. This is one reason why the state authorities (notably Mr. Carney and his colleagues at the Bank of England who have responsibility for interest rates) take quite a very measured view of the performance of the economy and have caught out speculators on interest rates more than once.

The ‘recovery’ takes many forms. The level of employment in Britain in actual numbers is much higher than it was at the beginning of the recession. Historically, it is higher than it has ever been. This is a bit confusing since unemployment is very high as well – even after the recent falls, it is over 2 million (and that is only the official count). Nonetheless, it is true that employment has expanded as the population has expanded (partly due to natural increase and partly due to immigration). Now, one does not have to be an expert to see that productivity has therefore fallen – significantly fallen. To figure out national productivity the bourgeoisie simply divide the overall economic output by the number of people working. Since the economy has only just got back to where it started (in 2008) it follows that productivity has fallen since the working population is significantly larger. That is a very serious problem for the bourgeoisie and has a profound implication for the ‘success’ of the recovery. That is why the bourgeoisie do not talk about their success in employing so many new people as often as one might expect – despite the fact that what has been achieved on this level is not replicated in every country.

Furthermore, for the bourgeoisie’s purposes, claims of ‘falling unemployment’ are not undermined by the growth of chronic underemployment, highlighted by the scandal of zero hours contracts; and ‘overall economic output’ tends to include any number of parasitic and unproductive  activities, such as property speculation. In sum, more reasons for being sceptical about the ‘recovery’.

This is why for every proclamation of progress in the economy, usually from the government and its least critical supporters, there is also caution. The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) recently upgraded their predictions for growth, but “dampened some of the feelgood factor with a warning that 2014 could mark the high point for the economy as households come under renewed financial strain next year once interest rates start to rise.” (Guardian 30/5/14). The director general of the BCC warned that “The task at hand is to ensure that 2014 is not ‘as good as it gets’ for the UK economy” (ibid) A spokesman for the treasury agreed that “we cannot take the recovery for granted” (ibid).

Other commentators are more blunt. “James Meadway, a former adviser at the Treasury, has criticised Chancellor George Osborne’s claim that newly released GDP figures prove ‘Britain is coming back.’ He argues that the government’s relentless pursuit of stringent austerity and expansion of household debt is reinforcing the risk of a major economic crash. Meadway argues that the policies driving UK growth are fatally flawed: ‘We are setting up… exactly the conditions that helped produce the crash of 2008: debt-led growth, in which stagnant or falling real earnings are masked by increasing levels of household debt that sustain continued consumer spending.’

Despite the 0.8% increase in growth over the last quarter, current performance indicates that manufacturing output ‘will not recover to its 2008 level before 2019.’ With average earnings rising at a rate of 1.4%, and the Consumer Price Index’s inflation figures ignoring the large cost of housing at around 40% of household income, real inflation ‘is now running at 2.5% a year, well ahead of increases in earnings…The fall in real earnings since 2008 is the longest sustained decline in most people’s living standards since the 1870s.’” (Guardian 1/5/14)

This particular bourgeois expert comes perilously close to telling the truth: that the ‘recovery’ is largely a sham fuelled by debt, that the prospects for future difficulties are clearly discernible, and that the perspective for the working class is a continuing attack on its living conditions.

Hardin/York 8/6/14

The country has a new president, Petro Poroshenko, elected by a majority in the first round of voting and promising to defeat the “separatist terrorists” in the East of the country within hours. A new hope he is not. His political career started in the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine and then the Party of Regions, loyal to Kuchma, an ally of Russia, before swapping to Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine Bloc in 2001.  He has been a minister in governments of both Yushchenko and Yanukovych. A chocolate billionaire, he was accused of corruption in 2005 and fought the presidential election with the support of former boxer Vitaly Klitschko, who was elected Mayor of Kiev at the same time, and his corrupt backers, Levochkin and Firtash. Ukraine has yet another corrupt oligarch in charge, imposing the only perspective this rotten capitalist system has in store for humanity: militarism and austerity.

Far from defeating the pro-Russian separatists in hours, the fighting has continued with Ukraine repulsing a separatist assault on Donetsk airport, at the cost of dozens of lives, and losing a helicopter with a general on board. The fighting continues and the separatists remain in place.

Far from ushering in a new era of democratic stability and growth, Ukraine’s presidential election on 25 May was another step in its slide into bloody civil war, just as much as the referendums held by separatists in Crimea in March and Donetsk and Luhansk in May. What we are seeing is the widening of the internal divisions in this bankrupt artificial country, precipitated by imperialist manoeuvres from outside. The danger is that the country will be torn apart in civil war, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, massacres, and widening imperialist conflict and instability in the region.

Ukraine’s inherent instability

Ukraine is Europe’s second largest country, an artificial construct including 78% Ukrainians and 17% Russian-speaking who form the majority in the Donbas Region, as well as various other nationalities including the Crimean Tartars. Economic divisions follow much the same lines, with the coal and steel industries in the Russian speaking East largely exporting to Russia, and accounting for 25% of the country’s exports, and with the Western part of the country, which has been the scene of the Orange protests in 2004 and the Maidan protests this last winter, looking towards the EU for its salvation.

The economy is a disaster. By 1999 output fell to 40% of the level of 1991 when the country became independent. After a relative revival it contracted by 15% in 2009. The industry in the East is out of date, highly dangerous and polluting. Depletion of the mines has led to more dangerous working at depths up to 1200 metres with the threat of methane and coal dust explosions as well as rock bursts (the hazards that caused over 300 deaths recently in Soma, Turkey). Pollution from mine water affects water supplies, while antiquated coke and steel mills spew out visible air pollution and spoil tips or slag heaps risk mud slides[1]. Added to which there is radioactivity from Soviet era nuclear mining. These industries are not competitive in the medium term, or even the short term if they have to face EU competition, and it is difficult to see who will want to put in the necessary investment. Not the oligarchs who have a history of getting very, very rich while the economy goes to pot. Not Russia which has its own out of date Soviet era industry to cope with. And surely not Western European capital which presided over the closure of much of its own mining and steel industries in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea that Russia could offer a way out of economic disaster, impoverishment and unemployment, which has all been going on while the oligarchs get rich – a sort of nostalgia for Stalinism and its disguised unemployment – is a dangerous illusion that could only undermine the working class’ ability to defend itself.

Illusions in money from the west are equally dangerous. The IMF bailout in March, worth $14-18billion, replacing the $15billion withdrawn by Russia when Yanukovych fell, has come on condition of strict austerity, raising fuel prices 40% and cutting 10% of public sector employees, about 24,000 jobs. Unemployment figures are already unreliable as many people are unregistered or underemployed.

While Ukraine was part of the USSR and surrounded on its Western borders by Russian satellites, the divisions did not threaten the integrity of the country. This does not mean such divisions were not used and played on. For instance 70 years ago the Crimean Tartars were expelled and only recently some of them returned. The divisions are being played up in the most nauseating and bloodthirsty manner by all sides. It’s not just the far right Svoboda, nor the interim government’s rehabilitation of Stepan Bandera, the wartime Ukrainian Nazi: Yulia Tymoshenko uses the language of shooting and bombing Russian leaders and population, and Poroshenko is putting this into practice. The Russian side is equally nauseating and murderous. Both sides have formed paramilitaries. Even Kiev does not rely solely on the regular army. These irregular forces include the most dangerous fanatics, mercenaries, terrorists, killers, inflicting terror on the civilian population and killing each other. Once these forces are unleashed they will tend to become autonomous, out of control, leading to the sort of death toll we see in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria.

Russia defends its strategic interest in Crimea

Russian imperialism needs Crimea for its Black Sea fleet, a warm water fleet with access to the Mediterranean. Without its Crimean bases Russia could no longer maintain operations in the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean. Its strategic position depends on Crimea. Ukraine is also needed for defence of the South Stream gas pipeline when it is finished. This has been a constant concern since Ukrainian independence. It simply cannot tolerate the possibility of a pro-Western Ukrainian government in charge of Crimea, hence its response to any question of an agreement with the EU. In 2010 it gave a discount on gas in return for an extension of the lease on its naval base in Crimea. When the Yanukovych government postponed the Association Agreement with the EU last November, Russia responded with a $15bn assistance package, which was halted when Yanukovych was impeached and fled Ukraine. Shortly after it took over Crimea and organised a referendum on joining Russia, which it could use in its propaganda war in favour of its annexation, despite the fact it has not been internationally recognised.

So in March Russia had Crimea, de facto if not recognised internationally. But it is still not secure, since it is surrounded by Ukraine, a country that is on its way to signing an Association Agreement with the EU and therefore allying with Russia’s enemies, and trying to escape from Russian blackmail by finding new donors in Western Europe. For strategic reasons, in order to have an overland access to Crimea, Russia needs the Eastern part of Ukraine under its control. Eastern Ukraine is a whole different matter from Crimea, despite the weight of the Russian-speaking population that provides the alibi for Russia’s moves. With no military base in Eastern Ukraine the separatist referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk cannot secure these regions for Russia but only destabilise them, lead to more fighting. It cannot even be certain to control the local separatist gangs.

Russia has one other card to play in the possible destabilisation in the area:Trans-Dniester, which broke away from Moldova on Ukraine’s South Western border, and also has a large Russian-speaking population.

Not a new cold war, but anotherspiral into military barbarity

This is by no means a return to the cold war. That was a period of decades of military tensions between two imperialist blocs that divided Europe. But in 1989 Russia had become weakened to the point that it could no longer keep control of its satellites, or even the old USSR, despite its efforts, such as the war in Chechnya. Now many Eastern European countries are in Nato, which can operate right up to the Russian border.  But Russia still has its nuclear arsenal, and it still has the same strategic interests. The threatened loss of all influence in Ukraine is a further weakening it cannot tolerate, and it has forced it to react.

The USA is the only remaining superpower, but it no longer has the authority of a bloc leader over its ‘allies’ and competitors in Europe, as shown by the fact that it could no longer mobilise these powers to support it in the second Iraq war the way it could in the first. The US has in fact been weakened by more than 20 years of being bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The USA is faced with the rise of a new rival, China, which is destabilising South East Asia and the Far East. As a result, despite the USA’s intention to cut its military budget, it is obliged to focus attention on that region of the world. Obama has said that “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences”[2]. That does not mean it will not try to get a piece of the Ukrainian action through diplomacy, propaganda and covert operations, but it has no immediate perspective of military intervention.  Russia does not face a united West, but a number of different countries all defending their own imperialist interests, however much they verbally condemn its moves in Ukraine. Britain does not want sanctions that harm Russian investment in the City, Germany is mindful of its current reliance on Russian gas, although it is searching for other energy suppliers. The Baltic states are in favour of the strongest condemnation and measures since with large Russian populations in their countries they also feel threatened. Thus the Ukrainian conflict has sparked off another spiral of military tensions in Eastern Europe, showing that they are an incurable cancer.

At present Russia faces sanctions which are potentially very damaging since it relies so much on its oil and gas exports. Its recent deal to sell gas to China will be a great help. China abstained on the UN condemnation of Russian annexation of Crimea.  On the level of propaganda it claims Taiwan on the same principle as Russia claimed Crimea, the unity of Chinese speaking people, but it does not want to admit the principle of self-determination when it has so many minorities of its own.

All the bourgeoisie’s factions, both within Ukraine and those stirring things up from outside, are facing a situation where every move makes things worse. This is like zugzwang in chess, a game much loved in Russia and Ukraine, a position in which any move a player can make only worsens his position, yet he has to move – or resign. For instance, Kiev and the EU want a closer association, which only leads to conflict with Russia and separatism in the East; Russia wants to secure its control of Crimea, but instead of taking control of Ukraine or its Eastern region all it can do is stir up separatism and instability. The more they try and defend their interests, the more chaotic the situation, the more the country slides towards open civil war – like Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This is a feature of the decomposition of capitalism in which the ruling class cannot put forward any rational perspective for society, and the working class is not yet able to put forward its own perspective.

The danger for the working class

The danger for the working class in this situation is that it should be recruited behind the various nationalist factions. This danger is greater because of the historical enmity based on the real barbarity carried out by each faction during the 20th century: the Ukrainian bourgeoisie can remind the population and particularly the working class of the famine that killed millions as a result of forced collectivisation under Stalinist Russia; the Russians can remind their population of the Ukrainian support for Germany in the Second World War; and the Tartars have not forgotten their expulsion from Crimea and the deaths of about half the 200,000 people affected. There is also the danger of workers being hoodwinked into blaming one or other faction for their increasing misery, and being drawn into support for the other on that basis. None of them have anything to offer the working class but worsening austerity and bloodthirsty conflict.

While it is inevitable that some workers will be drawn into the pro or anti-Russian sentiment[3] we do not know the situation on the ground. But the fact that the Donbas has become a battle ground for nationalist forces emphasises the weakness of the working class in the area. Faced with unemployment and poverty they have not been able to develop struggles for their own interests alongside their class brothers in western Ukraine, and are faced with the danger of being divided against each other.

There is a tiny, but nonetheless significant, minority of internationalists in Ukraine and Russia, the KRAS and others, whose courageous statement, “War on war! Not a single drop of blood for the ‘nation’!”[4], defends the working class position. The working class, while it cannot yet put forward its own revolutionary perspective, remains undefeated internationally, and this is the only hope for an alternative to capitalism’s headlong drive towards barbarism and self-destruction. 

Alex, 8.6.14

Iraq has been in an almost permanent state of war for four decades. It has been the theatre of three imperialist wars since 1980. But history is not just repetition. This new conflict, after 100 years of capitalist decadence, is the expression of the decomposition of a society which has become totally irrational. The tragedy unfolding in Iraq goes well beyond the frontiers of this country. As we go to press, the murder of three young Israelis, and the revenge murder of a Palestinian of the same age, is sharpening tensions in Israel/Palestine, with Netanyahu using it as a new opportunity to step up the simmering conflict with Hamas and with Iran.

For a century, capitalist society has been through two world wars which left tens of millions dead. Since 1945, there has been a succession of localised imperialist conflicts.

The wars in Korea and especially in Vietnam from the 50s to the 70s, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East such as the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and the conflict in Lebanon in the 1980s, the intifada between the Palestinians and Israel, the war in Somalia in 1992, in Rwanda in 1994, in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2000, but also in the Ivory Coast, Sudan, and most recently in Mali ...the list of imperialist wars goes on and on. For whole portions of humanity, horror has become their daily bread.

And the opening of the 21st century has not seen any improvement, far from it. According to the UN there are now officially over 50 million refugees in the world. These masses of human beings fleeing from war and disaster are for the most part stuck in camps, at best surviving from day today with little provision for food, medicine and hygiene. But for the bourgeoisie this doesn’t count for much and war continues and spreads. Syria is in ruins and a large part of the terrorised population lives in cellars and devastated buildings. And now for the fourth time since 1980, a new open war is ravaging Iraq. This inhuman reality confirms in blood and tears what the revolutionaries were saying a century ago:

“‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism”[1]. Between 1914 and 1945, this regression into barbarism was illustrated in particular by the outbreak of two world wars. Since then, it has taken the form of a proliferation of local wars which today are the expression of a society rotting on its feet. Why? Because since the 1960s, neither of the two fundamental classes in society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, have been able to develop their own perspective: world war on the one hand, world revolution on the other. The proletariat emerged from the Stalinist counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s (May 1968 in France being the symbol of the revival of the proletariat’s ability to struggle), so that the bourgeoisie was no longer facing a working class which had been crushed physically and ideologically, and ready to be dragooned into a new imperialist butchery, as in the 1930s. But at the same time, the proletariat has not been able to affirm its revolutionary perspective. Since 1989, the lying but horribly effective propaganda which equates Stalinism with communism, and the collapse of the ‘Soviet’ bloc with the end of the dream of a new society, has served to bring about a deep reflux in proletarian consciousness and in the self-confidence of the exploited. The situation thus appears to be blocked: neither world war, nor revolution. But nothing remains fixed, and society tends to decompose. Iraq is a dramatic illustration of this.

30 years war in Iraq

Since the beginning of the 80s, Iraq has been in an almost permanent state of war.

• At the beginning of that decade and for 8 years, there was a murderous conflict between Iraq and Iran, with the USA supporting the Saddam Hussein regime against Iran. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini led the US to push Iraq into the war, with its toll of between 500,000 and 1,200,000 million deaths.
   
• After the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc in 1989, America, then under the reign of George Bush Senior, provoked the Gulf war in order to try to hold its own bloc together. But the aim of the US at this time was not to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime. The fear of the country breaking up led the US and the western powers to leave the regime in place after the war. It was enough for the US to make a demonstration of its military power to its former allies. But the benefits of this demonstration didn’t last very long. With no common enemy, the western bloc rapidly disintegrated. Each imperialism, large or small, began to play its own cards more and more openly. It was a case of every man for himself.
   
• In 2003, the US invaded and occupied Iraq. The occupation was to last 8 years. The power of Saddam Hussein and the (Sunni) Baath party was destroyed. In its place the US put Nouri al-Malaki and his Shia clan in power. The idea was to set up a police and military apparatus that could maintain order and a direct US influence on the country. This was a lamentable failure. For  8 years the war never really ended. The country was mired in chaos. Malaki pushed the Sunnis out of government office to the benefit of his own clan, and to the despair of the Americans who could do nothing about it. The former partisans of Saddam Hussein and the most extreme jihadists carried out a never-ending series of terrorist attacks. Totally unable to do anything about it, the western armies and finally the Americans themselves pulled out of the whole mess both in Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving the various religious and ethnic groups to slug it out.

A country on the road towards fragmentation

This development of antagonisms and hatred between the Shia and Sunni populations is not only the result of the instrumentalisation of religious differences, or the simple defence of the bourgeois cliques that operate within these communities. Certainly the unleashing of obscurantism and irrationality, which is a world-wide phenomenon, is a fertile soil for the growth of religious and ethnic hatred. The fact that religious prejudices are such a potent element in this and other wars is itself a sign that capitalism is in a phase of terminal decline. The door has been opened wide to a new series of pogroms between different communities, as we are now seeing in Syria..

Today the forces of ISIS are on the offensive and heading towards Baghdad. Initially ISIS came from a Sunni tribal militia linked to the nebulous Al-Qaida. After the latter distanced itself from ISIS, the latte proclaimed its objective of creating an Islamic state that would take in Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine. In fact, as well as being made up of radical Islamists, ISIS is composed of a numerous former officers and fighters of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, whose main aim is to get revenge for being turfed out of power. On top of this there is the military strengthening of the Kurdish Peshmergas who are now militarily and politically dominating the Iraqi Kurdish region. This is a whole complex of armed forces with antagonistic interests, a situation pregnant with future conflicts.

The accelerating weakness of US imperialism

Since the end of the 1990s the USA’s global leadership has got weaker and weaker. Faced with the rise of Chinese imperialism, now an enemy of the first rank, the US is obliged to maintain a considerable military force in southern Asia, while also having to take account of the attempted advance of Russian imperialism, in Syria for example. In these conditions American imperialism has been obliged to do deals with the devil of yesterday. The accession of Rohani, for the moment more moderate than his predecessor, to the presidency of Iran, has been the pretext for a diplomatic opening.  This is what’s behind the negotiations on the problem of Iran’s nuclear programme. This has led to a rise in tensions with Russia which has been one of Iran’s main supporters, as well as to discount from Israel, an implacable enemy of Iran. However, the new war in Iraq is above all affecting Saudi Arabia, which for decades has been one of America’s main allies. This leading Middle Eastern state, which has a lot of internal divisions, is not looking kindly on the American hand tendered to Iran and the uncontrollable offensive by ISIS[2]. Its imperialist position is being threatened across the region. Thus, the recently signed bilateral agreement on energy between Saudi and China is not simply motivated by economic concerns. This is part of an attempted rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and China. Saudi Arabia is being more and more openly challenged in the Middle East, and it can’t let this happen without reacting, in Syria and probably in Iraq as well.

The fact that the US is clearly in an impasse with regard to the situation in Iraq illustrates the fact that its position as the world’s leading imperialist power is getting weaker all the time. Unable to come back in force to Iraq after quitting it from a position of total failure such a short time ago, it is obliged to support the present government in Baghdad, at least in words. It’s clear that the US wants to avoid the dismemberment of Iraq, just as it hoped that Syria wouldn’t fall apart. But its growing inability to stabilise the situation has itself become a factor pushing towards further chaos in the region. Today no one is really master of the house. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia know this, as do all the warlords and jihadists in the region. The Middle East is h is increasingly fragmenting into a whole number of permanent war zones. Everywhere religious, national and ethnic divisions are playing an increasing role in this slide into barbarism.

The current war in Iraq is a dramatic illustration of the decomposition of this society. This is what we wrote about this after the collapse of the Russian bloc after 1989:

“The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time ’partners’ are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries. For the moment, these rivalries and con­frontations cannot degenerate into a world war... However, with the disappearance of the disci­pline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more vi­olent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest”.(After the collapse of the eastern bloc, destabilisation and chaos [95], International Review 61)

Even if we can’t foresee the precise direction that events are going to follow, we can be sure that this part of the world is being dragged inexorably into the abyss of decomposition.

Tino

4July 2014

Readers will be aware that we have reduced the frequency of the publication of World Revolution.

On the positive side, our website is now our main publication, which we can update as necessary between publication dates giving a proletarian view on significant events in the world. It is also able to reach readers in parts on the world that our papers cannot.

At the same time, the rise in postal charges means that producing and selling papers is increasingly expensive.

From this issue we will be producing World Revolution quarterly, 4 issues a year. Our new subscription prices will appear in the next issue. All existing subscribers will get the full number of issues they have paid for.

September 20, 2014, 11 am to 6 pm

Lucas Arms, 245A Grays Inn Rd, Kings Cross, London WC1X 8QY

In all the noisy commemorations about the First World War, some things are more or less left in silence. First, that a crucial responsibility for the war lay with the ‘Labour’ and ‘Socialist’ parties who in 1914 voted for war credits and set about mobilising the workers for the war effort; and second, that the war was ended by the revolutionary struggles of the working class.

In the first session of this day of discussion, we will look at how the majority of the parties of the Second International came to betray the fundamental principles of internationalism and integrate themselves into the bourgeois state. This treason did not come about overnight, but was the product of a long process of degeneration which still contains many lessons for today. We will focus in particular on the German Social Democratic Party, the great jewel of the International, whose capitulation in 1914 was a decisive factor in the collapse of the International.

In the second session we will begin the discussion by showing a short film about how the working class recovered from its disarray in 1914 and, after three years of slaughter, began the wave of strikes, mutinies and uprisings which forced the ruling class to end the war and, for a while, threatened the very existence of the world capitalist system.

All welcome. Comrades who envisage coming to the meeting from outside London and will need accommodation should write to us at [email protected] [97].

We can hardly get away this year from a whole variety of historical experts telling us how the First World War actually got started and what it was really about. But very few of them – not least the left wing ideologues who are full of criticism about the sordid ambitions of the contending royal dynasties and ruling classes of the day –tell us that the war could not be unleashed until the ruling classes were confident that plunging Europe into a bloodbath would not in turn unleash the revolution.  The rulers could only go to war when it was clear that the ‘representative’ of the working class, the Socialist parties grouped in the Second International, and the trade unions, far from opposing war, would become its most crucial recruiting sergeants. This article begins the task of reminding us how this monstrous betrayal could take place.

When war broke out in August 1914, it hardly came as a surprise for the populations of Europe, especially the workers. For years, ever since the turn of the century, crisis had followed on crisis: the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, just to name the most serious of them. These crises saw the great powers going head to head, all of them engaged in a frantic arms race: Germany had begun a huge campaign of naval construction, which Britain had inevitably to answer. France had introduced three-year military service, and huge French loans were financing the modernisation of Russia’s railways, designed to transport troops to its frontier with Germany, as well as that of Serbia’s army. Russia, following the debacle of its war with Japan in 1905, had launched a thoroughgoing reform of its armed forces. Contrary to what all today’s propaganda about its origins tells us, World War I was consciously prepared and above all desired by all the ruling classes of all the great powers.

So it was not a surprise – but for the working class, it came as a terrible shock. Twice, at Stuttgart in 1907 and at Basel in 1912, the Socialist parties of the 2nd International had solemnly committed themselves to defend the principles of internationalism, to refuse the enrolment of the workers in war, and to resist it by every means possible. The Stuttgart Congress adopted a resolution, with an amendment proposed by its left wing – Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg: “In case war should break out [it is the Socialist parties’] duty to intervene in favour of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”. Jean Jaurès, the giant of French socialism, declared to the same Congress that “Parliamentary action is no longer enough in any domain... Our adversaries are horrified by the incalculable strength of the proletariat. We have proudly proclaimed the bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie. Let us not allow the bourgeoisie to speak of the bankruptcy of the International”. In July 1914, Jaurès had a statement adopted by the French Socialist Party’s Paris Congress, to the effect that: “Of all the means used to prevent and stop a war, the Congress considers as particularly effective the general strike, organised internationally in the countries concerned, as well as the most energetic action and agitation”.

And yet, in August 1914 the International collapsed, or more exactly it disintegrated as all its constituent parties (with a few honourable exceptions, like the Russians and the Serbs) betrayed its founding principle of proletarian internationalism, in the name of “danger to the nation” and the defence of “culture”. And needless to say, every ruling class, as it prepared to slaughter human lives by the millions, presented itself as the high point of civilisation and culture – its opponents of course, being nothing more than bloodthirsty brutes guilty of the worst atrocities...

How could such a disaster happen? How could those who, only a few months or even a few days previously, had threatened the ruling class with the consequences of war for its own rule, now turn round and join without protest in national unity with the class enemy – the Burgfriedenpolitik, as the Germans called it?

Of all the parties in the International, it is the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, the Germany Social-Democratic Party (SPD) which bears the heaviest responsibility. Not that the others were guiltless, especially not the French Socialist Party. But the German party was the flower of the International, the jewel in the crown of the proletariat. With more than a million members and more than 90 regular publications, the SPD was far and away the strongest and best organised party of the International. On the intellectual and theoretical level, it was the reference for the whole workers’ movement: the articles published in its theoretical review Neue Zeit (New Times) set the tone for marxist theory and Karl Kautsky, Neue Zeit’s editor, was sometimes considered as the “pope of marxism” As Rosa Luxemburg wrote: “By means of countless sacrifices and tireless attention to detail, [German Social Democracy] have built the strongest organization, the one most worthy of emulation; they created the biggest press, called the most effective means of education and enlightenment into being, gathered the most powerful masses of voters and attained the greatest number of parliamentary mandates. German Social Democracy was considered the purest embodiment of Marxist socialism. German Social Democracy had and claimed a special place in the Second International – as its teacher and leader” (Junius Pamphlet).

The SPD was the model that all the others sought to emulate, even the Bolsheviks in Russia. “In the Second International the German ‘decisive force’ played the determining role. At the [international] congresses, in the meetings of the International Socialist Bureau, all awaited the opinion of the Germans. Especially in the questions of the struggle against militarism and war, German Social Democracy always took the lead. ‘For us Germans that is unacceptable’ regularly sufficed to decide the orientation of the Second International, which blindly bestowed its confidence upon the admired leadership of the mighty German Social Democracy: the pride of every socialist and the terror of the ruling classes everywhere” (Junius Pamphlet). It was therefore down to the German Party to translate the commitments made at Stuttgart into action and to launch the resistance to war.

And yet, on that fateful day of 4th August 1914, the SPD joined the bourgeois parties in the Reichstag to vote for war credits. Overnight, the working class in all the belligerent countries found itself disarmed and disorganised, because its political parties and its unions had gone over to the enemy class and henceforth would be the most energetic organisers not of resistance to war, but on the contrary of society’s militarisation for war.

Today, legend would have it that the workers were swept away like the rest of the population by an immense wave of patriotism, and the media love to show us film of the soldiers seen off to the front  by a cheering population. Like many legends, this one has little to do with the truth. Yes there were demonstrations of nationalist hysteria, but these were mostly the actions of the petty bourgeoisie, of young students drunk with nationalism. In France and in Germany, the workers demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands against the war during July 1914: they were reduced to impotence by the treason of their organisations.

In reality of course, the SPD’s betrayal did not happen overnight. The SPD’s electoral power hid a political impotence, worse, it was precisely the SPD’s electoral success and the power of the union organisations that reduced the SPD to impotence as a revolutionary party. The long period of economic prosperity and relative political freedom that followed the abandonment of Germany’s anti-socialist laws in 1891 and the legalisation of the socialist parties, ended up convincing the union and parliamentary leadership that capitalism had entered a new phase, and that it had overcome its inner contradictions to the point where socialism could be achieved, not through a revolutionary uprising of the masses, but through a gradual process of parliamentary reform. Winning elections thus became the main aim of the SPD’s political activity, and as a result the parliamentary group became increasingly preponderant within the Party. The problem was that despite the workers’ meetings and demonstrations during electoral campaigns, the working class did not take part in elections as a class, but as isolated individuals in the company of other individuals belonging to other classes – whose prejudices had to be pandered to. Thus, during the 1907 elections, the Kaiser’s Imperial government conducted a campaign in favour of an aggressive colonial policy and the SPD – which up to then had always opposed military adventures – suffered considerable losses in the number of seats in the Reichstag. The SPD leadership, and especially the parliamentary group, concluded that it would not do to confront patriotic sensitivities too openly. As a result, the SPD resisted every attempt within the 2nd International (notably at the Copenhagen Congress in 1910) to discuss precise steps to be taken against war, should it break out.

Moving within the bourgeois world, the SPD leadership and bureaucracy increasingly took on its colouring. The revolutionary ardour which had allowed their predecessors to oppose the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 faded in the leadership; worse still it came to be seen as dangerous because it might expose the Party to repression. By 1914, behind its imposing façade, the SPD had become “a radical party like the others”. The Party adopted the standpoint of its own bourgeoisie and voted the war credits: only a small minority stood firm to resist the debacle. This hunted, persecuted, imprisoned minority laid the foundations of the Spartakus group which was to take the lead of the 1919 German revolution, and found the German section of the new International, the KPD.

It is almost a banality to say that we are still living today in the shadow of the 1914-18 war. It represents the moment when capitalism encircled and dominated the entire planet, integrating the whole of humanity into a single world market – a world market which was then and still is today the object of all the great powers’ covetous desires. Since 1914, imperialism and militarism have dominated production, war has become world- wide and permanent.

It was not inevitable that World War I should develop as it did. Had the International remained true to its commitments, it might not have been able to prevent the outbreak of war but it would have been able to encourage the inevitable workers’ resistance, give it a political and revolutionary direction, and so open the way, for the first time in history, to the possibility of creating a world- wide human community, without classes or exploitation, so bringing an end to the misery and the atrocities that a decadent and imperialist capitalism has ever since inflicted on humanity. This is no mere pious wish. On the contrary, the Russian revolution is the proof that the revolution was not, and is not only necessary, but possible. It was the masses’ immense assault on the heavens, this great upsurge of the proletariat, that made the international ruling classes tremble and forced them to bring the war to an end. War or revolution, socialism or barbarism, 1914 or 1917...: humanity’s only alternative could not be clearer.

Sceptics will say that the Russian revolution remained isolated and finally went down to defeat by the Stalinist counter-revolution, and that 1914-18 was followed by 1939-45. This is perfectly true. But if we are to avoid drawing false conclusions, then we need to understand the whys and wherefores rather than swallow whole the endless official propaganda. In 1917, the international revolutionary wave began in a context where the divisions of war were profoundly anchored, and the ruling class exploited these divisions to overcome the working class. Disoriented and confused, the proletariat failed to unite in one vast international movement. The workers remained divided between “victors” and “vanquished”. The heroic revolutionary uprisings, like that of 1919 in Germany, were drowned in blood, largely thanks to the traitorous workers’ party, the Social Democracy. This isolation made it possible for international reaction to defeat the Russian revolution and prepare the ground for a second world-wide butchery, confirming once again the historic alternative that is still before us: “socialism or barbarism”!

Jens

According to recent polls, 87%, even 97% of Israelis supported the military onslaught on Gaza when it was at its most intense. Some held parties on the hills overlooking the Strip, drinking beer while watching the deadly firework display from afar. Some of those interviewed in the wake of Hamas rocket attacks said that the only solution is to kill all of Gaza’s inhabitants – men, women and children. The Times of Israel published a piece from an American Jewish blogger Yochanan Gordon entitled ‘When Genocide is Permissible’1 In the marches that followed the murder of the three Israeli youths on the West Bank – the event that sparked off the present conflict – the slogan “death to the Arabs” became a crowd favourite.

In Gaza, it is reported that the population subjected to the merciless Israeli bombing and shelling cheered when Hamas or Islamic Jihad unleashed a new round of rockets, intended, even if rarely with any “success”, to kill as many Israelis as possible – men, women and children. The cry “death to the Jews” can be heard once again, just like in the 1930s, and not only in Gaza, and the West Bank but also in “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations in France and Germany where synagogues and Jewish shops have been attacked. In Britain there has also been an increase in anti-Semitic incidents.

Three years ago, in the summer of 2011, in the wake of the ‘Arab spring” and the “Indignados” revolt in Spain, the slogans were very different: “Netanyahu, Assad, Mubarak, same fight” - that was the watchword of tens of thousands of Israelis who had come out onto the streets against austerity and corruption, against the chronic housing shortage and other forms of social deprivation. Tentatively, nervously, the unity of interests between impoverished Jews and impoverished Arabs was addressed in meetings that crossed the national divide and in slogans about the housing question being an issue for everyone regardless of nationality.

Today, there have been reports of small gatherings of Israelis chanting that Netanyahu and Hamas are both our enemies, but they have been surrounded, drowned out and even physically attacked by the right wing Zionists with their increasingly blatant racist appeals. Ironic fate of the Zionist dream: a “Jewish Homeland” supposed to protect Jews from persecution and pogroms has given birth to its very own Jewish pogromists, typified by gangs like Betar and the Jewish Defence League.

In 2011, speakers from the protest movement voiced the fear that the government would find an excuse to start another assault on Gaza and thus drive social protest into the dead end of nationalism. This latest conflagration, more murderous than any of the previous wars over Gaza, seems to have begun with a provocation by Hamas or possibly a separate jihadist cell – the brutal kidnap and murder of the Israeli youths. But the Israeli government, with its spectacular deployment of troops to find the youths, and the arrests of hundreds of Palestinian suspects, was only too eager to seize on the events to strike a blow against the recently formed coalition between Hamas and the PLO, and at the same time, against those who stand behind Hamas, in particular Iran, the Shia “Islamic republic” currently being wooed by the US as an ally in Iraq against the advance of the fundamentalist Sunnis grouped in ISIS. But whatever the Israeli government’s motives in “accepting” the Hamas provocation (which of course includes the constant firing of rockets into Israel), there is no question that the current upsurge in nationalism and ethnic hatred in Israel and Palestine is a deadly blow against the fledgling growth of social and class consciousness that we saw in 2011.

A Kishinev air

It being the much-trumpeted centenary of the outbreak of World War One, we are reminded of what the internationalist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote from her prison cell in the Junius Pamphlet (originally titled The crisis of social democracy) about the atmosphere of German society at the outbreak of the war. Luxemburg tells us about

“the patriotic noise in the streets, the chase after the gold-coloured automobile, one false telegram after another, the wells poisoned by cholera, the Russian students heaving bombs over every railway bridge in Berlin, the French airplanes over Nuremberg, the spy hunting public running amok in the streets, the swaying crowds in the coffee shops with ear-deafening patriotic songs surging ever higher, whole city neighbourhoods transformed into mobs ready to denounce, to mistreat women, to shout hurrah and to induce delirium in themselves by means of wild rumours…. the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air where the crossing guard is the only remaining representative of human dignity”

As a matter of fact, by the time she wrote these words, in 1915, she was making it clear that this initial nationalist euphoria had been dispersed by the growing misery of the war at home and at the front, but the point remains: the mobilisation of the population for war, the cultivation of the spirit of revenge, destroys thought, destroys morality, and creates a disgusting “Kishinev air” - the air of the pogrom. Luxemburg was referring to the pogrom in 1903 in the city of Kishinev in Tsarist Russia where Jews were slaughtered on the mediaeval pretext of the “ritual murder” of a Christian boy.

Like the feudal powers who were happy to stir up anti-Jewish riots to divert attention from popular discontent against their rule, and not infrequently to make sure that the destruction of the Jews also destroyed the large debts that kings and lords had incurred at the hand of Jewish money-lenders, the pogroms of the 20th century also have this dual characteristic of a calculated, cynical manipulation on the part of the ruling class, and the awakening of the most irrational and antisocial feelings amongst the population, most notably amongst the desperate petty bourgeoisie and the most lumpenised elements of society. In Kishinev and similar pogroms, the Tsarist regime had its Black Hundreds, gangs of street thugs ready to do the bidding of their aristocratic masters. The Nazi authorities who stirred up the horrors of Kristallnacht in 1938 presented the beatings, lootings and murders as an expression of “spontaneous popular anger” against the Jews following the assassination of the Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a Polish Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan.

The powers of the netherworld and the power of the proletariat

The imperialist powers that rule the world today continue to stoke up these kinds of irrational forces in the defence of their own sordid interests. Bin Laden began his political career as an agent of the CIA pitched against the Russians in Afghanistan. But the destruction of the Twin Towers by Bin Laden’s al Qaida provides a potent example of how these forces can easily escape the control of those who try to manipulate them. And yet the progressive weakening of the USA’s world hegemony has led it to make the same mistake in Syria, where, alongside Britain, it was happy to covertly back the radical Islamists opposing the Assad regime – until they threatened to install in Syria and now in Iraq a regime even more hostile to US interests than the rule of Assad. Even Israel, with its highly trained secret service agencies, repeated the error when it initially encouraged the growth of Hamas in Gaza as a counterweight to the PLO.

At its most advanced stage of decline, capitalism is less and able to control the forces of the netherworld that it has conjured up. A clear manifestation of this tendency is that the spirit of the pogrom is spreading across the planet. In Central Africa, in Nigeria, in Kenya, non-Muslims are massacred by Islamist fanatics, provoking counter-massacres by Christian gangs. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Sunni terrorists bomb Shia mosques and processions, while ISIS in Iraq threatens Christians and Yazidis with conversion, expulsion or death. In Burma, the Muslim minority is regularly attacked by “militant Buddhists”. In Greece, immigrants are violently attacked by fascist groups like the Golden Dawn; in Hungary, the Jobbik party rails against Jews and Roma. And in “democratic” Western Europe xenophobic campaigns against Muslims, illegal immigrants, Romanians and others have become the political norm, as in the recent European elections.

In response to the Kishinev pogrom, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, at its historic 1903 congress, passed a resolution calling on the working class and revolutionaries to oppose the threat of pogroms with all their might:

“In view of the fact that movements such as the all too sadly well-known pogrom in Kishinev, quite apart from the abominable atrocities they commit, serve in the hands of the police as a means by which the latter seek to hold back the growth of class consciousness among the proletariat, the Congress recommends comrades to use all in their power to combat such movements and to explain to the proletariat the reactionary and class inspiration of anti-Semitic and all other national-chauvinist incitements”

How right was this resolution in seeing the pogrom as a direct attack on proletarian class consciousness! In 1905, faced with mass strikes and the appearance of the first workers’ soviets, the Tsarist regime unleashed the Odessa pogrom directly against the revolution. And the revolution responded no less directly: the soviets organised armed militias to defend Jewish neighbourhoods against the Black Hundreds.

Today this question is more universal and even more vital. The working class is seeing its class consciousness, its very sense of itself as a class, sapped and undermined by the relentless juggernaut of capitalist decomposition. At the social level, this decomposition of capitalist society means the struggle of each against all, the proliferation of gang rivalries, the sinister spread of ethnic, racial and religious hatreds. At the level of nation states, it means the spread of irrational military conflicts, unstable alliances, wars that both escape the control of the great powers but also drag them further into the very chaos they have created. And we are seeing in the wars in Israel/Palestine, in Iraq, in Ukraine, how the spirit of the pogrom becomes a direct adjunct of war, and threatens to turn into its ultimate avatar: genocide, the state-organised extermination of entire populations.

This sombre picture of a global society in its death agony can induce feelings of anguish and despair, especially since the hopes that sprang up in 2011 have been almost totally shattered, not only in Israel, but across the whole Middle East, which has seen protests in Libya and Syria submerged in murderous “civil wars” and Egypt’s so-called “revolution” giving rise to one repressive regime after another. And yet: these movements, above all the one in “democratic” Spain, did begin to create a perspective for the future by showing the potential of the masses when they come together in demonstrations, in assemblies, in profound debates about the direction of capitalist society and the possibility of getting rid of it. They were a sign that the proletariat is not defeated, that it has not been totally overwhelmed by the advancing putrefaction of the social order. They revived, in however confused and halting a manner, the spectre of the class struggle, of the international proletariat, which made the revolutions of 1905 and 1917-18, which put an end to the First World War with its strikes and uprisings, which blocked the road to World War Three with the renaissance of its struggles after May 1968 in France, and which has again begun to show its hand in the class movements between 2003 and 2013. The exploited class in capitalist society, realising the common interests that unite it across national, ethnic and religious barriers, is the only social force that can stand against the spirit of revenge, against the scapegoating of minorities, against national hatreds and against nation states and their endless wars.

Amos

The contribution that we are publishing below was posted on our online discussion forum by an ICC sympathiser in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in early August, and the subsequent protests and unrest[1].

Among the strengths of the posting are that it criticises the rhetoric of black nationalism and left liberalism. It acknowledges that looting, setting things on fire, and undirected expressions of anger are not in themselves going to change the world. It identifies the violence of state repression as a global phenomenon. It sees the importance of workers’ struggle and the need for social revolution.

The shooting of a young black man by police in the US followed by protests is not unusual. The text obliquely refers to the shooting of  Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012, and the shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland in 2009. These are among the incidents that are known internationally, for the angry responses they provoked. In fact the latest available figures show that a white police officer kills a black person in the US on average 96 times a year. In total the figure reported by local police to the FBI of all killings by the police is typically more than 400 a year (and that self-reported figure is probably a great underestimation). It could be suggested that, alongside the protests, it is also significant the number of times that there have been no protests.

The text also insists that “working people have to continue to defend themselves against the brutal repression of the ruling class”.  We would add that, in the face of repression, elementary self-defence can be the beginning of self-organisation.  If you look at what happened in Greece with the December 2008 Athens killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos and the subsequent protests, there were many occupations of universities and schools, which often devoted time to discuss questions way beyond the current situation. It is not just a matter of carefully considering “our tactics and methods and their effectiveness”, or finding out the best way to deal with tear gas and rubber bullets, important though that is. The extension of protests into a wider movement is posed with every struggle. The “more reflection and discussion” that is necessary is not limited to the tactics of struggle, but requires a serious attempt to understand capitalism, what it has become, and how the working class stands in relation to its exploiters and oppressors. The text asks what would happen “If one day we all woke up and just said, ‘No’”? In reality, the process that leads to revolution involves the development of class consciousness, drawing lessons from the setback of struggles, reflecting on the historic experience of the working class, and, ultimately, identifying the goal of communism. The protests of today can only be part of the movement toward a social revolution through the development of consciousness on a massive scale, a process that necessarily goes through numerous advances and retreats..

The post is right to point to the violence of state repression. In Ferguson armoured cars and snipers were routinely deployed. Local police throughout the US get military surplus equipment. The US has been in a lot of wars. That’s a lot of weaponry for a system desperate to defend itself. It also underlines the necessary scale and consciousness required of the struggle against it

There are a few formulations in the post that we would query. For example, the idea that “the wealthy American capitalist can’t afford a prosperous black nation” is contrary to the way capitalism actually functions. If  there ever is prosperity, a rising sector or national group with money to spend, then it offers capitalism possibilities to sell more of its commodities. Whatever the prejudices of individual bourgeois, capitalists like selling things, whatever the colour of the money, the buyer, or the government.

In terms of the repression of the bourgeoisie, this is posed worldwide, fundamentally because the working class is an international class, which can only threaten capitalist domination through an international struggle. As the text says “workers have to unite together across racial lines in order to save society and possibly all of human civilization from destruction”.

ICC

A Fire in the Master’s House is Lit

Immediately outside the confines of a tightly packed apartment complex in Ferguson, Missouri lay the crumpled corpse of a young teenager. His body was left in the street for four hours. He had been shot six times by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. This dead young man had no criminal record and the police did not have a warrant for his arrest. His name was Michael Brown. He was 18 years old.

So Ferguson joins the list, along with Sanford, Money, San Francisco, New York City, London, and so many other places in the United States and the world.

The response from the African-American community who are joined together with many other working people in St. Louis County has been fairly significant. However the rhetoric coming from people and the protests has ranged from black nationalism to “left liberalism” to libertarianism. Most of the dialogue has been based around the idea that race and human rights are the main issues in Michael Brown’s death.

But what other forces are at work here?

The repression of the protests and anger from the people of Ferguson, and across the country, by police and other government forces has struck a chord with many Americans. Among the many questions being asked, why are so many black youth being killed in similar situations in America? Is the life of an African-American valued less than others? Why aren’t the rights of African-American people better respected in the “democratic” system in America?

The capitalist system exploits all working people. Workers all over America are subjected to the same kinds of repression, even if the scale and drama of each situation varies.

There is a long tradition of the United States government violently suppressing street protests and assemblies by working class people! And all over the rest of the world!

Racism is at its core based on ethno-national divisions. The ruling class employs the police and the paramilitary (paid for by our taxes) who kill our children over bogus reasons because they themselves are inherently racist. Capitalism breeds racism. The wealthy American capitalist can’t afford a prosperous black nation, in Missouri, in California, in Africa or anywhere else. Capitalism means the competition of nations, races, economies and this relies directly on the elbow grease of all working men and women.

Ferguson, Missouri right now looks more like the West Bank than the United States. This is a common sentiment of the demonstrators, who have been talking back and forth with Palestinians and Egyptians about the best way to avoid tear gas and rubber bullets.

Why are the demonstrators in Gaza and Israel experiencing similar events to those of working class people in the “first world”? Why these experiences in a “developed” nation like the United States? Because working people have no borders, no countries. No matter where we live we are all subjected to the will of the state government, “democratic” or otherwise. It should come then as no surprise that the Ferguson police chief himself, along with many other St. Louis county police officers have actually trained weapons combat and guerrilla tactics in Israel in recent years.

Isn’t it Ironic? Nope, it’s just capitalism.

Working people have to continue to defend themselves against the brutal repression of the ruling class through the use of the capitalist state, whether it’s economic repression, the repression of people’s dignity, or the violent repression and murder of our youth.

But we have to carefully consider our tactics and methods and their effectiveness. Unchanneled anger gets us nowhere. More reflection and discussion is always necessary. Setting trashcans on fire and throwing rocks at armored personnel carriers and urban tanks is not the path to stopping the murder of black children. Neither is looting strip malls.

The only solution is a social revolution, which can only be carried out by working people like you and me. No matter how much we appeal to our handlers, the ruling class, to improve the condition of our lives it is fundamentally in their interest not to help. This decadent system can barely stay afloat in its current condition. And to demand from the government and the people who control us respect of our “democratic rights” and basic needs is to overload this system’s capacity. Unless we all want to go down sinking together, workers have to unite together across racial lines in order to save society and possibly all of human civilization from destruction.

What rights can they give us, democratic or not, that would stop our bosses from taking a cut of our work and our pay for their profit? As long as the exploitation of workers continues, and the extraction of profit from the labor of the working class continues, no amount of “civil” disobedience is going to stop poverty! We are being clubbed over the head by capitalism. It doesn’t help if the club was democratically elected.

We have to take away the stick.

What our rulers have continued to show us is that no matter how peaceful we are, there are always violent reprisals to be had at the hands of the state. Many times when people talk about social and economic justice, the redistribution of the wealth, it assumed the system is in a position to grant these reforms. But the wealthy are not just going to hand over their wealth! Do you think they store their billions under their mattress, or in massive piggy banks? No, their wealth is in hedge funds, stocks and bonds, and to demand economic justice is a direct hit to their money. Money extorted from the profit of our labor.

If all the people in Ferguson, including the police and the politicians, just stopped going to work, who would be around to protect us from each other? Would we be killing and stealing from each other? Or is it the system itself that encourages the killing? If one day we all woke up and just said, “No”, what would happen to the world?

Maybe places like Ferguson, Missouri could be a better place.   

Jamal 8.20.14 

Comrades,

I recently had a letter published in the CPGB Weekly Worker. It appears that there are some ‘Communists’ that consider such views as Ultra Left (I am quite happy with being Ultra Left) what would the ICC consider such views?

Below is a copy of my letter.

“In recent weeks there has been some debate as to whether believers can be members of the party or not. That is for CPGB members to decide. However, the CPGB is not the only group involved in revolution.

As a revolutionary socialist, I think that people who believe in god should be forewarned that all religious buildings after the revolution will be bulldozed and replaced with hospitals and decent housing for the working class.

The problem with god and religion is that it goes hand in hand with capitalism (in god we trust - and the US dollar) and monarchy, thus making god an enemy of the people. Even the Vicar of Rome does not really believe in god’s existence, as is proved by his lack of faith as he travels around in his bulletproof vehicle.

Religions create division even within the same religion, let alone between Christians, Muslims and Jews and others. Let’s leave this superstition where it should be - in the distant past. Let’s get on with the job in hand and get rid of this rotten system.

Now, if you can excuse me, I am off to start my present list ready to send to Father Christmas.”

From the ICC

Thank you for your letter, and our apologies for the delay in replying. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t discussed it. After some consideration, we decided to focus on the fact that you seem to have written to us as an expression of the ‘ultra-left’, since this poses some very basic questions about what we mean by the ‘left’ in general.

While we do refer to ourselves as left communists, we don’t call ourselves ‘ultra left’, since the latter has so often been used as a term of abuse hurled either by opportunists or outright bourgeois apologists at those who are seeking to defend and develop authentic communist politics. The term ‘communist left’ arose during the 1920s when the Communist Parties were entering into a phase of opportunist degeneration; and those like the tendencies around Bordiga, Pannekoek, Pankhurst and others who opposed this trajectory were frequently labelled ultra-leftists or infantile leftists[1] by those most caught up in the opportunist course. Since that time the Communist Parties haven’t stayed in a kind of opportunist half-way house: during the 1930s they became direct agents of the capitalist counter-revolution and of imperialist war. They were absolutely central in the mobilisation of the working class for the slaughter of 1939-45, and in the defence of the imperialist Russian state.

In our view, once an organisation has crossed the class line which separates the bourgeoisie from the working class, there is no going back. In general, crucial historical moments like war or revolution provide us with the criteria for judging whether this definitive passage has taken place. This was certainly the case with the ‘social chauvinists’ when they supported the war in 1914 and helped to crush the revolution (especially in Germany) in 1918-19, and history repeated itself with the Communist Parties originally formed to fight against this betrayal.

The organisation which you belong to, the CPGB, is an offshoot of the Stalinist CP in the UK and has never called into question its origins in a bourgeois party. The fact that it has subsequently veered first towards a kind of Trotskyism and then towards a strange attempt to revive pre-First World War social democracy certainly does not mean that such a fundamental self-critique has taken place. On the contrary: both social democracy and Trotskyism have also proved themselves to be part of what we call the left wing of capital – social democracy in 1914-18, Trotskyism with its participation in the second world war, its defence of the USSR and of wars of ‘national liberation’, and its critical support for the Labour and Stalinist parties. So moving from one variety of bourgeois politics to another does not mean that the essential question has been posed.

The characterisation of social democracy, Stalinism and Trotskyism as capitalist political tendencies is of course the ultimate in ‘ultra-leftism’ as far as any of these tendencies are concerned, but for us it is simply the necessary defence of class principles – the same path as that taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, or Luxemburg and Liebknecht, when they denounced those who had abandoned internationalism in 1914, and by the left communists in the 30s who understand that the Communist Parties had become the mortal enemy of the revolutionary movement. For these revolutionaries this was in no sense an academic or semantic dispute; it was the social democracy who directed the hunting down and murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in 1919, and it was the Stalinists who carried out the assassination of thousands of revolutionaries in the 30s and 40s.

One of the main functions of the organisations of the capitalist left is to recruit people who are beginning to question capitalism and then turn this questioning into dead-end forms of thought and activity. This is why we have never rejected discussion with individual members of such organisations even though we reject any form of cooperation with the organisations as such. But equally we have always stressed that any political progress by such individuals cannot avoid a radical break with the organisations of the capitalist left and their whole world outlook.

We will not enter here into the questions about religion that you pose, except to make it clear to you that the policies you advocate – such as the destruction of cathedrals and, apparently, the forcible suppression of religion by the proletarian dictatorship – may be called ‘ultra-left’ by your fellow CPGB members, but they certainly have nothing to do with the real traditions of the communist left and of Marxism in general. In fact the state repression of religion has always been a feature of the Stalinist regimes and proof that they were incapable of addressing the problem of religion at its roots: the alienated social relations which are equally the source of capitalism, whether in its democratic or Stalinist forms. […]

For the ICC, A

Iraq and Syria are no strangers to capitalist war and the very existence of these countries comes directly from the imperialist war of 1914-18. Iraq and Syria were created by imperialism along the Sykes-Picot border drawn up by Britain and France in 1916 to carve up the region from the lands of the Ottoman Empire. These two countries were born in and from a war that in some ways has continued ever since. Both were assets for the Allies in the Second World War against Germany and subsequently subject to coups and manipulations by the British and Americans in the Cold War against Russia from the 50s. Iraq was again used by the West against Iran in the bloody war of 1980 and was the whipping boy in 1991 where many tens of thousands were killed in a failed effort to keep the western bloc together while the butcher Saddam Hussein and his Revolutionary Guards were left intact. The 2003 invasion, led by the US and Britain, saw thousands more killed and injured by fuel-air and cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs and uranium-tipped shells. The peoples of Iraq are not unfamiliar with the embrace and kiss of imperialism, particularly the American, British and French kind.

The taking of Mosul on June 10, a city of over one million people, by IS (the “Islamic State”, known until June this year as “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”), has opened up a whole new descent into capitalist barbarity, chaos, terror and war across the already blighted region of the Middle East. IS is no rag-tag army of loose affiliations like Al Qaeda (which formally disavowed IS in February this year) but an efficient and ruthless fighting machine that is presently capable of waging war on three fronts: south towards Baghdad; east towards Kurdish territories and west into Aleppo, Syria. The Baghdad-based expert on IS, Hisham al-Hashimi says that the force is 50,000 strong (The Guardian, 21/8/14) and the same report says that it has “...five divisions’ worth of Iraqi military weapons, all of them US supplied” and suggests that “the large numbers of foreign fighters are increasingly holding sway in many areas”. IS has spread its particular reign of terror by growing from Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), then spread into the maelstrom of Syria where it absorbed, either willingly or under pain of death, other jihadist or ‘moderate’ anti-Assad forces; it now controls significant areas of the Euphrates Valley where it has established its ‘Caliphate’ across what little remains of the Iraq/Syria border, i.e., the Sykes-Picot line. The destruction of this border is significant of the deepening decay and chaos that is more and more the mark of capitalism across greater regions of the world.

With the regression into this particular shambles of the Middle East, comes a force, the Islamic State, whose tenets of a Muslim Caliphate are based on religious divisions and arguments of over a thousand years ago. The completely reactionary nature of this Caliphate is both a deepening and a reflection of the reactionary and irrational nature of the whole world of capitalism - a tendency in continuity with the First World War and all the subsequent imperialist massacres. The Islamic State has no possible future except as another destabilising gang of bandits, thugs and killers, an expression of imperialism which has stepped into the bloody mess of the wars tearing the region apart. Despite being a force of religious reaction, as shown in its brutal terror against civilian Shias, Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen, Shabaks, IS is fundamentally an expression of capitalism that has been supported and built up by local imperialist powers then assimilated into becoming the front line in an anti-Assad, anti-Iranian front. This development has been supported by the actions - direct or indirect, it doesn’t matter - of America and Britain.

Biting the hand that feeds you 

Surely not, some would say, where’s the sense in that? But capitalism has a history of creating its own monsters: Adolf Hitler was democratically put in place with the assistance of Britain and France in order to act as a force of terror against the working class in Germany primarily. Saddam and his killer regime were made in the west, particularly Whitehall. The same for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. The Islamic fundamentalist madrasas and Osama bin Laden were essentially products of the CIA, and of MI6 with the Pakistani secret service ISI, acting on their behalf in order to confront Russian imperialism in Afghanistan – a concoction which then gave rise to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The establishment of Hamas was initially encouraged by Israel as a means of weakening the PLO and jihadi forces have been armed, encouraged and supported by the west in Libya and the ex-Russian republics.

All the above have turned and bitten the hands that reared and fed them, showing that it’s not a question of evil individuals, but efficient capitalist psychopaths armed and encouraged by democracy. And now in the Middle East, more than ever, everything that the local and major imperialisms do to try to confront their rivals, play their cards or shape events ends not just in failure but contributes to the general deterioration of the situation, piling up more profound and widespread problems in the longer term.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been a force for over ten years but its offshoot, IS, under the new leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - released from US prison in the US Iraqi facility of Umm Qasr on Obama’s orders in 2009[1]- has been backed by Saudi and Qatari monies laundered through the compliant Kuwaiti banking system with their fighters given access to and fro across the border of Turkey. They have been armed, directly or indirectly, by the CIA and there are ongoing reports of IS fighters trained by US and British special forces in Jordan and the US base in Ircilik, Turkey[2]. Why? Because they wanted an effective fighting force against the Assad regime - much more effective than the ‘moderate’ forces. Even the Syrian regime has done business with IS and used it in the age-old strategy of supporting one’s enemy’s enemy. By supporting the forces of IS the local powers and the west sought to counter the growing strength of the Iran/Hezbollah/Assad fighting machine backed by Russia.

The Caliphate of IS doesn’t have much long term perspective but at the moment it is expanding and growing, particularly attracting a sort of ‘international brigade’ of nihilist youth. It has billions of dollars of equipment and a cash-flow from its many businesses. In another absurd twist US fighter power is ‘degrading’ its own material in selected areas. That’s not the only twist in events: US air power has given cover to the Kurdish PKK in their fight against the jihadis, even though it is a group designated as ‘terrorist’ by the US. Iran, Assad’s Syria and the West are in some ways now on the same side with reports (The Observer, 17/8/14) of Iranian warplanes operating from the massive Rasheed air base south of Baghdad and dropping barrel bombs on Sunni areas. There are undoubtedly Iranian forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria confronting IS. Turkey and Jordan, even the Saudis are now concerned about the threat of this organisation. Nothing is settled here; everything is in flux - imperialist flux.

When Sunni elements from Anbar Province joined IS to take Mosul in June, it was clear that the war in Syria had spread into Iraq. This was a complete reversal of the situation of 2006/7, where the Sunni tribal leaders of Anbar joined with US forces in the ‘Awakening’ to defeat Al-Qaeda. But the US-backed, Shia-dominated al-Maliki government in Baghdad excluded the Sunnis from any power, encouraged a pogrom-like attitude against them by Shia gangs, and treated their populations as would an occupying army. The new ‘inclusive’ government in Iraq can readmit some of its Sunni MPs but the latter are likely to be beheaded if they dare to go back to their constituencies. The US can hope for a stable government but the perspective for Iraq looks very much like a break up. The US cannot control or contain this chaos which it has, on the contrary, facilitated. For the moment it has decided to defend the Kurdish capital Irbil, where it has American ‘boots on the ground’, oil and other interests. There’s no ‘humanitarian’ intervention here, that’s just a blatant lie[3]. More lies from Cameron with “Britain is not going to get involved in another war in Iraq” (BBC News,18/8/14) alongside lies about the ‘humanitarian’ nature of its intervention. The decision to arm the Kurds by the US, France, Britain, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic, though by no means a common policy, can only strengthen the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), strengthen the tendency towards Iraq’s likely break up and cause more problems in the region.

In Irbil there are 60,000 refugees and in Dohuk, one of the poorest regions of Iraq, there are 300,000 more. Over a million in Iraq and millions across the region. These unprecedented numbers on the move, along with collapsing borders, is an expression of the further decay of this rotten system. The Iranian regime has been strengthened, the borders of Turkey (a NATO member) and Jordan weakened and threatened and yesterday’s terrorists and evildoers become today’s allies. And the ‘blowback’ danger to western capitals and industrial areas, always a threat as Prime Minister Blair was warned of by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in 20054[4], is now much more acute as the eventually defeated Jihadis return to the major centres and look for ways to continue their brutal attacks. IS encapsulates the putrefying, regressive nature of capitalism and its flight into militarism, barbarity and irrationality: killing and dying for religion[5], the wholesale slaughter of civilians, the rape and slavery of women and children. The US and its ‘allies’ may be able to push back IS, but it cannot contain the imperialist chaos that has given rise to it. On the contrary, the major and local powers can only deepen this instability further. What they don’t want is exactly what they have worked for and will continue to work for, because the whole capitalist system drives them blindly in this direction. 

Baboon 23/8/2014

This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC.

The Communist Party of Great Britain, which each summer hosts the “Communist University” in London, is different from the Socialist Workers Party. It’s extremely difficult for revolutionaries to speak at SWP meetings because they pack the floor with their own members who are pre-arranged to monopolise the brief period of debate that usually follows a lengthy introduction (or three). At the Communist University meeting titled ‘Left wing communism, an infantile disorder?’ the period of discussion was long enough and open enough for an ICC member to develop his argument. The SWP, in contrast, is not in the least open to critical theory. For example, internal discussion of the anthropological ideas of Chris Knight and Camilla Power, who have both spoken several times at ICC congresses, was ruled out by the SWP leadership. Both anthropologists gave talks at the Communist University and their ideas are given a regular airing in the CPGB paper Workers Weekly. When the SWP talk about the degeneration of the Russian revolution, they generally argue that it all went wrong under Stalin and readily agree with Lenin’s dismissal of the left communists as childish sectarians. At the meeting on left wing communism, several CPGB members or supporters agreed that the degeneration of the Soviet power began right from the beginning and expressed doubts about the leftist habit of using Lenin’s book Left wing Communism as a tactical manual for all occasions; one said that the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 had been a kind of “friendly fire” tragedy.

Does this mean that there is a class difference between the CPGB and the SWP? We don’t think so. Both groups provide examples of a genuine crisis among the organisations that make up the ‘left wing of capital’: the SWP with its mass defections following the revelations about sexual violence by a member of the central committee against a female member; and (as we argue in this issue to a CPGB member who has written to us), the CPGB with its curious meandering trajectory that has led it from Stalinism (it began as a faction within the old CP) to a kind of Trotskyism and now towards a flirtation with Kautskyism and pre-1914 social democracy. But the CPGB has only moved from one location to another within the horizon of leftism without ever once questioning its historic roots in the Stalinist counter-revolution, and its adoption of a more ‘democratic’ approach than that of the more brutal SWP does not change this. This is a question we can come back to in another article but it is relevant to the sense of the intervention we made at this meeting.

The talk on Lenin’s book was given by David Broder, a former member of the Commune group which originally split from the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty to work on a synthesis between Trotskyism and a sort of libertarian or councilist outlook, calling for ‘communism from below’. This group was a further product of the crisis of leftism and although it gave rise to some interesting discussions in and around it, the group has never really broken the umbilical cord connecting it to the capitalist left. And although Broder has now left the group you can still say the same about his own political history.

The presentation by Broder, who had previously contributed an article on Bordiga and Bordigism to the Weekly Worker[1] and has been in Italy researching the revolutionary movement in Italy during World War Two, contained some very accurate observations about how the survival needs of the early Soviet state pushed the Bolsheviks and the Communist International towards opportunist tactics - in particular the United Front with the social democratic parties and organisational fusion with centrist currents in Italy and Germany . This criticism had a certain councilist flavour: at one point the October revolution was described as a “coup” and the Communist International defined more or less as a tool of the Soviet state from day one. But Broder did emphasise the importance of the left communists’ defence of principles against tactical concessions which essentially reflected the increasingly national interests of the Soviet state rather than the necessity for international revolution. The intransigent internationalism of the communist left in the revolutionary period that followed the First World War was emphasised, even if it was also pointed out that they were never unified into a coherent international fraction.

And yet when it came to sketching out the history of the communist left after the 1920s, the talk descended into caricature. There was virtually no mention of the communist left in the 1930s and during World War Two, and no mention at all of the still existing political organisations of the communist left which have, in one way or another, tried to develop the work initiated in the early 1920s by the KAPD in Germany or Bordiga’s Communist Party of Italy. The impression given was that the left communist tradition evolved as follows: Socialisme ou Barbarie, with its ideas about ‘workers self-management’ in the 1950s and 60s, then the ‘communisation’ current which is uninterested in the defensive struggles of the class and demands communism right now. Included in this trend were the TPTG and Blaumachen in Greece (already inaccurate because only the second group fits this category), but particularly well-known individuals rather than political groups: Gilles Dauvé, Jacques Camatte and John Zerzan. The latter two were surely added to make the subsequent history of left wing communism look as ridiculous as possible: Camatte because, while he did begin his political life with the ‘orthodox’ Bordigists and later developed an interest in other currents of the communist left, ended up deciding that capital had become so all-powerful that the only solution was to “leave this world”, and Zerzan, who was never part of the communist left anyway, because he drifted into a kind of deep primitivism which came to the conclusion that human beings began to go wrong when they invented language.

These criticisms of Broder’s version of the subsequent evolution of left communism were included in our intervention at the meeting. Some of the previous participants had criticised Broder for not clearly drawing out any political lessons from his presentation; in defending the real continuity of the communist left, we insisted on the vital theoretical work the surviving fractions carried out in the dark period of the 30s and 40s, which led the most clear-sighted tendencies to the lesson that the role of a communist party is not to take power on behalf of the workers or identify itself with the transitional state – an error which not only pulled the Bolsheviks towards crushing working class opposition but also towards their own destruction as a party of the revolution. In particular, we insisted that the left communists were the only consistent internationalists during World War Two, along with a handful of anarchists and dissident Trotskyists, and that those currents that supported the anti-fascist war passed to the other side of the barricade, as had the social-chauvinists in 1914. This question of the integration into capitalism of the organisations of the official ‘Labour Movement’ – not of the working class itself, as the communisation theorists tend to argue – was seen in embryo by the left communists of the 20s and developed by their political descendants, who had experienced first-hand that Stalinism, for example, was not an opportunist or mistaken trend within the workers’ movement, but a direct agent of bourgeois repression against workers and revolutionaries.

This affirmation – which implies that to be a communist today you have to stand outside and against the organisations of the bourgeois left - was aimed not only at the CPGB but also at Broder who remains within the horizons of Trotskyism. This was confirmed in his response to our intervention regarding the Second World War: although he has always maintained that, unlike the Trotskyists, he regards the 1939-45 conflict as an imperialist war on both sides, at this meeting he rejected the position of the communist left that saw the patriotic Resistance as an integral part of the imperialist war fronts and opposed working inside them[2]. For him, it was necessary to be ‘inside’ the partisans because that is where the workers were - a classically Trotskyist pretext, and itself a degenerated version of Lenin’s argument, in Left Wing Communism, in favour of working inside the reactionary trade unions.  

Amos 30/8/14

John Ball, as Melvin Bragg points out in his two-part documentary Radical Lives[1], was consciously written out of history for 300 years after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Unfortunately the real message and meaning of the movement which John Ball gave voice to is also kept hidden in the present, and also in Melvin Bragg’s own programme.

Although Radical Lives is a well made and informative documentary, which does much to restore John Ball’s historical importance, it is also a piece of bourgeois liberal propaganda. Bragg from the outset states that he rejects the term ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ because although peasants took part so too did many other strata of society such as “artisans, administrators, one or two Knights of the realm”. This was certainly true, but he goes on to claim that the revolt was in fact a movement of the amorphous and comfortingly liberal/democratic but in actuality non-existent group the “commons of England”. This is an angle he is extremely keen to push, because he is in effect arguing that the Peasants’ Revolt was not an expression of the exploited class and their instinctive drive towards a communistic world view, but rather an early precursor to what marxists describe as a bourgeois revolution.

This idea may or may not have merit and it would require a much more in depth study to fully get to grips with what exactly the Peasants’ Revolt represents historically; I would suggest that it was more of an expression of the exploited peasants than of the emerging bourgeoisie. This is mainly because of the strength of its communistic tendencies and also the fact that it simply seems too early for a bourgeois revolution to really be a serious prospect - but all this is really a side issue for now, what is important to understand is the way in which Melvin Bragg’s views obscure the reality of the peasants’ revolt and it’s true legacy.

There is a conscious or unconscious policy throughout the show of ‘whatever you do don’t mention communism’; this is shown particularly clearly when he quotes Ball himself. The well-known quote

“My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!… They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of fine straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field; but it is from our labour they have the wherewith to support their pomp.… Let us go to the king, who is young, and remonstrate with him on our servitude, telling him we must have it otherwise, or that we shall find a remedy for it ourselves” (Typical sermon, described in The Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and other places adjoining by the contemporary historian Jean Froissart)

becomes “matters goeth not well to pass in England nor shall do until everything be common and the Lords be no greater masters than we be.” This rendering is nicely vague and democratic-sounding and can be understood as merely being a condemnation of the oppressiveness of the Feudal state and its undemocratic notions of the ‘divine right’ to rule. However the full quote and a half way thorough understanding of John Ball and the primitive Christianity which he turned to for his beliefs would make the condemnation of class society and private property in general much more clear; perhaps this is why it was avoided?

We are told by Bragg that John Ball’s vision of Christianity was a “kind of democracy in which men and women lived equally without being oppressed either by the Church or by the state.” He then quotes more of the quote above without seeing the contradiction between that and his ‘democratic’ ideology; namely the fact that the quote talks almost entirely about differences in wealth between the ‘Nobles’ and the poor and the fact that “it is from our labour they have the wherewith to support their pomp.” The implication being that the state in ‘democracy’ no longer oppresses anyone. John Ball was not a mere ‘democrat’. Rather, Ball and a few other Christians in history took seriously Jesus’ real teachings, representing the communist tradition which stretches back as long as human history.

The legacy of the 1381 Peasants Revolt

It can be said that I am nit-picking at an otherwise good documentary to point out what we communists would guess would be the case before watching any BBC programme - which is that it’s probably not going to have a clear marxist analysis. However it is still important to point these things out because it is ultimately a question of which class inspiring events such as the Peasants’ Revolt belong to - the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, the exploiters or the exploited. The Peasants’ Revolt, although ultimately a failure, as all our movements have so far been, remains highly inspirational and needs to be appreciated as part of our struggle and our history.

One of the most inspiring things about the Peasants’ Revolt, which the documentary brings out well, is its highly moral character. It is referenced a few times that there were very few instances of looting and that the violence that was carried out was almost universally done in a conscious and deliberate way against individuals known to have taken a serious role in the oppression and exploitation of the poor, rather than being allowed to descend into pogrom or riot mentality. The moral position against looting was taken in order to show that the rebels were not thieves but were interested only in gaining freedom from serfdom and oppression. This expresses both great strengths of the movement but also a few of its weaknesses. For example the peasants may have taken land from landowners they were opposed to but their attitude to wealth itself was largely one of dismissive anger. This is shown clearly in the order issued to those raiding the houses of noblemen in order to burn the documents and records which kept them in servitude: “None, on pain to lose his head, should presume to convert to his own use anything that was or might be found, but that they should break such plate and vessels of gold and silver, as were in that house in great plenty, into small pieces, and throw the same into the Thames or into the privies” (cited in The English Rising of 138, H Fagan and R H Hilton, Lawrence and Wishart, 1950, p120. This is a little known history of the revolt, but probably the best so far)

Another extremely inspiring aspect of the revolt is the way in which the peasants managed to co-ordinate their movement across large swathes of the country, especially in Kent and Essex, in a time before mass communication was easily achievable. The tendency towards ‘localism’ which this produced was always an issue for peasant movements and is an important reason why the peasantry are not seen by marxists as a revolutionary class as such. The fact that they could to some extent overcome this difficulty is an indication of just how inventive and powerful the exploited can be when they come together in a common cause.

In many of these aspects of the movement the role played by John Ball and Watt Tyler should not be underestimated. The movement was shaped massively by the teachings and worldview of John Ball in particular and his rhyming couplets such as the famous “When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who then was the Gentleman?” became extremely popular. Similarly his advice and moral demands such as his prohibition against looting were almost astonishingly (to us brought up in decomposing capitalism at least) strongly held to by the vast majority of those involved.

As a movement it clearly was not free of weaknesses and it was ultimately doomed to remain a glimpse of a dream which is still to be realised. This was largely because of the historical context, not yet truly allowing for the practical dismantling of class society, but this expressed itself ideologically also in a number of ways: for example firstly its vision of communism was still very much a ‘Christian communism’, a communism of poverty, and therefore there was little in the way of practical ideas about how to create and maintain the new society they envisioned. And the trust in the King and the failure to really question the idea of kingship in general proved a fatal mistake when the King repaid their trust with deception and savage repression. This trust in the King is a clear warning to all revolutionary movements: beware of and be on guard against any illusions fostered by the dominant class because any of these can become fatal in the struggle against their systems of tyranny. There are still ‘Kings’ or idols that we as a class still harbour illusions in today: democracy, the rule of law, the nation, or any of the countless lies perpetuated daily by the present day ‘noblemen’. Hopefully, when the proletariat does again rise up, it will not fall for any of these fatal lies.  

Jaycee, 29/8/14

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

In Iraq and Syria Britain condemns the advance of the Islamic State while insisting it will not take part in any military intervention; in Gaza it supports Israel’s right to self-defence while freezing export licences for military equipment in protest at the growing slaughter; while in the Ukraine it supports sanctions against Russia so long as the impact on its financial sector is not too great. Such apparent contradictions are often seen in the opaque and convoluted manoeuvres of participants in the ‘international community’. However, for the British state today they express not just the usual twists and turns of imperialist tactics but a growing incoherence at the level of imperialist strategy. This has its roots in the growing fragmentation and barbarism that has come to dominate the international situation since 1989 and in the long term decline of British power.

The decline of a global power

The decline of British imperialism from global domination to a distrusted second rate power has often been analysed. Nonetheless, it is worth recalling that before the First World War the British Empire encircled the globe and its military power, especially naval, was superior to its nearest rivals. Even then, however, the economic dominance that this was based on had already been eroded by the rise of rivals headed by Germany and America. The ‘Great War’ revealed this weakness to the world, perhaps with the exception of the British ruling class. The inter-war period was one of turbulence and uncertainty, above all because the revolutionary threat posed by the international working class meant that the reshaping of the imperialist world order was effectively interrupted.

In this sense, the Second World War can be seen as a completion of the First, in that it confirmed America’s dominance and Britain’s demotion to the second rank. However, the division of the world into the two blocs that emerged from the ruins of the war created an unprecedented situation, characterised on the one hand by a confrontation which if unleashed could have destroyed the planet and, on the other, by a certain level of stability as the lesser powers curbed their ambitions in exchange for the protection of the bloc leaders. This in no way meant that this was some kind of peaceful balance of power; on the contrary, it was marked by endless and bloody proxy wars as the two blocs probed each other and sought to gain the upper hand. Nor, indeed, did it mean peace and harmony within the blocs: ambitions were curbed, not abandoned.

The British ruling class generally recognised that its interests were best served by staying close to the US. This both reflected the existence of real common interests against the Russian Bloc and acquiescence to a situation it could no longer challenge – as the US had made clear in the 1950s when it slapped down Britain’s attempt to act independently over Suez. One consequence of this was that Britain effectively maintained a position in the global order that its own economic strength no longer warranted. The unravelling of the Western Bloc that followed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 changed this irrevocably.

British imperialism in the new world order

For many states this situation presented them with new possibilities. Old vassals of the USSR turned towards the US and Europe, others such as Germany and Japan that had been constrained after their defeat in the war began to stretch their muscles. The failure of American attempts to hold the line through the first Gulf War and beyond emboldened lesser powers, such as Israel and Iran, to assert themselves regionally.

For Britain however, this was less an opportunity than a threat because it was once again confronted by the full reality of its decline and the legacy of its past global swagger that had sown hatred and distrust amongst allies and enemies alike. At the same time, its ruling class not only had the imperialist ambitions common to all ruling classes, but also the pretensions of its past power and glory. In the new world order, the British state found itself caught between a US that was struggling to maintain its old authority and which was increasingly drowning parts of the world in blood in its attempts to do so, and a Europe that was increasingly dominated by a resurgent Germany. In our press we have charted British imperialism’s efforts to steer an independent line over the last quarter of a century and analysed the development of factions within the ruling class arguing for differing imperialist strategies. In the last decade we have shown the impasse into which the Blair government drove British imperialist strategy as a result of the turn towards the US that followed 9/11 and the disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cameron came to power with an idea of breaking out of this impasse by reaching beyond its parameters to new powers such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, Brazil and China, but this vision also foundered in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. Today it seems that every move Britain makes backfires. The intervention in Libya in 2011 to help the rebellion against Gaddafi was hailed a success at the time because it achieved its aim rapidly and with no loss of British military personnel. Today, the country is torn apart by a myriad factions of former ‘freedom fighters’ and the British embassy has been closed and its staff have fled. As we show in other articles in this issue, barbarism is spreading in many parts of the world, being particularly concentrated in those places where the US has led efforts to defeat ‘extremism’ and restore ‘order’ and where its former protégés and pawns have gone freelance.

The result within the British ruling class has been to increase its divisions and to force them into the open. This was seen most explicitly a year ago when the attempt to sanction military intervention in Syria was defeated in the House of Commons (see “Syria intervention vote: Impasse of British imperialism” in WR 362, September/October 2013[1]). The impasse that now exists within the ruling class means that it has been unable to develop a coherent imperialist policy in the last 12 months and it is this, rather than tactical oscillations, that lie behind the apparent contradictions noted at the start of this article.

The growing incoherence of British imperialism

In Iraq and Syria, Britain has joined the condemnation of the Islamic State but has been hesitant in getting involved. Nonetheless, there has been a gradual move from initially only providing ‘humanitarian’ aid, to agreeing to transport weapons to the Kurds supplied by others and then to declaring its willingness to supply British military equipment. The fighter aircraft originally deployed to aid the humanitarian mission are now carrying out military surveillance while ministers repeatedly state there will be no ‘boots on the ground’. Divisions have already come into the open, with military figures, such as Lord Dannatt, calling not only for armed intervention, but also for direct talks with President Assad of Syria. He has been joined by the former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind who said Britain had to be “harshly realistic” and likened working with Assad to the wartime alliance with Stalin, arguing that “history judged them right in coming to that difficult but necessary judgement” (Guardian 22/08/14).

There have also been demands for Parliament to be recalled, which Cameron has resisted on the grounds that the intervention in response to the humanitarian crisis does not require an emergency debate. Most recently, the possibility of joining the US air strikes has been raised in a report in the New York Times (26/08/14), which quoted unnamed US officials saying they expected that Britain and Australia would be willing to participate. Britain’s position does not exclude this possibility since ministers have only ruled out the use of ground troops. Thus it is possible that Cameron is trying to move towards intervention gradually, testing out the level of opposition as he goes in order to avoid a repeat of the humiliation over Syria. The execution of the journalist James Foley, because it may have been carried out by a British member of the Islamic State, could help to provide a pretext, although Cameron did not immediately take this opportunity.

During the latest violence in Gaza the British Government has condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas and reiterated its position that Israel has a right to defend itself, while gradually increasing its criticism of Israel over the number of civilian deaths and the attacks on UN buildings. There have been divisions across the political parties, coming to a head with the resignation of Baroness Warsi who condemned her government’s policy as “morally indefensible” and claimed that it was no longer acting as an ‘honest broker’ in the region. She was attacked by some fellow Tories, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, for over-reacting, suggesting that it was more a matter of pique over her demotion in the recent cabinet reshuffle than of principle as she claimed. There have also been tensions in the coalition over military exports to Israel, with Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Trade Minister stating that exports would be suspended if violence resumed.

Turning to the Ukraine, Britain supported its move towards Europe as part of its long-term support of the expansion of the European Union as a way of counter-balancing Germany’s position. Thus it supported the protestors in Kiev, playing down the fascist sympathies of many of the organisations involved in it, and has been happy to portray Russia as causing the current conflict for its own territorial ambitions. It has also supported the imposition of sanctions, suggesting that the restrictions on the movements and financial transactions of various senior figures in Russia would somehow have a real impact. However, it was far less willing to impose effective financial sanctions because of the possible impact on Britain’s financial sector, which remains one of the few profitable parts of the economy.

The confusion and indecision currently evident should not be seen as implying any lessening of Britain’s imperialist ambitions. The challenge is over precisely what those ambitions are and how to achieve them. So, intervention, whether in Iraq, Syria or elsewhere should not be ruled out. Nor should further attempts to develop new relationships amongst all the competing powers. But the historic decline of British imperialism cannot be reversed and the impasse it has reached remains. On paper, Britain remains a strong military power, ranked sixth in the world in terms of expenditure. Despite recent cuts, the current level of spending at 2.3% of GDP is only slightly lower than a decade before when it was 2.4% (“Trends in world military expenditure, 2013”, SIPRI 2014). But this reveals the real problem for Britain: the disorder and uncertainty of the international situation and its own history means that it faces the possibility of under-performing, of punching below its weight.

Just as Britain has ordered aircraft carriers without aircraft to carry, so today it has imperialist ambitions without a coherent strategy to realise them.

North, 29/08/14

Until only one week ago, the inhabitants of the working-class neighbourhood of Gamonal [in the town of Burgos in Castile, central Spain] have daily come out onto the streets to demand a halt to building work of a major road. The mayor had continually refused to do anything, but faced with persistent demonstrations and the widespread solidarity across Spain (in at least thirty towns), he initially announced a temporary suspension of the work and then finally on Friday 17th [January] agreed to call a total halt to it. However, when the residents, met in their assembly on Saturday 18th, they decided to continue the struggle, demanding the unconditional release of everyone taken into custody and the removal of the anti-riot police.

Why and how did such a movement arise? What lessons does it provide? Is it part of the international struggle of the working class? We will try to answer these questions in order to stimulate discussion and to aid the development of the class struggle. That said, we also want to express in particular our solidarity with the struggle and with those who were imprisoned.

Frustration and indignation

The struggle appears to have arisen out of something quite small: the reconstruction of a boulevard (a large avenue), part of the unfolding programme of road work taking place in many cities, lining the pockets of the urban developers, and tainted by corruption, but with no concern at all for improving the lives of local residents.

But sometimes we can be deceived by appearances and only a serious examination of the background to the struggles can enable us to understand them and to support them. In much the same way, a significant social movement in Turkey arose after the felling of some trees in a park in Istanbul[1]

Gamonal is a working-class neighbourhood of Burgos built in the 1960s next to an industrial area of the same name. The enormous buildings are like rabbit hutches squeezed together to make vertical slums. But if suffering from such living conditions for many years has left a bitter after-taste, more recently unemployment has increased dramatically, social services have been cut, and municipal taxes have spiralled, and evictions have increased ... an accumulated burden of suffering reflected in the faces of people in signs of anxiety, worry and a fear of things getting even worse.

In this context, rebuilding a boulevard that shows a blatant waste of money, and the proposals for an underground car park that would threaten the fragile foundations of many buildings, was seen as the final straw to break the camel's back coming on top of unacceptable levels of unemployment, a bleak future, atomisation, “living on one's nerves”. This is not peculiar to Burgos, but is the daily experience of millions of workers and exploited around the world.

Assemblies, the brain and the heart of the struggle

The struggle of Gamonal can't be compared with other kinds of protest where people come along and make a lot of noise before quietly retreating to the whence they came, home to their atomised and solitary existence. Every day without exception the assembly was held at noon and at 7:00 in the evening following the day's demonstrations.

The assemblies were the brain and the heart of the movement. The brain, because here there was a collective reflection about how to struggle, about what actions to take next, about the decisions to make. The heart, because the assembly is a real expression of the means of communicating, developing understanding and establishing links to break the isolation and the atomisation, which are the terrible stigma of a society where everyone is trapped "in their own little world", dominated by the commodity..

As some people who actively participated in the struggle wrote on a blog[2]: "The failure of the old structures of pseudo-participation such as political parties and the creation of the self-organised assemblies, without leaders, everyone participating as equals, opens the door to a new world", but even more important was the insistence that "we all are needed, the elderly, youth, the mothers and fathers and children" and it is inside the assembly (the method specific to the working class) where they all have a place and can each make specific contributions.

The assembly aimed to deepen consciousness. The struggles which have unfolded around the world since 2003 have arisen in the context of the loss of working class identity; the class has lost confidence in itself and is unable to recognise itself as such.[3] However, this is what we read: "Today, Thursday [16 January], we have freed our imprisoned comrades. Local residents, parents, all kinds of people in solidarity, came to greet them upon their release from prison in Burgos chanting. ‘You are not alone’ (and)’ Long live the struggle of the working class’!" Realistically, we know that this is only an indication, but such proclamations highlight the fact that at least some minorities are beginning to have confidence in the power of the working class.

One graffiti stated: "Barricades close the street but open up the road, Paris May 68 - Gamonal 14 January". Let us repeat: there is no room for complacency but we must emphasise the relationship established between this movement in a neighbourhood of Burgos and the struggle of May 68. Marx spoke of the subterranean maturation of consciousness in the great mass of workers as an old mole digging his hole and advancing through the depths of the earth. Today, the working class seems to be buried in a dark well, but the struggle of Gamonal shows it entails a striving for consciousness. Diario de Vurgos reminds us: "We are carrying a new world in our hearts".

It is very significant that the movement did not stop after the final abandonment of the roadworks, stating that it is necessary "to go much further, extending the struggle for housing, against work-unemployment -insecurity ... and in creating a community of struggle that confronts the various attacks of the State". "It is always necessary to keep alive the flame of a phenomenon that is not at all new and is part of the collective heritage of all the exploited and oppressed of the world."

How to deal with repression?

The state responded quickly. The neighbourhood was surrounded on all sides by riot police. It was an undeclared state of siege, with the police checking identities, establishing roadblocks everywhere, breaking up any "suspect" groups. There were 46 arrests.

The democratic state, which we are told is the champion of respect for human rights, treated the detainees in a brutal and humiliating manner: "In the assembly this afternoon [Thursday, 16th], a young boy who was held in prison, spoke about his stay in the police station and prison. Beatings were dished out at the police station,  (...) This youth was carrying a backpack when he was arrested that the police subsequently filled with stones. When he protested saying it was not him who put stones in the bag, the police threatened to put him in a cell with more police and to beat him up as they had done with others".

The unions and left parties provide a false picture of the state. They recognise that it has a nasty face (politicians, the government of the day, the police and its excesses) only to bamboozle us with the other face, that of the "eminent" judges who would not hesitate in indicting the daughter of the King! But such fairy tales vanish when we look at the actual experience of Gamonal: "This morning, the judge of the court No. 3 in Burgos jailed four comrades held on bail of 3000 euros, accused of committing crimes against public order on the Monday evening. (...) At the time of his court appearance, [this youth] has said that the judge spoke to them, insulted them, distrusted them, not even listening to their statements about how they had suffered in the police station". With the state, it is not a matter of the "nasty face" and the "friendly face"; it is a machine for repression in the service of the exploiting class and all its institutions play their part in this from the police and the church to the judges and unions.

The best weapon against repression is the massiveness of the struggle and the search for solidarity. On each occasion the assembly asked the participants not to disperse individually on their own after the event, but to leave in the most compact groups possible so that the anti-riot police were not able to hunt down lone protesters at the end of the demo. The assembly was trying to avoid police provocations that try to create a melee, dispersing the protesters into isolated groups and using police power against them. Diario de Vurgos puts it very clearly: "Today was not a pitched battle, it was psychological: the forces of repression have used intimidation for hours, gradually, throughout the neighbourhoods, with their guns, batons and uniforms, oozing hatred, trying to send the message: 'we are in charge here' but we have not fallen into the trap. They are not in control, though they want to be. Today, more than ever, the street still belongs to the neighbourhood of Gamonal and it is the neighbourhood itself that sets the tone and pace of the struggle and only the neighbourhood that decides when we roar and when we bite".

The strength of solidarity

That said, Diario de Vurgos falls into a contradiction: "In Madrid, we went out into the street three days running and we continue to charge [against the police]. In Zaragoza, barricades were built, as well as in Valencia and Alicante; in Barcelona, the windows of banks inside the barricades were smashed and in the Ramblas the police station was attacked. There were twenty arrests across the country. It is now up to us to show solidarity with all those who showed it to us! "Previously, Diario Virgos showed very clearly how the Gamonal Assembly had avoided the trap of isolated clashes with the police, and now it highlights such clashes.

We offer our support to the 20 detainees. We do not condemn their actions, on the contrary, we understand their rage and frustration very well. What we condemn is the trap the bourgeoisie has set up to make us believe that the struggle can be fought on the terrain of street violence by small minorities.

What is the "Gamonal danger" according to the televised news? It seems that what shook the Interior Minister most was the sight of hooded individuals throwing stones, the burned out containers and the shattered windows. There are probably some stupid bourgeois experiencing the chills faced with such ''disorder''. But Capital is a cold and impersonal machine and its smartest managers (who are also the most cynical) know perfectly well what in truth worries them most. In other words, what the so-called ''communications'' media don't speak the truth about when referring to Gamonal: the massive nature and "assembly form" of this movement.

Let's look at a blog called El Confidencial that credits itself with informing politicians and the employers. Regarding Gamonal[4], this blog says: "Jobs, housing and residents' participation, as in the case Gamonal, are not defended anymore on the basis of the same logic of five or six years ago, when there was no alternative leadership to the unions or organisations directly linked to political parties. Since then there has been a process of discrediting and decomposition of these social agents in parallel with the success of the new forms of organisation and protest, which have less structure but, on the other hand, a clear capacity to mobilise". Further on, these gentlemen give a warning. "The new logic of protest took everyone by surprise. They do not fall within the traditional definition of organisations and social movements, they do not correspond in any way to the neighbourhood associations, let alone the trade unions". Not one word about the "terrible danger" against which we were hysterically alerted by the Minister of the Interior or the Commissioner of the Government of the Region of Madrid (the latter now considered as "progressive" because of his ''criticisms'' of the Gallardón Law[5]).

The strength of Gamonal rests on two pillars: the assemblies and solidarity. Solidarity with the 46 imprisoned in response to the fact that today, Monday, the struggle continues owing to the fact that the prisoners have not been released or the charges against them dropped. But this solidarity has taken on a greater significance owing to the extension of the movement all across Spain.

The Assembly of Gamonal decided to send some delegates to other towns to inform them of its struggle and to explain its key objectives and especially to show that there is an underlying mutual interest in struggling together. This germ has borne fruit and on Wednesday 14th at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, where 3,000 people, mostly youth, demonstrated in support of Gamonal. On the Thursday and Friday, the demonstrations spread elsewhere while continuing inside the country's capital city. There were demonstrations in more than 30 cities where it was mostly young people gathering together to shout slogans of support for Gamonal. The solidarity of the street has strengthened the commitment of the Gamonal residents. The profound experience of 2011 was not completely lost in the void of forgetfulness[6], and some traces of it can be seen here and there. Only two months ago, there was the cleaners' strike in Madrid, and there were expressions of working class solidarity from other sectors[7] that helped to cushion the blows felt by the strikers. In November 2013, a large wave of strikes rocked Bangladesh in solidarity with the textile workers there. Currently, there is a struggle of workers in the Lavanderias (laundries) in the Madrid hospitals outside and against the unions. Similarly, the workers of Tragsa (a public company carrying out 'environmental work' consisting of 4,600 people across Spain) have rejected the agreement signed by the unions proposing 600 redundancies.

Criticism makes us strong

But it would be a serious mistake to overestimate the movement.

The Assembly of Gamonal had its own dynamics that the opposition parties (PSOE and IU[8]) failed to stop. But if people rejected the PSOE, the IU was better equipped to exert its influence in the neighbourhood associations and, even if it was still not able to block the struggle, it was able, on the other hand, to stop any clear understanding of it. It did this by arguing that the current PP government was the cause of the problems, and that everything could be blamed on the detrimental effect of privatisations on the public sector, and the claim that "an alternative" was possible if the municipal administration was really linked "to the people". For those who think only in terms of "action" and what matters is that "people react" without clearly knowing why, with whom, and to what end, raising any other sorts of questions would amount to talking nonsense and making life more complicated.

In fact, this only serves to hide the need we all have - we, the proletariat - to make the effort to reflect, to reclaim our historical experience. If we are going to avoid the errors of the past, we need a revolutionary theory that is a real force for action.

This difficulty to provide ourselves with an orientation is rooted in the fact that the demonstrations in solidarity with Gamonal are not backed up by assemblies. This means that, while being very precious and full of promise, the solidarity has remained at the level of good wishes; it has not been made concrete, and the demonstrations have not gone beyond simple protest.

Despite what is signified by the slogan "Long live the struggle of the working class!", the movement has still seen itself as a "citizens' or people's" struggle (in the demos we often heard : "The people united will never be defeated"). The bourgeoisie and its parties impose this vision (and the unions too speak about "popular protest").

If we see ourselves as "citizens" or "the people", we become the class brothers of the politicians who deceive us, of the police who beat us, of the judges who imprison us, of Amancio Ortega, the richest man in Spain; we are all part of the "greater Spanish family". And if we accept this "Holy Family", we have to also accept insecurity, cuts in social spending, lay-offs, as is required to make the "Spanish brand" more competitive[9]. This is what the government, the employers and the right wing politicians proclaim in all their cynical frankness and what the left and the unions oppose with their idyllic vision of "trademark Spain" without cuts or redundancies, which they do not believe in themselves,  as is clearly seen whenever the left is in government or the unions sign agreements on redundancies and wage cuts.

As we said in our international leaflet on the balance sheet of the movements in 2011: ''However society is divided into classes, a capitalist class that owns everything and produces nothing and an exploited class (the proletariat) which produces all and has less and less. The driving force of social change is not the democratic game of ‘the decision of a majority of citizens’ (this game is nothing more than a masquerade that covers up and legitimises the dictatorship of the ruling class) but the class struggle. The social movement needs to join up with the struggle of the principle exploited class (the proletariat) that collectively produces most of the wealth and ensures the functioning of social life: factories, hospitals, schools, universities, ports, construction, post offices (...) There is no opposition between the struggle of the modern proletariat and the profound needs of social layers exploited by capitalist oppression.  The struggle of the proletariat is not an egotistical or specific movement but the basis for 'the independent movement of the immense majority to the benefit of the immense majority'(The Communist Manifesto)”.

It is clear that in so far as the struggles are considered part of a "citizens' movement", they will not be directed against the state but will engage in a desperate search, continually coming up against the same wall of so-called "reform", which amounts to "everything must change so that everything can stay the same", as the Prince of Lampedusa said. Beyond insights like seeing the link between Gamonal, 2014, and May 68, if the struggles are seen as a "popular actions", they will not be able to break out of the national shackles and will not put forward what is needed: being an active link in the broad international movement of the proletariat. It is obvious that in so far as the struggles do not integrate themselves into the class struggle, they will not be fighting against the global capitalist system, but they will lose themselves in allocating blame to each in turn, to the speculators, the bankers, the corrupt politicians and so on, like selecting from an interlocking nest of Russian dolls. 

The assemblies, the debates, the discussions in the streets, in the workplaces and in the schools, must address these dilemmas. We shouldn't be afraid either of problems or criticisms. "These present movements would benefit from critically reviewing the experience of two centuries of proletarian struggle, and attempts at social liberation. The road is long and fraught with enormous obstacles, which calls to mind the slogan oft repeated in Spain: 'It is not that we are going slowly, it is that we are going far'. By starting the widest possible debate, without restrictions or discouragement, that is consciously preparing the future movements, we will be ensuring that this hope becomes a reality: another society is possible!" (Excerpt from our international leaflet quoted above). Gamonal with its assemblies and solidarity is one more step on the long and difficult road.

Acción Proletaria (22 January 2014)

Humanity should weep to see this, and greatly fear what it foretells. But to paraphrase the great philosopher Spinoza weeping is not enough; it is necessary to understand.

This growing nightmare is getting out of control but it is not impossible to understand. The cause of this upsurge in barbarism is the same one that resulted in the First World War: imperialism. That is, the life and death struggle by each national capital for a greater share of the world market.

In the nineteenth century the emerging capitalist nations could gobble up the rest of the planet. Millions died in the process. The major powers armed themselves to the teeth from the end of the century as each advance by one threatened the interests of the others. This culminated in World War I when Germany was forced to strike out to counter its strangulation by the other main powers. Millions upon millions of proletarians were slaughtered on the industrialised killing fields of France, Belgium, Turkey, Russia. This was the barbaric price humanity paid for capitalism’s continued existence. A tribute that increased the longer capitalism continued.

The Second World War turned much of the Eurasian land mass into one vast battlefield where there was no or little difference between military and civilians. In this war the ‘other side’ was the entire population of the enemy countries; thus destruction of the men women and children became the ‘legitimate’ aim of the war. It was now total war for the total destruction of the enemy. World War I had slaughtered millions of men, World War II annihilated tens of millions of men, women and children. This barbarism did not end with the war. Europe and the US may have had ‘peace’ but the rest of humanity suffered endless war as the two imperialist blocs reduced one country after another to ruin. North Vietnam had more tonnage of explosive dropped on it than the US used in the whole of World War Two. If this was not enough imperialism held out the prospect of the total annihilation of humanity in a third world war.

The US faced with the end of the ‘old order’ of imperialism

The end of the old imperialist blocs was hailed as the end of the threat of nuclear destruction and the opening of a New World Order. However, the last quarter century has witnessed an accelerating process of the decay of the US’s superpower status. It could not have been otherwise. Freed from the threat of destruction by the other bloc, every capitalist nation has been compelled to place its national imperialist interest first. Initially the US could use its might to get its rivals to tow its line, as seen in the “international coalition” during the first Gulf War, but by the 2003 war in Iraq it was faced with open hostility from many of its former allies like Germany and France.

As its power has weakened so its rivals have become emboldened. Russian imperialism’s recent push into Ukraine would not have happened if it had feared the response of the US. The Russian bourgeoisie, confronted with the US and Europe’s efforts to pull Ukraine away from its sphere of influence, had no choice but to act. But the Russian land-grab in Crimea and part of Eastern Ukraine was encouraged by the US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia has also used its support for the Assad regime to put pressure on the US. Its military, intelligence and diplomatic resources have propped up the regime. At the same time it blunted the USA’s efforts to step up its military campaign against the regime by agreeing to get rid of its chemical weapons.

At the global level the US has also been confronted by the rise of Chinese imperialism which is challenging its domination of the Far East, the Indian Ocean and even into Africa[1]. This growing imperialist power is also backing the USA’s main rivals in the Middle East: Syria and Iran. This has led to the US pivoting its imperialist policy towards the Far East. China is no military rival to the US, but it can certainly use the USA’s weakness to its own ends.

The weakening of US imperialism is being paid for in blood and suffering of millions around the world. Africa is another example. Only two years ago the US boasted about the ‘freeing’ of Libya from the terror of Gaddafi: this July the US ambassador, as well as the British, had to flee from Tripoli as this country went into free fall as rival militia, army units, and gangs fought for control of all the major cities in the country. The USA’s ‘freeing’ of Libya has certainly freed up the supply of looted arms from the collapsed Libyan army’s weapons dumps. These weapons have flowed across North Africa in order to feed numerous wars and armies, for example the upsurge of the jihadists in Mali last year was stimulated by the flow of arms and Islamist fighters from Libya.

In the Sudan, the US-backed break away South Sudan had no sooner declared itself as a new state, with great fanfare in the Western media, than it began to be  torn apart by a bloody war between parts of the bourgeois faction that had been supported by the US. This collapse of the USA’s effort to undermine the Sudanese government can only have stimulated the ambitions of Khartoum and its Chinese backers.

If the US cannot even stop some puppet government dependent upon it from falling apart, why would other countries and factions in the region have any confidence in the US?

In 1914 it was the weaker imperialism’s desperate effort to try and break the strangle-hold of its main rivals that struck the match of the conflagration, and the same scenario was repeated in 1939. Today it is the actions, or the inability to act, of the world’s main imperialist power that is stoking up barbarism. The American military is by far the biggest, most sophisticated and powerful in the world, dwarfing its rivals, but each time the US has used its military power it brings about more instability and barbarity.  This is evident in Pakistan where the increasing use of drones, cruise missiles and secret special forces operations to assassinate the “enemies of the US” (including 4 US civilians), and the consequent slaughter of civilians, is further shaking the foundations of a state like Pakistan which is already failing, whilst at the same time supplying ever more recruits into armed groups who claim to be fighting the US.

And the evolution of the “Islamic State” is the clearest proof that the USA’s efforts to manipulate different factions of the bourgeoisie are producing the disastrous phenomenon of ‘blow back’. Like al Qaeda before it, set up to oppose the Russians in Afghanistan but then becoming an avowed enemy of the USA, Isis or Islamic State was initially fed by the US and regional allies like Qatar as a force capable of confronting the ruthless Assad regime in Syria, but this ‘pawn’ has now become such a danger to the stability of the region that the US is now sending out feelers not only to Iran but also to Assad to see whether they can come to an agreement about fighting this new threat! This about-face speaks volumes about the increasing incoherence of US foreign policy, a reflection of its underlying weakness.

The USA will not be able to respond to this situation by retreating into a new isolationism. It will be forced, as the Obama administration is now being forced in Iraq and Syria, to launch itself into new military adventures. This is a spiral of barbarism which can only be halted by the elimination of its source: capitalism in its epoch of imperialist decline.

Phil 28/8/14

When Poroshenko was elected president of Ukraine he promised to defeat the “separatist terrorists” in the Donbass region, and in the last month the combination of Kiev’s regular army and irregular militias has gained a lot of ground particularly around Luhansk, with increasing cost to life as the fighting moved into more populated cities with more civilians caught in the crossfire. Estimates of the dead are all above 2,000. To this can be added the 298 killed when flight MH17 was shot down when Russia put powerful antiaircraft guns in the hands of separatists without the ability, or even the concern, to recognise civilian transponder signals, compounded by capitalism’s way of balancing the risk of flying over a war zone against the cost of extra fuel to go round it.

“Europe’s most serious security crisis”[1]

Ukraine is an inherently unstable and artificial country[2] grouping the majority Ukrainian population with a minority of Russian speakers as well as various other nationalities. The component populations are divided by historic hatreds going back to the famines of Stalin’s forced collectivisation, to the divisions in the Second World War, the expulsion of Crimean Tartars, all of which is played on by the extreme nationalist politicians and gangs. Added to this, with the economy already in disastrous straits the Ukrainian west of the country sees its salvation in closer trade with the EU while the East remains tied to trade with Russia.

For all that, this ‘civil’ war is not a fundamentally Ukrainian affair, but one whose genesis and implications are completely integrated into the wider imperialist conflicts in Europe and beyond. Before 1989 Ukraine was part of the USSR and divisions were held in check. Today Russia finds itself more and more tightly squeezed by the expansion of the EU and of NATO to include much of its former Eastern European sphere of influence, so much so that Barack Obama says the challenges Russia represents are “effectively regional” (The Economist, 9.8.14). But even with this former superpower cut down to regional size, there are some things it cannot give up, including its Crimean base on the Black Sea, a warm water port giving access to the Mediterranean and via the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean. Likewise it cannot allow Ukraine and its South Stream pipeline to fall entirely under the control of its rivals and enemies. Hence the encouragement and support to the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. In this Russia has benefited from the fact that the USA’s attention has turned to the Far East and the need to counter the rise of China.

So no way could Russia stand by and let ‘Novorossiya’ be destroyed. Russia has not only supplied heavy weapons to the separatists, but also has 20,000 troops massing near Rostov and carrying out manoeuvres on the Ukrainian border. The incursion of an estimated 1,000 troops has not only gone to the rescue of Donetsk, but started to make a land corridor towards Mariupol in the south. Clearly the ‘Novorossiyan’ separatists are not doing enough towards Russia’s desire to forge a land bridge to Crimea, which it annexed last March, and perhaps also towards the pro-Russian separatists in Trans-Dniester in Moldova. For the moment, this is only a not-so-covert incursion, not an open invasion. The perspective for now is continued destabilisation.

Meanwhile Ukraine wants to join NATO. Poroshenko and Putin may have met in Minsk at the Eurasian Union meeting in Minsk, but there was no basis for negotiation.

The ‘west’ cannot let Russia get away with this incursion, even if it is now only a regional power, even when Obama admitted the US has yet to develop a strategy to counter it. First of all there is diplomatic condemnation. Then there are increased sanctions, this time affecting Russian banks, decided after the Malaysian airliner was shot down. Then the question of supplying Kiev with aid: $690m from Germany as well as $1.4billion from the IMF (the second instalment of $17billion promised when Russia cut off aid last winter). No doubt the aid will also include sale of weapons. Lastly, Britain is to lead a new multilateral Joint Expeditionary Force of 10,000 from 6 countries, none of them NATO heavyweights, and Canada may also become involved – at this stage this is largely symbolic and certainly does not presage a military response to the Ukraine crisis. While all the EU countries are united in their interest in countering the Russian offensive, we should not imagine that there is a united ‘international community’ or ‘west’. In fact the neighbouring countries and European powers are all busy protecting their own interests: France is still delivering helicopter carriers to Russia, Britain still wants Russian businesses to invest through the City of London, and Germany still depends on Russian gas, and each wants the others to bear the cost of any sanctions. There are also divisions with those countries which take a much more hawkish view of the Russian incursions, usually because they have their own Russian minorities and fear the same kind of instability could be fomented at home. Meanwhile Serbia is caught in the dilemma of trying to keep its old Russian ally while also orientating itself towards the EU, a situation that cannot hold.

Internal ruin

The conflict in Ukraine is very destructive. In addition to the loss of life and physical destruction of infrastructure, particularly in the East, there is the effect on the economy. Although the mining and heavy industry in the Donbass is out of date and dangerous, the loss of a region that accounts for 16% of GDP and 27% of industrial production is a disaster for Kiev, whose GDP is predicted to fall by 6.5% by the end of the year and whose currency, the hryvnia, has fallen by 60% against the dollar since the beginning of the year. It is truly dependent on the aid it is getting.  Things will only get worse in the winter if Russia withholds the gas it depends on – with particularly disastrous implications for the population facing a Ukrainian winter.

117,000 people have been internally displaced and there are nearly a quarter of a million refugees in Russia.

The nature of the fighting, with both sides depending on militias made up of some of the worst fanatics, mercenaries, terrorists and adventurers, not only inflicts these killers on the civilian population now, but is also creating a really dangerous situation for the future. Who controls these irregular forces? Who will be able to call them off? We have only to look at the proliferation of various fanatical gangs in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Libya to see the threat.

The working class and the danger of nationalism

The greatest danger for the working class in the Ukrainian conflict is that it could be recruited behind the various nationalist factions. One very concrete guide to the success or failure of this recruitment can be seen in the willingness of workers to allow themselves to be drafted into the army, and in Ukraine there have been a number of protests against this. Mothers, wives and other relatives of soldiers have blocked roads in protest at their deployment to the Donbass: “after six soldiers originally from the region of Volhynia were killed, mothers, wives and relatives of soldiers of 51st brigade blocked the roads in the region of Volhinya to protest against further deployment of the unit in Donbas… 
Demonstrations and protests organized by wives and other relatives of draftees asking return of soldiers home or trying to block their departure to the front meanwhile spread to other regions of the Ukraine (Bukovina, Lviv, Kherson, Melitopol, Volhynia etc.). Families of the soldiers were blocking the roads with chopped down trees in the region of Lviv at the beginning of June” (article by the Czech group Guerre de Classe posted on the ICC discussion forum)[3]. There have been occupations of recruitment offices, military training grounds, even an airport.

Not all protests have managed to avoid the siren songs of nationalism. For instance the same article reports demonstrations in the Donbass calling for peace and an end to the “anti-terrorist operation”, in other words only for the end to the military action by the other side. In spite of this they report strikes by miners in the region with demands for safety (not going underground when bombardment could lead to them being trapped) and for higher wages.

These protests reported by Guerre de Classe are an important sign that the working class is not defeated, that many workers are not willing to throw their lives away on such a military adventure for the ruling class. It does not mean that the working class in Ukraine and Russia is already strong enough to directly call the war into question and the danger of the working class being recruited by the various nationalist gangs remains. To truly put the war into question would require a much more massive and above all much more conscious struggle of the working class on an international scale.

Alex, 30.8.14

Ebola is not merely a medical problem. It is foremost a social question, the product of a system that has all the technology and scientific know-how to reduce the suffering of the people in the world by epidemics to a minimum, but isn’t able to achieve this.

Mankind masters the explosive outbreaks of the most contagious epidemics

In its history mankind was regularly confronted with the outbreak of natural diseases, killing huge amounts of the world population. But the evolution of knowledge made mankind increasingly capable of finding the means to diminish their devastating effects and the number of people killed.

Probably the first massive and global pandemic was the so-called “Black Death”, peaking in Europe in the years 1346–1353. It was one of the most devastating epidemics, leading to the death of an estimated 30–60% of Europe's total population. By applying measures of quarantine mankind succeeded in preventing it spreading further. In the 19th century, in1826, a cholera epidemic broke out, hitting Europe and infecting tens of thousands of people in Britain. At first the idea was that it was caused by direct exposure to the products of filth and decay. But using simple research methods a small number of doctors showed that a lack of hygiene in the water supply spread the disease, something Friedrich Engels showed clearly:

“…..in spite of the excitement into which the cholera epidemic plunged the sanitary police (…) it is in almost the same state as in 1831! (….) Not only the cellars but the first floors of all the houses in this district are damp; a number of cellars, once filled up with earth, have now been emptied and are occupied once more. (….) In one cellar the water constantly wells up through a hole stopped with clay, the cellar lying below the river level, so that its occupant, a hand-loom weaver, had to bale out the water from his dwelling every morning and pour it into the street!” (The Condition of the Working Class in England)

In Hamburg, one of the fastest growing cities in Germany, cholera again raged for ten weeks, bringing all commerce and trade to a complete standstill. 8,600 people died.

In the year 1892 Friedrich Engels hoped that “The repeated visitations of cholera (…) and other epidemics have shown the British bourgeois the urgent necessity of sanitation in his towns and cities.” (Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892). Science finally found that cholera was transmitted through contaminated water supply and by exposure to the faeces of an infected person.

In the course of the 19th century medicine achieved enormous break-throughs. The development of vaccines and, more importantly, the introduction of environmental sanitary measures, coupled with a better understanding of infectious disease (epidemiology), have been invaluable weapons in the fight for human health. “The most crying abuses described in this book have either disappeared or have been made less conspicuous...” (Idem)

In the first half of the 20th century, the development of science continued, still achieving a considerable progress. The discovery of antibiotics, the introduction of effective drugs vaccination against an increas­ing number of diseases, have meant that a number of diseases no longer cause anything like the same number of deaths as before WWII. Thus sixty years ago the bourgeoisie was convinced that the global war against infectious diseases in the world was on the road to victory.

A new outbreak of pandemics in the decadence of capitalism

However with the aggravation of the contradictions of the capitalist system, the onset of decadence of capitalism, the historical crisis of the bourgeois system, the conditions had ripened for the outburst of two world wars and a numerous number of local wars. This was to have a dramatic impact on public health. World War I in particular led to the outbreak of a new pandemic.

The war had lead to a complete devastation of large regions of Europe, the displacement of millions of people, the destruction of the means of production and habitation, the massive transport of army troops from and to all regions of the world …. In other words: the creation of a huge chaos and a major regression of sanitary conditions and hygiene.

A new strain of influenza – dubbed Spanish flu as a result of wartime censorship rules - became highly contagious in the fall of 1918 in France. Chinese labourers, shipped from northern China to France, working just behind the frontline in the most horrible circumstances, already on the brink of starvation, infected the soldiers in the trenches. The flu quickly spread to the US and parts of Asia. The influenza killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, ranking as one of the deadliest epidemics in history. The bourgeoisie has always denied or played down any links between the conditions created by the war and the huge number of deaths from flu.

The aggravation of living conditions under decomposition

The progress in medical science and health systems which was achieved from the middle of the 19th century on was never extended towards and put into practice in all the countries of the world. In the so-called “developing countries”, access to such improvements remained blocked for the large majority of the workers and peasants. And this has never changed since. Increasing alarms about contagious diseases in these regions of the world are casting a shadow of doubt over the propaganda about the “bright future” and the “good health” of the present system.

For marxism, there is nothing surprising here. These diseases are expressions of the fact that the capitalist system is rotting on its feet, because of the existing stalemate between the two main classes in actual society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As the proletariat is not able to affirm its perspective of revolution, the contradictions of capitalism in decay only aggravate more and more.

The phase of the decomposition, beginning at the end of the 1980’s, provokes a spirit of ‘every man for himself’, tears away at social cohesion and leads to an ever-increasing moral decay. Decomposition has been marked by the tendency towards complete chaos in all corners of the world. Capitalism in decomposition not only fails to counter diseases, but even tends to aggravate and even initiate them.

Against the background of this growing chaos and because of the corresponding worsening of hygienic conditions, at the beginning of this millennium:

• approximately 3.3 billion in the “developing countries” had no access to clean drinking water;

• nearly 2.5 billion people (more than one third of the world population) has no access to basic sanitary supply.

• each year 250 million people get sick by contaminated water, in 5 to 10 million cases leading to death.

The advent of new infectious diseases and the re-emergence of old ones in different areas of the world, avowedly free of such diseases, have precipitated a new health crisis, which threatens to overwhelm all the gains made so far. Diseases that used to be geographically restricted, such as cholera, are now striking in regions once thought safe. While some diseases have been almost completely subdued, others such as malaria and tuberculosis, which have always been among the greatest “natural” enemies of mankind, are fighting back with renewed ferocity, causing millions of deaths every year.

It is the decomposition of society that is clearly responsible for healthcare getting out of control. SARS for instance, one of the last dangerous pandemics before the outbreak of Ebola. SARS “is thought to have jumped species in a poverty-stricken area of South East China where people live crowded together with their animals in conditions, reminiscent of the Middle Ages. This [situation] is at the origin of many of the most serious flu epidemics world wide. The ‘success’ of the world market in decadence lies not in preventing the emergence of the disease, but in providing the means for its spread across the globe.” (‘SARS: Symptom of a decaying society’, World Revolution, May 2003).

The conditions of decomposition in Africa

“It’s in Africa that capitalism’s descent into militarist barbarity is most clearly pronounced. In continuing conflicts, in the fragmentation of capitalist states, the wearing away of frontiers, the role of clans and warlords (……,) it’s possible to see fragmentation and chaos extending across a continent, giving us an idea of what the decomposition of capitalism could have in store for the whole of humanity. (‘The spread of war shows capitalism is at a dead-end, World Revolution, May 2013)

In the past decades, of the three countries worst hit by Ebola (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea), two have been ravaged by civil wars and ethnic massacres. Between 1989 and 2003 Liberia’s infrastructure was devastated by two civil wars. Sierra Leone had been plagued by a civil war of 11 years. More than 100,000 people lost their lives and many more of them had suffered ‘special’ punishment in the form of barbaric mutilation.

Moreover extractive projects by foreign companies, ruthlessly exploiting oil and gas or one of the mineral sources for the new economies, has lead to a massive deforestation and the destruction of the local habitat and natural infrastructure. The breakdown of social cohesion severely affected the livelihoods of the rural population. Indigenous people were forced to quit their land and shift to urban shanty towns.

Among the three countries, Liberia is one of the least economically developed and most impoverished countries in the world. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), 1.3 million people in Liberia live in extreme poverty. In Sierra Leone 70% of the population live in extreme poverty. Half the population of the three countries live in the greatest misery, lacking the most basic hygiene such as access to clean drinking water.

Continuous deforestation has also led to a radical change of the climate conditions in the countries of western and central Africa. Precipitation extremes are projected to increase. Sudden shifts from dry to wet conditions are favourable for the outbreak for Ebola. It is the combined effect of exploitation by foreign companies, the radical change of weather conditions and the global economic crisis that has created the conditions for the present health catastrophe.

Ebola’s devastating impact

The outbreak of the Ebola in the course of this year was not the first one. There have been repeated outbreaks almost every year since it was first discovered in 1976 in central Africa. Ebola is primarily a rural disease, where food gathered from hunting exposes people to infected animals, and where lack of clean water spreads infection. The isolated conditions in rural areas limited the numbers affected, only killing some hundreds of people.

This year the Ebola spread for the first time to the heavily populated areas along the west African coast. In these areas not only the conditions of sanitation, but also the state of health care, are disastrous, increasing the vulnerability of the township communities to the epidemic.

The virus completely overran the capacity of the local health systems. It is permanently racing ahead of the ability to control it. After 60 health care workers had died in the Ebola outbreak, there was a certain level of panic. Joseph Fair: “There’s been a lot of abandoning ship.” After the disease had killed nearly 1,000 people and infected nearly 2,000, on August 8th the World Health Organisation declared the Ebola epidemic an international public health emergency.

The pace of the infection is still accelerating. The public health system in Monrovia is nearing total collapse. All the most basic units for health care, including malarial drugs for children and medical care for pregnant women, have been closed.

In the West Point township in Monrovia local residents, upset by the events and out of deep distrust for the government, attacked a school that the authorities had quietly turned into an isolation center for people with Ebola symptoms. The protesters broke into the school and took bedding and other supplies. On Saturday August 18th West Point’s angry residents attacked health care workers.

On August 19th, a quarantine was announced forWest Point, trapping an estimated 75,000 people, turning the township in a huge graveyard. Residents were now in the killing fields of the epidemic. They can die, but at least it’s among themselves! The quarantine, causing the death of hundreds of people, not only because of Ebola, but also through malaria (children) and lack of food and clean water, had to be lifted after 10 days. In any case residents broke out in huge numbers.

The Ebola virus has all the potential to become a disaster on a scale never seen since the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920, nearly one hundred years ago.

The cynicism of the world bourgeoisie

Until now there has only been a tiny influx of aid from the wealthy countries. Half way through September documented pledges or donations totalled $326.7 million dollars. Besides the mobilisation of a few hundred dedicated volunteer doctors and nurses, for the greater part little actual deliveries of supplies, equipment and healthcare personnel take place. The documented contributions still fall short of the $600 million that will be needed for hospital beds, personnel and other needs to subdue an outbreak that is spreading with alarming speed.

US spending, over the past nine months, amounts to barely $100 million dollars. This contrasts dramatically with the billions made available by the imperialist powers, and their allies among the Gulf monarchies, for the new war in Syria and Iraq, let alone the hundreds of billions squandered on wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless Obama described the Ebola outbreak as a “national security priority” for the US, for it could trigger the destabilization of west Africa, posing “profound economic, political and security implications”. So he could think of nothing else than the sending of three thousand troops.

Reports from the WHO point to an exponential increase in cases, doubling roughly every three weeks. The IRC, on behalf of 34 NGO’s, has warned that the globe has only four weeks to stop the crisis from spiralling out of control (October 2, 2014). At the same time it finds that, of the 1,500 new drugs that were made available worldwide between 1974 and 2004, only 10 targeted the tropical illnesses. Regarding Ebola, since 1976, hardly any research has been done. So tropical diseases continue to affect more than a billion people in the world and kill up to 500,000 a year.

John Ashton, Faculty of Public Health in London, described the actual situation as “the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of an ethical and social framework.” The New Yorker bluntly stated that“diseases that mostly affect poor people in poor countries aren't a research priority, because it’s unlikely that those markets will ever provide a return”.

The actual spreading of the Ebola provokes a huge anxiety in the central countries. As always, the very 'anti-racist' states are quite keen to use the fear of African travellers to stir up xenophobic sentiments among the population of Europe. The dominant fractions of the ruling class make their own use of the climate of fear and panic:

• to make everyone to forget the much greater threats that we face today, such as war or nuclear disasters;
• to encourage the population of the central countries to side with the bourgeois state for protection;
• to block with all possible means people from African countries searching for refuge in the central countries.

By using soap and clean water the Ebola virus can be rather simply contained. But present day capitalism is even not capable of applying such a simple measure. The Ebola outbreak is the product of a sharpening of the contradictions of capitalism which, for a century, “has only brought more misery and destruction in all their forms. Faced with the advanced decomposition of its system, the dominant class has nothing other to offer than ideological lies and repression”. (‘SARS: It is capitalism which is responsible for the epidemic’, World Revolution May 2003)

Zyart, 15.10.14

The recent wave of youth protest in Hong Kong was begun by students organised by the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism on September 14, when hundreds of them occupied the roadways of several major arteries in the city, particularly its business district. The protests were over the change in rules imposed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), mainly in restricting “civic” nominations in the electoral process for 2017. In fact, the post of Chief Executive, the issue in contention, has been appointed by Beijing since Britain handed the territory back in 1997 under the so-called “one country, two systems” idea. The change in the rules coming from Beijing aims to strengthen the role of the business community in the electoral process, thus reflecting and responding to the need of the Chinese ruling class to consolidate its already tight grip on Hong Kong politics.

After some hundreds of protesters were initially and violently cleared from the streets, “Occupy Central” (“Occupy Central with Love and Peace”), an organisation initiated by a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, demanded that the PRC (the People’s Republic of China) government listen to them and began a campaign of civil disobedience with the aim of securing a voting system that provides a process that “satisfies the international standards in relation to universal suffrage”. Democratic and pacifist ideas have dominated the left in Hong Kong since the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989. The “Occupy Central” demand is doubly absurd because the state in every democratic country in the world today vets its own electoral candidates in one way or another and the origins of this demand lie with a particular legal faction of the island’s bourgeoisie. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) here is simply continuing the strategy used by British imperialism when it ruled the colony both at the level of legal chicanery and at the level of violent repression in order to reinforce its rule.
Following the repression of the students by police and organised thugs, government ultimatums, talking of “outside interference” and threatening bloody reprisals, came and went. What repression there was only served to bring more protesters onto the streets, resulting in a wider occupation of central points. A feature of the now dwindling protest movement has been its pacifism, its “politeness”, holding up arms as if in surrender, etc. This was especially noticeable in the business district of Admiralty and the super-expensive shopping district of Causeway Bay targeted by the protesters. By contrast, in the urban and working class district of Mong-Kok, fighting against the police has been ongoing and has only died down in the last few days. At the time of writing the government has had talks with the protest leaders and, given the demand for “universal suffrage”, appear to have things more or less under control for the moment, thus avoiding a more bloody repression for which the protesters were ill-prepared. The trade unions in Hong Kong, again built up by the British, have also joined the call for the “defence of democracy” alongside the protesters’ denunciation of the Hong Kong electoral process as “pseudo-democracy”. But again, all electoral and democratic processes from Europe to the Americas, from Africa to Afghanistan are “pseudo-democratic”, frauds and shams that keep the ruling class intact and the working class oppressed and divided. Another legacy of British rule is the division imposed by immigration and ghettos for the poor Mandarin-speaking workers with an estimated 50,000 of them living in little more than cages. There’s no concern for these workers in Occupy Central’s demand for “universal suffrage”.

The Mong-Kok “anarchists”

On the libcom website there are three texts coming from Hong Kong: the first is called “Never Retreat, a Mong-Kok State of Mind” signed by Kristine Kwok and another from Mong-Kok called “Hotpot, Gods and ‘Leftist Pricks’: Political Tensions in the Mong-Kok Occupation” signed by a Holok Chen. The third text is “Black vs Yellow: Class Antagonisms and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement” signed by “an American ultra and some friends”. We can look at the third in more detail but first the two based in Mong-Kok: the two texts seem to be from a related unidentified group. They see themselves as “anarchist” – though terms like “anarchist”, “leftist”, “left communist” are impossible to understand here.
These anarchist elements were involved in fights with the police, the organised thugs and some local people that didn’t agree with them. They insist on a carnival-type atmosphere to their occupation, including hot-pot, ping-pong and other games trying to construct their own “eco-system” in the area. They are not affiliated to “Occupy Central” and pose themselves as an opposition to it. They appear to see the need for discussion and assemblies but make no bones about the prime aim being “universal suffrage” (which doesn’t include immigrants incidentally) and for every group to maintain activity in their own area. They seem extremely limited and make no mention of the working class.

A contribution to a class perspective

The “Black vs Yellow...” text is something else and it’s not clear if it is in any way related to the previous group(s). Again some of terminology around the role of the “left” is difficult to understand, but there is much more weight and thought behind this long text which we will try to précis. The text clearly opposes the demand from the HKFS for democracy and universal suffrage and the author asks: what if such demands were met? The response is that it would mean participating in your own exploitation while giving rise to new bourgeois forces. The text criticises the group “Left21”, which expresses a commitment to the struggle for universal suffrage” and the establishment of a “participatory democracy” decided by the “people”. The participation in the democratic process is seen by “Left21” as a stage, a stepping-stone to the future where democratic reform can be superseded. We are familiar with these arguments about the justification of the democratic process as a means to a brighter future and it’s just as empty and dangerous in Hong Kong as it is in Britain and elsewhere. And the be-all and end-all of universal suffrage and democracy was also used against in the Indignados protest movement in Spain, in particular via the “Democracia Real Ya” (DRY), the main force for the democratic counter-offensive of the bourgeoisie.  Indeed this text points to the realities of the democracies of Greece and the United States as an answer to those that demand it here.

Another thing that the author is clear on is the economic basis for the protests. The Hong Kong economy, with the busiest port in the world, became a key re-export and service centre, developing its economy during the 80’s. This was beneficial to both China and Britain until the colony was handed back to China in 1997. Many of the mainland Chinese factories were set up with capital from Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. But underlining the student unrest today are questions of inflation, sky-high rents (an average of 40% of wages), food prices, inequality and public transport. And on top of this the relatively “better off” Hong Kong youth suffer desperate competition for university degrees for jobs that will not exist, or increasingly long hours for young workers or graduates – those lucky enough to be on the exhausting treadmill. The original protest movement of 2014, which also has the background of the “approaching doom” of China, has been re-branded in the west as a pacifist movement limited to constitutional alterations. But it was begun by the Occupy movement in 2011 which, though small and chaotic, made some criticisms of the demand for democracy, and many elements from this milieu were behind the beginnings of the current protest. The original Occupy movement was cleared out by the end of 2012; and in March 2013 one of the largest and longest strikes for decades broke out at the Kwai Tsing Container Terminal. The author says, and there’s no reason to doubt it, that the student and worker protest, if not allied, “was generated by the same economic stagnation and intensifying class antagonism”.  Prior to this the text details the riots in the mid-50’s, and riots in 1967 that lasted for eighteen months and were “the largest domestic disturbances in the city-state’s history”. There were massive strikes and street fighting against the police; government buildings and media outlets were bombed and attacked and while we can say that some of this was stirred up by the mainland bourgeoisie which supported the riots against the “fascists”, there are also elements of class struggle. Around the same time the Portuguese army had intervened against the demands of the Chinese-backed protesters in its colony of Macau and then agreed to most of their demands as the colony fell under the de facto control of the mainland. The proletarian aspect to the 67/8 uprising in Hong Kong can be seen in the bourgeoisie’s response: post-68, after thousands of arrests and deportations, the British authorities responded with their post world war one and two “reform” programmes of building more affordable houses, increased wages and an expanded welfare system. There is little such room for manoeuvre today and the author emphasises the “no future” that capitalism holds for youth, the trap of democracy and nationalism and the need for the struggle to spread. There are some ambiguities and the author specifically doesn’t mention the need for assemblies but is relatively clear that the only effective struggle must both involve and be towards the working class. It is clear from the text that the only propensity for a real development of the struggle lies with the working class and first of all its spread to workers on the mainland. And it’s a fact that the majority of strikes have taken place in the Guangdong southern province adjacent to Hong Kong (though it’s also a fact that workers’ strikes on the mainland have spread to all workers and all industries to the interior). The text also makes references to the history of wildcat strikes in Hong Kong, the strikes and riots from the mid-80’s, the wildcat beginnings of the 1997dock strike and its subversion by the union (Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions – HKFTU). In September the union called for support for the students by calling a strike on a national holiday, and what few workers joined the student protest did so as individuals.

Looming problems for the Chinese bourgeoisie

From October 20 to 23, under the auspices of Chinese president Xi Jinping, the 205 members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party held its Plenum dedicated to establishing “a system of the strict rule of law” (Reuters. 30.9.14). Under Xi’s eighteen month reign thousands of “corrupt” party officials have been executed, jailed, sacked or demoted in a widespread purge and settling of internal scores. It could mean a hardening stance, moving away from the weiwen policy of the maintenance of stability that has existed up to now. Of late there has been a crackdown on journalists and dissidents; internet censorship has been intensified and protesters from the countryside in the capital, mostly peasants with grievances, have been beaten up, jailed or deported back to their regions. We also saw the incidents of the direct repression of workers in and around the Yue Yuen strikes earlier in the year and the suggestion is that the situation will become more volatile. This need to confront the “social question” is all the more important for the ruling class in China now that the economy is slowing down and debt and the housing bubble are reaching unsustainable proportions. The coincidence of protest in Hong Kong and what must surely turn out to be rising levels of class struggle on the mainland presents the Chinese bourgeoisie with still more potential problems to solve, with repression and “the strict rule of law” the only possible answer that it has. Based in Hong Kong and its legal circles is the so-called “non-governmental organisation”, the “China Labour Bulletin” which is all for the pursuance of democracy and Free Trade Unions for Chinese workers “through peaceful and legal actions”. The CLB has supported and was probably involved in the promotion of the claims for “universal suffrage” among the students and its general approach could either be useful for the ruling class or it could invite repression. Whatever happens the CLB and its backers remain a danger for the working class with its claims for ‘democratic, free trade unions’.

Democracy and nationalism drowns the “Occupy Movement”

The “Black vs Yellow...” text is clear on the current weaknesses of the student protest and the capitalist nature of the demands for democracy that were imposed upon it. It surmises that the student protest has “few paths forward and many routes to defeat” and its critique of the democratic road to defeat, its analysis of “no future” and the necessity of a real extension to the working class as the only way forward are lessons that apply to all the “Occupy” movements across the globe.

We can say the indications are that after the heights of the Indignados movement in Spain, 2011/12, which had clear links with and possibilities for the class struggle, and the profound Occupy movements of Turkey and Brazil in 2012/13, that the movement has been checked first of all and then assimilated entirely into the framework of the bourgeoisie and its ideologies. Beginning in the Middle East and North Africa (Tunisia), the more or less positive nature of this movement was expressed in Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, the UK, the US, Canada and Spain and now the international dynamic of this movement is at least on the wane. The Hong Occupy movement, as one example, seems to reflect this in that the vocal minorities of the original movement that were openly critical of democracy have been drowned out in the latest protests. Democracy, and its twin brothers nationalism and imperialism, have filled the vacuum left by a movement whose only possibility was to extend to the working class and for the working class in turn to give it a kiss of life. Another indication of the end of this wave is how the word “revolution” has been linked to elements of the “Arab Spring” and the Occupy movement. A revolution is a mighty event involving untold masses of class conscious workers acting on their own self-organised grounds. As positive as some expressions of Occupy were they never came anywhere near to this and, at best, could only be an element towards it. Instead we see these “revolutions”, in many cases supported by various anarchists, as completely bourgeois, nationalist and imperialist. The Ukrainian “revolution” in Kiev is a case in point where the working class was drowned and mobilised for war. Some anarchists still go on about the Syrian “revolution” by which they mean the US-backed gangs of the Free Syrian Army. And even today in the barbaric free-for-all in Syria, some anarchists, through their rose-tinted magnifying glasses, see “the best example of the ‘Arab Spring’ so far in the movement of the democratic society in Syrian Kurdistan”. These adjuncts to imperialist war define the “Democratic autonomy” of nationalist ideology in Syrian Kurdistan as a “revolution”.

Such forms of anarchism help obscure the way forward for the proletariat by assimilating imperialist war, nationalism and democracy with “revolution”. But the lessons remain the same for the working class in any protest movement or strike even if it’s only small minorities that have drawn them out: assemblies and meetings open to all; free discussion (contrast this to the personalities and leaders of the Hong Kong democracy movement lecturing passive crowds); extension to other workers and self-organisation. The Occupy movement may be done to death but it was a positive and international moment that was unable to go any further without a more profound proletarian turn.

Baboon, 29.10.14 

Public meeting in Budapest on World War I

The Budapest bookshop Gondolkodó Autonom Antikvárium invited the ICC to hold in September 2014 a public discussion in the city, as we have already done in previous years1. The ICC suggested for this year showing the film on our website “How the working class brought an end to World War I”. 100 years ago, the working class – betrayed by its organisations, the unions and the socialist parties – was unable to prevent the outbreak of the most terrible war in history until then. Today, the commemorations of World War I are a further occasion for nationalist propaganda in its liberal-democratic or more populist-patriotic versions. What is left out in most of the expositions, documentaries and articles on World War I is the reality about the end of the war, and the causes of the armistice. As the film illustrates, the first revolutionary wave of the world proletariat is an example of a 'secret in plain sight'.  The material for the film is from widely available sources on the internet; many of the photos come from Wikipedia and original film footage from youtube. The fact that there were strikes, mutinies and uprisings at the end of World War I is hardly a secret. The revolutionary turmoil that led to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the withdrawal of Germany from the war has been extensively covered by bourgeois historians. The connection between these events and the Russian Revolution is also widely known. But despite all this, the simple fact that there was a worldwide wave of workers' struggles, as the film says, “from Canada to Argentina, from Finland to Australia, from Spain to Japan”, and that these struggles were in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, inspired by the example of the seizure of political power by the Russian workers in October 1917 - this is, in effect, still a secret, a fact that the world bourgeoisie is still very keen to keep hidden. Why? Because, again as the film says, for a few brief years these struggles shook the capitalist world to its very foundations, and the bourgeoisie today, despite all the difficulties of the proletariat, the apparent lack of struggles, the advance of the crisis and of decomposition, is still afraid of the example that the first revolutionary wave sets.

After showing the film we suggested a discussion not only on the historic events but also about the wars in the current phase of capitalist world order and about the role of the working class today. The proposed topics for the following debate were: nationalism vs. internationalism; is a further world war on the agenda of history? Do we face a future with less war? What kinds of wars are being waged today? What were the weaknesses of the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23? What are the difficulties for the working class and its revolutionary militants today?

The debate was, as always in Budapest, very lively and animated by the seriousness of the audience. There’s nothing self-evident about attending a public discussion about the perspectives of a classless society in a country whose inhabitants suffered 40 years of so-called Socialism (1949-89) and whose present government has and for a long time been openly based on Hungarian chauvinism. Taking an interest in such a meeting under these general political circumstances requires an attitude of being “against the current”. The economic situation in Hungary is worse than in most of the former “socialist” countries in Eastern Europe (Poland, Baltic EU members, Czech Republic, Slovakia) and the militancy of the working class is not more visible than in other countries. So the audience was rather politicised, politically and culturally “educated”, informed about the history of the workers’ movement and committed to clarification in open debate – from a proletarian point of view.

Questions about the revolutionary wave

The questions raised in the discussion at the beginning were about historical facts and the political assessment of events: about the Shanghai uprising in 1927, the Limerick workers’ council in Ireland 1920, the Slovak Republic of Councils in May/June 1919:

- The film says: “In 1927 more than half a million workers in Shanghai launch an armed insurrection and take control of the city. Again the uprising is brutally crushed by the nationalists in an orgy of bloodshed”. A participant wanted to know more about these events. The answer given by the ICC underlined the authentic working class character of the isolated but heroic Shanghai insurrection of March 1927.2 These struggles, which were still an expression of the ebbing wave, a “last gasp of world revolution” as we say in an article, took place in the huge expanse of China whose working class went through a phase of revolutionary ferment. The policy of the dominant Stalin faction in Russia towards the Chinese Communist Party consisted of establishing an anti-imperialist united front with the bourgeois Kuomintang to struggle for the ‘national liberation’ of China. Under Stalinist pressure the CCP ordered the workers to hand over their weapons to the Kuomintang who subsequently slaughtered the workers with these same weapons. So the Kuomintang brutally put an end to the Shanghai workers’ uprising, after the CCP had said to the workers to trust in the national army of Kuomintang leader Chang Kai Chek. What then followed and what the Maoists call the preparation of the “revolution” in 1949 was in fact only a long war between different bourgeois armies, leading to the seizure of power by Mao and the CCP in military uniforms.

- A comrade in the audience asked the question why there is nothing in the film about the Limerick soviet in summer 1920. In fact a 23 minutes film about the whole international dimension of the revolutionary wave cannot be complete, there are necessarily many struggles that can’t be mentioned, and many vital issues that can’t be covered – a film is not an article or a book. But it would certainly be worth drawing the lessons of this Irish example of a self-organised workers’ struggle – and about the role of nationalism (IRA, Sinn Fein) in the crushing of this movement.3

- The same could be said about the support given to the Slovak Republic of Councils in June 1919 by the Hungarian Red Army. These events are well registered in the memories of the politicised people in Eastern Central Europe, but not profoundly treated in the film. The ICC delegation could not refer to the concrete events in Slovakia in 1919 because of a lack of profound knowledge about the historical facts, but for the military aspect of the question it insisted on the principle that military means cannot replace the consciousness and self-activity of the working class, as the failure in 1920 of the (Russian) Red Army offensive in Poland showed.

Social democracy before 1914

A longer discussion evolved about the nature of social democracy before 1914 and during World War I. A comrade summed up a criticism of several participants of the ICC statement (also present in the film) about the “betrayal of social democracy”. The ICC defends the position that most of the member parties of the 2nd International betrayed the working class because these workers’ parties of the 19th century declared in different occasions before 1914 their attachment to the principle of internationalism (to defend the class, and not the nation state). However most of the leaders of the majority of these parties betrayed this principle by openly supporting their national bourgeoisie in the first days of August 1914 when war credits were voted in parliaments and the disaster began. Against this view of things the comrade speaking for a divergent position stated that the notion of betrayal does not make sense because “social democracy was never in favour of revolution”. According to this reasoning the parties of the 2nd International were workers’ parties, but not revolutionary ones since the working class in this pre-war period was not revolutionary; the social democratic parties were an expression of the weaknesses of the class in those days, and the latter was not only a victim of betrayal but part of it. Another comrade referred in the same discussion to the enthusiasm for war at the beginning of WWI and to the fact that the SPD (in Germany) was already tied to the capitalist state by its important parliamentary fraction.

There are different aspects to this discussion. The ICC defends the general framework of the ascendance and decadence of capitalism with different tasks for revolutionaries in the different periods. The social democratic parties of the ascendant period, ending with WWI, struggled for reforms within capitalism AND for revolution, as Rosa Luxemburg stated in 1899 in her polemic “Social reform or revolution ?” against party comrade Eduard Bernstein. Consequently the workers’ parties of this period hosted different currents, from openly reformist and statist ones to revolutionary currents like those around Luxemburg, Lenin, Pannekoek, Bordiga etc. In 1914 the leaders of most of the social democratic parties were effectively on the side of the national bourgeoisie – and then betrayed in theory and practice the internationalist principles of the Stuttgart and Basle Congresses of the 2nd International. During the war the revolutionary fractions prepared the formation of the 3rd International because the 2nd collapsed with the outbreak of the world war and because of the betrayal of most of its member parties.

Another aspect in this discussion is the question: to what extent do we consider ourselves to be part of the revolutionary tradition of previous periods? To what extent do we share a common heritage of principles and method, common concepts?

The comrades in the audience who did not share the historical framework of ascendance and decadence of capitalism insisted on the lack of a “communist programme” in social democracy, saying even without the betrayal of the leaders it would have been attached to reformism and the bourgeois/capitalist state. But despite this different historical framework there was a general concern in the discussion to see the working class and its revolutionary vanguard in their mutual relationship: the weaknesses of the class with respect to its self-organisation, but also the theoretical weaknesses of the communists and internationalist anarchists of the period. The role of unions and a lot of questions concerning the relationship between the class and its vanguard still needed to be clarified.

A young participant, referring to the situation of 1919 in Hungary, said that the seizure of power in the name of the working class was carried out by the social democratic and communist party leaders, and not by the spontaneous activity of the self-organized proletariat. Another particpant at the meeting underlined the fact that the Communist Party created in Hungary in autumn 1918 was formed by very different currents (Marxists, syndicalists, former prisoners of war returning from revolutionary Russia, and others) and was eclectic in its programme.

Today’s wars and class movements

In the last part of the discussion questions were raised about current issues. Most of the participants at the debate seemed to agree on the assessment about the increasing danger of war today. The expanding spiral of bloodshed in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine is all too obvious. One participant said that violence and war are stretching their grip from the periphery to the centres of capitalist power. If there was a divergence in this part of the discussion it was probably about the question of an economic rationality of these conflicts. Whereas the ICC comrades stressed the growing irrationality of today’s wars of decomposition, e.g. in the areas claimed by the Islamic State (IS), other participants replied that even these wars are profitable for some capitalists and even for capitalism as a whole. But here we are talking about two different kinds of rationality: on the one side the rationality of profits for some particular capitalists, on the other side the rationality of a species that needs to become fully human.

The last question raised in the discussion was: why didn’t the workers join the Occupy movement? Our reply was that even if numerous people gathering around this banner in 2011/13 belonged to the working class the movement as a whole did not think of extending their struggle towards the working class, except for some limited cases in Spain and in California. And most of the Occupy demonstrators did not conceive themselves as proletarian, although they often were. The difficulty of the class to develop a specific class identity was already a topic in the Budapest discussion in 2010. It is part of the consciousness within the class that must ripen. Without this self-consciousness of the revolutionary subject the jump to a new and really human society will not be possible.

It is – by the way – interesting that in the Budapest discussions one question that we hear often in Western Europe, i.e. the question of the existence of the working class, is never posed. Here the need for a class response is not questioned. It seems that there is a common concept of what the working class is, of its characteristics and responsibilities.

We want to thank again the bookshop Gondolkodó Autonom Antikvárium for the invitation to hold a public discussion and the audience for the debate which can only strengthen mutually our forces and capacities.

ICC, September 2014

A hundred years ago, in August 1914, the First World War broke out. The human balance sheet of this planetary slaughter is officially 10 million dead and 8 million wounded. When ‘peace’ was signed, the bourgeoisie swore with hand on heart that this would be the ‘last of all wars’. A lie, obviously. In fact it was only the first bloody conflagration marking the opening of the decadence of capitalism. The history of the 20th century and of this young 21st century has been riddled by incessant imperialist confrontations. The First World War was followed by the Second, the Second by the Cold War, and the Cold War by the numerous and unending theatres of conflict which have been spreading across the planet since the 1990s. This last period, if it doesn’t have the same spectacular aspect of a confrontation between two blocs, between two super-powers, contains no less of a threat to the survival of humanity because its dynamic is more insidious, leading not to world war but to the generalisation of wars and barbarism. The war in Ukraine, which marks the return of war to Europe, the historical heart of capitalism, is a qualitative step in his direction.

War returns to Europe

After the Second World War with its 50 million dead, Europe was straight away torn by the brutal rivalry between the eastern and western military blocs. During the long and murderous period of the Cold War, the slaughter took place at the peripheries of capitalism, through proxy wars between the USA and Russia. The bloody war in Vietnam was a clear illustration of this. But as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, a new period of conflicts began.

In 1991, the USA, at the head of a powerful but reluctant coalition, used the pretext of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to launch a war. The main aim was to stop the tendency towards the break-up of its old bloc through a demonstration of military force that would reaffirm its global leadership. The idea was to ensure the birth of a ‘new world order’. At the cost of a human and material disaster (more than 500,000 dead), above all through massive aerial bombardments and the explosion of depression bombs that destroy the lungs, this so-called ‘surgical war’ was to bring a new era of peace and prosperity. But this lie was very rapidly exposed. Almost simultaneously, a new war broke out at the very gates of Europe, in ex-Yugoslavia. An atrocious conflict a few hours from Paris, an accumulation of massacres, such as the one at Srebrenica, carried out with the complicity of the French Blue Helmets, where between 6000 and 8000 Bosnians were murdered.

And today, once again, the gangrene of militarism has reached the gates of Europe. In Ukraine the bourgeoisie is being torn to pieces. Armed militia, more or less controlled by the Russian and Ukrainian states, confront each other with the population as their hostage. This conflict, based on nationalisms which have been cultivated for decades, is one for the vultures: the main actors, as always, are the great powers, the USA, Russia, France and other western European countries.

The dramatic situation in Ukraine clearly marks a qualitative step in the agony of this system. The fact that that this conflict is being pushed forward by divergent interests and is so close to Europe, the focus for the world wars of the previous century, shows the level of disintegration the system has reached.

The development of every man for himself

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the USSR shattered the old bloc discipline and opened a real Pandora’s Box. Despite the short-lived illusions that followed the first Gulf war, the USA has been forced to carry on intervening, more frequently and in more places, and very often on its own: Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. This imperialist policy is the expression of a historic impasse and has clearly failed. Each new display of force by this declining super-power has resulted in an increasingly open loss of control over the war zones in which it has intervened. With the master in decline, we have entered a realm of disorder, of growing imperialist appetites, exacerbated nationalisms, spreading religious and ethnic conflicts.

The centrifugal forces fuelled by these appetites have engendered conflicts which demonstrate the reality of social decomposition, resulting in the break-up of states, the rise of the worst kinds of warlords, of mafia-type adventurers engaged in all varieties of trafficking. This process has been incubating for several decades. In the second half of the 1980s, a succession of terrorist attacks took place in major European cities like Paris, London and Madrid. These were not the work of isolated groups but of fully-formed states. They were acts of war which prefigured the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York. The darkest expressions of barbarity, previously confined to the edges of the system, had begun to return to the centres, to the areas where the presence and civilising potential of the proletariat stands as the only obstacle to a real plunge into nightmare.

Mounting barbarism

Every day, refugees fleeing from war-torn countries are dying in the attempt to cross the Mediterranean. Packed like cattle in unseaworthy boats, they are in desperate flight from the unspeakable. According to the UN’s Refugee Agency, the number of refugees and asylum-seekers, of people displaced within their own countries, has gone past 50 million for the first time since the Second World War. At the end of last year the war in Syria alone had produced 2.5 million refugees and 6.5 million displaced people. And all continents are affected by this.

Far from weakening the general tendencies of decadent capitalism, decomposition has strengthened imperialist ambitions and exacerbated their increasingly irrational aspects. The doors have been opened to the least lucid factions of the bourgeoisie, fed by the putrefaction of society and the resulting nihilism. The birth of Islamist groups like al Qaida, the Islamic State and Boko Haram are the result of this process of intellectual and moral regression, of unprecedented cultural devastation. On 29 June, IS announced the re-establishment of a ‘Caliphate’ in the regions under its control and proclaimed the establishment of Mohammed’s successor. Like its counter-part Boko Haram in Nigeria, it has distinguished itself by the murder of captives and the kidnapping and enslavement of young women.

These obscurantist organisations don’t obey anyone and are guided by a combination of mystical madness and sordid mafia interests. In Syria and Iraq, in the zones controlled by Islamic State, no new national state has any viability. On the contrary, the main tendency is towards the disintegration of the Syrian, Lebanese and Iraqi states.

This frightening barbarism, embodied in particular by the jihadists, is now serving as a pretext for new military crusades and western bombing campaigns. For the big imperialist powers, this makes it possible to terrorise the population and the working class at low cost to themselves while posing as civilised peacemakers. But Islamic State was at the outset partly armed by the US and factions of the Saudi bourgeoisie, not to mention the complicity of Turkey and Syria. This Islamist organisation has now escaped the control of its masters. Today it is besieging the town of Kobane in Syria, a few kilometres from the Turkish border, in a manly Kurdish region. Unlike the first Gulf war, the great powers, with the US at the fore, are running after events without any long-term political vision, simply reacting to immediate military imperatives. A heterogeneous coalition of 22 states, with very differing interests from each other, has taken the decision to bombard the parts of the town taken by IS. The US, the top gun in this pseudo-coalition, is today incapable of sending in ground troops and of forcing Turkey, which has a deep fear of the Kurdish forces around the PKK and PYD, to intervene militarily.

All the hot spots of the planet are bursting into flame. Everywhere the great powers are being drawn blindly into the fire. The French army is bogged down in Mali. The ‘peace’ negotiations between the Mali government and the armed groups have reached a dead-end. There is permanent war in the sub-Saharan region. In the north of Cameroon and of Nigeria, where Boko Haram has its hunting ground, armed conflicts and terrorist actions have multiplied. If we take into account the growing power of China in Asia, we can see that the same tensions, the same mafia methods are spreading across the entire planet.

Imperialist wars are more and more irrational

In the 19th century, when capitalism was flourishing, wars to form national states, colonial wars or imperialist conquests had a certain economic and political rationality. War was an indispensable means for the development of capitalism. It had to conquer the world; its combined economic and military power enabled it to achieve this result, as Marx put it, in “blood and filth”.

With the First World War, all this changed radically. The main powers in general emerged considerably weakened from these years of total warfare. Today, in the phase of the decomposition of the system, a veritable danse macabre, a plunge into madness, is pulling the world and humanity towards utter ruin. Self-destruction has become the dominant feature in the zones of war.

There is no immediate solution in the face of this infernal dynamic, but there is a revolutionary solution for the future. And this is what we have to patiently work towards. Capitalist society is obsolete; it’s not just a barrier to the development of civilisation but a menace to its survival. A century ago the communist revolution in Russia and its reverberations in Germany, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere put an end to the First World War. In the present historical period, it is still only the struggle of the proletariat which can finish with this rotting world system.

Antonin 5.11.14

“But German Social Democracy was not merely the strongest vanguard troop, it was the thinking head of the International. For this reason, we must begin the analysis, the self-examination process, with its fall. It has the duty to begin the salvation of international socialism, that means unsparing criticism of itself. None of the other parties, none of the other classes of bourgeois society, may look clearly and openly into the mirror of their own errors, their own weaknesses, for the mirror reflects their historical limitations and the historical doom that awaits them. The working class can boldly look truth straight in the face, even the bitterest self-renunciation, for its weaknesses are only confusion. The strict law of history gives back its power, stands guarantee for its final victory.

Unsparing self-criticism is not merely an essential for its existence but the working class’s supreme duty”.

Thus wrote Rosa Luxemburg in 1915, in The crisis in German Social Democracy, better known as the Junius Pamphlet, her searching examination of the betrayal of the majority of the German SPD, and other Socialist parties, faced with the supreme test of world imperialist war. In this passage she clearly lays out a central element of the marxist method: the principle of constant, “unsparing self-criticism”, which is both necessary and possible for marxism because it is the theoretical product of the first class in history that can “boldly look truth straight in the face”. During and after the First World War, this attempt to go the roots of the collapse of the Second International was a demarcating feature of the left currents which had been born out of the social democratic parties, but who now went on to form a new and explicitly communist International. And as the new International in turn slid into opportunism with the retreat of the post-war revolutionary wave – a regression most symbolically expressed in the policy of the United Front with the social democratic traitors - the same work of criticism was carried on by the left communist fractions within the Third International, in particular the German, Italian and Russian lefts.

In 1914, the anarchist movement also entered into crisis following the decision of the much-revered anarchist Peter Kropotkin and a group around him to declare their support for Entente imperialism against the bloc led by Germany, and the adoption of the same policy by the French ‘revolutionary syndicalist’ union, the CGT[1]. Within the ranks of the anarchist movement there were many who remained loyal to internationalism and who fiercely denounced the attitude of Kropotkin and other ‘anarcho-trenchists’. Probably a majority of the anarchists refused to participate in the imperialist war effort. But in contrast to the response of the marxist left, there was little attempt to undertake a theoretical analysis of the capitulation of a significant wing of the anarchist movement in 1914. And while the marxist left was able to call into question the underlying method and practice of the social democratic parties in the whole period before the war, no such capacity for “unsparing self-criticism” was displayed by the anarchists, who do not adhere to the historical materialist method but base themselves on more or less timeless and abstract principles and who are impregnated with the notion of being a kind of family united around the struggle for Freedom against Authority. There can be exceptions, serious attempts to go deeper into the problem, but generally they come from those anarchists who have been able to integrate certain elements from the theoretical method of marxism.

This inability to question itself in real depth derives from the original class nature of anarchism, which emerged from the resistance of the petty bourgeoisie, especially of independent artisans, to the process of proletarianisation which was disintegrating the class structure of the old feudal societies of 19th century Europe. The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the clearest embodiment of this current, with his rejection of communism in favour of a society of independent producers linked by equivalent exchange. It’s certainly true that the Proudhonists also expressed a movement towards ‘going over’ to the proletariat by joining the First International, but even with the most explicitly proletarian anarchist currents, such as the anarcho-syndicalists who developed towards the end of the 19th century, the incoherent, idealist and ahistorical political conceptions typical of the petty bourgeois world outlook were never fully overcome.

The price for this failure to draw the real lessons of 1914 was paid in full in the new crisis which swept the anarchist movement in reaction to the events in Spain in 1936-37. Important elements of the anarchist movement which had not betrayed in 1914 – above all the Spanish CNT – now plunged into support for a new imperialist war, in which a conflict between two capitalist factions, the Republican regime dominated by the bourgeois left, and the right wing forces led by Franco, was part of a wider inter-imperialist battle, most openly between the fascist states of Germany and Italy and the newly emerging imperialism of the USSR. Under the banner of anti-fascist unity, the CNT rapidly integrated itself into the Republican state at all levels, including the Catalan and Madrid governments.  Most importantly, the CNT’s central role was in diverting what had initially been an authentic proletarian response to the Franco coup, a response which had used the methods of the class struggle – general strike, fraternisation with troops, factory occupations and arming of the workers – into the military defence of the capitalist Republic. Given the strength of this initial proletarian reaction, not only the anarchists but also numerous marxist currents outside of Stalinism were also drawn into support for the anti-fascist front in one way or another; and this included not only the more opportunist tendency around Trotsky but important elements of the communist left, including a minority within the Italian Left Fraction. On the other hand, within anarchism there were certainly class reactions to the betrayal of the CNT, such as the Friends of Durruti Group and Camillo Berneri’s Guerra di Classe. But real clarity about the nature of the war only emerged from a small minority of the marxist left, above all the Italian Fraction which published Bilan. The latter was almost alone in rejecting the claim that the war in Spain was in any way a war for the interests of the proletariat: on the contrary it was a kind of dress rehearsal for the approaching world imperialist massacre. For Bilan Spain was a new 1914 for the anarchist movement in particular[2]. And in 1939, faced with the new world war which Bilan had predicted, it was now a majority of the anarchists, intoxicated by anti-fascism, which followed the road of capitulation to the Allied war effort, either as part of the ‘Resistance’ or directly as part of the official allied armies: at the head of the ‘Liberation’ parade in Paris in 1944 was an armoured car festooned with the banners of the CNT, which had been fighting inside the Free French army division led by General Leclerc. Again, there were anarchist groups and individuals who remained true to internationalist principles in 1939-45, but once again, there is little evidence that they carried out a systematic examination of the historic betrayal of the majority of the movement to which they still claimed adherence. The result has been that there has been, as after the betrayals of 1914, a failure to draw any class lines between the internationalists and the anarcho-patriots: in many cases, the latter were simply reintegrated into the “affinity group” which is the anarchist movement once things went back to “normal” after the war. Behind this incapacity to defend class principles in an intransigent manner is not only a profound intellectual weakness but also a lack of moral indignation: all is forgiven as long as you stay inside the family.

Today the question of war is once again facing the world proletariat. Not a world war around already constituted blocs, but a more general, more chaotic descent into military barbarism across the planet, as exemplified by the wars in Africa, the Middle East and the Ukraine. These wars are again imperialist wars, in which the bigger capitalist states vie against their rivals through various local or national factions, and they are all expressions of capitalism’s increasing descent into self-destruction. And once again, a part of the anarchist movement is openly participating in these imperialist conflicts:

• In Russia and Ukraine, there has been a growth of anarcho-nationalist or “ethno-anarchist” groups who openly function as a “libertarian” wing of the war drive in each country. But a more “respectable” anarchist group such as the Autonomous Workers’ Union, which publishes material on libcom and held a meeting at the annual Anarchist Bookfair this year, has also revealed its deep ambiguities on the current war: in some official statements it appears to take a position of opposition both to the Ukraine regime and the pro-Russian separatists, to NATO as well as the Russian Federation, but Facebook statements by some of its leading members tell a very different story, apparently defending the Kiev government and its war against Russian incursion and even calling for NATO support[3];
   
• In Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan, the Kurdish Anarchist Forum and the Turkish DAF (Devrimci Anarşist Faaliyet) support, participate in, and carry out global propaganda on behalf of the so-called ‘Rojava revolution’, claiming that the local population is organising itself in independent communes in its fight against the Syrian government and above all against the brutal jihadists of Islamic State. The DAF offers its services to participate in the fighting around the besieged city of Kobane near the Turkish border. In reality, these ‘communes’ are tightly controlled by the Kurdish nationalist PKK, which in the last few years has carried out a ‘turn’ away from Maoism towards the ‘libertarian municipalism’ of Murray Bookchin[4]. And in its conflict with IS, the PKK has been more or less openly acting as the ground forces of the ‘western’ coalition led by the USA;
   
• anarchist elements in the west are also drawn into the campaign of ‘solidarity with Kobane’, which is effectively a campaign in solidarity with the PKK. The anarchist celebrity David Graeber has published an article in The Guardian ‘Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?’[5] which describes the PKK’s experiment in ‘direct democracy’ as a “social revolution”, compares it with the anarchist collectives in Spain in 1936 and calls for the “international left” to prevent a repetition of the same tragic defeat. A similar outlook is taken up by the poster who signs as Ocelot on libcom, although his arguments in favour of antifascism and the “revolutionary Kurds” offer a more sophisticated version of the same thing, since he is well aware of what he calls the “Bordigist” position on the question of fascism, and is vehemently opposed to it[6]. But perhaps more important is the response of some of the established anarchist organisations. In France, for example, the CNT-AIT[7] participates in ‘solidarity with Kobane’ demonstrations behind a banner which says: “Arms for the Kurdish resistance, Rojava is hope, anarchists in solidarity” (see picture). The flags of the French Federation Anarchiste can also be seen behind the same banner, while the International of Anarchist Federations, to which French FA and the Anarchist Federation in the UK are both affiliated, and which lists the DAF and KAF as friendly organisations, publishes most of the DAF’s articles on the situation in Rojava without critical comment.

There are of course elements within anarchism who have been very consistent in their rejection of this support for nationalism. We have already published the internationalist statement by the KRAS, the Russian section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association, against the war between Russia and Ukraine[8], and we have pointed out above that a member of the KRAS, who posts as foristaruso, has posted some very strong criticisms of the positions of the AWU on libcom (see footnote 3). In one of the main libcom threads about the situation in the Middle East, individual comrades have argued forcefully against the pro-PKK line, notably a member of the UK branch of the IWA (Solidarity Federation) who posts as AES. The collective that runs the libcom site has featured two articles on the PKK and Rojava written from a left communist perspective: the ICC’s ‘warning’ against the PKK’s new libertarian facelift (footnote 4), and the article ‘The Bloodbath in Syria: Class war or Ethnic war’[9] written by Devrim and first published on the website of the Internationalist Communist Tendency. In the comments that follow the latter article there are furious and slanderous replies by posters who seem to be members or supporters of the Turkish DAF.

At the time of writing the AF in the UK has published a statement which has no illusions in the leftist, nationalist nature of the PKK and shows that the turn towards Bookchinism and ‘confederal democracy’ was initiated from above by its great leader Ocalan, who has also made similar approaches to the Assad regime, the Turkish state and towards Islam[10]. The AF has the courage to admit that the position it is taking up will not be popular given the large number of anarchists being drawn into the support for the ‘Rojava revolution’. But here again we see a total incoherence within the same ‘international’ tendency. The AF statement contains no criticism whatever of the DAF or the IAF and in its list of ‘concrete’ actions proposed at the end of statement is the call to “provide humanitarian aid to Rojava via IFA, which has direct contact with DAF”. This seems to be a concession to the pressure of “we must do something now”, which is very strong in the anarchist milieu, even if the aid (whether military or humanitarian) organised by a small group in Turkey would inevitably play into the hands of bigger organisations, such as the PKK. And this is in reality what the DAF is proposing, since it has offered volunteers to fight in the PKK-controlled ‘Peoples Protection Units’ or YPG. The AF also writes that it aims to “encourage and support any independent action of workers and peasants in the Rojava region. Argue against any nationalist agitation and for the unity of Kurdish, Arab, Muslim, Christian and Yezidi workers and peasants. Any such independent initiatives must free themselves from PKK/PYD control, and equally from aid by the Western allies, from their clients like the Free Syrian Army, Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, and the Turkish state”. But it could hardly do so without also arguing against the pro-PKK positions of the DAF itself.

It is certainly significant that the most consistent responses to the situation in Rojava have been written from within the tradition of left communism. What characterises the more general response of the anarchists is their total lack of coherence. When you look at the websites of the IWA, the CNT-AIT, or Solidarity Federation, they remain relentlessly focused on immediate and local workers’ struggles which they have been involved with[11] - rather in the style of the Economist current which Lenin criticised a hundred years ago. The great economic, political and social events in the world are hardly mentioned, and there is no sign of any debate about such a fundamental questions as internationalism and imperialist war, even when there are obviously profound differences within this current, ranging from internationalism to nationalism. This lack of debate, this avoidance of confronting differences – which we can also observe in the IAF - is far more dangerous than the crises which hit the anarchist movement in 1914 and 1936, when there was still a much greater reaction to the betrayal of principles within the ranks of the movement. Anarchism remains a family which can easily accommodate bourgeois and proletarian positions and in this sense still reflects the vagueness, the vacillation of social strata caught between the two major classes of society. This atmosphere is a real obstacle to clarification, preventing even the clearest, most firmly internationalist individuals or groupings from going to the roots of this latest example of anarchist collaboration with the bourgeoisie. To take their positions to their conclusion would demand a thorough re-examination of past crises in the anarchist milieu, above all the one in 1936 where, as we argue in our recent articles in the International Review, the fatal flaws of anarchism were revealed most tellingly. In the final analysis, it would demand a fundamental critique of anarchism itself and a real assimilation of the marxist method.

Amos 3/12/14

Let us begin by looking at the effect on pay. Of course the Chancellor’s only direct announcements on pay concern the public sector, the 2 year freeze on pay we have already seen, followed by a 1% cap, means an ongoing cut in pay in real terms. In addition the cap on benefits makes lower pay feasible for employers. The success of this policy has led to workers in Britain suffering a continuous fall in real wages since 2008 and the largest fall in real wages of all G20 countries since 2010. New jobs have been mainly self-employed, part time or low paid to such an extent that there is a shortfall in expected tax receipts leading to this year’s government borrowing requirement being higher than expected. Result: more cuts are called for.

Cuts in welfare are a constant concern for the Chancellor – and for the whole ruling class – and it is no surprise that they feature prominently in the autumn statement. Given the promises to protect state pensions this will fall predominantly on working age benefits. “The welfare budget has already been cut by between £20-£25bn. [Osborne] wants to do half as much again as what’s happened in this parliament – which gives a sense of the scale of the cuts, and their likely impact. The working age welfare bill is currently around £95bn. He wants to cut that by a further £12bn.” (Andrew Hood, research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies quoted in The Guardian 5.12.14). The aim is to tighten the cap on benefits from £500 a week to £440. Working age benefits do not only go to those out of work for whatever reason but also to those in low paid jobs – of whom there are now so many more that it is affecting tax receipts. For these workers the state essentially tops up their pay to prevent it falling too far below what’s needed given the cost of living and cultural level in this country. Already two thirds of children in poverty have at least one parent in work.

Over the last 5 years spending by government departments has been reduced by 9.5%. This was not a new invention by the coalition government as the majority of the cuts they announced in May 2010 had already been envisaged by the outgoing Labour administration. The autumn statement envisages a further cut in spending of 14.1%. The Office for Budget Responsibility has pointed out that this will reduce the share of GDP spent by the state to the level of the 1930s and the IFS said it would reduce the role of the state to the extent that it would have “changed beyond recognition” (The Guardian 5.12.14).

So is Osborne rolling back the state? Changing it beyond all recognition? Or is it the same state, carrying out the same functions while taking account of the depth of the economic crisis, and calculating what they can get away with before the working class responds?

Leaving aside the very pertinent question of whether the state changed beyond recognition in the 1940s, let us look at the nature of the cuts that have been announced. Of course as the IFS points out, the chancellor has not explained how the cuts should be carried out beyond the next financial year. If the NHS, education and overseas aid remain protected, other departments will have to face a 40% cut over the next 5 years. But in any case, protected spending in the NHS, for instance, does not mean it is spared ‘efficiency savings’ or cuts, since it is required to provide increased services for the aging population out of the same funds, and staff are currently required to look at what can be done to reduce hospital attendances and look after more sick people at home. In relation to this we can look at the one area of spending that has already suffered a cut in excess of 40% over the current parliament: community and local government. Here we can see what has happened to the non-medical services available to the elderly, disabled and sick who the state is desperately trying to keep out of hospital. Care services are cut to the bone; carers are on zero hours contracts and are often on sub minimum wages once their travel is taken into account; they are limited to a ridiculously short time to spend with each client, and their services are often paid for or topped up by the clients themselves. This is a cut in living standards, for both care worker and client, not a change in the nature of local government which will continue to carry out the same functions, including collecting council tax, even if there is a substantial risk of some of them failing financially or being unable to carry out all their current statutory functions.

The army has been cut from 102,000 to 82,500, but this does not mean the British state is going to cease to defend its imperialist interests abroad. On the contrary, not only is  the MoD trying to build up the Territorial Army of part timers, it has also just announced the first British base East of Suez since the 1970s, a naval base in Bahrain. Cuts to the Justice department do not mean an end to state repression. So far they have meant a swingeing cut in legal aid, in other words greater difficulty for those who aren’t well off to get access to the courts. In line with the increased use of the TA the Policy Exchange think-tank has recommended a network of members of the public to help fight crime – it is not clear whether they have in mind special constables or Stasi-style informers.

Cuts to living standards are the only option for the ruling class. How quickly the new cuts are brought in may be an issue after the next election, but they are not any kind of rolling back of the state, they are the state policy of the capitalist class faced with the current economic crisis.

Alex  6.12.14

Across the globe there is a ‘great debate’ about immigration. Mostly it consists of arguments about how to restrict it. Immigration is presented as having a harmful effect on vulnerable economies, as undermining a country’s culture, as making our lives worse.

Against these arguments there are those who say that economies always get a net benefit from newcomers, that cultural diversity is enriching, and that, in more affluent countries, there is a responsibility to welcome those who are fleeing from persecution, poverty and war.

Every day you can read new headlines that play with these themes:

• In the US President Obama proposes to reinforce border security while holding out the prospect of citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
• In the UK Prime Minister Cameron outlines further restrictions on and deterrents to potential immigrants.
• In Australia the current government adopted the policies of its Labour predecessor (which reintroduced the offshore processing of asylum seekers in Nauru and Papua New Guinea) and extended them, for example by putting the military in charge of asylum operations.
• In Switzerland, a referendum rejected proposed measures to severely reduce immigration – the opponents of the restrictions arguing that it would be bad for the economy.
• In the Mediterranean there are regular reports of rescues and drowning of refugees and migrants in boats on their way to Italy and Greece
• Internationally Amnesty International has criticised the “pitiful” response of the wealthiest countries in the resettlement of the millions of refugees from conflict in Syria.

The ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie are dominated by the idea of a foreign threat and the need to strengthen frontiers and deter invaders. As a form of nationalism it promotes the idea of a national home which risks impoverishment, alien influences, and cultural dilution. From the openly Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece to the rise of the UK Independence Party in Britain and the electoral resurgence of the Front National in France, there are a range of right wing parties which express racist ideas in ways that were not previously respectable in normal democratic discourse. In return, liberals and the left offer state repression (bans and restrictions on parties, criminalisation in some instances) and their own versions of nationalism. The Scottish independence referendum had international coverage and many of those who supported the proposed split-off of Scotland did so on the grounds of national self-determination. Over the last century this has proven to be just a left version of the same nationalist poison. Bourgeoisies across the world were envious of the way the UK bourgeoisie was able to stage this democratic confrontation between varieties of nationalism.

Is racism only natural?

Admitting that there was a “certain amount of xenophobia” in the ‘debate’ on immigration, the Mayor of London said that “All human beings are prey to that feeling. … It’s part of human nature. It doesn’t mean people are bad people, ok?” While this is a typically off-the-cuff remark it does convey something that the ruling class wants us to believe. It’s supposed to be only ‘natural’ to have prejudices. The lie is that we’re born with suspicions of anything that’s different or unfamiliar.

In reality, while there have been periods when immigration has been actively encouraged by the capitalist state[1] – and even today the ‘talented’ or ‘hard working’ are still nominally welcome everywhere – the competition between national capitals in its current stage has prompted the capitalist class to step up the familiar campaigns against foreigners. Sometimes this takes the form of the immigration ‘debate’, sometimes blatant racism, and sometimes against the threat posed by other religions.

The arguments that point out the benefits of immigration are still made on the basis of the national economy. Immigrants are not a burden; they are of value to the capitalist economy.

Another aspect of the bourgeoisie’s campaign is the trick of ethnicity. While denouncing the nationalism of the capitalist state and its supporters, there are those who encourage people to take refuge within ethnic groups. In practice, most national censuses have questions about ethnic background, showing an appreciation that, while people will not necessarily declare their loyalty to the capitalist state, they are often prepared to declare an identity that separates them from others.

Anti-racism is another phenomenon that the bourgeoisie uses against the development of class consciousness. Anti-racism constantly calls on the state to curb racism, tackle racists, and uphold justice. Look at the protests in the US against the killing of black people by white cops. The call is always for justice. And yet the state remains the apparatus of the ruling capitalist class and it’s only a united working class that can confront and destroy it.

A classic example of the reality of state anti-racism was the UK Labour government of the late 1960s. People familiar with the period think of Enoch Powell and his 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech foreseeing future ethnic conflict. In reality the Labour government had come to power in 1964 with a manifesto commitment saying that “the number of immigrants entering the United Kingdom must be limited” – and showed what this meant in 1968 with draconian restrictions on Kenyan Asians fleeing persecution. Another commitment in the 1964 manifesto was to “legislate against racial discrimination and incitement in public places” which led to the 1965 Race Relations Act and the setting up of a Race Relations Board (subsequently the Commission for Racial Equality). The state could say that it was committed to dealing with racism, while at the same time practising racist policies against different groups of immigrants attempting to settle in the UK.  The state could have its cake and eat it.

Morality of the working class

The idea that xenophobia is somehow natural goes against the actual experience of humanity. If you examine the tens of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer society before the advent of farming and social classes, it is clear that relations based on mutual solidarity were at the root of survival in primitive communist society. Furthermore, humanity would not have gone beyond the stage of the horde if particular communities had not developed ‘exogamic’ relations with other human groups. 

But while a social instinct is at the heart of what makes us human, the fragmentation of humanity, the alienation, individualism and nationalism fed by the capitalist system have brought to the fore other aspects of the human personality. Marxists have rightly shown what capitalism is responsible for: a system of exploitation that has led to imperialist wars and genocide. But while we can show the revolts, rebellions and revolutions against capitalist class rule, we also have to recognise the weight of conformity, obedience and acceptance of capitalism and its ideologies. The propaganda campaigns around immigration do have an impact; people often do believe that there is a threat that must be confronted, and the ‘foreigner’ in our midst is often the first scapegoat blamed for our miserable conditions.

The working class is often deeply divided by these prejudices and ideologies. But this does not detract from its historically unique nature. It is a class exploited by capitalism and subject to the weight of capitalist ideology. It is also a revolutionary class with the capacity to overthrow capitalism and develop new relations of production based on solidarity. The revolution of the working class is not just a revolt compelled by deprivation and repression; if it is to succeed it must have a consciousness of the world we must leave and the prospect of communism. As such, the working class view is not just a critique of society; it is also a moral view, in which the immediate needs of sections of the class are subordinated to a wider and more historic goal. Both classic racism and the anti-racism of the bourgeois left create illusions and cause divisions within the working class. For the working class to make a revolution it needs a unity that comes from a consciousness of its common interests internationally. Against racism, nationalism and xenophobia the working class offers a perspective of communism, a society based on association, not on the enforcement of separation. 

Car  6/12/14

A hundred years ago the world was plunged into the cataclysm of World War I, a vast inter-imperialist conflict in which 20 million died. During the war there were many workers’ struggles that went against the spirit of national defence. In Britain the Shop Stewards movement originally appeared as an expression of these struggles, but because they never broke from the trade union framework, they were subsequently integrated into the apparatus for controlling the working class. The article that follows was first published in WR 4 in August 1975. Written nearly forty years ago there are inevitably some formulations that we would now qualify, change or omit, but we are republishing it as it first appeared because its essential argument remains as valid as ever.

The aim of this article is to clarify the revolutionary experience of the proletariat in relation to the trade unions. One of the crucial political positions of the International Communist Current is that the trade unions, in the epoch of capitalist decadence, have amply proven their reactionary, anti-working class nature. Their support for imperialist wars and their sabotage of revolutionary upsurges, and other genuine struggles of the class, has made plain their place as a wing of the bourgeoisie.

In Britain, the shop stewards’ movement, composed of rank and file trade union delegates may seem to represent a progressive alternative to the unions as a whole.  To deepen an understanding of the real nature of the shop stewards, we must lay the basis for examining the apparent contradiction between them and the rest of the trade union apparatus.

We can best do this by looking at the growth of the Shop Stewards’ and Workers’ Committee Movement (SS&WCM) during World War I, when it played a part in the waves of revolutionary struggle sweeping Europe from 1917 to 1923.  We must also briefly see its role in the subsequent counter­revolutionary period, which has lasted until today’s re-awakening of proletarian revolt.

Historical period and class struggle

It is first of all necessary to briefly examine the precise historical period in which the SS&WCM arose. World War I marked the definitive end of the ascendant epoch of capitalism; the finish of the progressive expansion of world capitalism, and the beginning of cycles of imperialist wars and reconstruction periods, which demonstrated that capitalism was now a decadent social system.

The tempo and character of class struggle changed in response to the closure of the ascendant period.  Mass strikes occurred in Russia in 1905, and in Germany and other countries, in the decades preceding World War I.  This indicated that the protracted sectional and reformist workers’ struggles of the ascendant period were over.  The working class struggle started to break out of its factory confines, and began to confront the· capitalist system as a whole.  The massacre of millions of proletarians in World War I, plus the rapid disintegration of working class living standards, accelerated the deepening class struggle into direct revolutionary outbursts throughout .Europe. They reached their highest point in October 1917 in Russia, where the class captured power through the soviets under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Other revolutions for example those in Hungary and Germany, proved abortive, and the revolution in Russia remained isolated, thus preventing the urgent extension, world-wide, of proletarian power. The Russian Revolution degenerated as a result and the Russian regime became itself integrated into capitalist decadence. All the waves of the period were bloodily crushed and for more that fifty years the class had paid dearly for the continuance of capitalist barbarism, from which it is only starting to recover today.

In Britain, the revolutionary waves of 1917-23 found a substantial reverberation. From 1910 onwards an unprecedented period of working class struggle began. In 1910-11 the Cambrian Combine Strike occurred, involving 26,000 miners, to which the bourgeoisie responded with the use of troops. The militancy of merchant seamen in 1911 sparked off a strike by railway workers, bringing out 250,000 men in total. The Dublin Transport Strike of 1913-14 attracted sympathy strikes in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham. Altogether between January and July 1914, 9,105,800 working days were lost through strikes. The class struggle regained this intense militancy following a brief lull at the outbreak of World War I caused by the national patriotism in the class. In March 1915, 200,000 mineworkers struck illegally in defence of their living standards, and in 1916 an unofficial strike in Sheffield against conscription was successful. In May 1917, the most significant strike wave of the war erupted in opposition to the effects of imperialist carnage which involved at its climax 200 thousand engineering workers. The Clyde workers in 1919 staged a massive revolt in their attempt to secure a 40-hour week.

But the end of the ascendant period and the era of class struggle associated with it, which these and other struggles inaugurated, also demanded a change in the tactics and organisation previously adopted by the proletariat. The establishment of trade unions had originally been fought for by workers in order to defend and improve their conditions of life within the capitalist system. However, toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth century the impasse facing world capitalism increasingly prevented the trade unions from achieving any real reforms on behalf of the workers. The unions were, as institutions, forced more and more to identify their interests with those of the bourgeoisie in opposition to the heightening revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat. The growing bureaucratisation of the trade unions, in response to capitalist decadence, accelerated the divorce between the trade unions and the proletariat. The mass workers’ parties, linked to the trade unions, and similarly dedicated to reformism, as expressed in the minimum programme, represented the proletariat within the institutions of the bourgeoisie, (particularly parliament), gave support to the decaying capitalist system against the deepening struggle of the working class.

In Britain, this capitulation to capitalism by Social Democracy was definitely and irrevocably marked by the support for World War I of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress. In August 1914 the Labour Party and the TUC called for existing strikes to end and the prevention of any more for the duration of the war. This summons became lawful command (through the Munitions Act) after the Treasury agreements between the unions and the government in March 1915. Strikes were declared illegal; workers were tied to their place of employment; all restrictive practices were to be ended; objections to overtime, nightwork, and Sunday duty were to be rejected; the dilution[1] of labour was made acceptable; and many Factory Act safety and health prohibitions, successfully fought for by the class in the nineteenth century, were suspended.

In this way the organised expressions of the old workers’ movement not only helped mobilise the class for slaughter in the imperialist war, they also helped wipe out all the meagre gains the class had won in the previous epoch of reformist struggle. The offensive against the living conditions, and life itself, of the proletariat was not to last merely for the duration of the war, but was to become a permanent feature of the ensuing counter-revolutionary period. In 1914 the old workers’ movement definitively entered the bourgeois camp and became reactionary agents within the proletariat.

The most advanced sections of the world class, in this period, quite quickly created fundamentally new organisations to express the revolutionary interests of the proletariat. Workers’ councils emerged in 1905 and in 1917 in Russia, and in 1918 in Germany and elsewhere; the councils challenged the whole of the existing apparatus of capitalism and brought the class together to fight its independent struggle for social revolution. The role of revolutionaries in the new period of capitalist decadence was to help, and play a part in, the seizure of power by the workers’ councils, and no longer, as a mass party, to act on behalf of the proletariat, according to the old Social Democratic conception.

In Britain a period of militancy leading up to World War I had already provoked terror in the trade union machines. Following the outbreak of the War the unions had explicitly ceased to express proletarian interests. The class was clearly faced with the immense task of creating new organisations to express its new interests. The entire consciousness and organisation of the previous period was finished and the class had to rapidly develop a revolutionary praxis.

Britain - the limitations of the struggle

The long traditions of reformism and trade unionism within the British proletariat (which were unlike those of the Russian class for example) and the relative weakness of the revolutionary waves in Europe, prevented the British sector of the class from reaching its organisational expression in revolutionary workers’ councils. Instead, rank and file unionist and syndicalist organisations, the most important of which being the SS&WCM, were created in an attempt to answer the needs of the new period.

Tom Mann, who had been one of the leaders of the pre-war period of class struggle, helped form the Industrial Syndicalist Education League in 1910. He was a leader of the Seamens’ Union, which obtained substantial concessions from the shipping companies in 1911. He believed in militant reformism, was hostile to political struggle, encouraged unionisation along class lines and the amalgamation of existing competing unions. The SS&WCM was directly influenced by the ideas of Tom Mann and other syndicalist and industrial unionists.

Jack T. Murphy, a Sheffield engineer, and one of the leading theoreticians of the SS&WCM, described himself as a “syndicalist socialist”. He had been involved in the amalgamation committee movement before the war. He was strongly influenced by the ideas of the famous James Connolly, an industrial unionist and member of the Socialist Labour Party. Connolly saw the struggle for socialism as primarily a question of economic organisation. The organisation of the class within factories and workshops, according to him, would gradually develop and extend its power, and provide the basis for the proletarian revolution: “ .. the conquest of political power by the working class waits upon the conquest of economic power and must function through the economic’ organisation.”[2]

The SS&WCM was inspired by these theories. With the capitulation of the unions to the imperialist war effort, industrial organisation of the type described by Connolly was only really feasible at the level of the rank and file of the existing unions. According to Murphy: “all the trade unionists in any shop should have shop stewards, who should form themselves into a committee to represent the workers in that shop regardless of the trade unions they belonged to and thus make the first step towards uniting the unions.”[3]

This notion was derived from the amalgamation committee movement before the war. Similar committees to those envisaged by Murphy sprang up throughout Britain during the war years.

On the Clyde, in Scotland, where the shop steward movement first began, Willie Gallacher, chairman of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, echoed the theories of Connolly. He helped produce a pamphlet in 1917[4] which describes how rank and file industrial organisations of the class would undermine capitalism, merely by means of ‘contracts’, which would gradually help the class to take over the running of ‘industry’.

The stewards were not only averse to the political struggle of the class, they rejected the notion of leadership as such in reaction to what they saw as the ‘betrayal’ of union leaders. Rank and file miners produced a pamphlet, The Miners’ Next Step, which influenced the SS&WCM, in which they argued that “A leader implies … some men who are being led … self-respect which comes from manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in their leader… the order and system he maintains is based on the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being ‘the men’ or ‘the mob’.”[5]

There is here a failure to account for the objective reasons why there existed a chasm between leaders and union members (ie the working’ class). The division between leaders and led had become in fact an expression of a division of class interests. The union leaders, as representatives of the unions as a whole were defenders of bourgeois interests against those of the proletariat. Without understanding the class nature of the unions, the rank and file miners were reacting to bureaucracy within the context of trade unionism. As an indirect result they were also rejecting the inherent ability of the working class to elect and mandate ‘leaders’ to defend proletarian interests within workers’ councils. Murphy sympathised with the abstract rejection of leadership held by the rank and file miners: “Government by officials … is steadily eroding trade union members’ rights whereas … real democratic practice demands that every member of an organisation shall participate actively in the conduct of business.” “If one man can sway the crowd in one direction, another man can move them in the opposite direction.”[6]

 However the SS&WCM could not claim to have completely broken with the union officials. At the Manchester national conference of the SS&WCM in 1916, it was proclaimed: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them..” And their statement of aims included a further directly unionistic statement: (We aim at) “the furtherance of the interests of working class organisation as a partisan effort to improve the position in the present and to ultimately assist in the abolition of the wages system.”[7]

The SS&WCM’s consciousness and organisation, in essence, remained within the boundaries of trade unionism. It was undeniably a militant, proletarian reaction to the capitulation of the trade unions to capitalist barbarism, but it was severely limited. It did not fully appreciate the class forces and historical change in the capitalist system which had caused the degeneration of the old workers’ movement, and which required new, directly revolutionary tactics and forms of organisation by the proletariat.

Confusion about the trade unions

The problem of the trade unions was not fundamentally that they were based on trade and craft rather than on the level of the whole class, although this did express the backwardness of the unions. The amalgamation of existing unions, for example, could not change their reactionary content, it rather expressed the tendency of capitalism to centralise and bureaucratise the trade unions; the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, for example, capitulated with little trouble to the war effort. The industrial unionist idea that the industrial organisation of the class could gradually prepare for the proletariat to assume economic power, which would then burst the political shell of the state, was a complete misunderstanding of the character of union organisation. The function of the unions had been to defend the workers’ immediate interests, not to engage in an economistic attempt to dismantle capitalism. The attempt by the SS&WCM to give the unions, or rank and file trade unionist organisations, a revolutionary content occurred in a revolutionary period when the immediate task of the proletariat was to seize political power, not to organise itself unionistically, in however radical a manner. The SS&WCM’s theories described an unconscious desire to channel the revolutionary aspirations of the class into forms of organisation which were completely unsuited to these aspirations. The above-mentioned pamphlet by Gallacher spells out the content of attempts at encroaching control over capitalist industry -a workers’ management of capitalism which would leave political and military power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, to be used whenever it became necessary to suppress this confused objective of the class.

Without fully understanding the reasons for the degeneration of the trade unions, the SS&WCM reacted on a formalistic level. This was one of the reasons preventing the SS&WCM from escaping the framework of unionism. The essence of the union question was not, as Murphy asserted, that they had leaders who were out of touch with the rank and file, because of their different surroundings to those of the shop floor workers. The reactionary leaders were a product of the reactionary organisation of the trade unions themselves. This resulted from the changing historical conditions of capitalism and the resulting change in the direction of the class struggle.

By making a fetishism out of abstract democracy, which remained within the context of trade unionism, the shop stewards prevented themselves from appreciating and expressing the new needs of the workers’ movement. ‘Democracy’ has never existed independently from material conditions; it always has a content which represents a particular class interest. The bureaucrats in the trade union leadership were not opponents of democracy in the abstract, but of proletarian democracy, which could only genuinely exist outside of and against the unions. They were on the other hand keen supporters of capitalist democracy.

The SS&WCM was thus restricted by these false premises and particularly by its support for many conceptions made obsolete by the imperialist war. The most significant symptom of such structural backwardness was the failure of the SS&WCM to oppose the war along revolutionary lines, ie to express the need of the class to use the war to take offensive against capitalism as a whole. Many shop stewards were ‘opposed to the war’ but they did not agitate against it in the factories and mines. They restricted their activity within the proletariat mainly to industrial matters and grievances. The attempt in January 1918 to answer the call of the Bolsheviks to force the ending of the war came to nothing partly because the SS&WCM failed to make a clear call to the class on the issue. It failed to live up to its responsibilities, as an advanced sector of the proletariat, to proclaim the vital interests of the class in a systematic and effective way.

Lack of political initiative by the SS&WCM was also to be seen in its response to the wave of strikes of May 1917, which demanded that dilution be banned from non-military work, and that the Trade Card system, exempting some workers from conscription be restored. The strike” … spread throughout England, factories in Leicester, Rugby, Liverpool, Birkenhead, Leeds, Newcastle, Rotherham, Derby, Crayford, Erith, Woolwich and London … Before the strike was over it had extended to forty-eight towns, involving over two hundred thousand men and a loss of one and a half million working days - more than the combined total of days lost in engineering and shipbuilding since the outbreak of war.” [8]

This wave, which was a revolt against the barbarism of the whole war, as well as a product of immediate causes, placed the shop stewards at its head. Yet a national conference of strikers’ delegates did not meet until at least two weeks after the strike wave began. And the outcome of the meeting was merely a “request that the Minister of Munitions should meet a deputation”.[9] Instead of such a conciliationist stance as this taken by the shop stewards a movement was needed to call explicitly for the extension of the strikes, and the deepening of their content. The objective of such class struggle should have been made explicit: an assault against the capitalist state, the extension of the revolution to the world arena, which were the only methods of linking up with the Russian proletariat. The strike was eventually defeated.

Obviously the failure of the strike to extend itself was not solely a result of the shop stewards’ inadequacies. It was the product of the immaturity of the whole class. The proletariat had been torn out of a long epoch of reformism, forced to confront capitalism in a revolutionary way, yet did not have the experience to fully comprehend or realise its objective tasks. The shop stewards, to a greater or lesser extent, expressed these inadequacies by their vacillations and indecisiveness.

Other limitations

Further negative characteristics of the SS&WCM were its localism and sectionalism. The movement was confined mainly to the engineering industries, which had been given importance by capitalism’s need for armaments. When the importance of these industries for British capital sharply declined after the war, followed by lack of demand for labour, employers were then able to throw militants out of the factories with impunity. One of the pillars of the stewards’ strength was thus knocked aside after the war.

The miners did not develop any independent rank and file unionistic organs, and although they militantly defended their living standards, their struggle was confined within the miners’ union. This helped prevent any linking up between miners and other sections of the class. An attempt to unify the SS&WCM and the rank and file committees in the miners’ and railwaymen’s unions at a March 1919 conference proved unsuccessful. The committees in the latter unions were content to work within the union structure, unlike the engineering shop stewards.

Although the shop stewards’ movement was nominally co-ordinated nationally by the National Administrative Council, there was little deliberate sympathy action between different sections of workers and little overall central direction. For example, during the May strikes, the Clyde workers remained at work. And paradoxically when the Clyde workers struck for a forty hour week in January 1919, the NAC proved unable to secure any sympathy action from English workers. Similarly in March 1917, wildcat strikes in Barrow involving 10,000 workers failed to bring out workers in other districts, and the strike was defeated.

We are not, however, criticising the stewards simply for lack of unification and centralisation, as leftist commentators on the shop stewards’ movement invariably do. To do so would be to criticise them within the terms of unionism and would therefore imply the need for more effective union struggles. Our criticisms are based on the conception that the shop stewards’ movement was in the main an historically obsolete organisational form, with a consciousness linked to the ascendant period of capitalism. Our criticisms aim at showing the weakness of the SS&WCM in the face of the revolutionary tasks of the class. The essential need of the British sector of the class at the time, was for its most advanced elements to develop an organisation capable of defending the revolutionary programme within the entire proletariat; a party which could, as the Bolsheviks were able to do, clarify the urgent fact that the international class would have to create revolutionary workers’ councils in order to mount an assault on the capitalist system itself.

It is true that the SS&WCM identified their workers’ committees with the Russian Soviets, supported the October Revolution, and sympathised with the Bolshevik regime. But the workers’ committees were organised on the level of the factory only, and primarily for reformist struggles. They were essentially a type of union structure. The Russian Soviets, although by no means perfect, revolutionary forms of class organisation, were clearly expressions of the proletariat’s new historic needs. The Soviets were class-wide political organs which grouped the class to challenge the whole capitalist order, in however confused a manner. The Soviets, under Bolshevik leadership, secured the political, social and military overthrow of the bourgeois state machine, the dictatorship of the proletariat and gave impetus to the extension of the world revolution. The workers’ committees, on the other hand, were radical trade union-like organs, with a reformist mentality and an economistic theory of revolution, based on the notion of ‘workers’ control’.

It is also true that the shop stewards were instrumental in the creation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920: “Of the eight members of the National Administrative Council elected in August 1917, six, MacManus, the chairman, Peet, the secretary, Murphy, the assistant secretary, T. Hurst, W. Gallacher and T. Dingley, joined the Communist Party by the time of the Leeds Unity Convention in January 1921.” [10]

They therefore apparently helped create a revolutionary party, capable of linking up with the Communist International, to defend the revolutionary programme within the class. Yet, by this time, the revolutionary waves throughout Europe were ebbing and the Communist International, (Comintern), founded in Moscow in 1919, was compromising more and more with left factions of the bourgeoisie - the Social Democrats and the trade unions - in a desperate attempt to reverse the counter-revolutionary upswing. Ironically and tragically, the shop stewards were overcoming their limitations and taking part in a revolutionary regroupment just as the Comintern was ceasing to express the goal of world revolution. The Comintern was already encouraging work with1n the trade unions, ie supporting tactics from the ascendant period of capitalism which had now become completely reactionary.

In this way the SS&WCM and the advanced sections of the class in Britain were driven back into the trade unions. This took place through the Red International of Trade Unions, the British section or which was the Minority Movement. In the name of revolution, credence had been given to the most dangerous agents inside the working class, agents which had alrea­dy helped mobilise the proletariat for imperialist butchery and which now proved decisive in defeating its revolutionary aspirations. For the British working class the 1926 General Strike proved to be the final nail in the coffin of its revolutionary potential. This nail had been hammered home by the TUC in collusion with the rest of the bourgeoisie. At the time, the CPGB called for “All power to the General Council” (of the TUC), providing an ‘extreme left’ cover for the reactionary manoeuvres of the trade union leaders.

While the SS&WCM was being physically smashed directly after the war, through unemployment and wide-spread dismissals from factories, the revolutionary current which animated the war-time movement was defeated by the Social Democrats, the trade unions and the Comintern in its period of counter-revolut1onary decline. It was only at the instigation of these capitalist factions that the shop stewards’ movement re-emerged during the late thirties, no longer to express an embryonic revolutionary upsurge of the class, as it had during World War I, but to try and contain the proletariat while a second imperialist slaughter was being launched by world capitalism.

The purpose of our analysis is not to dismiss the SS&WCM, despite our deep criticism of it. It was one of the most advanced elements of the proletarian movement in Britain during the 1914-23 period. Its mistakes were those of the working class trying to grapple with the enormous tasks facing it at the onset of the era of capitalist decadence. Its failure resulted from the weakness and inexperience of the whole international proletariat at that time. Our criticisms aim to identify the mistakes of that period from the point of view of the emerging revolutionary movement of the class today. Only by understanding the failures of the first revolutionary period during capitalist decadence, can we comprehend and express how the future revolutionary movement of the class can be victorious. Our criticisms themselves are only possible owing to the experiences of the proletariat, particularly those which were refracted through the clearest elements in the 1917-23 struggles. These elements perceived with the greatest lucidity the needs of the new period and could see the mistakes of other revolutionaries.

John Maclean, and his group in the British Socialist Party, who took a revolutionary defeatist position[11] against World War I, were critical of the Clyde shop stewards, particularly their ambitions of workers’ control: “We are not for the absolute control of each industry by workers engaged, for that would be trustified caste control … the final control and destiny of the products of an industry must be in the hands of humanity as a whole.”[12]

While this position implied an understanding of the international, political, primacy of the socialist revolution, Maclean was less clear on the need for revolutionary organisation, and was steeped, even during the war, in many old Social Democratic prejudices; for example he tended to overvalue workers’ education as an end in itself.

The Workers’ Dreadnought, a left communist paper, also had an understanding somewhat in advance of the SS&WCM. In its issue of March 9, 1918 it stated that: “It is our intention to make the Dreadnought the medium for nationally co-ordinating the (shop stewards’) movement.”[13]

The Dreadnought apparently was aware of the danger of sectionalism and localism in the SS&WCM. WF Watson, a shop steward, who was very critical of the failure of the SS&WCM to take action to end the war, worked closely with Syliva Pankhurst, leader of the Dreadnought group. These elements, like the more important Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD), provide an important historical link with the needs of today’s escalating class struggle, and with the present revolutionary minorities.

The shop stewards and the counter-revolution

The absolute victory of the counter-revolution in the mid-twenties meant that the shop stewards could only re-emerge as a weapon of the left agents of capitalism: the trade unions, the Social Democratic Parties, and the Stalinists. The original ideology and practice of the shop stewards, expressed an abortive attempt to come to grips with the revolutionary period in the wake of World War I, but could only become, in a period of counter-revolutionary decline, a means of emasculating the class struggle itself. The fact that the shop stewards had once been expressions of working class interests became a weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie as it subjected the proletariat to barbarism, by means of mystification as well as brute force.

The stewards’ movement first re-emerged immediately before World War II, when it was dominated by the Stalinists. When Russia entered the war against the Axis powers in 1941, shop steward groups formed joint production committees with the management of factories for the purpose of helping mobilise the class behind one imperialist bloc, and smashing nascent proletarian reaction to capitalist war: “It falls upon us to strain every effort to achieve the maximum production so that arms flow in greater quantity despite the fact that thousands of workers will be transferred from the factories to shipyards to build the vessels whereby our products will be delivered to the fighting front. That is the task of the trade unionist in the factory, that is the responsibility of every anti-fascist worker.”[14]

Thus the re-emergent shop stewards’ movement was instrumental in the practical and ideological mobilisation of the class for its bloody defeat, behind the mystification of anti-fascism. The shop stewards’ movement of this time shared nothing, in terms of its class content, with the movement of World War I, which reacted in an elemental proletarian way to the imperialist carnage - albeit in a confused way.

From World War II until today, the shop stewards’ movement has played an openly reactionary role in bourgeois industrial relations. This has been partly due to the decentralisation of wage bargaining during the post war years, which has given shop stewards an increased importance in contrast to trade union leaders. But the more profoundly true reason for their increasing role is the importance of the shop stewards’ movement in diffusing the revolt of the class.

The shop stewards are dangerous today precisely because they are embedded in the working class. They are usually elected by workers on the shop floor, they smooth out day-to-day grievances of workers, work in the same surroundings, and even lead strikes. But their task is to ‘represent’ the workers within the framework of trade unionism and legal relations with the bourgeoisie. As a corollary of this, they are also usually influenced by Social Democratic or Stalinist ideology, often being members of the Labour or Communist Parties.

The shop stewards are thus in an extremely good position to demobilise any real working class revolt in the factories, any revolt which threatens to go beyond a sectional framework, becomes autonomous, and starts to understand the real function played by the unions within capitalism. Their position within the rank and file gives them credence which can help divert and contain the struggle. In such a way, illustrated millions of times in the post-war period, the shop stewards’ movement has proved itself to be one of the surest guardians of the trade unions, although it may well criticise union leaders from time to time.

The reactionary role of the shop stewards’ movement does not mean that every individual shop steward is counter-revolutionary. Many shop stewards are elected because ‘no one else would take the job’, and could easily cease to be stewards and rejoin the mass of other workers. Many militant workers on the other hand become fodder for bourgeois interests (it is one of the tragedies of the counnter-revo1utionary period that most militant workers who emerge today are immediately swallowed up by the left agents of capital). The question of the role of the shop stewards, however, does not revolve around this or that particular individual case but is determined by the position of the whole movement vis-à-vis contending class forces. As a form of organisation embodying a specific ideology, the shop stewards’ movement is undoubtedly a weapon of capitalism today.

The shop stewards and the Left

Leftist factions of the bourgeoisie also try inevitably to harness what was once a proletarian movement to reactionary ends. Trotskyists, libertarians, and ouvrierists of all kinds fawn on the shop stewards, and attempt to recruit and influence them, sensing their importance and power within the class. The International Socia1ists, for example, a popu1ist-trotskyist organisation, bases its main strategy within the class on recruiting shop stewards, and forming ‘rank and file movements’ within the trade unions. It grounds its policy on a false analogy with the SS&WCM during World War I. For IS the problems of this movement resided not in the consciousness and activity of the SS&WCM but rather in the lack of political direction from outside the movement: “It is too much to expect that, without the guidance of an interventionist revolutionary (sic) party, an industrial movement led by political militants (a reborn revolutionary shop stewards’ movement) can lead a revolutionary struggle to the point of challenging the government for power.”[15]

For such Trotskyists, the fact that the shop stewards remained within unionism was very acceptable; the ‘revolutionary’ party could thus have taken power on its behalf. (This quote also makes clear the ‘revolutionary’ nature of the party for Trotskyists which is to ‘challenge’ the ‘government’ for power. It thus struggles to obtain governmental office, not to destroy the whole capitalist system.) The Trotskyists are incapable of seeing that the working class has the ability to go beyond and destroy the unions by its own efforts, and to develop its own revolutionary organisations: workers’ councils and communist minorities.

The danger posed by the Trotskyists lies not in their ludicrous dreams of bourgeois governmental office, but in their avid support for all the left agents of capital, especially the shop stewards. Like them, the Trotskyists and others argue for the repetition of mistakes which the class made fifty or more years ago. However, to encourage and support the shop stewards’ movement today is not a mistake but brazen capitalist mystification.

The proletarian way

In the present deepening crisis of world capitalism, the emerging class struggle is forcing the proletariat to confront the shop stewards, and other rank and file union delegates in other countries, as guardians of the existing order. After fifty years experience of counter-revolution, and after the lessons of the previous revolutionary period, the class thus has the capability of going beyond its previous mistakes.

One of the most fundamental lessons learnt by proletarian experience over these fifty years is that the class can have no permanent mass organisations grouping the whole class or sections of the class under decadent capitalism. The shop stewards’ movement, despite the fact that it is composed of thousands of workers, is a clear proof of this impossibility, because though it pretends to be the most militant defender of the c1ass, in fact it is a strong defender of bourgeois interests. Indeed any rank and file unionistic organisation which seeks to institutionalise itself in the class struggle becomes a brake on the real battles of the class. Only .those committees which are thrown up in the course of strugg1e.eg during a wildcat strike, existing to develop that battle independently from the unions, and disbanding after the struggle is over, can aid the development of proletarian class organisation and consciousness. Such committees are embryonic precursors of the workers’ councils, the historically discovered organisational form through which the whole class smashes the capitalist state and expropriates the bourgeoisie.

Temporary committees thrown up in the course of real workers’ struggles can express proletarian interests because these struggles inevitably tend to go beyond their sectional limits, and attack capitalism as a whole. Temporary committees can therefore be potentially embryonic revolutionary forms. Permanent mass organisations, however, inevitably conform to the everyday circumstances of wage slavery and participate in the exploitation of workers which cannot be ame1iorated during capitalist decadence. They are often swallowed up by the unions or leftist organisations.

The anti-working class role of permanent ‘workers’ organisations is made clear when workers’ committees stay in existence after the purpose of the struggle for which they were created has disappeared. These committees are then emptied of their content of autonomous struggle and become tools for regulating day to day exploitation within the factory, or for attempting to ‘mobilise’ the rank and file.

The Workers’ Commissions in Spain, originally created by workers in struggle, became permanent organisations, and rapidly ceased to defend proletarian interests, becoming left appendages of capital. Similarly the Base Committees of Italian workers, which had a parallel development to the Workers’ Commissions, have been integrated into the reactionary apparatus of the unions. Today both these organisations have to be fought when the class develops its autonomous struggle in these countries.

One of the main functions of revolutionaries is to systematically demonstrate to workers in the industrial centres the reactionary role of the trade union apparatus with all its factions - whether the shop stewards’ movement or the trade union bureaucracy. The task of revolutionaries is to show that the class struggle, if it is to be successful in the face of the crisis, must sooner or later deepen and develop autonomously against the trade unions and every other capitalist faction. This is the only way for the revolutionary proletariat, the way which leads to the seizure of international political power by the working class, and the preparation of the conditions for a classless society.

Frank Smith, August 1975

“The events in Spain have put every organisation to the test”. In 1936-7 the entire international revolutionary movement was faced with the necessity to affirm the absolute incompatibility between proletarian class struggle and imperialist war, since the one can only advance to the detriment of the other. The class struggle either prevents or disrupts imperialist war; the working masses can only be mobilised for imperialist war by renouncing the class struggle. As we argue in the article on anarchism and imperialist war in this issue, significant parts of the anarchist movement failed this test in 1914, and even more spectacularly over the war in Spain; and the same pattern of capitulation to capitalist war is being repeated today in relation to Ukraine and the Middle East today. But the war in Spain also precipitated a crisis in the Marxist currents which had initially tried to resist the Stalinist counter-revolution, and it was only a small minority which was able to remain loyal to internationalism during that dark period.

The text we are republishing below[1], written by Eiffel, was a resolution on the war in Spain submitted by the minority of the Revolutionary Workers’ League in the USA. It was published in the November 1937 issue of The Fourth International, the RWL’s journal. As we recount in our book The Italian Communist Left, the RWL was one of the groups to the left of official Trotskyism which the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left engaged in discussion following the Fraction’s own exclusion from Trotsky’s International Left Opposition. Its best-known militant was Hugo Oehler. It had rejected the 1934 ‘turn’ towards entryism in the Socialist Parties and with regard to the events in Spain again stood on the left of the Trotskyists. But it also retained key elements of the Trotskyist platform, such as the defence of the USSR, and it was never able to make a clean break from the opportunist methods and habits of Trotskyism. Eiffel’s resolution is aimed at the fatal ambiguities of the RWL on the question of Spain, since in the final analysis its position offered a variety of critical support for the Republican war effort against Franco.

Eiffel was the pseudonym of the German anthropologist Paul Kirchoff, who had been a member of the left communist KAPD until 1931. After arriving in the USA in that year, he was involved first in the milieu of the Left Opposition in New York and then became a member of the RWL, primarily because of his opposition to the entryist policy. Expelled from the USA in 1937, he went to Mexico and, following his break from the RWL, formed the Marxist Workers’ Group whose documents on the wars in Spain and China, and on the reactionary nature of the nationalisations carried out by the leftist government in Mexico, were warmly welcomed by the Italian Fraction. We have published some of the MWG’s key documents in the International Review[2].

Resolution on Spain

The events in Spain have put every organisation to the test. We have to admit that we have not stood it. Seeing this, our first and foremost duty is to study the roots of our failure; our second duty is to admit our failure in all frankness before the national and international proletariat. Only thus can we hope to rehabilitate ourselves as a Marxist vanguard organisation.

The following resolution is very far from being a sufficiently searching analysis of the real significance of the events in Spain and of our attitude towards them. It aims to be nothing more than a first admission of our failure in the face of these events, and an introduction to the discussion which the whole organisation must at this late hour begin immediately.

The evolution of the position of our organisation with respect to the events in Spain has followed on the whole a line which seems to indicate that underlying all our mistakes there is a healthy and solid Marxist base; that line of evolution has steadily, although hesitatingly, moved away from the initial false position and has progressively approached a correct one. But this process has been exceedingly slow and to a large extent shame-faced or even unconscious. Not once during the past seven months, the most crucial months not only in the recent history of the proletariat, but of our organization as well, has the question of the correctness or incorrectness of our fundamental line on Spain been squarely posed by any of the leading comrades as the life or death question for our organization. Those who, like comrade Eiffel, had from the very beginning fundamental differences with the majority of the PC on this question, but did not make this difference the center of a principled struggle for a different line, have failed to carry out one of the most elementary duties of a leading member.

While the gradual evolution of our line on Spain seems to indicate that there is at bottom a really Marxist base in our organization, our initial failure and the false manner in which we have subsequently corrected it in part, are grave symptoms of the youth and immaturity of our organisation. If the organization pulls through this crisis, i.e. analyses to the bottom its failure to meet a historical test, and corrects it completely, it will be essentially a new organization, having outgrown the weaknesses of its childhood days. It will then be one of the very few organizations on an international scale that have weathered the Spanish storm. In fact it will be stronger than before, as are those who are capable of correcting themselves even when that correction touches the very essential of their position.

The essential significance of the events in Spain is this: the workers’ reaction to the attempt of the bourgeoisie, to shift from corruption to brutal oppression, induced the latter to embark upon a new road of driving the workers off their class line, a method never used before in such a thorough and systematic manner: WAR! The struggle in Spain began as a civil war, but was rapidly concerted into a capitalist, i.e. an imperialist war. The whole strategy of the Spanish and international bourgeoisie has consisted in carrying this transformation through without a change in the outward appearances and without the workers of Spain and the world noticing it. To achieve its end, the bourgeoisie had by all means at its disposal to keep alive the belief of the workers that they were fighting for their own class interests, i.e. that it was a civil war.

Those who did not recognise in time this transformation had already taken place (who saw it only after many months) or who did not radically change from the moment they recognized this (again we belong to this category), objectively played the game of the bourgeoisie. Radical workers’ organizations which combatted the open forms of class betrayal, but who at the same time prolonged the illusions of the workers that this war had anything to do with their class interests, that it was “at bottom” a civil war, were in fact indispensable to the plan of the Bourgeoisie. The most concise formula of this objective support to the Spanish and world bourgeoisie is contained in a leaflet published by the PC in the second half of February, that is in the seventh month of the war in Spain: “The Spanish working-class must march together with the People’s Front against Franco, but must prepare to turn their guns against Caballero to-morrow”.

To say this at a time when we had already understood and declared openly that civil war had been converted into imperialist war, is the very opposite of what Marxists have to tell the workers during imperialist war; sabotage! Fraternization with the “enemy”! desert! Revolutionary defeatism! Turn imperialist war into civil war! – It is only necessary to compare these slogans of Marxists during the world war with our slogans, to see the full depth of our failure to analyse the situation correctly and to draw the correct conclusions from it. To speak of imperialist war (beginning of article in January number of Fourth International) and then to end the same article with the statement; “It is necessary to fight at the front” – is proof what we really did not understand what “imperialist war” means in Marxist language. The following words (in that article mentioned) sound revolutionary, but in reality are left support to the schemes of the bourgeoisie, because they try to bring together what never can be brought together; class war and the imperialist war. (“… if power is not consolidated in the rear … the fight at the front is transformed into a fight to defend private property etc etc.”)

It is obvious that power can be won (for it is a question of winning, not “consolidating” it) only by strictly class methods, employed both in the rear and at the front; strikes, sabotage, fraternization, desertion, revolutionary defeatism. But not one of their (these) slogans was ever raised by us! Without them our slogans for the creation of soviets and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat (abstracting from the question of the existence of non-existence of a class party of the proletariat) objectively had the same effect as the slogan “Turn imperialist war into civil war” WITHOUT THE SLOGAN OF REVOLUTIONARY DEFEATISM, - a point we had well understood theoretically and even made a central point in our propaganda, but which we failed to apply in PRACTICE when the first historical test came. In fact we did not even raise the slogan “Turn the imperialist war into civil war”, which would probably have led to the logical conclusions: if this is the task, then we must be for the defeat of the People’s Front armies just as well as the armies of Franco.

Summing up we have to admit that we, just as those we have criticised, have fallen victims to the attempt of the world bourgeoisie to use the war in Spain in order to drive the proletariat off its clear class line and that in reality we have acted only as the leftest of the left in the camp of those duped by the bourgeoisie, forgetting during a period of months to mention even once the fundamental class weapon of the proletariat: STRIKE! We, who had built our whole PROPAGANDA on the question of the independence of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, did not know how to concretize this idea in PRACTICE.