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 [7]’, 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 [21]: “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.