Internationalist Perspective

The deepening of the world economic crisis, since 2008, has caused a significant degradation of living and working conditions in the “poor” countries and frontal attacks through austerity plans, the increase in unemployment, and the revocation of many [long standing] “social gains” in the “rich” countries.

Class reactions have multiplied throughout the world, there are strikes, riots with violent confrontations with the forces of repression, demonstrations…

What is significant in the current movements is the mobilization of youth. Greek youth have been the cutting edge of contestation since 2008 but in their wake, French and English students and, now, Tunisian, Algerian and Egyptian are the motivating force of the movements. But these young people, in Tunisia, in Egypt seem to have forged a link to other demands. They have been set in motion

The movements unfolding in the Maghreb must be situated in this context of a major aggravation of the world economic crisis and its repercussions on the proletariat, working or unemployed. They express a revolt against the price increase, but also, and this is fundamental, against the complete absence of any perspective represented by the capitalist system. This absence of any perspective manifests itself more and more strongly and affects the whole planet.

These movement are important in other ways too: they constitute an experiment in collective struggle, in the capacity to oppose, the capacity to say “No”, to reject the established order. These experiences, combined with the questioning about [the lack of any perspective, will not fail to have an important impact on the future development of the political consciousness of the proletariat.

The risk exists that the current demands in Tunisia and Egypt will be swallowed up by the illusion that a change of President or of the government will give work to the young people, will fill the shopping baskets of the housewife, and will allow freedom of expression and of organization.

Remember that the transformation of Latin America dictatorships and the so-called “communist” regimes into more modern, “democratic,” political systems, corresponded to a change into regimes better adapted to the present needs of the accumulation of capital, and the need for a democratic control of the working class. But, if these political adaptations allowed a better exploitation of natural resources and some industrial development, they only very partially masked the overturning of existing health care, housing, educational, systems, and the creation of an even wider gap between a newly enriched class and an increasing mass of the poor consigned to unemployment, to poverty, to drugs, and to the violence of the shantytowns and the street.

Thus, the movements of revolt agitating Tunisia and Egypt express at the same time the refusal of the poverty generated by the capitalist mode of production, the search for new perspectives, but also the hopes invested in a change [in the mode] of political management. They reflect the difficulty, for the world proletariat, to envision a new society and thus to break with the economic, social, and political functioning of capitalism.

It is now clear that life in this system, under whatever form it takes, can only produce more poverty, wars, destruction of the environment, and, at the end of the day, a major degradation in the conditions of existence of human beings.

Only putting into question the very bases of this society on a world scale can open up a revolutionary perspective for the creation of a society offering radically different perspectives.

Internationalist Perspective

Three comments / excerpts from internet discussion lists.

…I would add …that the other “battle” within the ruling class in Egypt, within the army, that is now playing out, over the fate of Mubarak (and whether he should be removed immediately or not) also needs to become the subject of Marxist analysis of the events. Even if the army decided to support the “people” and remove Mubarak now, so long as it retains control as an institution, so long as it constitutes a “caretaker” government until elections can be “organized” (which seems to be the choice of the Obama administration), the mass movement will be neutralized by capital, and the time gained will be used to negate it. Only a movement that explicitly raises class demands can begin to avert that fate.

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…Yes, revolutionaries in Egypt must be on the street … but what’s really needed is analysis, not just “pride” — the kind of analysis that Marx made of the class struggles in France in 1848, an analysis of the actual political and class forces in motion, but one relevant to Egypt in 2011. When several days ago the Egyptian army rolled into the streets around Tahrir Square, most of the protester there, including the representatives of organized political groups, greeted them as allies. As a conscript army, its ranks filled with the sons of workers and the poor, the prospects for appealing to them is real. But the army is also the officer corps, the very socio-political force from which Mubarak (like Nasser and Sadat before him came), the veritable lynchpin of the capitalist class in Egypt since 1953. Marxist analysis can make clear that as a political force the army (not the rank and file soldiers) is the enemy of the mass movement, of the working class, and the behavior of the army today, permitting the government thugs to attack Tahrir Square, standing down as hundreds of protesters were assaulted, and several killed, is the outcome. The only question was whether the army would deliver the coup de grace to Mubarak in the interests of preserving its own power or choose to crack down on the protesters: we may be seeing the answer to that question now. As to the political organizations which seek a democratic Egypt, the immediate removal of Mubarak, the suppport of the Obama administration, and elections, none of them, not ElBaradei, not the “New Wafd,” are in a position to mobilize the mass of the population in a free election. Indeed, at the risk of historical analogies they seem to be latter day Miliukov’s and Kerensky’s. Far more likely to emerge in a powerful, perhaps leading position, as a result of free elections is the Muslim Brotherhood, which does have a real powerful base. Perhaps Washington can live with such a regime (after all the Brotherhood is now “moderate”), but can women, Copts, Marxists, workers? That’s not the concern of Obama, but it is the concern of socialists, which is why analysis and not just being in Tahrir Square is what’s needed.

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Though old formulas may no longer work, worker’s councils, soviets (neighborhood and work place), elected and revocable, are still the place to begin. By contrast, the democratic regimes that replaced the Stalinist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 legitimated capitalist social relations, preserved the value form (wage labor, commodity production, etc.) and reduced the working class (and the mass of the population) to passive spectators of political processess managed by professionals in the service of capital accumulation and power politics. Is Poland, Hungary, or Romania, post-1989 the model for Tunisia or Egypt? That is where the call for democracy and free elections will lead even if successfful, and not simply a prelude to military rule or religio-ethnic xenophobia. Revolutionaries have something other to propose in an historical epoch where democracy in the best of cases is the political framework to manage austerity and the planet of slums that is all capitalism can produce today.

Mac Intosh

Another post from IDN

Yes, communists should “be calling for workers — and all of the working class, including the unemployed, students, youth, retireds, ‘housewives’ — to organize themselves wherever they are, at work, where they live, in their schools and universities and colleges, in the ‘community’: organize into autonomous assemblies to discuss and decide what needs to be done, and which direction to move the uprising into” – but what direction should they point to? Self-organization doesn’t occur for the sake of itself but to obtain a goal. Right now, the overriding goal is the removal of Mubarak. Hated as he may be by the workers of Egypt, this is no specific working class demand, so this goal does not require from the workers that they organize themselves autonomously. There may be some autonomous organisation going on, like for the defense of working class neighborhoods and the apprioriation of use values but we have almost no information on that. If somebody does, please let us know where we can find it.

I think what communists should say in Egypt and elsewhere is that, despite its symbolic importance, the departure of Mubarak will solve nothing for the working class, that the horrible conditions that pushed them to this fight will continue to worsen, that the fight against them must continue and deepen.

The inhumane conditions of the working class (in the wide sense we must give to this term), aggravated by the crisis, were clearly the starting point of the uprising in Tunesia and the riots in neighboring Algeria. They had a clear working class content. This struggle to survive was subdued (for now) after the army ousted the hated dictator and allowed some democratic reforms. But that was not a victory for the working class. Certainly, the new regime will be careful in its dealings with the working population and that will allow the latter some more breathing room, but the conditions which sparked the revolt, the poverty, unemployment and corruption will not improve, quite the contrary. The real victory in Tunesia was the overcoming of fear, the experience of collective struggle which will not be forgotten.

The struggle in Egypt was different in that it, from the very beginning, not only expressed the refusal of the working class to accept its conditions but also a desire of a large part of the capitalist class in Egypt for regime-change. Theirs is a struggle over how to manage the country, in other words, how to manage the exploitation. A decisive part of Egypt’s capitalist class wants a more modern, more flexible management and is using the revolt of the working class to make itself indispensable for the restauration of order, and is opportunistically supported by the Islamo-fascists who have their own power dreams. With the support of the media they try to reduce the events to just that, a question of personnel change. They make of the departure of Mubarak the fetish of the movement: once accomplished, everything will become magically ok and we’ll all go back home, back to the factories and offices, then the cleanup crews will come and everything will be normal again.

Most likely they will win and Mubarak will have to go. It’s clear that his continuation at the helm is against the interests of the capitalist class in Egypt and elsewhere. That he hasn’t gone already can only be because the army, the backbone of the state, hasn’t told him yet. Why not? One possible explanation is that it might not want the movement to end on a note of triumph and self-confidence. If the real victory for the working class in Tunis and Cairo is the experience of having overcome fear and isolation in confronting the state, the deciders have maybe decided to weaken that memory with new fear and dispersment. Maybe that is why they let the thugs attack the demonstrators. Maybe they want to see the protests weaken first before they save the day by ousting Mubarak, for the sake of future discipline.

I admit that this is speculative. All this is complicated by the fact that the removal of a dictator with such an extensive network of patronage is no easy matter. But it has been done before and it will happen in Egypt too and this will most likely end the revolt for now.
This will not be a surprise. What we’re seeing in Egypt is not a revolution, but the appearance of cracks in the solid capitalist façade, cracks that are being glued with democracy but that will nevertheless widen and multiply, as capitalism’s crisis deepens. The reason why the fetishization of the departure of Mubarak is so successful is not just the weight of ideology on the working class. There is not a crystal clear working class consciousness beneath that weight. If the working class would be convinced of its own power and its goal, it would not look for support outside of it, to the army, to Islam, to democracy. It looks to them because it feels weak, atomized. Certainly, the revolts in the Maghreb-countries, in which proletarians massively overcame their fear of confronting capital ans its state, and overcame their feeling of impotence in collective struggle, are an important, even historic step in a revolutionary direction. But communists have to be clear that the democratic adjustments to the management of capital in these countries are no more than a reshuffling of the furniture on the Titanic. The new leaders are our enemies just as much as the old ones, the struggle against exploitation continues.

Sander

IP is publishing articles and comments on the events in Egypt. This piece originally appeared on the Internationalist Discussion List.

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Greetings all

I assume most people on this list have been following the recent events in Egypt with interest. There are many sites on the internet which provide detailed factual accounts of what has transpired there since January 25. I have wondered, however, about the question of how (pro-)revolutionaries are analyzing the developing situation there, and what they/we would have to say to the working class in Egypt were they/we there. There are some who are saying that this is all just bourgeois politics, a movement to change the government/regime, to find a less corrupt one, maybe, at most, to bring about a representative democratic system of government with associated legal civil rights, on the model of the sorts of movements that took place around Eastern Europe 20 years ago following the collapse of the ‘Iron Curtain’. I am assuming that many here don’t share that perspective, and see that there is more going in Egypt than that.

The movement seems to be focused so far on one key demand: Mubarak (and his National Democratic Party regime) out! All of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Egyptians involved in this movement agree on this. These people are convinced that Mubarak and his regime are responsible for their plight. There is a common feeling that this plight is unacceptable, and they are demanding “No more!” When a regime is as totalitarian as Mubarak’s has been, it becomes the obvious focus for all who are dissatisfied with their situation, their socio-economic conditions. It becomes attractive to believe that if only the dictator and his regime were gone, things would be so much better. Of course, many people know better, since the world has seen many such dictators thrown out, only to give way to either another equally “bad” dictator/regime, or perhaps a slightly “less bad” regime, but general socio-economic conditions remaining the same as before or even
worsening, specifically for the working class, depending on the overall state of the economic crisis.

The willingness and determination of masses of people (and I am assuming that at least a large minority of these people are working class) to stand up to a dictatorial regime and say “Enough! Get out!” surely must be inspiring for (pro-)revolutionaries everywhere. And the fact that they have accomplished this and held their ground for as long as they have, determined to continue until Mubarak is gone, is already a kind of victory, in that it is a major step forward from passive acquiescence. But of course, we know that for the working class to fight for their interests they need to go much further than just getting rid of Mubarak and his regime. So the question is: what else to do?

It would seem that there is a fledgling ‘independent trade union federation’ which has arisen from the various strikes and workers’ struggles since 2007 in Egypt (e.g. in Mahalla), and it has issued a call-out for a ‘general strike’ as part of this movement. Since it is new and thus far not recognized and legalized by the government, it may offer workers more room for autonomous activity than typically established trade unions do.

“Today [Jan. 30], representatives of the of the Egyptian labor movement, made up of the independent Egyptian trade unions of workers in real estate tax collection, the retirees, the technical health professionals and representatives of the important industrial areas in Egypt: Helwan, Mahalla al-Kubra, the tenth of Ramadan city, Sadat City and workers from the various industrial and economic sectors such as: garment & textiles, metals industry, pharmaceuticals, chemical industry, government employees, iron and steel, automotive, etc… And they agreed to hold a press conference at 3:30pm this afternoon in Tahrir Square next to Omar Effendi Company store in downtown Cairo to announce the organization of the new Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions and to announce the formation of committees in all factories and enterprises to protect, defend them and to set a date for a general strike.”
As far as I can tell, a date has not yet been set for the proposed general strike

On the other hand, this federation has apparently already gained the support of the AFL-CIO and the ITUC, so perhaps there will be no more room within it for autonomous workers’ activity than within established legally recognized unions.

The following brief sketch of the situation in Egypt was written on January 31, before the attacks by the “pro-Mubarak” thugs, who seem mostly to be non-uniformed police. I am assuming that people here are reasonably well informed of the “main” events since then.

People should feel free to discuss not just the question of what to do, but also to offer analyses of the balance of forces involved in the situation in Egypt now, both class forces and those of various factions within the Egyptian ruling class, especially within the military, dominant as it is.

This text offers some analysis of the different factions within the Egyptian ruling class, including within the military.

***************O***************

Now (or recently) in Egypt we have a situation of an uprising initiated by some young (well-educated) unemployed workers which has spread into a general cross-section of the population (i.e. all classes and strata except the ruling class), the principal basic demand of which is the ouster of Mubarak and his regime. The buildings of Mubarak’s NDP party have been torched in various cities. The police initially confronted the uprising, in some cases with lethal violence, and in others with less than lethal force. After 4-5 (?) days, many police forces were defeated or else withdrew on command from their various stations and sites. The army came into the key public areas prior to the defeat/withdrawal of the police. Prisoners (thousands, perhaps many such) were either released or not prevented from ‘escaping’. It has been widely reported (via blogs) that quite a lot of looting, especially of people’s homes, has been occuring and that many of those involved
have been police/ex-police, (ex-) prisoners, and other criminals/gangsters. In various neighbouhoods (wealthy, ‘middle class’, and working class), the residents have organized themselves into what some have called “neighbourhood watch” committees.

Mubarak has sacked his cabinet and appointed a new VP and PM. The uprising has overwhelmingly rejected this ‘olive branch’ as unacceptable and is increasingly strongly demanding that Mubarak step down immediately. The army seems to be the key factor in this situation, the dominant player; and so far it has shown itself as prepared to act if (it decides it is) ‘necessary’, but thus far refusing to take sides. Some of the insurgents have taken the army’s refusal to (thus far) intervene with force as implicit support for the uprising and its demands.

So, in this situation, if we, as organized communists were to find ourselves there, what would we be saying ‘should be done’? It seems to me that the uprising has created an opening, a space, perhaps even a ‘vacuum’, as a result of the absence of the police. The police in some form or other — there were some reports of widespread ‘desertion’ by police to the side of the insurgents — will return, but likely not with the same authority they had before their defeat. By themselves they won’t be able to command the same degree of fear and intimidation as they could prior to the start of the uprising.

As I said, residents in various neighbourhoods have organized themselves for the purposes of defense and security of their residential property. Even if the army retains its position of holding supreme power in Egypt, it seems that the power of the state there has temporarily receded and that there is now or will be (soon?) space for workers to begin organizing themselves, both within their workplaces and within their residential neighbourhoods. Thus, I wonder if communists there should at this time be calling for workers — and all of the working class, including the unemployed, students, youth, retireds, ‘housewives’ — to organize themselves wherever they are, at work, where they live, in their schools and universities and colleges, in the ‘community’: organize into autonomous assemblies to discuss and decide what needs to be done, and which direction to move the uprising into.

Of course, I realize that this way of putting things is somewhat problematic, since if we were there, we would know a lot more specifics about the situation than we do not being there, we would be placed in concrete context, while the way I have posed it here is rather abstracted from that context. Perhaps there is already such organization going on. Perhaps other kinds of organizing has happened. Still, while we don’t know about any of that, we can at least consider what we think the best course of activity for organized communists there to be based on what we do know.

Urgent Appeal: Eight South Korean Labor Activists Face 5-7 Years in Prison

On Dec. 3 of last year, the prosecutor in the Seoul Central District Court demanded prison terms of 5-7 years for Oh sei-chull and other members (Yang Hyo-sik, Yang Joon-seok, Choi Young-ik, Park Joon-seon, Jeong Won-hyun, Oh Min-gyu, and Nam-goong Won) of the Socialist Workers’ Alliance of Korea (SWLK), a revolutionary socialist group. These activists in the Korean working-class movement were indicted under South Korea’s notorious National Security Law (passed in 1948 and theoretically still stipulating the death penalty for “pro-North” activities). The eight militants of the SWLK, who as internationalists advocate working-class revolution in both Koreas, were accused of no specific crime except being socialists, but in reality the indictment resulted from their intervention in several strikes and movements going back to 2007.

This is the first instance of such harsh repression under the National Security Law in many years. It occurs in the larger context of the hard-right turn (such as the smashing of the Ssangyong Motor Co. strike of 2009) of South Korean President Lee Myong Bak’s government since he took office in early 2008. (In fact, leaflets of the SWLK distributed during the Ssangyong strike were key evidence in the trial.)

Prosecutors have attempted to indict members of the SWLK several times since 2008, and prior to December, the prosecutors’ case was thrown out of court each time. It is not impossible that a barrage of e-mail protests to Judge Hyung Doo Kim of the Seoul Central District Court will help reduce or obviate the pending sentences altogether, when final sentencing will take place on Jan. 27.

Let Judge Kim know your feelings in your own words about this crackdown on “thought crime” by writing to swlk@jinbo.netThe e-mails must be received by 06:00 AM on Monday January 17th 2011 (Seoul time), so that the SWLK’s lawyer can forward them to Judge Kim prior to sentencing.

Please distribute this appeal as widely as possible. Messages in languages other than English are welcome.

The following excerpt is from the article “Burdened with Debt” published by the Greek pro-revolutionary organization TPTG.

The article contains many keen insights, and IP recommends readers look at the entire article. The piece is too long to be published here, but may be read in full at the Lib com site

We hope readers will take the opportunity to post comments either here or at the lib com site.

IP.

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Although the “debt crisis” increasingly undermines their already weak function to guarantee the improvement of the conditions of the reproduction of the proletariat as labour power, still the power of the unions resides in the sectional and even individualistic use the proletarians make of them: the particular history of political clientelism in Greece is also evident within the unions, especially in the public sector, as voting for the socialist or right-wing unionists usually meant either climbing up the social ladder or at least some kind of legal advice. Thus, even if such material gains are limited now, they are not drastically cut yet; union cadres can still rely on social inertia and political clientelism that creates a relatively loose hierarchy and discipline in the public sector so as not to feel threatened and attempt major reforms in the union apparatuses.

As for PAME’s activities (the “labour front” created by the CP), they probably seem impressive, taking into account the fact that in many cases PAME was the first one to call mobilisations, obliging GSEE and ADEDY to follow. PAME has organized a number of spectacular moves, such as occupations of ministries, TV stations, the stock market, blockades of the port of Piraeus, etc –in one case, PAME’s members had blockaded the port in order to defend a strike of the shipworkers that was ruled illegal by the courts. However, these mobilisations were under the complete control of the party without a grain of initiative from the rank’n’file and it is certain that if the struggles escalate, the CP will again assume the role of the police repressing any radical initiative or action, as it has done many times in the past. Besides, this is clearly shown by its permanent tactics to prevent any contact and communication of its members with other strikers, organizing separate and, above all, peaceful demonstrations.

But, apart from the role of all kinds of unionist policing mediation, there is an almost total lack of autonomous proletarian action and of openly expressed radical contents of struggle going beyond the union/sectional demands. It is maybe frustrating, but the truth is that those strikes and demos that have attracted worldwide attention have been called and organized from above, be it the union confederations or federations that determined their time and content. The response of the greater part of the working class has remained to a considerable extent passive. It is true that the class combativeness of many strikers in the streets, against the cops and the trade union leadership, their joy in mixing with strikers of other sectors and in occupying the centre of the city (in the case of the first demos in February and March and on the 5th of May) reveal a deeper rebellious content which is however latent and has not been expressed in an autonomous and co-ordinated organization of the struggle within the workplaces or in the neighbourhoods.

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Partly, an explanation for the inadequate response of the proletariat to the attack called “debt crisis” can be traced back in the state’s effective propaganda to legitimize it. In order to work more for less money we have to accept that we face a “problem” that is beyond our reach and control, something that needs our sacrifices,. Thus, the cause of the crisis is attributed to an almost metaphysical but inescapable world of markets, statistics, rating agencies, speculators and so on. This mystification veil is used in order to conceal the real cause of the crisis: the convulsive but persistent refusal of the global proletariat to become totally subordinated to capital and the circulation of its struggles, however limited it is.

Thus, in a period of acute crisis, capital’s obsession with regaining control over the proletariat – especially when the command of capital and its state was recently questioned and delegitimized in a violent way– is transmuted into the invisible dark omnipotence of “economy” and the “markets” working above us, causing a generalized feeling of weakness and impotence. The hard austerity measures, this clear declaration of class war, has to become “naturalized”: crisis has assumed the character of a natural catastrophe that cannot be reversed until it will come full circle after some years, as the economists-weathermen keep telling us in their forecasts.

The Greek state, under the PASOK administration, together with its European partners and the media scum, intensified the ideological terrorization by also using a traditional but all-weather powerful “weapon”: national unity. During crises, the partners turn into commanders and rivals; the unified European village whose inhabitants live harmoniously and co-decide democratically falls apart while a matter of utmost importance, the defence of the nation –this perennial deception– comes to the fore. In a few words, they try to persuade us that we won’t work for our bosses but for the country’s good.

The “debt crisis” offers the capitalist state a unique opportunity to reimpose the unification of the proletariat around the nation-state form and through that its disciplining, in the hope of an increasing productivity and higher profits. In the words of the Greek prime minister “…it is clear that the way in which we dealt with our finance affairs led us to lose a part of our national sovereignty. We have to take that part back by means of our credibility, our political programme and everyone’s self-sacrifice”. His “sacrifice” to “give away a part of the country’s sovereignty” entails “our self-sacrifice” in order to “take it back”. But we have to pay for this “part” with more work, less money, deeper divisions and competition among us in the face of the increasing numbers of the reserve army of unemployed.

National unity is reinforced as a surrogate “collective” identity when, at the moment of economic and social disintegration, individualist roles within the reified social relations are shattered.

In the last two decades, trade unionism and politics, which are both typically characterized by the use of collective means for individualist ends, tended to be less attractive and effective compared to the use of individual or household loans. The “sovereign debt crisis” and the imminent bankruptcy could entail a disaster on an individual and family level that most proletarians are not prepared to reverse in a class autonomous way. Passivity then under the flag of “national unity” can serve as a refuge and a rationalization for those who, not willing to protest against their devaluation now, put their hopes for a future increase of the value of their own labour power in the increase of the competitiveness of the Greek economy. The non-strikers might even attack verbally their fellow workers whose strikes would destroy this endeavour.

Since crisis is experienced as a multitude of personal failures bound together (“living beyond our means” summarizes the individual “excesses” and “malfunctions” that led to a “national failure”), self-blame and guilt can take such epidemic dimensions, that certain defence-mechanisms are needed. Those defence-mechanisms are activated through the projection of the feeling of guilt onto the witch-hunted “extravagant” civil servants, tax evaders or even selected scapegoated “corrupt” politicians who “failed” to perform their high functions. The state ideologues, on their part, who know that in periods of crises capital and its state are no longer trustworthy since the “rewards promised” never came, they are all too willing to channel anger and fear to a path safer for the system.19

Nationalism and populism, however, can also emerge through another route as well: through the struggles themselves mainly because of the influence of the dominant left and leftist discourse and activity on them. Nationalization of banks, self-management of key sectors of the national economy, different suggestions for the renegotiation of the debt by (this or another) government, emphasis on the “corruption” issue, ideas for a “productive” reorganization of Greece are the most popular slogans of the left in these days –in sum, a capitalism confined within the borders against the three foreign evils (IMF, ECB and EC) and the “Quisling” Greek government. Finally, to the “irresponsible” strikers who betray the “national cause” through struggle, the prime minister was clear when he declared: “Sacrifices are needed; we cannot afford blockades and strikes”. It is obvious that the government and the capitalists are afraid of a social unrest which can burst out if all mediations and mechanisms prove ineffective. The ideologues of the system try to eliminate even the memory of the December 2008 rebellion as a nightmare that should not be repeated. When they demand social peace they know that they are walking on thin ice: their arsenal – be it union apparatuses and functions, individualism or doses of fear and guilt– may be exhausted.

That’s why while the government puts on its humanist-antiracist mask and speaks the language of the “common good”, it holds the cop’s bludgeon at the same time. Social consent must prevail in any way. No wonder the streets are full of cops that try to control every space that could become a field of struggle and clash. To return to Nietzsche: “this world deep down has never again been completely free of a certain smell of blood and torture” –something that the Minister of Labour reminded us when, some months ago, during the announcement of the new “hard but necessary measures” he declared: “there will be blood”. Maybe, he unconsciously presaged the storm which is coming. A storm which may bring the recomposition of the struggles and will send the “public deficit” to the dustbin of history, together with the “life deficit”, the only real one.

TPTG August-October 2010

Words by the Canadian poet and activist Frank Scott (1899-1985), set to music by Leonard Cohen and sung by him, with Anjani Thomas, on his album ‘Dear Heather” (2004). Scott’s politics weren’t ours. Yet he expressed a feeling that made me think he wanted the same thing as we do. But he, and other social-democrats, need some more “bitter searching of the heart”…

Sander

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From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.
This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.
We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.
The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.
Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.
Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part.

On the text by “Woland pour Blaumachen”: A reply

“If the postwar period saw the subsumption of workers not only as labor power but as purchasing power, “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers” (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle), something else begins to happen during the crisis of the 1970s. The producer-consumer submits to new (and newly repressive) disciplines in the advanced capitalist countries: fragmented, decentralized, colonized by rhetorics of self-management and participation, flexibilized, rendered part-time and pushed into industries devoted to the sale, distribution, management and circulation of commodities (including labor-power). This reordering of the working class as in-itself – the reordering of what Italian operaismo might call its technical composition – renders its conversion into the proletariat, as revolutionary self-consciousness, nearly impossible. The restructuring dislocates the working-class from its own self-realization and self-abolition by way of the revolutionary seizure of the means of production”.

Jasper Bernes, The double barricade and the glass floor, an account of the 2009 struggles in the University of California.

***

Sander and MacIntosh’s (S&M) critique of the text ‘December 2008, Greece: an attempt to detect the power and the limits of our struggle’ published in Blaumachen (BM) #3, though brief, brings to the fore in a concrete manner the most important issue of grasping/theorising the relation between everyday proletarian struggles and the potential revolutionary overcoming of capital. It provides thus a welcome stimulation for us to clarify and productively develop the theorisation attempted in that text.

In overall, S&M’s critique is characterised by a perspective of the proletariat being constituted (united) as a class, where seems to be our main point of divergence. The self-evident obviousness of this perspective for them is probably the reason for whatever misunderstanding of certain points of BM’s text . This viewpoint of theirs is clearly summarised in the last sentence of their text: “How they see revolution as a practical possibility if the experience of self-organization and extension in struggles for demands would not stimulate class consciousness and thereby change the content of the struggle, is unclear to us”.

How can one expect this “growing extension” of the struggle today? What we have been experiencing during the last few years (especially after the burst of the global capitalist crisis) is a multiplication of scattered struggles of different fragments of the proletariat and an increase in their vigor, without on the other hand being able to see a rising unity or (if one prefers a workerist terminology) a recomposition of the working class, as a class for itself. The capitalist restructuring that followed the high peak of struggles around 1968 was a counter-revolution which crashed the proletarian offensive and gradually dismantled the previously existing working class power . But it was at the same time the all embracing transformation of the class relation in all its aspects. This means that one can no more face class conflicts having in mind the historical patterns of class struggle either of the late 19th/early 20th century or the Keynesian era. One cannot in 2010 expect the victorious repetition of the German revolution nor even a more self-organised, radically anti-unionist Hot Autumn.
The restructuring was a process of “liquidation of the working class” (and the restructured capitalism still advances this process). Its trends was to transform the latter from a collective subject confronting bourgeoisie into a sum of proletarians, everyone of whom is individually related to capital, without the mediation of the practical experience of a common class identity and workers’ organisations that would make of the class a recognised ‘social partner’, accepted to participate at the table of collective bargaining. This was achieved through the unceasing transformation of the technical composition of capital and the labour process and the highly accelerated internationalisation of capital, with the disintegration of the rigidities in the global circulation of capital and labour power and the subsequent ‘zoning’ in the global division of labour and the modalities of reproduction of the working class. This transformation while homogenising the essential conditions of the reproduction of the vast majority of the global population into the ‘proletarian condition’ -i.e. selling one’s labour power as the only means to survive- (contradictorily restricting at the same time access to the formal labour market for a huge percentage of it, producing a structurally overabundant proletariat and a vast ‘unofficial economy’), destroyed workers’ identity and the actuality of ‘common interests’ and fragmented the global proletariat to an unprecedented extent.
No call for class unity can re-establish a revolutionary community grounded on the affirmation of the proletarian class belonging. One cannot face the way capital brings proletarians together, i.e. the fragmented existence of the proletariat as labour power -which is its only existence- as superficial and inessential, as something to be superseded once proletarians begin to ‘understand’ that they have essentially common interests, thus demystifying social relations. In the cycle of struggles which had its peak during the years 1917-23, a unifying class consciousness was incorporated in the reproduction and the specific development of the relation of exploitation anticipating the communist revolution as the affirmation of the working class as the really productive force of society while appropriating the capitalist means of production. Class consciousness was not an apocalypse, but part of a specific historical existence of the class relation. Class consciousness persisted as the manifestation of the powerful workers’ identity of the post-war mass worker, though contradictorily so, since the ‘negation of work’ emerged as the practical critique against the impossibility of revolution as the affirmation of the proletariat, a critique produced nonetheless as inseparable part of this same content of revolution (see for example the contradictory co-existence of ‘ne travaillez jamais’ with the ideology of workers’ councils in the work of one of the most radical political groupings of the proletariat during that period, namely IS) . A unifying class consciousness (revolutionary self-consciousness of the proletariat) is out of the question today, not because the proletariat is on the defensive but because the current content of the relation of exploitation doesn’t affirm working class as a social entity seeking to prevail against the opponent class.

Theory, as the self-critical character of daily struggles, is necessarily faced with the re-elaboration of the way revolution is produced in these struggles today, but -here is the crux of the question- not necessarily as their linear expansion or deepening. When S&M claim that we “participate in demand struggles that concern us because by their failure, they create the conditions to go beyond unionism”, they reconstruct our sayings in a way that reduces the theorisation of the contradictory course of class struggles to a question of political intervention. Our participation in class conflicts is not a ‘choice’; it stems ‘spontaneously’ and ‘objectively’ from our position in the class relation, our situation. We don’t attribute to theory the role of formulating a Revolutionary Practice out of concrete proletarian practices, being thus transformed into a revolutionary programme seeking to ‘radicalise’ actual struggles.

Moreover, in regard to the essential aspect of S&M’s argument, it is not ‘defeat’ in a strict sense that creates the potential for the ‘demanding’ content of daily struggles to be overcome, but the fact that everywhere, in all their struggles over immediate demands, even in the (rare) cases when such struggles are victorious for a small fraction of labour power , proletarians at the end of the day face only the present specificity of the relation of exploitation, which means the perpetuation of their being superfluous, expendable, precarious, depreciated and fragmented. There is no wage/productivity deal anymore. There is no socialist alternative either, or a radical alternative to the ‘really existing’ socialist one (e.g. self-organisation and self-management). In other words, the dynamics and limits of class struggle today converge exactly at the inability of the struggle to conclude its class dynamics (meeting of demands, renewed fighting position inside the reproduction of capital). This is as well manifested in the fact that one can see no stabilisation of new organisational forms of the working class that would question the official unions-in-crisis on the ground of an enstrengthened position of the class in the negotiating of labour power: the December revolt in Greece, the occupations of factories in Britain and France and the strikes and riots in China, India and Bangladesh ‘have left nothing behind’ in that respect .

Nonetheless, making claims, putting forward demands, is the normal course of proletarian struggles; it is not the expression of something like ‘a false consciousness’ (or “ideological rubbish”) dominating the working class movement. For the time being, we can see such practices that demand nothing from capital as the manifestation of ruptures emerging inside (and in a close/dialectical relation to) the day-to-day class struggles. But these ruptures and the generalisation of the struggle are not a matter of “understanding that there is nothing to defend in capitalism”. The fact is that in a sense there is much to defend in capitalism, since after the restructuring of the ‘70s and the subsequent highly accelerated internationalisation of capital, global proletariat’s reproduction has been fully -and without mediations- integrated in the production of surplus value. The contradictory feature is that now the bourgeoisie does not give a shit to guarantee this reproduction, which it faces as a mere cost. By breaking down the rigidities of the Keynesian period and really subsuming labour now at a global level, capital tends more and more to free itself from maintaining the level of reproduction of the proletariat . Value’s utopia consists in emancipating itself from its dependence on living labour, in its uninterrupted parthenogenesis; needless to say that this is a self-destructive utopia which defines the present crisis as crisis of wage labour. We are confronted with a historically specific mode of accumulation where the wage, while at the heart of the crisis of reproduction of the capitalist relation (i.e. crisis of the reproduction of the proletariat, at the same time), has ceased to provide the core bargaining terrain for the face-off between THE working class and capital; demands have become ‘illegitimate’.
The potential of ruptures within the revindicative content of struggles grounds itself exactly in this presently a-systemic character of demanding. But then these ruptures are not a matter of forms of organisation either (against unions, let’s say) but a rupture with the content of the struggle, a rupture with being proletarian and necessarily fighting as such, which can only mean keep living all this shit. Ruptures are the failure of the class to conclude the course of its acting as a class. The generalisation of struggle then will be the result of a more or less simultaneous production of ruptures within revindicative struggles, i.e. the generalisation of practices that question proletarians’ existence as proletarians, which is not a matter of propaganda or finding effective ways to ‘bring out crowds’ or ‘call people to join’. This coming together of conflicts within struggles will immediately bring multiple aspects of the production of surplus value/reproduction of capital to a halt, putting thus at stake the reproduction of the working class itself, necessitating simultaneously the intensification and expansion of what will then be an open insurrection (or probably multiple insurrectionary fronts). Obviously, in this generalisation of struggle, the coming together of proletarian practices will not be a peaceful one; on the contrary a conflictive, contradictory and in many instances violent process is what we should expect . The production of ruptures is the questioning of class belonging within the class struggle. This dynamics of class struggle today can never be victorious because it will keep finding class struggle itself as its limit up to the point that the multiplication of ruptures will become the overcoming of class belonging (and therefore of self-organisation of the class) as a revolution within the revolution, as communising measures which will either de-capitalise (communise) life further and further or be crashed.

Proceeding from this understanding of the dynamics and limits of present day class struggles, we can account of lootings as a proletarian practice emerging in a great deal of instances within them. One could criticize “looting of goods for re-sale and individual profit”; but in doing so the important issue is the clarification of the real/material framework of any proletarian practice in a specific historical moment and not the weighing of really existing struggles against a self-proclaimed revolutionary tactics or strategy. In order for ‘looting for re-sale’ to be overcome, the existence of exchange should be widely questioned in a generalised communising struggle. In so far as exchange is the only means of reproducing oneself, one can only expect individual consumption and re-sale to be the prominent aim of re-appropriation of goods. So, the character of looting is not a matter of good or bad will. A critical account of specific instances of looting in present proletarian struggles is much more complex than just condemning the ‘bad looting for re-sale’. Immigrants appropriating and re-selling cell phones and laptops in Athens is quite different a thing from proletarians organised in gangs looting stores in Haiti aiming at a much profitable control of the distribution of essential goods, averting at the same time looting carried out by other proletarian groups for the meeting of immediate needs. In the last example, one could imagine that the practical questioning of ‘looting for re-sale’ in the potential development of a struggle would take much more violent forms, being identified with the questioning of the existence of gangs as temporary formalisations of the perpetuation of the domination of capital.

Finally, as far as the dynamics of destruction is concerned, S&M are right to imply that revolution will not be an all-embracing burning down of what already exists. However, it will not be today the appropriation of the shit that capitalist society produces. The existence of a great deal of the means of production and means of subsistence will necessarily be incompatible with the continuation of the revolutionary struggle as the abolition of value and the capitalist division of labour. On the other hand, one shall justifiably imagine that insurrected proletarians will seize aspects of the productive machinery of capital in order to retain their survival. But this seizing will be a conflictive process which will have to do away with exchange and the division of labour, de-capitalising thus the means of production to mere tools that could be useful (or not) to the needs of struggling proletarians becoming social individuals. Of course, we agree that the abolition of the value form is not merely destroying things. “Destroying things is not necessarily a blow to the value-form”, but a blow to the value-form necessarily includes the destruction of things, which are aspects of the existence of capital relation themselves. The nucleus of our disagreement with S&M is that there is no class that is responsible in itself “for the production of life in all its facets”. Only capital is responsible for the production of life today and capital is a moving contradiction between two classes and not the ground for an opposition between two autonomous subjects. The proletariat is the productive class only in so far as it is subsumed by capital. In this sense, we do not perceive of the revolution produced by class struggles today as the radical socialisation of the means of production , but as the abolition of both classes and of the means of production as such. The ‘necessity of communism’ is not a theoretical postulate; it is something that can be produced by the destructive action of the proletariat. If one wants to be a realist and understand history as human practice, then they have no choice other than understanding the ‘necessity of communism’ as a proletarian practice which decomposes capital to the extent that any going back will be impossible.

Rocamadur
November 2010

The new issue of Internationalist Perspective is now available

The issue features the following articles:

Editorial: What a Rotten Summer
Class Struggle: Exacerbation of the Historic Perspective
With Recoveries like this one, who needs Recessions?
Artificial Scarcity in a World of Overproduction: An Escape that isn’t
The Value Form, Reification and the Consciousness of the Collective Worker
Insurgent Notes: A New Pro-Revolutionary Publication

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Internationalist Perspective is participating in a conference on economic crisis being held in New York on November 6, 2010.

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