Communist Workers of Iran

Source:International Communist Current
As reported on our website , in April 2009 Internationalism hosted a weekend-long Days of Discussion conference which brought together a number of correspondents, readers, and sympathizers from geographically dispersed parts of the US and Canada for a much needed opportunity to meet face to face (often for the first time), to learn from each other, to exchange views, to deepen our understanding, the better to contribute to the development of class consciousness and class struggle in the period ahead. The agenda was developed in consultation with the participants and addressed the strategy of the bourgeoisie in the current economic crisis, the response of the working class, and the intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle. An additional discussion focused on Darwinism and the workers movement. Presentations for each discussion were prepared by non-members of the ICC and were intended not so much to present any particular position but rather to serve as point of departure for the discussion.

In order to give readers a better appreciation of the content and quality of the discussions at the conference and to share more fully the fruit of this important conference, we publish in this report the presentations on the strategy of the bourgeoisie and the intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle. The presentations have been edited slightly for reasons of space. Each is followed by a brief description of the discussion. – Internationalism, July 2009.

Strategy of the U.S. Bourgeoisie in the Current Economic Crisis

1. Introduction

This presentation will limit itself to the economic and monetary-policy strategies employed by the current Barack Obama Administration to manage the current problems of a continually deteriorating U.S. economy. Obama’s strategy of choice seems to be one in which desperation is quite evident, and which merely seeks to alleviate, in the short-term, the problems the country currently faces. Though its price tag would imply otherwise, the economic-monetary strategy employed is actually modest, as the state of a moribund U.S. capital takes away much of the incentive to seek long-term, stronger solutions to the problem. If the patient’s disease is terminal, a palliative approach makes sense.

The harshness and distastefulness of these economic-monetary remedies require an ideological/political approach that will make austerity more palatable to the masses, who are either unemployed or are facing the very real possibility of unemployment in the near future while watching the financial sector receive aid many believe it does not deserve. The administration seems to hoped that mass austerity and the propping up of the financial sector will be accepted as “necessary evils” to be endured on the “road to recovery”-though, of course, the most likely scenario is that the bourgeoisie are counting on normalizing austerity so as to make it palatable indefinitely beyond a period of “recovery.”

One of the ingenious, and thus dangerous, aspects of the Obama Administration is the relative ease and success with which it has thus far substituted lofty words for concrete plans (even the bourgeois type of plans!); and sold to the masses vacuity as substance. As the current Manager-In-Charge, Obama will continue to try to perfect his administration’s record as most effective snake-oil sales team through its plan to use the current widespread (and blind and uncritical) distaste for the Bush Administration and the current economic crisis, as a means to implement a social approach to the crisis, reminiscent of the Clinton Administration’s portrayal of the dismantling of the remaining social safety net in the U.S. as responsible and needed “reform.”

2. Economic Level

The U.S., and indeed the world bourgeoisie, faces the most serious economic crisis since at least the Great Depression. The meltdown of the housing market from the second half of 2006 provoked a massive financial crisis on Wall Street, which posed the possibility, in Fall 2008, of the complete collapse of the global financial system.

Since the fall of last year, only massive state intervention into the economy, in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars in cash infusions and asset purchases, has kept the U.S. and global economies from total impasse. However, even as the U.S. state flexes its muscles to prop up the banks, insurance companies, etc., the U.S. working class is being devastated. Massive layoffs have led to levels of official unemployment not seen since the recession of the early 1980s. And as everyone here knows, the official unemployment numbers do not begin to accurately describe the depth of the situation faced by the long-term unemployed who are not included in the official statistics

Faced with this situation, even bourgeois commentators have openly asked themselves if “capitalism is finished.” [1] While the rosier prognosticators continue to claim that recovery will happen sometime in the next year, the general consensus seems to be no consensus at all about how long the economic crisis will last and to what depths it will reach.

One thing is certain: The U.S. bourgeoisie will respond to this crisis by strengthening its state capitalist apparatus. Already, through the T.A.R.P. plan and through direct cash investments into the banks, the U.S. bourgeoisie has virtually nationalized the banking industry-at least temporarily. The U.S. government is now a major shareholder in banks such as CitiGroup and Bank of America, has encouraged or supervised the merger of other banks or financial companies, and taken a major step to shore up the banks and other financial institutions by bailing out AIG.

After nearly 30 years of so-called Reaganomics, which saw the U.S. state lift numerous regulations in the banking sector and throughout the economy as a whole, the Obama Administration has begun to implement an economic policy which some economists believe is reminiscent of the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Based on the theories of John Maynard Keynes, the American state is attempting to correct the economic crisis by taking a central place in the management and direction of the economy.

However, the nature of the Obama administration’s turn to Keynesianism is up for debate: will it invest on military adventures or in the direct investment on the productive (or potentially productive) sectors of the economy?

There are two types of Keynesianism: “weak” and “strong.” In the weak version, the state increases its “defense” budget and engages in militaristic adventures abroad in order to increase the market for military goods and the secondary institutions that support it. In the “strong” version, what economic historians have identified with the New Deal, the state engages in deficit spending and job creation. It intervenes on the social level with the goal to create jobs, lower unemployment and stimulate demand and consumption through massive infrastructure programs and investment. [2]

Both of these versions, however, have their problems from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, one of the problems with weak Keynesianism is that it requires significant increases in the state’s military budget. The United States military is already stretched precariously thin, thanks in part to the militaristic presidency of George W. Bush, even as it claims to be winding down its mission in Iraq. The Obama Administration, however, perhaps in an attempt to both continue its imperialist agenda and to prop up the economy to some extent through weak Keynesianism, has proposed a $527 billion (excluding war costs) FY 2010 defense budget, which has been calculated as an 8% increase from the FY 2009 Bush Administration allocation of $487.7 billion. [3] True to his promise during the campaign when he insisted he was “not against all wars, only stupid wars,” his will not be a “peace” administration, but rather as much a bellicose administration as the eight years of George W. Bush were.

On the other hand, strong Keynesianism’s efficacy is limited by the appearance of the proverbial “white elephant,” as the cost of job creation and infrastructure building at one point become too costly and absurd to continue. [4] The Obama Administration has not so far made serious overtures towards this type of economic policy other than to propose minuscule subsidies toward the growth of a “green economy,” and to pay similar lip-service toward other such initiatives. As things stand, after its financial sector bailout efforts, the U.S. Treasure finds further deficit spending extremely difficult. Furthermore, deficit spending (provided it is successful in creating jobs), combined with bailout money, poses the risk of runaway inflation once full(er) employment wages and the cash injections made to the financial sector begin circulating in the broader economy.

Perhaps one of the most dangerous consequences of the current monetary and economic policies is the collapsing value of the dollar. As the U.S. tentatively feels its way out of the current economic crisis, the central banks abroad could begin to “diversify” their foreign currency holdings away from the dollar, and the OPEC countries to begin “shifting” away from pricing its crude in U.S. dollars. As confidence in the U.S. economy (and the dollar in particular) weakens, and as the U.S. national debt continues its upward climb, the U.S. could experience a devaluation of its national currency, spelling the end of U.S. imperial omnipotence.

3. Political / Ideological level

During the past six months, just as the economy was collapsing around them, the U.S. bourgeoisie enjoyed a temporary political and ideological boost with the election of Barack Obama. The Obama campaign’s rhetoric of hope and change, coupled with the media barrage regarding the historic nature of the election of the first African American President, served to deflect most social and political unrest into electoral politics. For some time, it appeared that a messiah had arisen who would fix the economy, end the war, pay your mortgage, cancel your credit card debt and create a utopia of brotherhood on earth. The bourgeoisie will continue to play on these themes to the extent that it can in the period ahead, particularly with some of the most vulnerable groups in the population.

However, almost as soon as Obama took office, another message was propagated stressomg the tough road ahead to fix the myriad of economic, political and social problems “created by the irresponsible George W. Bush administration.” The American population was told that things would get worse before they get better, and that there would be no easy turn around in the immediate future. They were told to prepare for sacrifice in the form of continued job losses and lack of access to credit. Recently, Obama has taken this rhetoric further, arguing that Americans must learn to consume less and export more. [5] The glory days of consumerism fueled by home equity and credit cards is now over. If Obama has kept one promise, it is that of “change:” A change from a credit-subsidized consumption bubble (which to some extent propped up the standard of living for the working class for the last two decades); to direct austerity in the form of a declining standard of living and record unemployment. “Change we can believe in,” indeed!

While the Bush and Obama administrations work feverishly to prop up the banks and financial sector, they simultaneously work to smash whatever remnants of “high wage” and “high benefit” employment remains, with serious talk of forcing General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy. The unions for their part are only too happy to oblige, agreeing to “compromises” in order to keep the companies solvent. [6] The Obama administration, with full cooperation of its Republican mouthpieces in Congress and the media, have taken advantage of the crisis to mobilize public opinion against the auto workers, labeling them overpaid special interests. [7]

4. Social level

On the social level, the U.S. bourgeoisie has taken advantage of the economic crisis and Obama’s election to continue the policies of previous administrations to impose austerity against the working class.

However, the Obama administration has also hinted at certain measures that appear on the surface to be reforms. In particular, he has announced a supposedly ambitious plan to enact a “universal” health care system in the U.S., the absence of which drags down the U.S.’s international competitiveness. [8] Obama’s attempt to change the health care system in the U.S. is above all an attempt to rationalize health care delivery from the point of view of the state. The American system of public education is yet another area in which Obama seems to plan further “reforms.” His appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, suggests that public schools and their teachers will continue to experience the attacks begun under the Bush Administration. From No Child Left Behind, we will soon see No Teacher Left Standing. [9]

5. Questions for discussion

1. To what extent can the Keynesianism of the Obama administration succeed in alleviating the worst effects of the economic crisis? Is a new New Deal really possible?

2. To What extent are the ideological campaigns about socialism emanating from the Republicans reflective of a real split in the U.S. bourgeoisie regarding how to handle its response to the crisis?

3. Is the bourgeoisie’s willingness to bail out the banks reflective of the domination of finance over productive capital? To what extent is this distinction useful for understanding the capitalist economy today?

4. What is the meaning of the attacks on the autoworkers for the broader working class response to the crisis?

5.Will the Obama administration be successful in imposing austerity withut provoking a serious working class response? Are confrontations of the scale witnessed in France, Greece and other European countries likely to happen in the U.S. Why or why not?

Notes

1. See for example Tobin Harshaw’s blog for the New York Times, “Weekend Opinionator: A Different Kind of Red America”; (Press TV’s interview with Noam Chomsky; David Harvey’s “The End of Capitalism? A Response to Tim Geithner”; and The Atlantic’s “The End of Capitalism?”.

2. Harvey, David. “Why the U.S. Stimulus Package is Bound to Fail.” Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey, February 12, 2009.

3 Congressional Quarterly. “White House Draws Line on Defense Budget.” CQ Politics, February 2, 2009.

4. See this article for a brief definition of the economic “White Elephant;” and Kevin Depew’s commentary, “Two Ways to Play,” broadcast on PBS’s Nightly Business Report on February 5, 2009, for a brief critique of public works spending.

5. ibid.

6. Dwyer, Dustin and Michele Norris. “United Auto Workers Open to Contract Changes.” National Public Radio, All Things Considered, December 3, 2008.

7. Weber, Sarah. “Local Auto Workers Frustrated by Lack of Support From Fellow Americans.” Sandusky Register Online, February 21, 2009. Maddow, Rachel. “Talk Me Down! Since When are Auto Workers the Fat Cats?” Newsvine, November 26, 2008.

8. Kaufman, Marc and Rob Stein. “Record Share of Economy Spent on Health Care.” The Washington Post, January 10, 2006.

9 Giroux, Henry A. and Kenneth Saltman. New Catholic Times, January 19, 2009. Rossi, Rosalind and Lynn. Chicago Sun-Times, December 15, 2008.

10.http://en.internationalism.org/wr/318/doortostruggles

Discussion Summary

The presentation triggered a very stimulating discussion which stressed the importance of placing the current economic situation in an historic context. In particular it was noted that the present recession is but the latest manifestation of the permanent crisis of capitalist overproduction, and that the current crisis is in fact the worst capitalist crisis in history since it has occurred despite all the state capitalist palliatives that were put in place in the 1930′s. Regarding the recent media fixation on the distinction between finance and productive capital and the significance of this differentiation, the conference felt that this campaign was an ideological manipulation needed by the bourgeoisie for the purpose of obscuring the perspective of “no future” that capitalism offers to the working class. The campaign to blame the “evil” bankers for the current crisis seeks to obscure the fact that this is fundamentally a crisis of capitalist overproduction. This ideology will be utilized also to try to impose and justify austerity attacks against the working class. Repeatedly it was stressed that the ruling class has no way out the crisis, no choice but to continue to resort to debt, military expansionism, strengthened state capitalism, and austerity against the working class. A number of points that needed to be deepened in further research and discussion were identified, particularly the growing weight of gangsterism or illegality in economic life.

The intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle

Presentation by Jogiches

In Class Consciousness and Communist Organization, the ICC quotes Marx as saying: “Theory is only realized in the masses to the extent that it is a realization of their needs…” and goes one to say, speaking of Bolshevik intervention in the class struggle in 1917,

“…the party had to go beyond the illusions remaining among the proletariat…Rather than waiting for the working class to get rid of them itself, without any intervention from its vanguard, it had to, on the contrary, put itself ahead of the confused aspirations of the workers, give them a clear expression, facilitate the development of class consciousness, act in such a way that the proletariat might arrive at a con­ception of its real historical interests. For Lenin, this was not a matter of flattering the prejudices that most workers still held to, nor of acting without taking into account the level of consciousness of the working masses, but of generalizing throughout the proletariat the awareness of the necessity for the seizure of power and of making the proletariat capable itself of realizing its historical task.”

I read a quote from an article in Internationalism that said: “A working class that can’t defend itself can’t make a revolution.” 10 which made a lot of sense to me in terms of revolutionaries intervening in the class struggle. Along those same lines, there was an article in last month’s Internationalism that said:

“A social revolution can only be made by those ‘below’, those who have least to gain from the preservation of the existing order. But those below will never advance towards making a revolution unless they forge themselves into a force that is capable of defending itself today, of fighting against every encroachment made by the capitalist system – every factory closure, every benefit cut, every wage reduction, every attempt of the bosses and the state to repress this resistance and victimize those who take part in it.”

In some senses, defensive class struggle is a precondition to revolutionary offensive struggle–the intervention of revolutionaries must be to encourage the extension of these defensive struggles. But what is our role in these struggles? Is it our role to initiate them?

I was speaking to a Trotskyist who quoted me an old maxim he’d heard saying that “‘sectarians’ are like a man standing on the shore shouting swimming instructions to a drowning man (the working class), whereas what is needed is to throw the drowning man a lifesaver or swimming out to him to carry him to shore” Such a conception is false because, to extend the metaphor, the drowning man doesn’t learn to swim. The entire set up of the metaphor conceives of the working class entirely as the victim of history, the object of history, but never as a revolutionary subject. However, because the revolution can only be carried out by the conscious, organized effort of the entire class acting for itself (and not as the obedience of the class to the slogans and demands put forward by revolutionaries), the intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle must always be attempting to increase the consciousness and self-confidence and self-reliance of the working class–if workers are unconscious masses to be led by revolutionaries, they can just as easily be led by the bourgeoisie and will never be able to end their exploitation.

The central goal of all intervention in the class struggle then is to contribute to the process whereby the working class becomes a force strong enough, united enough, and conscious enough to overthrow capitalism and build communism internationally. The most important question for each intervention to answer is: how does this increase the consciousness, the self-confidence, and the self-reliance of the working class and increase their belief in their own capacity to struggle together as a class? How does this move toward the working class constituting itself into a force that can overthrow capitalism?

How can revolutionaries be an active part of the growth of the class into such a force?

It is the material interests of the working class push it to struggle against the most fundamental demands of capitalism, and the only way for the struggle to be successful is for them to consciously unite with other workers. This is why the defensive struggles of the working class are inherently revolutionary in the period when the bourgeoisie cannot give an inch but is instead constantly asking for lower wages, longer hours, fewer staff, more insecurity, etc. The role of revolutionaries is to encourage this tendency and speed it along as much as possible and spread the consciousness of this process and encourage the class to take control of its own struggles.

Again from the Communist Organizations and Class Consciousness pamphlet:

“When they (revolutionaries) intervene in the class struggle, they do not put forward a pure abstract theory that the workers are supposed to ‘appropriate’ instead of struggling. They are in the struggle. In it, they defend demands, forms of organization (strike committees, genera1 assemblies…). They support everything that can spread and strengthen the struggle. Their task is to intervene and participate – as far as they are able – in all the partial struggles of their class. They must stimulate every tendency for the proletariat to organize itself indep­endently of capital. Revolutionaries will be present in every political and organizational expression of the prolet­ariat, in every struggle, in the general assemblies, soviets, and neighborhood committees. There they will rigorously attack the maneuvers of capital’s guard-dogs who will use the cover of ‘working class’ language to try to detour the struggle into dead-ends and defeat.”
“…as communists, we do not have the task of initiating slogans of daily struggle amongst the working masses – these must be posed by the workers in the factories. We must always point out to the workers that the solution of these daily questions will not better their situation, and that in no way will it be able to bring about the downfall of capitalism. We Commun­ists have the task of participation in this daily combat, of marching at the head of these struggles. Therefore, comrades, we don’t reject this daily combat, but in this combat we put ourselves ahead of the masses, we always show them the road and the great goal of communism.” (Intervention of Meyer-Bergman (KAPD) at the same congress)

What do revolutionaries do to ensure that class consciousness moves forward?

They participate in every struggle and in its organization, and from beginning to end they use the driving force of each combat to take the greatest possible number of steps towards the constitution of the proletariat as a force capable of overthrowing the dominant system.

“The aim of communist intervention is to contribute to this apprenticeship. In every struggle, communists must show the movement’s historical and geographical dimensions, but this does not mean remaining satisfied with setting out the final goal of world-wide communism. We must, moreover, at each instant know how to weigh up the point the struggle has reached, and be able to make proposals which are concretely realisable, and at the same time represent a real advance of the struggle in the development of the unity and awareness of the whole class. To go as far as possible in each struggle, to push its potential capacities to the limit by proposing goals which are realizable but always more advanced – this is what revo­lutionaries aim, for when they intervene in the open struggles of their class.”
Concretely, what does this mean? From “Unions Against the Working Class”:
[the revolutionary organization must] “be among the most resolute participants in the struggle, propagating a general orientation for the struggle and denouncing the agents and ideologies of the bourgeoisie within the class. During the struggle it stresses the need for generalization…It is neither a spectator nor a mere water-carrier.”

In addition to this, revolutionaries should encourage the appearance of workers’ discussion circles and participate in them–not to artificially turn them into transmission belts of parties or thinking that they will become workers’ councils–workers’ circles can only be valuable if they don’t adopt half-formed platforms but instead remain a place open to all workers interested in discussion the problems that face workers as workers..

Discussion Summary

In regard to the intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle, there was consensus that there is:

* No separation between the class and the revolutionary organization
* No separation between theory and practice
* No separation between the immediate struggle and the final goal of communism.

It was agreed that the objective of the revolutionaries’ intervention in the class struggle is:

* To help the class to extend struggles to other sectors of the working class
* To strengthen the self confidence of the working class in itself as a class;
* To help its tendencies towards self-organization, towards taking conscious control over its own struggle

As one comrade noted, there is a statement by Marx that the revolution is the task of the workers themselves. The organization does not organize the class, does not give orders to the class, as that would contradict the notion that it is the task of the class to make the revolution. It is the responsibility of the revolutionary minority within the class to contribute to the rise of consciousness. The organization is not able to formulate the immediate demands of the class. Indeed it does not have the capacity to do so, and it does not have that function. The dangers of an immediatist approach to our intervention, what to do in our own job, etc. were considered. Sometimes we intervene at locations other than where we work. We have also talked of the need for the working class to draw continuously the lessons of its struggle. We cannot think of intervention as an “individual” thing, but rather as a reflection of the collective struggle of the working class.

Days of Discussion II: Lessons of the Russian Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 was a heroic moment in the history of the working class, when it took political power for the first time, and did its best to hold it. Its aftermath is one of the great tragedies in the history of the working class: isolated by counter-revolution in the west, and outmaneuvered at home, it was beaten finally into line by the goons of Stalinism. The events of the revolution are well-known, and I don’t think that so many people asked to discuss the lessons it can teach us because they wanted to dwell on heroic images or agonize over tragedy. The fact is that the Russian revolution, precisely because it is as of now the highest tide-line of the proletariat’s ebbing and flowing struggle, is the richest experience from which revolutionaries today can draw lessons for their politics. The Left Communists of the twenties and thirties saw this clearly, and saw as their task the preservation of the theoretical gains made by the workers’ movement during the Russian revolution and its Russian and international aftermath. Today, as the world situation forces the proletariat to struggle in defense of its living conditions, it is important that, as we intervene, we keep the lessons the Russian revolution can teach us firmly in mind, so that we can be as clear and as effective as possible.

Internationalism is one of the core principles of the workers’ movement, and we would be remiss in our duty to the working class if we failed to examine the Russian revolution in an international framework. It is a favorite tactic of bourgeois commentators and especially academics to isolate the Russian experience from the experience of the world proletariat. According to these distorters of history, the Russian revolution was noteworthy at all because it ended Tsarism. In this world, the most important consequence of the revolution was to make the Allies of World War I entirely “democratic”, set against the “autocratic” German bloc and to make it acceptable for the pure-of-heart, democratic United States to enter the war. Another favorite distortion is to locate the rot at the heart of the Russian system in the countryside and to emphasize the role of the peasantry in bringing down Tsarism. Against this distortion, revolutionaries must recognize, from an examination of the facts, that the rot at the heart of the Russian system was the endemic crisis of world capitalism, the same crisis that had produced the World War. We must reaffirm that what made the revolution possible was not simply the internal weakness of the regime, but the change in historical epoch that marked the end of capitalism as a progressive system. We must recognize that the epoch of “wars and revolutions” identified by the Communist International is the epoch in which we live, and that changes in the balance of force between classes only push society towards either war or revolution.

Nor may we forget that the Russian revolution, though it marked the only point where the proletariat managed to seize power, did not happen in a vacuum. It was the first act in a worldwide revolutionary drama, and inspired and taught the other actors by its performance. The German and Hungarian working classes learned to demand a republic of workers’ councils from the Russians. The Mensheviks’, the Social Democrats’ defense of their old slogan of the democratic republic reaffirmed their allegiance to the counter-revolution. Today, the demand for the democratic republic in Iran and countries like it is used to tie the workers in those countries to a faction of the bourgeoisie. The Russian revolution teaches us that this demand is an intrusion of bourgeois ideology into the workers’ movement. Lastly, history shows us that the revolutionary wave was not merely international, but also internationalist. It was the uprising of Russian workers that led to that country withdrawing from the World War. It was the rising of German workers, and not, as bourgeois academics would have it, the Junker military, that forced Germany to ask for an armistice. It was not out of some special kindness, but rather due to the mass struggles of British, French, Japanese, and American dockers, railroad workers, munitions makers, and other workers that the British, French, Japanese, and American ruling classes were forced to withdraw from Russia.

What principles, besides the necessity of international working-class solidarity, and the fact that a good way for workers to defend themselves is to spread their struggle, does the Russian revolution teach us to reaffirm? The Russian experience shows us that, yes, the working class does possess the power within itself to organize to overthrow capitalism. Moreover, it reveals the forms in which this organization takes place, and that its development is directly linked to the development of the class struggle. First, when the struggle is defensive, isolated and a-political, there is the discussion circle, examined during the last Days of Discussion. Confined to a small group of workers-perhaps not even a whole workplace, depending on the level of struggle-this is just what it sounds like, a place for interested workers to talk about what’s going on around them and how to defend themselves. If a struggle spreads, there appear the strike committee, the mass meeting, and the general assembly. The workers are beginning to take confidence in the ability of their struggle to succeed, and planning on how to achieve it. They are reaching out, finding and drawing in allies amongst other workers and in the non-exploiting general population. They begin to monopolize space, to convert it to their purpose. As the struggle becomes broader, and to become political, there appear workers’ councils, elected and responsible bodies composed of recallable delegates. Only in a few places and times in history has the workers’ council form appeared, and only when and where the struggle became political, where workers demanded power. Finally, this capacity to struggle as a class shows that it is the working class alone that can pose this question of political power.

Beyond reaffirming in the heat of reality what we already know, the Russian revolution disproved certain theories long-held by the workers’ movement, and still paraded out today by the left of capital in order to prove its socialist credentials. One of the most important is that it is not the revolutionary organization that takes power, whether riding the wave of an insurrection or a democratic election. The idea that it was the organization that takes power was widely accepted in the workers’ movement up until the Lefts in the Communist International began to examine the Russian experience critically, and to see that one of the major factors that led to the degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the International itself as revolutionary organizations was their integration into the Russian state. In fact, and this is another important lesson, it was that state apparatus itself, and not the dangerous but historically disarmed small bourgeoisie or foreign imperialism, that became the instigator and conductor of the counter-revolution. In order to understand how the state that emerged out of the revolution began and carried out the counter-revolution, we must understand its social foundation. The social foundation of the post-revolutionary Russian state was nationalized property. Most large industry, money, and transportation capacity was, during the revolution, deeded over to the state specifically, by means of nationalization. At the time, this was considered a revolutionary act: the history of the twentieth century teaches us to know better. Nationalization a recognized tool of bourgeois policy, and the property of the state is not the property of society. In Russia, this property, over time, came to be managed by agents of the state, people who had been union leaders, party leaders, or middle management in the old firms. Reacting to the defeat of the revolution outside Russia, this state found itself bound to follow the law of value and the other laws of motion of capitalism. Because the Bolsheviks had, by their own policy, integrated both themselves and the whole social capital into the state, they were unable, despite ferocious intra-party struggle, to resist the transformation of the state into the national capitalist, and their transformation into agents of the national capitalist. State capitalism developed the way it did in Russia because of the theoretical and practical errors the Bolsheviks made, and because the defeat of the international revolutionary wave allowed no room or time for such errors to be corrected.

This raises an important question which I hope will be considered in discussion: just how does property become the property of society. Not through nationalization. Nor can it be through the ownership of property by the workers’ councils. To conceive of these bodies as organs of economic management weakens them, and diverts them away from the question of political power. The Russian experience proves this: prior to the revolution, the workers’ councils were political bodies. Afterwards, and especially once the counter-revolution had begun, they were shut up in the factories, cut off from each other, and tied to the state by converting them into transmission belts from the economic planners to the workers. Today, the demand that workplaces be owned by the people who work in them amounts to imprisonment inside the workplace, the inability to reach out and spread the struggle.

The last lesson that we must learn from the Russian revolution comes not from the revolution itself, but from the way it was examined after the revolutionary wave had ended. There exists the conception among council communists and some anarchists that the protagonist of the Russian revolution was not the proletariat at all. For them, the revolution began as a bourgeois revolution that may or may not have dragged the proletariat along, ending in a coup by the Bolshevik party that put that party at the head of the already created bourgeois state. They arrive at this position by examining the product of the counter-revolution-state capitalism, and a Bolshevik party integrated into the state-and assume that endpoint was the only and inevitable consequence of the revolution. There are a number of problems with this conception. First, it ignores entirely the question of capitalist decadence, assuming there could be a bourgeois revolution in a world already dominated by capitalist relations of production. Second, and quite oddly, given this tendency’s emphasis on the need for proletarian self-organization, it ignores or emasculates the independent political activity of the working class, and ignores the fact that the revolution was fundamentally a political act. The Bordigist conception that Russia saw a simultaneous bourgeois and proletarian revolution that led to the defeat of the latter by the former, and that the former was the bearer of state capitalism in Russia is similarly flawed. Revolutionaries today must defend the Russian revolution as a proletarian event, as a political event, and as an event that was not foredoomed to failure by its own shortcomings, but defeated in bloody counter-revolution.

Ron 2/1/10

Days of Discussion II: Internationalists Debate Class Positions

In early January Internationalsm hosted its second weekend-long Days of Discussion conference in New York, once again bringing together sympathizers, readers, and correspondents from across the US and Canada for the opportunity of political discussion and theoretical deepening. As at the previous conference last April, the agenda was developed in consultation with the participants and presentations for each discussion were prepared by non-members of the ICC. Participants represented the old, young and middling generations, ranging in age from 18 to 63, coming from as far away as California, Manitoba, and Florida. Some were veterans of political activity; for one comrade, whose previous political experience had been conducted exclusively via the internet, the conference was the first “real life,” face-to-face meeting with other left communists. There were university students, workers, employed and unemployed, comrades born in the US and immigrants from three continents. The conference sent solidarity messages to two comrades who couldn’t participate because of health problems and to another comrade who was stranded by automobile problems en route to New York.

The welcoming remarks that opened the conference, prepared by a young sympathizer, stressed the importance of the discussion conferences as a means of overcoming the terrible isolation often suffered by geographically dispersed left communists, contributing to the work of theoretical clarification so crucial for the effective intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle, and developing a fraternal spirit and openness to the exchange of ideas. This introduction set the tone for the entire weekend. The presentations were exemplary and helped to focus the discussions in a manner that permitted serious deepening on the understanding of the Russian Revolution, state capitalism, and the connection between student movements and the working class. The discussions were rich; there were no hesitancies to speak or express divergent views. Disagreements were discussed fraternally and openly.

The presentation on the Russian Revolution correctly avoided focusing on the events themselves, but instead stressed the lessons of the revolution for the workers movement. There was immediate consensus that the Russian Revolution was the highest achievement yet attained in the history of the working class, rejecting libertarian assertions that it was not a proletarian, but a bourgeois revolution. The fact that the revolution ultimately failed and was consumed by counter revolution made it all the more important that revolutionaries learn the lessons of what happened in order to avoid similar tragedy in the future. The discussion developed very quickly around the issues of the relationship between the workers councils and the working class and the state in the period of transition – some of the same themes that had attracted the attention of the ICC in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s. This reflected an ability of the younger comrades to pick up the analysis of the Russian Revolution at a higher level that was possible initially in the 1970′s.

The presentation on state capitalism demonstrated that contrary to the assertions of leftism, the state capitalist analysis defended by the left communist movement is not some new, outlandish conception, but was in fact the position developed by the workers movement at the time of the founding of the Communist International at the height of the first revolutionary wave. The irreversibility of the “state-ization” of the economy was identified in the Manifesto of the Communist International in 1919, in the writings of Bukharin and Louis Fraina, in the US. There was no time lost in musing over whether state capitalism applies only to Stalinist states, as well as to countries like the United States. This was in effect taken as a given – a huge step forward in relation to the situation in the 70s and 80s.

The presentation on student movements and the working class described the difficulties of the workers movement to situate students demographically within a class framework, sometimes considering students as a “privileged” petty bourgeois strata, and sometimes as linked to the working class, identified the links between student struggles and the working class, whether France 1968, the French CPE struggles in 2006 or the student struggles in Greece in December 2008. The increasing proletarianization of the professions and the petty bourgeoisie, as well as the rising college loan debt for students in the US, belies the notion that students are an over-privileged strata. The discussion was particularly animated as student participants described struggles and political discussions on their campuses, the ideological confusions rampant on college campuses, such as identity politics, a contempt for the working class (an idea of seeking an education to escape from the proletariat), and a tendency for leftists to personalize responsibility for attacks against students (tuition increases, cutbacks in services and academic programs) as emanating from pernicious administrators and thereby obscure the fact that the general economic crisis of capitalism is the culprit. The point was raised several times that student debt is used by the bourgeoisie as a form of “indentured servitude,” to depress student militancy and tie workers to the state.

A wrap up discussion on Sunday emphasized the importance of continuing the discussions in the future and explored the possibility of regional meetings to draw other interested people into the discussion. We are publishing the presentations on the Russian Revolution and state capitalism below. The discussion on student movements and the working class continues via an online forum and will be the topic of an article in a future issue of Internationalism.

Internationalism 28/1/10

Source: International Communist Current-
After more than two years of grim economic news, last year came to a close with cheers for the supposedly “budding” economic recovery. However, so far 2010 does not seem very promising. Presently the mass media message about the economic crisis is quite ambiguous: on the one hand we are told that the recession is over. Why? Because the economy is growing again, bankers are making money, Wall Street is again flying high, etc. On the other hand the bad news of the last two years of recession keeps on coming. For instance, unemployment is still growing, the housing market is deep in shambles, commercial real estate is hitting the wall only now, consumer loans defaults remain at record highs, and banks are still failing.

In the specialized economic media, the mood is mostly gloomy. In general it seems that bourgeois economic specialists have no confidence in the long term effectiveness of the state capitalist policies that have been put in place to pull the global economy out of the recession. And surely it is difficult to be optimistic when you know that these policies are, essentially, no different than the policies that have so much contributed to the severity of the so-called “great recession”. In particular there is a growing anxiety among bourgeois economists about the huge increase of state debt the world over as governments have been trying to ‘stimulate’ their national economies.

A new surge of public debt

From so-called ‘communist’ China to democratic America, the bourgeoisie has been keen to spend its way out of the recession. Every national state is everywhere intent on saving capitalism not just by increasing the money supply through interest rate manipulation, but by a direct massive injection of money both in the sphere of production and the circulation of commodities. Sure the question arises, where is all this money coming from? According to some good thrifty souls, national states, like individuals, are supposed to spend only what they have. But obviously nobody follows this frugal advice. Like individuals, states, through credit, can “buy today, and pay tomorrow,” and in fact have been covering their budget deficits through public debt more or less forever – which of course does not exclude the occasional running of the printing money machine at full speed. However in the last four decades, in the context of an insane policy of abusing the credit system to alleviate the devastating consequences of capitalism’s chronic crisis of overproduction, state public debt the world over has grown to monstrous and more and more unsustainable levels. The reality that the mountain of debt that national states are sitting on all over the world has no chance of being repaid, is creating a nightmare scenario for the whole capitalist system.

We’ve seen on a smaller scale what can happen when you hit the limits of this policy. This has already been demonstrated several times; for instance, when Argentina and Russia defaulted on their foreign debt in 2002 and 1998 respectively, and in 1997-98 during the collapse of the so-called Asian dragons and tigers that once were paraded as an example of the vitality of capitalism. We could also point to the decade long Japanese crisis in the 1990s -the so-called ‘lost decade’ in this country economic history.

That capitalism’s day of reckoning is fast approaching has been signaled recently by the bankruptcies declared by Iceland and Dubai, which are likely only the opening salvo in a coming storm, but also by the quasi-official insolvency of several “developed” countries that are much closer to the epicenter of capitalism, such as Spain, Ireland and Italy. These countries are still standing only because of European ‘solidarity,’ or better said, because the European bourgeoisie is afraid of the economic, political and social consequences that their collapse could create. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published a research report by its economists about the finances of the world’s “richest” countries, (the G-20 club) which provides considerable ammunition to support the argument that world capitalism is heading towards new convulsions, spearheaded this time by the financial insolvency of the biggest economic powers. A full analysis of the dozens of tables published in the IMF document is beyond the scope of this article, but we can extract from them two unavoidable conclusions.

- in most countries national debt has grown tremendously in the last two years, as governments the world over have tried to spend their way out of the recession and at the same time confronted diminished tax revenues. In addition, according to the IMF, this imbalance between expenses and revenues, financed by a growing debt, is not likely to end any time soon. The IMF document shows that in 2007 the average government debt to GDP ratio among the advanced economic nations of the G-20 group was 78.2 percent; by 2009 this average had grown to 98.9 percent, and by 2014 it will reach the breathtaking figure of 118 percent. Among the economic heavyweights of the G-20, Japan, Italy, the US and Great Britain are the countries with the biggest total government debt loads as measured by the debt-to-GDP ratio (this figure expressed as a percentage is found by dividing the total debt of a country by a year’s worth of its domestic production). Thus Japan, Italy, the US, and Great Britain are expected to reach by 2014 a public debt-to-GDP ratio of 245.6 percent, 128.5 percent, 108.2 percent and 98.3 percent respectively. In other words it would take Japan about two and a half years worth of its gross domestic production and around one year for the rest to paid off their debts and balance their public expenses!

-there is no way that this mountain of debt can be repaid and the most likely scenario is a wave of defaults that will make the “great recession” look like child’s play in comparison. The IMF report has not said so, but its own projections of the governments budget adjustments needed – draconian cuts in expenses, particularly in social programs, and sharp tax increases – in order to get the debt under control speak for themselves. For instance the IMF estimates that getting public debt under control “…will require a sharp correction in the structural primary balance of advanced countries. On average, bringing government debt-to-GDP ratios in advanced economies below 60 percent by 2030 would require steadily raising the structural primary balance from a deficit of 3½ percent of GDP in 2010 to a surplus of 4½ percent of GDP in 2020 – an 8 percentage point swing in one decade-and keeping it at that level for the following decade.” By country, based on spending cuts or tax increases or both, this “correction” swing would amount to 8.8 percent for the US, 12.8 percent for Great Britain, 13.4p percent for Japan and around 10 percent for Spain, Greece and Ireland.

Incidentally it is a wonder of bourgeois economics that today the IMF is considering a 60 percent debt to GDP ratio as a prudent fiscal policy for the so-called advanced economic nations, when the same organization back in January 2003 chastised the Bush administration for running up a record breaking budget deficit of $400 billion, which now looks like peanuts, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 40 percent. “An unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country” would push up interest rates and slow global growth, as the IMF warned just seven years ago. Today the US is running deficits of over a trillion dollars a year, its national debt has more than doubled in the last decade, and probably will pay more for servicing its debt this year than the total budget deficit of 2003. In the face of these “little” changes, the IMF economists mainly recommend a bogus budget adjustment. The bourgeoisie has really lost any sense of reality!

No way out under capitalism

The bourgeoisie can finagle its numbers all it wants to pretend that it can get society out of capitalism’s historical crisis. Four decades of ever worsening economic conditions prove the reality that there is no solution to this crisis on capitalism’s terms. The monstrous increase of state debt is just as much a dead end policy as the consumer credit bubble burst during the “great recession.” Yet strictly speaking it is even worse. While consumer credit can stimulate production and thus help valorize capital, debt financed state expenses are mostly parasitic, a pure waste of value, which, except for economically sound infrastructure enterprises, don’t add anything to the national economy. In fact the huge increase in state debt all over the world, reflecting growing government expenditures and diminished national revenues, mirrors also the repugnant growth of the bourgeois state which is sucking up the blood and energy of civil society. The upkeep of an omnipresent permanent bureaucracy, the running of an efficient repressive apparatus able to maintain bourgeois law and order and the maintenance of a well fed and equipped military – a killing machine able to wage war and defend the bourgeoisie’s imperialist interests; all these cost enormous amounts of money. For instance in 2008 the world military expenditures amounted to $1.473 trillion, of which, not surprisingly, 48 percent ($711 billion) were spent by the US alone.

In the coming period we will frequently hear the government call for sacrifice and a national “solidarity,” a call to accept higher taxes and less social services to help shoulder the burdens of “our” public debt. The working class has only one way to respond to this bourgeois gimmick: the development of its class struggle on its own terrain, for its own demands, refusing to bear the brunt of the crisis. The only solution to the crisis is the overthrow of capitalism and its state, and the building of a real human community. This is the historical mission of the world working class.

Eduardo Smith. 21/1/10

Source:Weekly Worker 802 Thursday January 28 2010 –
Ben Lewis welcomes the initiative of Communist Workers of Iran and offers some fraternal criticisms:
We welcome the political platform of the Communist Workers of Iran (CWI). We have proofed and edited the English text and are publishing it in the hope that, at a time when the Iranian masses are on the move once more, the question of the formation of a mass Marxist party in Iran can be seriously addressed. As Lenin once put it, without a party the working class is nothing, but with one it is everything.

We in the CPGB have been at the forefront of raising principled, anti-imperialist solidarity with the Iranian masses through our work in Hands Off the People of Iran. We have always made clear that solidarity demands a two-pronged fight, both against imperialist intervention and against the theocratic regime. As well as giving a voice to the demonstrations, slogans and demands of the Iranian working class and campaigning to raise money for strike funds and organising materials, it is also incumbent upon us to critically engage with the politics that our comrades are forging in the heat of struggle.

It is in this spirit that my comments on the CWI platform should be understood. Hopefully we can initiate a wider dialogue and learn from each other. This certainly is not intended as an attempt to lay down ‘the line’ from London to comrades abroad, by means of some sort of delusional ‘international perspectives for Iran’ theses à la Workers Power, Socialist Appeal, etc. I am aware of potential problems, and difficulties with translation, but a serious dialogue could prove fruitful.

The positives

From Britain, where halfway-housism, reformism and Labourism abound, it is certainly encouraging to see that the comrades are raising the need to form “working class parties based on Marxist concepts of class struggle, in order to lead the revolutionary movement” as an immediate task. “Throughout the world,” they state, “revolutionary communists have a duty to form vanguard parties in the areas where they are based, to achieve the independence of the working class in line with revolutionary tactical and strategic goals.” This task is also correctly historically located in the “new period” of imperialism following the collapse of the USSR and the “dispersion” and lack of intellectual orientation of the working class following “the defeats of the treacherous organisations and parties in the last century” – Stalinism and social democracy, in other words, with the former’s treachery still fresh in the minds of Iranians since 1979.

We should certainly accentuate this extremely positive aspect of the platform and fight for this core premise in Britain, Iran and internationally. Largely due to its status as a ‘core’ imperialist country, the effects of the economic crisis here in Britain pale in comparison to what has engulfed Iran. But the objective need for a party of Marxism – ie, a democratic centralist organisation whose goal is the dictatorship of the proletariat (rule of the working class majority) and a clear commitment to communism – is just as great. Those looking to revive ‘old Labour’ or set up a Labour Party mark two are not only objectively opportunist: they are living in the wrong times.

There is a strong emphasis in this platform on working class independence and a clear rejection of popular frontism, with the comrades dismissing “the compromising theories which, using excuses such as the ‘lack of working class readiness’ or ‘unpreparedness of the society’s foundation’, try to reduce its class goals to a level acceptable to the bourgeoisie”. This is quite right: the strategy we expound must have the conquest of state power by the working class as its aim and all of our tactical shifts and retreats must be subordinate to this. Particularly at a time when Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s ‘reformists’ are seeking to limit and control the movement, it is necessary to break any illusions the masses might have. It is also excellent that the platform stresses the need for “leadership of the working class party over all social movements” in order to win them “to fulfil the strategic goals and slogans of the revolutionary proletarian movement”.

Strategy

To do this, it is necessary for communists to seriously study the dynamics of other subordinate classes alongside the working class. Although the platform quite correctly identifies capitalism as the “dominant mode of production”, with the majority class both in Iran and the world being the proletariat, it is too simplistic to merely talk of “two antagonistic classes confronting each other” or to argue that during the shah’s rule “the collapsing feudal system was replaced with a capitalist mode of production”. The Iranian state bureaucracy precisely retains aspects of feudal patronage and organisation, which is extremely important in terms of its relationship with other classes.

For example, there are other subordinate strata in Iran, such as the peasantry, the shanty-town dwellers eking out an existence by buying and selling what they can, the petty bourgeoisie, small landowners, etc. A communist programme for Iran should aim for the proletariat to become the hegemonic class, organising a programme for every particular democratic grievance – using the carrot and the stick to remove the threat of these other forces being won over as a bastion of reaction in the interests of the Iranian ruling class. Thus it would be helpful for the comrades to expand on the nature of relations in the countryside, how the towns and cities are fed and what demands possibly flow from this for communists.

I would have to take issue too with some of the strategic perspectives that result from this omission. For example, the immediate demands outlined do not seem to link up with a more general strategy for power, apart from numerous references to soviets – “the only form of state in class society that can take away all political and legal privileges of the bourgeoisie, and act as a key change to end relations in society which are based on prejudice vis-à-vis sex, class, nationality and religion”. Further, by citing the example of the Paris Commune as the first incarnation of “people’s assemblies (soviets)”, the struggle for the “democratic republic” is incorrectly equated to “liberal and revisionist views of socialism which try to maintain pyramidal and parliamentarian bourgeois power using deceptive terms, such as ‘democratic republic’ …”

Indeed, such an approach would make Friedrich Engels either a liberal or a revisionist! It was he who pointed out: “If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown” (A critique of the draft Social Democratic programme of 1891). Marx and Engels did indeed see the Paris Commune as a manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat – although it did not spring from soviet-style people’s councils, but from an election to a local authority!

The sort of democratic republican demands developed by Marx and Engels which were realised in 1871 are also of extreme importance now in Iran: universal suffrage to an assembly with full legislative and executive power, instantly recallable representatives on a worker’s wage; the people’s militia, etc. Obviously this has nothing to do with the kind of two-stage revolution that the term ‘democratic republic’ clearly summons up for many comrades in Iran.

The danger of voluntarism looms here, however – for example, when the platform states that the Iranian working class welcomes the current crisis “to use the opportunity to overthrow and annihilate the bourgeois ruling machine” by establishing soviets, etc. Yet the soviet form of power only proved successful once, and then only for a limited time.

What was decisive in the Russian Revolution was the leadership of a Bolshevik Party that had sunk roots before the revolutionary outbreak of 1917 and that did have the struggle for the democratic republic at the heart of its programme. Whether the comrades want to use the name ‘democratic republic’ or not, it is evident that the current platform is missing key democratic demands in relation to the state on top of the ones that are included, such as freedom of assembly, etc.

The platform could also place more of a stress on the regional significance of the Iranian workers’ movement. It is perfectly correct to emphasise the struggle for a “united international body capable of overthrowing the global capitalist order (imperialism)”, a body that is different to the numerous parodies of genuine internationals organised today. However, is it also worth noting the importance of international cooperation across a Middle East torn by imperialism and reaction. Given that the struggle against imperialism now links more or less the entire region directly, I feel that with the right approach a Marxist party of that region could be a serious medium-term goal.

What this presupposes though, which is not mentioned in the text, is the strategic orientation required to actually fashion a party of the working class. For example, how does CWI wish to relate to other left organisations in Iran, however discredited they may be and however much they have been submerged by the ‘green’ movement? What about united front tactics and/or programmatic critiques of the cultism of the Hekmatists, the naked class-collaborationism of Tudeh and other groups?

Party organisation

The platform is right to “reject all petty bourgeois understandings of revolution that believe a group of vanguard ‘representatives’ of the working class can directly and without relying on the conscious, strategic and organised struggle of the working class to reach the final goal of working class revolution”. Which is why the party form is a crucial political question.

This also has relevance in the organisational steps that CWI plans to take towards building a ‘vanguard party’. As this paper has pointed out, the concept of a ‘vanguard party’ is a problematic one. Most of the far left upholds the example of a Bolshevik Party, as laid down by the first four congresses of the Comintern. But in looking to build Marxist parties as opposed to sects, it is necessary to look back to the origins of Bolshevism. In this period Lenin and his followers built an organisation around the acceptance (not agreement) of the party programme. Thus it would be better to talk of the formation of parties based on acceptance of a Marxist programme, as opposed to “Marxist concepts of class struggle”.

The Bolsheviks were actually both a vanguard and a mass party, which aimed to follow the example of German Social Democracy under Russian conditions. This is also important. Open agitation and organisation is out of the question for our comrades in Iran. But with programmatic seriousness and a collective organiser, agitator and educator in the form of an Iskra-type Marxist publication that gives precedence to the formation of such a party, huge gains could be made. For this reason, it is important that the ‘organisational’ aspects of the platform are expanded to include the right to form factions, openly criticise party actions and positions before and after their implementation, and so on. These questions are not secondary. Given the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party itself, they are of huge importance for the kind of working class rule we wish to bring about.

Precisely because of the strategic defeats of our class in the 20th century, the overriding task of communists is to engage in serious programmatic rapprochement in order to live up to the huge opportunities that will be thrown our way in a new and dangerous period of capitalism’s sordid history. We hope that some of these criticisms prove helpful. We look forward to a response, and are committed to doing our utmost to ensure that the Iranian working class can set its own agenda in the struggle against the tottering Islamic Republic.

Source:International Communist Current
From Rivoluzione Internazionale no. 146, June-September 2006.

In the last two articles, which appeared in issue number 142 and number 143 , we saw how, apart from a formal mention of Lenin on the question of the party, the theoretical framework and the political practice of Cervetto and of Lotta Comunista (LC) corresponds to a conception and method whose vision is a bourgeois one. In this article we will see how this bourgeois vision is not a result of an inadequate understanding of Lenin’s teaching, but rather of a real distortion of the latter, particularly of What is to be Done? This is to such an extent that it leads to positions and, above all, to a political practice, that were by no means those either of Lenin or of the various expressions of the Communist Left that LC pretends to incarnate.
Is LC the political heir of Lenin?

Cervetto claims to have based the whole of his doctrine of the party on an idea expressed by Lenin in What is to be Done? According to this, “Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. (…)The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia… Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously. … the task of Social-Democracy is to imbue the proletariat with the consciousness of its position and the consciousness of its task” (from What is to be Done?; II “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social Democrats”; B. “Bowing to Spontaneity”). We have often voiced our critique of the idea that consciousness comes from outside the class. At the same time we agree with the valid criticism that Lenin develops in this text against the Economists of the period, for whom the revolutionary vanguard of the class served merely to support the proletariat’s struggles for its immediate demands[1]. We will not develop this aspect here because the counter-revolutionary nature of LC is not a consequence of its adhering to the erroneous position of Lenin. The Bordigist current – to which groups like Programme Comunista, Le Proletaire, Il Partito in Florence, etc belong – bases its conception of the party on this same vision. However our critique of the Bordigist conception of the revolutionary party and of the Bordigist current generally, albeit profound and determined, has never cast doubt on its belonging to the revolutionary camp. The point is that Cervetto in his basic text “Class struggle and the Revolutionary Party” completely distorts the idea expressed by Lenin in his polemic against the Economists. Moreover Lenin himself modified it after 1905: “From a strike and demonstrations to isolated barricades. From isolated barricades to the mass erection of barricades and street fighting against the troops. Over the heads of the organisations, the mass proletarian struggle developed from a strike to an uprising. (…) The movement was raised from a general political strike to a higher stage. (…). The proletariat sensed sooner than its leaders the change in the objective conditions of the struggle and the need for a transition from the strike to an uprising. As is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory.”[2] These are the words of the same Lenin who wrote What is to be Done? They are the words of a Marxist who, on the basis of the experience of his class, is able to understand that the soviets coming out of the 1905 revolution in Russia were not just any old means for proletarians to organise in order to pursue their demands. He recognised that they were rather the organisational form that corresponds “to a higher level” of political maturity reached by the class, to the realisation that only by unifying their forces and deciding themselves how to struggle, with what aims and with what instruments, proletarians can put an end to the unbearable conditions in which they live.

The vision of the working class that emerges from the whole of Cervetto’s text is, on the contrary, that of a class that is ‘genetically’ incapable of going beyond the struggle for immediate demands, for the defence of its conditions as wage earner, unless it is led by the party. Even when Lenin says “The best elements of the working class marched at the head, dragging in their wake the hesitant ones, awaking those who were sleeping, encouraging the weak”, talking about the link between the economic strike and the political strike as revealed by the experience of 1905, Cervetto gives us to understand that this link “was the result of the struggle of the proletarian vanguard (elsewhere identified with the party, our note), which dragged the class and the exploited masses into generalised struggle.” (Class Struggle and Revolutionary Party, pg 62).

However, this is more than just a distortion. Especially in the chapter “The Natural Superiority of the Proletariat”, the proletariat is in fact presented as a manoeuvrable mass that the party must first snatch from the hands of the bourgeoisie. Then, once compacted, it is to be used to take advantage of the conflicts between bourgeois factions (both petty and big bourgeoisie) that have divergent interests in order to break up the bourgeois front and make the revolution: “Only when it has weakened the bourgeois forces of the contribution of the proletarian forces that they use, can the revolutionary party count on its natural superiority (which, as previously explained, is given by the numerical superiority of its ‘compactness’, that is, by the concentration of the proletariat in the large factories, our note) against the bourgeois forces that, once deprived of the proletarian contingents, inevitably come into conflict and open up the way to the crisis of disintegration in which the proletariat will remain the only compact force” (idem, pg 60).

The vision coming out of this is no more or less than that of a military strategy that studies how best to position its army (its amorphous cannon fodder) in order to best exploit the weaknesses in the enemy’s defences and defeat it. This vision has nothing to do with the understanding that has always been defended by the revolutionary vanguard; that is, the awareness of the revolutionary nature of the working class and of the dynamic of developing consciousness that leads to revolution.

In fact, the so-called Leninist orthodoxy that LC has banded about in every issue and every article of its paper from the beginning, has only served to legitimise as revolutionary a political practice that is not a jot different from that of any group of the capitalist left. Every theoretical elaboration must be verified by the facts. As we have seen in the previous articles, the history of the founders of LC and of LC itself is a whole series of great theoretical affirmations that are trampled under foot by concrete action. Let’s go back briefly to a central question; work in the unions, in order to see how the politics of this group are based on a vision of the working class as a mass to be manoeuvred by the party.
LC and work in the unions, or the policy of how to ‘make room for oneself’

On the question of the unions, Cervetto in the first instance, followed by LC up to the present day, pretend to base themselves on the position of Lenin and the Bolshevik party, according to which the revolutionary vanguard should work within union organisations because the latter still have a positive role to play in the development of the class struggle. This is in spite of the fact that the 1905 experience showed that the soviets are the form taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is well known that the union question stimulated a big debate at the 1st Congress of the 3rd International in 1919 between the Bolsheviks and the other revolutionary organisations, particularly those from Germany, Switzerland and England. The former supported the thesis because they came from a country ruled by a backward regime of Czarist absolutism in which the unions had emerged fairly recently (in 1905 in fact, when the revolutionary upheaval dragged them into the movement, often under the leadership of the soviets). The other organisations on the contrary came from countries that were more mature at the level of capitalist development and had more experience of unionism, so even at this early stage they were able to denounce the union as an organism no longer feasible for the development of the class movement[3]. The differences on the union question have continued to exist within the communist left, where the position of the Bolshevik party on the unions has been taken up by other political formations, in particular by the Bordigist current. But the position and the resulting practice of LC have nothing to do with this. Cervetto, in his so-called scientific elaboration of the question, does not even bother to examine – not even to criticise them – the positions expressed by other revolutionary forces of the period or subsequently. Nor does he make an historic evaluation of these positions. Apart from this, what is the political practice that comes out of this supposed faithfulness to Lenin? In his 1957 Theses, in the point on the Union Question, we read “On the principle that our action must go towards ‘revolutionary activity in the unions’ and not within unionism, the Communist Left (that is LC according to the author, our note) must organise its own union current within the CGIL and use every initiative and instrument at its disposal to advance this organisation (union ballots and meetings, elect leaders for union work, union bulletin, etc). Given the nature of the only union current existing within the CGIL that is revolutionary -the committees for union defence – the Communist Left must make an agreement with the anarchist comrades within it, with the aim of an eventual alliance to build a single union current composed of the revolutionary minority within the CGIL.”

So whereas for Lenin work in the unions in Russia at the beginning of the 1900s meant encouraging proletarian regroupment, unity in the common struggle, furthering developing consciousness of its own strength as a class, for LC it is no more than a policy of entryism. A policy that is undertaken in order to create a following and so acquire a position of strength within the union structure by making alliances with anybody whatsoever as long as it helps it to become part of the leadership. It is no accident that it chooses the CGIL as a forum for its activity because, being ‘left-wing’, it has members who have already chosen a political direction and are therefore easier to recruit by those who present themselves as revolutionary. In coherence with this vision, LC’s role has always been to support the unions and their specific function within the capitalist camp against the working class. This is to contain the workers’ reaction to their own exploitation within the framework of the ‘democratic contracting’ permitted by the rules of the system, blocking any attempt of the class (in the words so dear to Cervetto) to go from the ‘economic struggle’ to the ‘political struggle’, from the defensive struggle for its own living conditions within capitalist society to the offensive struggle to destroy this system of exploitation.
LC against the maturation and the development of workers’ struggles

During the struggles of the hot autumn in Italy in 1969, the workers began to identify the unions as their enemy and the latter, realising that the internal commissions were no longer adequate to control the working class, began to depend on more efficient instruments such as the ‘factory councils’. In this situation LC, apart from raving about these being comparable to the soviets, did all they could to give class credibility to a whole series of organs of union management which had defended the formation of the factory councils. “Within the unions themselves there are men holding ‘syndicalist’ positions, ‘trade unionist’ positions,… who are trying to bring into being the big union with positions linked to the big factories. … These positions … are to be found expressly in the documents developed in conferences and meetings of the leadership, etc…” (from LC’s text “Factory Councils, internal commissions: an analysis of a political conflict”). The documents that LC mentioned were from the Central Committee of the FIOM, from the National Secretariat of the FIOM, from the provincial leadership of the FIM, FIOM, UILM of Genoa and so on.

When in 1987 the school workers organised outside the unions to carry out the struggle on the basis of sovereign general assemblies in which the workers decided how to struggle, LC tried to bring the workers back into the fold by defending the idea that they should not abandon the CGIL. When they saw that they had no success, they scorned the struggle, calling it “southern” (because it developed mainly in the south of Italy) while inciting the CGIL to get a move on and call an extraordinary congress to try and regain credibility within the movement.

In 2002 there was a whole mystificatory campaign on the part of the CGIL with the referendum around article 18 of the labour laws. This campaign aimed to drag young workers in particular onto the terrain of ‘democratic consultation’ as a form of ‘struggle’ against precarious and flexible work (already generally introduced in Italy thanks to the unions). Did LC denounce this? Not at all, except for the usual criticism of ‘opportunist leaders’, of Pezzotta and Cofferati et al. What orientation did LC give to the proletariat? “… only a vision going against the stream based on a clear Marxist strategy can give a lasting meaning to union defence, an intelligence to class pride, a future to the communist struggle against opportunism” (LC, March 2008, pg. 16). What does this mean? Who knows! Maybe we can make sense of it by looking at the assessment that LC made of it four years later when it compares the movement last spring of the young French workers against precarious work[4] with the demonstration organised by the unions in Rome 2001 around article 18. It says “We wrote that the CGIL of Sergio Cofferati, with the support of the opposition parties, rejected flexibility measures that would have risked leading the union to unconditional surrender. This hard struggle forced the government to withdraw the measures and threw the group of managers of Confindustria into crisis.” Unfortunately “the illusory aim of the referendum” to extend article 18 to businesses with less than 15 workers, “that was never attempted by the unions, an indication of how weak the union confederation has always been”, led to the “inevitable disaster” that “put an end to the period of struggles around article 18; the flexibility measures were put into practice…” (LC March 2006, pg 16). In other words, full support for union policy both economically and in terms of sabotaging the class. It is just that everything was badly managed. This demonstrates the need to get elected as delegates, to take on positions in the leadership, in other words to win positions of strength within the union structure. The proletariat remains imprisoned within the bourgeois framework? They are prevented from understanding what weapons the bourgeoisie uses against them, from becoming conscious of their revolutionary class nature and their strength, from understanding who to fight and how? What’s the problem? The party science will take care of that at the opportune moment. For now it is important that this party-science makes a place for itself strategically within the structure.

This is the ‘consciousness’ that Lotta Comunista wants to import from the outside into the working class.

This kind of ‘consciousness’; this method has always been denounced by Marxists, Lenin above all, as belonging to the dominant class.

To conclude this short series of articles, we want to draw attention to the following point: nearly everyone considers LC to be a revolutionary group and it boasts itself that it is a group of the Communist Left. This is possible because LC hides behind the errors of the historic groups of the Communist Left. With the IBRP it shares the idea of building the party at a national level before moving on to the international party. With the Bordigists it shares the idea that consciousness comes from outside the class and that it is necessary to work in the unions. In addition, let’s not forget that Cervetto frequented Battaglia Comunista for a time and even wrote some articles for Prometeo. This is why we have insisted, and go on insisting, that in the case of LC it is not a matter of a mere accumulation of errors, of wrong positions. What basically characterises LC are power politics that aim at winning a position of strength within the union by using the working class as a mass to be manoeuvred. The relations of force used against their own militants who are no longer willing to follow “the directives coming from the centre” and their absolute refusal to question the political practice of conquering strategic positions, makes LC a dangerous counter-revolutionary group that has absolutely no place among proletarian groups.

Eva, 2 June 2006

[1] On the question of consciousness see our pamphlet in French and English “Class Consciousness and the Role of Revolutionaries” and in Italian the articles “Class Consciousness and the Role of Revolutionaries” in Revista Internazionale no.3 and “On the Role of Revolutionaries in the Proletarian Struggle: a reply to the Petrified Marxism of Programma Comunista” in Rivoluzione Internazionale no.12, April 1978).

[2] Lenin, Rapporto sulla rivoluzione del 1905 in Selected Works, Riunite Edition (our emphasis), published in English as Lessons of the Moscow Uprising. For the evaluation of the 1905 revolution made by the revolutionary forces of the period, see our article “The 1905 Revolution; the Proletariat affirms its Revolutionary Nature” in nos.140 and 141 of Rivoluzione Internazionale.

[3] See the article “The Political Positions adopted by the 3rd International” (in the series “The Decadence Theory at the heart of Historic Materialism”) in the International Review no.123, 4th quarter 2005. For the ICC’s analysis of the union question see the brochure “The Unions against the Working Class”.

[4] For the significance and importance of the movement in France, see the articles in this issue of the paper and the previous one and the Theses on the Movement of the French Students on our internet site www.it.internationalist.org.

Source: International Communist Current
“One accord, yet discord”;[1] “Last-minute scramble to save face at climate talks”;[2] “Obama’s climate accord fails the test”[3]… the verdict of the media was unanimous: the ‘historic’ summit had ended in fiasco.

In the weeks beforehand the media and politicians were full of grand phrases that the summit held the fate of humanity and the planet in its hands. On the first day of the summit 56 newspapers around the world, in countries such as France, Russia, China, India and Britain, carried a common editorial under the heading “Fourteen days to seal history’s judgement on this generation”. “We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west.” These pious wishes came to nothing but the editorial contained some truth: “The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C – the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction – would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea.”[4]
Capitalism is already destroying the planet

In fact, the situation is even more serious than this. 26 million people may already have been displaced as a result of climate change,[5] while a rise of 1°C, which would require CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and is considered impossible to achieve, will lead to the melting of glaciers that provide the water for crops for 50 million people, to 300,000 people being affected each year by diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea and the death of most of the world’s corals. The existence of some low-lying islands and countries will also be threatened. A rise of 2°C, which has become the accepted target, will spell disaster for millions of the planet’s inhabitants: “The Amazon turns into desert and grasslands, while increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere make the world’s oceans too acidic for remaining coral reefs and thousands of other marine life forms. The West Antarctic ice sheet collapses, the Greenland ice sheet melts and the world’s sea level begins to rise by seven metres over the next few hundred years. A third of the world’s species will become extinct”.[6] During the summit the findings of research into the acidification of the oceans were released that showed that ocean acidity, which occurs when the level of CO2 absorbed by the oceans increases, has increased by 30% since the industrial revolution. This aspect of climate change, so far relatively little studied, could have profound consequences: “Ocean acidification could trigger a chain reaction of impacts through the marine food web, beginning with larval fish and shellfish, which are particularly vulnerable. This will affect the multibillion-dollar fishing industry and threaten the food security of many of the world’s poorest. Most regions of the ocean will become inhospitable to coral reefs thus affecting food security, tourism, shoreline protection and biodiversity”.[7] Furthermore, there is no known way to reduce ocean acidity levels other than allowing natural processes to take effect, which could take tens of thousands of years.
The laws of capitalism threaten the world

Human activity has always had an impact on the environment but from its early days capitalism showed a contempt for the natural world to match its contempt for the humans who laboured in its factories, mines and fields. In the 19th Century the industrial cities and towns in Britain poured filth and pollution into the environment undermining the health of the population as a whole and of the working class in particular. In the recent past Stalinism turned large parts of Russia into a wasteland while today in China the contamination of waterways and land is being repeated once again, but this time the contaminants are possibly even more poisonous than in the past.

This situation does not arise simply from the ill-will and ignorance of this or that member of the ruling class but from the fundamental laws of capitalism, which we summarised in a recent issue of our International Review:

- “the division of labour and, even more, the reign of money and capital over production, which divides humanity into an infinity of competing units;

- the fact that the goal of production is not use value, but exchange value, commodities which must at all cost be sold, whatever the consequences for humanity and the planet in order to realise a profit.”[8]

Profit and competition are what drive capitalism and the consequences now threaten the world. The ruling class, in contrast, present capitalism as based on meeting human needs, arguing that it responds to ‘consumer demand’ for the necessaries and luxuries of life and pointing to the improvements in income and quality of life that have been achieved for millions of people. There is some truth in this, in that capitalism has developed the means of production beyond anything that could be imagined in the past and there have been real improvements for many, especially those in the most developed countries. But this has only been done when it coincides with the real purpose of capitalism: making profits. Capitalism is an economic system that must continually expand or it will collapse: businesses must grow or they will fail and their carcass will be picked over by their competitors; nation states must defend their interests or they will be made subservient to their rivals. As this is inconceivable to the ruling class it is necessary to make any sacrifice to keep their economy, their society and their positions intact. This is why in a world of abundance millions starve; why, despite disarmament agreements and declarations of human rights, wars rage without end; why billions have recently been poured into propping up the economy while millions of human beings go without adequate healthcare and education. It is also why, despite the overwhelming evidence of climate change, the bourgeoisie is incapable of saving the planet.
International summits are arenas of national competition

The laws that drive capitalism affect every aspect of the society it has created, including international summits. Such meetings, whatever their declared purpose and even when apparently common interests are at stake, are always nothing but struggles for advantage between competing nations. The ceremonies, grand speeches and ringing declarations about human rights, ending poverty and saving the planet are just a mask to deceive us. The Copenhagen summit, like Rio de Janeiro and Kyoto before it, demonstrated this amply.

At Copenhagen both economic and imperialist interests clashed and since, while they overlap, they are not necessarily identical, this made the situation all the more complex with shifting alliances and changes of position.

Much was made during and after the summit of the supposed clash between developed and developing nations. There are clearly some common interests between developed economies just as there are between those reliant on supplying basic commodities, such as coffee or metal ores, but there can be no lasting unity. The EU came to the summit with a common agreement to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020 and the suggestion that this might increase to 30% if the talks went well. Within this group are economies with a greater or lesser industrial sector. Britain, with a much-reduced industrial sector, has been at the forefront of pushing for more ambitious targets, in contrast to Germany with its still relatively large industrial sector, while former eastern bloc countries like Poland oppose cuts beyond 20%. According to official figures, Britain is on target not just to meet but to significantly exceed its Kyoto target of a 12.5% reduction on greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990. At the summit Gordon Brown rushed around taking the moral high-ground and trying once again to play the world leader. In fact Britain’s performance is a consequence of the changes in its economy and reflects the fact that emissions are calculated on the basis of production rather than consumption: “The structural changes which have taken place in the UK economy over the last 30 years have resulted in significant deindustrialisation. As a result, the carbon intensity of the UK economy has fallen and the UK now imports large quantities of products which are relatively carbon-intensive to manufacture. UK consumption is therefore indirectly responsible for the emissions associated with these imports. Were the balance of imports and exports to be taken into account, UK reported emissions would be significantly different”.[9] In fact, they would show an increase by as much as 19% since 1990.[10] In short, British capitalism has outsourced its pollution just as it has outsourced production. At the imperialist level, Brown’s desperate activity at this summit, as during the ‘credit crunch’, is partly an attempt to compensate for the continued decline of Britain as an imperialist power.

The US is also involved in deindustrialisation and the relocation of production to countries where the costs are cheaper but it still retains a substantial industrial sector. The intensity of competition felt by this sector has resulted in its being particularly active in opposing anything that it perceives as putting it at a disadvantage with its competitors. This is one of the reasons why the US is continually embroiled in trade disputes, why efforts to reach a new world trade agreement have so often failed and why it refused to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. In the final years of his administration Bush was forced to concede that climate change was real but the US has proposed its own targets and pushed for countries like China to also make cuts. Nothing has changed under Obama other than the rhetoric. The US remains opposed to significant cuts and any binding agreement and particularly loath to do anything that could benefit China for both economic and imperialist reasons.

One hundred and thirty-two countries defined as ‘developing’ grouped together in the G77 at the summit. With relatively small economies and little industry their common aim was to push for the maximum financial assistance possible. They came to the summit with a demand for financial assistance of $400bn a year while a number also demanded that the maximum temperature increase accepted should not be more than 1.5°C. They also sought to keep the Kyoto treaty that requires signatories from developed countries to make cuts in emissions and which many of latter hoped would disappear into a single new Copenhagen agreement.

China has been the target of much ‘concern’ about its emissions now that it has become the single biggest producer of greenhouse gases in the world. The rapid development of its economy has drawn vast sums of money towards it and enabled it to assume a much greater and more active role internationally. It has developed important economic links with many developing countries, often providing them with assistance to develop their production of primary commodities, which are then supplied to China to feed its industry. This growing economic strength has underpinned a low-key but determined effort to extend its imperialist influence around the world. To accept any meaningful limits on its emissions would mean limiting its economic growth and political power thus, while, it has proposed to reduce the carbon intensity of its industry (the amount of carbon per unit of production) it has strongly opposed any cuts and the demands by the US for independent verification. At the summit it associated itself with the G77 while also being part of a separate grouping with Brazil, South Africa and India known as BASIC that opposed the positions of the richer nations. Within this group, Brazil has defended its position as a major producer of biofuels despite the fact that it is taking production away from vital food production.
The manoeuvring at the summit

The summit was marked by the manoeuvrings of the participants, which included deliberate provocations and confrontations. One of the methods used was the widespread and not particularly hidden leaking of documents, as one journalist commented: “…the leaks became more regular until by the end there was a flood [...] Secret documents were deliberately left on photocopiers, others were thrust into journalists’ hands or put on the web. People were photographing them and handing them around all of the time.”[11]

On the third day of the conference the first crisis was provoked when the so-called ‘Danish text’ emerged. This had been produced prior to the summit by a secret informal group known as “the circle of commitment” that included the US, and the host of the summit Denmark. The text, which had no formal status since it was drafted outside the UN framework, would have ended the Kyoto treaty with its legal requirement for emission cuts by signatories, imposed a 2°C increase as the accepted target and made changes to the funding arrangements. It was suggested that the intention was to impose it on the summit late in the day when the foreseen stalemate had arisen. This led to an outcry from G77 countries who accused the developed countries of trying to hijack the summit and impose their own agreement.

This was followed by a proposal from a number of developing countries for the increase in global temperatures to be kept below 1.5°C since any increase above that could spell disaster for small island states like Tuvalu. The proposal called for legally binding cuts to be agreed. It was immediately opposed by other countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and India, and divided the G77 group. The dispute that followed led to the suspension of part of the talks for several hours.

In the following days a revised UN text was introduced and disputes continued firstly over whether the Kyoto agreement should continue as a separate track or be incorporated into a new agreement and secondly over the funding to assist developing countries. Various proposals for fast track funding and long term funding surfaced and a number of countries, including Britain, repeated their call for the introduction of a tax on financial transactions (the Tobin tax) to fund climate change measures. The UN text seemed to be an attempt to reach a compromise with developed countries cutting emissions by 25-45% to keep the increase in temperature below 2°C. Developing countries would also be required to cut their emissions by 15-30% while the Kyoto agreement would remain in force. In reality the cuts proposed by the developed countries did not even reach the lower percentage proposed, while loopholes in the agreement would allow emissions to increase by 10%.

As the talks entered their second week, with heads of government due to arrive to sign the non-existent agreement, the confrontations sharpened, with the heads of some African countries threatening not to attend unless the agreement was changed. The dispute over the future of the Kyoto treaty led to a further suspension of part of the talks until it was finally agreed that it would continue. The dispute over monitoring also increased with India and China opposing US led demands for external verification. By the middle of the week the chaos could not be hidden: the chair of the summit resigned to be replaced by the Danish Prime Minister, proposals and counter proposals about emissions cuts, funding and verification flowed back and forth with more and more amendments being proposed to the UN draft agreement effectively creating a stalemate. It was rumoured that a revised version of the ‘Danish text’ was about to be released while the G77 prepared a counter text. Further splits in the G77 emerged when Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and head of the African group of countries at the summit, proposed that they accept a deal under which $100bn would be given in financial assistance to poorer countries by 2020, rather than the $400bn they originally demanded. He was attacked by others for selling out the lives and hopes of Africans. This ‘compromise’ came after intense negotiations involving Zenawi and a number of the more developed countries and led to accusations that he had succumbed to pressure and that countries reliant on ‘aid’ for much of their economies are in no position to argue with the purse holders. Finally, a leaked UN document showed that the emissions cuts proposed at the talks would result in an increase of 3°C.

Much was made on the penultimate day of America’s acceptance of the target of $100bn financial assistance as a breakthrough paving the way for Obama to come and save the day. In fact the agreement was conditional on China accepting the verification it had already rejected while the money would have to come from non-government sources. On his arrival Obama repeated the demand for China to accept US verification demands leading to an angry response from China and the refusal of President Hu Jintao to attend a meeting of heads of state with Obama. The summit ended with a desperate attempt to cobble an agreement together with numerous texts circulating, private meetings between Obama and the Chinese Prime Minister and negotiators working into the early hours and again on the final day. In the last hours a group led by the US, Britain and Australia forced the Danish President out of the chair and pushed through a compromise amongst a small group of the most powerful nations. The final text appeared just before midnight and was immediately attacked by those excluded as a deal done in the dark and a coup against the UN.

The summit began with a two hundred-page draft agreement covering a wide range of areas. It ended with a few pages of vague statements and promises for tomorrow cobbled together on the final night by a few of the main players outside the international framework of the UN they all claim to uphold. The final act of the summit was merely to note the existence of the agreement.

In the end the Copenhagen summit achieved one thing: it showed that the bourgeoisie is not fit to hold the fate of the world in its hands and that until this class and the economic system that supports it is swept away neither humanity nor the Earth itself has a future.

North 03/01/10.

[1]. Financial Times 22/12/09.

[2]. Guardian 19/12/09

[3]. Independent 19/12/09

[4]. Guardian 07/12/09

[5]. Suffering the Science, Oxfam Briefing Paper, July 2009.

[6]. Guardian 19/12/09

[7]. Ocean Acidification: The Facts. European Association on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA) http://www.epoca-project.eu/index.php/ Outreach/RUG/

[8]. International Review 139. “The world on the eve of an environmental catastrophe II: Who is responsible?”

[9]. UK greenhouse gas emissions: measurement and reporting. National Audit Office, March 2008.

[10]. Too good to be true? The UK’s climate change record. Helm, Smale, Phillips. December 2007.

[11]. Guardian On-line 20/12/09

Source: OSAG-
By:Nancy Davies-
Once again the government municipal inspectors accosted a group of APPO vendors in the zócalo. The APPO set up a table to collect political signatures in condemnation of the government and Ulises Ruiz Ortiz for violence against the population during the 2006 uprising. Affiliated vendors use the APPO presence as a legal shelter for selling their products, since the city government has banned ambulant vendors from the area. This ban, ironically, is supposed to protect tourists — horrified witnesses to another confrontation— and commercial shop-owners and workers. By chance, members of the political opposition played a role in defying the police.

The officials, whom in the past I personally have witnessed taking cash from zócalo vendors, accosted these vendors, not to rob them, but to evict them, in line with the current policy. At the same time, they took advantage of the moment to throw over the table for signatures and petitions denouncing the governor.

The eviction took place before noon in a warm, sunny zócalo populated by Friday strollers and shoppers. According to Noticias reporter Luis Ignacio Velasquez, PRI officials exhorted state and municipal police to attack about twenty vendors, and destroy the political table with collected papers and signatures denouncing the governor. APPO shelters under legal protection, as do all citizens, to conduct peaceful signature gathering. The signatures they gather demand political justice against Ulises Ruiz, whom the Supreme Court declared guilty of human rights violations during 2006, but the court’s judgment includes no criminal procedures. Therefore it would take an act of the local Oaxaca congress to impugn Ruiz.

Meanwhile, at the APPO table and encampment, former political prisoner Marcelino Coache Verano maintains a hunger strike. At the scuffle he shouted, “I am not going to permit this new aggression against my companions, what you’re doing is illegal, you have no justification for taking their merchandise! They [the police] are trampling the goods that belong to that girl, they can’t do that!” An inspector grabbed him by the neck trying to strike him in the face, but was thwarted. Coache is a small man maybe five feet tall and weighing not much more than a hundred pounds. He was tortured in prison.

The chief of police Pedro Cruz tried to coordinate the rumpus, shouting at the cops, “You cover, you cover, you can’t be standing there doing nothing but watching, fuck them!”. To their credit, the police seemed reluctant. They formed a security belt to protect the municipal officials while the merchants and APPO sympathizers tried to recover their merchandise. Police shouted to both sides to stay calm, with small results, while a young woman on the ground cried, “That’s mine, that’s mine!” as she tried to retrieve her plastic bagful of merchandise which inspectors had grabbed.

“You killed our people. I know you, you’re one of the auxiliary [paramilitary] of Alejandro Barrita, you participated in the Caravan of Death,” Coache accused one of the state police, who according to the Noticias reporter began to shrink and turn away.

When the violence broke out, members from the Forum for Democratic Transition in Oaxaca and members of the State Democratic Convention Free Oaxaca happened to be talking with the state PRD man José Montero Garnica in one of the zócalo cafes. Along with him were players in the current political alliance: Francisco Martínez Neri, Luis Ugarteche Begné, Victor Raúl Martínez Vasquez, Faustino Díaz Montes and Pedro Sosa Gutiérrez, and others. They rushed to defend the abused vendors, taking the stage at the APPO encampment.

“We condemn the police brutality, it can’t be that a group of people who collect signatures in a peaceful manner in the zócalo of Oaxaca be treated this way, we condemn it and we call the commander [Pedro Cruz] to give back the things they are carried off; we cannot continue to consent to this type treatment of the people. No more violence in Oaxaca. Oaxaca will not be reconciled with a police presence,” Ugartechea affirmed at the microphones.

“Is seeking political judgment against Ulises Ruiz a crime, while national and international visitors witness it? That is the reply of the government, that’s how it works in Oaxaca, that’s how the municipal police act, they are the ones who have stolen power and keep punishing the citizens,” APPO sympathizer César Mateos declaimed in turn.

And then, spontaneously the crowds began to shout: “Assassins! Assassins! Assassins!” and “Eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, Ulises assassin your bill is coming due!” Something for those working on the political opposition coalition to take to heart, along with another example of the incredible arrogance of the PRI machine. On Saturday the APPO and its table are back functioning.

more on corruption against vendors

Militants of the Frente Amplio de Lucha Popular (FALP) marched to the Zócalo
of the city to the Palacio Municipal to demand a halt to the hostile
behavior of the municipal inspectors of Oaxaca de Juárez, whom they accuse
of charging from 100 to 200 pesos daily to each vendor to permit them to
work in the Andador Turístico.
In an interview, the leader of the FALP, Giovanni Rojas, demanded a halt to
the actions of the inspectors,; he asked fthat the head of inspectors be
fired. The man is known only as Matías, whom he accuses of receiving all the
payments which are collected by the officials in his command.
The leader of the vendors recalled that the past Thursday Matías passed
through the andador turístico and asked each one of the 25 vendors for 100
pesos.
He said that in spite of having agreements with the municipal authorities to
sell in the public street , the hostility of the officials amounts daily to
them carrying off between 2,000 and 3,000 pesos by extortion. “It’s the same
every day,lemens they extort from our companions and now it seems even a
vendetta against the vendors on the part of these men, a thing that we are
not going to continue to suffer”, he said.
Giovanni Rojas called himself respectful of the actions that the municipal
authorities carry out with regard to regulation of the vendors in the public
way, but assured that although they don’t have licenses, they have an
agreement with the municipal administration.
In this sense, he demanded that said agreement be respected, or if it si
not, protest action will follow.,including at the session of the city
council next Wednesday.
He denounced that the past December 22 nearly 800 pesos went to the chief of
inspectors as a result of the extortion from his companions, for which, he
said, he was tired of these actions.
He said that equity does not exist in the granting of licenses, since the
same vendors installed in the Abasto have stalls in the center, Andador
Turístico and in the gardens. “How are we not going to protest if we have
persons who have three or four stalls in different places and keep on asking
for more, taking places by blackmail”, he added.
In conclusion, the militants of FALP marched from t he center of the city
to the Palacio Municipal de Oaxaca de Juárez, and afterward returned again
to the Zócalo de la ciudad due to a lack of work negotiation with the
authorities.

Isfahan’s Steel Company is and has always been one of the largest industrial complexes in Iran. Despite this, and although workers have been involved in industrial action to improve their working conditions, Iran’s Steel Company workers have never benefited from the right to form any type of trade union , workers organisation… to defend their wages and, to pursue their just rights and demands. In the current situation, as a result of severe economic hardship and the uncertain future, at a time when workers in this complex face many backbreaking pressures, as a group of workers of Steel Company we have decided to take the very first steps in the direction of defending workers right and consolidating our dispersed ranks hereby announcing the formation of the Provisional Council of Isfahan’s Steel Company Workers. Since this step (the formation of the council) was taken in conditions of underground work, it is not based upon workers’ elections. That is why the council has given itself the title “provisional” however, as a body it is committed to hold free elections with the participation of all factory workers as soon as suitable conditions arise. Until such time, this council will endeavor to defend the rights of all workers in this complex and we will keep fellow workers informed of all our decisions through statements.

The council presents its positions and views as follows;

1 – The council considers all workers equal and alike. It believes that both the obvious and hidden discriminations between official workers and workers under contract (those employed directly by the company under contract or through contractor companies) are initiated entirely by managers and decision makers and workers are not responsible for this. The Council believes that the creation of such discriminations amongst workers is a deliberate policy to divide workers in this complex.

2 – Council believes that the right to strike is an absolute right of the work force, and, in conditions where the company’s workers have not received their wages (for between two to six months) going on strike is the only means by which the workers can struggle for their demands. Therefore the council states its solidarity with courageous workers of Ehyagostaran Espadan, Nasooz Azar, Isaargarane-hadid, Nasre Bonyad and all the workers who have gone on strike to fight for the payment of their unpaid wages.

3 – The councils warns workers to be aware of the delays of official deadlines for payment of their wages and monthly bonuses, There is a possibility that management is trying to reduce or abolish monthly bonuses ; that is why workers have every right to go on hunger strike, white strike (working less and disrupting production lines) and finally strike. Such actions are just and legitimate.

4 – Council finds Plant’s policies of blaming workers for all the severe hardships they face , especially when accidents causes workers death or severe injuries leading to handicap as an inhumane policies and, declares that the main reasons for safety failures are severe working conditions for the workforce, worn off equipment, old technologies and pressure and expedition that the management imposes upon workers to increase production .

5 –At a time when the official line of poverty in urban areas is declared (by the state) to be 800 thousands Tomans, the council finds maximum income of 400 thousands Tomans per month an obvious oppression towards workers and their families and expects gradual, step by step annihilation of discriminations between official workers and reset of the work force.

6 – The council believes Privatising the Steel Company complex will have terrible effects upon the workers’ living conditions and their labour and considers the reconstruction period for privatization as definite proof that showed the effects of this policy on workers’ income and conditions; this is an experience we, Iran Steel workers are experiencing every day.

7 – Billions have been paid for expenses and hundred million Toman contracts made and spent on the Steel Company Football Team during the last few years at a time when official workers are paid with delay and rest of the workforce has incomes below the poverty line. The Council’s view is that such policies are outrageous.

8 – Council considers company’s weekly ATISHKAR as a management source use for self flattery and exaggerated claims. The claim that the company produced and supplied the railroad for the National Rail Company – is a blatant lie and every worker here is aware of it. The Council expects ATISHKAR’s content to include reports about workers’ payment conditions and their protests, covering all incidents that cause death and disability, announcing the names of workers dying at work and also monthly reports about work accidents.

9 – Due to not having aboveboard activities the council asks all workers to create their spontaneous workers nucleuses all over the Steel Company and, it believes without such units formed by workers themselves they will not have a chance develop their struggles and advance in them. Role of such units is bringing awareness, unity and solidarity among workers and electing leaders for their struggles. Such units can be formed around team of friends, recreation groups, workers welfare boxes and so forth.

Fellow workers! We shake your hands in solidarity.

Provisional Council of Isfahan Steel Company – January 2010

Translation by: Behrooz Navayii, Communist Workers of Iran
Edited by: Yassamine Mather & Chris Stafford

Source: International Communist Current –
We reproduce below the account of the Tekel tobacco-workers’ strike, published by the ICC’s section in Turkey.-
On December 14th 2009, thousands of workers of Tekel[1] enterprises from dozens of cities in Turkey left their homes and families in order to travel to Ankara. The workers of Tekel took this journey with the aim of struggling against the horrible conditions forced upon them by the capitalist order. This honorable struggle of the Tekel workers which has been going on for more than a month now, carried the idea of a strike in which all workers would participate. By doing so, the workers of Tekel started leading and carrying forward the working class movement in the whole country. What we will try to give the account of here is the story of what happened so far in the Tekel struggle. It should not be forgotten that what this account concerns not just the Tekel workers, but the workers of the whole world. We owe our warm thanks to the Tekel workers for making the writing of this article possible by pushing the struggles of our class forward, by their determined struggle and by explaining to us what they went through, their experiences and thoughts.

We think that firstly it would be in order to explain what caused the workers of Tekel to launch this struggle. The Tekel workers are struggling against the 4-C policy of the Turkish state. The state has been employing tens of thousands of workers other than the Tekel workers under the 4-C conditions. These conditions are what is coming to tens of thousands of workers soon, the sugar factory workers being among the first future victims. Besides, lots of sectors of the workin class have been experiencing similar attacks under different names, and such attacks are waiting for those who haven’t been hit by them yet. What is this 4-C then? This practice was actually a ‘blessing’ put forward by the Turkish state when the number of workers who were to lose their jobs due to privitations increased. It includes, aside from a serious pay-cut, public workers being shifted to different sectors within the state under horrible conditions. The worst of the conditions introduced by the 4-C policy is that it gives the bosses of the state an absolute power over the workers. Thus, the wage, which is determined by the state and is already a massive pay-cut for the workers, is merely a maximum price. It can be reduced by the state enterprise managers arbitrarily. Also, working hours are completely abolished for those who are to work under the 4-C conditions and the bosses of the state enterprises gain the right to arbitrarily make the workers stay at work for as long as they want, until the workers “finish the task assigned to them”. The workers get no money whatsoever in return for this “extra” work after regular public employees’ working hours or during holidays. Under this policy, the bosses have the power to fire the workers arbitrarily, without being obliged to pay them any compensation. Besides, the period workers can work in a year is between three months and ten months, nothing being paid to the workers in the months they aren’t asked to work and the duration of their work again being arbitrarily determined by the bosses. Despite this, the workers are forbidden to find a second job even if they are not working at a certain period. The social security payments of the workers are not made anymore under the 4-C policy, and all health benefits are taken away. The privatisations, just like the 4-C policy started long before. In the Tekel enterprises, initially the cigarette and alchohol departments were privatised, and then the process led to the leaf tobacco factories being closed. We are of the opinion that today, it is clear that the problem here is not just the privatisations. We think it is obvious that the private capital which is taking the workers’ jobs, and the state, that is the state capital, wanting to exploit the workers by condemning them to the most unimaginable conditions are jointly making the attack. In this sense we can say the fight of the Tekel workers is born out of the class interests of all workers and represents a struggle against the capitalist order as a whole.

We think it would also be in order to explain the situation of the working class movement in Turkey around the period the Tekel workers launched their struggle. On 25th November 2009, a one day strike organized by KESK, DISK and Kamu-Sen[2] had taken place. As we said, the Tekel workers took the journey to Ankara on 14th December, several weeks after this one day strike. The same week that the Tekel workers came to Ankara, two other workers’ struggles took place. The first one was the demonstrations by firemen who were to lose their jobs at the beginning of 2010, and the second was the one day strike by railway workers in protest at the firing of some of their workmates for their participation in the strike on the 25th November. The riot police, seeing that class struggles were on the rise, brutally attacked the firemen and the railway workers. The Tekel workers were not treated any differently either. Besides, the number of railway workers who lost their jobs for participating in the strikes rose to nearly fifty. Lots of workers were taken into custody. It was to take some time for the firemen to recover from these attacks. As for the railway workers, unfortunately they haven’t managed to make a come back to the terrain of class struggle so far. What put the workers of Tekel in the vanguard by the end of the week which started with December 14th was the fact that they managed to stand up against the repressive measures of the state, and that they kept their struggle going and alive.

So how did the Tekel struggle begin? There already was a considerable minority who wanted to struggle, yet what was to trigger the struggle took place on 5th December, in an opening ceremony attended by prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan[3]. The Tekel workers, with their families, went up unexpectedly against Erdoğan in this ceremony in order to ask what was going to happen to them. They interrupted Erdoğan’s speach saying “The workers of Tekel are waiting for you to give the good news”. In reply Erdoğan said: “Unfortunately elements such as these have been appearing in Turkey so far. Such elements want to make money without doing any work, by laying down. We closed the era of making money by laying down (…) They have said the property of the state is a sea and who doesn’t eat it are pigs. This was how they looked at this issue. This is not how we look at it. Here is your seniority compensation. If you want we can use you under 4-C, if not go and set up your own business if you are going to. We said this too. We had an agreement with their trade-union. I talked to them, I told them ‘You have this much time. Do what is necessary’. Although we had an agreement, well there the process came to the end and one or two years passed. These are still here saying things like we want to keep our jobs and continue the same way, we want to retain the same rights in other places. No, we talked about these things. Ten thousand Tekel workers cost us forty trillion a month.”[4] Erdoğan had no idea what kind of trouble he had just gotten himself into. The workers, most of whom had supported the government previously, were now angry. How to launch a struggle was discussed by the workers in the workplaces. A workers from Adıyaman[5] explains the process like this in an article he wrote, published in a leftist daily: “That process stimulated the workers fellows who haven’t been participating in the struggle which was tried to be waged, as small as it was. They started seeing the real face of the Justice and Development Party because of these words the prime minister spoke. The first thing they did was resign their party membership. In the discussions that started in our workplaces, we decided to protect our labor all together” [6]. The trade-union[7] which Erdoğan had said that he agreed with, and which had not taken any serious actions in the process called for a gathering in Ankara. As a result the workers took the roads, travelling to the capital.

The forces of the state staged a sneaky attack against the workers from the start. The riot police stopped the buses carrying workers, and declared that they weren’t going to let the workers from the Kurdish cities where Tekel factories are concentrated, but that the workers from the Western, Mediterranean, Central Anatolian and Black Sea regions could pass. This aimed at pitting the Kurdish workers and the other workers against each other, and thus dividing the class movement on ethnic lines. This sneaky attack in reality tore down two masks of the state: that of unity and harmony and that of the Kurdish reform. Yet the workers of Tekel did not fall into this police trap. With the workers from Tokat leading them, the workers from outside the Kurdish cities protested against this position of the police, and insisted with determination on all workers entering the city together and no one being left behind. The riot police, unable to calculate the stance the government was to take, ended up having to allow the workers to enter the city all together. This incident made workers coming from different cities, regions and ethnic backgrounds form deep bonds on class terrain. Following this incident the workers from the Western, Mediterranean, Central Anatolian and Black Sea regions were to express that the strength and inspiration they took from the resistance, determination and consciousness of the Kurdish workers was to contribute greatly to their participation in the struggle and that they learnt much from those workers. The workers of Tekel had won their first victory upon entering the city.

On December 15th, the Tekel workers started their protest demonstration in front of the national headquarters of the Justice and Development Party in Ankara. A Tekel worker who came to Ankara that day explains what happened like this: “We marched to the national headquarters of the Justice and Development Party. We lit a fire at night and waited in front of the building until 10 PM. When it got too cold, we went to the Atatürk Gym. There were five thousand of us. We took out our carpets and cardboards and spent the night there. In the morning, the police pushed us to Abdi İpekçi Park and encircled us. Some of our mates marched to the Justice and Development Party headquarters again. When we were waiting in the park, we wanted to go and meet up with our mates, and those waiting in front of the Justice and Development Party headquarters wanted to come to us: the police attacked with tear gas. Then at 7 PM we managed to meet up with out mates in the park. We had walked for four hours. We spent the night in the park, in the rain.”[8] On the other hand, the most brutal attack by the police took place on December 17th. The riot police, obviously acting on orders and perhaps in order to make up for not being able to prevent the Kurdish workers from entering the city when they first arrived, attacked the workers in the park with great violence and hatred. The aim was to disperse the workers. Yet this time also there was something which the forces of the state had failed to calculate: the workers capacity for self-organization. The workers, dispersed by the police, managed to organize themselves without the help of any bureaucrat and met up in a massive demonstration in front of the Türk-İş[9] headquarters in the afternoon. On the same day, the workers, having nowhere to stay, occupied two floors of the Türk-İş building. On the days following December 17th, the demonstrations of the Tekel workers were to take place on the small street in front of the Türk-İş headquarters, at the center of Ankara.

The struggle between the workers of Tekel and the Türk-İş administration marked the days following this date until the New Year. Actually, even at the beginning of the struggle, the workers did not trust the trade-union bureaucrats. They had been sending two workers from all cities with the trade-unionists to all the negotiations. The purpose of this was for all the workers to be informed of what really was happening. Both Tek Gıda-İş and Türk-İş, and the government expected Tekel workers to give up in a few days in the face of the freezing cold Ankara winter, police repression and material difficulties. The doors of the Türk-İş building were, unsurprisingly, locked up in a very short time to prevent the workers from entering the building. Against this, the workers started a struggle in order to be allowed to use the toilets in the building and for the woman workers to be able to rest in the building and this struggle resulted in a victory for the workers. The workers had no intention of going back. A serious support by the Ankara working class and above all students from proletarian backgrounds was given to Tekel workers with regards to the material difficulities of finding places to stay: perhaps a small but nevertheless important part of the Ankara working class mobilized to host Tekel workers in their homes. Rather than giving up and going back, the Tekel workers gathered every day on the small street in front of the Türk-İş building, and started discussing how to make their struggle go forward. It did not take long for the workers to realize that the only solution to get over their isolation was for their struggle to extend to the rest of the working class.

In this context, militant workers from all cities who saw that Tek Gıda-İş and Türk-İş weren’t going to do anything for them tried to establish a strike committee, with the foremost purpose of transmitting their demands to the trade-union. Among these demands were the setting up of a strike tent and the New Year being celebrated by workers collectively, with a demonstration in front of the Türk-İş building. The trade-union executives opposed this initiative taken by the workers. After all, what need was there for the trade-union if the workers were going to go ahead and take the control of their struggle into their own hands! This attitude had a veiled threat behind it: the workers who were already isolated feared the possibility of being left all alone if the trade-union withdrew its support. Thus the strike committee was abolished. Yet the will of the workers to take the control of their struggle into their own hands was to retain its existence. Quickly, the workers launched efforts to form bonds with the sugar factory workers who are to face the same 4-C conditions soon, and they went to the workers neighbourhoods and universities they were invited to and explained their struggle. In the meanwhile, the workers were continuing their struggle with the Türk-İş administration which was not behind the workers in any way. The day the Türk-İş board of executives met, the workers forced the doors of the trade-union headquarters. The riot police mobilized to protect Mustafa Kumlu, the chairman of Türk-İş from the workers. Workers started shouting slogans like “We will sell out who sells us out”, “Türk-İş to duty, to the general strike”, “Kumlu, resign”. Kumlu dared not face the workers until he had announced a series of actions, including strikes which were to happen every week, starting from a one hour strike and doubling in period every week and a demonstration in front of the Türk-İş building to take place every week. He was afraid for his life. Even after Kumlu’s declaration of a series of actions though, workers still did not trust Türk-İş. When a Tekel worker from Diyarbakır[10] declared in an interview he gave that “We won’t follow any decision taken by the trade-union administration to end the struggle and go back. And if a decision to end the struggle without there being a gain made as they did last year, we are thinking of emptying the Türk-İş building and then burning it down”[11], he expressed the feelings of lots of other Tekel workers.

Türk-İş backed down from its action plan when the first one hour strike had a participation rate of 30% of all trade-unions. Türk-İş executives were as terrified of the generalization of the struggle of the Tekel workers as the government was. Following the cheerful New Year’s demonstration in front of the Türk-İş headquarters, a closed vote was taken among the workers in order to decide whether to go on or return home. 99% of the workers voted to continue with the struggle. Meanwhile, a new action plan, suggested by the trade-union, started being discussed: following January 15th, there was to be a three day sit-in, followed by a three-day hunger strike and then a three day death fast. A demonstration with massive participation was also to take place, as the Türk-İş administration promised. The workers initially thought that a hunger strike would be a good idea. Already being isolated, they did not want to be forgotten and ignored and they thought a hunger strike could avoid this. Also, they were feeling that they were stuck in front of Türk-İş and felt the need to go on action somehow. A hunger-strike could have acted as an intimidation for Türk-İş also.

One of the most significant texts written by the Tekel workers appeared in those days: a letter written by a Tekel worker to the sugar factory workers. The Tekel worker from the city of Batman[12] wrote the following: “Our hardworking and honorable sugar factory worker brothers and sisters, Today, the honorable struggle that Tekel workers have undertaken is a historical chance for those whose rights are being taken away. In order not to miss this chance, your participation in our honorable struggle would make us happier and stronger. My friends, I would like especially to indicate that for the time being trade-unionists would promise hope you that ‘we will take care of this affair’. However, as we have passed through the same process, we know well that they are well-to-do people and have no life-death concern. On the contrary, you are the ones whose rights would be grabbed and whose right to work would be taken from you. If you are not to take part in the struggle today, tomorrow would be too late for you. All in all, this struggle will be victorious whether or not you are in it and we have no doubt or mistrust in ourselves to take care of this. Because we are sure that if the workers become united and act as a body, there remains nothing that they cannot succeed in. With these feelings, I salute you with my deepest intimacy and respect in the name of all workers of Tekel.”[13] This letter not only called on the sugar workers themselves to join the struggle by themselves; it also expressed what had happened in Tekel with all its clarity. At the same time, it expressed the consciousness shared by many Tekel workers that they were struggling not just for themselves but for the entire working class.

On January 15th, the Tekel workers came to Ankara to participate in the sit-in we previously mentioned. Now there were nearly ten thousand Tekel workers in the Sakarya Square. Some of their families had came with them. The workers had take sick-days and holidays to come to Ankara and most of them had to go back several times to renew their holiday permits. Now, nearly all Tekel workers were together. A demonstration with a wide participation was planned for January 16th, Saturday. The forces of order feared this demonstration since it could provide ground for the generalization and massive expansion of the struggle. The possibility of workers who arrived on Saturday for the demonstration spending the night and all day Sunday with the Tekel workers could result in strong and massive bonds being formed between the arriving workers and the Tekel workers. Thus the forces of order insisted on moving the demonstration to Sunday, and Türk-İş, with a typical manoeuvre, further weakened the demonstration by preventing the workers from Kurdish cities coming. It was also calculated that spending two nights in the icy Ankara winter, staging a sit-in in the streets would break the resistance and strength of the Tekel workers. It would turn out on the demonstration which took place on January 17th that this calculation was a serious mistake.

The demonstration on January 17th started calmly. The workers who gathered in Ankara and several political groups started marching from the Ankara Train Station at 10am into Sıhhiye Square. In the demonstration, attended by tens of thousands of workers, first a worker from Tekel, then a firemen and a sugar factory worker spoke from the platform. The explosion took place afterwards. After the workers, Mustafa Kumlu, the chairman of Türk-İş took the stage. Kumlu, who neither cared about the struggle nor about the living conditions of the Tekel workers to spread nor about its spread made a completely moderate, conciliatory and empty speech. Türk-İş had made a particular effort to keep the workers away from the platform and had placed the metal workers who were completely unaware of what was going on in front of it. Nevertheless, the Tekel workers, asking the metal workers to let them pass, managed to come right in front of the platform. During Kumlu’s speech, the Tekel workers did their best to interrupt him with their slogans. The last offence that did the trick for the workers was the announcement that following Kumlu’s speech, Alişan, a pop singer who has no relation whatsoever to the working class movement, was going to give a concert in the demonstration area. The workers occupied the platform, started shouting their own slogans and despite the fact that the trade-union executives turned the sound system down, they workers who came to the demonstration managed to join these slogans. For a while, the trade-union completely lost control. Only the workers had it. Trade-union executives, rushing to the stage, started giving radical speeches on the one hand and trying to get the workers to leave the platform. When this didn’t work, they tried to provoke the workers against each other and against the students and workers who came to support them. The trade-unionists tried to pit the workers who have been present in Ankara from the beginning of the struggle against those who arrived recently, and they tried to target those who came to offer their support. In the end the trade-union executives managed to make the workers who occupied the stage go down, and convinced the workers to rapidly return to the street in front of the Türk-İş building. The fact that speeches regarding hunger strikes and death fasts being put forward in order to play down the slogans about the general strike was, in our opinion, interesting. In any case, returning to the Türk-İş building was not enough to extinguish the workers’ anger. Slogans such as “General strike, general resistance”, “Türk-İş don’t test our patience” and “We will sell out who sells us out” were being shouted in front of the union building now. A few hours later, a group of workers numbering around 150 managed to break the bureaucratic barricade in front of the Türk-İş doors and occupied the building. Tekel workers who were searching for Mustafa Kumlu in the building started shouting “Enemy of workers, servant of the AKP” when they reached the door of Kumlu’s room. Following the demonstration on January 17th, efforts to launch another strike committee began among the workers. This committee was to be made up of workers who didn’t think a hunger strike was a suitable way to go forward for the struggle and that the only way forward was to extent the struggle. The effort to form it was known by all workers and supported by an overwhelming majority. As for those who didn’t support it, they weren’t speaking against it either. Among the things seen as the tasks of the committee, other than transmitting their demands to the trade-union, was realizing communication and self-organization among the workers. Like the previous strike-committee, this committee also was made up entirely of the workers and was completely independent from the trade-union. The same determination of self-organization made it possible for hundreds of Tekel workers to join the demonstration of the health sector employees who went on a one day strike on January 19th. On the same day, while only a hundred workers were allowed to participate in the three-day hunger strike, three thousand workers joined them, despite the fact that the general feeling among the workers now is that it is not the appropriate way for the struggle to go forward. The reason behind this was that these workers did not want to leave their mates going on the hunger strike alone, that they wanted to engage in solidarity with them, that they wanted to share what their friends were to go through.

Although the Tekel workers have been having regular meetings among themselves according to the cities they came from, so far a mass meeting with all the workers participating hasn’t been possible. This being said, since December 17th, the street in front of the Türk-İş building had the character of an informal but regular mass assembly. Sakarya Square these days is full of hundreds of workers from different cities, discussing how to push the struggle forward, how to expand it, what to do. Another important characteristic of the struggle was how the workers from different ethnic backgrounds managed to unite against the capitalist order despite all the provocations of the regime. The slogan “Kurdish and Turkish workers together”, shouted since the first days of the struggle, expresses this very clearly. In the Tekel struggle, lots of workers from the Black Sea region danced to Şemame, and lots of Kurdish workers made the Horon dance for the first time in their lives[14]. Another point where the approach of the Tekel workers has been very significant is the importance they have been giving to extending the struggle and workers’ solidarity, and this is not based on a narrow national perspective but on one which includes the mutual support and solidarity of the workers of the whole world. Also the Tekel workers managed to prevent the parts of the ruling class in opposition to use the struggle for their own purposes and do not trust opposition parties either. They are aware of how the Republican People’s Party[15] attacked the workers who were fired from Kent AŞ[16], how the Nationalist Movement Party[17] has its share in shaping state policies and how it is anti-working class. A worker expresses this consciousness very clearly in an interview he gave: “We understood what all of them are. Men who voted for the privatisation law are today telling us about how they understand our situation. Until now, I always voted for the Nationalist Movement Party. I met revolutionaries only with this struggle. I am in this struggle because I am a worker. Revolutionaries are always with us. The Nationalist Movement Party and the Republican People’s Party make five minute speeches here and then they leave. There were those among us who cheered for them when we first came here. Now, there is no such situation.”[18] The most striking example of this consciousness was how the workers of Tekel prevented the speakers from the fascist Alperen Organization[19], the same one which attacked Kent AŞ workers who were demonstrating in the Abdi İpekçi Park because they were Kurds. The Tekel struggle also made a great contribution to the firemen who were brutally attacked after their first demonstration by giving them morale which enabled them to return to the struggle. Generally, Tekel workers have given hope not only to the firemen but to all sectors of the working class in Turkey who want to struggle.

The Tekel workers have managed to put a strike in which all workers will participate on the agenda. This is why today the Tekel workers are proudly standing at the vanguard of the working class in Turkey, and are carrying our class which has been in slumber for years into joining with the struggles of the workers of the whole world. This is why they are holding the seeds of the mass strike which, from Egypt to Greece, from Bangladesh to Spain, from England to China has been shaking the world for the last few years. This honorable struggle is still ongoing, and we think that it is not yet the time to draw its lessons. With the idea of a hunger strike and a death strike being pushed forward on the one hand and the idea of a strike committee made up of workers who don’t find the idea of a hunger strike fit for the struggle and want to extent the struggle; with Türk-İş bureaucrats who are nothing but a part of the state on one hand and workers who want a general strike on the other, it is hard to predict what lays ahead for the struggle, where it will go, what its results will be. This being said, we have to stress that no matter what the outcome of the struggle is, the honorable stance of the Tekel workers will bear very important results and leave priceless lessons for the whole working class.

Gerdûn, 20.01.10

[1] Tekel used to be the state monopoly company consisting of all tobacco and alcohol producing enterprises.

[2] Leftist Public Workers Unions Confederation, Revolutionary Workers Unions Confederation and the major Public Employees Unions Confederation, known for its fascist symphaties.

[3] Also the leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP

[4] http://www.cnnturk.com/2009/turkiye/12/05/erdogana.tekel.iscilerinden.protesto/554272.0/

[5] A city in Turkish Kurdistan.

[6] http://www.evrensel.net/haber.php?haber_id=63999

[7] Tek Gıda-İş, Food, Alchohol, Tobacco Workers Union, member union of Türk-İş

[8] http://www.evrensel.net/haber.php?haber_id=63999

[9] Confederation of Turkish Trade-Unions, the oldest and largest trade-union confederation in Turkey which has quite an infamous history, having been formed under the influence of the US in the 50ies, modelled after the AFL-CIO and has been sabotaging workers’ struggles since.

[10] Known as the unofficial capital of Kurdistan, Diyarbakır is a metropole in Turkish Kurdistan

[11] http://www.kizilbayrak.net/sinif-hareketi/haber/arsiv/2009/12/30/select/roeportaj/artikel/136/direnisteki-tek.html

[12] A city in Turkish Kurdistan.

[13] http://tr.internationalism.org/ekaonline-2000s/ekaonline-2009/tekel-iscisinden-seker-iscisine-mektup

[14] Şemamme is a very famous Kurdish dance, and Horon is a very famous dance from the Black Sea region of Turkey.

[15] The Kemalist, secularist, left-nationalist party, member of the Socialist International, extremely chauvinistic.

[16] Municipality workers from İzmir, a metropole at the coast of the Aegean sea. These workers were fired by the Republican People’s Party who controlled the municipality they worked for and then brutally attacked by the police while protesting the Party’s leader.

[17] The mainstream fascist party.

[18] http://www.kizilbayrak.net/sinif-hareketi/haber/arsiv/2009/12/30/select/roeportaj/artikel/136/direnisteki-tek.html

[19] Murderous gang connected to the Grand Union Party, a radical fascist split from the Nationalist Movement Party

Source: Sendika.Org –

performance for TEKEL workers

First it started as a book. Using the distinct northern Turkish dialect, enriched with smart and witty jokes, Marx was reintroduced to readers in Turkey. The book was sold out very soon after its release.

Then it became a stand up performance. Since this show opened its curtains last year, it entertained and educated more than 28,000 people with more than 112 performances.

This year’s first performance carries a special meaning. It will be performed to the heroic Tekel public workers at the Turk-Is union confederation building where the workers have been struggling for more than 22 days. Workers have been resisting to defend their benefits and against contracting and privatizations.

The ruling Justice and Democracy Party (JDP) which has championed free market austerity measures dictated by the IMF, the World Bank and the US recently announced that the workers struggle had no more than 300 supporters, all “union bosses,” and that the workers did not support this action.

The workers response was to hold a referendum to decide whether to continue with the resistance or not. Overwhelming vote, held at every Tekel plant location, resulted in workers demand to escalate the resistance against the government and the bosses. The decision to escalate includes a massive march to the state’s capital on January 14th, holding wide spread sit-in’s, and hunger strikes.

Solidarity from all progressive organizations poured and continues to pour to the Tekel workers who endured a brutal attack in Ankara by the police who attacked their peaceful congregation with water cannons and tear gas.

The Marx in the northern Laz dialect will perform for the workers. Yesterday, a committee from The International Istanbul Labor Film Festival paid a solidarity visit to the Tekel workers as well. The festival will be bringing the labor films to the workers for special screening and will hold discussions after each film.

Source: OSAG -
By: Nancy Davies -

While Juan Manuel Martinez in Ixcotel prison hollers for help, SNTE Section
22 already has him logged onto their agenda, Secretary General Chepi said on
Monday at a meeting in Juchitán where a burro festival also livened the
atmosphere. The problem, of course, is that the teachers also must deal with
the assassination of professor Eleazar Martinez Almaraz in San Augustin
Loxicha, the recent attempted homicide against Jaime Rosas Chavez in
Huahuapan de Leon, plus the April 2009 assassination of a PRD woman, along
with all the rest of the murders still unpunished.

At the same time, the former secretary of Teacher Training Formation of
Section 59, Alejandro Osorio Solórzano announced that he has initiated talks
with the directors of Section 22 to eventually rejoin 22— a huge bargaining
unit in any comparison. The catch is that Osorio wants it to be optional for
teachers to attend political marches and rallies, a policy which would soon
lessen the clout of Section 22, but which would help resolve the split in
loyalties among parents, while kicking Dragon Lady for Life Elba Esther
Gordillo in her political butt. If the return is not negotiated, Osorio
noted, he would push for the creation of a state union of education workers,
bringing along about 100 teachers who resigned from Section 59, which, not
surprisingly, now is another corrupted organization.

In other words, it’s a busy time for Section 22. Chepi states that “the
politics of deaf ears” and the upcoming July 4 election for governor, will
put the teachers into massive actions on several fronts starting on January
18 in Miahuatlan, (see photo) followed by various state-wide assemblies. The
teachers’ presence in the gubernatorial election is now a foregone
conclusion.

So what about the elections? For novices in the baroque routines of Oaxaca
politics, the first step involved getting the “opposition coalition” in
order. This means that the non-PRI (the decades-long ruling party, Partido
Institucional ) parties, with no regard whatsoever for ideologies, and no
presently fixed candidates, had to receive from their state party
headquarters respective permission to go ahead and join an opposition
coalition. Thus while the state PRD, and state Convergencia were asked for
permissions, they also had to consult their national parties. The national
result, where 11 governors are coming up for re-election, is a hodge-podge:
in one state an alliance of PAN and PT (neoliberal PAN and Workers Party)
formed, while in another state the coalition is not aimed at ousting the PRI
as in Oaxaca, but at ousting the incumbent PAN, so you see a coalition of
PRI and PT. Whew! In Oaxaca, the voter weakness of all the coalition
parties is revealed, particularly the PAN and the PRD. The PRD was hijacked
nationally by “the chuchos”, (guys with the first name of Jesus), leaving
presidential candidate Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador strolling the Oaxaca
hinterland with baby drool on his shirtfront. Oaxaca, of all the states, had
a large functioning PRD, especially on the Isthmus. But if the PAN forms a
coalition with its arch nemesis PRD, which refused to recognize Felipe
Calderon and refers to Lopez Obrador as the “legitimate” president, we can
guess how weak those two parties feel. The PAN suffers from the piss-poor
image of President Calderon, and the PRD has been decimated. To note how the
wind blows, Convergencia (and who knows what their politics are, certainly
not Left) hopeful Gabino Cué went off to visit Calderon to make nice, i.e.,
assure Calderon that Cué would not undermine him, as the PRD has done. With
all that, in many states as well as in Oaxaca, the PRI by itself outnumbers
any opposition coalition.

An exception to that might be caused by a rupture in the PRI. Here in
Oaxaca, the fight for the PRI nomination is underway, and the worse they
fight the better I like it. The revelation that Jorge Franco Vargas was
signing with a false “licenciado”, meaning he signed public documents with a
false law degree title, was well-publicized by *Noticias*. El Chucky, as we
like to call him, is fading, but those moving into the front ranks are
numerous, and either dull or scandalous. One suggestion made is that the
teachers take on the roll of monitoring the election in July; I’m uncertain
how that would be legalized. Poll watchers are just for decoration, they can
not say or do anything.

The opposition alliance is not as incredible as it sounds, as long as you
keep in mind that the only goal is to win, and political positions have
nothing to do with it. Not only the parties, but civil society organizations
like EDUCA and “Reforemos Oaxaca” (Let’s Reform Oaxaca), are working to
ready a platform because it is assumed that whichever party fields the
coalition candidate, the entire coalition will sign on to the platform.
What, you ask, implement the platform? No, just sign on. It will certainly
include citizen participation, referendum, recall, and maybe a second ballot
in case of no majority. When evoking the mythic 2010 100th anniversary of
the Mexican Revolution, the slogan for Oaxaca is: Fish or cut bait. Now or
never.

In Oaxaca it’s no surprise that the PRI refers to the opposition alliance as
something like a two-headed calf, a critter that was never meant to be and
cannot survive. In addition, Franco Vargas has already started to undermine,
bribe and co-opt coalition workers.* *Going beyond Oaxaca, PRI governments
in other states stand determined to prevent alliances in Puebla, Durango and
Hidalgo, declaring such coalitions illegal and throwing up a variety of
legal blocks. Lopez Obrador insists that voters look at the candidate, not
the candidate’s party. Well may he say so, since without the PRD, Lopez
Obrador promotes Worker Party candidates, and incidentally, Gabino Cué.

The people? Well, I don’t suppose they will win much, but on the cheery
side, in Oaxaca there’s nothing left to lose. Fracturing the PRI, after
umpteen decades of their cement-and-death grip throughout the state’s
twelve regions, has become the only, the most important goal.

The regions for electoral purposes: Cañada, Mazateca, Mixteca Baja, Mixteca
Alta, Chinantla, Sierra Zapoteca, Región Mixe, Valle de Oaxaca, Mixteca de
la Costa, Sierra del Sur, Istmo y Chimalapas. Oaxaca contains 570
municipalities (Chiapas has 118). Of the 570 “municipios”, 418 contain
populations
badly reduced by emigration, but predominantly indigenous. And therein they
connect both the bad and the good: the marginalization of an extremely
neglected and undereducated population, and the retention of local uses and
customs based on mutual aid. The PRI caciques who in past elections
collected voter credentials to photocopy, and assured the local voters that
there was no such thing as a secret ballot, once again are packing
food-boxes ahead of the elections. Maybe this time it will not work; Section
22 is going all-out for statewide rural education.