More bloodshed in the Middle East

The assault by the Israeli army’s crack troops on a flotilla of cargo ships hired by pacifists of various nationalities, who wanted to force the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and bring in essential goods for the people subjected to the embargo, is a new act of war in a region that hasn’t known peace for almost a century.
Whilst in the UNO’s sumptuous headquarters diplomatic talks between the States flounder in a mire of endless debates, providing further evidence of this institution’s inconclusiveness and hypocrisy, the bloodshed and suffering of war looms once again as the unique solution to the economic crisis which is presently strangling the bourgeois society of global capital.

The bourgeois state of Israel’s continual provocations against neighbouring states and peoples are nothing but an instrument of world capitalism’s imperialist policy, and in particular of the United States, which is interested in permanently stoking up tensions in this crucial region and keeping it politically and economically divided.

The bourgeois state of Israel, which is experiencing a profound domestic crisis, just as, and maybe even more than, other industrialised states, both from the political and social as well as the economic point of view. The attack on Lebanon and the ‘molten lead’ offensive against Gaza has already shown that the Israeli government can see no other way of easing the crisis than war.

All these wars have had as their primary victim Palestinian civilians, and the proletariat in particular. But Jewish proletarians have also been its victims, forced into the army to act as jailers and tormentors, and at the same time to accept any sacrifice imposed in the name of ‘national defence’; the strategic interests of its own bourgeoisie in other words.

 These continual wars have therefore not produced the security and peace promised over the course of three generations. On the contrary, they threaten to entangle the entire region in a new conflict, and one which would be disastrous for the proletariat as a whole, irrespective of religion, race or nationality.
What they fear most is that the proletariat in Israel, and in every other country for that matter, disorientated for decades by the warmongering propaganda of both the social democratic and the openly reactionary parties, will withdraw its solidarity from the dominant classes; classes which are increasingly corrupt, incompetent, and whose sole interest and abiding obsession is the maintenance of their privileges.

There is another road which the working class in all countries, Israel included, can follow, a road that goes in a very different direction to the one it’s been following up to now: that of the road to class solidarity and class struggle. In the Middle East this means the Israeli proletariat uniting and collaborating with the proletariat in Palestine and in the rest of the region in a joint struggle against the bourgeoisie, in order to defend its immediate and future class interests. For this to happen, the proletariat will need to rediscover its political independence, its own party, and internationalist and revolutionary communism.

And are the bourgeoisie’s solutions really ‘more realistic’? Is imprisonment within the Gaza Strip and the Left Bank, starvation wages with no prospect of a decent life, and thousands of young Palestinian proletarians putting their faith in the nationalist parties really the way forward? What can Palestinian micro-nationalism offer to the workers in a situation of crisis in which millions of unemployed, even in the big industrialised states, are going hungry?

Against war between states!  For war between classes to achieve proletarian emancipation, real peace in a classless society and Communism! This prospect, which today seems a distant unrealisable Utopia is, in fact, the only realistic way of achieving proletarian emancipation.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

    The following short articles, designed to be distributed as leaflets, and translated from Italian into several other languages so as to be accessible to immigrant workers, situate the issue of race where it belongs: squarely within the context of the international working class struggle against capitalism. The first was written in response to a revolt of immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno in the South of Italy. Rising anger about appalling working and living conditions finally erupted after two immigrant farm workers were subjected to a random airgun attack in early January 2010.
    The second leaflet takes up the same theme in a more general way, and was distributed on March 1st at a demonstration in Italy called in defence of the rights and conditions of immigrant workers.
 

Rosarno - an example to all workers
A question of Class and Class struggle, not Race!

The immigrant farm workers have proved they can contain their anger no longer. Their explosive demonstration is a body blow to the apologists of the ‘progressive nature’ of capitalism. Their strike that exploded on the streets of Rosarno, for such indeed it was, wasn’t an episode in a racial war but a battle between the two opposed sides in a class war; a typical seasonal farm workers’ struggle bearing all the same tumultuous features of its centuries-old history. On one side stands a strata of completely proletarian wage-earners who, like the rest of their class, have nothing to lose and no country, whilst on the other side stand the landowners and the agrarian capitalists, with their state, their police and armed janissaries; whilst on the trees the ripening fruit waits to be harvested.

Just the fact of the class sticking up for itself was enough to terrorise the bourgeoisie and get all of its hired thugs to make a hasty exit.

Yes, certainly the farmworkers’ living and working conditions were ‘fit for slaves’, and their pay miniscule, as the bourgeois bleeding hearts have not been slow to point out. But such conditions are, in fact, the usual lot of the casual labourer. Starvation wages and unbearably long hours are normal and inevitable for workers under capitalism; as much the case now in capitalism’s decline and death throes as during its ascent in the eighteenth century. Is the condition of the young part-time worker in the ‘rich North’ really any better, even though they’re white Italian citizens? Do they earn more than the 30 euros a day that ‘the Negro’ gets? Aren’t they sacked without warning and without back pay as well, whenever the boss can get away it?

Racism, the fruit of a dirty campaign skilfully organised by the bourgeois regime’s clever tricks department, is the required instrument to divide the working class front. The other major rift is the one lying between old workers in ‘permanent’ jobs and young workers who are deprived of any protection or security. It isn’t a matter of fighting racism with anti-racism, of ‘integrating them’ into ‘our’ society, but of integrating them into our class and into our struggles. And clearly it is the Italian workers who need to be integrated, not the immigrant farmworkers!

Not a hint of this simple truth can be detected in the pronouncements of the regime unions. There is not a mention of it in either the Fiom or the RdB documents.

Everything is blamed on ‘local criminality’, as if instead of the problem being inevitable in capitalist society it was a question of ‘public order’, or was the result of a particular type of ‘immorality’ against which the workers should concentrate their efforts, side by side with the ‘honest’ bourgeois, of course, to make their state function better. The working class must fight against the bourgeois state not seek to ‘improve’ it. And indeed the ‘ndrangheta’ would be hard put to squeeze the workers any more than the state is already doing on behalf of the bourgeoisie.

The real responsibility for the harsh conditions of the farm workers and illegal immigrants in general is certainly to be ascribed to the discriminatory laws of the bourgeois state, who divide workers according to their passports. But this has only been possible because the regime’s unions, the Cgil-Cisl-Uil-Ugl, have never opposed this divide and rule tactic, and have done nothing for the great mass of workers forced into illegality. The defence of the working class includes the struggle to defend its weakest and most vulnerable elements, something that is necessary to oppose the bourgeois organisation of blackleggery by the utilisation of the most blackmailable and lowest paid workers, whether temporary workers or immigrants. The unions have abandoned the ‘illegal’ immigrants to the same degree they have accepted the ‘regularisation’ of temporary work, because they are unions which are betrayers of the working class as a whole. The common organisation of every type of wage worker and a joint trade union fight for common objectives, with the mobilisation and strength which the full timers would bring, would defend these particularly vulnerable workers and also the new generation of workers.

The anti-racists, who organise the immigrants as immigrants instead of alongside the Italian workers, regard racism as a kind of illness from which present society needs to be cured whilst we regard it as a weapon of the bourgeoisie in its permanent war against the working class. With its weak and moralizing tone, anti-racism is an expression of the petty bourgeois thinking which is totally extraneous to the working class. It is an anti-racism which does nothing to tackle the underlying causes of racism.

The more the conditions of workers of every nationality, race and trade come to resemble each other, the easier and more urgent will it become for them to reorganise as a unitary fighting trade union and for them to recover the old perspective of a common emancipation.

With that in mind we address the class – of Rosarno, and everywhere else in the world – and invite them to proclaim, along with us their, and our, one instruction: Workers of the world unite!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

March 1st
Oppose all divisions in the Working Class
For Working class unity!

The proletariat is a class of migrants; a global class of the exploited which transcends national boundaries; a class whose true collective interest is to fight to defend its living and working conditions since it has nothing to lose and a world to gain.

The bourgeoisie seeks to hide this truth from the workers. In every country it seeks to restrict the resolution of problems to within the narrow confines of national boundaries. The mass media, with its cynical and well orchestrated racist campaigns, encourages mistrust and hatred between the indigenous and the immigrant worker. In the performance of this infamous task the democracies are demonstrating that they are even more sophisticated and efficient than openly racist and dictatorial bourgeois regimes of past and present.

The bourgeoisie’s racist propaganda takes advantage of the competition between indigenous and immigrant workers that was created by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class, weaken it and make it easier to exploit. As such, racism is no different from the other means of creating divisions which the bosses use, such as the employment of workers on short-term contracts, the subcontracting of work to external companies, the rift between older workers on ‘protected’ terms and conditions and younger workers without any kind of protection or security, and the division between workers in different companies and workplaces as a result of the progressive dismantling of collective bargaining at a national level.

So, racism isn’t a sick instinct from which bourgeois society can be cured, but rather the inevitable fruit of the latter’s conditions of existence and a weapon in the class war waged between capital and the proletariat. It will disappear when there is no more class struggle, after classes themselves have become extinct, after the proletariat has freed itself from wage labour; it will happen under communism.

It is for this reason that fighting racism with anti-racism, on the abstract plane of opinions and moral values, is not only useless but positively dangerous. Communism does not set as its goal an impossible inter-cultural mediation, but aspires to go beyond mankind’s ancient historic cultures in order to synthesise them into a higher form which will stand in opposition to all of them.

The battle being fought today is a classist and proletarian one which has unity as its objective. Its aim is to prevent the employment of workers under worse terms and conditions, whether through lower salaries, the greater ease with which workers can be sacked or through them being in a position where they can be blackmailed by the threat of expulsion if they are sacked! The really important struggles of the working class are those that coincide with the defence of its weakest components: by taking part in these struggles the workers who are relatively less exploited are above all looking after their own interests, insofar as they prevent their more blackmailable class brothers and sisters from exercising a downward pressure on their own terms and conditions.

These simple, sound principles of class action and class struggle have been trampled on at an international level by pro-regime trade unionism which everywhere has adopted a diametrically opposed method: with the state and bosses they have pursued a tactic which first saw the conditions of temporary workers, immigrants, young people and employees of small businesses being attacked, immediately followed by a further onslaught on the last restricted circle of workers with ‘safe’ jobs, thus obtaining the defeat of the entire working class.

In every country the official unions (in Italy the Ggil-Cisl-Uil-Ugl, in France the Cgt-Cfdt-Fo, in England the trade unions in their poisonous alliance with the labour Party) are all organisations which have permanently passed over to the side of the bosses. Those who continue to militate within them with a view to restoring them to heath (like the Cgil left) have achieved nothing at all over the last thirty years, apart from facilitating anti-worker action by spreading the illusion of internal pluralism and retarding and boycotting the work of reconstructing a genuine class union.

But to those today who, using the betrayal of the Cgil-Cisl-Uil as pretext, claim that they wish to fight against racism outside the field of trade union struggle by organising demonstrations of inter-class opinion, or who propose that immigrant workers should strike on their own (something impossible to achieve and doomed from the start) we say to them that the only contribution they are making is to create new, and worse, disorientation and confusion.

The one way forward is to reconstruct the class’s trade union organisation, and organise it on a territorial basis like the traditional Camere del Lavoro,(the chambers of labour similar in some respects to the old trade’s councils and labor unions in England and America). These were organised outside the workplaces and united the different trades, enabling them to include workers from smaller companies as well and to act on the basis of the principles of class struggle. It would be a movement, for example, which wouldn’t distance itself from revolts such as those of the Rosarno labourers and their quite understandable reaction to being shot at, but which would consider them as its own; a movement which would seriously aspire to an ever broader movement culminating in the general strike as a means of obtaining the real immediate objectives of the working class:

- Reduced working hours with no reduction of pay!
- A guaranteed wage for unemployed workers!
- Wage increases, especially in the worst paid sectors!
- Rights of citizenship for immigrant workers!
 
 
 
 
 

The struggle of the immigrant labourers is for the whole of the working class

Throughout Europe the bosses and the various bourgeois governments are attacking the workers’ living standards, because increasing their exploitation of the working class is the only way they can keep the capitalist economy, inexorably heading towards a crash, afloat.

In ensure the success of these attacks the bourgeoisie is using every means at its disposal to divide the working class.

Racism, which is being cynically propagated in the media, is a weapon used by the bosses to divide the workers, as indeed is part-time work, the subcontracting of work by companies to external agencies, the split between old ‘guaranteed’ workers and young workers without any job security or protection, the competition between workers of various agencies and firms due to the progressive dismantling of national wage negotiations, and the competition between public sector workers and those employed by private companies.

The more the Italian workers neglect immigrant workers the more they weaken themselves and lay themselves open to being blackmailed by their bosses; the more they are forced to accept lower wages and worse working conditions; the more the competition between workers exerts its crippling effect. The true struggle of the working class corresponds with the defence of those most prone to blackmail: by fighting for them, the workers who are relatively less exploited defend themselves from a competitive downward pressure being exerted on their own terms and conditions.

It is in the interest of the entire working class to fight to see immigrant workers relieved from the threat of losing their residence permits if they are laid off and for an extension of the right of citizenship to their families.

It is likewise in the interest of the entire working class to fight the blackmail of unemployment by struggling, employed and unemployed together, for the reduction of working hours and for the right to full pay for workers who are laid off; to prevent suppliers of contract labour who employ workers on worse terms and conditions from entering the factory or workplace; to prevent the hiring of workers on short-term, lower paid contracts; and to defend the national contract for each trade.

In order to defend itself from the effects of the crisis and from the increasingly harsh attacks by the bosses, the working class needs a genuine working-class union which, setting out from its struggles in the workshop, factory, company and trade, addresses itself directly to the workers and prepares them to mobilise together for a general strike, for as long as necessary and in pursuit of clear objectives, namely: against sackings, for unemployment pay related to the cost of living, for the defence of national bargaining and contracts, for rights of citizenship for immigrant workers and their families, for the reduction of working hours without a reduction in wages. These have been the objectives of the working class movement throughout its existence and they are based on the principle that defending the working class means eliminating competition from lower paid workers, which includes immigrant and unemployed workers. Such objectives can only be attained by a general movement, organised and led by a true working class union.

Rebuilding such a trade union is therefore an unavoidable question for the entire working class. Today it could emerge from a unification of rank-and-file trade unionism, which for many years has been struggling amidst countless difficulties against the bosses and the regime unions, unreservedly taking up the cause of the immigrant workers as the cause of all workers. But this unification can only emerge ‘from below’, overcoming sectarianism and the career politicking of the present leaders. It is therefore incumbent on the most combative and far-seeing workers and delegates in all the trade unions to organise themselves within their respective organisations to combat the serious damage being caused by the current divisions within rank-and-file trade unionism.

Racism isn’t an illness from which capitalism can be cured. Fighting racism with anti-racism, on the abstract plane of morality and respect for different cultures, is not just ineffective but dangerous, since it attacks none of racism’s material foundations. The only truely anti-racist struggle is the class struggle, because it unifies workers beyond race and nationality, and because it leads them to pass beyond capitalism to communist society; a society free from the slavery of wage labour, and the only material basis possible for the elimination of exploitation, racism and all the other reactionary ideologies of this increasingly inhuman and anti-historical society.
 
 
 
 

CAPITALISM - ALREADY A NAUSEATING CORPSE

Marxism views history as a series of modes of production and of relationships between human beings determined by them, from primitive communism, organic and natural, through to the societies based on class divisions. The capitalist epoch established itself on the basis of modern production techniques which utilised the discoveries of science and concentrated the workers in great factories. The modern proletariat, deprived of any means of subsistence, was to become a seller of its own labour power.

However, under capitalism improvement of the systems of production generates increasing misery and insecurity instead of being a condition for well-being. The enormous accumulation of commodities produced, for the most part useless or dangerous, and which the market cannot absorb, generates the phenomenon of over-production, of poverty amongst wealth, which is such a defining characteristic of capitalism.

In addition, the increased employment of machinery and relative reduction in the number of workers produce the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: the more Capital’s unrestricted growth seems to make it a force which entirely dominates society, the more its power and vitality is reduced. This mechanism which underlies the economic crisis means it is impossible to remedy.

It is this ‘agonal’ state of capitalism which forces States to have recourse to imperialist war: it is just to postpone its own demise that on the one hand the global bourgeois class pushes for an increase in the extortion of surplus value from the working class, and on the other, to precipitate humanity into a third imperialist war, in which the workers will be lined up against each other on opposite sides of the barricades; intimidated or brainwashed into fighting for ‘their’ country, and thus for ‘their’ bourgeoisie, rather than for their own, international class.

The crisis in 1929 led the imperialisms to declare war on each other during the second world massacre: only after destroying people, cities, machinery, commodities did they manage to get a new cycle of accumulation underway again. This demented cycle of growth drew to a close in the mid-seventies, when the current crisis really started.
 

AND THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS CAN AND MUST FREE ITSELF OF IT

There is only one force within capitalist society which can deal the death blow to this regime, the working class, the class that not only already produces all of the wealth but which also, having once freed itself from its political and economic subjugation to capital, is the bearer of the new society, communism, which from within the capitalist shell is pushing ever harder to emerge into the full light of day.

But today, due to the immense difficulties encountered on its centuries’ long path to emancipation, the global working class, despite the conditions being objectively mature, is forced to start once again from nothing.

The revolutionary bid for power in the first two decades of the last century produced a world communist party, the Third Communist International, and basing itself on the radical intransigent theses of left Marxism, it achieved victory for the revolution in Russia and took power in the name of the world communist revolution.

The revolutionary wave, the mainstay of which was proletarian defeatism in peace and in war, would eventually be defeated, thenceforth the working class would be assailed on all sides by lies and betrayals – worse even than those that caused the degeneration of the Second social-democratic International – which made it forget its class interests and the hard lessons of the past.

Stalinism, Maoism and Castroism, along with the theory of socialism in one country, would all end up concealing capitalist and bourgeois parties, states and economies, all of which were total capitalist, under the banner of communism.

In parallel the communist movement would support the demand to defend bourgeois democracy and would ally itself with the forces of anti-fascism, the degenerate communist parties turning into the most eager defenders of parliaments, constitutions and bourgeois justice.

The trade union movement was dragged into this vortex of submission to capitalist institutions too. If previously it had been inspired to fight not only immediate economic battles around jobs and wages but also to realise its true purpose by fighting for the long-term goal of the emancipation of the working class from capital, it would now jettison this view.
 

WHY THE CRISIS IS BOTH NECESSARY AND USEFUL

The crisis of capital doesn’t, in the final analysis, represent a crisis for the working class, even if it will be hardest hit by its consequences. Properly understood it represents the mortal crisis of its social and historical enemy and is the premise for the revolutionary overthrow of the present regime, and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Comrades! We must start again from square one!

The working class has its stock of theory, its vision of the world along with a century and a half of lessons learnt in the course of many defeats and a few, great victories. Everything it has been taught, by enemies and false friends, over the last eighty years has proved to be lies and falsehoods; however, it has never been betrayed or deceived by authentic Marxism, whose correct predictions about capitalism’s crash are before the eyes of all.

The present task is reconnection with the original communist doctrine and with the International Communist Party; the party which alone is the depositary of this doctrine, and which alone is capable of deploying it within the organisation and wielding it in the realm of political activity.

On the plane of the immediate struggle to defend working conditions, wage levels, etc, the international proletariat will need to find the strength to respond to the sustained attack it is being subjected to by reequipping itself with a class trade union organisation, which having as its aim the unconditional defence of the workers will once again reject any co-responsibility with the bourgeoisie for the economy in the name of ‘the national interest’. This union, organised on a territorial basis as well as by trade, will include workers of different trades, nationalities and political opinions, the employed and the unemployed, and bring together workers currently kept separate in individual workplaces. This will favour the coordination of battles fought for common objectives and lead to greater unity.

The great task that awaits present and future generations of workers is a stirring prospect; the communist emancipation of mankind from this thoroughly rotten and decrepit society.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Following the recent emergency budget in the UK, which outlines the government’s proposals for major cuts in welfare benefits, social services and in other state spending, there has been a remorseless campaign in the capitalist media to enforce their acceptance, which can be summed up in the oft repeated mantra: ‘the cuts are necessary; the cuts are necessary; the cuts are necessary’.

Once again we are being told that the ‘bitter pill’ of austerity and sacrifice must be swallowed to restore ‘the nation’s finances’ to ‘health’. But it appears not all will share the burden, and indeed an especial source of anger is the fact that the banking elite, recently baled out to the tune of billions of pounds from State income, is already back to awarding itself massive multi-million pound bonuses. Given that, and the palpable sense of injustice it has provoked, the proletariat this time round might not be quite so happy paying for the crisis. And the direct attacks on the wages of those in work, already suffering significant pay cuts along with an intensification of labour, is now to be compounded by an attack on the reserve army of labour - the unemployed and the sick, already condemned to a poverty-stricken half-life on the margins of society.

Discontent is already bubbling to the surface, but unfortunately the recent industrial action in the underground about staff cuts and rising discontent in the Public Sector has not met with a very robust response at the recent Trades Union Congress, which has merely come up with a few soporific measures to try and contain the situation, consisting of the same tired old remedy of ‘lobbying MPs’ and of course the obligatory ‘demo’; on this occasion postponed for six months until March 2011. No one can accuse the TUC of striking when the iron is hot!

An example of the proposed attacks by the Government on the unemployed is the introduction of a cut in Housing Benefits to 90% of full entitlement if a claimant is unable to find a job within a year of first signing on. This reduced payment is a truly harsh measure which effectively blackmails the unemployed into taking any job at all, even with dire working conditions and pay, rather than risk losing their accommodation and ending up on the streets.

The State’s campaign to cut the welfare bill will also attack the sick by extending the definition of those deemed ‘capable of work’ to large sections of those suffering from one type of illness or another. The government has set a target of half-a-million of those currently on Incapacity Benefit to be redefined as fit-for-work. The way this is being accomplished is by incorporating Income Support (sickness benefit) and Incapacity Benefit into a new benefit called Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) for which claimants will have to be reassessed. To re-qualify for ESA, current claimants will be asked to attend gruelling ‘medicals’, conducted by stony-faced interrogators, who are often very intimidating and have anything other than what can be described as a ‘bedside manner’. The new questionnaire is evidently designed to redefine people hitherto defined as ‘sick’ as ‘capable of (some form of) work’, despite the fact that most of this group will only be able to perform the most specialised jobs, in specialised settings and for specific periods of time, and will be competing against other workers in the job market who will be deemed by employers t be less of a risk.

Those claimants who are redefined as ‘capable of work’ then have to abide by the same regime as the rest of the unemployed.

Those already signing on as unemployed are finding themselves under increasing pressure to find work by the Job Centres. The latter, and the various companies to whom the Job Centres sub-contract the work, keep benefit claimants busy by filling in endless, often conspicuously short, CVs, and by sending their ‘customers’ off on various pointless ‘work placements’, which generally lead precisely nowhere for the individuals concerned: as often as not they find, at the end of a work placement into which they entered in the expectation of possible paid work at the end of it, that they are suddenly replaced by a new batch of unemployed hopefuls, and the realisation dawns that the have been used as cheap, nay free, labour.

Another indignity the unemployed have to put up with is the risk of being ‘sanctioned’. This consists of a reduction in benefit which is imposed, amongst other reasons, if the clamant is held to be not ‘putting his back into applying for work’ (the efforts made have to be evidenced and documented), or not attending at the designated time to ‘sign on’ for the benefit and declare oneself ‘available for work’, with or without good reason. This ‘sanction’ not only results in basic benefits being stopped but has a knock on effect on housing and council tax benefits, since the departments that administer these benefits are automatically informed of the claimant’s ‘change of circumstances’ arising from the sanction, with these latter benefits being abruptly withdrawn, producing consequent worry about rent and irate landlords. And now many of the charities and agencies, funded largely by the State, who currently help the unemployed unravel these various paperwork trails and to launch appeals are themselves at risk from the threatened cuts.

So, the unemployed, now forced to compete not only with each other but with the new influx of those previously designated as sick and incapable of work, will be especially hard hit. And those who do end up in employment will find, as often as not, that they are working for virtually the same amounts they received when on benefits! After jumping through all the hoops and straining every nerve to find a job, it is surely small comfort for these workers to find they still remain trapped in poverty.
 

The TUC’s position on the Unemployed

So what attempts to organise the unemployed have been made over recent years? A very revealing insight is given in an article, available on the internet, entitled ‘Why I resigned from the TUC’s ‘Consultative’ Committee of Unemployed Workers Centres’.

We note first that Unemployment Centres arose in the 1980s, during an earlier time of especially high unemployment, and that they sprang up all over the country and numbered 150 at their height, eve if by 2009 merely 50 remained.

These were useful up to a point by breaking down isolation amongst the unemployed, and by providing some support and advice around benefits along with a limited sense of solidarity in the best of cases. But these centres are certainly not a universal panacea, and our stance is that the most important organisational factor is that which enables the unemployed to be organised alongside the employed, and that this should be a core priority of any trade union which claims to have a classist outlook.

The running of these unemployed workers centres has varied in different parts of the country. The unemployed centre in Liverpool was run largely as a business enterprise, mainly as a Conference Centre, and definitely not for the unemployed. The tough management stance there would actually lead to industrial action by the cleaning staff. Indeed, the person who organised the cleaning staff (against management) was barred from the centre - and the police were subsequently called in to escort him out of centre’s trendily named “Flying Picket” bar!

Anyway, the author of the article cited above refers to how the unemployment centres were forced to go cap in hand to government agencies and local authorities to seek funding, and how funds were consequently made conditional on the centres adopting a ‘non-political’ stance and reducing their campaigning activities (the State demonstrating, thereby, that it was well aware of the potential for such centres to become potential centres of agitation, veritable ‘chambers of unemployment’ even). The author declares himself as the secretary of a TUC recognised unemployment centre and as such he was elected from his region to a body known as the National Consultative Meeting of the Unemployed Workers Centres (NCMUWC).

The author explains:

    “I attended one meeting to which I sent a paper ‘What is the purpose and role of the Unemployed Workers Centres’ Committee?’. I never got an answer. The Committee, all 5-6 of them, became extremely defensive. We are just there for the TUC to consult. It’s not our fault if the number of Centres has declined. And of course that is true, to some extent. But the Committee purports to be the main voice of the unemployed to the TUC and to represent TUC Unemployed Workers Centres. Yet apart from a puny campaign called ‘Peanuts for Benefits’ (yes I don’t suppose you ever heard of it - we only did when a box of peanuts arrived at the Centre) there have been no campaigns whatsoever during the past 2-3 years. Nothing about the Welfare Reform Act, the proposals to make single parents go out to work when their youngest child becomes 7, nothing about the abolition of Incapacity Benefit, the atrocious levels of benefit for single and young people or indeed the introduction of the Local Housing Allowance, aimed at forcing unemployed people to live in the worst housing conditions [at that time, the LHA was linked to the rent of the cheapest 50% of rental properties in any particular category; it will be reduced to the cheapest 30% under the new proposals].”
    “Indeed, I forgot, there is one campaign the Committee have been involved in, The End Child Poverty Campaign, an offshoot of the Child Poverty Action Group. It is a well-meaning charity, which doesn’t like child poverty and it had an ‘event’ in Trafalgar Square back on October 4th 2008. It does a bit of lobbying and persuading, but what it is not is a movement to organise benefit claimants and the unemployed. By its very nature it has nothing to say on the attacks on the unemployed. But having scrapped the annual conference of Unemployed Centres, the Consultative Committee decided that it should organise a conference entitled ‘Ending Povertyism’ with the ECP group, on October 17 2008. Apparently the problem is not so much little things like cutting people’s benefits, sanctions etc. It is the attitude that others have to those living in poverty!”
    “I therefore decided, having thought about the matter, that there was no purpose to sitting on the NCMUWC, which is controlled by a group called the Unemployed Centres Combine. A group that may not even exist now other than as a collection of assorted individuals, most of whom have spent their adult life in unemployed workers centres and see it as some kind of sinecure.”
    “One would think that, with unemployment now headed for 3 million, and banks all but toppling over, that the Committee would develop some sense of urgency. Instead it acts as the conscience of the TUC leaders who, more than anything, fear any movement of self-organisation of the unemployed”.

    “I hardly think it necessary to describe what is happening in the outside world - rapidly increasing unemployment and a concerted attack on the unemployed, coupled with a TUC ‘consultative’ committee that is paralysed into doing nothing and captivated by its own inertia. It has adopted a trappist silence regarding New Labour’s Welfare Reforms, has produced no literature, leaflets or indeed anything of relevance and its only purpose or role would seem to be to preside over the gradual disappearance of a TUC network of unemployed centres”.

So, whilst the TUC offers a few half-hearted palliatives to the unemployed, whilst at the same time letting its former unemployed workers centres wither away, others see it as a money making opportunity.
 

Divisions within the Ruling Class

Although there is wide-spread unanimity in the ruling class about the needs for cuts in state spending, it is only the scale of the cuts and how they will be administered that bothers them. And underlying these divisions is the perennial question of who is to make money out of the whole process.

The strategy for dealing with the (now greatly enlarged) unemployed population is a “welfare-into-work” scheme to be managed by private providers. An agreement has been made between the welfare reform and work ministers, Lord Freud and Chris Grayling, and financial institutions in the City of London about the possibility of providing these resources, these agreements being linked to the idea of the private sector deriving revenue on the basis of benefits revenue saved.

The Managing Director of welfare-into-work at G4S, the so-called security and support services group (which provides such private sector services such as moving prisoners between gaols and courts) thinks that a model “that allows investors to provide upfront payments, with the money coming back from the revenue streams as people move into work, is a challenge. But we think it can be made to work.” The private sector, facing contracting markets, is constantly looking for new ways of making money, and smells an opportunity here for doing so by exploiting the most disadvantaged sectors of the proletariat.

And the Treasury’s object of enforcing a 25% cut across most state sector budgets is causing concern across many sectors of the state. Even the Police are worried and are seeking to prove their indispensability by opportunistically unveiling worst case scenarios to frighten the bourgeoisie into backtracking on their recent proposal to cut an estimated 40,000 jobs from the Police force. At the recent Police Superintendents Association the association’s president argued that the Police should be protected from the worst of the cuts because a “strong and confident” Police force will be needed to deal with the rise in industrial and social tension that is likely to arise from the cuts: a tension, we read between the lines, likely to be exacerbated by 40,000 angry unemployed coppers!

And the ‘elephant in the room’ at this conference must surely have been protests called by the Police Federation (the lower ranking police officer’s staff association) a couple of years back; and indeed perhaps even the memory of the riots which occurred during the police strikes following the First World War, after which the police were forbidden from joining a union.

We cannot resist mentioning in this context that during these police strikes it was the army which was brought in to “maintain order” on the streets, but it looks like the armed forces, already significantly reduced, will also be affected by the present cuts; and with the prospect of the auxiliary fire engines, the renowned “Green Goddesses”, used by the army in the past to break Fire Brigade strikes also being phased out, who knows what the future may hold!

In general, where things will go from here is difficult to say, but the TUC has been forced to adopt a slightly more militant face and, along with the insipid measures previously mentioned it has be obliged to declare the necessity for an ill-defined ‘Joint Action’ between the various unions. Such joint action - when and if it happens - will only be effective if it escapes from the control of the union leaders, whose vision, if past experience is anything to go by, is severely restricted by their anticipation of an eventual seat in the House of Lords; by their hefty pay packets; and by a ‘Union Jackist’ outlook which seems unprepared to back any measure incompatible with the interests of the national economy; indeed ‘the country before the class’ seems to be their motto.

The workers, along with the unemployed, in order to launch effective actions, will be forced to transcend job category and work place and build a broader and broader alliance; this alliance (which the names of the big unions ‘Unite!’ and ‘Unison’ hint at but ever fall sadly short of) will eventually have to resort to illegal and wildcat measures and step outside official structures. Only by such means will the proletariat be able to build up sufficient force to act as a class and force the bourgeoisie to relent in its ruthless attacks, testing its strength for the final, inevitable battle with capitalism.
 

To trade union activists!

Long-term Support for the unemployed, sick and disabled can only be provided by defending all members of our class, rather than by passing meaningless resolutions and engaging in publicity stunts. The bosses want a mass of potential workers who are “flexible”, a euphemism for working for next to nothing, and being at the beck and call of employers. The organising of the unorganised is a direct way of protecting those still at work. Look towards defending all the workers, rather than those who are members of the existing trade unions! This way forward is especially important when the public sector is facing whole-scale cuts in the work-force, with many facing the prospect of joining the ranks of the unemployed.

Comrades, Proletarians, Workers, employed and unemployed, State and private sector workers, Workers from Home and Abroad, Proletarians of all races, Sick and able-bodied,
- Unite to resist these cuts!
- Let the capitalists bear the consequences of their own crisis!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Proletarian Giant shakes Egypt

Egypt is one link in the chain of social crises caused by the economic recession, which is hitting the proletariat in the countries of young capitalism as much as in the old, along with the poor peasant farmers. The recession has induced the bourgeoisie to withdraw even the little it had conceded over the past few decades, and this has forced the proletariat onto the offensive, in the south as in the north of the world.

In Egypt, in struggles taking place throughout the country for several weeks, more than 300 people have been killed and thousands more wounded or incarcerated.

Returning to the streets en masse on February 11^th to demand the removal from office of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian protestors have obtained what they asked for. At the time of writing the head of State had resigned and the government of the country had passed into the hands of a Committee set up by the General Staff of the military.

The Army, who participated in the repression even if it was a job left mainly in the hands of the police, finally decided to abandon Mubarak and take power into their own hands, even if only temporarily – or so they are saying. Certainly this has caused a split between the sectors of the bourgeoisie prepared to defend the government at any cost and those prepared to sacrifice Mubarak and his numerous ‘clients’, apart from his alliance with the Washington, that is.

The United States, following the Tunisian uprising and the hasty exit of their man, Ben Ali, were faced with a sharpening of the revolt in Egypt and the threat of it spreading to neighbouring countries. Considering that Egypt is a country of key strategic importance in the Middle East and North Africa, and the country which the USA throws most money at in the region after Israel, it finally decided to press for a change in the head of government. The CIA it seems was taken by surprise by the recent events, explaining the odd twists and turns of American diplomacy, but the Pentagon, meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, sent battle ships to defend that vital artery of capitalism, the Suez Canal.

As far as Israeli diplomacy is concerned, it fought, without success evidently, to the bitter end to keep its faithful ally Mubarak firmly in place. And it also comes as no surprise to us that the Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, reacted in the same way as the Israelis, and both of them, in the occupied territories and in Gaza, either repressed or contained the spontaneous manifestations of joy and solidarity with the Egyptians which burst onto the streets. Indeed Hamas actually took over the job of the Egyptian police by hermetically sealing the Rafah crossing.

The watchword of the bourgeoisie the world over, whether Arab, Egyptian or from elsewhere, is “change within continuity”, that is, the classic “changing everything in order to keep everything the same”.

In fact, what we are witnessing today in Egypt is a reinforcement of the regime. Mubarak’s government, after 30 years of open, brutal dictatorship and faced with an economic crisis ended up far too discredited in the eyes of all social classes. Leaving aside the working class, which is permanently rebellious, the petty bourgeoisie is no longer prepared to put up with a system which openly subjects it to the arbitrary decisions, corruption and the privileges of Big Capital, which for the most part is incarnated in a tiny minority of top officials and businessmen linked to the family of the president.

In Egypt, then, the big bourgeoisie, big finance and industry, centred mostly around the military hierarchy, is showing that it is prepared to make concessions to the people, who had taken to the streets, and to put a break on corruption and re-establish a certain ‘quantum’ of democracy and political liberty.

Given the lack of any bourgeois political party with a real programme of any recognisable interest to the masses, this ‘change’ can only be managed from above. And now, not only in the countries of young capitalism but everywhere else, the real party of the bourgeoisie looks for its base of support, in terms of power and intelligence, not from within the social mass but within the State apparatus itself and, in the case of Egypt, historically and in this particular case as well, within the army. Thus was it in 1953, with the national revolution of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his colleagues in the military.

Thus on the streets of the Egyptian cities there is a mixture of classes which are all colliding together. On the one side there is the lumpen proletariat of the capital, defending the supreme leader and the handouts they have come to expect from him. On the other hand there is the petty bourgeoisie, which is nationalist, in all its various sub-species and across its entire ideological spectrum, ranging from the Nasserites to the democratic liberals to the infinite varieties of Islamism, etc. Finally there is the working class, which takes the bourgeois watchwords of liberty and democracy to mean the possibility of trade union organisation, wage increases and reduction of the working day.

The only classes of any real significance in modern society are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the big landowners. The others are either hybrids or historical relics. Only classes have a historical and, at the appropriate juncture, revolutionary capacity. In Egypt as well, as though a war was approaching, we find the main classes, whether they are aware of it or not and whether they want it or not, silently preparing for battle: the working class concealed behind the iridescent superfetations of the middle classes; the capitalists and landowners behind the coteries and families who have been making use of their time in power to line their own pockets.

Indeed, the petty bourgeoisie, in its quest for greater democracy, political liberty and freedom of expression, has obtained fleeting satisfaction only because it has received the backing of that veritable giant, in both numerical terms and in terms of its long history of struggle, which is the Egyptian proletariat; those millions of workers in industry, services and agriculture who work for a miserable salary and who, faced with massive unemployment, have managed to organise themselves in clandestine trade unions despite the threat of prison and torture, and to engage in formidable strikes up to the point of obtaining significant victories, even if only partial and temporary.

The working class, despite being the central factor in the crisis, and despite seeing its struggles ignored by the media, which wants to depict a unitary but indistinct movement of people fighting for liberty, has managed to maintain a separate presence by demanding the freedom to form trade unions and to strike. It was the mobilisation of workers which forced the Mubarak government into conceding a 15% increase in wages to State employees; a demand which was straightaway taken up by workers in the private sector.

But now, when every patriot and every bourgeois is calling for an orderly “return to work” for the good of the country and to “build a new Egypt”, the proletariat can hardly share in the exultation of petty bourgeoisie about some old pharaoh being put out to grass; such an outcome certainly doesn’t satisfy the demand for significant and general wage increases, for trade union freedom, for work and for an income for the unemployed.

The test of strength on those issues will be with the new military, and the rendering of accounts is already happening at the Mahala Textile Company, where 20,000 textile workers are still out on strike despite the deployment of forces by the military.

In order to delay the inevitable social clash with the working class, even though it will not be long in coming, the big bourgeoisie, both Egyptian and foreign, is counting on the uncertainty of the political situation, on the novelty of the electoral farce, on euphoria over the few scraps of freedom which have been recovered.

But when that clash happens, the proletariat, in Egypt as everywhere else, mustn’t be caught unprepared.

It should continue on the path it has already embarked upon, of organising itself into trade unions which are independent of the State and the bosses; organisations which are indispensable not only to defend living standards and working conditions but also to protect its members and leaders; organisations which are needed to unite the class by the overcoming of all divisions of trade, sex, religion, in order to move on to the constitution of economic organisations of struggle at the national level.

It will need to keep its eye on the army, on its general staff, which has functioned up to now and will continue to function as the truncheon of bourgeois power and as long as it remains will be used against the proletariat.

It will also need to keep its eye on false friends such as the Muslim Brotherhood who, even if for decades they have not escaped persecution from the regime themselves, they have nevertheless long constituted an arms length anti-worker, anti-trade union and anti-communist militia.

The workers also must not place any faith in the bourgeois parties, even the most ‘democratic’ ones or of the so-called ‘left’, like the ex Egyptian Communist Party, which has always shown itself ready to turn its back on the workers whenever they are determined to go their own way.

The workers must reconnect with their international and anti-capitalist programme of social emancipation, which is separate from and opposed to that of all other parties. In communism’s programme there is, on the historic scale, the proletarian revolution – the time for it is already ripe – and the simultaneous overthrow of bourgeois power in all the countries of the region.

It is not an easy task which awaits the proletariat. And in order not to lose sight of the way ahead, which is full of pitfalls and unknown challenges, it is necessary that the most conscious and combative proletarians reconnect to the invariant tradition and the party of Marxist revolutionary internationalism.

Without its party, as centuries of experience have shown, the proletariat can arrive at the point of mounting a violent revolt, but not of transforming it into a revolutionary process; into a social movement capable not only of replacing a government of the bourgeois State but of overthrowing the bourgeois power, of striking at the heart of the regime of wage labour.

The sole revolutionary programme is the communist programme. The sole revolutionary party is the Communist Party. Every other party is inevitably reactionary and counter-revolutionary.

For there to be a communist revolution there needs to be a Communist Party, an organ of political combat forged over centuries and founded on clear and immutable principles, with a pre-established plan of revolutionary action, with a unique, centralised global leadership connected to a disciplined body of proven militants, who are faithful and enthusiastic, and solidly rooted within the working class and the main countries. A party known to soldiers in the armies, who alone can direct military actions needed to defend the revolution.

Only with this indispensable instrument – moving as one man because able to predict events and the moves of its bourgeois enemy, and in the full knowledge of the homicidal fury and tricks the latter will resort to defend its privileges, but also of its inherent weaknesses – will the victory of the working class be possible.
 
 
 
 
 

In Tunisia the proletariat has taken to the streets, forced into taking action by increasing poverty and growing unemployment. For over a month it fought the police and more than a 100 demonstrators lost their lives. What sparked the revolt was an increase in food prices. After a few weeks the petty bourgeoisie also joined the movement. The rise in prices was partly revoked.

Ben Ali, one of the many dictators in North Africa, has fled, urged on his way by his former collaborators and the army. He stood at the head of a system of corruption which was so vast that he had even become a dangerous liability to the country’s bourgeoisie, and was hated not just by the proletariat but by all social classes.

But of course corruption and nepotism are inevitable in all bourgeois societies. In Europe and America it also happens on a grand scale, with the recent expenses scandal in England just one example among many.

Tunisia is no stranger to social conflict. In 2008, following the sacking of miners in the Southern mining region of Gafsa, there was a protracted struggle against the forces of repression which lasted for 8 months.

Throughout the world we see confirmation of the Marxist thesis that capitalism is incapable of providing for humanity’s needs. The majority of African States have developed a ‘cash crop’ agriculture and monoculture which is geared to the export market. Although more profitable it has resulted in the ruin of the small-holding peasantry and it provides no nutritional benefit to the local population. What is more, a part of the global cereal production is dedicated to the production of fuel for motor vehicles. In a society based on capital and profit agriculture is inevitably neglected and food stocks are never sufficient.

In Tunisia today, the battle is between the members of the old government, who have been recycled as members of the new government, and the petty bourgeois parties. The bourgeois opposition is demanding a Provisional Government which includes all parties and new elections. The openly bourgeois parties like the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberty, the Islamic parties, and the ex-Stalinist Ettajdid all aspire to a democratic government on the European model. The Communist Party of Tunisian Workers calls for a Constituent Assembly and a ‘genuine democratic republic’.

Once again they are setting the trap of democracy to ensnare the working class. This vile, decrepit bourgeois confidence trick, this new superstition which has virtually become a religion, now performs the same function in the West as Islam does in the Arab world and the Middle East. Democracy has as its economic basis the exploitation of wage labour; it is the mask behind which lurks the dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and the big landowners. Under democratic regimes as well it is still they that decide the fate of all the millions of workers and their families.

It may well be that a new Tunisian government is formed and declares itself to be democratic, and yet, due to the grave economic and social crisis, it will not be long before it is inevitably transformed back into a dictatorship. But the Tunisian proletariat – deprived as it is today of its communist and revolutionary political party – will be powerless even if the opposition parties do win the election. The overthrow of the Ben Ali family is not enough to liberate the proletariat from capitalism and poverty. For that to happen the proletariat will have to organise itself into a vast network of trade union organisations, permeable to revolutionary activity, which regroup all workers on the basis of defending their immediate interests and which includes the unemployed as well. These organisations, same as everywhere else, will have to take up a position outside and against official trade-unionism, which in Tunisia’s case is represented by the UGTT, which is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

To prepare for the overthrow of capitalism in every country, the vanguard of the Tunisian proletariat, and that of North Africa as a whole, will need to enrol itself in the ranks of the International Communist Party.

But nothing can detract from the fact that the Tunisian proletariat, which flexed its muscles and overthrew this bloody regime, has provided an inspirational example and given hope both to itself and to the exploited of the Maghreb and, we could say, to the entire world. Egyptian proletarians have already risen up and ousted another dictator, other battles have erupted in the Yemen and Bahrain, and now a civil war rages in Libya.

But not only the gangrenous regimes of North Africa and the Middle East, but also those in ‘rich Europe’ have seen the writing on the wall in the events in Tunisia.

This crisis is in fact neither Tunisian nor North African but is linked to the crisis of international capitalism. It is part of a chain of events which include, amongst others, the social movements in Greece and the strikes in Portugal and Spain, which announce that the countdown to the overthrow of bourgeois domination has already begun.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The current crisis is the result of over production and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As the rate of profit plummets and vast masses of commodities sit rotting in the warehouses, the forces of capital want the wage earning class, whether in or out of work, to pay for the crisis. The slashing of wages, the extension of working hours, the increased pace of work, and the move away from full time work to temporary contracts and even unpaid work is now reaching an insupportable level. Along with this the social wage is also being reduced, that is, the safety net for the proletariat that provides a buffer against ill health and disability, unemployment and poverty and finally, in the twilight of our lives, old age. Now the bosses and their government are telling us we will have to retire later, pay significantly more into our pension pots and get less when we retire. No wonder we are worried… and angry.

Comrades! Workers! The frantic land speculation and dealing in junk bonds which marked the beginning of the crisis is a symptom of the capitalist crisis and not its cause. The massive bailout of the banks by the government, followed by the spectacle of their senior executives awarding themselves disgustingly large bonuses, nevertheless shows precisely who calls the shots in this society. The bankers and the other plunderers of what is ultimately socially generated wealth are effectively saying “f**k you!” to the working class. They are saying “we can get away with this because it is not the politicians telling the bankers what to do. It is we tell them what to do!” Indeed, it is becoming very evident to all that the political parties are nothing but gangs of political speculators; and the elections nothing more than competitive tenders for the lucrative job of running capitalism.

Faced with these intensified attacks by Capital, the workers need to forge a united front to defend their standard of living. But it will need to be a proletarian united front, organised on class lines and incorporating both those in and out of work. It will need to be centred on real economic demands and head ultimately in the direction of a General Strike. The workers would be mugs to consign their fate to the loose coalition of miscellaneous political parties, bishops and do-gooders which will volunteer to act on their behalf!

Comrades! Workers! In Italy, the vanguard of the workers has been compelled to organise outside and against the official trade unions such as the CGIL. These unions have clearly gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie, since they are prepared to modify all there demands to fit around the requirements of the bosses and the national economy. Rather than just offering a mediation service and cheap car insurance or whatever, perhaps the trades unions need to recall that it is force which is the deciding factor; as the whopping 15% wage rise recently won by State employees during the recent uprising in Egypt so graphically illustrates.

The rediscovering of working class consciousness will be more and more likely, even in this so-called ‘classless society’, as the bosses’ offensive becomes more and more intense and, well, obvious. But to make sense of these lessons the class also needs its party, which functions as the repository of its history – its past, present and its future – and as the force which focuses the working class on its historical mission, of finally settling accounts with the source of all its ills – Capitalism.