The Prime Minister of the Japanese State has declared the catastrophic earthquake, tsunami and loss of control of the nuclear reactors, currently weighing down on the country in the midst of a severe economic depression, to be the worst disaster since the Second World War and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time however it is national capital which is irradiating the Japanese.

The plates into which the Earth’s crust is divided are in constant motion. Tensions that extend for hundreds of kilometres thus accumulate along their edges, corresponding with the fault lines which mark their boundaries. When this elastic energy encounters a fault, it is released in an earthquake. Due to stresses arising from mutual compression, one plate is pushed under the other producing the phenomenon known as subduction: the plate on which Japan sits is sliding over the Pacific Plate.

The Archipelago is situated in the so-called “Ring of Fire”, the 40 thousand kilometre strip surrounding that ocean and which includes numerous oceanic trenches and volcanic mountain chains, in particular where four of the plates collide. It is a zone in which the risk of seismic activity and tsunamis is extremely high: in fact around 80% of the earthquakes that occur are generated within this area, and it has always been known to be extremely dangerous.

Japan experienced two extremely large earthquakes in the last century alone: the first one, on September 1st, 1923, was of a 7.9 and 8.4 magnitude and struck the Kanto plain, the main island of Honshu and had its epicentre in Sagami bay. The quake lasted ten minutes and destroyed Tokyo, the port of Yokohama and the cities of Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka and the entire Kanto region. The death toll was 177,000 dead. The devastating fire which followed the quake reduced entire cities to ashes. The second major earthquake, which occurred on the morning of 17 January 1995, was in Kobe, and registered 6.9 on the Richter Scale and caused 6,434 deaths. The destruction of buildings was immense with more than 100, 000 buildings raised to the ground and half a million damaged. Even in the last two years there have been 5 or 6 earthquakes registering over 6 degrees on the scale.

Already in 2007 an earthquake had damaged the Kashiwasaki-Kariwa nuclear power station and radioactive nuclei were released, although the amount and precisely what happened has never been communicated. On March 9 this year an earthquake of 7.9 was registered in the North of the country, with its epicentre 32 kilometers beneath the Pacific ocean floor and 130 kilometres off the north coast of the island of Honshu. The Japanese Metereological Office issued a seaquake alarm, then retracted it. Two days later, on March 11, one of the biggest seismic episodes ever registered, lasting two minutes, took place. The epicentre was beneath the ocean floor and around 120 kilometres off the North-east coast of Japan. The sudden displacement of the ocean floor provoked a tsunami, a gigantic wave 15 meters high which crashed down on the coastal region and caused massive devastation.

But capitalism prevents that, because it is always guided by the immediate rate of profit. Due to the law of natural selection, or rather, of capitalist nature, the capitalist who doesn’t continually aim for the maximum rate of profit, by any means, and whatever the consequences for the future, goes under. To have built an adequate distance from the waters’ edge, or a few metres higher, would have increased costs; the costs of transporting materials and of labour. A very small difference, and certainly infinitely less trouble than all the suffering produced by the cataclysm, and the hard slog of rebuilding it all, but it is only the here and now which ever counts, and that still minimum difference in costs which, in the present economic recession in particular, determines the survival of one capital and the demise of another. This is the key to the understanding of all town-planning, or rather, of its absence.
 

Not yes or no to nuclear power, but yes or no to capitalism

We have our say on the matter, as synthesised in the above heading.

The production of energy by means of atomic fission is based on the property of the uranium 235 nucleus – an isotope of the normal uranium 238 present in nature, constituting about 0.7% of the total – which, when hit by another neutron, spontaneously divides into one atom of barium 144, one of Krypton 89 and three other neutrons. In this reaction around one per cent of the mass is lost and transformed into energy as light and heat. If the newly emitted neutrons collide with the nucleus of another atom of uranium 235 a chain reaction results, and there is no further need to provide any further external neutrons because the production of energy is spontaneously maintained. In order to contain or shut down the process as far as possible, it is necessary to prevent the neutrons emitted from colliding with other atoms. This can be achieved by interposing a material between the uranium rods which absorbs the neutrons, such as graphite for example. The reaction is the same one used in the bomb which on 6 August 1945 was dropped and exploded 500 metres above Hiroshima. Three days later, over Nagasaki, they tried out another one, based on a different type of nuclear reaction containing plutonium 239. As is well known, the resulting deaths were of the order of hundreds of thousands.

After the war ended, the use of nuclear reactions to produce electrical energy proved to be relatively simple, and all of the different types of nuclear reactor which have been proposed since, including those in the planning stages today, have shown few significant variations or improvements. The so-called ‘fuel’, that is, the rods of uranium 235, are inserted into a tank of water; the pressure of the vapour which is produced drives a turbine, which turns an alternator; the vapour, using water from a lake or from the sea, is then cooled down, transforming it back into the liquid state before it flows back into the tank. The inconvenient side of the production of nuclear energy is that the basic reaction doesn’t just stop at barium and krypton, but continues, producing a series of other elements in various proportions, some of which in their turn are radioactive. Out of these some have only a very ephemeral life, but others only lose their radioactivity after a very long time; and not on the minimum scale of capitalism but even with respect to the life of our planet. Of these the ones which particularly endanger the health of animal species are: iodine 131, with a radioactive half-life of 8 days; caesium 137 and strontium 90, with half-lives of 30 years; and plutonium 239, which remains radioactive practically for ever. If a crack should appear in a tank or, worse still, a tank shatters following an explosion, as happened at Chernobyl when the graphite caught fire, these poisons are released into the atmosphere and into the rivers and oceans. Further heating produces a fusion of the rods of uranium and plutonium which, having penetrated the containment vessel, contaminate the surrounding area.

Another unknown with serious repercussions is how to store the ‘waste’ safely, some of which will always be radioactive and presents a danger to life. The problem is facilitated by the relatively small amount of material that needs to be stored, which is around 3 cubic metres per reactor per year, and yet the fact is that no country has yet come up with an appropriate storage facility or a definitive set of procedures: for fifty years now the containers of radioactive waste have been languishing in provisional warehouses awaiting a solution. On the other side it has been observed, with respect to reliance on the fossil fuels, coal, oil and methane – the resources of the latter two having been thoughtlessly squandered by capitalism over the last century – that nuclear power on the one hand uses cheaper materials, which are abundant and easily extractable, and on the other it doesn’t produce CO2, whose presence in the atmosphere is claimed to be modifying the climate. Evidently, due to the huge interests which loom over it (oil, industrial, etcetera) it is highly unlikely that capitalism will ever reach an understanding of the climate’s delicate and complex dynamics – in which phenomena of very short duration are superimposed on those which are much longer – let alone of the real dimension of the changes taking place; and we certainly rule out that it could ever modify the course of the climate, or indeed be inclined to do so, even if only to mitigate the effects on it of its congenital anarchy and improvidence.

These then are the technical foundations, summed up very briefly, on which the production of nuclear energy is based, and around which a useless debate is taking place between its supporters and its adversaries. And why we say it is useless is because we know it will be Almighty Capital that will decide, in an unholy compromise with the various industrial lobbies, in a tangle of company, geopolitical and strategic interests that determine the different stances; conditioned also by factors of a military order. But the criterion that will eventually predominate is minimum cost. This is the dogma which all the contenders feel obliged to address, with the ‘ecologists’ in particular going to great lengths to demonstrate that nuclear energy doesn’t cost less. An example: a reactor project exists at CERN, named after the physicist Carlo Rubbia, which uses thorium instead of uranium. Its advantage is that it tackles the problem of the reaction ‘running away’ (in other words if anything went wrong, the reaction would stop and the reactor would cool down). Also, less long-lived radioactive residue is produced. It has one defect: it costs more and we can’t have that. Capitalist society is society on the cheap!

The historical merit of capitalism is that it enormously reduced the costs of goods, in terms of the hours it takes to produce them. To barely heat a room in winter you used to have to gather wood all year round. Two centuries later – during which time, in order to reduce costs, which at the level of the individual business means to increase profits, capitalism has destroyed everything it could destroy – capitalism now produces too much of everything, energy included.

Energy is a commodity, which has a value and a market. The producers of energy are all competing amongst themselves, like all the other sectors and, like them, those who sell at the cheapest price prevail. Any other consideration in this society is either due to naivety or bad faith. As far as energy is concerned, there is too much being produced: there isn’t a lack of energy, just a lack of it at a certain price. The reality is that the productive capacity of the power stations, in almost ever country and certainly on a global scale, is much greater than what is required; there wouldn’t be a problem, were it not for Capital. Under communism, the first truly human society to emerge from prehistory, the constant striving to reduce the cost per unit of production ceases. Instead it becomes a matter of looking for the best solution, and the amount of labour time required will only be one factor of minor importance in determining what solution is opted for. Once the production of useless items and the general wastefulness of capitalism has been reduced, including of surplus power, the labour time spent in the production of what is essential for human needs, which even now is barely a couple of hours a day, would be much reduced, with the rest of society’s energy expended in the pursuit of its remaining interests, which will be carried out spontaneously and freely, and without charge, and be expressed in different modes and styles, precisely in order so we can seek together, as a collective, the best solutions, in all senses, for the living and yet to be born, and, in general, for all forms of life in the world-universe.

Coming back to Japan, the damaged reactors in the Fukushima nuclear power plant are, on the contrary, proof of capitalism’s criminal and blinkered way of going about things, even in one of its most evolved and mature societies. In fact, we will go so far as to say that the two things don’t run counter to each other, but rather in parallel: the more science and technology there is, the greater is the disdain for any proper forecasting, proper construction and proper maintenance. The primary aim of bourgeois technology and science is the reduction of costs: the best technology to provide the worst product. Most of what happened at Fukushima is a State, and class, secret, and, like in a war, information is filtered. The war, within every country, between capital and the working class: capital’s dictatorship.

On the other hand the essential facts are not difficult to discern. If there is one place in the world where a critically important and vulnerable installation like a nuclear power station should not be placed, it is in an area of major seismic activity: within these regions today we find 12 nuclear installations in Japan, 3 in Taiwan, 1 in China, 1 in Pakistan, 1 in Iran and 2 in California. On top of that Japan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world with an average density of 340 people per square kilometre. In the present postwar period, Japanese capitalism was able to become the third world power, only recently overtaken by the Chinese. Since it is able to produce only 16% of its energy requirements from internal sources, Japan has become the largest importer in the world of liquefied natural gas and coal, and the third largest of oil. For that reason the Japanese bourgeoisie has sought with nuclear energy to reduce its energy dependence.

And here we see coming into play the anti-historical division of the world into nations, consequence and limit of capitalism, in which each one of them, all of them the enemy of ever other, must fend for itself. But the radioactive iodine emitted into the ocean from Fukushima won’t be stopped at passport control.

But not building close to the built up areas, unlike the case today, would involve the energy having to be transmitted over long distances, causing, they say, too much energy leak. In the meantime, having freed ourselves of monetary calculations, we could just use hydrogen, the fundamental element, and produce it in a big power station in the desert, transmitting it to wherever it was needed.

We don’t know what condition the Fukushima installation was in, or about its maintenance regime, but we do know it was built in 1970, and that the relevant authorities in the country had decided to close it some time ago. In Japan, over the next decade, 18 reactors, including 5 at Fukushima, will have reached 40 years old. This is considered the maximum life expectancy for these structures although some claim they are dangerous well before that. In any case, despite the laws which decide their maximum safe life span, the various governments, faced with the expenses involved in constructing new reactors, authorise extensions to this period despite the risks involved. In Japan, and elsewhere, those reaping the benefit of this policy are the producers of electricity: it is entirely in the interest of the companies managing these plants to extend their life; already amortized, they produce only profit, and the enormous costs of dismantling them are postponed too.

At Fukushima, the earth tremors dislodged the bars of graphite, but, given an electrical failure, which should certainly have been predicted, the pumps circulating the water shut down, which were still necessary to disperse externally the heat from the residual reaction. Even the emergency back up system, powered by a separate generator, failed to kick in. No other cooling apparatus was in place. A simple radiator circuit would have sufficed; installed at other installations, this functions passively, and actually utilises the same nuclear thermal energy. Or else a gravity duct drawing on a reservoir in the hills. At this point all the technicians could do was to get out, and the two youngest ones, who stayed behind to try and head off a disaster, paid with their lives. Both of the power stations in Fukushima, only eleven kilometres apart, suffered similar damage and analogous problems with their cooling systems, and to more than one of their reactors, which confirms the non-casualness of the event.

Even the company which manages the plant has admitted the situation is out of control. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that water had to be sprayed onto the reactors from a distance using hosepipes, and dropped from helicopters, to contain the fusion of the uranium rods; and to prevent an explosion due to the hydrogen and oxygen produced by the disassociation of water at high temperatures, with a consequent rupture of the reactor casing.

In addition there were the plutonium rich exhausted fuel rods in the storage tanks, and in one of the reactors the so-called MOX, a mixture of plutonium and uranium, ‘caught fire’. The water being used as a coolant coming in from the outside, and the water escaping from the primary circuit which contained radioactive elements, gathered in the tanks and the security channels. From here it leaked into the sea which is right next to the plant. As of now the entire population within a 20 kilometre radius has been evacuated, and for the people living in the next 10 kilometre band, they have been told to stay in their homes and caulk all windows and doors. Then it was if, from on high, the spirits of the ancestors stepped in, and started blowing the wind back out towards the ocean, channelling the radioactive cargo, not unreasonably, in the direction of the American aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan, which then immediately put about. Beyond this radius, if we are to believe the official reassurances, the contamination from the radioactive elements in the air isn’t that serious, compared to the explosions in the reactors and the leaking of the valves. What is certain however is that the entire plant, and a significant area around it will become forbidden terrain, and certainly the sea has been seriously contaminated, with consequences which no one can predict on marine life and on the economy, and on the diet of the Japanese and the peoples of the Western Pacific.

Of course, we won’t be able to settle the question of ‘nuclear power – yes or no’. That is a task which can only be tackled, maybe even as soon as the next generation, once this putrid system of production has been swept away. Then it will be possible to decide whether to utilise nuclear power or not. Or even decide not to decide, closing down, as far as possible, the existing nuclear power stations and, given the uncertainty, undertaking further research.

If the prehistory of the human species begins with the discovery of fire, which distinguishes it from other animals, its true entrance into history, and its full unfolding under communism, might be marked by its mastery of another, higher force, the one which illuminates the sun and the stars.

But the utilisation by mankind of fission, and tomorrow of nuclear fusion, makes communism not just a requirement but an absolute necessity. Only then will it be possible to conceive a unique plan of production and distribution, which, insofar as it relates to energy, would involve planning and running power stations in a way that isn’t guiltily insecure. We can also forecast that for the first few decades many of the existing power stations will just be closed down, because most of the useless commodities which are vomited out by capitalism today will no longer be required, and the rational distribution of products will bring about a drastic reduction in transportation. We also predict that a lot more time and effort will be expended on the construction of homes, which will no longer have to be done on the cheap, and all due care and attention will be given to the requirement of efficient energy distribution. All of this will lead to a reduction in the demand for energy.

There is no solution, on the other hand, for today’s society, which is caught between the requirement to generate profit and the expansion of the gigantic forces it has unleashed: of over-population; of superabundance of commodities, with possibly irreparable degradation of the environment as a side effect; of lack of natural resources; and of a looming shortage of basic foodstuffs (everywhere supplies are dwindling, and the analysts are saying that one year of bad harvests could cause a colossal food shortage).

It is simply utopian to think the question can be resolved under capitalism. The environmental movements are inevitably reactionary insofar as they would like to patch up this system of production, which is by nature not capable of being reformed. Only the proletariat, once it has taken power by revolutionary methods, will be able to reform anything, in the sense that it will build a new society adapted to man and to nature. Today, whether in Japan, already mourning the loss of its ten thousand dead, or in the rest of the world, people’s reactions have been very restrained. Because clearly under capitalism, the present arrangements are the best possible. The democratic method will always support capitalism and all of its excesses.

What we communists are waiting for is the latent force of the proletariat, building up as friction between the tectonic plates of society, to be released and generate a gigantic tidal wave, which will overwhelm the ignorance and criminal stupidity of bourgeois society. That is the tsunami we are hoping for!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On June 15 the Greek workers took to the streets in the third general strike this year to oppose the new austerity measures of the Pasok government, which has been taken by the scruff of its neck by the Central European Bank. The latest austerity plan involves further cuts to salaries and pensions, and massive layoffs in the public sector.

The Greek workers are to be forced to make further drastic sacrifices, to make sure the ‘coupon cutters’ and the banks can go on accumulating profits, and to ensure the bourgeois State can keep on functioning and maintain its machinery of repression and control over the working class; a machinery, take note, which includes trade unions and the so-called left-wing parties, all of whom feature on the list of providers of services to Capital.

During the demonstration in Athens, the anger against the parties of government and of opposition, against the privileged and corrupt politicians, was clearly shown by the attack on parliament. This provoked a harsh reaction from the police, which didn’t hold back in its use of the riot baton and powers of arrest.

The government, forced to accept the conditions set by the European banks, is in crisis. The parties of the parliamentary left, from the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) to SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) and SYNASPISMOS (Coalition of the Left of Movements and Ecology) are calling for early elections, but this is only to divert the proletariat from its struggle and to drive it into the cul de sac of parliamentary games and the trickery of bourgeois elections.

The Greek workers must put their trust in their own independent organisation of the class struggle; they can expect nothing from new elections or from this farcical parliament.

No bourgeois government is going to defend their interests; not even if the KKE, or any of the other parties of the so-called parliamentary ‘left’, become part of it. Indeed, in moments of grave political crisis it is precisely these parties which become the main defenders of the bourgeois regime. This has been historically demonstrated, once and for all, by the role carried out by social-democracy in Germany in the first twenty years of the 20^th century, when it was precisely the social-democrats who took the proletariat into the war and then destroyed the revolutionary communist movement.

The general strike on June 15 was the eleventh general strike since the beginning of 2010. However, the bourgeois regime is equipped to resist this limited type of mobilisation by now, on the one hand using the police to contain protesters in the square, and on the other by ‘engaging in dialogue’ with unions and opposition parties, with a view to reaching new agreements only to then regularly question them and water them down as the weeks go by.

The Greek trade unions, whether the Adedy, the GSEE or the Pame, are not class unions prepared to do what it takes defend the general interests of the proletariat. They are instead inextricably linked to the opportunist, bourgeois parties, and rather than stimulating the struggle to defend the proletariat’s living and working conditions, especially of its weakest and most exploited members, it instead contains the struggle and puts a break on it.

What the trade union organisation should be doing is working unreservedly to ensure the unity of the working class, in order to overcome the contrast between workers in the private and public sectors, between permanent and contract workers, between old and young, between those in work and the unemployed, between indigenous and immigrant workers. If the working class rebuilds its unity on the plane of economic defence it can win, if it doesn’t it will lose.

For independent proletarian organisation

The generous struggle of the Greek proletariat against the government’s and bosses anti-proletarian measures will cause the more combative and determined proletarians to reflect that it is not a matter of fighting against one party or one government because the enemy is the capitalist regime, in its entirety; and to do that the first priority is working to forming class organisations capable of ensuring that workers’ day to day interests will be protected. But besides that, they will also have to reconnect with the historic programme of the emancipation of the proletariat from wage labour: the programme of revolutionary and internationalist communism.

The ‘strong medicine’ which the Greek government is trying to get ‘its’ proletarians to swallow, these austerity measures, they are in fact the same being applied in all the advanced capitalist States. Today, the bourgeois is forcing the proletariat to shed more blood, sweat and tears as its tries to cure the malady which, cancer like, is gnawing away at the capitalist organism from within: the world crisis of over production, caused by the falling rate of profit. Tomorrow, it will try and get proletarians to kill each other on the battle fronts, as it attempts to give another, new, horrible lease of life to this decrepit system, as happened before in 1914 and 1939.

There is nothing more that can be done within this system of production; there can be no capitalism which is less corrupt, and more just and more respectful of people and the natural environment: the scrabble for ever greater profits doesn’t tolerate rules and, as it heads blindly into the future, it could end up by destroying humanity itself . . .

The rejection of the capitalist regime has to be total, and it has to be revolutionary.

Proletarians! Reconnect with the genuine programme of revolutionary left communism. Join the International Communist Party !
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

We return to the social situation in Greece to comment on the so-called 48 hour general strike of the 28^th and 29^th June 2011 which was called by the three main trade unions, namely, the GSEE, which organizes workers in the private and state sector, the Adedy, which organizes public servants, and the Pame, the union linked to the Greek ‘Communist’ party, the KKE.

The strike was called to prevent Parliament from voting through the new austerity plan, imposed by the European Union as the condition for obtaining a new tranche of the famous maxi loan, which will supposedly prevent the Greek State from going bankrupt but which will not only force the Greek workers, after the major sacrifices it has already made, to accept a further worsening in its living and working conditions, but also entail a further rise in the already high levels of unemployment, mainly amongst young people, and hit pensioners, the majority of whom are already only just surviving on the miserable amounts they are getting now.

During the two-day strike various demonstrations in cities throughout Greece were scheduled to take place, above all in Athens. Processions in the capital were expected to converge on the Piazza Sintagma, just across from Parliament. Here, for over a month, there has been an encampment of a few hundred “aganaktismeni” (“indignants”), who have been calling for “real” or "direct democracy" and are rebelling against the rule of the banks and the impositions of the European Union. Within this setting the parliamentary majority (Pasok) and opposition (Nea Dimocratia) are accused not only of being dishonest, and of using their public powers to line their own pockets, but of being traitors (of wanting to sell the country to foreigners); this “anti-Europeanist” stance is shared not only by “the indignants” (who refuse to be identified with the political parties and demand an impossible autonomy) but also by a section of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary right, along with the KKE, SYRIZA and the other small parties that orbit around it as well.

Despite the widespread discontent in the country about the Government’s new restrictive measures, and despite the proclamation of strike which should have allowed workers to take part in the demonstrations, the mobilisation, considering that the numbers taking part in the demonstrations were less than previously, must be counted a total failure.

This failure would have been more visible if the special police corps, the hated MAT hadn’t organised during those two days an out and out and indiscriminate war against the demonstrators. They fired so many tear gas canisters into the crowd that the air across the whole of the Piazza Sintagma was unbreathable, and deployed squads of motorcycle cops to rough up the few thousand demonstrators who had dared to take to the streets, and who for their part were completely disorganised.

Using the excuse of wanting to clear the few thousand demonstrators out of the Piazza Sintagma, the police used highly excessive force, deploying at least 5,000 officers and Inundating the city centre with toxic gases. The only opposition they met with was from some small, well organised groups of anarchist, who equipped with masks and sunglasses, and batons as well, tried to hold their positions as well as from some other demonstrators who were trying to reacted against the police brutality. On Wednesday alone 2,200 tear gas canisters were discharged and on the following day they were forced to obtain further supplies from Salonika. Over the ensuing days, with money suddenly no object, the arms manufacturers received an 800,000 euro order for more canisters, showing that the police are expecting further, and more serious, demonstrations to come. Agents provocateurs were also clearly in evidence, i.e., police officers dressed as rioters busily going around smashing things up. Among them were some fascists who pretended rioters. Some film clips, a few actually televised, would catch these “awful” protesters sidling over and quietly chatting to the police before then heading off to chuck stones and break windows.

What was clearly evident was that the two main trade unions, along with the KKE and its union (Pame), were working to ensure the demonstrations failed; on the second day of the strike the Pame withdrew from the rally at Syntagma square and melted way as soon as the police fired the first volley of tear gas, whilst the other unions didn’t even take part. What is more, all the means of public transport apart from the tube were closed down during the two-day strike, and this meant many workers, who mainly live in the outskirts of the city, were prevented from reaching the city centre.

If, as the KKE maintains, there was collaboration between the police and groups of “extremists”, there was also, and much more seriously, collaboration between the higher echelons of government, the repressive apparatus of the State, and the unions and the parties of the so-called opposition, to ensure that the social protests didn’t surpass certain limits. This has become clear from how the Pame and the KKE behaved over the course of the two day mobilisation.

These two days are the umpteenth proof of what democracy is really like under a State that still declares itself to be democratic and which is led by a centre-left government: no toleration of any organised opposition against key decisions of the State, a State which, never so much as now, represents, in a society divided into classes – as Karl Marx wrote – nothing so much as the repressive machinery of the ruling classes. The State has in fact enormously increased its repressive apparatus over recent years. It has extended its control over the parties and trade unions and attentively monitors the press and the other main means of distributing information. And it tolerates dissent only to the extent that it serves to disguise its actual, totalitarian nature.

The Greek State in particular, from the early 1900s onwards, has shown that it will always take the side of the bourgeoisie and the landed proprietors against the working class and its organisations; even the brief “democratic” parenthesis following the dictatorship of the colonels has been merely a collective illusion provoked more by the opening up towards Europe and the sudden increase in family income than by any real change in the relations of power within the State.

The call for “direct" democracy, advanced by the ‘indignants’, is thus a mere illusion and serves only to demonstrate the primitive and reactionary nature of their ideology. In the bourgeois State, particularly during a period of global economic crisis like the one we’re going through at the moment, any “real” democracy is impossible since only the dictatorship of the iron laws of Capital can exist. The elections, the parliamentary game of majority versus the opposition, the so-called “freedom” of the press and of association, all of these are just a farce to delude the proletarian about its real situation: living in a state of subjection to the possessing classes.

The 28^th and 29^th June will certainly not be remembered in Greece as historic dates: there will be more “plans”, more “measures” and further parliamentary elections. The austerity measures, approved by the small majority at premier George Papandreou’s disposal, are part of the 78 billion euro plan (of which 50 billion euro is to be derived from privatisations and 28 billion from cuts and tax measures) which needed to be approved to allow 12 billion euros to be transferred from the European central bank to the creditor banks of the Hellenic national debt; but we’re talking about only the fifth tranche of a new loan to a country that is on its knees. As the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera, of June 30, put it: “The fact of the matter is the Greeks are trying hard but the Europeans persist in putting forward a solution which hasn’t worked up to now: lending more money to those who are in debt and have less and less income with which to repay it”.

There will therefore be other occasions on which the intentions of the trade unions will be to put to the test, but one thing is for sure, the days of the 28^th and 29^th June, which were billed as the occasion for a test of strength, have instead revealed the weakness of the trade union movement, and indeed the weakness of the so-called “extreme” left.

These recent days have served as further evidence that even if the proletariat is strong numerically, even if it displays considerable strength and determination, it is nevertheless nothing unless united in organisations which are completely independent from those of the bourgeoisie, in class organisations with a clear programme which is rigorously adhered to.

The proletarian revolution will be impossible without genuine trade union organisations to muster the strength of the proletarian majority and without proletarian political organisation; without a party which stands by the historical programme of left revolutionary communism. The revolution, therefore, is not imminent, and the proletarian vanguard in Greece is still faced with the difficult and long task of trade union and political reorganisation. The fact is it will be necessary, both inside and outside the trade union organisations, to engage with the task of forming groups of workers for the creation of a single trade union front based on class positions; a front prepared to put up an intransigent defence of the general interests of the working class and fight against not only the bosses, the State and the opportunist leaders of the present trade unions, but also the particularist views, and corporative and partial interests, that exist amongst workers.

It will also be necessary for a significant proletarian minority to reconnect with the positions of revolutionary left communism; that current which, during the tempestuous revolutionary decade of the 1920s, during the early years of the Third Communist International and of the Communist Party of Italy, reached its historical apogee, and whose work is continued today by the International Communist Party today.
 
 
 
 
 
 

On 30^th June, a number of public sector and teaching unions called their members out on a one-day strike to protest against the changes to their members’ pensions schemes being proposed by the government; changes that would involve the workers affected paying more, working for longer, and getting less when they retire. The strike is the biggest the country has seen in the last five years and the biggest in the public sector for a generation.

Three teachers unions, the UCU (University and College Union) the NUT (National Union of Teachers) and the ATL (Association of Teachers and lecturers) were involved in the strike, along with the Public and Commercial Services Union, with members in the Job Centres, border controls and passport offices amongst other places.

UNISON, the biggest union in the public sector, didn’t however ballot for industrial action, the reason given being that their leader, Dave Prentice, was chairing the negotiations with the government which were underway at the time and due to be completed on the day of the strike.

These negotiations, supposedly about ‘principles’, will then be followed by further talks, about the various sector-specific pension schemes. A leaked memo from the TUC revealingly indicates that its strategy will be to focus on winning advantages within these various separate sector-specific schemes.

The latter strategy, it goes without saying, will badly undermine the sense of unity that has slowly been building up over past months, and which was evidenced by the range of different workers from different unions and different sectors that went out on strike on the 30^th June, with large numbers showing up for the various processions and rallies throughout the country. The TUC’s strategy indeed nicely complements the government’s own divide and rule tactic, which by way of the usual orchestrated media campaign, using ‘ordinary people’ as its mouthpieces, seeks to pit workers in the private and public sectors against each other by drawing attention to certain (minor) current advantages public sector workers have.

UNISON is talking about balloting its own members for strike action only later in the autumn. As well as relying on the excuse given above, it also explains this delay as due to the difficulties involved in complying with existing legislation. It points out that to call a strike within the bounds of the Law the union has to demonstrate an accurate database and carry out a full ballot of all members affected, a process that can take 17 weeks to complete…

It is certainly true that employers’ have used the courts to undermine ballots by focussing on small procedural errors, and delays were caused as a result in the recent British Airways dispute, and on the Docklands light railway; (where in fact it backfired, and the latter had to pay out £100,000 to the RMT union). UNISON is therefore saying it needs more time to block off some of these loopholes. But the issue is much bigger than this. If government legislation is restricting the field of trade union action (and the government is now talking of making strikes totally illegal in certain ‘key sectors’ – i.e., the underground) then surely there needs to be a vigorous and broad-based campaign against such anti-worker legislation! This would be a great basis for inter-union co-operation, but it simply isn’t happening; and the silence of the unions on the subject one can only interpret as effectively accepting it.

This acceptance is due to the fact that that the trade union movement in Great Britain is pretty much the creature of the Labour Party; and the Labour party is very definitely the creature of capitalism. This is the horrible Gordion knot that needs to be split asunder if the working class is to progress towards protecting its standard of living and working conditions.

The strike on the 30^th although impressive was limited to one day only, notice of which had to be given far in advance to comply with the present legislation and which the authorities could therefore make adequate plans for. The strike’s effectiveness and scope was sabotaged by the biggest public sector union UNISON not going out as well, supposedly because of the ‘important’ role its leader had at the negotiating table, where he sat to discuss ‘principles’ which would form the basis for future ‘talks’, which it looks like will have a extremely divisive effect because they will be about the technicalities of various individual pension schemes.

THIS IS NOT THE WAY FORWARD!

For workers to mount an effective defence against the increasingly violent attacks of the bosses and their political representatives, they will have to rely on a trade union organisation that is prepared to fight on a class basis. How this class union will be built it is difficult to say, but happen it must, either by splits within the present movement or outside and against the trade unions, as is looking increasingly likely.

It will also have to reconnect with its class party, the International Communist Party, and break with its ‘traditional’ support for that horrible life-sapping excrescence that is the Labour Party; which wrecks every working class initiative it comes anywhere near, and whose spell over the working class in Britain will have to be broken before any real progress can be made.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On August 7th, 45,000 workers went on strike against employer Verizon Communications Inc., the global broadband and wireless telecommunications company. Their contract had expired the night previously, and as Verizon continued demands for further painful concessions – including cuts to medical benefits and the loss of pension accrual this year – the workers decided enough was enough. The walkout involved call center workers, repair technicians and FiOS installers from Massachusetts to Virginia. The strike was called by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which represents 35,000 of the strikers, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), which represents 10,000. Coincidentally, this strike was the largest in the US since 74,000 General Motors employees went on strike for two days in 2007.

Specifically, Verizon wants the unionized workers to contribute to their health care premiums to the tune of $1,300 to $3,000 a year for family coverage. Verizon also wants to freeze company contributions to employee pensions, limit sick days to five a year, drop job security provisions and eliminate pensions for future workers.

Despite earning record profits ($27.5 billion in revenue for the second quarter alone), Verizon has been demanding $1 billion in concessions per year, or $20,000 from every worker. This from a company whose top five executives earned $258 million in compensation and bonuses over the last four years.The CEO of Verizon alone earned $18 million in 2010.

Just as could be predicted, the unions involved in the strike have been completely ineffectual, as both union leaderships made it clear that nothing was off the table. And the ridiculous court-imposed injunctions against strikers were not argued by either union, such as, in Pennsylvania, pickets limited to six strikers; and in New York, pickets limited to the number of scabs present at each workplace. (As far as solidarity goes, the major AFL-CIO had nothing to say about the strike.)

As various acts of violence against striking workers by scabs and management began to be noticed, Verizon countered with media reports of service interruptions for their customers, as well as enlisting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate over 90 supposed acts of 'sabotage' by Verizon workers, including cut wires (referred to by the FBI as a "national security" issue). Verizon workers maintained that scare tactics were being used by the company.

Verizon's deadline was August 31st for strikers to return to work or else face the suspension of all health care benefits, and the strike was called off on the 21st.

The 45,000 employees returned to work on August 23rd, without a contract and only the “agreement to restructure bargaining". With nothing achieved, little chance of wildcat actions, and the future of the labor unions looking ever more dire and hopeless, it is high time – indeed it is urgent – for the proletariat to throw all illusions in the capitalist system in the dustbin of history and start anew. A real class union, composed entirely of the proletariat and operating only in their interests, would eliminate all the useless 'bargaining' which benefits the rich and bring the real needs and problems of the working class to the fore, with the means to resolve them. It is also extremely important for the proletariat of the US to adhere to the program of revolutionary Left communism, as embodied by the International Communist Party, the genuine party of the working class.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

As scientifically predicted by Marxist communism, the internal contradictions of the capitalist regime are brining about its ruin.

The present international economic crisis isn’t just financial, but results from over-production. Bankruptcy, debt and speculation are not the causes but the inevitable consequences of the recession and of the historical bankruptcy of capital – which is industrial and financial combined – as a mode of production. The markets are glutted with unsold commodities, many branches of production are cutting production and entire factories are closing down. The number of the unemployed who are often not on welfare benefits, is going up. Capital is finding it more and more difficult to keep its slaves alive.

States throughout the world, both ‘right’ and ‘left’ governments, have intervened to defend the profits of national capital. On the one hand they have forcibly reduced salaries and increased the intensity and duration of the working day, on the other they have accumulated enormous debts with a view to preventing the crisis from coming to a head; a crisis which has already been around for decades and is finally spiralling out of control. The unravelling world crisis has further demonstrated the failure of the profit making regime, both in the form of State capitalism and in its so-called liberal, free-trade incarnation. As the crisis takes hold, the use of the infamous bourgeois myth of Democracy, to disguise the iron Dictatorship of capital over the working class, is becoming increasingly difficult.

Any policy implemented by the bourgeois State is bound to be against the working class. National capitals are indissolubly intertwined with the world market and global finance. To call for these connections to be severed is not only utopian but reactionary. For any government of any State, also those of the big imperialist powers, and for the international finance organisations, the policy on budgets, taxes etc, is imposed from without, by the deterioration of the economic substructure; they have no choice in the matter.

Whether a national bourgeoisies is permitted to have its declaration of bankruptcy postponed, or whether in the end it is forced to accept it, the fact of the matter is, whether it ‘pays’ or ‘doesn’t pay’, that conditions will get worse for the workers if they don’t resist the mounting pressure put on them by the bosses and States with a general, well-organised mobilisation of the class.

The debt – of the bourgeois State to the bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois State to other bourgeois States – is nothing to do with the workers. It is indicative of their agonised and ruinous state, not that of our class. The workers are not oppressed by “debt slavery” but by wage slavery.

It isn’t the job of the working class to advise the bourgeois State how it should bring about an impossible ‘return to economic growth’, but to oppose, with all its strength, the bosses’ attempts to profit from the crisis by increasing its exploitation of the workers, dividing them, and channelling the movement into false channels.

The present crisis, so generalised, deep and irreversible, demonstrates that the capitalist regime has nothing to offer proletarians. They won’t be able to save themselves within the confines of the individual factory, nor of the individual nation. Proletarians have no country. The proletariat can only save itself, and along with it the whole of the world’s oppressed, by re-establishing the unity of its class, first at the national, then on the international scale.

This regime will not collapse due just to its highly evident economic, social and intellectual bankruptcy. If the bourgeois class still manages to retain political power at the State level, if the conscious international action of the revolutionary proletariat and communism doesn’t intervene, humanity will be hurled into a third world war, the only instrument which can allow Capital to regenerate itself through the catastrophic destruction of enormous masses of commodities and human beings.

Today, every bourgeois government, of ‘right’ and of ‘left’, has been impelled by the crisis to impose harsh measures on the labouring class. Tomorrow, faced with its imminent collapse it will try and draw the workers into slaughtering each other in a new war to divide up the global market, but above all, to prevent revolution.

This prediction made by revolutionary communism will be confirmed tomorrow just as the Marxist prediction of the great crisis has been confirmed today, because both are based on the same scientific foundation of Marxism, and of its reading of the historical experience of two centuries of capitalism, of its crises, revolutions and two world wars.

The demand to “not pay the debt” and the struggle “against the bankers’ Europe” doesn’t defend the working class. On the contrary they are slogans which may be useful to a future bourgeois government, decked out in red or black, which has the job of drawing the workers into a war to defend ‘the country’ against the enemy nations.

The real proletarian struggle isn’t against debt but against wage slavery! Workers must once again make the historic demands of the workers’ movement their own:
- Minimum wage for all workers linked to the cost of living;
- The same wage for workers who have lost their jobs;
- Reduction of working hours with wage levels maintained;
- The same working conditions regardless of race, nationality or gender;
- Immigrant workers and their families to have full civil rights.

These demands are ones which all workers have in common, uniting their struggles over and above the religious, racial, sectional and company divides. And it is only on the basis of these demands that a general mobilisation of the class can be built.

These historical demands have been snatched out of the workers’ hands and replaced with ones which divide them and keep them firmly incarcerated within the company prisons, causing them to forget, after decades of the regime trade unionism, what they once stood up for. But whoever calls on the workers today to ‘struggle against the debt’ is just providing a new disguise for this old anti-worker work of opportunism, which remains forever with us!

What is becoming an ever more urgent matter for workers is to re-establish a trade union united front on the basis of these demands, and to call for their unconditional defence, opposed as they are to the interests of the bourgeois national economy and incompatible with capitalism, clearing the way thereby for the reconstitution of a powerful class trade union, outside and against the regime trade unions!

The working class has to relearn how to organise seperately from the dominant enemy classes and apart from the vacillating intermediate strata and their “movements”, because only the working class represents the seed of the future, and has the strength to bring a better future into being. But only a class which is well organised and focussed on its objectives, which employs the strike weapon and not the polling booths, will be able to draw to its side all the boundless expressions of social discontent with capitalism.

For this it is necessary that the political organisation of the proletariat, the International Communist Party – which is the indispensable instrument for keeping alive today the revolutionary communist perspective – is strengthened and expanded, so that it will be able, one day, to lead the proletariat in the struggle to take political power, and embark on the road to the complete communist emancipation of mankind.
 
 
 
 
 
 

As far as Marxism is concerned, to treat the crisis of the European Monetary Union as though it were just an, admittedly severe, regional financial crisis which is being experienced by a group of European States, and which was triggered by the already “technically bankrupt” Greece, this is a reading of the facts and their causes that only does not explain what is happening, but does not even identify the increasing tendency to bring forward ever more extreme solutions to the general crisis that eventually broke out in 2009 in the heart of financial capitalism, the United States of America; a crisis which, having been staunched with the most incredible example of the acquisition of private debt the history of capitalism has ever known by transmuting it into public debt, has dragged on, through its various highs and lows, up to the present day.

The apparent stabilisation in 2010 was accompanied by loud declarations that the crisis was over, that the revival was ‘just around the corner’, that the figures all indicated growth. The finance markets, bringing much comfort to the saver-speculating public, extolled the re-ascent of the stock market figures, previously heavily in the red, as a sign of spectacular growth to come, a growth set at half last year’s increase and defined as “relatively robust” by the president of the European Central Bank. And this was all accompanied by a relentless optimism, and relentless talk about having had a ‘lucky escape’, because the crisis was passing.

But in fact the crisis, not only in its financial but above all in its productive components, is not only far from being over but is clearly and very definitely still with us, even if not in as violent and obvious a form as over the past two years.

Apparently something is different, is manifesting in a different way, and the underlying problems, still totally unresolved, downplayed and brushed under the carpet, are all focalised in Europe, as an expression not just of political unity – by now totally broken down and contradictory – but above all of monetary unity.

It is therefore relevant, in the light of the Greek affair in particular and regarding Europe under the single currency in general, to cast some light on the clash going on in the financial field, which is as ruthless and vicious as if a war was going on, although it hasn’t reached that stage, yet.

From the moment the Euro appeared on the scene it was a potential alternative to the financial might of the Dollar; it was the financial expression of a group of States, crisis ridden and weak as a unitary form, but powerful in terms of future potential and of the sum of the productive capacities of the individual countries belonging to the Union. However, this was a false indicator. As we are seeing now, and as in fact was pointed out at the time, there is an underlying weakness: financial power and political power are not separate from each other but are indissolubly conjoined at State level. This was a well-known fact, and Marxism has no need to disagree. It was said that Europe was an economic giant, which later events would prove wrong, but a political dwarf, which perhaps wasn’t quite correct, at least as far as some of its component States is concerned.

The devastating events of the past two years have shown that only those who can impose their will at a political level can hope to resist for longer by imposing their decisions, their plans on the others. The Europe of the Euro hasn’t had sufficient time to move beyond the phase of monetary to political structuring. With hindsight all are now aware that that is never going to happen and the Utopia of a United States of Europe was, and remains, a petty bourgeois chimera.

Restricted within the orbit of small scale politics, conducted mainly at the national level by the component states, European unity on the monetary level is becoming ever weaker and its future less and less certain.

It seems a long time ago that China, the main holder of the United States public debt, seemed about to shift to investing in the Euro, which appeared, because of the difficulties being faced by the Dollar, as a currency strong enough currency to possibly guarantee the US currency. And this, very broadly, is the central factor in the conflict that is currently underway.

To concentrate on the vicissitudes of the Euro, or of the financial and political disaster of a group of States that have subscribed to the Euro, is however to lose sight of the overall framework of this crisis; which hasn’t shifted from the Western centre of Europe towards the middle, but has simply encountered, during this particular phase, the serious weakness of a monetary form which isn’t supported by a unitary continental State. At the present moment the USA, China, Europe, the emerging States and Russia are each going through the crisis in ways that reflect their own characteristics, and in relation to their respective points of departure when it broke out; but none are unaffected, or can be said to be immune from the consequences.

This umpteenth breakdown is happening in a specifically defined area, and for now it favours the interests of the world’s biggest imperialism, which is keen to draw attention to the Euro’s plight and take every possible advantage to ensure its own supremacy and own survival: even if, or rather especially if, it is at its ‘competitors’ expense.

The pernicious machinery of finance, and especially the banking sector in which the “private” clearly prevails over the collective interest, also concurs in this process. The European banks, due to the great amount of money available, linked to the second mandate consenting to a loan from the FED, have for some time been financing themselves in dollars then exchanging the Dollars for Euros, accumulating liquidity and keeping the exchange rate with the Dollar low: essentially the German, French and English banks this is. The “strong” part of the Euro zone sees this tactic as a way of maintaining a substantial base of monetary liquidity if Greece’s bankruptcy should cause a domino effect throughout the weaker areas. This however causes a weakening on the “home front”, that is, it is the same “strong” Europe’s banking system which is abandoning the European front. The United States currency is kept at a low exchange rate which favours precisely the United States, which stand to gain most if the European plan runs aground.

And yet from a certain point of view the tactic has a definite goal. Clearly global finance is expecting further chaos, maybe another two years of deepening recession: it is compelled to “accumulate munitions” to try and counter the new impending disaster. With financial followed by an economic war being the prospect in view, the weaker partners, Greece followed by the others, all those who would get in the way of mounting an all-out defence, all those likely to succumb in the face with the violent struggle to come, will have to be abandoned. This would sanction the closing down of the European Central Bank, glutted with junk State-bonds, and consequently the ending of the monetary union. A decision along these lines, after a month of doubts, hesitations and initiatives costing billions, is assuming corporeal form despite the ‘policy makers’ mounting a last ditch resistance. It is therefore no accident that the specialised press in Germany, and the great economic theoreticians in the United States, are continuing to ram home the message about the need to let Greece fail, and to put a stop to a European currency “open to all of its States”.

But the bankruptcy of Greece will only be the first act in the shake-up of the financial system.

At the beginning of June, 14 months after Greece’s first official bail-out, with the economic and financial indicators continuing to show a steady decline, the ‘policy makers’ hypothesized getting the French and German banks involved to underwrite a new issue of public bonds, in other words to refinance the Greek debt with a further loan, thus extending the deadline for repayment, and having recourse therefore to “private” intervention – as they like to call it. The European Central Bank doesn’t agree with this scheme: in 2009, after the flaring up of the financial component of the crisis had already shown how much ‘creative’ accounting was going into balancing the public debit, it made major interventions to alleviate the debt situation in Portugal and Ireland; and in 2010 it managed the rescue package for Greece which drained the French and German banks of a major part of their credit to the Greek State.

That first massive payout involved certain conditions which hit the Greek people extremely hard. Wages went down, unemployment went up, growth and investments were drastically reduced. But the debt would still go up instead of going down, and the interventions had clearly worsened the situation.

Also not of much use was the lowering of the rate of interest on repayments of the 2010 loan, and the extension of the repayment deadline – tantamount in itself to a declaration of “semi-bankruptcy”. In the Spring of 2011 another loan would be required. A plan to raise 100 billion Euro, eventually not considered enough, and then 120 billion would be put forward, with the figure hypothetically broken down into 60 billion from the EU and IMF, 30 from “private” sources, and 30 from “privatisations”.

For the ECB, the plan risks generating losses of interest on the 45 billion bought back from the banks.

The decision doesn’t materialise: come the 11th June and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, after a long, awkward and uncertain phase, makes the peremptory assertion that Greece must be “saved” in order to prevent an even worse crisis than the one in 2009 triggered by the failure of Lehman Brothers; a crisis which would spread to the entire global economy, and thus affect Germany as well.

If an economic system, the Greek one, whose gross national product makes up 0.5% of the gross global product, really does threaten, in the case of bankruptcy – that is, the inability to honour its debt, or even just the interest on that debt – to induce a financial crisis like the one in 2008-9, then whoever makes such a claim would either be aiming to induce a panic and destabilisation, and from a head of State this would hardly be expected, or the general conditions of the financial system have really reached the point where an economic system’s sheer magnitude no longer counts when it comes to evaluating systemic risks, in a world that lives and works in a morass of paper symbols and fictitious values. Maybe the pressure of dealing with this worrying and critical situation has given Frau Merkel a glimpse of this terrible truth.

At the end of July these ‘policy’ declarations had once again been overtaken by events, rendered redundant by the European financial crisis. The risk of a collapse will have to be run, which seems inevitable if the rescue package policy is continued.

To alleviate the pressure of the debt – and of the interests on the debt – there is talk, off the record, of a return to the drachma. The effective devaluation which would be the result could restore economic equilibrium by balancing the prices of imports and exports. Even if, we add, it could open up the prospect of a Weimar Republic type scenario: but that would the people’s problem.

It’s just an idea that’s floating around at the moment, and has’nt been contradicted. While other official voices ring out in Europe, financial and economic theoreticians are already starting to examine the prospect of the ending of the Euro as the general currency of the European bloc.

The immediate future for Greece and maybe for other countries in the Eurozone seems marked out. But then it will be the turn of the others, of the “productive” juggernauts, with Germany to the fore, whose “strength” and “integrity”, will be put sorely to the test. In the war that is already underway there won’t be any winners, not even the strong States that are the main influence on the fate of Europe and the World.

There will be no recovery, no salvation because the capitalist crisis will not permit it. Within the capitalist system no means exists, no financial alchemy that can save any country, let alone little Greece, from the precipice of deflation, i.e., devaluation, “spending deficits” and monetary austerity to declare bankrupt whoever can’t honour their debt.

And of course it will be the proletariat throughout the world which will take the brunt of it all; especially if unable to stop another world war, which would temporarily nullify all accounting in a massive bankruptcy-regeneration of the universe of capital.
 
 
 
 
 

Throughout the world, Capitalism’s economic crisis is having a detrimental effect on the working and living conditions of the labouring class. “Let the bosses pay for the crisis” is a nice slogan, but capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism if the ominous effects of this mode of production weren’t borne mainly by the proletariat. Actually the only way the working class won’t end up “paying for” the crisis is by overthrowing capitalism, with which economic crises will cease insofar as their causes will have been addressed. But as long as capitalism survives, the working class can only resist the attacks it constantly suffers – with the mode of capitalist production itself the underlying reason for those attacks – by mounting a defensive struggle. We mean the economic struggle, or if you like the trade union struggle, which, once having attained a certain degree of development and intensity, the quantitative to qualitative leap having been made, becomes a political struggle. Both exist as two, dialectically connected, levels of the class struggle, with the latter superior to the former. The necessary condition for the transition from the working class’s economic to its political struggle is the class party. And the necessary condition for this qualitative leap, although not sufficient in itself, is the class trade union, in whatever form that might take.

The swelling of the ranks of the unemployed – which Marx referred to as the reserve army of labour – puts pressure on the employed workers, forcing them to accept lower salaries. This is determined on the one hand by the constant factory closures, and on the other by the defeatist action of today’s trade unions, which stifle any serious attempt to prepare for a genuine workers’ mobilisation.

It isn’t just by lowering salaries that the exploitation of the workers is increased. Increasing the intensity of work and working hours, for example, with overtime, are other ways. All these methods are described in minute detail in Capital and are daily confirmed in the experience of workers in all countries, yesterday, today and in what remains of the capitalist future.

Clearly for revolutionary communism – Marx’s and ours – the denunciation of “increasing exploitation” doesn’t have a moral value – like for example the petty bourgeoisie who dreams of fair and equitable trade – but a scientific one; it isn’t even just about rallying the class (on a sentimental, pre-scientific, level: we are on the side of the working class), it is rather to indicate the increase in the quota of surplus value that capital needs to try and extract from the workers in order to avoid being inexorably crushed by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – an economic law described by Marxism which condemns capitalism to decline and death.

To the army of unemployed workers, in this first two years of crisis, we add agency workers and those on short contracts as well: the bosses don’t need to sack them; they can just choose not to renew their contracts.

For many workers the crisis has resulted in a drastic reduction in wages.

The Communist Left – the only current in the world workers’ movement which remained faithful to revolutionary Marxism following the sorting-out process of the counter-revolutionary period, and which is represented today by our party alone – has never been so banal as to maintain that there is a mechanical correlation between crisis and class struggle. We have repeatedly shown how the great crises to begin with have generally had a depressing effect on worker’s struggles, due to unemployment and its power to blackmail those still in work. But despite this, the general deterioration of proletarian living conditions is one of the factors which prompt it to return to the path of open class struggle.

The relationship between the worsening of conditions and the return to the solid use of the strike weapon is affected by two key elements: the trade union and the class party. These two distinct organs of the working class are products and factors in this dynamic which is being fought out on a historical and international scale.

If the trade union battle is what we might call defensive, to do with resistance, while the political battle is offensive, the working class finds itself – not just today but for the last thirty years – in a difficult defensive phase. The numerous reports of struggles, triggered by the crisis, which are taking place throughout the world talk mainly of battles confined to particular companies. The workers are resorting to measures which although sometimes extreme nevertheless reveal their weakness, desperation and above all, the impossibility of lining up for a general conflict between the classes, or even of imagining how such a thing could happen.

If, until recently, apathy reigned throughout most of the working class, and there was a general lack of interest in trade union questions, today the workers, hit by the crisis, lack experience, and are therefore easy victims of a great confusion of ideas and the clever traps prepared for them by the career trade unionists in the regime trade unions; as well as being susceptible to the mistakes and naivety of those workers who have placed themselves at the head of the struggles against trade unionist opportunism. In the present state of things al this is serving to prevent, deviate or delay making the fundamental practical step without which the workers’ struggles, even if generous, are destined to fail, that is: unification within a general movement committed to struggle. And this can happen only if the working class equips itself with the necessary instrument to make such a step, namely, a genuine Class Trade Union, which it will have to rebuild outside and against the present regime unions.

The limitations of a struggle fought within a particular company are evident: the workers’ demands cannot go beyond the limits set by what is required to keep the company competitive, for fear of it being closing down or relocating elsewhere, and running the risk of some or all of the workforce being laid off. During phases of economic growth, like the one which ran from the end of the 2nd World War through to 1973, companies were under less pressure from competition and could be forced to make concessions. But competition becomes increasingly fierce during crises, and companies resort to exploiting the labour force as much as they can to stay in business.

The need for unification of the workers’ struggles is daily rejected and obstructed by the unions’ entrenched loyalty to the capitalist regime. Trade unions subjected to the State and the requirements of capital are the main instrument the bourgeoisie uses to weaken and undermine working class combattivity. It is they that take care to bombard the workers with all the ideas and ideological paraphernalia certain to weaken their defensive struggles, and deprive them of a following.

One of their main techniques is to keep each battle isolated and make sure they don’t link up. With this end in view the union avoids identifying itself with the general common objectives of the class and refuses to mobilise its members to fight for them. Even when agitating for goals that seem to be uniting the class, in reality they are working to keep it divided. A case in point is the frequently heard slogan, “stop the sackings”, a demand that tends, as in so many cases, to focus workers’ attention on their own particular company or department, given that it is there where the decision to lay anyone off is made, and if so, who and how many. Also, a firm that is about to close, can it actually avoid sacking its staff? Only by not paying them anything.

To mount a defence during this crisis against the consequences of mass lay offs, the correct class demand for rallying workers is: wages for unemployed workers, and a reduction of working hours with no reduction in wages for employed workers. To achieve these objectives, which alone correspond to the requirements of workers’ defence and which overcome the difficulty that the individual employer in crisis is unable to pay, will involve a sector-wide general struggle, indeed of all sectors and professional categories. The adversary is no longer the particular capitalist productive cell, the firm, where the struggle to defend jobs entails keeping it afloat at any cost, something which is objectively impossible, but now becomes the entire bourgeois class as incarnated in its State, from which is demanded the payment of an unemployment wage.

Naturally that isn’t to say the union shouldn’t also be organising the workers’ struggle at the level of the individual firm as well. But its role should be to organise the whole of a category at least on the national scale and to represent the inescapable necessity of overcoming the barriers of the union struggles fought at the micro level; in order to extend the battle onto the plane of an open and general struggle of all workers for their common demands.

Another way the betrayal in the trade unions manifests itself is the way it tries to prevent different struggles from linking up by downplaying the relationship between the individual crises in each firm and the larger global one, depicting the particular characteristics of the individual firm to the workers as the crucial factor. Thus we have criticism of the boss for not doing his job properly, for not having an effective industrial plan in place, for having incompetent directors for being corrupt, etc, etc. According to this reasoning the salvation of the working class depends on the company’s ‘fitness for purpose’, like it was for the slaves of old, chained to the oars of the galleys. The same reasoning, on the scale of the country, is applied to governments: it is the government’s policy which is aggravating the crisis! But now the crisis has got to the stage of closing factories, this inter-classist, national-company solidarity appears in its most monstrous aspect, and it really needs to be exploded.

Any crisis at company level has its own particularities of course. But what it has in common with all the others is the fact that a part of the workers will be condemned to unemployment, and the ones that are left will have to carry a heavier workload. For this reason the efforts of a true class union should be about providing the material possibility of developing a class identity based on a sense of having the same social interests, and joint mobilisation for genera objectives, which regard all workers as such, not insofar as they are employees of such and such a company. And this because the broader and more united a large strike is, the more effective it is bound to be.

The pro-regime trade-unionists delude the workers that the solution to their problems lies in finding a brilliant entrepreneur to take over the firm, and that is what they should be fighting for! In reality speculative, financial, freebooting capitalism is the legitimate offspring of entrepreneurial and industrial capitalism. Speculation is inherent in the laws of capitalism and has been there since its birth. What makes it increasingly sought after is the growing difficulties involved in getting businesses to invest in production.

These class demands – full salary to unemployed workers and reduction of working hours – are not new; indeed both of them are features of traditional class trade unionism.

Marxist communism’s position on the trade unions has never been one based on generic, superficial extremism, of the “we want everything and we want it now” variety so characteristic of the petty bourgeois and student groupings that infested the margins of the workers’ movement in the 1970s. Certainly our classist slogans don’t have in themselves the magical property of transforming workers from the state of weakness and difficulty in which they find themelves today into a class which is all of sudden strong, united and combattive.

What distinguishes class syndicalism from bourgeois syndicalism is the general plan of struggle. Traditional class trade unionism perceives its ultimate goal as achieving the emancipation of labour; the present regime unionism perceives it as an all-out defence of parliamentary democracy. Everything else is the consequence. If the period between the end of the Second World War and now has resulted in the working class relapsing into its present state of prostration, to the point it has even lost the sense of being a class, this is because the second form of organisation has had success, that of the bourgeois regime, whose aim is to destroy bit by bit any residual class positions within the unions and the proletariat. This incessant work continues today, and will never cease as long as capitalism exists.

Communist intervention amongst the workers doesn’t deny the importance, and the role, of partial and limited struggles such as those occurring today. It means supporting them, but also, when the struggle has reached a degree of intensity that the workers can see what they are facing more clearly, profiting from these battles to point out the need for a larger and broader deployment of forces. It means reminding the class of the general aims of trade union struggle. And the latter must be proposed not as an abstract declaration of principles but as an immediate and necessary goal to be fought for, and for which material preparations need to be made.

With regard to struggles that arise within a particular company, in practice we communists will point out to the workers in particular disputes what we consider to be the least worst directives, but at the same time we will explain how their inherent weakness proves the need to organise themselves in preparation for harder and longer strikes, ultimately arriving at the point where a general strike for class demands once again becomes a possibility.

The correct approach to the trade union struggle is one which aims to prevent the energy expended in partial struggles being entirely exhausted at a purely local level, so it can be used, to a greater or lesser degree, to take a step towards the unification of the worker’s forces, towards an enhanced capacity of the working class to fight its battles.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

As predicted, the economic situation in Greece is getting worse and worse. According to the GSEE trade union, in 2012 the latest government measures will cause unemployment to rise to a massive 30%, meaning more will be unemployed than in work!

Due to the lowering of average income, many are already unable to pay the new tax on property, which is very high (for an old apartment of 55 square meters in a cheap area of Athens it is around 350 euros per annum). Around 90% of Greeks own their own house. If you are unemployed or retired you can try and rent out your property but most of the income will be taken by the State in taxes. Sooner or later many will be forced to sell up in order to survive. Many young people are going abroad to find work, others have started to head back to the country from the city. An overriding sense of melancholy and fear, especially in Athens, is spreading throughout the country and the suicide rate is mounting rapidly. And this is only the beginning.

For years the government has been pushing through a series of measures designed to cut public spending, which it justifies as necessary to obtain a new loan. But of course it is impossible for Greece to reduce the deficit and pay off the debt, and it is sliding further and further into a massive economic depression.

Now even harsher measures, and the placing of the country’s finances directly under the control of the credit institutions, are anticipated. This is seen as the only way of avoiding a declaration of bankruptcy by the Hellenic State, which would impact severely on the system of European finances and in particular the French and German banks, which are in a critical state and risk dragging all of the creditor countries into the abyss.

Therefore, on 3 October, in order to obtain further loans from the ‘troika’, composed of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF, the government initiated a series of new measures which, as always, will hit workers and the petty bourgeoisie. Indeed it has been decided to reduce the threshold of untaxed earnings to 5,000 Euros, and to impose a tax on first houses as well (to be collected via the electricity bill: those who don’t pay get cut off). By the end of the year, 10,000 state employees will have been made redundant and 20,000 more with paid leave set at 60% of basic pay for a year; then if the worker isn’t required to work during this period he is sacked. The aim is to sack 200,000 public employees, both those on short and long-term contracts, by 2015. And not only this, they also want to abolish national contracts and replace them with local agreements.

Obviously such an accord will be of no advantage either to Greek workers or those in other European countries who are paying for the crisis with their lives.
 

The workers’ reaction

The Greek proletariat is responding to this ferocious attack with mass mobilisations and strikes, but finds itself faced with many enemies; not just the bosses and the government but also the opportunist trade unions and parties which have sold out to the class enemy.

On October 5, the GSEE, a trade union which organises public employees and workers in enterprises controlled by the State, called its 24th general strike. Given that 30,000 demonstrators took to the streets, the demonstration in Athens was relatively successful.

On October 19 and 20, another general strike of the public and private sector was called. This time it was for 48 hours and was called by the GSEE, by the ADEDY, which also organises public employees, and by the PAME, the trade union linked to the Stalinist ‘Communist’ Party, the KKE. The aim was to demonstrate outside parliament at the same time as the anti-worker measures instigated by the government on October 3 were being ratified.

These trade unions however do not want to organise the proletariat from a class struggle perspective. Instead they oppose the state and bosses’ attack from a narrowly nationalist, parliamentarist and social-democratic point of view, and as each day goes by they give more and more evidence it is they, in fact, who are the regime’s main instruments used to control and repress the workers’ combativeness.

This was evidenced in the demonstration on 20 October in Athens. Here the demonstration took place in a particularly tense atmosphere because the city council workers had already been out on strike for a week. Indeed the government had earlier resorted to calling in the army to clear up the uncollected rubbish piling up in the streets. More than 150,000 demonstrators turned up in the capital. The government mobilised thousands of policemen and also, yet again, the special forces, the infamous MAT which intervened to break up the demonstration making liberal use of toxic gases; the use of which, incidentally, is forbidden in the international conventions that govern war between states, but evidently allowed when it’s a matter of class war!
 

The open betrayal of the PAME

On October 20, the day of the vote of ratification on the anti-proletarian measures, the PAME trade union, controlled by the KKE, got its militants to occupy the access roads around Parliament. The objectives were to prevent the strikers, gathered in Syntagma Square, from disturbing parliament’s ‘work’, to hold back the furious workers back from the area around Parliament, and to avoid clashes with the police and allowing the parliamentary deputies to have a nice quiet vote.

The leaders of the two main trade unions, the GSEE and the ADEDY, are no longer trusted by the strikers who they can no longer control. Only the organised force of the PAME, which poses as the most radical of the trade unions, was capable of guaranteeing protection to Parliament, which in fact over the last months has often been a target for the demonstrators. Therefore it was only a few anarchist groups, a few hundred people in all, who attacked the PAME activists and fought with the police protecting parliament.

Indeed it is now almost expected that the anarchist groups will attack the police, who then ferociously attack all of the demonstrators and break up the processions. It is similar to what happened in Rome on October 15. Pitch battles then took place between the Stalinists and the anarchists which lasted for hours. When the latter finally managed to break through the line of PAME activists the police attacked, trying to separate the two sides. Just before the vote was due, the PAME moved out of the area in front of the parliament building and the riot police cleared the strikers, now divided and disorganised, from Syntagma Square.

During this intervention a member of the PAME, a builder, died. The leaders of the ‘communist’ party immediately announced he had been killed by the anarchists, and continued to assert this even after the hospital declared that the man had died after a cardiac arrest brought on by exposure to a tear gas canister hurled by the police. Even the right opposition went along with the Stalinist party’s version and congratulated the KKE, the protector of parliament.
 

For the rebirth of the class union, for the strengthening of the revolutionary communist party

Faced with this difficult situation, the parties of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Left as well have called for new elections: this is the classic stratagem deployed by social democratic opportunism to derail the class struggle.

In periods of economic crisis such as the current one, which objectively weaken the working class by subjecting it to the blackmail of unemployment and hunger, it is an ever more pressing necessity to organise the workers in a class union which is genuinely committed to defending the proletariat; a class union outside and against those unions which are clearly hand in glove with the capitalist regime, such as not only the PAME, but also the GSEE and the ADEDY.

The workers’ struggles in Greece over the last two years are yet more evidence that the working class will only be able to protect itself under a decadent capitalism by rediscovering its own unity and strength through action and struggle, and first of all by creating its own class organisations and freeing itself from the opportunist leaders who have sold out to the bosses.

It is also more and more important that the party that lives in the tradition of left revolutionary communism gets stronger; the party, which is the indispensable organ needed to prepare the overthrow of this system of production; a system which continues to sacrifice the lives of millions of proletarians to ensure its survival.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On November 30th an estimated 2 million public sector workers went on strike in Great Britain, making it the biggest protest since the General Strike in 1926. Several of the big public sector unions called out those of its members currently in  a public sector pension scheme to strike against the huge cuts the government is proposing, which involve workers paying more into their pension pots, working longer and receiving less when they retire. Even the headmasters union went on strike, which has never struck before in its entire 150 year existence!

In a classic divide and rule strategy the government has tried to turn private sector workers against public sector workers by portraying the latter as all set up for a comfortable retirement at the expense of taxpaying private sector workers. Thus a lot of the literature distributed at the various protest marches held up and down the country aimed to address this misleading government propaganda by giving figures of what most public sector workers are actually likely to get as pensions, which even before the proposed changes is not very much at all (averaging, very roughly, from around £ 2,500 to £ 5,000). The government, meanwhile, to prove its point, wheeled out as an example of a private sector worker… a cafe owner and a market stall owner!

But where to from here?

The generally reactionary nature of the trade union leadership (forced to call this strike today by the rank-and-file, as expressed organisationally, more or less, by the National Shop Stewards Network, an organisation formed by the RMT transport union in 2006) is being openly discussed but the solutions being put forward to tackle this problem are generally along the lines of reforming the trade unions by increasing democracy in the unions. Thus we read in The Socialist «it is essential that decisions on the struggle are not left in the hands of the national trade union leaders. We demand that trade union members have democratic control of the negotiations at ever stage». There is then a call for «fighting left organisations to struggle to ensure that the trade unions fight in their members’ interests. One demand of such organisations should be for regular elections of full-time officials and for them to be paid no more than a worker’s wage». Furthermore, and not just in The Socialist, there are calls for trade unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party as the latter isn’t a working class party.

The generally reactionary nature of the trade union leadership (forced to call this strike today by the rank-and-file, as expressed organisationally, more or less, by the National Shop Stewards Network, an organisation formed by the RMT transport union in 2006) is being openly discussed but the solutions being put forward to tackle this problem are generally along the lines of reforming the trade unions by increasing democracy in the unions. Thus we read in The Socialist «it is essential that decisions on the struggle are not left in the hands of the national trade union leaders. We demand that trade union members have democratic control of the negotiations at ever stage». There is then a call for «fighting left organisations to struggle to ensure that the trade unions fight in their members’ interests. One demand of such organisations should be for regular elections of full-time officials and for them to be paid no more than a worker’s wage». Furthermore, and not just in The Socialist, there are calls for trade unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party as the latter isn’t a working class party.

Nothing we say will stop adherents of this strategy from seeking to put it in to action, but we hope that the participants in this experiment will monitor its results very closely, because we believe that the Trade union movement in its present form is now so intertwined with the capitalist establishment that attempts to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, and to bring down official’s salaries, are inevitably doomed to failure.

The official unions, and in particular the trade union leaders, are always prepared to put the imaginary unity of ‘the country’ (national capital in other words) before the interests of its members, whose true interests in fact are linked not to the particular ‘national cage’ they happen to find themselves in, but to the international working class.

To truly represent the interests of the working class, the workers’ economic organisations have to become a class union, prepared to go all the way in the defence of their members’ interests and step outside the limits of what is compatible with capitalism. How such a union can emerge from the womb of the present unions it is difficult to see, and it might be that it can only emerge outside and against the official trade unions.

Nevertheless, this magnificent strike already produced, on the following day, a very sudden volte face on the part of the government. After having insultingly dubbed the strike as a ‘damp squib’ the government seems nevertheless suddenly very keen to get around the negotiating table as quickly as possible, and has already promised further concessions and arranged meetings for later the same week.

If the trade union leaders at these negotiations accept anything less than a major climb-down on the part of the government then they will likely have to face considerable anger from their members. Then there will be an opportunity for the new inter-union rank-and-file organisations, which seem to be slowly emerging and flexing their muscles, to show if they really can mount a effective challenge to the leadership or not. But, we must add, any such challenge they mount will only be effective to the degree that they represent a separate class force confronting the trade union leadership, and the bosses; and creating and maintaining this class force will be difficult to maintain without a clear split.

Commenting on Trade union organisation in general, there is a passage in the Communist Manifesto which states «Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers».

That will the main legacy of the November 30 Public sector Workers Strike, and already there is much talk of uniting the struggle with the private sector workers.
 
 
 
 
 
 

The movement currently sweeping across the United States expresses widespread anger toward the big corporations and financial institutions, but thus far, no real demands have been put forward. No solutions. Not even a generic Band-Aid to be applied to the oozing, gaping wound of capitalism!

It started with an ongoing series of demonstrations in New York City based in the Wall Street financial district. The protests were called by activist groups, and have been aimed at economic inequality, corporate greed, political corruption and lobbyists. The slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to the disparity of wealth in the US and elsewhere, where the bulk of the world's money and power is situated in the hands of the richest 1% of the population. Beginning in September 2011, the protests have since spread to nearly a thousand US cities, with hundreds to thousands of participants, with massive media attention and increasing police repression. Donations have kept the movement afloat, and the only sign of major trouble is the rapidly approaching winter weather.

We've all seen the TV news reports, we've all heard the talking heads. But what exactly does the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) want?

According to what has been gleaned from the generally-chaotic din, it is asking for more jobs, more equal wealth distribution, and less corporate influence over government. A kind of "compassionate capitalism". That seems to be the entire message. With polls suggesting over 50% of US voters are viewing the OWS favorably, the two major US capitalist parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have both jumped on board the 'populist OWS bandwagon', further diluting the already impossibly weak brew of lukewarm anger the leaders of the OWS movement have been ladeling out.

Many of the protesters think this more compassionate capitalism will be obtainable by exerting moral pressure: if the capitalists are made to feel guilty for their selfish and greedy behaviour they might be persuaded ‘to share’, rather like infants in a kinder garden. In fact the capitalists have been quite happy to shift the debate onto this terrain, and to provide us with role models from among the ‘great men’ of capitalist philanthropy such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. Thus it is no coincidence that we see stepping forward as valiant defender of the protesters (and capitalists), and hero of the hour, none other than... Bill Gates!

If the predominant voice emerging from the OWS movement is that capitalism needs to be purged of its most blatantly corrupt elements, and made ‘more caring’, hopefully once these protesters have been forcibly dragged off the streets by the police, and the authorities have finished ostentatiously spraying disinfectant on the pavements where they were previously encamped, some of them will end up believing instead that ‘the 1%’ needs to be overthrown rather than ‘guilt tripped’ into being more caring and sharing to ‘the 99%’!

Hopefully the protestors will eventually come to see that capitalism is now a corpse that walks and has had its day, and the only discussion worth having is about how its grave diggers, the working class, will accomplish their historical task of burying it.

Obviously it is a case of an inter-classist movement. One of its leaders writes: “We must strengthen the Occupy movement by allying it with the workers and the trade unions, with migrants, students, unemployed, homeless, communities of resistance and religious groups”. What possible coherence could be given to any political directive that includes all these groups, classes and ideologies? It is another broad “front” which has as its common basis only idolatry of democracy, a fetish which none dare question. Occupy is neither an economic movement nor a political one but is a confused, and confusing, mixture of both. It is an inter-classist movement, and along with the inevitable anarchists, preaching their indiscriminate and disabling message of opposition to all organization, we find also liberal, petty bourgeois and Christian socialist elements, all vying with each other to gain recruits to their various causes; and all of them having the effect of throwing genuine class fighters off course.
 

On 18 November, Occupy Oakland, following an initiative launched by Occupy Los Angeles, proclaimed

«the blockade and interruption of the economic apparatus managed by the 1% through the co-ordinated closure of the ports of the entire West Coast, fixed for 12 December. The 1% have devastated the lives of the lorry drivers, dockers and workers who create their wealth, just as attacks by the police co-ordinated on a national scale have transformed our cities into battlefields in the attempt to destroy our occupation movement. We invite each occupation of the West Coast to organise a mass mobilisation to blockade their local port. Union-busting needs to be attentively monitored, in particular the breaking of the contract with the dockers by EGT at Longview Washington. Occupy Los Angeles has already approved a resolution to take action in the port of Los Angeles on 12 December to close the terminals of SSA, which are the property of Goldman Sachs.
«Occupy Oakland extends this invitation to the entire West Coast, and calls for continuous solidarity with the dockers of Longview Washington in their ongoing struggle with EGT (...) During the general strike of 2 November, tens of thousands of people blockaded the port of Oakland to persuade EGT they need to stop their attacks on the Longview workers. Given that EGT has ignored this message, and continues to attack the dockers, we will now close the ports of the entire West Coast».

The organising body of this local general strike was a general assembly of workers. No credit can at all be laid at the door of the big central unions. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win, an alternative coalition of trade unions formed in 2005, immediately tried to boycott the strike by invoking anti-strike laws which they themselves had underwritten in the contracts of the individual categories. They were also quick to invoke the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 which, along with numerous additional add-ons at local state and federal level, effectively bans general strikes and sets out severe penalties; and which, it is worth mentioning, the big unions have launched no major campaign to oppose... But once important teachers’ and dockers Locals had declared their support for the strike (although not going out themselves), the big unions climbed down and decided against a frontal attack. Only the small but historic IWW and the dockers’ Local 10, previously participants of the blockade of ships carrying armaments destined for the troops in Iraq in 2003, actively organised the strike in the places of work.

The subsequent blockade of the ports on December 12 involved marches and protests in ports along the entire West Coast from San Diego to Portland, and up to Anchorage in Alaska, but participation was low. Only In Portland and Oakland did the blockade have any real success, again receiving support from the local sections of the dockers’ union (ILWU) but not from union bosses. Indeed Robert McElrath, the national secretary of the ILWU, appearing to sense his position threatened, was quick to denounce “the attempt of external groups who by putting forward their political demands are co-opting out struggle”.

Other union spokesman then tried to sow divisions by pointing to the Occupy movement as responsible for ILWU members losing a days work, ironically thereby also appearing to support the non-unionised and self-employed lorry drivers, also up in arms about having lost work.

There is now talk about another big strike on May 1st of 2012.
 

If capitalism is to be overthrown there needs to be a clear vision of the road ahead and how it is to be reached. Any struggle that doesn’t know how to acknowledge the lessons of past struggles will fail. They teach that the working class army which will eventually overthrow capitalism will crystallise around practical demands in the realm of the economic struggle and will assume the form of class based trade union organisations. This army, to be effective, will need to be led by its international class party; a party which traces its history back to the middle of the 19th century and is the repository of the political experience of the working class movement.

Only the Communist Party is conscious of the historic role of the working class as the natural and material opponent of capitalism. The latter can no longer offer up any further concessions to the class it exploits, whose labour produces everything; a class quite capable of effectively organising its economic life without capitalists, for it is now very evident that the latter’s much vaunted and highly rewarded ‘organisational expertise’ is severely lacking; an ‘expertise’ which in fact is nothing more than a rationalisation of their position as exploiters; a parasite’s rationalisation.

Only the working class, or rather, the proletariat, a historical and dynamic term rather than a sociological one, can directly challenge this parasitism with its revolutionary movement, once it has rediscovered its original and intransigent political programme, which was already fully articulated back in 1848.

The American working class has spilled much blood in the past and has a long history of confronting a particularly ruthless, brutal and blatantly exploitative national capitalism, has shed much blood for in the past. Now it must rediscover its proud tradition of class struggle, its political organisation, the International Communist Party; a rediscovery that will be made in a country where communism has, perhaps more than in any other, been correctly identified as capitalism’s enemy number one!