WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY – The line running from Marx to Lenin to the foundation of the Third International and the birth of the Communist Party of Italy in Leghorn (Livorno) 1921, and from there to the struggle of the Italian Communist Left against the degeneration in Moscow and to the rejection of popular fronts and coalition of resistance groups – The tough work of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and the party organ, in contact with the working class, outside the realm of personal politics and electoralist manoevrings
Threats of Trade Tariffs
Already Deny the Bourgeois Illusions of War-Free Imperialism
Among the many terrible wars raging on the outskirts of the capitalist
bastions, with the bloody succession of ruins, nameless massacres and
desperate refugees, it seems that capitalism is giving us a new one,
perhaps no less bloody and harbinger of terrible consequences: the slowing
down, if not the end, of the timid but promising economic recovery, which
until now has gladdened politicians and capitalists.
Capitalism, which has been plunging since 2008 into its
longest known recession, was finally recovering, but now a reckless, they
say, elected to be in charge of the most powerful empire, by means of its
improvident outbursts and political and economic decisions, would threaten
that virtuous path. It is the end of commercial freedom, the end of a
praiseworthy globalisation, which would have allowed everyone to prosper.
It is the trade war, a war fought with the use of duties. In fact the
reasons taken to justify this tightening on the free transit of goods have
a foundation indeed. If we look at the figures of trade balances between
the United States of America and its main world counterparts, it is clear
that there is a systematic imbalance between import and export volumes;
commercially, the US economy is in a significant deficit with all of them.
Of a very different weight compared to the deficit of the
Balance of Trade, at least in the long term, it is the
enormous
and growing volume of public debt, the financial situation
towards the rest of the world, which finances the great empire through the
purchase of American Treasury Bonds. However, the US administration does
not take care of this endemic dynamic, on the contrary it practices it
with absolute continuity.
But that is another matter.
Here we are not talking about capital but about goods, tangible things
that circulate across the borders of states, and must realize the surplus
value crystallized in them.
This “trade war” actually
includes several aspects, and is not only limited to the expectation of
limiting the dynamic of a growing deficit, taken as an excuse for the
opening of commercial hostilities. The USA, the world’s largest global
exporter, is also the largest importer. At the end of 2017 (data from the
U.S. Census Bureau), China, Canada and Mexico, in this descending order,
have an import-export volume with the USA of 630, 582 and 557 billion
dollars respectively, and involve a negative balance for the USA of 505.6,
300 and 314 billion dollars.
China, the economy with the
largest volume of trade compared to 130 billion imports from the United
States, exports 505.6. Japan imports 67.7 and exports 204.2, while
Germany, South Korea, the United Kingdom, France, India and Italy limit
themselves to positive double-digit trade balances: Germany imports 53.5
billion and exports 136.5, Italy 50.0 against 68.3.
The strongest imperialism
appears therefore on the world stage as the leading importer of goods and
the leading exporter of capital. And it is no coincidence that the Asian
giant, which holds the largest volume of both commercial assets and US
government debt, matches it in both positions.
These are the irrefutable
numbers that have given formal justification to the American decisions to
introduce import-limiting customs tariffs in order to constitute
"anti-dumping" barriers.
However it is to be seen to
whom, on what products and to what extent, because these aggregated trade
balances do not show the situation by type of goods. If, for the moment,
the reason for the clash would mainly be related to steel and aluminium,
the American "retaliations" could extend to other product categories: from
cars to semiconductors, thus constituting a serious problem for some
capitalisms of Europe and of the Far East.
In a real trade war, the weakest
economies can only lose out. It is enough to consider that Germany, France
and the United Kingdom have export-based economies, unlike the USA, which
exports a small part of its GDP (12%), to realize that the main problem
would be for these States, rather than for those who have announced the
restrictions with great pomp. But to believe that the protectionist shift,
however agitated and only partially applied, can in some way contribute
not to cancel but only to reduce the enormous American trade deficit is an
unfounded idea. And not for the possibility of "counter-tariffs" that the
interested States could apply towards the USA. Because the trade deficit
of the superpower is innate to its productive dimensions, to its financial
power, to the strength of its currency which is, at least until today, the
reference for every kind of transaction. Therefore, the measures, which
have not yet been followed up consequently, will have little real effect.
And in particular on saving those
jobs that, according to the demagoguery of the rulers on duty, would be
put at risk by the imported products.
Obviously, we
Communists understand well that the American impositions, which seem to
blatantly violate the foundations of the "free market" and the much
adored "globalization", in the name of which the imperialist
brigands compete for market dominance, do not have a trade basis such as
the reduction of the deficit, but a political and strategic one.
Nevertheless speaking of "war" in general at this stage
sounds more like a catch phrase than like a real fact. Although every war
begins by looking for allies; and the threat to the productive
capabilities of allies and vassals in NATO or SEAT, and of rivals such as
Russia and China, is one of the tools in this strategic readjustment.
One objective is that the European Union, and in
particular Germany, take restrictive measures against Russia and China.
The containment, if not even blocking, of gas sales made by Russia would
play a strategic role for the US. For Europe, where Germany, the eighth
supplier of steel to the USA, is leading, another American objective is to
make the rebellious NATO allies bear the cost of common defence and to
disjoin a laborious Union that already tends to crumble on its own. It is
necessary to realign the allies on a military level, continuing the
imperialist policy as it is developing in this millennium, breaking an
alliance that would place them isolated from the overseas dominus.
For their part, Mexico and Canada are involved in the
revision of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Treaty, and the threat of
tariffs plays its part in a Leonine contract as the United States has in
mind.
It is certain that the war will really have to start
sooner or later, initially on the trade front, and will certainly be to
the detriment of countries whose economy and trade are threatened with
duties, including China. Even if today, in fact, after an initial phase of
protests, the positions of all the contenders have softened and
negotiations have discreetly resumed.
The indications of this “unilteral decision”, which seems
to cancel out the very basis of the fake globalisation and is articulated
on different but competing levels, are clear.
First of all, they mark another of our theoretical
victory: finally, they are clearing the field of any infringement of
mediations that would guarantee perpetual peace between the imperialist
robbers, whose huge production of goods will never be able to compensate
for, even in a global market without constraints and tariffs.
Secondly because they show what the level of friction
between the imperial blocs is at the moment and how the effects of the
ten-year capitalist crisis are pushing the States towards a future,
perhaps not too far away, conflict unfolded. This new and further step
towards war does not come unexpectedly to us. We knew that imperial
monsters could in no way "co-exist", not even commercially, from the dawn
of our doctrine, even though the dream of "reasonable" capitalism, of
"fair and honest" trade, of "virtuous" competition, continues to guide the
illusions of the small bourgeoisie, and ultimate shame, of the proletarian
drunkenness of democracy and of bourgeois "honesty". As if the evil of
capitalism were "dishonesty", fraud, and robbery.
Therefore, we welcome these ferocious, contemptuous
decisions of the strongest towards the weakest. The class rebound also
passes from here.
Trump’s attack on Syria,
coordinated with Britain and France, has claimed to have been in the
interest of the Syrian people and the world, by targeting chemical
weapons.
This is a lie, the interest is of capital. Any threat of
war or the continuation of war by the bourgeoisie is a threat to the
proletariat, not to a nation or to a Constitution. The Constitutions of
the ruling class, once a document defending chattel slavery, now defend
wage slavery and the trade of the proletarian workforce. The proletariat
must unite and organize against these attacks, the Syrian bombings, along
with other wars of profits, have been a continuous crime against the
working class world wide.
As shown by Lenin two years before the First World War,
which he branded as imperialist, the only correct action against any wars
of imperialism is to unite the proletariat against the bourgeoisie sending
them to their deaths.
“The conversion of the present imperialist war into a
civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan, one that follows from
the experience of the Commune, and outlined in the Basle resolution
(1912); it has been dictated by all the conditions of an imperialist war
between highly developed bourgeois countries".
The tactics laid out by Lenin in response to WWI are as
follows:
“The following should be indicated as the first steps
towards converting the present imperialist war into a civil war:
an absolute refusal to vote for war credits, and resignation from bourgeois governments;
a complete break with the policy of a "class truce" (bloc national, Burgfrieden);
formation of an underground organisation wherever the governments and the bourgeoisie abolish constitutional liberties by introducing martial law;
support for fraternisation between soldiers of the belligerent nations, in the trenches and on battlefields in general;
support for every kind of revolutionary mass action by the proletariat in general".
While we are not yet in the condition to know when a third war such as that will break
out, the never ending minor wars have certainly provided relief to
capital’s crises. However, the conditions of the capitalist world keep
worsening, after the growth that followed WW2, paid with proletarian
sweat and blood. As expanded by Marx in Capital,
capitalism imposes surplus production in order to keep appropriating
surplus value, which leads to the destruction of men and of the world.
For capitalism to produce surplus a surplus population is necessary.
Although there is enough food and housing for us all, there must be
starving people, there must be homeless people. There must be
unemployed, to act as a reserve to force wages down.
The Liberals and Progressives that make up the Democratic
Party, have also an interest in war, even when occasionally they oppose
specific actions, like the recent one in Syria, because they are all
agents of capital.
It was the Democrats, for instance, to organize the
destabilization of Syria, wishing to oust Assad and defend “democracy” and
“moderate rebels”. Meantime the US allies in the region, particularly
Saudi Arabia, a capitalist state which maintains a feudal structure, have
brutally repressed Middle East and North Africa proletarians.
Kuwait for instance, was encouraged by the US and Saudi
Arabia to side drill into Iraqi oil fields, and overproduce oil past the
agreed OPEC quotas. Saddam asked what would the US do in response to an
invasion of Kuwait, which the Pentagon replied with ambivalence, which in
diplomatic terms is the same as a go ahead. Then, knowing Saddam would not
respond to UN ordering withdrawal of Iraqi troops, the US lead a coalition
to “save democracy”, ignoring the simple and readily accessible fact that
Kuwait was an absolute monarchy.
The nature of capital is seeking constant expansion to
lessen its tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The technicalities are
not necessary here. The destruction of Kuwait and Iraq provided capital
room to expand. This phenomena was most evident after the two Imperialist
wars, where for instance the US had massive economic booms in the 1920s
and 1950s, as destruction was unequaled, and the death of the proletariat
and destruction of capital and commodities provided ample room to grow in
formerly oversaturated markets. The war policies of the US are completely
resulting from this. From Korea, to Vietnam, to civil wars in Africa and
South and Central America, destruction brings profits, and arms
manufacturers expand.
Saddam was less than cooperative than what was hoped
after the First Gulf War. Following 9/11, which was partly responsible for
mid ranked Saudi officials, the US immediately invaded Afghanistan, a
proposal that Democrats voted for.
Rebuilding the World Trade Center turned a profit as
well, while the workers, firefighters, and rescue volunteers were to
suffer lung disease and cancer without any aid from the government. The
priorities of the government was elsewhere, and the government passed acts
to limit anti-war expressions.
Then, the War on Terror started. It is often joked about
that you can’t win a war against a concept, such as the “War on Poverty”
or “War on Drugs”. These wars aren’t meant to be “won”, but to run a
profit. From the turning overhead costs of education and healthcare into
commodity capital; to acquiring slave labor in prisons, destroying
countries to civil wars and coups, and actually selling drugs (like the
CIA did).
The war on terror is the same. Para-military
corporations, arms manufacturers, infrastructure firms, oil companies and
oil miners, private contractors, etc. all make profits off young men and
women forced to kill, and who come back with the mental and physical scars
of war, if they come back at all.
Iraq in particular had a lot of oil, and would provide a
pipeline route, reducing overhead costs in transportation. The Democrats
(including Clinton) and Republicans coordinated to raise profits through
the spilling of blood of hundreds of thousands, a process still continuing
and issues given lip service by the “brave” anti-war Democrats with the
situation in Syria.
The expansion of the drone program under Obama is also
telling. The costs of taking care of soldiers and their families when they
suffer is not only an overhead cost capital wishes to eliminate, but is
also bad publicity. Drone manufacturers make their profit, and other
corporations will expand into the burned and leveled homes of the
innocent. Drones reduce overhead costs of transportation and maintenance
of the living soldiers. As with all things, capital’s inorganic part grows
faster than its organic part, and the reset is needed every so often to
combat the trend of rate of profit falling.
So is the case in every country the US invaded. Syria is
in the same position. While not having much oil, it would provide a route
for an oil pipeline, further reducing overhead costs. What better way to
abuse the proletariat than to throw alleged support to one “rebel group”,
giving Assad legitimacy in crushing his opposition brutally (Assad is to
be fully opposed as the enemy of the working class, along with all leaders
of all states and their lackeys), and the use “illegal means of killing”
provides legitimacy in invasion. It matters not which side used chemical
warfare, the inter-bourgeoisie struggle of the US capital and Russian
capital in Syria does nothing but slaughter the proletariat, leave
families aching at the loss of their loved ones, and many more fleeing to
better places.
These better
places treat them with contempt and open arms at the same time. There
are two forces of capital at work: contempt by the petty bourgeoisie,
open arms by liberal capital and liberal petit-bourgeois. Migrants and
refugees provide cheap source of labour-power to exploit. This is why
Starbucks, Chobani, and Walmart for instance are taking the “brave and
righteous stand against racism, xenophobia, and bigotry”. Who else
would be less able to demand better working conditions and wages than
people who come out of a warzone? First bomb and destroy their homes,
then pretend to bother about their welfare. They need democracy, after
all, and this is democracy!
This caring is best shown when Obama deported 600,000
people from the US, then proceeding to show any inclination of a heart
when children made dangerous journeys on foot to America.
If a section of capitalists allows protection of the
worst paid, it does so only to avoid the competition taking advance of it.
This trend is also hundreds of years old, for instance when one group of
capitalists in Great Britain in the 1840-50s had to limit child labor,
this was the same group of capital that forced the restrictions on all
other domestic industries. There was, and is, an unspoken agreement to
continue to exploit children in poorer areas of the world, and to
constantly undermine attempts to limit child labor there.
Let it also be known that more exploitative conditions,
such as slavery, have recently experienced a rapid spike, thanks to
Obama’s intervention in Libya. A remarkable achievement for our first
black president, the re-emergence of the slave trade in North Africa!
We’re guessing this wasn’t the Change and Hope slogans weren’t meant for
the people being beaten and malnourished in slavery, unless the Change was
from an already bad situation to an even worse one!
Let it be known that no state or democratic posturing is
in the interest of the proletariat. Democracy is a trap in which any
petit-bourgeois and bourgeois reforms are made to seem wanted by the
“people”, and the promised economic growth would be to the benefit of all
classes. Even the war would be fought and won by the whole society, and
all classes would be benefited by it. Society in its entirety would
periodically decide its own destruction and oppression, as a matter of
fact always to the advantage of the top classes.
We wish to destroy this society that causes so much
destruction and suffering, so that we can finally live in a human society.
One where there is no class of people to sell their labor-power to earn
their survival, while the capitalist class profits off unpaid, alienating
labor.
There is no interest of the proletariat in any political
party inside any Congress or Parliament or Diet or in any President or
Prime Minister or whichever agent of capital puts on a smile in a suit or
a dress or a pant suit or in casual wear. The interest of the proletariat
is the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and their lackeys. For
only a war of liberation of the proletarian class can end all wars. This
is to be done with the coordination of the proletariat’s class party, the
Communist Party, able to rally the proletarian class and the deserters
from other classes.
The conditions of organization of the proletariat are in
a very poor state. This is why to all haters of the current society we say
that we must support the rebirth of local labor organizations, both
against the immediate boss and the class of the bosses; coordinate with
other labor organizations and break with labor organizations that
irreversibly betrayed workers interests. Defy all limitations on ability
to strike and negotiate, including if it is illegal for you to strike.
The communist workers will inform and help organize local
struggles, in view to restore proletarian class unity.
Thus organized, in its party and in its unions, the
working class can once again make immediate economic demands to the bosses
and to the states.
In such a situation the proletariat will be in a position
to turn any wars of imperialism into civil wars, in which the workers and
all the oppressed can overthrow, forever and internationally, the power of
its enemies and oppressors.
Behind the Farce of the 19th Congress of the Chinese "Communist" Party The Power and the Frailty of a Great Imperialist Country
Comments in the bourgeois press on the 19th Congress of
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) all agree when it comes to praising the
confirmation of President Xi Jinping, being anointed as the third most
powerful president of the People’s Republic after Mao Zedong and Deng
Xiaoping. Even a stuffy review like The Economist dedicated its
cover to the "most powerful man in the world".
Once again, an impotent
bourgeoisie feels the need to dream about great leaders. Without
having to make any political distinctions, everybody agrees about giving
importance to the efforts and personal qualities of Presidents and Prime
Ministers in influencing both past and future events. Indeed, for the
bourgeoisie and its hack writers, the progression of history is governed
by brilliant leaders, deceitful or thoughtful in turn. And the hacks get
all excited and fawning in reverent admiration for some personality, who,
in reality, is pretty trivial. The more capitalist society rots, the more
spreads the religious belief that from the great and powerful we can
expect either salvation or doom. According to this belief, history is
determined by "men of destiny" and by their comings and goings at the
world’s capitals, either in the American, the Russian or the Chinese way.
Our Italian comrades would call these ’great leaders’ a
bunch of ’battilocchi’. A “battilocchio” is a lad who strives for
attention while displaying his own utter emptiness at the same time.
Marxism has always questioned the role of individuals in social processes
and in particular the role of great personalities. Engels wrote: "for a
great man to be born in a certain age and place, naturally is a sheer
accident. But, if we dispose of them, the demand for a substitute
immediately takes place; and without much further ado, that substitute
will be eventually found". Marxism recognizes the authentic engine of
History in the economic material necessities of the classes, in the
context of a given production process and their social struggle.
It’s these circumstances which require the arrival and
success of certain individuals. It is history which plays with these
supposed ’superhumans’, not them with it.
Almost a century ago, in 1924, we asserted that "our
theory of leadership is far away from all the idiocies with which
theologies and official politics prove the need of popes, kings, "first
citizens", dictators, Duces, all poor puppets who deceive themselves in
believing they are making history".
So it’s obviously for the sake of Chinese capitalism that
Xi Jinping’s "political vision" has been added to the Party’s
Constitution; a privilege that up till now has been reserved for Mao
Zedong. In 1997 "Deng Xiaoping’s theory" was introduced in the
Constitution of the Party, though Deng Xiaoping was already dead. From a Marxist point of
view, Mao, Deng and now Xi, who are being celebrated as "great helmsmen",
are only representatives of three different periods of the national
history of China.
From Mao to Deng, National Independence and Capitalist Development
As a result of the impositions of the imperialist States,
which pushed themselves to engaging the shameful Opium Wars, China, which
is now characterizing itself as a world-scale capitalistic power, thus
capable of sustaining a competition with the old powers which came to
their own status by centuries. was in a miserable state at the beginning
of the 20th Century.
Unlike India and other colonial countries, China entered
modern history as "everybody’s colony". Soon the export of capital to
China prevailed over that of industrial products. To protect their
investments, the great powers agreed to partition the country into spheres
of influence In Beijing, the foreign diplomatic corps controlled the
Chinese state’s finances.
The imperialistic rule, that firstly weakened the
imperial dynasty and ended up eliminating it completely, produced in China
the dismembering of its land. Indeed, without a centralized power, it
ended up under the rule of the so called warlords, that is the military
leaders, paid by the imperialistic powers, who detained the rule through
the use of mercenary armies made up of landless peasants. A warlord’s
regional control corresponded to the sphere of influence of the country
which aid them.
The warlords protected the interests of imperialism and
the foreign backed bourgeoisie by exploiting the proletariat of both the
cities and the countryside and by taking control over the country’s
wealth.
The weak national bourgeoisie, while being conscious
about the need to get rid of imperialist oppression and reestablish
national unity, lacked the needed strength to achieve its aims.
China in the early 1900s was fraught with bourgeois
revolution. Ahead of it was not only the the essential task of gaining
national independence, but also enacting agrarian reforms – a precondition
of for industrial development. Although it was unclear if such a task
would need to be carried out by the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
In 1911, a top down revolution had overthrown the
imperial dynasty and established a bourgeois republic under the presidency
of Sun Yat-sen. Soon an inconsistency emerged: The newborn republic was
immediately killed off by the interference of warlords. The warlords were
encouraged by the bourgeoisie itself, proving that class to be incapable
of fulfilling even the tasks of its own revolution.
This principally in the fear of not being able to control
the powerful forces of the proletariat and the peasants, since a
revolutionary process would have inevitably set these forces in motion. So
the Chinese bourgeoisie was in conflict with the warlords, but was also
tied to them for the sake of repressing the proletarian movement. And in
1911 Sun Yat-sen, President of the Republic, passed over his government’s
power to the regional warlords. It was clear, as in Russia, that the
national bourgeoisie, with its own forces, would have not been capable of
leading its revolution to success.
In the meantime a new fact began to have a decisive
influence over world events. World War One caused the outbreak of the
Russian revolution. The proletarian victory in October 1917 shocked the
world. Each country having to make a choice: revolutionary communism or
bourgeois counter-revolution. The strategy of the Communist International
theses on the colonial question was to connect class struggle in the main
capitalist countries with the national revolutions going on in the
colonies. Such a world strategy would have put communist Russia at the
revolutionary epicenter, which in a complex cycle, which would have ended
up overthrowing capitalism worldwide.
Just like in Russia, the working class, in alliance with
the peasants, ripped off their chains – that is the chains of capitalist
and landlord power – and put an end to an imperialist war. While in the
west, proletarian revolution was on the agenda, in the backward countries,
such as China, a struggle for a double revolution, guided by the
communists in the form of a soviet regime, was not only feasible, but
proper in the point of view of revolutionary communism.
The emergence of Stalinism, and the overthrowing within
the proletariat’s own power in Russia put this perspective to an end. A
triumphant worldwide counter-revolution, especially in Russia, handed the
Chinese proletariat to the bourgeoisie.
Stalinism stood as a dominant force in Russia and the
International during the period of 1923 to 1927. The Chinese Communist
Party was forced to kowtow to the bourgeois Chinese nationalist party, the
Kuomintang. The CPC had lost any chance of the independent struggle needed
for a revolutionary victory.
The giant revolutionary efforts of the Chinese workers
and peasants were drowned in blood. The tragic epilogue turned out to be
in year 1927. In March of that year, the particularly numerous and
combative proletariat of Shanghai (the most important industrial and port
city in China) rose up and took over the city. For the dominant position
Shanghai had in China’s economic life and for the recent developments in
the revolutionary workers and peasants movement, this episode could have
given the Chinese revolution a totally anti-bourgeois direction. Instead,
the Communist Party and the working class organizations who were in power
submitted to Moscow’s guidance and handed over their rule to Chiang
Kai-shek, who not long after broke his alliance with the communists and
turned to full repression, imprisoning and mass killing communists and
workers, destroying both their trade unions and their political
organizations. The Shanghai massacre was only the first of many more
massacres that took the working class and the peasants down.
The year 1927 stands for the victory of
counter-revolution and the defeat of the revolutionary proletarian
movement in China.
A revolutionary movement shall come back to life only
after the second world war, starting with the most backward and rural
areas of China, with a completely different class characterization, being
nationalist and anti-imperialist, yet not communist.
It was from those regions that Mao’s peasant armies ran
rampant and conquered the towns. The following events and the character of
the Chinese revolution itself that made China in 1949 turn into an
independent nation, can only be explained under the light of the tragic
facts that happened in the 20s. The defeat of the Chinese proletariat and
the repression it had to face, helped the shifting of the revolutionary
movement from the towns to the countryside and the full overturning of its
character from a class point of view.
The following revolutionary movement in China featured a
completely absent proletariat and may be considered to be a petit
bourgeois-peasant movement, enclosed in the frame of its national
revolution. The party in the lead of this movement at the time,
notwithstanding it continued to label itself Communist Party, didn’t have
any more features to qualify as one: in its own words, it became the
"authentic Kuomintang", or conversely, the authentic representation of the
interests of the bourgeoisie and the small Chinese nationalist
bourgeoisie. The social constituent basis of the CPC was composed by
peasants and their main purpose became the achievement of the national
unity and independence, not for the sake of the proletarian dictatorship,
but of the ’Four classes’ block’, in other words of the bourgeois-driven
development.
Even if we define Mao’s party as reactionary for having
forsaken the tactic of the double revolution and the main line that would
have brought to the proletariat’s historical affirmation, the final
victory of CPC on the Kuomintang, and the installation of the People’s
Republic of China, has represented an essential step from the point of
view of the installation of the modern capitalism. It in turn has, through
a long and tormented process, allowed the humongous development of Chinese
economy, and therefore the rising of a modern proletariat, clustered and
powerful, which is the forthcoming terminator of bourgeois society.
Since its own beginning, the Chinese national revolution
had to fulfil its historical goal of developing capitalism, facilitate
commerce and the industrialization of the whole enormous country, since
then dominated by an unbounded and backward rural world.
Even though traitors and counterfeiters had announced the
"construction of socialism" in China and in other places, our Party has
always countered that such "socialism" only meant a further accumulation
of capital and the extending of market economy.
Anyhow we underlined the great historical significance of
those events, and the figure of Mao was a part of this great historical
process. "Mao’s thought" wasn’t other than the expression of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution in China and the worldwide
anti-proletarian counter-revolution.
The national unification was a necessary material
precondition of the process of accumulation of capital in China, for the
making of a domestic market between the towns to trade and the
countryside, the development of capitalistic economic relations based on
waged labour and its associated work and mechanization, in the real
perspective of a proper process of industrialization.
Mao’s economic program consisted essentially in
nationalizing big companies and banks and actuating the agrarian reform.
In spite of Mao’s verbal extremism, that was so passionate about a so
called Chinese road to socialism, skipping the capitalist phase, its
program was pretty much exactly a democratic-bourgeois revolutionary
program. The Maoist program differed slightly to the Kuomintang’s, having
added to Sun Yat-sen’s "Three People’s Principles" – i.e. nationalism
(Mínzú Zhǔyì), democracy (Mínquán Zhǔyì) and people’s wealth (Mínshēng
Zhǔyì) – some other measures such as the eight-hour working day and a
agrarian reform defined as "radical".
The
Agrarian Reform
Indeed, the first important act of the Chinese Popular
Republic was the Agrarian Reform Law of June 1950. This reform was
perfectly compatible with the bourgeois regime. We may cite the first
article just to leave no doubt about it: "the system of peasant land
ownership shall be introduced in order to set free the rural productive
forces, develop agricultural production, and thus pave the way for new
China’s industrialisation".
At first the reform seamed to realize the millenial dream
for a egalitarian repartition of the farmland. The new Law ensured each
individual under the age of 16 a minimum of 2 to 3 mu of farmland (15 mu
make a hectare, around 6 mu make an acre) depending on the region. This
meant in practice that a family of five would be given an hectare of land.
Land ownership implied that the new land owner would
acquire also the right to buy, sell or rent their own land.
The distribution of land was carried out especially at
the expense of the landowners, whose land, draught animals, agricultural
equipment, cereal surpluses and rural buildings were confiscated without
compensation (though they still had the right to receive 2 to 3 mu of land
just like all the rest). Apart some exceptions both the land of the rich
farmers cultivated by themselves or with the help of waged labour and the
rich farmer’s other possessions were protected and could not be affected;
just like the other small plots of land they owned and rented.
Apart some exceptions both the land of the rich farmers
cultivated by themselves or with the help of waged labour and the rich
farmer’s other possessions were protected and could not be affected; just
like the other small plots of land they owned and rented. The land of the
average farmers, including the ones better off, was inviolable without any
exception. In this way almost half of the area under cultivation (47
million hectares) was distributed among 300 million peasants, who had
themselves assigned about 0.15 hectares each, i.e. 2.3 mu.
Yet the distribution of the farmland could not be the
definite solution of the agrarian question in China. Since centuries the
Chinese farmland was extremely fragmented: indeed the land, even if
possessed by a rather small number of landowners, was divided into small
plots and rented to the peasantry. The land indeed was already divided,
and a further massive division would not solve the problem at all.
This is why until year 1927 the revolutionary proletariat
claimed the nationalization of the farmland, since this would have lead to
the development of big state companies conducted by waged workers with the
use of modern means of farming. The watchword of the division of the
farmland was typically the average farmers’, that is of those farmers who
already cultivated a small plot of land and who wanted to get rid of the
heavy landlord’s rent. With the reform the rent was replaced by a state
tax a high as 17-19% of the harvest’s value.
If the agrarian reform eliminated the landlords and a
small part of the rich farmers, with the distribution of all the former’s
farmland and of part of the latter’s, making the peasants free to
cultivate without having to pay a rent to the landowner, such undeniable
advantages could not minimally change the relations of production in the
countryside, because of the excessive fragmentation of the farms and the
extreme backwardness of their farming technology and their farming methods
who both carried jarred with the needs of capital accumulation.
The division of the farmland, brought to better living
conditions for the peasants, yet it did not imply any growth of the
productive forces and did not make agricultural surpluses available. The
peasants were all worried about reaching a better living conditions and
methods of farming of the small plots stayed the same around for thousands
of years. So when the bourgeois state asked for money, the farmlands
ignored the state’s call, since the agricultural surplus amounted to 30
million tons of cereals, so it was all absorbed by the peasants. Yet
already significant signs of social polarization appeared such as the
buying and selling of farmland, loan sharking etc.
The boundless small farmer family lead production became
the swamp which blocked the projects of rapid industrialization. The low
productivity of the parcelled agricultural property out of lease was
unable to fully absolve the bluntly bourgeois task of forming and
developing a national market, it was not capable of supplying surplus
value to the cities and excesses of agricultural products necessary for
the industrialization and to feed a grown army of proletarians.
Industrialization was slowed by the underdeveloped countryside, without
machines and capital.
Both to overcome such unfavourable material matter of
facts and for fear of not managing to control the social differences that
were emerging in the countryside, in the mid 50s the regime launched the
cooperatives’ and Communes movement. The disturbing mass campaigns that
were being organized were inspired by old principles that have always been
present in the thousands of years lasting Chinese history: collectivity is
higher than the individual and the state has an indisputable supremacy.
But the fundamental point over which such initiatives were based on is the
fact that such initiatives could count on the only wealth that a backward
country such as China could have, that is millions of men. The energy and
direct interests of the peasant masses were used as a leverage to deal
with a new immense task: now it was not a question of supplying the
central state with surplus value and more food for the sake of developing
the industrial sector, instead, it was a question of substituting the
industrial sector itself with a small village industry that would have
used the available technical resources around and the workforce that
exceeds the work at the fields and the stalls.
Yet the toil of the peasant communities to meet such a
new task not only produces exceeding capitals, it also ended up in
complete failure. Also for the bad meteorological and climatic conditions,
such a toil resulted just in misery and famine. The productive forces,
which do never abide by the domination nor of the governments, neither by
the personality of men, the latter great or not, imposed their own rhythm:
a sudden recoil shook a regime that used to be in office, safe and sound
until then. The failure of these gigantic mass campaigns, the Great Leap
Forward and the Commons movement had as their consequences a first harsh
crisis in Peking’s regime, but, maybe still on the trail of the great
victory of the previous decade, which meant power and prestige, it was
able to keep the structure of the Party and of the State both solid and
united. Mao Zedong had to leave Liu Shaoqi in charge of the Presidency of
the Republic, which didn’t have the meaning of a simple substitution of
men: at the opposite, it was the initial display of the clash of enormous
social forces, which would have pervaded the immense space of China for
the subsequent 20 years, with more or less memorable facts, including the
so-defined Cultural Revolution
The failure of that first Maoist mobilization granted new
power to theses which had already been conceived in the 50’s and
disregarded as "right-wing". The deepest problem, and yet the most
dreadful for the growth and development of China since the Republic’s
foundation was a social structure still revolving around agriculture for
the most part of it. According to the industry’s own needs, the
productivity of the rural world had to be increased and the latter should
have focused on producing for the market, not for direct consumption.
Likewise, the national industry was powerless about stocking the
countryside with necessary tools to meet such expectations of
mechanization and modernization, which would have allowed such
productivity increase, because of its insufficient development at the
time.
The overcoming of China’s belated industrial development
had in its premises the expropriation of tens of millions of peasants,
therefore obliged to leave the land, and once depleted of their basic
goods, to flow into the outskirts of the cities, thus starting their
proletarization. But, a quick process of this kind awed the Communist
Party in office, because of the necessity to carry out both its management
and control, all the above avoiding to throw the constituted order into
hazard.
Since the early 1950s, In order to provide a solution to
this problem, two main lines already emerged in the CPC. The first had a
firmer resolution to rapidly offer a solution to the rural issue by
putting the necessary reforms into action, to implement the capitalist
system into the context of agriculture also. The second was more concerned
about any possible effects such reforms could be able to cause, more
conservative and with less impatience of rendering them effective. The
latter tendency kept into proper consideration that the recent rise to the
power of the CPC was made possible by the support accorded by the
peasants, of which the approval couldn’t afford to be lost. Through the
Great Leap Forward, such tendency attempted to reach the goal of
industrialization by the "peasant" path, resorting to forced and
gratuitous mobilizations of workforce. Not out of aesthetic nuances, but
basic necessity, these mobilizations required a society with a strong
egalitarian connotation, absolutely collective, to fight back against
every kind of "individualism" and thwart social polarization.
The so-defined "right-wing" tendency, more conscious of
the necessity to introduce reforms, argued that, since the State was not
able to finance the intake of capitals in the countryside, if not in a way
that would have deemed utterly insufficient, it was to be a part of the
peasant themselves to deal with such historical duty, thereby thriving on
land, machinery and capitals. It would have been necessary then to invite
the peasants to trade and thrive such that the State could have the chance
to reinforce its control structure, and keep in its hands the formidable
leads of the monopoly over the dairies’ commerce, the allowances for
residence and transfer to the population to prevent an excessive and
uncontrolled urbanization from happening.
Both of these conflicting lines, even if they were given
off as left- and right-wing, were corresponding to the needs of the
national economy, to the necessity of developing capitalism and both if
them were bourgeois lines. Notwithstanding their differences, they were in
accord upon each other on the need of devolving every resource to the
capital’s reproduction and the accumulation. Afterwards, we can say that the
so-defined "right-wing" line was likely envisioning one safer and quicker
perspective of industrialization, resolved to hastily precipitate a large
fraction of the immense peasant class in the hell circle of the
proletarization and the salary work. It held the meaning to barely come
back to the private business in the countrysides, with the including
freedom to sell land, buy it, rent it, in order to favor a relatively
quick ruin and expropriation for the majority of the peasants, with the
final constitution of a modern, mechanized agriculture, based on privately
run large businesses.
The Cultural Revolution taking place in the second half
of the 1960s held the meaning of an attempt of the most conservative line
to stop the reformists in their track, so that they got expelled by their
directive duties. The propagandist affirmations and famous sentences must
be put in the context of the struggle between economic forces into place
back then: it went by the name Cultural Revolution, because it was the
small bourgeois and the teachers who were the most receptive, so they put
themselves at the hands.of the Maoist fraction of the Party and the State.
For the definitive
predominance of the "reformist" line, China had to wait until the 11th CPC
Congress in August 1977, which saw the rise to the power of Deng Xiaoping.
That way, the romantic heroic deeds of the Chinese national revolution,
that had shaken the enormous country for more than 60 years long came to
an end. It was the time for China to be faced with more pragmatic issues.
After dropping myths and illusions, the one and only remaining thing was
the categorical imperative to produce as much as possible, to carry out
the development of production forces, to decrease times and costs of
production, and of extending the capital constantly and safely in the
unfathomable rural world, still to be subverted and proletarized for the
most part. In absence of a victorious movement of the proletariat in other
countries, equipped with a fully mature capitalism, his stage has
represented a necessary step for the disruption of those pre-capitalistic
production reports and property forms that were bothersome to a further
development of the productive forces, but this eventually came at the
price of a painful, blood-dropping path for the proletarian generations
who were affected by it.
Xi
Jinping and Chinese Imperialism
Present day China has concluded this awesome development
process of its productive forces, thus becoming ’the World’s factory’,
the largest exporter in the entire world. China can today project is
economical and military power far beyond its own national borders, and it
portrays itself on world market as a freebooter among other freebooters,
looking for raw materials and new markets. It has begun to review its
relationships with other States, not just with close ones: it will be
sufficient to mention the tensions in the Southern and Eastern Chinese
Sea, but it’s posing even a threat to the dominance of the greatest
world-scale imperialism, the United States of America. Chinese imperialism
is trying to redefine the entire world’s power balance, seeking to expand
itself: it’s not doubtful that this powerful force corresponds to
ideological reflexes, thus requiring new forms to be theorized by the
Communist Power in charge in China.
The last CPC congress has then reconfirmed Xi Jinping to
the role of guide of the Party and the State, even contributing to grow
its myth. But, exactly as his illustrious predecessors, Xi is nothing else
than the product of a certain social situation, of a certain development
level of the productive forces, to which he cannot hold any opposition, no
matter his personal virtues.
The so-called "Xi’s thought" cannot but put itself into
accord with the powerful historical process that testifies the end of the
age in which China was forced to "hold a low profile", and the beginning
of a new historical phase, the third after the ones of Mao and then Deng:
the Chinese imperialist interests’ outburst phase.
Xi’s thought, as stated in the Congress, is summarized
into "14 Principles" which clearly express the imperialistic maturation of
China, as well as its desire to become a world-scale power. The "Chinese
dream" of the "Nation’s resurgence", a rhetoric tool characterizing all of
China’s leaders from Sun Yat-sen onward, is today intended as the return
to a role as world-scale power after the humiliation suffered between 19th
and 20th centuries: The "Xi’s Jinping thought" about a "Socialism with
Chinese characteristics for a new age" revolves around this very concept.
The
New Silk Road
An enormous importance is acknowledged to the New Silk
Road Project (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI), which refers to the new
commercial routes which, from China through Asia, will reach the heart of
Europe. This project has been explicitly included into the Party’s
Statute, among the "14 Principles", in order to elicit its relevance for
the "Chinese dream" of the "Nation resurgence". But nowadays China should
not only find markets for selling the humongous amount of goods it
produces, it also need to make abroad investments with the capital
accumulated and already exceeding. Thus, its foreign money reserve are, at
a rough estimate, 3’000 billion dollars. BRI project would allow a
fraction of this capital to be invested for building infrastructures in
many of the 65 traversed countries, who host more than half of the world
population, three quarters of the energetic supplies, and a third of the
global gross domestic product. According to Morgan Stanley, the enormous
project requires 1’200 billion investments into roads, railways, ports,
electrical supply networks. BRI would be the likely candidate for the
largest project of investment ever attempted, Taking inflation into
account, it would surpass the notorious Marshall Plan of at least 12
times.
Through the creation of the Silk Road Fund and of the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China has equipped itself already
with the necessary financial tools, but whatever public or private entity
in the world having an interest is called to take part to the project, for
example, during the Trump’s visit in China an agreement was signed between
the American General Electrics and the Chinese Silk Road Fund.
In addition to the terrestrial link between China and
Northern Europe, with its branch from Central Asia to Middle East, with
the development of a commercial zone throughout the whole Asia, a sea
route, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, has been also envisioned. It’s
a pool of backing ports which will connect Chinese ports to those of
Southern Europe through the Chinese Southern Sea and the Indian Ocean.
These infrastructures would cut the transportation time of goods, from
Europe to China and backwards, of a significant fraction.
In the present day, they amount to 19 days by rail and
29-35 by sea.
Recent
Tensions
Will China manage to complete their project?
For starters, China’s expansion gets in friction with the
American imperialism. Chinese projects do not invest only economical
aspects, but they have large scale strategical side effects, since Chinese
investments in other countries, as well as the financing of pompous
infrastructures allows China to expand their abroad economical interest,
consequently attracting the involved countries in its political sphere of
influence.
Clearly, this is the answer to Pivot to Asia, the United
States’ strategy applied to the containment of the economical and military
rise of China in the Far East, envisioning empowered relationships between
the US and the countries which perceive China as a threat. These include
Japan, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Australia.
With its own projects, China does not just address the
Eurasian continental area. As we mentioned in various previous articles,
Peking claims to seize control over a large part of the Chinese Southern
Sea, disputing its sovereign over the other coastal states: Vietnam,
Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia. For this purpose, China is
building artificial islands, in the Paracel and Spratly islands, for
military use in these waters. The goal is to provide coast with protection
from various attacks, and to control the transit of merchant ships towards
China. A rising China cannot indefinitely stand an obtrusive US military
presence in those waters. On the other hand, the United States are opposed
to China in the area, both maintaining a substantial military force in
their bases in the Pacific, and striving to reinforce their long running
relationships and alliances with those Asian countries who feel threatened
by China.
In its visit to Asia last November, Trump has made stops
in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and Philippines, having as a goal
the reassurance of his allies and restate America the engagement in the
region.
Trump has even made a stop in China, where he met Xi
Jinping. But, other than the deployment of the honor guard, the menu of
the banquet and the itinerary of the visit to the Forbidden City, the two
"great leaders" had little to no chance of affecting the course of the
events. The Asian-Pacific region represents the pulsating heart of the
world’s economy. It’s in this area that the contrast between the
imperialist countries will become fiercer, and it’s here that the direct
clash between China and the United States will spark.
In the present moment, these contrasts are at a risk of
an explosion because of the North-Korean issue. The United States are
trying to oblige China, under the threat of commercial sanctions, to put
North Korean nuclear ambitions to stop. But, if one hand Peking cannot
push too much the barrel into putting severe measures into action against
North Korea, because it doesn’t want the crumbling of that regime, on the
other hand Pyongyang goes on with their missile and nuclear tests in order
to put their safety under warrant.
The latest missile test occurred the 28th of November.
Having made the test only two months after the previous launch, this made
tensions grow in the region, to the point that an imminent war was
mentioned. Many have referred about Chinese military preparations in the
perspective of a possible conflict between North Korea and the US. China
continues to promote talks between the two countries, but nevertheless it
also prepares countermeasures at the Korean border. In the last months
there has been a significant growth of activities going on in that part of
the country, including the growth of military personnel and training. In
the meantime Chinese media talk about a possible imminent conflict in the
Korean peninsula.
The fundamental problem is that the birth of a new, great
imperialism has put on the top of the agenda the issue of a new division
of the world, in which context the Chinese imperialism aspires to
supersede the United States. First and foremost, this is what the "Chinese
dream" is about. And in order to fulfill it, Chinese proletarians will be
called to spill their blood for the Nation.
The constant rumors of an imminent war in Korea fostered
by the mass media of several involved countries, even if they may just be
regarded as propaganda, serve anyway the purpose to prepare the workers to
the moment when they will be called to "sacrifice themselves for the
Nation" when the latter will call them to arms. Chinese proletarians, as
well as those from all the other countries, must not side with their own
imperialism. The "dream" which the Chinese leaders brag about, is nothing
but an illusion to distract the proletarians from the struggle in defense
of their own interests, in order to stop retaliatory struggles that are
more and more increasing. Conversely, they should continue to extend the
struggle for salary increase, the shrink of working hours, the freedom of
association and strike, fueling class organization, the rebirth of
class-wide workers:unions and the rejoicing with the program of
revolutionary Communism.
The young Chinese proletariat has a glorious tradition to
rejoice with. It should resort back to the methods of struggle and
organization, which were proper of its first working class generations.
Albeit its inconsistency in numbers respect to the peasants mass, the
Chinese proletariat put itself in the lead of the revolution in the 1920s.
The workers’ unions, which were nearly nonexistent in
China before the 1920s, have been created in those years, leading either
struggles and strikes which were authentic class wars, which left on the
field a lot of worker’s blood, but also yet another historical
confirmation that the proletariat can fight for power and win, exactly as
it happened for the victorious Shanghai insurrection of ninety years ago.
Today in China capitalist development has decomposed the
Chinese countryside, piled the proletarians in hundreds of gigantic
industrial metropolis, giving life to hundreds of Shanghai-like cities.
The "Chinese dream" of the "Resurrection of the Nation" just translates
into the nightmare of the exploitation for the sake of the Capital and
proletarians may safely assume that tomorrow the Nation will call them to
shed sweat and blood.
The answer shall be like Shanghai in 1927: class war for
the overthrowing of the capitalist regime and the overtake of the power.
No illustrious name worth of commemoration have make it into History out
of that revolution, let alone a "great leader" to idolize.
Anonymous proletarians fought, with their class
organization and their Party having their backs. Let’s leave to the
bourgeoisie, coward and powerless, the cult of their minions.
In order to win, the proletariat doesn’t have to wait the
coming of any great leader of sort. As we have repeatedly stated, the
revolution will rise its head once again, anonymous and dreadful.
There have been some attempts in the past to organise
workers well in fast food restaurants, but these have faced real obstacles
in maintaining any form of organisation.
There is now a more determined campaign to publicise
their campaign for organisation, recognition and pay rise to £10 per hour
across the board, which means the end of youth rates of pay, as well as
guaranteed hours of work. McDonald stores are in particular being targeted
for campaigns and demonstrations. Information on this campaign can be
found on the internet under #McStrike and @FastfoodRights.
Demonstrations were held in five centres, from
Manchester, Cambridge and London, ending with a rally at Watford later on
at the First May Rally. The campaign began shortly after midnight in
Manchester on First May when the McDonald’s restaurant on Oxford Street
store’s staff member (Blaz Mesner, a Slovenian worker) walked off his
shift, to be greeted by those on the picket line. The pickets returned
later in the morning to continue the picket line.
That same morning saw a demonstration outside a
McDonald’s in Cambridge at which some workers walked off the job in
support of higher pay and organising rights. Also at Crayford in Bexley,
South-East London, a demonstration took place in support of workers who
had walked out for a second time. The demonstrators came together at
Watford, the home town of McDonald’s Boss.
This parallels similar campaigns in the US, which demands
a minimum rate of pay of $15 per hour.
At the moment the campaigners are members of a small
trade union, the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers [BF&AW], who are
affiliated to the Trades Union Congress. The choice of this union is to
give them some form of official status while keeping as much control in
their own hands. Although the campaigners have banners with their union
emblem on their banners, there is little sign of the resources of the
Bakers Union being available to them. Also the fact that this same union
is controlled by trotskists seems to make little difference to the lack
of official support. The campaigners are clear that their movement is rank
and file led, and it is likely to remain that way. That politicals and MPs
are providing support at the moment is only to be expected, but how far
that support will remain when the fight becomes determined remains to be
seen.
The internet publicity is a way of communicating and
organising themselves. It also keeps the campaign under their own control,
for the moment at least.
These May Day demonstrations by Fast Food Workers was a
bright example of the spirit of May Day and what it should be, rather than
the subsequent rallies of the official Labour movement pleading for the
lessening of the nasty politics of austerity and other aspects of a
bankrupt society.
Done with the Tories or Done
with Capitalism?
After May Day there were marches (7th May in Liverpool
and 12th May in London) against the Tory Government to prove they will not
tolerate any further cuts in wages, or the general and progressive
deterioration of their living conditions. In the 10 years following the
2008 economic crash, workers have seen their purchasing power decline
significantly, with the cost of living steadily rising and their wages
staying put, when not actually decreasing. At the same time the amount of
wealth amassing at the other end of society (latest example: Persimmon
boss receives £75 Million bonus) has reached grotesque dimensions. As even
mainstream media are forced to admit, the world now sees the worst levels
of inequality since records began. No wonder Marxists are now starting to
gain a wider audience.
What will come next?
A change of government will not bring any gain whatsoever
to the working class. Once in power, the Labour Party, which claims to be
defending the workers interests, will promptly drop all its promises in
the name of the higher “national interest” (i.e., in the interests
of capitalism and the fight of UK capitalists against those of other
nations). The Labour Party, that is, once in power again, as is likely to
happen, will deal with the declining rate of profit by ramping up the
level of exploitation of labour by increasing its intensity and the length
of the working day, and by making it easier to hire and fire through the
use of part-time and agency workers, which has the additional effect of
driving a wedge between full-time and ‘temps’ status. And on the latter
issue, where solidarity between workers in full-time and those in
precarious employment is an urgent necessity, we will not hear much from
the trade union leaders.
Workers have seen this drama happening over and over
again. To bring this perpetual ‘groundhog day’ to a close they need to
build a real and strong movement that is decidedly based on class demands,
which will mean leaving behind the illusion that their enemy, or false
friends like the Labour Party, with its insipid brand of acceptable
radicalism, are going to guarantee them a better life. What they need is
to dedicate their energy to rebuilding unity of action, rebuilding a class
movement in the trade union sphere on a territorial basis, focused on
inter-sectoral actions, that chooses not to place any faith in the parties
and institutions of the enemy class.
An Arduous but Necessary Struggle
The proletariat class has the ability to conduct and win
difficult battles. In their daily resistance against a system based on
ever increasing work exploitation, they should demand:
Minimum wage for all workers linked to the
cost of living;
Reduction of working hours with wage levels
maintained;
A living wage for workers who have lost
their jobs;
A general increase in pensions.
With the unity of all working class and the guidance of
its own party, the proletariat – the class that has to sell its labour,
whether its individual members are in work or not – will be able to defeat
capitalism and free itself and humanity from the yoke of wage labour and
the ongoing farce of capitalist ‘planning’; which is so patently unable to
resolve the huge problems of war, the environment, increasing population
and, of course, the problems of unemployment, a living wage and perpetual
insecurity.
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose
but your chains.
The recent trucker
strike started on May 21st and as of today, June 11th,
it has not ended.
First, we have to
take into account that a good portion of the striking truck drivers
either belong to the petty bourgeoisie or they are associated with a
transport company,. This means that, while there is
legitimate revolt surrounding the price spike on fuels, there is also a
confluence of interests between the drivers and the bosses;,
the end of negotiations and the refusal of many drivers to end the
strike made possible the appearance of a sector of drivers disposed to
assume classist positions, that is, close to the demands of the
proletariat, going further than the demand of a reducing of fuel prices
and better freight prices in demanding a raise in wages and a cutting of
work hours.
The truck driver,
as a member of the petty bourgeoisie, often goes through many of the
difficulties that any other work goes through, but sometimes, their
immediate interests end up aligned with the capitalist class, their own
bosses, this resulted in the initial collaboration between the
autonomous drivers and the employer’s union. This “fluidity” of
positions and alliances are characteristic of any petty bourgeois
movement, however, this should not mean an abandonment of intervention
amidst the strike or the general movement, not in a blind appropriation
of the demands of the drivers, but in an assertive and precise manner
that aims to not only push it away from it’s petty bourgeois positions
towards the immediate demands of the proletariat but also towards its
historical program, communism.
It is safe to say
that this strike also reveals a confrontation between sectors of the
bourgeoisie, in one side ‘shareholders’ of the present government and in
the other, the transport industry and international investors: the
proletariat has no interest in allying with either and should instead
enjoy a renewed struggle.
This opportunity
was followed by the declaration by Oil Workers of a 72 hour strike
calling for a reduction of fuel prices and the expelling of the current
president of Petrobras, Pedro Parente they join in this wave of strikes
teachers in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, freight drivers, subway
workers.
It is in the face
of this opening and wave of activity that we turn our eyes to the
opportunist positions of Social democrats and “Marxists”: the official
leadership of our social democratic left has managed to align the
position of their bases in defense of the strikes, but don’t let
yourself be fooled, they did so in the interest of their electoral
hopes, this is a guarantee that they are “by the side of the people”,
that the politics of PT are opposed to Temer’s, that this crisis and
instability would not take place in a government that “fought for the
worker”, the vote is again placed as an alternative to the convulsions
of the capitalist system.
This support by the
social democrats have not lead to bigger mobilizations, no call for a
general strike on behalf of their unions, not even a defense of a new
cycle of struggles, it is nothing more than an opportunist declaration
in time for the elections.
Our “Marxists” have
not acted much different, PCB has also declared its support, not for the
opportunity of reorganization of the class, but in defense of “our”
companies, of the national interest of our own bourgeois dictatorship
and of the old lie of the “united front”; it’s here, facing a notable
opportunity to reaffirm revolutionary positions that we see both the
representatives of social democracy and of so-called communists placing
themselves always in a defensive position, in defense of democratic
guarantees, of “our” companies, of national interests and of every other
cliche made popular by the ‘left of capital’.
It’s in the
replacing of class struggle for the defense of a “united front” and of
democratic stability that we can clearly see that their compromise is
not with the proletariat and the proletarian revolution but with the
legitimation of the bourgeois dictatorship we live under.
We should not mistake ourselves over the consequences of this process of confrontation, the disruption of the bourgeois State and the intensification of social conflict will not take us straight to a revolutionary upheaval, our situation can only be objectively revolutionary when the class – more than breaks with the traitorous unions that abandoned their struggle – founds their own class unions,
their own organs of struggle and assume a fundamental defense of the
revolutionary program of communism.
What emerges from
this wave of strikes is the necessity of a response to the continuous
attacks of the bourgeois against our class, it is necessary, therefore,
to organize a united front of the proletariat, based on their demands,
their strike committees, one that rejects conciliation, cooperation and
affirms a true classist organization.
The class struggle,
therefore, can’t be directed by old or new electoral parties, but by its
own party, an organization of struggle that can transpose the
limitations of the economic struggle of the proletariat and direct the
class towards a revolutionary conclusion, this is the task undertook by
the International Communist Party.
Even in Nicaragua, the Blood of the Proletariat is Exposing “Socialism of the 21st Century”
It is not like the Nicaraguan government has become
bourgeois and bloody today, all the sudden. The Sandinista Front for
National Liberation (FSLN) was already bourgeois from its origins when, as
a guerrilla movement, based on the oppressed masses, it overthrew the
government of Anastasio Somoza.
Its government later managed the interests of the
bourgeoisie, securing social control with propaganda, politicking, and
violence.
With the imposition of Chavez in Venezuela, which waved
the banner of "Socialism of the 21st century", and the emergence of a
series of equally characterized governments in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil,
Argentina, El Salvador, and Honduras, the bourgeois government of
Nicaragua has not hesitated to align itself in spreading that populism and
that demagoguery that have allowed the secure perpetuation of capitalist
exploitation and the growth of corporate profits. The number of workers
enrolled in the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (INSS) in March 2018
fell by 1.5%, with respect to the same month in 2017: 896,869 versus
910,621. In March, the nominal average monthly salary was 10,737.8
Córdobas, about 342 dollars. Between April 2017 and April 2018, the rate
of inflation was 4.75%. However, in Nicaragua, illegal employment, with
low wages and no social security, continues to be over 70%. Of the total
population of 6,279,712, 50% are considered economically active; this also
counts the unemployed and those who worked only one hour.
Agriculture is one of the main activities of the country,
representing 60 percent of exports, a with strong employment, but there
are also some industrial centers and the extraction of precious minerals.
The Government of Managua has also fulfilled its
commitments with the IMF, signed in 2005, when it had remitted the debt,
as long as it respected an adjustment plan for the economy, so much so
that in 2012 the debt of Nicaragua to the IMF was reduced to zero. In 2006
the country also signed the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the
Dominican Republic and the other states of Central America and the United
States.
In an agreement with Chinese companies, the Government of
Nicaragua in 2014 presented the "Great Inter-Oceanic Canal" project: a
blueprint of 278 kilometers, from the mouth of the Punta Gorda river on
the Caribbean coast to the mouth of the Brito river on the Pacific coast,
in which 50,000 workers would have to work. This project opens a new space
for trade and geopolitical confrontation between the United States and
China.
Therefore, in Nicaragua the capitalists are fine,
although with some contrast with the IMF regarding the policies to carry
out regarding pensions and social security, and with the US government
mainly due to the penetration of Chinese capital.
So, for many years Nicaragua has not come on the front
pages of international newspapers: although the says only that which the
bourgeoisie wants to make known, and with distorted versions of reality,
the truth is that a lot of time has passed without it hearing anything of
trade union conflicts, of the social situation and the repressive action
of the government.
But, as in a volcano, underground pressure accumulates
until the lava of social struggle explodes, pushed by the contradictions
between capital and labor.
The government had announced a series of laws aimed at
guaranteeing the financial sustainability of the INSS, reforms that it
intended to agree upon with the representation of the businessmen, the
Superior Council of Private Business (COSEP). However, without having
reached an agreement with COSEP, it approved a decree that increased the
contributions that companies and workers deposit into the national pension
system. COSEP rejected the decree because it would have increased the cost
of work, launching screams about the reduction of competitiveness and the
employment ability of the companies. Obviously, it opposed the decree not
in defense of workers, pensioners, and social security, but because of the
threat to corporate profits.
The government then admitted that the INSS would not have
had the funds to pay pensions before the end of the year. For this reason,
the provision expected that the insured workers would have paid more (from
6.25% to 7%), employers from 19% to 22.5%, while to the pensioners the
pension would have been reduced by 5% and the State would have
contributed, although with a minimum.
But last April a spontaneous explosion of rage and
protest surprised both the government and the various movements and
political groups. The reaction of the workers was immediate. Only the
National Employees Union supported the reform and saw some small
concentrations of public sector workers who expressed their support for
the government, against the "destabilizing violence of the right".
The bourgeois government, led by Daniel Ortega and
Rosario Murillo, then ordered a massacre across the country; proletarian
blood once again flowed through the paved streets in Managua, where there
were counted at least 27 dead, then in the cities of Masaya, Leon, Esteli,
Matagalpa, and Bluefields, with a further 50 dead and more than 400
wounded.
The disproportionate military and police response against
the demonstrators came after more than a decade of strict political and
repressive control over the workers, of an intense action of suppression
of their organizations of defensive economic struggle, to expand the
corruption and capitulation of the existing unions. So That is why the
reaction of the masses to the reform of the social security system has
needed necessarily to occur in this manner, spontaneous and anarchic,
since there do not exist forms of class-based organization that can
channel and direct the struggles.
Naturally, the official version, like that of all the
"workers" and "progressive" governments of Latin America, in line with
"Socialism of the 21st century", has proclaimed that in order to defend
the workers that this reform was imposed on the employer, and to "not bend
to the IMF". In this propaganda, the Sandinistas are accompanied by
international opportunism that repeats that Ortega has "faced the IMF" and
the "imperialist right", committed to destabilize his government, and
defends the working class.
Thus, the government believed that to control the
reaction of the masses it would have been sufficient, as in the past, its
Collectives or its goon squads: it was not so. Although the university
students have also publicly protested in their petty-bourgeois style, with
them have united vast strata of workers who mobilized in the area. They
erected barricades and there were street clashes. he government has turned
off the free wi-Fi that since 2014 had been installed in all public
places, since it was used to coordinate the protest actions.
The situation has reached such dimensions that the
government has decided to call for dialogue and to review the reform of
the INSS with the business community.
In the meantime, COSEP had announced a demonstration for
April 23 in Managua; the population of the capital joined the procession
of industrialists and the crowd overflowed.
Later they tried to broaden the negotiations also to the
students and to the Church. On April 28 it was the Church that announced a
"Pilgrimage for Peace", that had had again a massive participation. The
government for its part organized an event for the occasion of the 1st of
May, ending with a speech by President Ortega.
The opposition movements have seen in this occasion the
possibility to increase their weak forces. They know that if the
bourgeoisie decided that the FSLN government no longer guarantees them the
ability to exploit the workers in a climate of social peace, as in recent
years, it has the possibility to choose between the opponents, who can
equally guarantee their interests.
If COSEP rejects the reform of the INSS, because it
damages the interests of the employers, the businessmen have however
benefited from the government of a reduction of many taxes and have had
facilitated the exploitation of the workers. Moreover, COSEP, like the
businessmen in all the world today, push for an increase in the retirement
age to 70 years and for the increase in contributions the burden of the
workers.
The bourgeois solution that has taken up the negotiations
is clear in the points of order of the day: investigations on the murders
during the demonstrations; b) reform of the electoral system to guarantee
"free and transparent" elections; c) institutional reforms that guarantee
the "State of rights", and elimination of corruption; d) resolution of the
INSS crisis.
Both the bourgeois political fronts, the government and
opposition, will act to prevent the masses of employees to join and
organize on the basis of their goals, such as the request of a salary
increase, a reduction of working hours, and a reduction in retirement age.
The president Daniel Ortega on April 22nd finally
announced the repeal of the reform. But roadblocks, barricades and clashes
continued in the month of May. Parts of the barricades were made by the
"Movimiento Campesino Anticanal" (Anti-Canal Farmer Movement), against the
expropriation of the land. Looting also began in stores. Therefore, the
list of dead, injured and arrested has continued to grow. On May 13 a
caravan of vehicles, with great attendance, left from Managua for Masaya,
in solidarity with that city, where the clashes on Saturday the 12th had
left at least 1 dead and about 150 wounded.
On May 12th, the Army in a declaration appealed to
"non-violence" and to the resumption of "dialogue". On May 14, the
government announced to have authorized the Inter-American Human Rights
Commission to come and observe the situation in the country, after the
death of at least 54 demonstrators!
It is certain that it is due to the courageous revolt of
the lower classes the success in the forced cancellation of the reform, at
least for the moment. However, in all this clash, although violent and
general, the independent participation of the working class has not yet
emerged, nor have its exclusive claims been heard, nor have its forms of
struggle been imposed, first of all the strike.
The opposition is now pushing for
the resignation of Ortega or for the induction of elections. Whether after
this crisis the government of the FSLN remains in office, or whether its
opponents take control, Nicaraguan workers have nothing to foresee from
either. As in the rest of the world, they must traverse the path of unity
and organization at the base, to resume the claimed class struggle,
outside of the unions of the regime and of the appeals to electoral
solutions, the defense of the homeland, and the national economy,
proclaimed by all the opportunists.
For nearly five years, negotiations on port reform have
been going on in Israel, conducted by the dockers union, which is
affiliated with the Histadrut union confederation and without any results.
As time has passed, the construction of two new privately
held ports, whose opening is scheduled for 2021, has advanced a great
deal, alongside the existing publicly owned ones in Haifa and Ashdod.
Obviously, the investment is so the bourgeoisie, both foreign and
domestic, can increase the rate of exploitation of the port workers.
Reform of the ports would involve a reduction in jobs,
more competition between the ports of call, a reorganisation of pilots,
tug boats and moorings, a deterioration in wage conditions and greater
freedom for dismissal. As often happens, the bosses aim to break through
on all fronts, with the hope of success in at least some of them.
The port of Ashdod, one of the most strategic sectors for
Israeli capitalism, has reported earnings of more than 200 million Israeli
Shekels (US$55,062,000, €46,944,000) in the last year alone. But it
is also one of the industrial centres with the highest rate of
unionisation, nearly 100%.
In April 2018, tired of the endless and inconclusive
negotiations, and worried by the rumours in anticipation of the new ports
opening, the patience of the workers ended. A couple factors were the
straws that broke the camel’s back. First was the release of an audio
recording in which the secretary of the Federation of Transport Unions – Avi Edri – suggested that Histadrut was willing to give in even if the
demands of the union were not accepted during the negotiations.
The second is a judicial decree issued by the Labour
Court which obliges dockers to recover certain quotas of quantity and
intensity of work. From the last week of April through the beginning of
May, there was a 20% drop in productivity compared with the same period
last year, a 39% increase in the time it takes to process the goods
arriving at the port, and therefore a decrease in profits. This data – produced by a statistical office paid by the companies – was presented as
evidence of sabotage of production by workers. On the basis of the boss’
allegations, the Court issued a judgment where the dockworkers were
accused of implementing what is curiously called an "Italian-style
strike", i.e. a voluntary slowdown in work activity. The dockers were
ordered to recover the productivity allegedly lost and were warned not to
take industrial action until the negotiation process was underway.
Thus on 9 May, without any prior notice and without
consulting the Histadrut, the dockers of Ashdod and Haifa, led by the
leaders of their trade union, left their jobs in an organized way,
completely paralysing port activity, without establishing a deadline for
the strike and, therefore, ripping up the court’s decree.
The bosses, as always happens in these cases, have begun
to scream in their powerful press, about the damage to the economy of the
country, the huge amounts of damaged and irrecoverable goods, astronomical
losses every day, the rule of law, democracy, and the Histadrut as a
necessary union collaborator.
The judiciary promptly declared the strike illegal,
ordering the workers to "immediately stop the action" and warning the
Histadrut to "apply its organizational power to force the dockers back to
work". A valuable demonstration of the nature of this trade union
confederation.
TThe workers, using the methods of class struggle – autonomously and against the wishes of the all trade unions who have sold
out to capital – found themselves facing all the ideological and
repressive weapons of the ruling class. Starting with the collaborationist
trade unions, passing to the mass media and supposed experts from
the middle class. Finally on to brute repression, be it the judicial, the
police, prison and, if necessary, the army.
The next day, May 10th, in the face of the continuation
of the strike, the court gave a mandate to the police to search for and
arrest the leaders of the dockers union. The Secretary of the Federation
of Transport Unions, who is a member of the Histadrut confederation,
stated that the leaders being sought were "untraceable" but that the
confederation would "work as closely as possible with all available means
to achieve a dialogue with them" (from the Histadrut online newspaper
"Davar Rishon", May 11th).
The judiciary, in Israel, like everywhere, is proclaimed
by the bourgeois left as a bulwark of that counterrevolutionary myth of
democracy. The courts have shown their nature by attacking the workers who
dared to break out of a legal cage built in defence of the bourgeois
regime of exploitation. The courts, criminalising and attacking the
struggles of these proletarians with repression. "What has happened – Judge Ilan Atikh, vice-president of the National Labour Court and
signatory of the judicial decree said to the bourgeois economic daily
"Calcalist" on May 13th – is something unthinkable in a rule of law (...)
it is not a particular issue but of national order (...) is something that
can not go unnoticed". We fully agree with this eminent member of the
bourgeois regime. But we believe that we can aim even higher and more
precisely: this is not a national issue but an international one and,
above all, a class issue. It must not be passed over in silence, but must
be brought to the attention of workers beyond national borders.
When the workers return to using the methods of class
struggle, when they defend their class interest against that of the
bourgeoisie, whose class interests are passed off as universal, it is
something unthinkable for any capitalist regime, in that it is too
dangerous – as well as unsustainable – to immediately take off the
democratic mask and show the real face of capitalism’s dictatorship.
The National Labour Court has fined the Dock Workers
Union leadership with disproportionately harsh fines of €25,000 each. The
police have been ordered to search for them. They have also given them
their final judgment, threatening imprisonment, as well as an increase in
their fines for every hour the strike continues.
The Histadrut, for the entire duration of the strike, did
not move a finger to help the dockers, placing a barrier between the
federation and the dockers’ struggle. They worked to isolate it in order
to help the bourgeois regime defeat it. Thus showing once again the
federation’s nature as a union servile to Capital. This was confirmed by a
statement of one of the federation’s leaders, confirming those of the
magistrate: "For the Histadrut, the rule of law and respect for the law
are a fundamental principle" ("Ynetnews", 10 May), to which the living and
working conditions of the proletariat are subject, we add.
The repressive action combined with the isolation imposed
by the Israeli regime union accomplished it’s aim of helping the bosses in
trouble and on May 12th, after three consecutive days of total blockade of
port activities and a demonstration lasting until late at night, with
hundreds of workers outside of the court, the strike was suspended.
Before this outcome, the return to using the methods of
class struggle was a victory in itself for the working class, which has
been able to see how democracy is a mask of the political dominion of the
bourgeoisie. It also showed how the Histadrut central trade union is an
impediment to effective struggles, rather than a useful tool for this
purpose.
In the following days, the Dockers asked the Histadrut to
declare a legal strike, threatening to leave the Confederation if it
wasn’t declared. They also demanded the Secretary of the Transport
Federation – the Avi Edri mentioned above – to resign. The Histadrut,
having achieved its real goal, began the procedure declaring the strike on
June 12th. But on June 10th, the relevant governmental body refused to
issue the permit.
The employers continued to complain about the fall in
production rates. Histadrut, for its part, is on the verge of losing
control of the workers, which we hope will happen as soon as possible.
Such a collapse allows for the construction of a trade union organisation
that does not claim, as the various puppets of the capitalist regime do,
the “rule of law” and “legality” but the use of class methods of struggle:
strikes without warning, to the bitter end, without minimum services.
We will now go more deeply into the trade union policy that emerged from
the congress.
In its communiqués the USB states that it wants to build a great class
union.
But from what appears in the confederal congress document – which also
informs the congress documents of the different categories – the
leadership aspires instead to build an organization which oversteps the
confines of the working class – the sphere within which the trade union
traditionally operates, and which, in our view, needs to be preserved to
ensure its healthy development – to the point that it loses its class
character and adopts “popular”, inter-classist features. What is indicated
in the introduction to the document as the organization’s general
objective is: “To build a general confederation of all of the working and
non-working sectors of society that are today caught in the vicelike grip
of neo-liberalism”.
The words are never chosen at random and they express political
positions that are reflected in well-defined practical policies. We would
have written this instead: “To build a general confederation of all wage
workers, in and out of work, who are exploited and oppressed by
capitalism”. The USB leadership’s way of expressing things is different
from ours because it entails a different policy both as regards
organization and practical action.
With the formula “social sectors of society” it means to include not
only waged workers but also some self-employed workers, broadly speaking
“on a low income”, such as the small farmers, small shopkeepers, street
peddlers and taxi drivers that the USB is already organizing in some
cities.
Then are included not only sacked workers, casual workers, working
students, or those whose job contract has expired, but generically “those
who aren’t working”, a category which lends itself to infinite
stratification: students who are not workers, members of the petty
bourgeoisie fallen on hard times, lumpen proletarians…
This policy is expressed in the document by repeatedly using the terms
“social class” and “social bloc” as though they were interchangeable: “A
militant trade union that reassembles an entire social bloc”, is the title
of the document’s final section; “The construction of a social bloc
involves the production of a new class consciousness, that has adapted to
the features of contemporary society” is stated at another point.
This extension of the trade union’s organizational range beyond the
confines of the toiling class is justified, according to the USB
leadership, on the grounds of the changes within contemporary capitalism
and its impact on the class.
The congress document correctly criticises and rejects “the hackneyed
notion of the disappearance of the working class”, noting that on the
international level the number of wage workers is enormous and still
rising; that “in the industrialized countries, faced with a reduction in
the number of workers employed in manufacturing and mining (…) we are
witnessing a process of “workerization” of largescale
commercial distribution and care services and “intellectual work
too” is undergoing a process of “proletarianization both from a wages and
organizational standpoint”.
However the analysis of the USB leaders becomes openly duplicitous when
it tries to convince us that the increase in job insecurity experienced by
an ever greater portion of the working class is blurring the boundaries of
the class to the extent of transforming it into a generic “social
precariate of temporary employees”, which forms a “social bloc”, of which
the working class is just a part, albeit the most important part.
The document in fact is keen to emphasize the most recent “novelties” in
the field of flexible working: “the new forms of work like ‘smart working’
[…] have a devastating effect (…) The impact on the condition of the
worker is isolation in his working and social life (…) New forms of
super-exploitation are on the increase, above all of the young […] a world
without permanent jobs or rights […] All this produces a social condition
in which fulfilling your needs becomes impossible in the face of crushing
material circumstances, which cannot be changed unless collective social
demands are made and there is an ‘organized subjectivity’.”
Meanwhile we say that the ‘precariate’ to whom the USB leadership
refers, along with sacked workers and pensioners, are simply other
divisions of the working class, just waiting to be reintegrated into the
union as such.
We note in addition that the analysis of the USB leaders exaggerates
somewhat by painting an unduly negative picture (“The new forms of work
have a devastating effect”). An extreme vision which is useful in
justifying their erroneous position and which reveals a lack of confidence
in the working class, in its capacity to arouse itself from its current
position of weakness and overcome these divisions, even if they continue
to be exposed to the same old ideological rubbish from the bourgeoisie,
who as ever peddle their threadbare dreams of a working class that has
magically disappeared, leaving behind a society of robotic
individuals eternally submitted to the whims of capital.
Yes, capitalism does fragment the working class, impose isolation and
individualism and does try to atomize class identity, all of which makes
the organization of workers more difficult. But this constant state of
insecurity and precariousness, of being alone against the overwhelming
power of capital and the bosses, that is, precisely the working class
condition, and always has been. The only exception has been a few decades
of post-war economic boom in a very few countries. And the function of the
trade union is and has always been precisely to alleviate this condition
by means of a collective effort.
It was during a period of far greater job insecurity than now that the
early trade union organizations came into being. The working class has
been able to organize under much worse conditions than the present, and it
will do so again in the future.
As to the most recent forms of ‘flexible working’, it has certainly not
guaranteed employers who have used it any immunity from workers’
struggles; the most recent example being what happened last year among the
delivery workers of Foodora and Deliveroo in Italy, Spain, Belgium and
England.
Finally, if it is true that out-sourcing and contractual fragmentation
within the big firms present a difficult obstacle for the collective
organization of workers to overcome, nevertheless, the sharing of a common
workplace remains a powerful, irrepressible material factor which, if
effective trade union work is carried out, is bound to sooner or later
shatter the bosses’ dream of a permanently weak and divided workforce.
What the labor movement needs is not alliances with other social strata
and classes, but to engage in the tough, serious work of rebuilding unity
on the basis of trade union struggle. The proletariat is a slumbering
giant which is only temporarily weakened, when it recovers its strength it
will once again strike fear into the ruling classes.
Oppose Class Divisions by Organizing on a Territorial Basis
How does the USB leadership propose to combat the divisions that weaken
the working class?
“If work no longer constitutes the most natural and immediate terrain on
which to get organized because one is unemployed or retired, or because
one only works for a few hours or on one’s own, or because the activity is
too irregular, it will be the locality and the shared condition of
precariousness which will form the links on which to build new coalitions
and new collective relationships".
It might appear that the road to territorial organization of the union is
finally being indicated here.
Among the essential pillars of our party’s trade union policy is the one
which refers back to the experience of the original Chambers of Labour
(Camere del Lavoro), which were territorial organizational centres of the
labour struggle. Workers gathering within a territorial framework would
meet with workers from other companies and from other sectors and trades;
there they would recognize each other not just as employees of such an
such a firm, but also and above all as members of the same class. This
helped overcome the narrow horizons of the firm and the trade and favoured
class unity.
The USB would be making an very important and positive change if it
placed the union’s territorial framework at the centre of its activity
because up to now that hasn’t been the case. Most union activity has been
expended at the company level; it begins there and ends there. The union’s
offices are hardly ever visited by its members, militants or even its
representatives. Meetings of its representatives are often held in the
workplace and not in the territorial office. Only rarely do the provincial
co-ordinations meet.
Obviously we don’t want to deny the difficulties involved in getting
workers to participate in union life, but nor do we want to deny the
responsibility of the union as a whole for their failure to carry out
systematic work among its militants and representatives with a view to
increasing their awareness of the need to emerge from the strictures of a
purely company based trade union activity.
Real Centralization or Organizational Rigidity?
The need to place at the union’s territorial framework at the centre of
the union’s organization is, as we have stated, a central plank of our
party’s union policy. This point we recently underlined at the first
congress of the SI Cobas in May 2015, pointing out that it would be a good
idea to modify the union’s statute which declares: “The underlying
structure of the SI COBAS is the Comitato di Base (Cobas)”, reformulating
it as: “The union arises in the places of work, where the Cobas’s are
based, but the inter-company territorial bodies, the provincial
coordinations, are what constitute its underlying structure.” This seems
to us the best way to convey how the trade union organization can raise
itself from the level of the Cobas to that of the class union.
This objective the USB leadership reckons it has already achieved. And
that might appear true if we restricted ourselves to observations on the
USB’s organizational structure, which is formally defined and centralized;
elements which are certainly necessary and useful for a class union.
But this formal centralization, in order to have any real substance, must
be capable of maintaining itself in two ways, not just from top to bottom
but by ensuring real participation on the part of militants and union
representatives in union life. Where instead the bulk of union activity
continues to devolve mainly on the union’s representatives and officials,
without the development of an intermediate strata of militants between
them and the rank-and-file members, and without sufficient participation
on the part of the latter, then organizational formalities count for very
little in terms of enhancing union growth.
And they can become downright dangerous when used to impose the leadership’s line without any proper discussion within the union, a typical example of which was when a small group within the union leadership decided, within the space of a week, to subscribe to the TUR. (TheTesto Unico sulla Rappresentanza Sindacale – Unified Text on
Trade Union Representation – which came into effect in January 2014, is
effectively an agreement between the regime workers’ Unions on the one
hand and the bosses’ Confederation – the so-called “Confindustria” – on
the other. It defines the “rules on trade-union representation”,
establishing, among other things, that the right to be included in the
trade union representation at the company level, and to participate in the
national CCNL negotiations, is conditional on agreeing to limitations on
the freedom to strike.)
The reconstitution of a network of union territorial organizations, a
new network of Chambers of Labour, would today be especially useful given
the contractual fragmentation described in the confederal congress
document.
Union reps and militants in medium-sized and large companies could get
together with their counterparts in smaller firms, to which an ever
increasing part of their company’s work is contracted out, and thus help
to rebuild labour unity in the workplace. Also workers in the many small
firms spread throughout the territory would find they had an
organizational focus. Organizing and bringing together unemployed and
retired workers together in these centres would help them maintain links
with those who are still working. By going down this road the re-emergence
of a working class identity would also be encouraged.
Who it is that the USB wants to organize on a territorial basis however
is those workers whose working situation is most insecure alongside groups
and strata in society who do not belong to the working class, who with it
supposedly constitute the “social precariate” and consequently the
so-called “social bloc”. Such it is that instead of encouraging class
unity and the rediscovery of its identity the opposite proves to be the
case:
Those workers who, due to contractual conditions or their activity or
because unemployed or retired, have the most difficulty integrating
into the class and identifying with it are further alienated by being
associated with self-employed workers of various types and with an array
of interclassist movements (students, service users, etc);
The divide between part-time/agency/temp workers and workers in
full-time or relatively more secure work is further accentuated;
Since temps are more likely to be young, it also drives a wedge between
them and older workers, resulting in precious energy which could have been
spent on union work being diverted into movements of the so-called “Social
bloc”, of petty bourgeois and lumpen-proletarian origin.
The Union and the ‘Social Movements’
A class union is right to denounce the injustices of this reactionary
and inhuman society and to express solidarity, in practical ways as well,
with whoever rebels against it, but it is not designed to deal with all of
capitalism’s ills. The union is the organization which workers use to
defend themselves economically, and it would be denying its function if it
altered its constitution to encompass and provide leadership to a whole
range of other types of organizations and movements. It would be
detrimental to the unity of the wage-earning class and the building of its
organization and it is doomed to failure.
At the very least the union should first dedicate its strength and
energy – of which there is never enough – to the objective which gave rise
to it, that is, to increase in size and only then, once it has set down
firm roots, should the problem of cautiously entering into relations with
movements on the margins of the working class be broached.
To try to cram into the union variegated social types, belonging to
different social strata and classes, only appears useful to those who
naïvely subscribe to the idea that greater numbers necessarily corresponds
with a stronger organization. But such a mixture of often conflicting
conditions and interests is impossible to synthesize and can only end up
by damaging the organization of the labour struggle.
The class of wage-earners, however divided it is by the bosses and its
various machinations, is united by a profound common interest: opposition
to the selling of its labour power for less. The defence of wage levels
and working conditions, under its various aspects of struggle against the
extension of the working day and for its reduction, struggle against the
intensification of the pace of work, against redundancy and dismissal, and
in defence of the social wage, pensions and benefits, it is this which
unites all workers and overcomes all barriers.
This is the union’s job, and if it thinks it can take on other ones as
well then it won’t function properly. The task of bringing about the
general transformation of society, of finding a remedy for its many
contradictions and injustices, that is a function that only the party can
perform, by taking political power, which for communists can only be
achieved by revolutionary means.
The community of interests that unites the working class is not found
among the various so-called ‘social’ or petty bourgeois movements. The
workers’ movement is capable of equipping itself with organizations which
endure for years or decades, organized at the national and even
international level, of launching strikes which cover an entire national
territory, and which encompass an entire sector or even the class as a
whole. It is a movement which originates in and hits at capitalism’s vital
core, the production of surplus value (profits, rents, interest). Even
when a part of the wage-earning class which is not directly involved in
the production of surplus value goes on strike, public sector workers for
instance, the capitalist regime in its various manifestations is always
arrayed against it, due to its innate, and justifiable, fear of any
strengthening of the trade union organization and the class movement.
Meanwhile, movements exterior to the working class, of the so-called
‘social’ variety, come into conflict with workers’ organizations both
because their aims are not the same and because of the extempore methods
they use ‘to protest’.
What is more the working class – even if today in its current weakened
condition the opposite might appear to be the case – has a specific
character of its own, one that is distinct from the rest of the society;
it is a character within which we communists can discern, among the many
defects generated by being subjugated to capital, the seeds of
genuine rebellion against the present society, and also the society of the
future: the negation and overcoming of both Capital and wage labour, of
the bourgeois condition as much as the proletarian one. For us the working
class isn’t a ‘reference point’ – a horrible expression used in the
congress document which smacks of a ‘marriage of convenience’ and is
typical of opportunism – but is simply “our class”. Jealously protective
of it we want it to be independently organized and separated from the
negative influences of the petty bourgeoisie and irrelevant social
classes.
This is also made clear on the theoretical plane. One of Marxism’s
fundamental arguments is that the dominant ideology is ruling class
ideology. Within the working class, too, the bourgeois ideology prevails,
although not as completely as outside it. Fighting this ideology inside
the working class is already quite difficult enough without trying to
achieve the organizational union of the workers with other groups, ranks,
strata and classes; frankly, it just does the ruling class a favour, by
making the penetration of their ideology amongst the working class that
much easier.
Either you make a commitment to uniting working class actions and
organization – and creating a working class identity in the process – or
you undermine that task by diverting precious energy into building ‘a
social bloc’, a ruse devised by political and trade union
opportunism to create an entity which will be forever incapable of
deciding which direction it wants to go in.
The ‘Social Issues Federation’
This line adopted by the USB leadership is not new. We have already
alluded to its earlier incarnation as the ‘metropolitan union’, which was
how it was described to the national assembly of the RdB-CUB in May 2009;
the one which sanctioned the end of the “Patto di Base” – the
rank-and-file pact – and the split between the RdB and CUB.
The arguments used by the USB national co-ordinator (still in post now)
at the time are analogous to the ones being used now: “The world of work –
he announced – has been radically transformed. There exists a whole swathe
of people who don’t have a physical place of work (…) or only for a few
months at a time”. And he suggested breaking with “the hegemony of pure
trade unionism” so as to embrace “practices which are different but
absolutely fit-for -purpose that are proving their worth in the cities and
the social sector”. For this reason the Assembly should have produced “a
proposal for a political/organizational synthesis with a corresponding
larger general assembly of rank-and-file trade unionism, open to social
movements and social activists who believe it to be useful and who want to
link up with it”.
The second USB congress has taken this inter-classist line a step
further. If in May 2009 the proposal was to make overtures to the social
movements, that is for the union to have some kind of relationship with
them, what is being suggested now is that they should be organized in the
union itself by creating an appropriate “organizational setting” for them:
the Federazione del Sociale, (‘Social Issues Federation’).
The USB leadership attributes such a degree of importance to this new
structure that it refers to it in the congress document as the
organization’s “third limb”, along with the USB Lavoro Privato and the USB
Pubblico Impiego (Its private and public sector branches).
Particularly clear about the duties that the union’s new structure
should take on was a representative of the National Executive who spoke at
the first congress of the USB pensioners’ organization on May 10th: “A new
entity which we are going to set up will be utilized by and be the home
for all that is […] self-employment”.
The final document approved by the national congress, within the
Federazione del Sociale, to ASIA USB (Tenants and Residents Association)
and the USB Pensionati it has added a new entity: the SLANG, the
“Sindacato lavoratori autonomi di nuove generazione” – Union of the New
Generation of Self-employed Workers.
Since companies use self-employed labour as a way of avoiding taking new
workers onto the payroll, thereby cutting labour costs, it is right that
the union should get involved in the battle to raise the conditions of
these workers to the level of full-time workers. Thus is it is necessary
to organize temporary workers and those on short-term contracts within the
same organizations as those to which the rest of the workers in the
company belong. But with SLANG a framework will be created in which
self-employed labour is organized separately. Thus there is the risk that
the Federazione del Sociale will aggravate the isolated position in which
self-employed workers find themselves, by abandoning them to the influence
of non-working class groups and strata. The brief of the Federazione del
Sociale is to take charge of organizing and supporting a diverse group of
inter-classist movements, ranging from users of social services, to
environmentalists, to those involved in inner city regeneration schemes.
The young temporary workers, the unemployed workers, and the pensioners
who are supposed to be part of it will end up wasting their energy in
activities that are nothing to do with trade union struggle and which are
imbued with inter-classism. Temporary and retired workers, instead of
imbuing a sense of solidarity and power of their working class, and being
welcomed into its organizational embrace, will instead be pushed towards
the desperate impotent world of the déclassé.
Class tradition dictates that unemployed and retired workers, rather
than being organized in separate organizations, should be organized in the
unions of the category to which they originally belonged, thus maintaining
their connection with active workers and with union activity. Our party
fought for this kind of organizational approach within the CGIL when, up
to the late 1970s, it was still calling upon militants to fight within
this union, denouncing for example the separate organization of retired
workers in the Pensioner’s union (the SPI).
The creation of the USB pensionati is going down the same road as the
SPI, with the additional aggravating circumstance that not only are
retired workers now to be separated from active workers on an
organizational level, but also as regards their activity, with the
emphasis being put on supporting the work in the “social movements”
instead of in the trade unions.
The Trade Union Movement and the Political Parties
The USB’s intervention in the “social movements” didn’t begin with the
formation of the Federazione del Sociale but, as the congress document
itself explains, was the outcome of previous experimental forays,
beginning with the “sindacato metropolitano” as it was called, followed by
the “confederalita sociale”.
And yet this activity, in contrast with its declared objectives, has
never been particularly strong, has been present only in a few localities,
and is poorly organized.
TThe problem is that even this sphere of activity, in which the leadership
wants the union to get increasingly involved, requires energy which
is in short supply, which makes the choice of not concentrating what
little, previous energy there is on proper class-based trade union work
all the more wrong.
Therefore, setting aside our critique of the leadership’s overambitious
projects to commit the union to engaging with the social movements and
with self-employed labour, and the fact we do not share those objectives,
it must be taken into account that even their partial realization will be
far from easy and cannot be taken for granted.
Although this should reassure us, that is only partly the case, for
reasons we will go on to explain. It is necessary in fact to understand
these movements better and how the trade unions, not only the USB, relate
to them.
Whereas in the class camp, groups of workers from within the
wage-earning class sign up to their union irrespective of the ideological
or political loyalties, propelled by the need to defend their own living
and working conditions, in the “social movement” camp, on the other hand,
the intervention of the union is often mediated through a relationship
with bodies that already operate within the sector and which, despite
presenting themselves as “social”, are instead political, i.e.,
collectives, social centres, etc. We come against the myriad groups
of the so-called “movement”, adjectiveless insofar as it is not a workers’
movement. It is a characteristic phenomenon of imperialism, the final
phase of capitalism, and expresses the inconclusive agitating of the
intermediate social strata, of the middle classes, cultivated by each
national capitalism, in proportion to its power, useful insofar as they
attenuate the opposition between the working class and the bourgeoisie, to
whom is left some economic space by the ephemeral wellbeing and heightened
morale brought about by the temporary weakness of the working class. The
phenomenon re-appeared in Italy and other countries with a mature
capitalism from around 1968.
By intervening in this camp therefore, each union encounters, as
distinct from what happens in inter-union relations, “political entities”, and it goes without saying that each union leader contrives to establish
relations with those groups with whom he or she has a political affinity.
relations with those groups with whom he or she has a political affinity.
In the end, behind all the theoretical justifications and ambitious
projects regarding the “social bloc”, which are unrealistic and of minimal
importance, the practical effect that counts – and this is an open secret
– is the mundane creation of a new repertoire of manoeuvres which can be
deployed in demonstrations, and a base of support within the union, useful
to the leadership in pursuing its petty political schemes.
Because, naturally enough, the “third limb” of the union will have a
certain weight in terms of its delegates, within the confederal,
territorial and national bodies. And since these are chosen on the basis
of a process of political selection, already they give, and will continue
to give, the leadership a greater guarantee it can successfully impose its
policies on the union.
This stirring in of the union leaders with the “social movements” leads
to the union becoming characterised politically in a certain way, not as a
result of a maturation of the working class in that direction, but quite
the opposite, because it is going to exacerbate the opposition between the
various rank-and-file organizations and therefore hold back the class
struggle, the growth of which is the condition for a general
organizational strengthening of the class in the unions and, eventually,
on the political level as well.
The various rank-and-file unions thus tend to resemble party unions,
perpetually battling and competing among themselves. Not that they become
parties and cease to be unions. But by using the excuse that they are
acting as part of “the social movement” the leaders acquire a greater
degree of control over the organization, in order to use it for their own
ends, than they would if they were restricted to just working on behalf of
the wage-earning class.
Trade Union and “Political Role”
The congress document explains how the attack against the working class
is becoming increasingly harsh – which is pretty obvious to everyone
– and that in order to respond to it the union must take on a “political”
role as well: “Today the union of the trade unionist type [il sindaco di
stampo tradeunionista], linked solely to industrial disputes and
interventions at the company level, is largely obsolete, and there is a
willingness on the part of the leading cadres of the organization, but not
only them, to take on a political role (…) Even collaborationist unions,
who are accomplices of the state, have responded to the politicization of
the struggle with politicization (…) To meet the challenge of the
struggle’s politicization, and consequently of our role, means to have a
broad leading cadre that is well-equipped and of a high calibre”.
Apart from the fact we should take it for granted that a self-proclaimed
class union wouldn’t tail along behind “accomplice, collaborationist”
unionism, we will try to shed a little light on this, as opportunism
thrives on confusion.
Meanwhile it has to be said that, between the union “linked solely to
industrial disputes and interventions at the company level”, which the USB
leaders wrongly define as “trade-unionist”, and the union that takes on “a
political role”, there are a host of others somewhere in-between.
The policy of the class union is to try and achieve the unification of
workers’ struggles, insofar as that is the condition for maximising the
workers’ strength. Therefore it highlights the importance of overcoming
the various divisions in the wage earning class: between the different
parts of a company, between the different companies, between categories,
between full and part timers, between those in the state and private
sectors, between large and small firms, between ‘native citizens’ and
immigrants, and then of sex, political opinion, religion and nationality.
As regards union organizations, it indicates that the path to unity is via
joint struggles, that is, joint strike actions.
The best way to enact this policy is to respect the true function of the
union, whereas the immature, impatient utilization of the union to carry
out a “political function” can only delay or reverse any progress made in
this direction, eventually dividing the workers and the union movement on
the basis of political opinions.
It is on the practical level of the struggle, not on the basis of
opinions, ideology or social theory that most workers will subscribe to
the communist line on trade unions, because it is seen as demonstrably the
most coherent and efficient in terms of effectively defending and
strengthening of the wage earning class. While the other trade union
policies, emanating from other schools of thought and political parties
will, as the class struggle becomes harder due to the inexorable advance
of the economic crisis of capitalism, end up subordinating this trade
union objective – in words proclaimed not just by communists – to their
counter-revolutionary and opportunist political objectives.
The communist policy is the only one which will not manipulate and
exploit the union in this way, not because the communists are genuine and
the others are not, but because their line uniquely expresses a general
political objective which coincides with the best and maximum development
of the trade union movement.
We should make clear that we are neither indignant nor scandalized by
the fact that the union leaders aim to achieve political objectives. In a
general sense we can accept that they believe they are doing so for the
good of the workers. An apolitical union is an impossibility. Politics
affects every aspect of social life and is evidently, and necessarily,
linked to the trade union sphere. Precisely because the union organizes
workers on the basis of their social condition and not their political or
religious faith, there naturally develops within it different approaches
to trade union policy, which in a more or less coherent way lead back to
the various political parties. Mistrusting those who hide their opinions
and intentions is a good thing; conversely, their expression with maximum
clarity is to be valued and freedom of expression within the union should
be the rule. To fight for trade union apoliticism can only result,
on the one hand, on the repression of the expression and manifestation of
different political opinions, and on the other, the maintenance of an
illusion – apoliticism – behind which lurks an indifferent and cynical
‘who cares’ attitude, which is in fact just one more cover for ruling
class ideology.
What we object to, therefore, is not that the leadership of the USB
pursues political objectives – as it inevitably does – but rather the
evident contrast between these objectives and the practical necessities of
the active forward movement of the workers’ struggle and of their trade
union organizations.
The USB leadership’s campaign to get the union to take on a political
role, at a time when the formation of the class union is still a distant
prospect, when the practical activity of the USB still has difficulty
moving beyond the confines of the workplace, will put a brake on and
distort the union’s development, like a new-born baby in restrictive
swaddling clothes. This is happening for example, as described above, with
the creation of the union’s so-called “third limb”, la Federazione del
Sociale, with the aim of widening the base the leadership can count on
within the union to support its political aims.
The real “Political” Objectives of the USB Leadership
These political objectives are expresse in the so-called Eurostop Social
Platform, summed up in the slogan “No Euro, No EU, No NATO”, with the USB
one of its key proponents.
Our political objective is overthrowing capitalism, the USB leadership’s
objective is fighting new-liberalism, in other words, fighting for an
alleged better form of capitalism, since they harbour the illusion there
is a possibility of reforming this system, rather than it just being
subjugated and destroyed.
The fight against neo-liberalism translates in practice into struggle
for a “left” government, via elections. To that end, of much more use to
it than developing the unity of the working class, is the formation of a
political movement, which is precisely what Eurostop is, at whose service
the USB has been placed, drawing in the broadest possible spectrum of the
electorate, and therefore also class ranks, strata and social classes not
of the salaried class.
While revolutionary communism advocates overthrowing capitalism, and
points out the only way to get there as the path of revolution – on the
national level, by destroying the bourgeois state apparatus and replacing
it in the short term with a working class state, and on the international
level, by rejecting all fronts composed of alliances between capitalist
states – reformism always seeks an alleged ameliorative political
objective to defend, and seeks out an international front composed of
better, or less bad, bourgeois states to ally itself with. This political
objective today is to leave the Eurozone or the European Union and, on the
international alliances front, to leave NATO in order to support the other
imperialist front, Russia and, in Syria for example, the Assad Regime.
About these political objectives most of the rank-and-file members know
little,and even less about how much of their money is spent on them,
seeing that their membership subscriptions go to fund conventions,
demonstrations and even trips for USB national delegations to the theatres
of war – like Donbass (Ukraine) and to Syria – hosted and protected by the
political and military structures of one or other of the belligerent
parties.
Faced with these local wars, which will tend to become increasingly
generalized and are bound to lead to a global imperialist conflict unless
the proletarian revolution prevents it, the USB is already taking an
interventionist stance, i.e., one which lends itself to drawing up the
workers on one of the war fronts.
This stance is nothing new, and is not that surprising given it emanates
from the same political group that has been in charge of this union since
it was formed back in the early 1980s as the RdB. Indeed, during the wars
in Iraq and Serbia the leadership took the side of Saddam Hussein and
Milosevic.
They are the political positions of social-democratic opportunism, in
Stalinist guise, replacing the working class with “the people”, with the
“social bloc”; Internationalism with nationalism; and communism with state
capitalism.
Conclusion
That this policy of the USB leadership has been more or less approved at
the union’s second congress doesn’t mean it will actually come to
anything. The leadership of a union, whatever it may want, has to take
account not only of the class enemy but of the living nature of the union
organ, and of the reason why it arose and came into existence. A union
isn’t willed into existence by its organizers and leaders but because it
encounters the necessity of organizing and defending workers. The policy
of a union’s leadership can either damage or favour the development of the
organization and of the power of the working class, but it cannot do with
it whatever it wants.
Notwithstanding the foolish ambition of the USB leadership to intervene
in the social movements and create a related organizational structure,
trade union work will continue to be, as it is today, a fundamental part
of the organization’s activity, and whose forward movement will tend to
attract other fighting spirits who have already embarked on the same path.
Since for hundreds of years the union has had certain characteristics
and boundaries and still has them today, organizing only the working
class, because this corresponds to determined material characteristics of
capitalism, the innovatory opportunistic fantasies of the USB leadership
are not going to change that any time soon.
If and in the measure that new groups of workers join the USB, injecting
new energy into it, the trade union side of the work will have a flywheel
effect and condition the organization more and more, forcing the
leadership to come to terms with this practical necessity.
It will also be reflected in a plurality of trade union policies and
positions, which will be much harder to repress if the membership
continues to grow.
The USB leaders are themselves certainly aware of this and if at
congress level they have formulated, as we have seen, very restrictive
rules, something that for now has been accepted due to the union’s overall
immaturity, there is, at the company and category level often greater room
for manoeuvre.
Indeed the leadership’s positions haven’t been the only ones to be aired
at this congress. The Lavoro Privato, the private sector workers section
of the union, which is the most important, tabled motions and agenda items
which raised issues we have highlighted in this article: the need to focus
energy on union work, the wrongness of the policy which aims to have the
union take on a “political role”, unity of action with rank-and-file
unionism.
In a motion approved at various regional congresses of the Lavoro
Privato and then presented to the category’s national congress, where it
was rejected, we read: “Labour is at the centre of union activity; it is
the priority. The rest is dodging the issue, a flight from reality (…)
Faced with the politicization of discontent, the response is not to
politicize ourselves in our turn. Quite the contrary: we must resume and
reinforce our core, typically trade union work (…) Which doesn’t mean just
participating in the election of Rsu and Rsa 1.
Quite the reverse (…) The unity of all those who work in the same place,
whatever their contract, must be the USB’s priority (…) USB supports the
initiatives of working men and women that have arisen in the work place,
independently from what union they may belong to”.
In this direction our work as communists continues.
1)These footnotes appear alongside part one of this article in The Communist Party, issue 7-8
