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
6.For the Class Union: Quebec Health Care Workers - Greece - Pakistan - German Rail Strikes
Afghanistan: Return of the Taliban
The
return of the Taliban to power in Kabul is a fact that does not surprise
us too much. Of course, we cannot deny that the grand finale of the
macabre spectacle of a twenty-year conflict, which has cost rivers of
blood and mountains of money, has taken on surreal characteristics,
especially if the result of so much mad effort has been nothing other
than to see the faction that had been driven out of power thanks to the
military intervention of the United States return to power.
The collapse
of the regime held in place thanks to the protection of the armed forces
of the first military power in the world, looks like a stinging defeat
likely to significantly alter the balance between the great imperialist
powers. It is not by chance that the Beijing government, emboldened by
the American defeat, took the opportunity to reaffirm the imperial
appetites of mainland China over Taiwan and wanted to send a warning
message to the Taipei rulers: "watch how the United States abandon their
protégés to an inauspicious fate. Tomorrow the same fate could befall
you".
But the consequences are not necessarily less serious at the
domestic level: reliving in the Kabul of 2021 the defeat already
suffered in Saigon in 1975, and moreover with a very similar script,
inflicts a disfiguring wound to the image of the U.S. establishment that
after more than 2,400 American deaths and a trillion dollars dissipated
in a totally inconclusive occupation, is presented in front of the
spectacular machine of bourgeois propaganda with very meager spoils of
war. Yet we would be wrong to see in these results only the ineptitude
of the four presidents who in these twenty years have managed American
foreign policy.
If in the epoch of bourgeois decadence the frenzied race
of the economy towards the overproduction of goods and capital seems to
us ever more irrational and destructive, why should we be surprised if
the policy of the greatest economic and military power on the planet
also turns out to be absurd and inconclusive? If politics for us
Marxists is a concentration of economics, why shouldn’t a demented
economy correspond to an equally demented policy?
We don’t want to
insist too much on the real or presumed ineptitude of those responsible
for US policy, because it is not in our method to overestimate the
function of individuals. Our reading starts rather from the
consideration that the foreign policy of states is nothing more than the
result of objective factors linked to the necessities imposed by the
valorization of capital, by the aims of social preservation imposed by
the overall interests of the ruling class and in the last instance by
the relations of force between the powers.
In the case of the United
States, marked by decades of relative decline in its economic weight on
a global scale, foreign policy can no longer adhere to a coherent
overall strategic design, but finds itself forced to come to terms with
ever-increasing difficulties in many areas of the world that impose
swings and sudden turns with almost never decisive consequences.
After
the attacks of September 11, 2001 against the Twin Towers in New York
and against the Pentagon, the decision of then US President George W.
Bush to invade Afghanistan was officially motivated by the need to
strike at the alliance linking al-Qaeda to the Taliban regime that had
been ruling the Central Asian country of Afghanistan since 1996. In
reality, if the aim had really been that of striking the protectors and
instigators of those who had struck the beating heart of American power
in such a devastating way, the war would have had to be conducted
elsewhere, given that behind al-Qaeda were the great economic interests
tied essentially to oil revenues in Saudi Arabia.
This aspect was also
confirmed by the fact that most of the attackers were Saudi citizens. In
the second place, if the objective had been that of striking the
Taliban, at the time at the helm of a fragile State structure, born on
the ruins of the civil war between the "war lords" of the so-called
"resistance" to the Soviet invasion, then it would have been more
logical to take it out on Pakistan, which had been, since its birth, the
nurturer and political godfather of the movement of the "Koranic
students". But all that was impossible since Pakistan and Saudi Arabia
were historic allies of the US.
Then there had already been some of
those natural setbacks that mark the progress of history: the religious
Afghan mujahidin who had been supported militarily to sustain the war
against the Soviet Union, once the pro-Soviet regime had been
overthrown, massacred themselves in a bloody civil war whose sides had
been defined along the fault lines of the various ethnic and religious
components of a country with an only fictitious national unity.
The
fragility of the country’s cohesion stemmed from a process of state
formation in which British colonial policy had played a decisive role.
In a certain sense, Afghanistan resembles many states that were first
drawn on maps by the old colonial powers rather than in actual reality.
In fact, the 2,670-kilometre-long border separating Afghanistan from
Pakistan was the result of an agreement reached in 1893 between the
Secretary of State of British India Sir Mortimer Durand and the then
Afghan Emir Abd ur-Rahman Khan. Since then, the so-called Durand Line
has defined, with few variations, the arbitrarily drawn boundary between
Pakistan and Afghanistan, two states that, in the act of birth, bore in
varying degrees and for different reasons the stigmata of British
colonial domination.
The former was born at the time of Indian
independence, thanks to the work of fragmentation of the independence
movement on a religious basis, planned and pursued with pertinacious
determination by London. The second was born instead as a "buffer
state", again at the behest of British diplomacy, in order to keep under
control the expansionist aims of Tsarist Russia, which through Central
Asia were turning in the direction of the warm seas. It should be added
that the birth of Afghanistan, which became fully independent from a de
facto British protectorate only in 1919, was a sort of fallback solution
for the colonial power.
This was the consequence of the outcome of the
three Anglo-English wars that in a span of 70 years had failed to subdue
the country. This solution was the result of the so-called Great Game
which, starting from the middle of the 19th century, involved the great
world powers of the time around what is now Afghanistan. It is no
coincidence that in the mid-1970s, after decades of relative dormancy,
the Great Game came back to the fore as a consequence of the first
serious economic crisis of the cycle of capitalist accumulation
following the Second World War. Just as it is no coincidence that in the
last 42 years Afghanistan has gone from one war to another in a process
of social upheaval that has also manifested itself in the urbanization
of large portions of the rural population.
The
last two decades of the "American war" have also seen the progressive
inclusion of China in the Afghan Great Game, in a way completely
parallel to the affirmation of the latter as an industrial power in the
world. The Chinese interest in Afghanistan was also propitiated by the
geographical contiguity, so much so that the two countries shared a
92-kilometre-long stretch of border, the route of which was defined for
the first time in 1895 in an agreement between Russia and Great Britain
in which the two empires placed a "no man’s land" between their
respective areas of influence, arbitrarily attributing to Afghanistan
the inhospitable, desolate and impervious Wakhan Corridor (350
kilometres long and less than 30 wide on average), located between the
high altitudes of the Hindokush mountain range.
Today,
China’s attention towards Afghanistan is motivated by various aspects,
first and foremost the fact that it represents an obligatory passage
along the three lines of expansion of Chinese trade, one of which moves
in the direction of the Indian Ocean, another goes towards ex-Soviet
Central Asia and yet another heads straight for the Mediterranean. With
regard to the first line of Chinese expansion, Beijing has invested in
two major projects: the first is the "Five Countries Railway" which,
passing through Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, will end in the
Iranian port of Chabahar and will connect China to the Gulf of Oman; the
second is the "Sino-Pakistan Economic Corridor" which, crossing the
areas inhabited by Pashtuns and Beluci (the same populations also
present in Afghanistan), will reach the port of Gwadar, on the Indian
Ocean, which is being enlarged thanks to substantial Chinese funding.
So
it is not surprising if Beijing’s Afghan policy aspires first and
foremost to the political stabilization of the neighboring country. This
is an aspiration that, for diametrically opposed reasons, does not
arouse the same enthusiasm in the United States, China’s main imperial
rival.
This crucial knot has had its weight in the chain of events that
has led the United States to derail on the road to its military
disengagement from the Afghan conflict and it is certainly no
coincidence that in an attempt to make Chinese hegemony over a vast
geo-historical area including Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran more
difficult, the last two US administrations have decided to play the card
of the political rehabilitation of the Taliban, who have become key
players in Washington’s Afghan policy. There are several factual
elements that corroborate the picture of a dialogue and cooperation with
the Taliban that may never have completely disappeared but have
certainly been growing in recent years.
In 2017, the United States
pressured Pakistan to release Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar,
also known as Mullah Baradar Akhund, from its prisons in order to
represent the "Koranic students" movement in direct negotiations. The
negotiation between the U.S. Representative for Afghan Affairs, the
Afghan-born, Pashtun-ethnic diplomat Zalmai Khalilzad, and Abdul Ghani
Baradar himself, also like most of the Pashtun-ethnic Taliban, resulted
in the February 2020 Doha Agreement in which Washington agreed on the
agenda for its military withdrawal with its apparent "arch-enemies"
after nearly two decades of uninterrupted war.
But the thing that made
this circumstance even more paradoxical was that the "friendly"
government in Kabul was kept (rightly!) out of the negotiations.
To
highlight some of the paradoxical and apparently incongruous aspects of
imperialist warfare, it so happens that Qatar, of which Doha is the
capital, is also the country where the US military base of al-Ubeid, the
most important in the Middle East, is located. But at the same time,
Doha has been home to the headquarters of the Taliban for several years.
Moreover, Qatar is, as is well known, the main international sponsor of
the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest component of Sunni political Islam,
whose expansion has been opposed or encouraged in alternating phases by
the United States itself. Suffice it to say that the Muslim Brotherhood
is also affiliated with the A.K.P. of Turkish President Erdogan and the
Palestinian group Hamas, further confirmation of the ambivalent
relations between states and organizations once considered enemies and
now considered allies. And it is no coincidence that, taking advantage
of the hospitality offered to the Taliban, Doha has risen to contribute
to that shift in identity that has changed the features of the Afghan
fundamentalist movement, bringing them closer to the Muslim Brotherhood
and in some respects – something that was unheard of until recently –
even to the Iranian theocracy.
Once misoneists and iconoclasts (one
remembers the destruction of the gigantic statues of the Buddhas of
Bamyan or the scenes in which the television sets were smashed with an
ax in spectacular propagandistic representations of the fight against
unbelief), the Taliban are ready to propagandize their new course in
which, in tune with modern fundamentalism, they show themselves willing
to Islamicize capitalist modernity rather than oppose it. This attitude
was manifested immediately after the fall of Kabul into their hands with
a proclamation affirming their commitment to respect property and
investments, including foreign ones. The Taliban want to make themselves
out to be the best promise of bourgeois continuity for Afghanistan
available on the market today, and in this endeavor it cannot be taken
for granted that they will fail since they have excellent credentials
(of which the world capitalist class is well aware).
In this regard, it
is worth noting the immense trust granted to the Taliban by the U.S.
that among the points of the Doha Agreements had agreed to include the
release of 5,000 prisoners of war from Afghan jails. This aspect of the
agreement was opposed in every way, and for reasons easily
understandable, by the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani who precisely
opposed the measure, denouncing it as unconstitutional. But a puppet
government cannot but obey the strings of its puppet master and so
Washington "suggested" to the president the convocation of a Loya Jirga,
the Great National Assembly that groups together the Afghan notables
representing all the ethnic groups and all the territorial realities of
the country, judged in that case to be competent to adopt such a
decision. So in August 2020, in his opening speech of the Loya Jirga,
Ashraf Ghani found himself obtorto collo in the paradoxical condition of
pleading for the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for the
release of a thousand soldiers and public officials detained by the
Koranic students. An episode which explains how ample strata of the
Afghan dominant class, worried by such weakness on the part of the Kabul
Government, was encouraged to keep its foot in two stirrups, thus
preparing itself for the eventuality of a change of regime, limiting
possible clashes, friction and useless and inculcated heroism.
To make
the surrender without a fight that took place in the first half of
August more plausible, there is also the Afghan custom (typical of all
societies that do not boast of a tradition of solid state order) of not
considering loyalty to the State or to a political alliance as superior
to the loyalty owed to one’s own tribe. It is almost needless to say
that most of the prisoners freed in September 2020 went to swell the
ranks of the Taliban militias, contributing to creating havoc and
distrust in the government forces.
At the
end of 2020, the Taliban already controlled a conspicuous part of the
Afghan territory. Although excluded from the large cities, which were
held by the regular army backed by US and NATO forces, they were at the
head of a "de facto State". A state which they managed with efficiency
and shrewdness, especially when compared to the extreme inefficiency and
corruption of the official government which, lacking any real cohesion,
was a brand behind which the interests of the tribal clans survived the
lack of centralization of the country due to the fragility of a state
entity without its own strength.
In fiscal year 2020, the Taliban
managed a budget of about $1.6 billion, only part of which came from the
taxation of opium cultivation, the refining of drugs and their marketing
(a fact that, according to sources such as the Financial Times, dispels
the myth of an armed insurgency entirely dependent on drug trafficking).
According to some estimates, the narcotics trade has contributed a
quarter of the Taliban’s income, roughly equal to that of the taxes
collected on the exploitation of the mines, a very important sector and
very promising for the future, considering the wealth of the Afghan
subsoil. Particularly profitable is the exploitation of the talc mines
extracted in Afghanistan, exported through the porous Pakistani border
thanks to the good offices of the ISI (the Pakistani secret services)
and then marketed as talc "made in Pakistan" throughout the world (the
US and Italy are among the major consumers).
Among the other sources of
income were the taxes imposed on the subject population (the press
opposed to the Taliban defines these as "extortion") which contributed
160 million to 10% of the total budget. Exports of goods yielded $240
million, while donations came from many countries. Pakistan, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates contributed a similar amount to
the Taliban coffers, confirming the existence of a dense international
network of support.
The financial resources of the Taliban played an
essential role in the long war of position that prepared the triumphant
final offensive if, as it appears from various sources, the Taliban
militias were mercenary troops in all respects and received a salary
generally higher than that of the regular troops. Moreover, as has been
repeated in several media outlets in recent days, the regular army’s
numbers were inflated by commanders in order to obtain more funding from
the state.
There
are now various difficulties and unknowns for the Taliban in power. The
political unification of the country under its own flag, with the
exception of a few pockets of resistance, seems substantially complete.
The chances of the so-called "Northern Alliance", barricaded with a few
thousand men in the Panjshir valley, to effectively oppose an announced
Taliban offensive also seem slim.
It is necessary to remember that the
spoils of war of the Taliban, obtained from the dissolution of the
regular army supplied by the United States, include many hundreds of
Humvee armored vehicles, some Black Hawk combat helicopters and twenty
or so A-29 Super Tucano aircraft. All of which put the Taliban in a
clear advantageous position in the face of any eventual armed
insurgency.
This does not mean, however, that the country will be easily
pacified. Another difficulty with which the Taliban must reckon is the
freezing of international financial flows destined for the old Afghan
government and which were indispensable to guarantee its functioning. A
third difficulty could come from the internal divisions of a not very
homogeneous political structure. Some components would be more
interested in imprinting an "internationalist" character of all-out
Islamic propaganda on the Taliban Emirate, as would be the case of the
Haqqani Network traditionally tied to the Pakistani services and to Al
Qaeda.
The most influential component, at the moment, seems to be more
interested in highlighting the national character of the movement.
Exponents of this tendency are the leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada,
designated as Amir al-Muminin (Prince of Believers) and the already
nominated Head of the Government, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
In a
meeting in early August in Tianjin with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang
Yi, the latter pledged not to interfere with the thorny issue of the
Uyghurs, a Sunni Muslim and Turkic-speaking population in China’s
Xinjiang, whose ethnic discrimination by the Beijing government is one
of the leitmotifs of anti-Chinese propaganda advocated by the US and
Western powers. The armed movement called the Turkistan Islamic Party,
which gathers Uyguri jihadists, is active in China and took part in some
moments of the war in Afghanistan and the war in Syria by joining the
jihadists in Idlib. This aspect presents itself as one of the obstacles
that could hinder the development of those "friendly" relations between
China and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that the Beijing government
hastened to hope for immediately after the fall of Kabul into Taliban
hands.
For us
Marxists, national and religious conflicts conceal material interests
that are mostly unconfessable, just as the Taliban flag is waved to
propitiate and co-conspire more or less shady business deals. A new
advance by China could undoubtedly benefit from a pacified and unified
Afghanistan, even if under the banner of the Taliban, which is
indigestible to many. Chinese imperialism is anxious to fill a void left
by the retreating American imperialism, but a success in this sense is
far from being taken for granted. What will determine future
developments in the Great Game of the 21st century will be the balance
of power between the great powers on the verge of entering the final
straight of the general war, of the infamous world imperialist
slaughter.
20 Years Since September 11th
This
month marks twenty years since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The
workers of the United States can expect a flood of patriotic drivel to
mark the anniversary. Indeed, September 11 remembrance is a cottage
industry in the United States, encompassing everyone from the media
personalities who drone on about the tragedy every year to the sensitive
entrepreneurs who sell 9/11 mementos to tourists in New York City. One
only needs to spend a few minutes at the World Trade Center Memorial in
Manhattan to experience this ghoulish, sanctimonious, for-profit
remembrance.
This
twisted form of national memory obscures the real meaning of the
attacks. The events of September 11 were of great world-historical
significance. This fact is especially clear on their twentieth
anniversary, as the United States’ occupation of Afghanistan crumbles in
front of our eyes. The September 11 attacks represented the first
obvious crack in United States imperial power after the end of the Cold
War. It has continued to disintegrate in the two decades since, and now
nears collapse.
September 11, 2001 marked the abrupt and unexpected end of the post-Cold
War imperialist system. The decline of Russian imperialism after 1989
left the United States as the dominant imperialist state. The paid hacks
of the American bourgeoisie call this a “unipolar” international system,
with the United States acting as its “hegemon” (borrowing a term from
that Stalinist hack Gramsci). They believe that this is still the
situation today. September 11 shows that this is not true. At what
seemed to be the absolute height of United States power, nineteen
members of an international terrorist organization were able to murder
three thousand people in two of its most important cities. The
international system is never really “polar,” and no state can ever
really be hegemonic. International networks, whether formal
organizations or informal connections, always exist in the modern world,
and they can be just as powerful as any state. As a class that emerged
from international trading networks at the end of the Middle Ages, the
bourgeoisie knows this truth very well. And after all, it was an
international network which laid the foundations for Al Qaeda: the
so-called “Afghan Arabs” from the Gulf States who supported the
Mujahideen during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, funded by
American and Saudi money.
No
country can escape the contradictions of the imperialist stage of
capitalism, no matter how strong a position it may seem to have. Even
with no other state as its equal, the United States had to face the
history that its policy-makers were desperate to escape after the Cold
War. Two centuries of imperialism in the Middle East, Africa, and South
Asia set the scene for the humiliation of September 11, 2001. Just like
every Great Power that had sought control over that geopolitically
important region, the United States paid off the regional forces who
seemed to be on its side and violently suppressed anything that looked
like opposition.
The
result was the creation of a colonial middle class. Like every middle
class in history, this national bourgeoisie wanted to rule outright, but
it was prevented from doing so by the imperial bourgeoisie of the United
States. So a section of the national bourgeoisie crafted the reactionary
ideology of Wahabism, seeing a fundamentalist religious revival as the
key to reviving the nation with their class at its head. This ideology
was useful to the American imperial masters when it was targeted at
their rivals in Russia – but deals with the devil always turn out the
same way. The individuals who planned and carried out the September 11
attacks were members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and
petty-bourgeoisie of Middle East, raised in the shadow of the Afghan
Mujahideen. Afghanistan was the perfect place for their base of
operations, sitting on the frontier between the Middle East and South
Asia but not completely under the influence of the regional powers in
either one.
The
United States helped create the Taliban through its support for the
Afghan Mujahideen against the Russian occupation, yet American
politicians continue to claim that their invasion in 2001 was a
humanitarian intervention. The CIA had extensive contacts with
Mujahideen fighters before they coalesced into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The United States knew exactly who the Islamists were and what they
would do to Afghanistan. Yet it was only after the whole plan blew up in
their faces on September 11 that the captains of American imperialism
started crying about the need to “liberate” the Afghan people.
This
“liberation” was nothing more than a calculated (or miscalculated, as
the past twenty years have proved) geopolitical action, intended
exercise control over the types of political groups that could operate
in the Middle East and South Asia. In that respect it was no different
that the earlier civilizing missions of the British imperialists, who
fought three different wars in Afghanistan between 1839 and 1919.
Britain’s wars in Afghanistan were about bringing a strong British
backed puppet government to power, which would reign in the “frontier
tribes” and stabilize the frontier between Britain’s colonial possession
in India and Russia’s possessions in Central Asia. The United States’
war for the past twenty years has been about bringing a strong
American-backed puppet government to power, which would stomp out any
challenge to American control of the entire globe. It is abundantly
clear that both missions failed.
The
United States’ invasion of Afghanistan brought about nothing but
repression. At least 220,000 Afghans died as a result of the invasion
and occupation. Others suffered as a result of poverty and the collapse
of the medical system. At least another million people died as result of
the United States’ invasion of Iraq, which it used to September 11
attacks to justify. And others across the world suffered from the
“anti-terrorist” measures that reveal the truly repressive nature of
democracy: drone assassinations, kidnapping, torture, imprisonment
without trial, and mass surveillance.
The
historical meaning of the September 11 attacks is that they marked the
downward trajectory of one of the most important imperial powers in
history. Now engaged in a new Great Power rivalry with China, the United
States strains under the weight of that burden of history.
Mexico: Cooking Gas Prices Rise and Wages remain in the ditch
When
the Mexican government of López Obrador (AMLO) wanted to adjust the
price of LP gas, for domestic use, and to incorporate the new state
company "Gas Bienestar" in the distribution, announcing on 28 July the
Decree "Emergency Directive for the Welfare of the Liquefied Petroleum
Gas Consumer", the response of the owners and cartels of this lucrative
business, which moves billions of pesos a day, was activated.
At
least 80% of the population is affected by the shortage of LPG. The
strike and the protest of the so-called "commission agents", who are the
ones who close the circuit in the attention to the end users, in an
atmosphere of "tolerated informality", with the delivery of cylinders or
the refilling of stationary tanks, was the employers’ response,
supported by this mass of informal workers who carry out the
distribution. With this employers’ strike, the intention is clear: to
force the government to back down on the gas price cap and the creation
of the public company.
Over
the years previous governments have allowed the exponential movement of
gas prices. It currently sells for over 500 pesos. The minimum wage in
Mexico does not exceed 150 pesos. To buy a tank of gas a worker would
have to save more than 3 minimum wages and not spend on anything else.
From the first minute of this Sunday, August 8, millions of people in
the capital woke up to the news that the price of LP gas, both for
stationary tanks and metal cylinders, will increase by 45 cents and 15
cents per kilogram and litre, respectively.
Amid
the biggest rise in 20 years in the international price of LPG, the
value of Mexican imports of the fuel between January and last May grew
67.5% to 1.299 billion dollars, according to the most updated data of
the trade balance published by the National Institute of Geography and
Statistics (INEGI). During the same period, the values of imports of
gasoline and diesel - the two petroleum derivatives that Mexico imports
most - grew at much more moderate rates of 3.2 per cent and 1.8 per
cent, respectively. As a result, the share of LPG in the value of total
Mexican imports of petroleum products from January to May grew from 8.3
per cent to 12.8 per cent from 2020 to 2021, while the share of gasoline
fell from 52.5 per cent to 50 per cent and that of diesel from 22.9 per
cent to 21.6 per cent. The notable rise in the value of imported LPG is
mainly explained by the significant increase in the price of its main
component, propane, whose international average price (Mont Belvieu,
spot) between January and May rose 132% to 0.865 dollars per gallon
compared to the same period in 2020. This increase is, according to data
from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the largest
observed for a comparable period since 2000, when it rose 111 per cent.
In this context, the volume of LPG imported by Mexico during January-May
grew just 6.8 per cent to an average of 194,000 barrels per day,
according to data from the Mexican government’s Energy Secretariat.
Five
large companies control the distribution of domestic gas, the main gas
groups operating in Mexico are Tomás Zaragoza Fuentes’ Tomza Group,
which controls most of the northwest region of the country from Baja
California, along with Zeta Gas, owned by his brother Miguel Zaragoza
Fuentes. This list of the G5 also includes Gas Uribe, headed by Óscar
Uribe, which has a high penetration in the Valley of Mexico and its
surroundings, where it also shares the market in this area with Vela
Gas, owned by Lázaro Bello.
In the
political confrontation, the opportunists want to present this conflict
as a clash between the capitalist gas cartels on the one hand and the
government and the workers on the other. AMLO has declared that "the
government will not bow to the strike"; but immediately, conciliatory,
he affirmed: "It has already been explained to them, it is an emergency
measure that was taken, it is transitory until a balance is established
in the prices, because they have gone too high and are affecting the
popular economy" and he recognised that "it is not about all the
distributors and commission agents".
AMLO’s
government and his 4T, like previous governments, only administers the
interests of the bourgeoisie, the interests of big capital, even when it
tries to find a "middle ground" between corporate profits, international
prices and the purchasing power of the workers. The apparent
confrontation between the government and the gas bosses should not
confuse the workers. Even some calls for the nationalisation of the gas
companies and their transfer to workers’ control, ends up being an
approach that, although it sounds "radical", really takes the workers’
movement away from the central struggle for wage increases. Once again
opportunism is placing its booby traps in the path of the proletariat to
take it away from the centre of its battle.
The
Mexican workers’ movement must advance in its trade union and rank and
file organisation and orient itself towards unity of action for wage
increases and a reduction in the working day. The price of gas must be
covered by a new wage that allows workers to pay their own and their
families’ bills. In this struggle AMLO’s government is as much the enemy
of the workers as are the capitalist gas cartels and the entire economy.
VAX / No-VAX
The
bourgeoisie does science in spite of itself, it is forced to do so to
the extent necessary to continue making profits. But it has always
wavered in its regard for the scientific method and in its confidence in
the practical applications of its discoveries. When in the ascendant
phase of the economic cycle, it has gone from idolising the progress of
knowledge, from which all classes would benefit, to rejecting science as
such in times of crisis and general insecurity, and even to adopting
pessimistic and agnostic attitudes.
Today,
in times of epidemics, the Vax and the No-vax are aligned on these two
opposing fronts.
We
wrote in 1977 in "Defending the revolutionary theory is defending the
future of the proletariat", "The problem, both practical and
theoretical, has always kept the revolutionary communist theory vividly
engaged, while the bourgeoisie and opportunism, in alternating and
contradictory phases, have now exalted the experimental scientific
achievements, now they have preferred to make them preceded by
idealistic, subjectivist and instrumental fumblings.
"Bourgeois
science
takes on the characteristics of subjectivism and metaphysics, more or
less evident, when the need to preserve class privileges takes
precedence over the need to wrest from nature its secrets for the growth
of the productive forces and the accumulation of surplus value.
"We
deny the bourgeoisie - which never before has shown itself to be selfish
and blind, bloodthirsty and incapable of setting itself general human
objectives - the right to present itself as the author and dispenser of
true science. That is why we are fighting for its violent end and the
establishment of communism".
The
position of Marxism is well known, opposite and far superior to both
these fallacious bourgeois conceptions. Science and technology, which
progress intertwined and push each other forward, are indeed the result
of the perfecting of the productive forces, including the forces of
labour, and of the work of the brain, but they are likewise subservient
to the class of the holders of the means of production.
Hence
the permanent and historically growing contrast between the forces of
thought, science and technology, which tend to grow, and the relations
of production.
This
is despite the fact that the dominant thought, with its essentially
ideological and anti-dialectical approaches, does not fail to penetrate
the skulls of even the greatest researchers, holding them back and
diverting them from fully representing the reality.
As
early as 1898, science had clearly described the origin of asbestosis,
generated by the inhalation of asbestos crystals; the same can be said
for the damage caused by tobacco smoke, or the lead poisoning generated
by lead vapours. It was Capital, for its own exclusive interests, that
ignored all warnings for almost a century. Because not ’philosophers’,
in this case biologists, are in power in a class society.
In
dealing with the Covid, therefore, we wrote immediately "what does not
work in order to preserve the health of the species is capitalism", not
in the sense that science can already cure all ills, but that capital
also prevents the full application of what science can already teach.
There
is no, it is not possible for there to exist, in present class society,
an ’alternative’ science, an anti or post-bourgeois knowledge, to which
the better informed proletarians can have access. The only non-bourgeois
science is that of the party, Marxism, pertaining to the field of human
societies; we do not yet have our own communist science, except that of
history and revolution. The party, from our great Frederick onwards, has
always kept abreast of every new discovery and theory in the natural
sciences, but not even we communists can know more. We only criticise
bourgeois science, the science of our centuries, which are bourgeois
centuries. Because there can be no other science today.
But it
is the science "of the multinationals"! Sure, and whose science should
it be? By now, universities have been reduced to such hiding places of
know-nothing, copy-and-paste ignorance and careerism that research and
science is carried out directly by capital. Do you want the ’national’
vaccine, or from your local pharmacy?
This
dying society, a victim of its own conflicting interests, is also
incapable of getting its slave science to give it a definite direction.
So it pretends to appeal to the will of the people and the individual
freedom of citizens. Not only is he unable and unwilling to clarify
matters, but he continues to wreak havoc and misinformation. Even what
would be a healthy and necessary debate between medical and clinical
schools of thought is degraded to a television show, somewhere between
hilarious and terrorist. Will Vax or No-vax win tonight?
But
the No-vaxers add: it’s all a conspiracy, and all the numbers they’re
giving us are false, manipulated!
Of
course. But just as we use bourgeois statistics to great advantage in
our studies of economics, even though we know that they are rigged, we
are obliged to do the same in all fields of knowledge. We have to start
from these data, which are the least worst we have.
Moreover,
the
world’s bourgeoisies are not so prescient, omnipotent, united and
disciplined. Just the opposite. There is no hidden director who writes
the script and controls the actors. Instead, it is a tangle of
scoundrels and liars, but who, historically and contingently, have the
world against them and must defend themselves against it. The
bourgeoisie, in its current comatose state, cannot be expected to make
effectively rational choices and behave rationally; it is struggling to
stay afloat.
But,
they object, the No-vax, petit-bourgeois for the most part, in various
countries have even taken to the streets to demonstrate against
vaccination and health cards. Certainly they are the expression of a
malaise within the popular strata, which has been going on for several
decades now, of a state of suffering due to their conditions,
precariousness, relative impoverishment, etc., But it cannot be defined
as a resumption of class struggle every kind of rebellionist
demonstration, from the No-vax to the yellow vests. The class struggle -
which is and can only be proletariat against bourgeoisie - is expressed,
developed and organised in a completely different way. The rebels, the
discontented of all the intermediate classes will join the proletarian
movement, but only when it is strong and wins the social battle.
Otherwise, petty-bourgeois movements are born and remain
counter-revolutionary.
Finally,
we
come to the everyday and the practical, of course, in this largely
involuntary bourgeois shambles, complicated by the more than legitimate
suspicion that the directives issued by the health institutions of the
states are not the best, that the use of ineffective treatments is
neglected or delayed for criminal reasons of commercial interest, or
imposed as unsafe. How can proletarian families defend themselves
against the epidemic? Who should they listen to? To vaccinate or not to
vaccinate?
There
is no individual escape from bourgeois society and culture. Neither can
this be denied or opposed by individual goodwill or ’more conscious’
behaviour. Nor can the working class as a whole, except partially in the
practice of its defensive action. Only the party in its revolutionary
programme and its militant structure escapes it. Proletarians can only
be treated in this society according to its science, which is bourgeois
science. We will certainly not invite them to blindly rely on the cares
of the state, but neither on the dementia of television talk shows, nor
on the self-medication on the Internet, typical of the individual
bourgeois solitude.
The
proletarians, in the absence of class welfare structures, which could
emanate from the trade unions, will treat themselves as they have always
done and could not fail to do, by consulting the health workers of the
health structures of the present society, workers devoted to science and
medical practice, mostly proletarians, and certainly the least ignorant
and most disinterested to turn to.
Finally,
then,
it is clear that communists are neither Vax nor No-vax.
Constitutional Wrangles and Election Hysteria
A
number of books have now been published relating to the events at the
conclusion of the Trump Presidency and the Inauguration of Biden as the
46th President of the United States of America. Each book and study on
these events are expected to be dramatic, relaying interviews with
prominent politicians and Government officials, with many giving new
revelations from participants with different slants on their motives and
what they in effect prevented. The authors and media personalities were
then rushed off to TV studios to speak again about their interviews and
the impressions they formed about what the outgoing President and his
allies were doing as a result of the loss of the 2020 election.
Without going over the various revelations and reports of the events
leading up to the riot of January 6th and the assault on the Capitol
building, the consensus was the horrifying conclusion that on January
6th the Constitution of the USA “hung by a thread”. It was suggested
that the American state and way of life was in danger and could have
been extinguished that very day. It was none the less an extraordinary
event, an outgoing head of state in a presumed stable democracy calling
out supporters to invade the session of elected representatives
disrupting the result of elections for his replacement. The rationale,
the excuse for the mobilisation of protesters was that the election was
stolen from Trump and that far-fetched and outlandish claims were made
about fraudulent means had been used to “steal the election”.
The
traumatic events since the election of Biden in the November 2020
General Election are still being played out on many levels with the
ferocious campaign by Trump and his supporters to question if not
overturn that election. The wrangling going on in Congress, the previous
replacing of various government agencies with more “pliable” people
(including the Pentagon), the investigations about attempts to suborn
the Department of Justice, the various cases both criminal and civil
going before the Courts as well as the pantomime of the Maricopa County
ballot “audit”. We have not touched upon the civil and criminal
investigations into the Trump organisation and its related companies,
the demand for the release of Trump’s Tax Returns, and the eventual
biggie, possibly conspiracy and sedition charges against Trump and / or
his associates.
There
are well-used methods of ensuring the turning out of supporters at
election time. There is the well-known arrangement called
Gerry-mandering after the way Catholic voters were confined to voting
areas in Ulster in order to maintain a Protestant majority in the
Northern Ireland Parliament. A similar system has long been used in the
US in reducing the number of non-white representatives who are sent to
Congress. There was a tried and tested system used in Australia, later
imported into the UK, where certain parts of the population and certain
marginal areas were targeted with resources in the strategy of getting
an electoral victory. Similar methods previously had been used in the
US. However for 2016 more drastic steps were taken when being confronted
by the almost certain chance of Hilary Clinton being elected. The Hilary
Clinton candidacy proved to be organisationally inept and outclassed by
the Republican candidate (Trump) who had the internet backing of Moscow
and media algorithms to target potential voters.
The 2020 Presidential Campaign
The
accusation of the “stealing” of the election away from Trump seems to be
a contingency already prepared for in Trump’s White House no matter what
reservations some of the Government officials may have had. The
crippling of the Postal Service (an attempt to limit large scale postal
voting) and the reliance on far-right forces such as Alt-Right and QAnon
was having an impact on traditional Republican supporters. Attempts to
limit voting in Georgia was having widespread criticism amongst business
sectors, with a clear threat to move business interests out of that
state. This was a clear unease by sections of the capitalist class about
the way the Trump administration was conducting itself.
During the last year it became apparent that the Biden campaign was
outspending the Trump campaign by three to one, an unheard of imbalance
– this was a clear expression of the support from business in general
for the Democratic candidate as the one standing for stability and
certainty in economics and politics. Although there has traditionally
been two main parties of the American bourgeoisie (Republican and
Democratic parties) with the election process switching between the two,
depending upon the usefulness of the policies being expounded, the
instability and uncertainty of whose interests the Trump administration
was representing (had Moscow something on Donald Trump was a common
concern) has led to a pronounced shift to the Democratic Party as the
preferred main party of the American bourgeoisie, at least for the
moment. The desire for consistency and certainty of the Biden
administration is a recognition that the American state and its
institutions are there to represent and protect the interests of all of
the capitalist class (in so far as that is practicable) instead of that
of a bunch of property speculators and apparently unhinged conspiracy
theorists.
Trump’s campaign was thrown into a panic and sought urgent financial
funding from his supporters, in most cases taking multiple bank
payments, many payments having to be refunded. The frantic conspiracy
theories were reaching a fever pitch, especially plots by the “Deep
State” to take over the country.
It
was the Arizona election declaration which gave the clear indication for
a Biden victory. This was followed by a similar result in other swing
states. Initial election results were showing that tens of thousands of
normally Republican voters were either abstaining or voting for other
candidates. It was this defection of republican voters (who voted for
Republican candidates in everything but the Presidential election) which
gave rise to the absurd claims that some software had been used, or some
mechanism had been fitted which caused the “flipping” of votes from
Trump to Biden. Recounts were done, and proper audits were carried out
which confirmed at large the original result. This did not stop the
hysteria of election fraud, with the attempted invasion of election
ballot counts to “monitor” events. Nothing to change ballot counting
results were ever found, for the simple reason they did not exist. The
handful of fraudulent voting turned out to have been carried out by
Republican party supporters. But the lack of any way of changing the
voting totals did not stop such idiotic conspiracy theories such as
“Italygate”, laser signals supposedly from Italy were being sent by
satellite causing voting machines to switch votes. Why these signals
from Italy were taking place was never explained. That lack of reality
did not deter Trump from raising this absurd notion with all and sundry.
There were even weirder theories, some gleaned from the internet, such
as wifi access being gained at counting stations through room
temperature thermometers. The very fact that the election counting
machines were isolated (not connected) to the internet has been mostly
ignored. Each more outlandish theory was desperately considered by
Donald Trump. One White House official reportedly stated that the
“crazies of the crazies” were being entertained, while the White House
staff are reported to have been keeping their distance from these events
and preparing to head for the door.
The
so-called January 6th Insurrection
The
Presidential election results stood despite attempts by Trump and his
allies to intimidate State officials into changing the voting outcomes.
The results were due to be counted and certified by Congress on 6th
January, but Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) wanted to
challenge that. First of all there was to be a Million MAGA March on
Washington DC, then that was scaled back to half-a-million “Stop The
Steal” rally outside the White House, a projected “wild event”. The vast
crowd of half-a-million never materialised. Trump and his associates had
been visited and assured of a mobilisation of militias, a Patriot
Caravan, etc. There was supposed to be vast multitudes to overwhelm
Washington DC to clamour for the 2020 election to be nullified and
changed. The vast crowd did not appear.
The
subsequent event of the fiery speeches, the march on the Capitol
building, its invasion and partial occupation, with the disruption of
proceedings have all been televised. The fiery orators had all
disappeared, the out-going President feeling they were not his sort of
people, went back to the White House to watch events on TV. What was the
storming of the Capitol to achieve except to delay the certification of
the election. Security forces evacuated the Vice President and Congress
members to places of safety and waited out events. After hours of
rioting the protesters withdrew and the business of confirming Joe Biden
as President took place. All the rioters had achieved was wrecking part
of the Capitol building, taking off some trophies and taking loads of
selfies and video recordings which the FBI would use later to identify
many of the key rioters.
The
Military and other State agencies begin their work
Once
the confirmation of the Electoral College results by the Vice President
Mike Pence that Joe Biden as the following President the military took
over. There would be a peaceable takeover as laid down in the
Constitution. A ring of steel was placed around the White House and
surrounding area. Arrangements were made for the orderly leaving of
Donald Trump and family (by the back door) and for the installation of
the Biden Presidency. In that way it was shown that the American state
and its institutions had taken the strain, buckled slightly but had
held. The FBI, supposedly affected by the previous sacking of its Head
(Comey) did not wait for the Inauguration of the next president but were
already investigating events. More than 500 of the rioters have been
arrested and charged with some already been sentenced.
A
second Impeachment charge was brought in the Senate against the outgoing
President Trump, but there were insufficient votes to carry out the
trial. There was a determined closing of ranks by Republicans Senators
to protect trump and keep the Republican Party in some sort of order.
Congressional enquiries are taking placed to examine all these previous
events. The attempts to pressurise (and weaponize) the Department of
Justice is beginning to emerge.
Trump
and his diminishing band of supporters have continued the campaign of
discrediting the election count and trying to substantiate claims of
outside interference, and that the vote counting machines had been
hacked into “flipping” votes to Biden. This campaign has broadened out
into a general assault on elections, and trying to get the Presidential
election declared invalid. The Courts have systematically thrown out of
all the election challenges, Judgments coming out that the cases were
frivolous, unbelievable and even ridiculous. THE Lawyers who brought
many of these cases are now paying a high price for bringing these
cases, by being suspended from practice, some threatened with disbarment
as Lawyers and ultimately having to pay damages and for all the Court
costs of the cases.
Further
discrediting
of the Election process
The
big test on the election counting process was to be the “audit” in
Arizona, in Maricopa County where the ballot papers and vote counting
machines were handed over to self-styled Cyber Ninjas (a Republican
Party sponsored organisation which had no experience in audit ballots).
The “audit” which was started in April was to last for three weeks, but
what we are labelling as a pantomime has been going on for more than
three months. First of all the ballot papers and machines were being
scanned for traces of bamboo (presumably the suspicion that ballot
papers had been surreptitiously imported from China to replace the
original ones. How this was to be done was never explained, especially
replacing ballot papers which were specially milled (with distincived
water mark) printed ballot papers. After failing to find traces of
bamboo, searches were made of the ballot counting machines looking for
nefarious devices for changing the ballot counting. Again nothing was
found. The examination of the voting counting machine had led them been
declared unusable and needing to be replaced. This will be costing
Maricopa County $3 million to be replaced. The “Cyber Ninjas” finally
demanded that the routers should be handed over to be examined. Maricopa
County officials refused to part with the computer system routers, not
only because they would not reveal any useful information, but also
because they were being used for the County’s services and would cost $6
million to replace. Nothing has been produced to point to any
irregularities or fraudulent behaviour. It has however led to threats
and intimidation of election organisers in various states in the US,
including death threats.
The
Arizona “audit” was to be the centre piece of the campaign to overturn
the 2020 Election, to reveal that Trump won by a Landslide at a
so-called Cyber Symposium in South Dakota on 10th – 12th August. After
all the “incontrovertible” evidence were presented the big revelation
would hit the country and Biden and Harris would be forced to resign and
that it would go to the Supreme Court who would vote by Nine to Nil for
Trump to be reinstated as President. All this was to take place on
Friday 13th August. As we all now know Friday 13th came and went and no
big change took place.
All
this has descended into a farce. The chaos and lack of evidence was put
down to disruption and infiltration by Antifa, even though there were
few people at this supposedly 72 hour rolling live coverage. The Cyber
expert on the stage said he had not seen any “legitimate” internet
evidence, and was reported as saying he had been handed “a turd”. The
“white-hat” hacker whose evidence was being relied upon was finally
named, and apparently this former Casino worker had reportedly
previously hoaxed the Pentagon and CIA. It is not known how much was
paid to this “white-hat” hacker.
The
campaign to discredit the 2020 Elections, which has no basis in reality
(even the outgoing Trump Attorney General Bill Barr conceded that the
election was fair), and is getting further out of touch with reality.
The US bourgeoisie has ended up in a real bind.
For the Class Union
Quebec: FIQ Health Care Workers
On 6
August, the FIQ (Fédération interprofessionnelle du Québec) voted to
accept a provisional agreement, the result of 18 months of negotiations.
The three main unions arrived at the agreement united, separating the
workers at the beginning of the negotiations. The pitting of the unions
against each other, to the delight of the bosses and their allies in
government, has led to heavy defeats over the years. It should be noted
that the FIQ, which represents 76,000 nurses, nursing assistants and
respiratory therapy technicians, has historically never formed a common
front with the large central trade union organisations.
In the
end, the agreement was accepted with a small majority of 54%, with low
participation rates (between 32% and 44% depending on the region) and
was pushed back in some regions. Surprising with regard to its content:
a small wage increase of only 2% over the 3 years of the agreement,
which is just above inflation. In addition, there is a 3.5% FIQ bonus,
which will only be paid to members of that union and will increase the
already existing gap between workers. Finally, there are retention and
attendance bonuses, but in reality the government will never have to pay
them because the working conditions in the field will not change for
those who have to work compulsory overtime (OTT) or who cannot reconcile
work and family.
The
biggest problem are the salaries but the working conditions for nurses:
too many patients, lack of resources, being constantly understaffed.
These conditions make it impossible for health care facilities to retain
staff or hire new ones. Throughout the dispute, the FIQ has not
hesitated to reveal its reactionary nature through the agreement in
principle, which shows little interest in its members.
In
reality, the leadership of the FIQ wants to avoid the strike at all
costs, because it prefers its position as a mediator between employers
and workers, and simply has no interest in conducting this kind of
struggle.
The
weakness of the protest against the agreement unfortunately shows us
that the majority of members are not ready to mobilise. Despite the
heroic combativeness of a number of nurses, who have not been afraid to
show their discontent and their will to fight, they are only a minority
for the time being. Most of them have never experienced a strike, while
another part is still de-moralised by the defeat of 1999.
Workers
have
stopped seeing unions as a powerful weapon in the class struggle, but
rather as a kind of insurance they pay for certain services. This is
certainly due in part to the opportunism of union leaders such as those
in the FIQ, who prefer conciliation to struggle.
Moreover,
provisions
such as the Rand formula, which obliges employees in a workplace to pay
for union membership even if they are not members, tend to lower the
level of consciousness and leave the field open to opportunists. Workers
must bear in mind that their economic situation means they have
interests that cannot be reconciled with the bosses and their state, and
that the class struggle will therefore inevitably lead to confrontation.
They therefore need structures that enable them to fight effectively,
which is not the case with their current trade unions. Money does not
buy happiness, so the FIQ can call this agreement a success.
The
meagre wage increases signed are not enough! It is not enough for nurses
and it is not enough for the entire Quebec working class who must work
in dilapidated facilities.
Nurses
are now stuck with this terrible contract until March 2023. We need a
fighting movement of health care employees who can fight for better
working conditions. This must start with a mobilisation in the trade
unions and the agreement to form a common front in order to arrive
prepared for the 2023 contract.
Greece: New Labor Law
After
the approval of the new labor law by the Parliament, the "Newspaper of
the Editors", close to the position of Syriza and the Greek social
democracy, was entitled: "Back to the Middle Ages for the workers".
Nothing
more
misleading! The law approved by Parliament in June, with the votes of
the right-wing majority, responds to the most recent directives of all
the bourgeoisies in the world, and also of the European Commission,
towards ever greater flexibility and job insecurity and with further
limitations on strikes and to the trade union organization. It is
therefore the result not of "backwardness" but of a necessity and an
explicit request of the most modern capitalist mode of production,
increasingly in crisis and increasingly inhuman and anti-historical.
The
government justified the law to allow Greece to "seize the growth
opportunities" after the 2020 crisis and the pandemic, "improve
competitiveness" and "create new jobs", attracting foreign investors for
the reduced wage costs and general.
The
new law firstly abolishes the 8-hour day and the 5-day week; it
eliminates the obligation for entrepreneurs to pay increased wages for
overtime over 8 hours and 5 days and provides that it is possible to
work up to 10 hours a day without wage integration; overtime can be
compensated with days off. However, the limit of 40 hours per week is
safeguarded. Hours in excess of 40 will be counted as overtime; up to
150 hours of overtime per year are allowed, or even more for “urgent
work”, with a 40% increase in wages, while currently the maximum is 120
hours and the increase is 60%.
Added
to this is the abolition of compulsory Sunday rest and the introduction
of tele-work. A "digital work card" is also activated to monitor the
hours worked.
The
raising of the working day to 10 hours knocks down one of the symbols of
the international labor movement, the eight hours a day, the result of
more than a century of hard struggles. But in practice a large part of
the proletariat, even in Greece, is currently in such a condition of
weakness that has to accept much heavier work situations, in terms of
hours and wages.
But
the worst aspect of the law is the attack on the role of trade unions,
it gives space to individual relationships between the employee and the
company, aiming at overcoming national collective agreements. The
workers thus lose the possibility of asserting the strength of numbers
and their organization in the determination of hours and wages.
According to the new law these will be resolved in the framework of
"individual contracts", bypassing the trade unions!
It
could be the final blow to the recognition of collective agreements,
already severely limited with the "austerity memorandums", after the
2010-2011 crisis, also with the collaboration of the Syriza government
in the 2015-2019 period, which now pretends to oppose to the initiative
of the right-wing government.
But
the attack on the union is not limited to this. Now the unions are
obliged to keep a digital "register of members", available to the
Ministry of Labor and employers’ organizations. A strike decision must
first be approved (by electronic vote) by 50% + 1 of all company
personnel. In the critical sectors of public services (health,
education, transport, energy, etc.) in the event of a strike, 35% of the
workforce must continue to work, for "social responsibility".
In the
event that the union does not respect these rules, workers will be
subject to civil and criminal penalties. A system similar to the one
that in Italy currently affects workers who perform so-called
"essential" public services but not those of industry, commerce, etc.
In the
months preceding the approval of the law, the main trade unions, the
General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE), the Confederation of
Public Employees (ADEDY) and the Militant Front of All Workers (PAME),
held demonstrations and even a strike general 24 hours. But these
struggles have highlighted not the strength but the state of weakness of
the Greek proletariat which in recent years has had to swallow a series
of burning defeats and has seen its living and working conditions
considerably worsen.
According
to
OECD data for 2019, the average effective working time in Greece was
1,950 hours per year, lower only than in Korea and Mexico, while it is
much higher, for example, than in Germany (1,386 hours per year). Real
wages between 2008 and 2019 are estimated to have decreased by 30%, the
average wage having gone from about 1,300 euros to 950.
The
current government is also, in line with previous ones, drawing up plans
for the privatization of the system. public pension and social security,
as well as massive privatizations of all that is still owned by the
state.
To
this the proletariat is unable to oppose a single trade union front of
class struggle, given that the two main unions have a policy of
substantial agreement with the employers while PAME contributes to the
division of the trade union front, tied as it is double-stranded with
the opportunist boulder of the KKE.
The
parties and political organizations on the left of the KKE, while they
are agitated in the search for a phantom political unity, neglect to
organize workers on the level of union demands, overcoming the divisions
between categories, to try to reconstitute the indispensable unity of
the class.
Pakistan: Recent Labour News
On
27th August, a fire broke out in a chemical factory named (BM LUGGAGE
industry) in Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi, resulting in 17 workers
being burnt to death. In classic fashion, there was only one entry point
into the factory, windows were locked and all other exists were closed.
This unfortunate incident, a crime of bourgeoisie world, is just one
among many, in a similar particularly tragic incident, more than 250
workers were killed as a fire broke out in a garment factory in 2012,
Karachi. Some trade unions have started protesting outside the chemical
factory.
On
August 17th 2021, 16 thousand active government workers from various
departments, institutions have been sacked by a decision from the
supreme court. In the 90’s all these workers had been also previously
sacked during the governance of the Muslim league party, in 2010 the
governance of the people’s party had reinstated these employees by
passing a bill. The court now deems the bill unconstitutional, and the
fate of 16 thousand workers hangs in the air, the court had already made
its decision in 2019 and reserved in announcing the verdict, appeals
from the various departments from which these workers belonged had also
been rejected. Going on, workers committees have been formed, unions
have started being involved. It is important to note, many government
departments have been going through privatization, a process which many
government employees have been actively opposing through strikes,
protests etc. The people’s party making use of this opportunity
participated in a worker’s convention in Tando Allahyar, Sindh province,
announcing protests and “solidarity” with the workers, deceiving
workers.
Germany: Railroad Strikes
There
has been a series of strikes by the train drivers in Germany, the union
is GDL (Gewerkschaft Deutscher Lokomotivführer) and its demand is
modest, €600 bonus for the extra stress and work during Coronavirus and
a 3.2% pay increase.
Train
drivers are officially “civil servants” in Germany, members of the civil
service confederation, but their formerly privileged position has been
eroded.
The
train drivers have had to do more demanding shifts and unpaid hours
during coronavirus.
Moreover
the
“Tarifeinheitsgesetz” gives the main trade union confederation DGB a
virtual monopoly over collective bargaining, which threatens concessions
won by the GDL in the past. In particular, the drivers worry that
Deutsche Bahn will get more leverage in changing shifts at short notice.
The
pandemic has also created more work for train conductors as they often
have to take care of 1,000 passengers on their own and are required to
ensure that coronavirus restrictions are adhered to (which means they
sometimes suffer abuse).
They are members of a separate union, the EVG (Eisenbahnverkehr Gewerkschaft) and the two union bureaucracies strive to prevent joint action.
Third German Railworkers’ Strike
A
third strike by German railworkers took place between the first Thursday
to Tuesday of September, with two large rallies of the Gewerkschaft
Deutscher Lokführer (German Locomotive Drivers’ Union, GDL) in Nuremberg
and Essen on Friday, September 3. According to newspaper reports the
strike was solid on Thursday and Friday, with just a quarter of trains
running.
The
day before, the Frankfurt Labor Court in the State of Hessen rejected an
appeal from German Railways (Deutsche Bahn, DB), as the court could not
determine whether or not the strike was illegal. DB has been desperately
trying to divide the striking train drivers from other groups of
employees by allowing their “representation” only by the in-house union
the Eisenbahn- und Verkehrsgewerkschaft (EVG). DB continues to pursue
legal actions in other jurisdictions.
DB has
made a derisory offer of a Covid-19 “bonus” of between €400 and €600 and
a wage increase of just 3.2% over 36 months, while inflation means this
will be a severe cut in real terms.
The
drivers are angry about the additional workload and poor sickness
provision during the pandemic. Among other things, a lot of goods
including vitally needed disinfectants have been moved to rail transport
as a result of the shortage of truck drivers. Extra journeys are also
impacting other workers such as maintenance crews. On passenger trains,
attendants have also had to work extra shifts and faced the additional
stress of enforcing Covid-19 rules.
There
is a very strong feeling that the extra work should be recognized with a
pay increase and not just ritual applause from management.
Apart
from the issue of wages, the strike is about the proportion of so-called
“disposition shifts” in drivers’ schedules. These are shifts outside of
and beyond planned rosters, for example because of staff sick leave or
other unforeseen circumstances. This currently stands at 20% of all
shifts, and DB wants to raise it to 40%.
The
militancy of the drivers and other rail workers is setting off alarm
bells. Shift work and overtime are becoming more and more unbearable
across many sectors while wages are getting worse, and the prospects of
unemployment and poverty pensions are increasing.
German
workers understand the need for greater union militancy. As a result of
the strike, GDL has succeeded in recruiting and additional 4,000
members.
DB has
therefore had no trouble mobilizing support from the government and the
German media. There is a strong possibility that the September election
will see a change of government, with the “left” party in the coalition,
the SPD, becoming the dominant voice in a new multi-party constellation.
This
is another reason for DB is pursuing the legal route, hoping to sue the
GDL for damages. The SPD leadership has let it be known that they want
to stick to the current law, which limits strike action and provides a
framework for annual wage negotiations. The law is, in effect, a
straitjacket on the working class.
Meanwhile
the
leader of the GDL, Claus Weselsky (who is actually a member of the
governing conservative party, the CDU) is urgently seeking a compromise.
He can see the railworkers’ militancy spiraling out of control.
