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
Contents:
1. Turkey-Syria Earthquake: Destruction and Death are our Fate under Capitalism
Turkey-Syria Earthquake: Destruction and Death
are our Fate under Capitalism
"What happened happened. These are things that happen in the plan of
fate" - Erdoğan
In Islamic
literature, fate, which was included among the conditions of faith during
the Umayyad period, is roughly defined as the belief that everything that
has happened and will happen is from Allah and that nothing can happen
outside of Allah’s will and knowledge. According to Sunni Islam, those who
do not accept the conditions of faith are not considered Muslims.
Similar
words to the above, which Erdoğan said to earthquake victims in one of the
tent cities, are used by the Turkish bourgeoisie from time to time. In a
country that is 99.8% Muslim on paper, in fact half, maybe more, of the
population is secular Muslim or secular. As such, the fate discourse gives
the impression that it covers up its own negligence and aims to create
religious tension in one half of the society and naturally draws great
reaction.
Erdoğan escalates tensions by equating harsh criticism of his
opponents in many sources with questioning the concept of fate, while
blocking the other half of the society from questioning the destruction
and death to such an extent. In short, these tens of thousands of people
would have died even without the earthquake because they were destined to
die! What will be will be, precautions don’t matter! These days you can
watch on Turkish TV the miraculous rescues of children protected by their
mother’s ghost!
Yes, the
death toll in this earthquake, which is currently around 50,000 and will
probably reach 100,000, is fate! If we talk about the unplanned
construction, the uncontrolled and poorly financially supported migration
process, the racial discrimination and bullying against Kurds and other
minorities in the region, the corrupt administration and control
mechanisms, we can show that fate has woven its webs without any
supernatural intervention. Of course, it is fate that buildings built on
fault lines in violation of scientific rules, without inspection and
earthquake resistance tests, collapse like playing cards. This fate will
not change until these conditions change!
Capitalist and Imperialist Crisis Management
At 4:17 am,
the preliminary report of the earthquake centered in Pazarcık district of
Kahramanmaraş is claimed to be in the hands of the state at 5 am. The
first press release comes 1 and a half hours later and it is stated that
rescue teams have been dispatched. There is an army in Malatya, corps in
Diyarbakır and Adana, and a brigade in Kahramanmaraş. So if all the troops
had been dispatched without delay, together with local AFAD and Red
Crescent troops, many lives could have been saved by 6 o’clock. Thousands
of soldiers could have started working only in their cities, but 40 hours
after the earthquake, 7035 soldiers were directed to work in the region,
according to government accounts. It is reported that only in the 57th
hour of the earthquake, 16,785 soldiers joined the rescue efforts. By that
time, a team of 6 thousand people from other countries and search and
rescue dogs were also involved in the rescue efforts.
The
government’s rescue teams, which have been targeting relief zones based on
the vote in the upcoming elections, arrived in Hatay - a city many
volunteers could reach by personal vehicle - two days after the earthquake
because the roads were impassable. Many people trapped under the collapse
could not be reached and pulled out, even though their location was known.
There are thousands of people who have lost their lives because of the
days-long wait, despite their loved ones frantically searching for rescue
teams. After Erdoğan’s declaration of a state of emergency, there have
been reports of people being beaten by law enforcement officers for
allegedly looting. These attacks seem to be mostly directed against Syrian
earthquake victims. There is even civilian participation in these attacks.
The entire
districts of Hassa in Hatay, Islahiye and Nurdağı in Gaziantep are built
on faults. There are no restrictions preventing building on the fault.
According to geologists’ investigations in the field, liquefaction was
observed in the part of the Amik Plain towards Hatay and on the coast of
Iskenderun. Structures built on such soils will not survive such an
earthquake. Turkey today has 550 active faults and such disasters are no
surprise for this country. 66% of the country is in the 1st or 2nd degree
earthquake zone. It is obvious that when the ground conditions are well
defined, appropriate structures are designed and built in the right
places, there will not be such a great loss of life. Of course, this is
not an easy thing to implement for Turkey, which is a populous country.
Moreover, considering that it has received a large amount of foreign
migration in recent years. Turkey’s population has increased to a rate
that the infrastructure of the cities cannot handle. Let’s take a look at
the conditions that prepared this:
Background to the Disaster: Building Excess and Real Estate Bubble
TOKİ
(Housing Development Administration), a bureaucratic institution that
Erdoğan took over shortly after he came to power, has turned into a power
center since 2004. TOKİ acquired valuable land at nominal or no cost and
put it out to tender. In the years that followed, the real estate sector
began to develop very rapidly. It had been experienced in other countries
that an economy based on the rapid growth of the real estate sector would
be plunged into crisis. By 2014, there was a huge surplus of housing units
across Turkey, particularly in Istanbul. This was triggered by the fact
that purchasing power was not taken into account. When banks raised
interest rates, middle- and low-income workers were unable to buy houses.
As a solution to this situation, they turned to buyers from abroad.
According to
experts, the Pazarcık fault was expected to break, but it was not
predicted that it would break the Amanos fault (Hatay). 9 hours later, it
was never expected to break the Sürgü fault. The earthquake, which
affected 10 provinces in Turkey and the vicinity of Aleppo and Idlib in
Syria, is known as the deadliest earthquake of the recent period after the
Haiti earthquake. It is also worth noting that an earthquake is expected
in the region west of the Amik Plain leading to the Red Sea within a
period of 10 to 30 years, affecting partly Turkey but mostly Syria,
Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. One of the two major faults crossing Turkey
has been activated. This fault, together with the Dead Sea fault, is one
of the most active faults in the Middle East, separating the Arabian
peninsula from Africa. The severity of the situation is not hard to
understand, but to blame the severity of the natural disaster as the sole
cause of the death toll would at best infuriate anyone who has studied the
process and consequences of other earthquakes around the world. The data
shows that in two different regions with similar population densities and
similar types and intensity of earthquakes, mortality rates increase in
direct proportion to the material power of the country and the region.
The teams,
which were very late in the first days of the earthquake, are in a hurry
to remove the rubble left after the earthquake, with thousands of dead
underneath, and prepare it for the election period. One of the posts you
can often see on social media was this: even though many people in the
area have reported to the authorities that there are voices coming from
the rubble, the teams say that the rescue process is over and turn to
debris removal. While people were still coming out of the rubble alive...
As per their orders... Many public buildings such as hospitals, airports
and schools are unusable. Damage to roads makes transportation very
difficult in many earthquake-affected provinces. There is no access to
electricity, water or natural gas.
The process
will not end with this, the aftershocks of the earthquake will be as big
as the earthquake itself. The aftershocks of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake
can be as high as 6.5. It will take time for all cities to assess damage
and prepare plans. It is useful for people to stay away from their homes
during the process. After the first month, earthquakes will gradually
become smaller, but they will make themselves felt for a year. Of course,
the buildings with minor damage will also wear out in this process. The
survivors of the region’s population, which officially stands at 13 and a
half million, and unregistered migrants are now homeless and in need of
even basic necessities. The tent cities set up for millions of homeless
people do not meet the need.
Not a single
one of the 135,000 TOKİ houses built in the 10 cities devastated by the
earthquake was damaged in the earthquake. While people are still being
pulled from the rubble, TOKİ officials have made new announcements: Thirty
thousand houses are planned and construction will be completed within a
year. They do not neglect to announce that they will come up with many
more new projects. It was known that the tension of this fault line, which
had not produced a major earthquake in a long time, was rising, but not by
the inhabitants, as AFAD’s report before the earthquake indicated. The
need for housing for the rapidly growing population due to out-migration
was enough to make construction companies salivate. Low-quality houses
were sold or rented at exorbitant prices to migrants fleeing harsh
conditions. Many migrants were forced to struggle to survive in conditions
of severe poverty in very unhealthy structures. The situation for the
local working class was not much better. They were going through a similar
process, with wages not increasing despite rising prices. This led to an
avalanche of poor masses in the cities. No institutional infrastructure
was strong enough to handle this scale of migration. In many cities in
Turkey, everything from transportation to health and education is in
gridlock. Schools are overcrowded, public transportation is inadequate and
crowded, employment opportunities are narrow and there is a backlog. Job
queues are endless. There is a need for doctors in hospitals, teachers in
schools, janitors, etc. There is a need for too many workers in almost
every field. These unhealthy cities make epidemics and natural disasters
much more deadly.
On the
Syrian side, the Assad government did not specially deliver aid from
different parts of the world to the two hardest hit cities. This was
because these were areas that the government perceived as terrorist.
Hundreds of women and children kidnapped by Islamic extremist groups were
also left helpless under the rubble. Assad even made sure to drop bombs on
the earthquake victims. The earthquake obviously made Assad happy. People
in the area were already in desperate need of humanitarian aid and the UN
routinely sent some supplies, just enough to keep them alive. According to
local reports, the UN did not send the advertised aid. It sent aid
materials that it already routinely sends. Many of these were not even
useful under earthquake conditions. Now, after millions of deaths, an
estimated 5.3 million people are homeless and in need of aid.
Capitalism
does not shy away from the loss of life in the pursuit of profit, and so
the same fate befalls many cities and the workers who inhabit their worst
and most flimsy housing. Scientists have been warning for a long time that
a very strong earthquake is coming for Istanbul, just like the earthquake
in Turkey and Syria. In Istanbul, as in the 10 other cities where the
earthquake occurred, zoning amnesties keep being issued to register
illegal buildings that are not scientifically compatible with the
conditions of the region. By 2023, Istanbul’s population is expected to
reach 18 million, and the city hosts around 15 million tourists every
year. Overpopulation is making this gigantic city increasingly decrepit
and knotted. Now we are waiting for an earthquake in a huge city where 90%
of its buildings are said to be unstable in 2018. You can deduce how the
next earthquake is managed from the management of this earthquake. As we
can see, the fate of Istanbul has already been written, it is only left to
be realized.
Spontaneous Mobilization Led by the Working Class
If a great
class solidarity had not been established from the first moments of the
earthquake, the situation today could have been even worse. From the
moment they learned about the earthquake, people tried to reach out to
people they knew in the area. Many people asked for help from anyone they
could contact from under the rubble. Cries for help spread rapidly through
social media. Reports poured in to state institutions. When the
institutions did not show up for duty, civilians gathered in gathering
places such as schools and gymnasiums through social media and immediately
started collecting aid. They tried to reach the region in teams. Workers
from many sectors, from health workers to miners, flocked to the region.
They not only participated in search and rescue operations but also made
the voices of the earthquake victims heard.
Workers
pressured their bosses to send them to the earthquake zone, but the bosses
prevented them. Workers who had annual leave went and carried out search
and rescue operations; those who stayed behind were on duty to deliver
truckloads of aid to the region, to identify the places where there were
sounds in the rubble and to convey them to the aid teams. Especially in
regions with low vote potential for the current government, a large
segment of the working class, which already distrusted the state,
immediately realized that the state was leaving people to die.
While the
working class shared their pennies, the owners of capital started to
donate sums that would not burden them at all due to the pressure of
social media and the high advertising potential. Donations were also
pouring into the Turkish state from other countries and organizations. But
the vast majority of the Turkish working class found it safer to donate to
a charity founded by an alternative music artist than to the state’s
organizations set up to deal with such disasters.
The Attitude of the Combative Trade Unions
While the
rank and file of leftist trade union confederations such as DISK and KESK
were actively involved in the mobilization, with KESK’s Health Workers
Union drawing attention to the health conditions of the earthquake victims
and DISK’s Gıda-İş opposing racist attacks on refugees, in general the
interventions of the opportunist leaders of these confederations and their
member unions did not go beyond visits to the region.
Umut-Sen, an
organization of struggling grassroots unions, declared a state of
emergency and went to the earthquake zone with the workers it could
organize. Umut-Sen listed the following demands:
"All
relations and possibilities must be organized to ensure that the debris
work is carried out correctly and quickly and that every one of the
citizens under the rubble is rescued without losing any time. Transparent
information should be shared with the public about the situation and
activities in the earthquake zone. Neither manipulations that would lead
the public to panic and fear nor steps to deceive and mislead the public
should be resorted to. All communication companies must ensure that all
lines closed due to unpaid bills are activated. The solidarity and work of
the government and municipalities, all kinds of institutions, structures
and individuals must never be based on competition; as in previous
examples, provocation must not be resorted to by law enforcement. Public
resources created with the taxes of the people must be used without limit
to meet all the needs of the people, to establish disaster assembly areas
and for all kinds of work. Those who call on people in the earthquake zone
to leave their homes should never "impose work" on laborers. Workers from
all branches of labor in the earthquake zone should be put on
administrative leave during this period. No worker should be forced to
work under the risk of earthquake and such anxiety".
Millions of
migrants who entered Turkey legally and illegally, who are used as cheap
labor and live in very unhealthy conditions in the countries they came
from fleeing war, also experienced the earthquake disaster. According to
the posts circulating on social media, the atmosphere in the region is
appalling, from people coming from other provinces and attacking migrants
in groups on the streets, to law enforcement officers beating migrants on
the pretext of so-called looting. On the one hand, they are chased out of
their tent areas and beaten up even by earthquake victims who are going
through the same process as them, and on the other hand, they cannot even
benefit from the basic aid that the state delivers too little and too
late. When we add the deaths of unregistered migrants who will not even be
mentioned, who knows how many thousands the total number of deaths will
reach? If anyone has access to the data, we will find out. Formed in 2021,
the Migrant Trade Union Initiative’s text titled "Our Call Against
Increasing Discrimination and Verbal-Physical Violence Against Migrants in
the Earthquake Region" explains the situation of earthquake-stricken
migrants quite well:
"According
to the information we have received from the field since the first hours
of the earthquake, migrants are often excluded from the food, shelter and
medicine aid reaching the area and face serious problems in evacuating the
area. Although a circular has been issued to allow earthquake-affected
migrants to leave the area without a travel permit, they are not able to
benefit from the services and assistance provided by buses, planes and
accommodation companies, and only those who are able to leave by their own
means are able to leave the area.
In addition
to not being able to leave the area and not being able to access the aid,
a perception is created that they are looting the aid parcels and houses.
Clearly, the inadequacy of state institutions in search and rescue and aid
delivery is being covered up with hatred of migrants, and some
establishment politicians and their media outlets are consciously serving
this purpose".
Natural
Disasters and Capitalism
In the 24th
issue of our newspaper at the time, Battaglia Comunista, published in
1951, in an article entitled "Slaughter of the Dead", we explained how
natural disasters provide a renewal for capitalism:
"When
disaster destroys houses, fields and factories and leaves the active
population unemployed, it undoubtedly destroys wealth. But this cannot be
remedied by transferring wealth from elsewhere, as in the miserable
operation of rummaging through old things, where advertising, collecting
and transportation cost far more than the value of the worn-out clothes.
The wealth
that disappeared was the wealth of the past, the wealth of centuries of
labor. A huge mass of present, living labor is needed to undo the impact
of the catastrophe. Therefore, if we use a concrete social definition of
wealth, not an abstract one, we can see it as the right of certain
individuals of the ruling class to benefit from living contemporary labor.
New incomes and new privileged fortunes are generated by the mobilization
of new labour, and the capitalist economy offers no way to close the gap
by "shifting" wealth accumulated elsewhere...
This is why
taxing the ownership of the fields, houses and factories that remain
intact to rebuild those affected is a stupid idea.
At the heart
of capitalism is not the ownership of such investments, but a type of
economy that allows to exploit and profit from what human labor creates in
endless cycles, subordinating the employment of that labor to this
withdrawal...
The basis of
Marxist economic analysis is the distinction between dead and living
labor. We define capitalism not as the ownership of past, crystallized
masses of labor, but as the right to extract from living and active labor.
Therefore the present economy cannot lead to a good solution with a
minimum expenditure of present labor, which realizes a rational
preservation of what past labor has passed on to us and better foundations
for the performance of future labor. What concerns bourgeois economics is
the frenzy of the contemporary rhythm of work, which, without regard for
welfare, promotes the destruction of the still useful masses of past
labor".
Both
Sides of the Border share a Common Destiny
The crisis
management of capitalism, where political ambitions and competition of
interests are prioritized above all else, is always planned in a way that
is most profitable for capital. It was clear on both sides of the border
that the effort to save millions of people was kept to a minimum. In the
first days of the earthquake, when the maximum number of rescue operations
could have been carried out, the states hosting the earthquake, and even
other states promising to help, slowed down their efforts. While Turkey
was trying to cope by dragging unemployed young people to university
education, internships and wars at home and abroad, it rejoiced when
thousands of people died due to ’fate’. The Turkish government would have
shown its joy more openly if its chances in the elections had not been so
slim. In Syria, the Assad regime would be most grateful for an earthquake
hitting the groups it is already fighting. International aid and support
on top of a massacre that he can carry out without wasting bombs...
The only
strength the working class can count on is the solidarity of its
classmates, as such disasters show. There are many lessons to be learned
from this earthquake: It would have been possible to save many more lives,
especially in disaster conditions, if workers who could offer professional
help (miners, workers with search and rescue training, medics, lawyers,
social workers...) had come out of their workplaces en masse and shown
reflexes very early. But organizing through real class unions, both across
different sectors and across different unions in the same sector, makes it
possible to prepare in advance for what can be done in emergencies and to
mobilize quickly. In fact, making it possible to expand the trade union
network also helps the working class to raise awareness of regional
problems and work together to overcome them. Against racism, against
unhealthy living conditions, against the housing crisis caused by massive
population growth, workers must join arms with those they trust most,
their classmates. The answer of the working class of Turkey and Syria,
which is being crushed day by day by the conditions of life, to the rulers
who disregard their own lives, can be a powerful class struggle born out
of acting together.
Only under
the power of the proletarian state can this trade union activity fulfill
its social goals. The Communist Party International, having learned the
lessons of history in the light of Marxist doctrine, is the guide the
working class needs to exist as a class and win as a class.
On February
3rd, in a small village on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania called East
Palestine, a train derailed (specifically, 51 of the 150 cars). Five of
these cars were carrying 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride, a carcinogenic
which is extremely flammable. Due to the nature of this chemical, the crew
released the chemical and burned it after three days. Both the governor of
Ohio and Pennsylvania ordered an evacuation, which was lifted on February
8th. However, 43,000 animals have died in the area.
Who could
trust the government in a post-chernobyl world? The EPA is here to assure
us that this is a safe place, no cause for immediate concern. But the key
word here is immediate, which is the only time-frame capitalism has any
time for. Experts at Texas A&M University found instead that if the
concentrations of the chemicals continue for the next few months, there
could be serious long-term health effects. In the meantime, such chemicals
may cause headaches, lung irritation, eye irritation. It goes without
saying too, the level of carcinogens are elevated. Fortunately, the EPA
has not measured such chemicals inside of people’s homes, but experts are
unaware of what the long term effect will be on these people’s health.
Social
media ran with the hysterics as the grifters came over, behaving
obnoxiously and spreading misinformation, for in our society every act of
antisocial behavior seems to be rewarded. The political authorities of
course used this as an opportunity to talk about anything other than the
crisis. Trump visited the place, offering out his own brand of “Trump
Water.” JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, somehow used the crisis as an
excuse to appear on talking head shows and refer to the environment and
racism as “fake problems.” Pete Buttigieg, a member of the Democratic
party, has responded the way any ruling government does to a disaster:
let’s not talk about politics, let’s not talk about causes, let’s unite as
a nation and fix this!
But it is
politics that is to blame. The crew had little time to react and reacted
in an appropriate manner. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)
have stated in their report "We have no evidence that the crew did
anything wrong".
We
immediately see the failure of capitalist “regulation” that refused to
mark this as hazardous. While electronic rail brakes were required for
trains in 2015, the previous presidential administration axed those rules,
and the current one had made no moves to reinstate them. Though such
brakes alone would not have prevented the derailment, they certainly
would’ve decreased the number of cars derailed.
On that
topic, we should be stunned at the number of cars. The train was over 150
cars long, clocking in at over a mile and a half! Capital, which is by its
nature short-sighted, rewarded such a measure. Norfolk managed to liberate
itself from 30% of its staff by making these measures. In the future
society, they will look back puzzled at how we allowed the love of money
to end the livelihood of 30% of an organization while simultaneously
embarking on an organizational strategy known to be unsafe. Today the
bourgeoisie says it does not want to deal with the “logistical nightmare”
of making trains safe. Tomorrow, communist man will be horrified that when
they read about our ruling class’s worldview.
It is
natural and expected that an industrial society should experience
catastrophes now and again. But lately it feels as if we are experiencing
more than our fair share. Only communism can save us from this world rife
with disaster.
As the U.S.
federal government and railroads try to avoid supply disruptions caused by
an unruly workforce, another threat of chaos looms over the economy. The
Mississippi River, the great artery of U.S. freight transportation, due to
lack of rainfall has reached its lowest levels in 40 years, preventing
barges from being drawn. Water levels in Memphis, Tennessee, a major
logistics hub, are nearly 11 feet below average. The sailing time of a
barge, the preferred mode of transportation for most agricultural
products, from St. Louis, the main trading center on the river at the
confluence of the Missouri River, to New Orleans, at the mouth of the
great river on the Gulf of Mexico, has doubled.
Barges must
be less loaded because of the reduced draft, nine feet compared to twelve
in normal times and fourteen on the lower Mississippi. In addition, voyage
times have increased greatly; a tug can push fewer barges because of the
navigable width, reduced by low water: a typical convoy of 40 barges now
pushes only 25. A standard barge loads 1,500 short tons, about 1,361
metric tons, for example 50,000 bushels of soybeans. Every foot less draft
reduces the capacity of a barge by 150 to 200 short tons-a 25 to 30
percent reduction.
Army
engineers in October began dredging the bottom and raised a berm of mud on
the riverbed, which further restricted traffic: it was possible to travel
along the Mississippi only during the day and in the berm area alternately
one-way. More than 1,000 barges waited in line.
It is
important for U.S. farms to ship their products to the international
market while the southern hemisphere, particularly South America, is still
in winter. The world’s largest soybean producer is Brazil, where the
planting season begins in September. Beans are harvested on average after
nearly 4 months. As Brazilian production arrives, prices begin to fall.
This will result in reduced profits. In addition, the corn harvest is
approaching, which will require new shipments.
The problem
shows no sign of abating in the near future. Even if rainfall returns soon
the dried up soil from the long drought would absorb most of it.
Conversely, if the rain were too concentrated, the parched farmland would
not have time for it to percolate from the surface, to feed the water
tables and springs, and would be washed away.
The
bourgeoisie, however, is unwilling to take any measures to mitigate this
problem.
The big
capitalist powers remain locked into fossil fuels, particularly
petrochemicals, as a huge source of profits and rents.
From oil
they get not only energy but chemicals for fertilizers. Warming caused by
fossil fuel emissions, together with the disruption of the nitrogen cycle
caused by overuse of fertilizers, has severely disrupted the natural
climate cycles that sustain life on this planet.
The
destruction of billions of dollars of capital invested in this sector is
unthinkable; too much money is at stake.
Although
everyone knows that negative carbon emissions and the restoration of the
nitrogen cycle to facilitate the growth of plants, which capture carbon,
are necessary to avoid catastrophe, the impassive bourgeoisie insists that
we must produce and consume more and more goods. Only communist revolution
can lead us off this dead-end course.
Regional
celebrations of democracy have churned out for Lazio and Lombardy an
unequivocal verdict: the right has "won", the bourgeois left has "lost".
Although the democratic hype laments the fall in voter turnout, which has
become a minority phenomenon.
Certainly
the political bestiary in vogue does not shine with "seriousness and
competence", those compassionate and hypocritical attitudes that
characterized the first decades of the republic’s history, when the
political class feigned that tribute to virtue that motivates lying. The
deployments no longer even advance the semblance of ideas, no longer an
ideological vision of a world, but a primordial soup of prejudices, of
automatic mottos, running mindlessly.
We will not
stand for the easy analogy with the nibelung "night and fog" of the Third
Reich, we will not cry out for fascism as if it were new: on that horse
the bourgeoisie has been swinging for more than a century, in open
dictatorship as in the swamped one in democratic garb, from it it will not
and cannot dismount.
The same fog
envelops the bands of figures in the electoral liturgy, fictitious
deployments on "divisive" issues, infuriating some, reassuring others, in
a universality of superstitions, reactionary and patriotic enthusiasms or
resignation to the existing disguised as rationalism. Immigration,
security, terrorism, crime, easy to arouse ephemeral urges in the media
artifact that is "public opinion".
It is an
excellent ploy commissioned from a class of politicians, at the service of
the bourgeois ruling class, which now has no economic tools or margins to
deal with the crisis: it engages in battle with what the situation allows.
Everything
is ground down. Much of the electoral propaganda this time has focused on
the affair of anarchist Alfredo Cospito’s hunger strike. It has emerged
from the boisterous polemics that the whole "parliamentary arc" is in
favor of maintaining 41-bis. Even the "leftist" parties themselves.
The reality
is that each ruling class attributes to its state only one end, principle
and norm: to defend its interests, if not its survival in power, by any
means. Anything that serves this is legal and legally enshrined. The law
of war applies.
One pounces
on the poor man not to punish individual action, but to oil the
legislative, jurisprudential, police and propaganda devices to strike
tomorrow at those who stand at the antipodes of the anarchist’s theory and
methods. The bourgeoisie takes the run-up by preparing public opinion for
the climate of open police control. It counts on assimilating into the
category of "terrorism" every movement of collective discontent of the
proletariat.
A question
arises, however: how long can the raging river of future workers’
uprisings be kept within the banks of legality if they are too narrow?
The
oppressed class already shows a growing disaffection with the pretense and
liturgies of democracy, and it is increasingly difficult to convince them
that it is useful to get in line to determine which is the least abject of
the bourgeois political factions, which is the least "dishonest" and
rapacious.
Il
Partito Comunista, number 420, January - February
2023
ICP intervention in the Portland City Workers’ Strike
For the
first time in decades, Portland municipal workers involved in wastewater
treatment and from park and road maintenance have gone on strike.
Portland is
Oregon’s most populous city, with a metropolitan area of more than 2
million people. It is a major river port on the Willamette River, 100 km
from the northern Pacific coast of the United States and 300 km south of
Seattle.
There were
600 workers who took to the fight, organized in the Laborers’ Local 483
union. On December 14, the City of Portland and the union had reached a
tentative agreement, but the city administration immediately disregarded
it, refusing to implement the planned wage increases. This led to new
unsuccessful negotiations and the proclamation of a strike.
The
municipality reacted by proclaiming a state of emergency so that it could
hire temporary contract workers to replace the strikers. It also attempted
to file a series of legal injunctions to criminalize the strike and target
individual workers who would strike. While unsuccessful, this legal action
still had an intimidating purpose.
In
preparation for the strike, Laborers’ Local 483 organized a demonstration
on Saturday, January 28, which was attended by about 100 workers. Our
comrades there distributed, in addition to The Communist Party newspaper
(link to the latest issue) the first of three leaflets translated and
published below, which denounced the employers’ attempts to criminalize
the strike and linked them to the state repression of the recent national
railroad strike.
On
Wednesday, February 1, it was clear that no agreement would be reached.
The union therefore called a second demonstration for late in the evening
at the city’s water treatment plant in preparation for the strike to begin
at midnight the same day.
The plant is
a vital city facility, the largest water treatment facility between
Seattle and San Francisco, a 1,300-mile stretch of coastline. For the
duration of the pandemic from Ovid 19, workers were considered "essential"
and forced to work, with no compensation for additional risk and fatigue.
More than
300 workers were present at the demonstration. There was immediately a
great spirit of solidarity, with workers from various unions such as
AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees),
Teamsters, SEIU (Service Employees Industrial Union) and others
participating.
Workers were
confident that scabs would be of little use. Several recounted that it had
taken them years to learn how to operate the plant and equipment, which
was built in the 1950s and was constantly breaking down.
Since the
night the strike began, solidarity from other workers has shown itself
even more strongly. Workers from the "Local 209" section of the Steam
Fitters Union (installation and maintenance of heating, air conditioning
and ventilation systems) who were working inside the building refused to
continue working. The water treatment plant requires numerous trucks in
and out to remove sludge every day, or the entire plant will break down.
The picket worked to block or slow the flow of trucks. One engineer
stopped the train in front of the main entrance to the plant, blocking it
for a long time, then pulling out when forced as slowly as possible. Word
of the strike spread among railway workers who repeated the same action in
the following days. Workers and union activists from other companies, such
as UPS and the nearby logistics warehouse of a beer company, participated
in the picket line. Many trucks turned around never to return, with
drivers expressing solidarity with the struggle and interest in organizing
at their workplaces.
Our comrades
participated in the picket lines, helping the workers to strengthen them
and supporting those among the most combative who wanted to make them more
effective, a fact recognized and appreciated by the workers, several of
whom also expressed agreement with the party’s union direction expressed
in the leaflets distributed. This conduct, of course, did not please at
all the militants of the opportunist parties present, in the unions and on
the picket lines, especially those of the Democratic Socialists of
America, who in the following days tried, to no avail, to intimidate our
comrades.
On Friday,
as a heavy rainstorm loomed, the City Council tried desperately to end the
strike, as sewage overflow seemed imminent. It began issuing statements to
local media creating a scare campaign about the "violence" of workers on
the picket lines. He doubled the police presence at the picket lines.
Forces
spread over four picket lines were concentrated by workers in front of the
water treatment plant. On Saturday, workers gathered from 6 a.m. and held
another large demonstration to block trucks from entering the plant. Our
comrades drafted and distributed a second leaflet, posted below. Police
began threatening to arrest workers who blocked the trucks. Union leaders
began to impose a strike discipline of blocking the trucks for as little
as thirty seconds, as allowed by law.
The strike
ended that evening, Sunday, February 5, at 1 a.m., with a compromise in
which most of the workers’ wage demands were met, with a 13 percent wage
increase retroactive to July 2022.
Local 483
ended the strike with a demonstration in which almost all workers
expressed a positive evaluation towards the agreement. Our comrades
distributed a third short leaflet noting the value of these days of
struggle, which demonstrated the workers’ instinct to unite above
divisions between companies and categories and the correctness of the
party’s union direction in this regard.
Portland municipal workers Fighting for freedom to strike (Saturday, Jan. 28)
In the face
of Portland’s bourgeois municipal administration trying to criminalize a
potential strike, it is time for workers to unite in struggle and organize
in a united union front to make it clear to our class enemies that their
attacks on the freedom to strike will no longer stand!
On December
14, Portland City Hall and the municipal workers’ union had signed an
agreement. Not even a month later, the local government took it back.
Portland City Hall is refusing to implement the agreed wages, placing
workers in the wrong qualifications and with a different step increase
than the one negotiated. Thus the 5% wage increase as agreed upon is not
applied.
Global
inflation continues to rise, reducing the purchasing power and thus the
real wages of workers around the world. Capitalists’ profits skyrocket as
preparations for war continue. Because the capitalist class is always
working to deprive workers of as much wages as possible in order to
increase their profits, workers are driven by necessity to act.
The local
capitalist class is frightened by the strength of the city’s workers
because the prospect of the wastewater treatment plant closing and the
roads freezing threatens the profit-oriented activities taking place in
the city.
From the
recent intervention of the federal government to ban the railroad workers’
strike to the threatened injunction by Portland City Hall to criminalize
municipal workers’ strikes, it is clear that it is the capitalist class
that decides what is and what is not illegal, depending on what suits it
best. In reality, we live in a perpetual state of class struggle, which
makes it all the more necessary for workers of all categories to join
forces in a class-based Single Trade Union Front.
Portland: End capitalism’s violent campaign of intimidation against municipal workers (Friday, Feb. 3)
With only a
few days to go before more than 600 municipal workers go on strike, the
city’s ruling class is panicking over the prospect of a disaster in the
sewer system. With the arrival of rain, with an inactive sewage treatment
plant, the bosses may be forced to strike a deal with the workers to avoid
facing far worse consequences.
Thanks to
the declaration of a "state of emergency", the city administration was
able to call for more workers, scabs, who, not caring about the strike,
went to work. However, this action seems to have been unsuccessful thanks
to the tenacity of the striking workers with their picket lines and also
thanks to the solidarity of workers throughout the city. A condition, the
latter, that will be increasingly essential to defend the collective
interests of the working class.
In
response, the city’s capitalist administration, through the mayor’s
office, issued statements dutifully disseminated by bourgeois media to
perpetuate a campaign of vilification toward the workers and create a
situation to justify state repression. Like the Willamette River, the
bosses and their media cover themselves in excrement.
Not to be
outdone is the left wing of capital, the Democratic Party, which, through
its elected advisers, has sided against the workers. Nationally, Biden and
"democratic socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have effectively crushed
the railroad workers’ strike. The goal of local Democrats is the same.
To avoid
becoming the next Detroit, start-ups on the Silicon Valley model and
skilled workers have been encouraged to move to Portland in recent years.
But, for the first time since the 1980s, Portland’s population is
declining.
As the
global capitalist system has entered an ever-deepening economic crisis,
exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty and decay have emerged in
several neighborhoods in the city, the result of an increasingly decadent
capital economy that destroys social relations by making true human
community impossible. The bourgeois illusion of being able to "make money"
in Portland has definitely vanished.
Moreover,
the deepening crisis has made the ruling class less and less willing to
give wage increases to municipal workers. During the pandemic, workers who
kept "critical" infrastructure running and produced the goods we all need
to live were forced to work and labeled "essential workers", effectively
sacrificed for the "greater good" of the nation. Hundreds of thousands of
workers died, a scenario that effectively created a labor shortage. Now
since this pandemic crisis has abated, the "we are all in the same boat"
propaganda is momentarily shelved. But reviving the economy has meant
intensifying the employers’ attack on workers’ wages and stubbornly
refusing to negotiate. Wherever possible, they are pushing workers and
fighting unions to the brink, with the ultimate goal of breaking any
sincere collective defense body in order to reduce labor market costs.
The current
actions in the city of Portland are but one piece of evidence that the
entire bourgeois order is in essence an "organized and criminal
association against the working class". It exists to extort surplus value
from the wage-earning class, which if it does not accept the scraps
offered will be violently attacked.
Workers
have been educated to believe the lie that the government of capital is
"democratic", "for and of the people", founded in the "land of the free".
The truth sees workers fighting tooth and nail for their daily bread
against state violence.
This
government is nothing but one of the expressions of capitalism, and the
"two parties" (Democrats and Republicans) serve the same class interests
as the regime of capital. Why should labor unions support the political
party that stabs them in the back?
We call for
workers around the world to unite in a single class union front, free from
the political maneuvers of capitalism, which can conduct its own defensive
struggles, in its own interest.
However,
workers’ defensive struggles will one day have to shift to a revolutionary
proletarian counteroffensive, led by a centralized party to abolish class
society for good.
The
Portland municipal workers’ strike is over (Sunday, Feb. 5)
Machinists
blocking entrances to the water treatment plant with incredibly long and
slow trains. A sludge truck driver honoring the picket line and going home
to join the union so that sludge overflows from the plant. Workers from
various other sectors who went to the picket line before and after going
to work, to put their bodies between trucks and scab vans while being
threatened with arrest by police. Municipal workers themselves who finally
took the risk of going on strike in defense of their living conditions.
The Portland municipal workers’ strike demonstrated the strength of a
united class.
Some workers
were surprised to see how city institutions regard workers and how they
want to exploit them as much and more than private companies do. But this
is the experience of all workers internationally in every sector.
It is only
through the uniting of arms above sectors and borders that the working
class can truly struggle to end its exploitative condition under
capitalism and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We must organize as a
class to coordinate struggle activities. Harm to one is harm to all.
Case New
Holland Industrial (CNHi), which produces agricultural and construction
equipment in 18 factories in the United States, is an Italian-U.S.
multinational whose major owner is a financial fund created in 2012 by the
merger of U.S. CNH with FIAT. The bosses are Italian but the headquarters
are in the Netherlands, confirming how capital is an international class
relationship and nationalism an ideological tool against the proletariat
to keep it divided and make it slog along.
At two
plants in the Midwest, in Racine, Wisconsin, on Great Lake Michigan, and
Burlington, Iowa, 450 kilometers apart, collective bargaining agreements
expired on April 30. The two local branches of the United Auto Workers --
the regimented union in the auto industry affiliated with the AFL-CIO
confederation -- the "UAW Local 180" in Racine and the "UAW Local 807" in
Burlington, finding the employers’ proposals for renewal unsatisfactory,
called the 1,000 workers in the two factories to strike from May 2.
The strike
lasted a full eight months. The UAW, which has a strike fund of about $185
million (the subject of a recent embezzlement scandal), paid the strikers
a check for $400 a week.
With such a
large fund, it could have supported a long-term strike at all CNHi
factories across the country. Instead, the union leadership confined the
dispute to the two factories, without trying to open a broader and
stronger front of struggle by mobilizing all CNHi factories. It appears
from this that the local union sections in Racine and Burlington pressured
the UAW leadership to expand the struggle, taking it beyond the confines
of the two factories.
In Racine,
on December 17, a demonstration was organized in support of the strike by
the UAW and a diverse set of other organizations, whose broad spectrum
ranged from workers’ organizations to those of the liberal bourgeois left.
The
initiative of the rally of support is certainly useful, all the more so in
the United States, where it is still extremely rare. But such an action
should have been aimed at growing workers’ unity, extending the struggle
to other factories in the group, to other companies in the territory, to
other categories. It should have had a class rather than a popular
character, which it had, consonant the latter with the scrambling of the
electoral politics of the bourgeois and opportunist workers’ parties.
The
demonstration did, however, have the good result of raising funds for the
local union branch, thus facilitating the possibility of continuing the
strike.
CNHi
responded by presenting a new offer, which the UAW union sections again
rejected by organizing a vote, by secret ballot, in which they instructed
the workers to vote against it. On Saturday, January 7, the contract was
rejected.
But the
details of the negotiations are the sole preserve of union leaders. In
eight months no assemblies were ever called to inform the workers and
involve them in organizing the struggle, thus imposing a relationship
between the mass of workers and the union that resembles that between
customers and a service-providing agency, in which all those intermediate
actions, such as assemblies, meetings, picket lines and propaganda, that
make the union alive thanks to the voluntary efforts of the most combative
workers, disappear.
After the
vote, the Minister of Labor intervened to mediate in the negotiations and
a second contract was proposed, ominously presented as "final". In the
meantime, the company had taken care to inform the workers, through
voicemails and text messages, that they would be replaced with other
permanent workers if they did not accept the proposal.
On Jan. 23,
a second vote approved the employer proposal with 70 percent in favor,
despite indications from sections of the union that they would vote
against it.
Local UAW
leaders during the eight months of struggle stressed the positive value of
unity in action among workers at the two plants and also denounced the
factory-divided collective agreements applied by CNHi. But they never
confronted the union leadership so that it would develop general action to
combat this obvious employers’ practice.
January 19, 2023 - ICP Leaflet - General Strikes in France
Yet Another Attack on Living and Working Conditions
Workers!
Since the
Balladur reform of 1993, we are in the fourth reform of the pension
system. Thus the duration of contribution has increased from 37.5 years to
43 years and the age of departure from 60 to 62 years. The umpteenth
reform proposes to raise it to 64, or even, if possible, to 65, knowing
that most companies dismiss workers from 55 years old, condemning them to
precariousness and alternating unemployment and fixed-term contracts.
Tomorrow the future reform will postpone the retirement age to 67, while
attacking the level of pensions.
One can hear
many lies about the standard of living of pensioners. Some "economists" do
not hesitate to say or write that retirees have a higher standard of
living than those who work. But what does INSEE tell us in its latest
report, that the median income is 1789 € and that the average pension is
1509 €! The propagandists of the bourgeoisie are not far from a lie.
What is the
purpose of all these maneuvers? For the bourgeoisie and its government, it
is a question of reducing social charges in order to increase the rate of
profit, hence the permanent attacks on the pension system, the
unemployment benefit, the labor legislation - which is gradually being
emptied of all its content - and the attacks on public services, in
particular the hospital system. At the same time, the profits of the
banks, the emoluments paid to the shareholders are soaring to new heights:
in 2022, the CAC 40 paid this layer of parasites 80 BILLION euros!
Are these
gigantic profits reinvested in industrial production, in the relocation of
companies, in services? Absolutely not, companies invest at a minimum. The
great historical role of the capitalist mode of production has been to
socialize the productive forces by substituting the small family
production of the peasant and the craftsman with the mechanized and
centralized production of large-scale industry and agriculture, which
relies on the collective work of the proletariat.
This
socialization of the productive forces - the basis of communist society -
comes into conflict with private appropriation and leads ineluctably to
the fall of the rate of profit and to the economic crises of
overproduction which break out recurrently. This outdated mode of
production, which is based on the exploitation of wage labor, has only
been maintained up to the present day by two world wars. It was the
massive destruction of the Second World War and its 50 million dead that
made possible the famous "thirty glorious years" of the post-war period.
But since the great international crisis of 1974-75, this cycle has come
to an end. And world capitalism has only been able to maintain itself by
squeezing the proletariat more and more and by making ever wider layers of
workers more precarious, as well as by a headlong rush into state and
corporate debt. The development of capitalism in Southeast Asia,
particularly in China, has allowed world capitalism to gain thirty years,
but today, in its turn, Chinese capitalism is affected by the crisis of
overproduction.
We are now
in the same situation as in the 1930s, which led to the Second World War.
At the cost of colossal debts, the world bourgeoisie has managed to
prevent the serious crisis of 2008-2009 from turning into a devastating
recession like the one in 1929, but this is only a temporary setback.
The crisis
of capitalism inevitably pushes the different states towards a general
confrontation, of which the imperialist war between Russia and Ukraine is
a harbinger. Tomorrow the confrontation will concern two blocks headed on
one side by Chinese imperialism and on the other by American imperialism.
Capitalism
since the beginning of the 20th century has become a totally parasitic and
sterile mode of production. The big bourgeoisie, industrial, financial and
landed, does everything possible to maintain its mode of production in a
state of survival, which assures it immense privileges. The result is an
increasing pauperization and precariousness of the proletariat, a headlong
rush into debt that is becoming dizzying, and a profiteering and
parasitism that have become colossal. One example, among many others, of
the organized plundering is the price of electricity and energy: on the
sly, the different European governments have aligned the price of
electricity with the price of gas, which itself is determined by the least
profitable well, hence the gigantic rents that the big gas and oil groups
are reaping.
Workers, the
alternative exists: the passage to a communist management, that is to say
not mercantile, of production and distribution, is possible and necessary,
because capitalism has largely fulfilled its historical role by developing
on a large scale the economic bases of communist society.
This implies
the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, its outlawing and the destruction of
its state, which, as the Paris Commune showed, is unusable by the wage
workers - the proletariat.
You must
therefore prepare yourself morally and materially for the confrontation
with this class of parasites and useless people that the big bourgeoisie
has become.
But to do
this, we must begin by finding the path of fraternity and mutual aid
between workers and organizing ourselves in real class unions, which seek
to unify struggles and centralize them to make them truly effective. And
not, like our current unions, whose leadership is in the hands of
reformists, and who pretend to organize you by practicing the policy of
accompaniment, in order to avoid any centralization of the struggles,
especially by organizing decision-making at the local level, thus
scattering the movement.
If the
organization in real class unions is a necessary first step, it is not
enough in itself. It is necessary to organize politically and to recover
the historical program of Communism. For this, the vanguard of the
proletariat must join the ranks of the International Communist Party,
which has been able, until now, to maintain itself firmly on the line of
the Communist Program, as stated in the Manifesto of the Communist Party
of 1848 and in the theses of the first two congresses of the International
Communists of 1919-1921.
FOR THE
ABOLITION OF WAGE-LABOUR AND CAPITAL, LONG LIVE THE CLASS STRUGGLE, LONG
LIVE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT!
A sample of
the labor situation that occurs at the level of public workers in
Venezuela, were the protest actions that occurred nationwide, in many
offices of the Instituto Postal Telegráfico (IPOSTEL), between October 31
and November 4, 2022. This national institution manages postal services
and other public administrative offices. It groups between active, retired
and pensioners around 7,200 workers. The labor-management relationship has
always been marked by the employer’s failure to comply with contractual
agreements. Prior to the signing of the current collective bargaining
agreement - currently expired - the last one was 24 years overdue. Hardly
a better corollary.
These events
of the struggle of the Ipostel working class reflect the discontent
prevailing in the labor mass of the State, which is of the order of three
million workers. This year a large part of the labor protests were led by
public workers in the mining, health, education, etc. sectors. In spite of
the fact that in Ipostel the "mockery" of the Employer is the daily bread,
its employees do not respond forcefully when it comes to demanding the
fulfillment of their demands. This situation is easily explained, due to
the control exercised by opportunism, through its union agents, as well as
the great level of class unconsciousness suffered by the workers. In the
last struggle, the events were triggered by the elimination of certain
wage bonuses, which officially had begun to be cancelled, both for active
and retired workers. This became a direct reduction of salaries and
pensions.
The labor
climate at Ipostel, already heated due to the pyrrhic salaries received by
these workers, as well as the great breach of the collective bargaining
agreement, triggered a sudden protest, which if it was not absolute of all
the workers at national level, in most of the post offices, a percentage
of the workers kept on protesting for all those days. At the beginning of
these events, some union leaders from the province went to the capital of
the country to improvise a union "command" to lead the struggle. At the
main headquarters of this Institute in Caracas, the focus of the street
protest was installed. There, active and retired workers, more retired
than active, were agitating and spreading the word about their situation.
The national press, social networks and banners helped in this.
As it is
obvious, the struggle was contaminated by legalistic, pro-government,
patriotic, democratic and politically naïve positions. But even so the
capital-labor contradiction was maintained in the protest. In spite of all
this, the bosses agreed to negotiate with the workers, making agreements
that were never very clear and were subject to the availability of the
institution’s financial resources. The salary bonuses were reinstated, but
with no salary impact, according to the employer for the time being.
Likewise, there was no retaliation against any worker for participating in
the struggle, a point that was demanded in the negotiations with the
employer.
Finally, the
results of the conflict were assumed by the workers as one more deception
by the bosses, since the demands achieved were very insignificant. And the
intention of the bosses with these agreements was to demobilize the
workers and put an end to the protest. These negative results could have
occurred because the struggle was being waged by a small group of workers,
the active workers had very little participation, and also in the
leadership of the actions there were some sympathizers or militants of the
government party and other opponents of the government, who obviously did
not manage to maintain a class-based leadership and organization of the
struggle. Even though the conflict was ended, there remained the idea
among the workers that it would be resumed again.
Although
many times in the spontaneous leadership of these conflicts, we find
workers who have some sympathy with the opportunist parties or others, the
facts lead them to take classist positions, since their political sympathy
in most cases is not solid. But this favorable leap will depend on the
great participation of the workers, under positions that go in defense of
the demands and organization of the working class. And so the
revolutionary work of the communists within the working class will be to
continue with the work of carrying the revolutionary message for the
organization and struggle not only in the economic field, but also
politically.
Turkish and Syrian Textile Workers Unite in Gaziantep
Workers at
some 20 textile plants in the Küsget industrial district in Gaziantep,
Turkey, some 50 kilometers from the Syrian border, led a victorious strike
against the bosses’ attempts to impose a below-minimum wages and increased
workloads. 350 workers from Turkey and Syria were involved. The strike
ended on January 5 after four days, when the bosses withdrew their demands
of an increased production and offered a wage increase of 3,000 Turkish
liras. The workers had been demanding 4,000.
Gaziantep-where
the
interim Syrian opposition government is based-is among the cities in
Turkey that has taken in the largest number of Syrian refugees. The
national atmosphere of racist hatred against refugees did not stop Turkish
and Syrian workers in Küsget from fighting united until they defeated the
bosses. This is the best demonstration of how only workers’ struggle can
defeat nationalism and racism.
These
workers so far have not organized themselves into a union, but have been
supported by the Bırtek-Sen (United Textile, Weaving and Leather Workers
Union), the most combative union in Gaziantep, a city where the textile
industry dominates.
Bırtek-Sen
was founded in 2022 by the former regional head of Dısk-Tekstil, the
textile workers’ union belonging to DİSK, the Confederation of Progressive
Trade Unions.
Two
DİSK-Tekstil leaders in the past became general secretaries of DİSK and
then entered parliament among the forces of the Kemalist Social Democrats.
In 2021, another trade union in the textile sector-the Dev-Tekstİl
(Unitary Union of Garment, Weaving and Leather Workers)-has harshly
accused the DİSK-Tekstil of failing to support its laid-off members and of
acting as a regime union in negotiations over a company’s collective
contract in Istanbul. These factors point to this DİSK federation as one
of the strongholds of opportunism, which dominates at the leadership of
this combative union confederation.
Gaziantep’s
textile sector has seen strong strikes before. We accounted for this in
the report "The Series of Brave Struggles of the Young Working Class in
Turkey" presented to our party’s general meeting in May 2021.
Between Feb.
10 and March 9, 2022, some 12,000 workers from 35 factories, most of them
belonging to the textile sector, went on unannounced strikes for wage
increases, as reported by the Birtek-Sen, which was founded in those days.
The Küsget
foundry workers’ strike shows the way for workers in Gaziantep and
throughout Turkey, where Turkish proletarians work side by side with
Kurds, Syrians, Africans and others. It is necessary to fight together,
united above different nationalities, organized in the combative trade
unions, fighting for the unity of action of all the combative trade
unions, for a united trade union front from below, a harbinger of the
formation of the great class union that workers in Turkey and in all
countries need more and more urgently.
For its
liberation, the proletariat then needs its class party, the Communist
Party, whose positions can only be internationalist. The International
Communist Party wants to be the one world party of the proletarian
revolution. It strives to unite the struggles of workers throughout the
world, by building maximum class unity through a unitary class trade union
front, and by linking the struggles of today with lessons from the past,
going back to the days of the League of Communists and the three
Internationals.
Russia and Georgia: By Striking, Proletarian Youth Challenge
the Police State
From
December 20 to 25, food delivery workers in Russia, organized in the
Kourier union, engaged in one of the largest worker struggles in the
country in recent years: more than 3,800 delivery workers went on strike
in more than 15 cities for their class demands against Yandex, the
industry giant, an analogue of Uber Eats, which holds a monopoly in Russia
after acquiring its main competitor, Delivery Club, in September 2022.
Yandex’s
delivery drivers work in the so-called gig economy, with conditions
similar to those of delivery drivers in other countries, from Italy to the
United Kingdom, from the United States to Turkey. Conditions which have
caused them to strike in a number of these countries. In these companies
employment is framed as “Independent Contractors” and are bombarded by
propaganda campaigns which presents them as part of an emerging petty
bourgeoisie, instead of what they actually are, an extremely poorly paid
and precarious stratum of the proletariat. This framing of them makes them
responsible for all the risks and expenses that come with the job, and
exposes them to complete “at will” dismissal by the company: Yandex can
block them from using the Eats app at any time, without any notice or
explanation.
In Italy,
this is what happened last October to Sebastian, who was fired after he
died: the day after the boy died in a car accident while making a
delivery, his family received the automatic message of dismissal on his
cell phone, "for not respecting the terms of the delivery".
During the
Covid-19 pandemic, as with all other strata of workers, conditions for
delivery drivers worsened, while companies had record profits: revenues
from Yandex’s food-tech sector, which includes Yandex.Eats and
Yandex.Market, increased in the third quarter of 2022 by 124 percent over
the previous year to 9.8 billion rubles ($135 million) - all this despite
Western sanctions due to the imperialist war in Ukraine.
According to
the propaganda put forward by the Russian bourgeois regime, Russia would
be exempt from the decadence of the so-called West. But a look at the
conditions of the working class and its struggles reveals that it is not
about East and West, but about capitalism, which is the same under all
skies, in Moscow, Paris, Rome or Berlin.
The workers,
with the Kourier union, fought for the introduction of a labor contract
that would frame them as wage earners instead of self-employed, and that
would improve their wages, provide greater protection from dismissal,
payment of sick days and wages indexed to inflation.
The strike
demonstrated how even the proletariat employed through these apps can take
fighting actions: thousands of workers refused to take orders through the
Yandex.Eats mobile app, disrupting service in several cities. Kourier
organized workers to stop work at restaurants contracted with Yandex,
forming picket lines and blocking cash registers and customers.
The strike
demonstrated to workers in this sector, considered a case in itself by
bourgeois sociology, a fundamental truth: that there are no "new" ways of
struggle, that the road to poverty is the same for the entire working
class: the struggle needs to be taken to the streets, it needs to involve
the maximum number of workers, with picket lines, work stoppages in an
attempt to damage the profits of the bosses.
In response,
Yandex launched a campaign of lies against the strikers, claiming that
they were already enjoying high wages and even having its hack pen-pushers
at its service write that there was no strike going on.
Kourier
reacted with a campaign to lower Yandex’s online rating and with the
strike, which began with about 600 deliverymen in Moscow and St.
Petersburg and grew to 3,800, in more than 15 cities, thus uniting more
workers than the union leaders themselves had expected.
As a result
of the strike, fines for delays were essentially abolished, additional pay
was introduced for working New Year’s Eve, and Yandex backed down from its
"two-for-two" work schedule (two days of work, followed by two days
off-something that is not easy when you have to work 12-14 hour shifts
like the delivery drivers).
The Kourier
union was born in June 2020, when workers at the Delivery Club company –
which was purchased by Yandex last September - struck for two months
because of delayed payments. The company capitulated and sent the payments
due, and thus the union was born. It acts as a class union. Since its
origins, it has organized several struggles, mainly strikes on issues
ranging from defending wages to rejecting fines against workers for minor
infractions of company rules.
Last April
its main leader - Kirill Ukraintsev - was arrested for "violating the
rules of assembly", that is, for his union activity, and is still in jail.
Despite this, the Kourier continued its activity, even to the point of
organizing the December strike.
It is
notable about this strike, in addition to its extent, is that it succeeded
in halting production activity, breaking with the practice of regime
unions in Russia, which for years have organized demonstrations that do
not stop work. The fact that this occurred in the midst of the imperialist
war in which the bourgeois regime in Moscow is dragging the working class
into makes this strike, an inherently defeatist action, all the more
important.
There has
been no shortage, in addition to bourgeois state repression, of problems
within the union. One of the opportunist workers’ parties with influence
within Kourier made public the location and date of a meeting to prepare
for the strike, which was thus interrupted by the arrival of the police,
who identified several union militants. Those responsible were expelled
from the union, and the political group saw fit to organize a competing
union.
The struggle
within the working class and its organizations against political and trade
union opportunism is part of the struggle against capitalist exploitation
on the economic level, and against the regime of capital on the political
level, until the workers have the strength to confront and overcome the
bourgeoisie and until they have cleaned up within their organizations.
This struggle, in order to be fought and won, needs to spread its work to
other categories of workers.
Georgia: Strike of Taxi Drivers and Couriers
Georgia, a
small country in the South Caucasus and part of the USSR until 1991, also
saw two categories of workers in the so-called gig economy sector come out
in struggle in February.
The first to
move were taxi drivers from the Estonian company Bolt-which also operates
in London, Paris, and Lisbon-who made demands related to their status as
self-employed workers: 1) Return to the pre-2023 fare; 2) Reduction of the
percentage owed to the company; 3) Compensation for long distances 4)
Computation of waiting time; and 4) Opening of an office in Georgia and
activation of a 24/7 call center.
Subsequently,
since
Feb. 5, cyclo-drivers of the Finnish food delivery company Wolt have taken
up the struggle, explicitly declaring solidarity and unity with the Bolt
drivers. Several hundred of them held an assembly. One of the couriers, in
an interview, explained that while prices have increased by 200 to 300
percent, their wages have remained the same. The couriers are calling for
a reduction in the radius of deliveries, an increase in wages, and an
improvement in insurance, which should cover health care costs, since
traffic accidents are also very common in Tbilisi.
Wolt’s
management has decided to address the workers with an open letter, nothing
more than an exhortation to return to work until the company resolves
their problems.
Media
coverage of these actions of struggle is minimal and most of the
population is unaware of what is happening.
But the
Georgian proletariat is showing signs of awakening from the torpor into
which it has been thrown by decades of lies, first by the supposed
“communist regime” of the USSR, then of the equally bogus one that shows
itself to be aligned to the so-called free and democratic world, which is
no less anti-proletarian than the former.
The
International Communist Party denounces to the workers the deception of
the propaganda of the Georgian bourgeois regime, which points to the
Russian and Turkish states, along with immigrant workers of the various
ethnic groups, as their enemies. The workers’ enemy is the bourgeoisie of
all countries, beginning with the bourgeoisie of the country in which they
are exploited, and their allies are the workers of the whole world.
Only with
the international union of workers - of their struggles in defense of
their living conditions, organized into true class unions - can workers
prevent themselves from being dragged into the hunger, poverty and war
toward which capitalism is leading them.
Georgian
workers must take inspiration from the working class neighbors in
struggle, most recently in Kazakhstan, in Russia and in Turkey.
1. - Historical Types of War
2. - Inevitability of Imperialist War
3. - Avoidability of Imperialist War
4. - From Proletarian Reformism to Bourgeois Betrayal
5. - The Communist Movement in Opposition to Crisis and War
6. - Long Wars don’t Favour Revolution
7. - The Party’s Tasks in Different Situations
8. - Defencism and Intermediatism
9. - Revolutionary Defeatism
10. - Against Indifferentism
11. - Theses on Tactics
