계급투쟁과 계급의식을 갉아먹는 기생충(패러사이티즘)같은 부류들(종파주의, 개인주의, 기회주의, 모험주의, 반역주의)의 찬란한 역사와 그 전통에 대한 공산주의자의 경고와 프롤레타리아트의 철퇴!

Theses on parasitism

1) Throughout its history, the workers’ movement has had to deal with the penetration into its ranks of alien ideologies, coming either from the ruling class or from the petty bourgeoisie. This penetration has taken a number of forms within working class organisations. Among the most widespread and best-known we can point to:

• sectarianism
• individualism
• opportunism
• adventurism
• putschism

2) Sectarianism is the typical expression of a petty bourgeois conception of organisation. It reflects the petty-bourgeois mindset of wanting to be king of your own little castle, and it manifests itself in the tendency to place the particular interests and concepts of one organisation above those of the movement as a whole. In the sectarian vision, the organisation is “all alone in the world” and it displays a regal disdain towards all the other organisations that belong to the proletarian camp, seen as “rivals” or even “enemies”. As it feels threatened by the latter, the sectarian organisation in general refuses to engage in debate and polemic with them. It prefers to take refuge in its “splendid isolation”, acting as though the others did not exist, or else obstinately putting forward what distinguishes itself from the others without taking into account what it has in common with them.

3) Individualism can also derive from petty bourgeois influences, or from directly bourgeois ones. From the ruling class it takes up the official ideology which sees individuals as the subject of history, which glorifies the “self-made man” and justifies the “struggle of each against all”. However, it is above all through the vehicle of the petty bourgeoisie that it penetrates into the organisations of the proletariat, particularly through newly proletarianised elements coming from strata like the peasantry and the artisans (this was notably the case last century) or from the intellectual and student milieu (this has been especially true since the historic resurgence of the working class at the end of the 60s). Individualism expresses itself mainly through the tendency :

• to see the organisation not as a collective whole but as a sum of individuals in which relations between persons take precedence over political and statutory relations;
• to advance one’s own “desires” and “interests” as opposed to the needs of the organisation;
• consequently, to resist the discipline necessary within the organisation;
• to look for “personal realisation” through militant activity;
• to adopt an attitude of constantly contesting the central organs, which are accused of trying to crush individuality; the complementary attitude is that of looking for “promotion” through gaining a place in these organs;
• more generally, to adhere to an élitist view of the organisation in which you aspire to be one of the “first class militants” while developing a contemptuous attitude to those seen as “second class militants”.

4) Opportunism, which has historically constituted the most serious danger for the organisations of the proletariat, is another expression of the penetration of petty bourgeois ideology. One of its motor-forces is impatience, which expresses the viewpoint of a social stratum doomed to impotence, having no future on the scale of history. Its other motor is the tendency to try to conciliate between the interests and positions of the two major classes in society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. From this starting point, opportunism distinguishes itself by the fact that it tends to sacrifice the general and historic interests of the proletariat to the illusion of immediate and circumstantial “successes”. But since for the working class there is no opposition between its struggle inside capitalism and its historical combat for the abolition of the system, the politics of opportunism in the end lead to sacrificing the immediate interests of the proletariat as well, in particular by pushing the class to compromise with the interests and positions of the bourgeoisie. In the final analysis, at crucial historical moments, such as imperialist war and proletarian revolution, opportunist political currents are led to join the enemy camp, as was the case with the majority of the Socialist parties during World War I, and with the Communist parties on the eve of World War II.

5) Adventurism (or putschism[1]) presents itself as the opposite of opportunism. Under cover of “intransigence” and “radicalism” it declares itself to be ready at all times to launch the attack on the bourgeoisie, to enter into the “decisive” combat when the conditions for such a combat don’t yet exist for the proletariat. And in so doing it does not hesitate to qualify as opportunist and conciliationist, even as “traitorous”, the authentically proletarian and marxist current which is concerned to prevent the working class from being drawn into a struggle which would be lost in advance. In reality, deriving from the same source as opportunism - petty bourgeois impatience - it has frequently converged with the latter. History is rich in examples in which opportunist currents have supported putschist currents or have been converted to putschist radicalism. Thus, at the beginning of the century, the right wing of German Social Democracy, against the opposition of its left wing represented notably by Rosa Luxemburg, gave its support to the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were adepts of terrorism. Similarly, in January 1919, when even Rosa Luxemburg had pronounced against an insurrection by the Berlin workers, following the provocation by the Social Democratic government, the Independents, who had only just left this government themselves, rushed into an insurrection which ended in a massacre of thousands of workers, including the main communist leaders.

6) The combat against the penetration of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology into the organisations of the class, as well as against its different manifestations, is a permanent responsibility for revolutionaries. In fact, it can even be said that it is the main combat which the authentically proletarian and revolutionary currents have had to wage within the organisations of the class, to the extent that it is much more difficult than the direct fight against the declared and official forces of the bourgeoisie. The fight against sects and sectarianism was one of the first waged by Marx and Engels, particularly within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). Similarly, the fight against individualism, notably in the form of anarchism, mobilised not only the latter but also the marxists of the Second International (particularly Luxemburg and Lenin). The combat against opportunism has certainly been the most constant and systematic carried out by the revolutionary current since its origins:

• against Lassallean “state socialism” in the 1860s and 1870s;
• against all the Bernstein-type revisionists and reformists at the turn of the century;
• against Menshevism;
• against Kautsky’s centrism on immediately before, during, and after World War I;
• against the degeneration of the Communist International and the Communist parties throughout the 20s and at the beginning of the 30s;
• against the degeneration of the Trotskyist current during the 1930s.

The fight against putschism has not been as constant a necessity as the struggle against opportunism. However, it has been waged since the first steps of the workers’ movement (against the immediatist Willich-Schapper tendency in the Communist League, against the Bakuninist adventures over the Lyon “Commune” in 1870 and the civil war in Spain in 1873). Similarly, it was particularly important during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23: in particular, it was largely the Bolsheviks’ ability to carry out this struggle in July 1917 that allowed the October revolution to take place.

7) The preceding examples show that the impact of these different manifestations of the penetration of alien ideologies depends closely on:

• the historic period;
• the moment in the development of the working class;
• the responsibilities of the class in this or that circumstance.

For example, one of the most important expressions of the penetration of petty bourgeois ideology, and the one most explicitly fought against, opportunism, even if it is a permanent feature in the history of the workers’ movement, found its terrain par excellence in the parties of the Second International, during a period:

• in which illusions in conciliation with the bourgeoisie flourished because of the prosperity of capitalism and the real advances in the living conditions of the working class;
• in which the existence of mass parties gave credence to the idea that mere pressure from these parties could gradually lead capitalism to transform itself into socialism.

Similarly, the penetration of opportunism into the parties of the Third International was strongly determined by the ebb in the revolutionary wave. This encouraged the idea that it was possible to gain an audience in the working masses by making concessions to their illusions on questions like parliamentarism, trade unionism or the nature of the “Socialist” parties.

The importance of the historic moment to the different type of penetration of alien ideologies into the class is revealed even more clearly when it comes to sectarianism. This was particularly significant at the very beginning of the workers’ movement, when the proletariat was only just emerging from the artisans and journeymen’s societies with their rituals and trade secrets. Again, it went through a major revival in the depth of the counter-revolution with the Bordigist current, which saw withdrawing into its shell as an (obviously false) way of protecting itself from the threat of opportunism.

8) The phenomenon of political parasitism, which to a large extent is also the result of the penetration of alien ideologies into the working class, has not been accorded, within the history of the workers’ movement, the same amount of attention as other phenomena such as opportunism. This has been the case because parasitism has only significantly affected proletarian organisations in very specific moments in history. Opportunism, for example, constitutes a constant menace for proletarian organisations and it expresses itself above all when the latter are going through their greatest phases of development. By contrast, parasitism does not basically manifest itself at the time of the most important movements of the class. On the contrary, it is in a period of immaturity of the movement when the organisations of the class still have a weak impact and not very strong traditions that parasitism finds its most fertile soil. This is linked to the very nature of parasitism, which, to be effective, has to relate to elements looking for class positions but who find it hard to distinguish real revolutionary organisations from currents whose only reason for existing is to live at the expense of the former, to sabotage their activities, indeed to destroy them. At the same time, the phenomenon of parasitism, again by its nature, does not appear at the very beginning of the development of the organisations of the class but when they have already been constituted and have proved that they really defend proletarian interests. These are indeed the elements which we find in the first historic manifestation of political parasitism, the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, which sought to sabotage the combat of the IWA and to destroy it.

9) It was Marx and Engels who first identified the threat of parasitism to proletarian organisations:

“It is high time to put an end, once and for all, to the internal conflicts provoked daily in our Association by the presence of this parasitic body. These quarrels only serve to waste energies which should be used to fight against the bourgeois regime. By paralysing the activity of the International against the enemies of the working class, the Alliance admirably serves the bourgeoisies and the governments" (Engels, “The General Council to all the members of the International” - a warning against Bakunin’s Alliance).

Thus the notion of political parasitism is not at all an “ICC invention”. It was the IWA which was the first to be confronted with this threat against the proletarian movement, which it identified and fought. It was the IWA, beginning with Marx and Engels, who already characterised the parasites as politicised elements who, while claiming to adhere to the programme and organisations of the proletariat, concentrated their efforts on the combat not against the ruling class but against the organisations of the revolutionary class. The essence of their activity was to denigrate and manoeuvre against the communist camp, even if they claimed to belong to it and to serve it [2]

“For the first time in the history of the class struggle, we are confronted with a secret conspiracy at the heart of the working class whose aim is to destroy not the existing regime of exploitation, but the very Association which represents the bitterest enemy of this regime” (Engels, Report to the Hague Congress on the Alliance).

10) To the extent that the workers’ movement, in the shape of the IWA, possesses a rich experience of struggle against parasitism, it is of the utmost importance, if we are to face up to the present-day parasitic offensives and arm ourselves against them, to recall the principal lessons of this past struggle. These lessons concern a whole series of aspects:

• the moment of parasitism’s appearance;
• its specificities with regard to other dangers facing proletarian organisations;
• its recruiting ground;
• its methods;
• the most effective means of fighting it.

In fact, as we shall see, on all these aspects there is a striking similarity between the situation facing the proletarian milieu today and the one confronted by the IWA.

11) Although it affected a working class which was still historically inexperienced, parasitism only appears historically as an enemy of the workers’ movement when the latter has reached a certain level of maturity, having gone beyond the infantile sectarian stage.

“The first phase of the struggle of the proletariat was characterised by the movement of the sects. This was justified in a period in which the proletariat had not developed sufficiently to act as a class” (Marx/Engels).

It was the appearance of marxism, the maturation of proletarian class consciousness and the capacity of the class and its vanguard to organise the struggle which set the workers’ movement on a healthy foundation:

“From this moment on, when the movement of the working class had become a reality, the fantastic utopias were called upon to disappear....because the place of these utopias had been taken by a clear understanding of the historical conditions of this movement and because the forces of a combat organisation of the working class were more and more being gathered together” (Marx, first draft of The Civil War in France).

In fact, parasitism appeared historically in response to the foundation of the First International, which Engels described as “the means to progressively dissolve and absorb all the different little sects” (Engels, letter to Kelly/Vischnevetsky).

In other words, the International was the instrument that obliged the different components of the workers’ movement to embark upon a collective and public process of clarification, and to submit to a unified, impersonal, proletarian organisational discipline. It was in resistance to this international “dissolution and absorption” of all these non-proletarian programmatic and organisational particularities and autonomies that parasitism first declared war on the revolutionary movement:

“The sects, which at the beginning had been a lever to the movement, became an obstacle to as soon as they were no longer on the order of the day; they then became reactionary. The proof of this is the sects in France and Britain, and recently the Lassalleans in Germany, where after years of supporting the organisation of the proletariat, they have become mere instruments of the police” (Marx/Engels, The so-called split in the International).

12) It is this dynamic framework of analysis developed by the First International that explains why the present period, that of the 80s and above all of the 90s, has witnessed a development of parasitism unprecedented since the time of the Alliance and the Lassallean current. For today we are confronted with all sorts of informal regroupments, often acting in the shadows, claiming to belong to the camp of the communist left, but actually devoting their energies to fighting the existing marxist organisations rather than the bourgeois regime. As in the time of Marx and Engels, the function of this reactionary parasitic wave is to sabotage the development of open debate and proletarian clarification, and to prevent the establishment of rules of behaviour that link all members of the proletarian camp. The existence:

• of an international marxist current like the ICC, which rejects sectarianism and monolithism;
• of public polemics between revolutionary organisations;
• of the current debate about marxist organisational principles and the defence of the revolutionary milieu;
• of new revolutionary elements searching for the real marxist organisational and programmatic traditions,

are among the most important elements presently provoking the hatred and offensive of political parasitism.

As we saw with the experience of the IWA, it is only in periods when the workers’ movement leaves behind a stage of basic immaturity and reaches a qualitatively superior level, a specifically communist level, that parasitism becomes its main opponent. In the current period, this immaturity is not the product of the youth of the workers’ movement as a whole, as in the days of the IWA, but is above all the result of the 50 years of counter-revolution which followed the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Today, it is this break in organic continuity with the traditions of past generations of revolutionaries which above all else explains why there is such a weight of petty bourgeois anti-organisational reflexes and behaviour among so many of the elements who lay claim to marxism and the communist left.

13) There are a whole series of similarities between the conditions and characteristics of the emergence of parasitism in the days of the IWA, and of parasitism today. However, we should also note an important difference between the two periods: last century, parasitism largely took the form of a structured and centralised organisation within the class’ organisation, whereas today its form is essentially that of little groups, or even of “non-organised” elements (though the two often work together). This difference does not call into question the fundamental identity of the parasitic phenomenon in the two periods, which can be explained essentially by the following facts:

• the Alliance developed in part on the basis of the vestiges of the sects of the preceding period: it adopted their structure, tightly centralised around a “prophet”, and their taste for clandestine organisation; by contrast, one of the bases for today’s parasitism is the remnants of the student rebellion which weighed on the historic recovery of proletarian struggle at the end of the 1960s, and especially in 1968, along with all its baggage of individualism and calling into question organisation and centralisation, which supposedly “stifled individuals”; [3]
• while the IWA existed, there was only one organisation that regrouped the whole proletarian movement, and the currents whose aim was to destroy it, while still claiming to be fighting the same struggle against the bourgeoisie, had to act within it; by contrast, at a moment in history where the elements who represent the revolutionary struggle of the working class are dispersed in the different organisations of the proletarian milieu, each parasitic group can put itself forward as representing another “component” of the milieu, along with the other groups.

In this sense, it is important to say clearly that the present dispersal of the proletarian political milieu, and any sectarian behaviour which prevents or hinders an effort towards the regroupment of fraternal debate between its different components, plays into the hands of parasitism.

14) Marxism, following the experience of the IWA, has pointed out the differences between parasitism and the other manifestations of the penetration of alien ideologies into the organisations of the class. For example, opportunism, even if it can initially manifest itself in an organisational form (as in the case of the Mensheviks in 1903) fundamentally attacks the programme of the proletarian organisation. Parasitism, on the other hand, if it is to carry out its role, does not a priori attack the programme. It carries out its activity essentially on the organisational terrain, even if, in order to “recruit”, it is often led to put into question certain aspects of the programme. Thus at the Basle Congress of 1869, we saw Bakunin launch his battle cry of “the abolition of the right of inheritance”, because he knew that he could gather numerous delegates around this empty, demagogic demand, given that many illusions existed on this question in the International. But his real aim in doing so was to overturn the General Council influenced by Marx, and which fought against this demand, in order to constitute a General Council devoted to himself.[4] Because parasitism directly attacks the organisational structure of proletarian formations, it represents, when historical conditions permit its appearance, a much more immediate danger than opportunism. These two expressions of the penetration of alien ideologies are a mortal danger for proletarian organisations. Opportunism leads to their death as instruments of the working class through their passage into the bourgeois camp, but to the extent that opportunism above all attacks the programme, it only reaches this end through a whole process in which the revolutionary current, the left, is able to develop within the organisation a struggle for the defence of the programme.[5] By contrast, to the extent that it is the organisation itself, as a structure, which is threatened by parasitism, this leaves the proletarian current much less time to organise its defence. The example of the IWA is significant in this respect: the whole of the struggle against the Alliance lasted no more than 4 years, between 1868 when Bakunin entered the International and 1872 when he was expelled at the Hague Congress. This simply underlines one thing: the necessity for the proletarian current to attack parasitism head on, not to wait until its already done its worst before launching the fight against it.

15) As we have seen, it is important to distinguish parasitism from other expressions of the class’ penetration by alien ideologies. However, one of parasitism’s characteristics is that it uses these other expressions. This springs from parasitism’s origins, which are also the result of the penetration of alien influences, but also from the fact that its approach - whose aim, in the final analysis, is the destruction of proletarian organisations - is not encumbered with principles or scruples. As we have seen, within the IWA and the workers’ movement of the day, the Alliance was distinguished by its ability to make use of the remnants of sectarianism, to use an opportunist approach (on the question of the right of inheritance, for example), and to launch into completely adventurist undertakings (the Lyon “Commune”, and the civil war of 1873 in Spain). Similarly, it was strongly founded on the individualism of a proletariat which had barely emerged from the artisan and peasant classes (especially in Spain and the Swiss Jura). The same characteristics are also to be found in parasitism today. We have already mentioned the role of individualism in the formation of parasitism, but it is worth pointing out that all the splits from the ICC which have since formed parasitic groups (GCI, CBG, EFICC), have been based on a sectarian approach, splitting prematurely and refusing to take the debate to a clear conclusion. Similarly, opportunism was one of the marks of the GCI, which accused the ICC (when still a “tendency” within the organisation) of not imposing sufficiently rigorous conditions on new candidates, only to turn to the most unprincipled recruitment, even modifying its programme to accommodate the fashionable leftist mystifications of the day (such as “Third Worldism”). The same opportunism was demonstrated by the CBG and the EFICC at the beginning of the 1990s, when they entered an incredible round of bargaining, in an attempt to begin a process of regroupment. Finally, as far as adventurism-putschism is concerned, it is remarkable that, even if we leave aside the GCI’s softness for terrorism, all these groups have systematically plunged head first into the traps that the bourgeoisie lays for the class, calling on the workers to develop their struggle when the ground had been mined in advance by the ruling class and the unions, particularly, for example, during the autumn of 1995 in France.

16) The experience of the IWA has revealed the difference that can exist between parasitism and the swamp (even if the latter term was not used at the time). Marxism defines the swamp as a political zone divided between the positions of the working class, and those of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. Such areas can emerge as a first step in a process of coming to consciousness by sectors of the class, or of breaking from bourgeois positions. They can also contain the remnants of currents which at a certain point did express a real effort by the class to come to consciousness, but which have proved unable to evolve with the new conditions and experience of the proletarian struggle. The groups of the swamp can rarely maintain a stable existence. Torn between the positions of the proletariat, and those of other classes, they either fully adopt the positions of the proletariat, or go over to those of the bourgeoisie, or end up split between the two. Such a process of decantation is generally given greater impetus by the great events that confront the working class (in the 20th century, these have been essentially imperialist war and proletarian revolution), and the general direction of this decantation is largely dependent on the evolution of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Faced with these currents, the attitude adopted by the left of the workers’ movement has never been to consider these groups completely lost for the workers’ movement, but to give an impetus to the clarification within them, to allow the clearest elements to join the combat while firmly denouncing those who go over to the enemy class.

17) Within the IWA, there existed alongside the vanguard marxist current, currents which we could define as belonging to the swamp. Such was the case, for example, with certain Proudhonist currents which in the first part of the 19th century had formed a real vanguard of the French proletariat. By the time of the struggle against the parasitic Alliance, these groups were no longer a vanguard. Nonetheless, despite their confusions they were capable of participating in the struggle to save the International, notably during the Hague Congress. The attitude of the marxist current towards them was quite different from its attitude towards the Alliance. There was never any question of excluding them. On the contrary, it was important to involve them in the struggle against the Alliance, not only because of their weight within the International, but also because the struggle itself was an experience which could help these currents to greater clarity. In practice, this combat confirmed the existence of a fundamental difference between the swamp and parasitism: where as the former is traversed by a proletarian life which allows its best elements to join the revolutionary current, the latter’s fundamental vocation is to destroy the class organisation, and it is completely unable to evolve in this direction, even if some individuals who have been deceived by parasitism may be able to do so.

Today, it is equally important to distinguish between the currents of the swamp[6] and the parasitic currents. The groups of the proletarian milieu must try to help the former evolve towards marxist positions, and provoke a political clarification within them. Towards the latter, they must exercise the greatest severity, and denounce the sordid role that they play to the great profit of the bourgeoisie. This is all the more important, in that the confusions of the currents in the swamp are particularly vulnerable to the attacks of parasitism (particularly given their reticence towards organisation, as in the case of those that come from councilism).

18) Every penetration of alien ideology into proletarian organisations plays the game of the enemy class. This is particularly evident when it comes to parasitism whose aim is the destruction of these organisations (whether this is openly avowed or not). Here again, the IWA was particularly clear in affirming that even if he was not an agent of the capitalist state, Bakunin served the interests of the state far better than any agent could have done. This does not at all signify that parasitism in itself represents a sector of the political apparatus of the ruling class like the bourgeois currents of the extreme left like Trotskyism today. In fact, in the eyes of Marx and Engels, even the best known parasites of their day, Bakunin and Lassalle, were not seen as political representatives of the bourgeois class. This analysis derived from their understanding that parasitism as such does not constitute a fraction of the bourgeoisie, having neither a programme or orientation for the national capital, nor a particular place in the state organs for controlling the struggle of the working class. This said, bearing in mind what a service parasitism renders to the bourgeoisie, the latter accords it a particular solicitude. This expresses itself in three main forms:

• a political support to the activities of parasitism; thus, the European bourgeois press took up the cause of the Alliance and Bakunin in their conflict with the General Council;
• infiltration and manoeuvres of state agents within parasitic currents; thus, the Lyon section of the Alliance was clearly led by two Bonapartist agents, Richard and Blanc;
• the direct creation by sectors of the bourgeoisie of political currents whose vocation is to parasite on the proletarian organisation: thus the Mazzinists joined the International at its foundation while the “League for Peace and Freedom” (led by the Bonapartist agent Vogt) was, as Marx put it, “formed in opposition to the International” and tried, in 1868, to “ally” itself with it.

Here it should be noted that while the majority of parasitic currents advertise a proletarian programme, the latter is not indispensable for an organisation in carrying out the functions of political parasitism, which is not distinguished by the positions it defends but by its destructive attitude towards the real organisations of the working class.

19) In the present period, when proletarian organisations don’t have the notoriety that the IWA had in its day, official bourgeois propaganda does not on the whole concern itself with providing support to the parasitic groups and elements (which in any case would have the disadvantage of discrediting them in front of the elements who are searching for communist positions). It should however be noted that in the bourgeois campaigns around “negationism” specifically aimed at the communist left, an important place is reserved for groups like the ex-Mouvement Communiste, La Banquise, etc, who are presented as representatives of the communist left, when in fact they have a strong parasitic colouring.

On the other hand, it was indeed a state agent, Chénier,[7] who played a key role in the formation within the ICC of a “secret tendency” which, having provoked the loss of half the section in Britain, gave rise to one of the most typical parasitic grouplets, the CBG. Neither should we exclude the possibility that certain elements who were at the origin of the 1978 split from the ICC which gave rise to the GCI were also agents of the state or leftist organisations (as some of those who seceded at the time now think).

Finally, the efforts of bourgeois currents to infiltrate the proletarian milieu and carry out a parasitic function there can be seen clearly with the activities of the Spanish leftist group Hilo Rojo (which for years had been trying to get into the good books of the proletarian milieu before launching an all-out attack on it), or those of the OCI (an Italian leftist group certain of whose elements have come from Bordigism and which today presents itself as the “true heir” of this current).

20) The penetration of state agents into the parasitic circles is obviously facilitated by the very nature of parasitism, whose fundamental calling is to combat the real proletarian organisations. Indeed, the fact that parasitism recruits among those elements who reject the discipline of a class organisation, who have nothing but contempt for its statutory functioning, who rejoice in informalism and personal loyalties rather than loyalty to the organisation, leaves the door of the parasitic milieu wide open to infiltration of this type. These doors are equally wide open to those involuntary auxiliaries of the capitalist state, the adventurers, those declassed elements who seek to place the workers’ movement in the service of their own ambitions, of their quest for a notoriety and power denied to them by bourgeois society. In the IWA, the example of Bakunin is obviously the best known in this regard. Marx and his comrades never claimed that Bakunin was a direct agent of the state. But this didn’t stop them from identifying and denouncing not only the services he involuntarily rendered to the ruling class, but also the approach and class origins of adventurers within proletarian organisations and the role they play as leaders of parasitism. Thus, with regard to the actions of Bakunin’s secret Alliance within the IWA, they wrote that the “declassed elements” had been able “to infiltrate it and establish secret organisations at its very heart”. The same approach was taken up by Bebel in the case of Schweitzer, the leader of the Lassallean parasitic current: “he joined the movement as soon as he saw that there was no future for him within the bourgeoisie, that for him, whose mode of life had declassed him very early on, the only hope was to play a role in the workers’ movement in keeping with his ambition and his capacities” (Bebel: Autobiography).

21) This being said, even if parasitic currents are often led by declassed adventurers (when not by direct state agents), they do not only recruit in this category. We can also find there elements who at the outset are animated by a revolutionary will and who don’t set out to destroy the organisation but who:

• impregnated by petty bourgeois ideology, impatient, individualist, elitist, preferring affinity relations to political relations;
• “disappointed” by the working class which doesn’t move ahead quickly enough for them;
• finding it hard to put up with organisational discipline, frustrated at not finding in militant activity the “satisfaction” they hoped for or the “posts” they aspired to,

end up developing a deep hostility towards the proletarian organisation, even if this hostility is masked by “militant” pretensions.

In the IWA, a certain number of members of the General Council, such as Eccarius, Jung and Hales, fall into this category.

Moreover, parasitism is capable of recruiting sincere and militant proletarian elements who, affected by petty bourgeois weaknesses or through lack of experience, allow themselves to be deceived or manipulated by openly anti-proletarian elements. In the IWA, this was typically the case with most of the workers who were part of the Alliance in Spain.

22) As far as the ICC is concerned, most of the splits which led to the formation of parasitic groups were very clearly made up of elements animated by the petty bourgeois approach described above. The impetus given by intellectuals seeking “recognition”, frustrated by not receiving it from the organisation, impatience because they did not manage to convince other militants of the “correctness” of their positions or at the slow pace of the development of the class struggle, sensitivity to criticisms of their positions or their behaviour, the rejection of centralisation which they felt to be “Stalinism”, were the motive force behind the formation of the “tendencies” which led to the formation of more or less ephemeral parasitic groups, and to the desertions which fuelled informal parasitism. In succession, the 1979 “tendency” which gave birth to the “Groupe Communiste Internationaliste”, the Chénier tendency, one of whose avatars was the defunct “Communist Bulletin Group”, the McIntosh-JA-ML “tendency” (largely made up of members of the central organ of the ICC) which gave rise to the EFICC, (now Internationalist Perspective) are typical illustrations of this phenomenon. In these episodes it could also be seen that elements who undoubtedly had proletarian concerns allowed themselves to be led astray by personal loyalty towards the leading members of these “tendencies” which were not really tendencies but clans as the ICC has already defined them. The fact that all these parasitic splits from our organisation first appeared in the form of internal clans is obviously no accident. In reality, there is a great similarity between the organisational behaviour that lies at the basis of the formation of clans and those which fuel parasitism: individualism, statutory frameworks seen as a constraint, frustration with militant activity, loyalty towards personalities to the detriment of loyalty towards the organisation, the influence of “gurus” (elements seeking to have a personal hold over other militants).

In fact, what the formation of clans already represents - the destruction of the organisational tissue - finds its ultimate expression in parasitism: the will to destroy proletarian organisations themselves.[8]

23) The heterogeneity which is one of the marks of parasitism, since it counts in its ranks both relatively sincere elements and those animated by a hatred of the proletarian organisation, even political adventurers or direct state agents, makes it the terrain par excellence for the secret policies of those elements who are most hostile to proletarian concerns, enabling them to drag the more sincere elements behind them. The presence of these “sincere” elements, especially those who have dedicated real efforts towards the construction of the organisation, is actually one of the preconditions for the success of parasitism since its lends credit and authority to its false “proletarian” passport (just as trade unionism needs its “sincere and devoted” militants in order to carry out its role). At the same time, parasitism, and its leading elements, can only establish control over a large part of their troops by hiding their real aims. Thus, the Alliance in the IWA was made up of several circles around “citizen B”, and there were secret statutes reserved for the “initiated”. “The Alliance divides its members into two castes, the initiated and the non-initiated, aristocrats and plebeians, the latter being condemned to be directed by the former via an organisation whose very existence is unknown to them” (Engels, Report on the Alliance). Today, parasitism acts in the same way and it is rare for the parasitic groups, and particularly the adventurers or frustrated intellectuals who animate them, to openly parade their programmme. In this sense, “Mouvement Communiste”,[9] which clearly says that the left communist milieu has to be destroyed, is both a caricature of parasitism and a mouthpiece for its real underlying aims.

24) The methods used by the First International and the Eisenachers against parasitism have served as a model for those used by the ICC today. In the public documents of the congresses, in the press, in open meetings and even in parliament, the manoeuvres of parasitism were denounced. Again and again, it was shown that it was the ruling classes themselves who stood behind these attacks and that their goal was the destruction of marxism. The work of the Hague Congress as well as Bebel’s famous speeches against the secret politics of Bismarck and Schweitzer revealed the capacity of the workers’ movement to give a global explanation for these manoeuvres while denouncing them in an extremely concrete manner. Among the most important reasons given by the First International for publishing the revelations about Bakunin, we can point above all to the following:

• openly unmasking them is the only way to rid the workers’ movement of such methods. Only if all the members of the organisation became conscious of these questions would it be possible to prevent such things happening in the future;
• it was necessary to publicly denounce Bakunin’s Alliance in order to dissuade those who were using the same methods. Marx and Engels knew quite well that other parasites were still carrying out secret activities inside and outside the organisation, such as the adepts of Pyat;
• only a public debate could break Bakunin’s control over many of his victims and encourage them to speak out. To this end, Bakunin’s methods of manipulation were revealed above all by the publication of the Revolutionary Catechism;
• a public denunciation was indispensable to prevent the International being associated with such practices. Thus, the decision to expel Bakunin from the International was taken after the arrival of the news about the Nechayev affair, with the danger that it would be used against the International;
• the lessons of this struggle had a historical importance, not only for the International but for the future of the workers’ movement. It was in this spirit that years later Bebel devoted 80 pages of his autobiography to the struggle against Lassalle and Schweitzer.

But at the centre of this policy lay the necessity to unmask political adventurers like Bakunin and Schweitzer.

It cannot be emphasized often enough that such an attitude characterised Marx’s whole political life, as we can see in his denunciation of the acolytes of Lord Palmerston or Herr Vogt. He understood very well that sweeping such affairs under the carpet could only benefit the ruling class.

25) It is this great tradition that the ICC is continuing with its articles on its own internal struggles, its polemics against parasitism, the public announcement of the unanimous exclusion of one of its members by the 11th international congress, the publication of articles on freemasonry, etc. In particular, the ICC’s defence of the tradition of the court of honour in the case of elements who have lost the confidence of revolutionary organisations, in order to defend the milieu as a whole: all this partakes of exactly the same spirit as that of the Hague Congress and the commissions of inquiry of the workers’ parties in Russia towards people suspected of being agents provocateurs.

The storm of protest and accusations broadcast by the bourgeois press following the publication of the principal results of the inquiry into the Alliance shows that it is this rigorous method of public denunciation that scares the bourgeoisie more than anything else. Similarly, the way that the opportunist leadership of the Second International, in the years prior to 1914, systematically ignored the famous chapter “Marx against Bakunin” in the history of the workers’ movement shows the same fear on the part of all defenders of petty bourgeois organisational conceptions.

26) Towards the petty bourgeois infantry of parasitism, the policy of the workers’ movement has been to make it disappear from the political scene. Here the denunciation of the absurdity of the positions and political activities of the parasites plays an important role. Thus Engels, in his celebrated article “The Bakuninists at work” (during the civil war in Spain) backed up and completed the revelations on the organisational behaviour of the Alliance.

Today, the ICC has adopted the same policy by fighting against the adepts of the different organised and “unorganised” centres of the parasitic network.

With regard to the more or less proletarian elements, more or less taken in by parasitism, the policy of marxism has always been quite different. It has always been to drive a wedge between these elements and the parasitic leadership which is directed and encouraged by the bourgeoisie, showing that the first are the victims of the second. The aim of this policy is always to isolate the parasitic leadership by drawing the victims away from its sphere of influence. Towards these “victims”, marxism has always denounced their attitude and their activities while at the same time struggling to revive their confidence in the organisation and the milieu. The work of Engels and Lafargue towards the Spanish section of the First International is a perfect concretisation of this.

The ICC has also followed this tradition by organising confrontations with parasitism in order to win back the elements who have been deceived. Bebel and Liebknecht’s denunication of Schweitzer as an agent of Bismarck at a mass meeting of the Lassallean party at Wuppertal is a well known example of this attitude.

27) The fact that the tradition of struggle against parasitism has been lost since the great combats within the IWA, owing to:

• the fact that parasitism did not represent a major danger for proletarian organisations after the IWA;
• the length and depth of the counter-revolution.

This constitutes a major weakness for the proletarian political milieu faced with the parasitic offensive. This danger is all the more serious as a result of the ideological pressure of the decomposition of capitalism, a pressure which, as the ICC has shown, facilitates the penetration of the most extreme forms of petty bourgeois ideology and creates an ideal terrain for the growth of parasitism.[10] It is thus a very important responsibility of the proletarian milieu to engage itself in a determined combat against this scourge. To a certain extent, the capacity of revolutionary currents to identify and combat parasitism will be an indication of their capacity to combat the other dangers which weigh on the organisations of the proletariat, particularly the most permanent danger, opportunism.

In fact, to the extent that opportunism and parasitism both come from the same source (the penetration of petty bourgeois ideology) and represent an attack against the principles of proletarian organisation (programmatic principles for the first, organisational principles for the second), it is quite natural for them to tolerate each other and to converge. Thus it was not at all a paradox that in the IWA we saw the “anti-statist” Bakuninists hand in hand with the “statist” Lassalleans (who represented a variety of opportunism). One of the consequences of this is that it is basically up to the left currents of proletarian organisations to wage the combat against parasitism. In the IWA, it was directly Marx and Engels and their tendency who assumed the fight against the Alliance. It was no accident that the main documents produced during this combat bore their signature (the circular of 5 March 1872, The so-called split in the International was written by Marx and Engels; the 1873 report on “The Alliance for Socialist Democracy and the International Workingmen’s Association” by Marx, Engels, Lafargue and Utin).

What was valid in the time of the IWA remains valid today. The struggle against parasitism constitutes one of the essential responsibilities of the communist left and is part of the tradition of its bitter struggles against opportunism. Today it is one of the basic components in the preparation of the party of tomorrow, and in fact is one of the determining factors both of the moment when the party can arise and its capacity to play its role in the decisive battles of the proletariat.

Greece: difficulties in the development of the movement

After negotiations with the EU, IMF and the European Central Bank, the Greek government got parliamentary backing for a further array of austerity measures. Following last year’s bailout and a previous a wave of cuts in jobs, wages and pensions, the new 28 billion Euro package of cuts includes a further 15% cut in wages and 150,000 jobs for public sector workers, cuts in benefits, and in government services. Despite the addition of taxes for lower paid workers who’d previously been excluded, and some other new taxes including a ‘solidarity levy’, there is still anxiety throughout the bourgeoisies of Europe that Greek state capitalism could default on its loans and that the country might have to leave the Euro.

The responses to the blows from the economic crisis and the attacks by the state have varied. For example, Greece used to be noted for its low suicide rate, but over the last couple of years suicides have gone up 40% as people have failed to cope with debt and unemployment. On the other hand, the initial impulses of those who occupied squares across Greece and held assemblies to discuss what could be done were a healthy response to the situation. However, after the early days of the occupations the assemblies have become more formalised, with more invited speakers and much less discussion. Yes, all politicians are routinely denounced as ‘thieves’, but the suspicion of politics has not prevented meetings being increasingly influenced by leftist and liberal demagogues.

Even more significantly, the unions (despite their links and support for the governing PASOK party) have been re-establishing their influence. Last year, there were seven one-day general strikes; this year there have already been five, including one 48-hour strike. With the addition of the minority who bring along flares and other weaponry there have been some spectacular confrontations, but these have been played out as so many theatrical rituals in which the police are prepared to play their part. At the time of key parliamentary votes the police used greater force than usual along with tear gas, while some anarchists attacked the finance ministry and a branch of a major bank. Events outside parliament choreographed to go with the melodrama inside.

The role of the unions is crucial for Greek capitalism. It relies on them to recuperate, divide and divert struggles. There is a great deal of anger in the ranks of Greek workers, but the unions have so far ensured that this anger is not being transformed into anything effective. For example, included in the package of measures are plans for the privatisation of 50 billion Euros worth of assets. This programme is fiercely contested by unions and their leftist supporters. The campaign against privatisation is a classic diversion. Workers are already suffering from the attacks undertaken by public sector institutions, but the left/unions try to persuade workers to defend the state and government employers.

The economic crisis that has driven the ruling class in Greece to attack so brutally the working and living standards of the working class is the same crisis that led to the need to bailout Ireland and Portugal and with it the imposition of their austerity regimes. It’s not all a plot by the EU/IMF/ECB; it’s a desperate response to a crisis that has an international reality. The working class is also international. The assemblies that occupied squares in Greece were partly inspired by events in Spain. The bourgeoisie is worried about a domino effect if the economy of one country in the Euro should collapse, but they’re even more worried that they will not be able to contain any future struggles within the frontiers of a single country.  

Car 30/6/11

Protests in China come up against state repression

The Xintang area of Zengcheng, in China’s southern Guangzhou province, annually produces 260 million pairs of jeans, 60% of China’s and a third of the world’s output for more than 60 international brands. Known as the ‘jeans capital of the world’ it is in some ways symbolic of Chinese economic development over the last thirty years. In June, demonstrations and clashes with the police in angry protests by thousands of workers against the treatment of a pregnant 20-year-old, hint at the reality experienced by workers in the heart of an ‘economical miracle’.

Workers attacked government buildings, overturned police cars and battled with police. Against the protests the Chinese state sent in 6000 paramilitary police with armoured vehicles, deploying tear gas as they attacked up to 10,000 workers.

After strikes at Honda last year spread, the company conceded substantial wage increases. In the face of these recent protests by workers, many of whom were rural migrants, the state offered residency rights to anyone who would identify rioters. In Chinese cities those without household registry are not entitled to healthcare, education and other social benefits.

The days of protests in Zengcheng are not isolated incidents. A week previously “migrants from Sichuan clashed with police and overturned cars in Chaozhou, about 210 miles east of Guangzhou, after a worker demanding two months of back wages was allegedly attacked by the boss of the ceramics factory where he had worked” (Los Angeles Times 13/6/11).

As the Financial Times (17/6/11) put it “Although similar demonstrations are relatively common in China, in both cases a standoff between police and angry citizens quickly descended into violence.”

The bourgeois press has highlighted the fact that migrant workers have been involved in these conflicts. In China there are 153 million migrant workers living outside their hometowns. Leaving rural areas they go to work on construction sites, factories, restaurants and new projects as they occur. Sixty per cent of them are under 30, and, when questioned in surveys, the younger workers are much more likely to say that they would take part in collective actions than older workers. Workers now working in urban areas mostly have no intention of returning to the countryside, with very few, for example, having any farming experience.

Also, as evidence of the degree of attachment to their place of origin, younger workers “tend to remit less money to home villagers. The National Bureau of Statistics found that in 2009 young migrants sent back about 37.2 percent of their income, while older migrants sent back 51.1 percent” (Reuters 28/6/11).

The response of Chinese capitalism

Whether dealing with strikes or other protests “the first instinct of China’s government, at both local and national level, is to use force. Suppression can work for a while. But if the underlying causes are not addressed, China risks an explosion” (FT 19/6/11). This doesn’t of course mean that China is going to let up on repression.

Bloomberg (6/3/11) reported that “China spent more on its internal police force than on its armed forces in 2010, and plans to do the same this year, as the government deployed security forces around the country to control growing social unrest”. As the article continues “The surge in public security spending comes as so-called mass incidents, everything from strikes to riots and demonstrations, are on the rise. There were at least 180,000 such incidents in 2010, twice as many as in 2006” according to Sun Liping, a professor of sociology at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The concern of the Chinese ruling class is partly at the proliferation of ‘mass incidents’ but also “The perception that local protests might be gaining a broader national coherence is deeply threatening to China’s Communist Party” (FT 19/6/11).
This doesn’t mean that the Chinese bourgeoisie can deal with the ‘underlying causes’ of unrest. What lies behind protests and strikes, fundamentally, are the conditions in which workers live and work. And without the imposition of these conditions China’s economic growth would not have been possible.

Chinese capitalism can’t offer meaningful material improvements to millions of workers, and that’s why it risks an ‘explosion’. But it does know it needs something other than repression. As the Bloomberg article notes “Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee who oversees the country’s security forces, said in a Feb. 21 article in the People’s Daily, the party’s official mouthpiece, that the government must ‘defuse social conflicts and disputes just as they ‘germinate’”.

In general the Chinese bourgeoisie lacks the means to defuse conflict in its early stages. The official unions are inflexible, widely distrusted and rightly perceived as being part of the state. Those ‘independent’ unions that have existed have been in on a very limited scale. It is interesting, therefore, to note that Han Dongfan, an activist who set up a union during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, is revising his view of the official unions.

In a Guardian (26/6/11) article he says that recent protests and demands for improved wages and conditions show that “with no real trade union that can articulate those demands, workers are left with little option but to take to the streets”. He thinks that “This new era of activism has forced China’s official trade union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, to re-examine its role and look for ways to become an organisation that really does represent workers’ interests”. The Chinese ruling class certainly wishes that the official unions had more influence with the working class, but for workers there is no form of union organisation that can answer their needs. For the working class it’s not a matter of swapping one sort of union for another but finding the means for the most effective collective action. The fact that strikes and demonstrations so quickly end up in confrontations with the police is one piece of evidence that demonstrates to workers the need for their struggles, ultimately, to create a force that will be able to destroy the Chinese capitalist state.  

Car 1/7/11

Two Battles in Athens

After Tahrir Square in Cairo and the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, once again Syntagma Square in Athens is the focal point of resistance against the consequences of capitalism's crisis. In Spain, the `indignados' stated they were inspired by the revolt in Egypt and Tunisia, and likewise demonstrators in Syntagma are proclaiming their linkage to the struggles in North Africa and Spain. Clearly, in our times, borders cannot stop the spirit of resistance; and the official media can no longer control the flow of information. The struggle is contagious.

With admiration and solidarity we are watching the tens of thousands battling the security forces of the Greek government in response to the draconian austerity program that it is savagely imposing on the working class (youth, employed, unemployed, pensioners, immigrants without papers). But there's more than one battle going on in Athens.

One is a battle between two factions of the ruling class over how to respond to the global capitalist crisis and the specific form that it has taken in Greece: a sovereign debt crisis, the specter of state bankruptcy, and the inability of the state to make its debt payments to bondholders (the big European banks). For the Socialist (PASOK) government, the necessary response is an austerity program that will satisfy the conditions set by the banks, by the European Central Bank (ECB), and the IMF, and that will permit new loans that will avert a default. For the "hard" left, the Stalinist KKE, the "radical left" (Syriza), and the unions, the necessary response is a rejection of the proposed austerity measures, a default on the debt, withdrawal from the euro zone, return to a Greek currency, and new parliamentary elections that will produce a government that will protect flag and nation. A new government of the KKE, Syriza, and the unions, a government that defaults on the state debt and sticks it to the big banks and bondholders, will not solve the present crisis or spare the working class the pain and misery of its own draconian austerity plan. So long as the capitalist state itself is not overthrown, so long as the commodity form and wage labor are not abolished, the capitalist law of value will impose its rules, its imperatives, and -- in the face of the present global crisis – its austerity measures and attack on the living standards of those who have only their labor power to sell. Like PASOK, the KKE or Syriza, were it to come to power would have to put the working class on rations. And such a government would impose its will on the working class with the same tear gas and stun grenades if the workers did not accept the need for patriotic sacrifice – not sacrifice for the IMF, for bondholders, but sacrifice for the Nation, for the motherland, for Greece.

That lesson is already drawn by many of the militants fighting in Syntagma square: their leaflets and their arguments against the left, the unions, and the leftists, have made that clear. And that is the second battle being waged in Athens. For those engaged in that battle, the abolition of capitalism, of the dictatorship of the economy, of the commodification of every facet of human life, has to be an integral part of the present struggle, not some distant goal, a stage that can be reached only at some future time. The only way for workers to defend their immediate existence, to claim their "bread" today, to be able to have any possibility of living a decent life, is to directly attack the whole system of production, of social relations based on the value-form and wage-labor. It is that perspective that pro-revolutionaries can provide within these struggles, in the assemblies that arise in the occupations of the public space within this second battle. That conception, with all of the complex issues that it raises, is the only way to begin to create a human community. And that entails clarity on the actual bases of capitalism, its laws of motion, and its underlying social relations. Communism should not be seen either as state ownership of the means of production, nationalization, or as worker's self-management of individual enterprises and units of production, both of which, in different ways, would perpetuate proletarian labor and the imperatives of the law of value, of capital accumulation. Nationalization or worker's self-management, "radical" though each appears, will be subject to the same crisis tendencies, the same exploitation of living labor and extraction of surplus value, as any other form of capitalist production. It is the signs of that second battle in Athens that here and now concretely represents a principle of revolutionary hope.

INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

Footnotes:

¹ Many of the citations on strike activity that follow in this article came from the indispensable website www.labourstart.org.

² Arundhati Roy, «Confronting Empire: Speech Given at the World Social Forum«, January 27, 2003 Porto Alegre, Brazil

³ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 London and New York: Penguin, 1991, pp.254-301. Marx makes clear that this process of the equalization or formation of a general rate of profit is a political process of concentration and of ruling class political unity: «…each individual capitalist, just like the totality of all capitalists in each particular sphere of production, participates in the exploitation of the entire working class by capital as a whole, and in the level of this exploitation not just in terms of a general class sympathy but in a direct economic sense« (p.298-9).

⁴ Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization, Vol. 2 The Wheels of Commerce New York: Harper and Row 1979 ; Vol. 3 The Perspective of the World London: Phoenix Press 1984.

⁵ Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, London and New York: Penguin, chapter 32, «The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,« p. 929; Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World op. cit. p.622, p.629 and passim.

⁶ «French Protesters Block Marseilles Airport« Associated Press Oct. 21, 2010; «French Leader Vows to Punish Violent Protesters« New York Times Oct. 22, 2010;

⁷ «Acropolis Closed, Riot Police Protecting Entrance« Associated Press Oct. 19, 2010;

⁸ «AENA is Ready to Fire Those Air Controllers Who Strike Tomorrow« Avio News Oct. 21, 2010

⁹ «Firefighters Vote for Strike Action« Tullamore Tribune Oct. 14, 201.

¹⁰ «UK Workplace News Roundup« from www.libcom.org Oct 21, 2010.

¹¹ Workers at Newsquest Hampshire Vote Overwhelmingly for Action« National Union of Journalists h://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1779.

¹² «Court Injunction Halts Tyrone Meat Plant Strike« BBC Oct. 21, 2010

¹³ «Public Sector Cuts Make Strikes Inevitable, Warn Unions« The Guardian Oct. 21, 2010

¹⁴ «1,000 dock yards workers march in protest in Romania requesting higher wages« The Associated Press (CP) – 23 October 2010

¹⁵ «Unions Threaten with General Strike« Croatian Times Oct. 22, 2010

¹⁶ «PSA Planning Massive Protest« Trinidad and Tobago’s Newsday Sept. 21, 2010; «Lecturers in Pay Protest at UWI« Trinidad Express Oct. 16, 2010; «Workers Also March in Tobago« Guardian (Trinidad and Tobago) Oct. 20, 2010; «UWI Increases Wage Offer to Staff« The Guardian (Trinidad and Tobago) Oct. 21, 2010.

¹⁷ «NIEPA Workers Protest Non-Payment of New Wage« NEXT (Nigeria) Oct. 21, 2010.

¹⁸ «Strike Jump Starts Year End Revision« Hawkes Bay Today (New Zealand) Oct. 21, 2010; «PNC in Solidarity with POTAG« The Accra Mail Oct. 21, 2010; «Italy: Strikes Delay Start of Academic Year« University World News Oct. 17, 2010.

¹⁹ «NWC Customers Warned to Brace for Problems from Threatened Strike« Jamaica Observer Oct. 20, 2010; «Unions to Government: Renegotiate IMF Agreement« Sunday Jamaica Observer Sept. 12, 2010.

²⁰ «Government Happy General Strike Called Off« Jamaica Observer Sept. 17, 2010.

²¹ «Kenya: Union Warns Tea Firms Not to Replace Striking Workers« Business Daily (Nairobi) Oct. 20, 2010; «Tea Plantation Workers Set to Strike« The Standard (Nairobi) Oct. 20, 2010; «80,000 Workers Strike Over New Technology« Reuters Oct. 18, 2010; «More Than Just a Gathering Storm in Kenya’s Tea Cup« The Standard (Nairobi) Oct. 18, 2010.

²² «Stay 200 Meters Away From Unitrans Premises« Times of Swaziland Oct. 21, 2010.

²³ «Striking Union Workers: DTCB Compromising Diamond Security« The Israeli Diamond Industry Diamond News Oct. 20, 2010.

²⁴ «Chinese Bosses Fire on Angry Zambian Miners« Daily Telegraph (Canada) Oct. 19, 2010.

²⁵ «Civil Servants in Protest March to Demand Higher Pay« SW Radio Africa News Sept. 17, 2010.

²⁶ «Benin Trade Unions Slam Government Over Ban on Protests« Africa News Oct. 13, 2010.

²⁷ «KCC Employees On Strike« Daily Monitor (Kampala) Sept. 21, 2010.

²⁸ «Labour Shelves Pay Raise Strike« Vanguard (Lagos) May 4, 2010;

²⁹ «Nigerian Oil Union Calls Strike at Exxon’s Local Unit« Bloomberg Oct. 12, 2010.

³⁰ «Union Intensifies Strike« Nigerian Observer Oct. 22, 2010; «Electricity Workers Threaten Indefinite Strike« AllAfrica.com Oct. 4, 2010; «Nigerian Oil Unions Threaten Strike over PIB Implementation« www.icem.org Oct. 4, 2010; «New Minimum Wage: Workers Threaten to Go On Strike Oct. 1« Nigerian Tribune Sept. 23, 2010.

³¹ «CTG Dock Workers Attack Private Berth Operators, 15 Hurt« The Daily Star (Dhaka) Oct. 13, 2010; «Bangladesh Deploys Army As Port Strike Hits Garment Exports« AFP Oct. 15, 2010; «Jute Export Hampered as Bailing Workers Continue Strike« The Daily Star (Dhaka) Oct. 21, 2010.

³² «Pilots Defy Warning, Begin Protest against Service Benefit Slash« Daily Star (Dhaka) Oct. 23, 2010

³³ «Sugar Workers Strike for Pay Hike« Stabroek News (Georgetown, Guyana) Oct. 19, 2010.

³⁴ «Foxconn’s Global Empire Reflects a New Breed of Sweatshop« In These Times Oct. 19, 2010; «Protesting Workers at Foxconn Arrested« Express News Service Sept. 25, 2010.

³⁵ «DHL Faces Worldwide Unrest« Transport and Logistics News Oct. 14, 2010;

³⁶ «World Action Day Tomorrow Backs Fired Turkish UPS Workers« International Transport Workers www.itf.global.org Aug. 21, 2010;

³⁷ «Chilean Public Employees on Strike« Latin American Herald Tribune (Caracas) Oct. 22, 2010; «Chile Collahuasi Union Set to Strike as Vote Near« Reuters Oct. 21, 2010.

³⁸ «ACT NOW! Solidarity Campaign – Labour Conflict in Chile« Building and Wood Workers International bwint.org Oct. 20, 2010.

³⁹ «Brazil Bank Workers Keep Strike After 6.5% Raise Offer. They Want 11%« Brazzil Magazine Oct. 20, 2010; «Bank Workers End 15-Day Strike« Wall Street Journal Oct. 14, 2010.

⁴⁰ «Unions Secure Record Wage Increases in Brazilian Auto Sector« International Metalworkers Federation www.imfmetal.org Sept. 22, 201.

⁴¹ «COSATU: Strike Over But Still No Deal« Mail and Guardian (Pretoria) Oct. 13, 2010;

⁴² «Argentina Protest Over Labour Activist Killing« BBC News Oct. 21, 2010; «Tension Mounts as Demonstrators March to Protest Death in Earlier Clashes, CTA Umbrella Union Calls for General Strike Today« Buenos Aires Herald Oct. 21, 2010; «Garbage Collection Returns to Normal After 3-Day Conflict« Buenos Aires Herald Oct. 20, 2010.

⁴³ «Workers at Vietnam Footwear Factory on Strike« http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/business/news/article_1593271.php/Workers-at-Vietnam-footwear-factory-on-strike Oct. 22, 2010

⁴⁴ «Police Alert Over Anti-G20 Rallies« Korean Herald Oct. 15, 2010.

⁴⁵ «Labourers Stage Protests Nationwide to Demand Better Salaries« Al Masry Al Youm Oct. 20, 2010; «Workers Protests Put Forcibly Down« Al Masry Al Youm Oct. 19, 2010.

⁴⁶ «Palestinian Authority Workers Still on Wages Strike at Sol-Or Factory« Jerusalem Post Oct. 21, 2010; «Public Health Risk as UNRWA Goes On Strike« Ma’an News Agency Oct. 21, 2010.

⁴⁷ «Workers in Governmental Universities and Colleges hold a sit-in in front of the Council of Ministers asking the PA to meet their demands« Democracy and Workers Rights Center Palestine www.dwrc.org Oct. 22, 2010

⁴⁸ «Demonstration in Belgrade Rejects European Austerity Plans« Building and Wood Workers International bwint.org Oct. 1, 2010; «Bulgarian Police Officers Start Protests« FOCUS News Agency Oct. 17, 2010; «Czech Unions May Go On Strike if Further Talks with Government Fail« Prague Monitor Sept. 17, 2010; «Protest Over Pay Cuts« Prague Post Sept. 22, 2010; «Meeting Between PM and Union Shows No Progress on Wage Issue« Prague Daily Monitor Oct. 1, 2010; «Romanian Finance Ministry Workers Protest Pay Cut« Reuters Oct. 14, 2010; «Romanian Teachers Strike Over IMF-Driven Pay Cuts« www.laboureducator.org April 24, 2010; «Poland: Trade Unions to Protest Wage Freeze« The News.PL Sept. 22, 2010; «Croatian Workers Protest Against Shipyard Sale Decided by Government as Part of Effort to Join EU« Canadian Press Sept. 22, 2010; «Vegrad Workers On Strike« Slovenian Press Agency Sept. 20, 2010;

⁴⁹ «Long Struggle Ends in Victory for Ukraine Belkozin Workers« International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers Associations www.iuf.org Oct. 15, 201.

⁵⁰ «Kazakh Oil Workers Strike over Activist Arrest« Radio Free Europe Oct. 23, 2010

⁵¹ BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union – Political Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring

June 13, 2009 Saturday «Expert analyses tendency of strikes, labour disputes in Russia«

⁵² «New Trade Union Association Created in Russia« Itar-Tass Sept. 20, 2010.

⁵³ Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt . of California Press 2007, p.5

⁵⁴ «Building Workers Block Traffic in Protest Over Wages« The National (Dubai) Oct. 22, 2010; «Capital’s Taxi Drivers Refuse to Sign New Contracts« The National (Dubai) May 13, 2010; «1,474 Labourers in Mass Salary Delay Protest« ArabianBusiness.com January 5, 2010.

⁵⁵ «Al Hamad Workers Strike in Bahrain« Constructionweekonline.com Nov. 16, 2009; «Hundreds of Oil Workers Protest in Bahrain« Business.Maktoob.com Feb. 12, 2010; «Bahrain Port Workers Call Off Protest« Business.Maktoob.com Nov. 9, 2009; «Strike Plan by Bahrain Company Workers« Trade Arabia.com Jan. 21, 2010; «DHL Trade Union in Bahrain Strike Talks« ArabianBusiness.com July 12, 2010;

⁵⁶ Sherwood Ross, «Union Busting in Iraq« Counterpunch.org Oct.19, 2010.

⁵⁷ As brilliantly demonstrated in the pioneering study, Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor and the Logistics Revolution Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2008.

⁵⁸ An argument I develop more fully in my forthcoming book, The Working Class and the Making of the Global Crisis. The last straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was not the strike wave of urban workers, but the failure of the global elite’s last gasp at avoiding the need to turn to a crisis to overcome worker resistance – namely the attempt to finish the Doha round of WTO talks on world trade, which instead capsized on resistance by emerging economies like China and India who in turn were reacting to the gigantic wave of revolt each has seen across the countryside of their national territories. In facing such revolt, agreeing to lift tariffs and subsidies and expose their largely subsistence farmers to the competition of global agribusiness would have been like pouring gasoline on a very large fire already barely kept under control.

⁵⁹ Haas originally referred to the increasingly European outlook and cooperation beyond the immediate issues at hand resulting from working with one’s government counterparts in the European Economic Community, Ernst Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces 1950-57 Stanford: Stanford University Press 1968. I have extended the meaning here to suggest a process of international, arguably global class formation.

⁶⁰ To give an idea how central to our times is this process, and how formative or transformative participation in such organizations and events, including Davos, can be be, consider the following passage from Nelson Mandela’s published diary extracts: «The decisive moment..was when I attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where I …met the major industrial leaders of the world…who made it a point to express their views very candidly on the question of nationalization, and I realized…that if we want investments we will have to review nationalization…we had to remove the fear of business that…their assets will be nationalized.« Nelson Mandela, Conversations with Myself London: MacMillan 2010 p. 381.

⁶¹ On the Arab revolts as anti-IMF, anti-neoliberal movements, see, among others, «Egypt takes a step back away from IMF ways« Inter Press Service, Feb. 20, 2011; Nomi Prins, «The Egyptian Uprising is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism« Alternet.org Feb. 4, 2011; On the Egyptian revolution as a working class movement and on its basis in the preceding strike movements, see, among many: Mohammad Fadel, «Labor and the Future of the Egyptian Revolution« Foreign Policy March 14, 2011; «Cairo unrest has its roots in actions of Mahallah’s workers« Los Angeles Times Feb. 8, 2011; «Labor unions boost Egypt’s protest« Al Jazeera Feb. 9, 2011.

⁶² «Public servants face pay cuts as IMF moves in« The Independent (Ireland) Nov.19, 2010

⁶³ «Unions to Gov’t: Renegotiate IMF Agreement« Jamaica Observer Sept.12, 2010

⁶⁴ «Croatia’s United Unions Threaten General Strike Dec. 10« Bloomberg Nov. 17, 2010

⁶⁵ «Romanian Finance Ministry Workers Protest Pay Cuts« Reuters Oct. 14, 2010

⁶⁶ «Privatization of Power Sector in Pakistan: Appeal for Solidarity with WAPDA Workers« (statement by Divisional Chairman & Zonal Secretary WAPDA Hydro Union) from website www.marxist.com Oct. 28, 2010

⁶⁷ «Unions Rally to Fight European Austerity Measures« tribunemagazine.co.uk Sept. 17, 2010

⁶⁸ «ILO Staff Protest Halts Board Meeting« Swiss Info www.swissinfo.ch. Nov. 10, 2010

⁶⁹ See for instance the call by the IMF for Ireland to reduce its minimum wage, which has no relation to budget cutting or debt whatever, as a part of the austerity program needed to obtain an EU-IMF loan: «EU Urges Feuding Ireland not to Delay Budget« Reuters November. 23, 2010.

⁷⁰ For instance the widespread acts of solidarity with the UPS workers’ struggle in Turkey, the recognition of the struggles of Greek workers as a predecessor to their own fight against austerity on the part of French unions, the aforementioned protest in Brussels by united European unions, the support of international unions for the strikes by Chittagong, Bangladesh dock workers, and the protests against the G20, among others that could be cited.

⁷¹ Karl Marx letter to Friedrich Bolte Nov. 23, 1871 in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence Moscow: Progress Publishers 1955 p. 269-70, also available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm.

⁷² Indeed, in commenting on what he identified as «the first definitive working-class political organization formed in Britain«, the London Corresponding Society, EP Thompson noted «the intermingling of economic and political themes – the ‘hardness of the times’ and Parliamentary Reform« as among the «features which help us to define…the nature of a ‘working-class organization.« EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class New York: Vintage 1966, p.21

⁷³ See Paul Krugman, «Graduates versus Oligarchs« New York Times Feb. 27, 2006.

⁷⁴ This is one form of what Silver calls «associational power« ranging from mere union organization and solidarity to such wider class movements based on common interests and causes and inspiration by struggles spreading more widely. Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers Movements and Globalization Since 1870 Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003, p.13.

⁷⁵ The best overall study of these remains John Walton and David Seddon, Free Markets and Food Riots Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford, UK: Blackwell 1994.

⁷⁶ Walton and Sedden, p.50.

⁷⁷ See the interesting analysis, especially regarding the World Social Forum in relation to the three Internationals in Samir Amin, The World We Wish to See New York: Monthly Review Press 2008; see also Midnight Notes, «One No, Many Yeses«

⁷⁸ Silver, op.cit., calls this «structural power«, p.13.

⁷⁹ «Five Suez Canal companies workers go on strike, no major disruptions witnessed yet« Ahram Online Feb. 8, 2011.

⁸⁰ Interestingly, of two important works that foresee a global revolutionary political crisis, Adam Webb, «The Calm Before the Storm? Revolutionary Pressures and Global Governance« in International Political Science Review, Vol. 27, No.1 (Jan.2006), pp.73-92, p.83, and Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as an Unifinished Revolution CambridgeUniversity Press Cambridge 2000, the more fully developed analysis, that of Shaw which develops an entire, plausible and intelligent alternative political framework for understanding globalization, does not tie his concept of global revolution to the struggles against Structural Adjustment or neoliberalism, let alone austerity and global governance, but rather to an extension of liberal globalist values. Webb, in noting that the majority of the world’s people do not believe that globalization has addressed their needs or improved their conditions, is closer to the mark here, but fails to see any structural power in the hands of the disaffected that might make the global revolution more than a utopian possibility. Webb thus relies on Iraq-like inter-state conflict and the spread of Political Islam to identify agents capable of carrying out the global revolt he presciently senses on the horizon.

⁸¹ For Shorter and Tilly, political crisis is «a prime factor in bringing a large number of men together for collective action« but «political crises do not ‘cause’ strike waves to happen.« Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France 1830-1968 London and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press 1974, p.104.

⁸² Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times London New York: Verso 1994; Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century London New York: Verso 2007.

⁸³ The most influential work on states of emergency is Giorgio Agamben State of Exception, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago 2005; for my critique of Agamben for neglecting class relations and failing to see the relationship between the imposition of neoliberal policies and states of emergency, see Steven Colatrella, Nothing Exceptional: Against Agamben Journal of Critical Education and Policy Studies 9 (1) March-April 2011; The most important work linking states of emergency to neoliberalism remains Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine London and New York: Penguin 2007.

⁸⁴ For the neoliberal nature of Qaddafi’s regime since the 1980s see Vijay Prashad, «The Libyan Labyrinth« Counterpunch Feb. 22, 2011 available at http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad02222011.html.

Wildcat 90, Summer 2011

그리스 투쟁, 자본주의 폐지로 향할 수 있는가?

그리스에서 온 편지 (News from the streets in Greece)

지난 주 그리스 전역에 걸쳐 매일같이 진행된 거대한 시위가 있었다. IMF 관리에 접어든지 1년가량 지나자 사람들은 진절머리를 내고 있다.

그리스의 모든 곳, 60여개 도시에서 매일 시위가 벌어지고 있다. 어제 아테네에서는 20만 명이 의회를 둘러싸고 정치인들에게 “강도들!!”이라고 외쳤다. 그들은 정치인을 상징하는 인형을 목매달기도했다. 계층, 나이를 막론하고 금속 식기류를 들고 나섰다.

지금의 운동은 “분노”라고 불리며, 웹사이트와 페이스북을 이용하여 소통하고 조직화를 진행하고 있다.

현재 요구사항은 직접민주주의, IMF 대출에 대한 상환 중지, 부패 정치인들의 구속, 헌법 개정, 그리고 정권 퇴진이다. 그리고 EU 탈퇴 및 그리스 자국 통화 체제인 드라크마로 복귀까지 주장하고 있다. 이들은 정부가 IMF 대출 상황을 중단하지 않을 경우 예금인출을 통해 은행시스템 자체를 마비시킬 것이라고 경고하고 있다. 예금자들이 집단적으로 은행예금을 인출하여 “뱅크런”을 일으키겠다는 구상이다. 실제 정부로 하여금 디폴트 선언, 혹은 은행 파산 둘 중에 무엇이든 간에 양단간 결정이 날 때까지 참가자들에게 매일 100-200유로를 계좌에서 인출하자는 제안이 있었다.

매일 밤 각 도시들마다 광장에서는 집회가 벌어지고, 사람들은 함께 모여 직접민주주의를 적용한 새로운 체제에 대해 이야기하고 있다. 이 사람들은 어떠한 정당도 원하지 않으며, 깃발이나 정당 상징하는 표시를 지닌 사람이 시위에 접근하려하거나 집회에 참가하려고 하면, 일체의 정치적 표식이나 소속 없이 참여하라며 그 사람들을 쫓아낸다.

지금까지 시위는 매우 평화롭다. 시위 과정에서 질서를 유지할 별도의 보안 그룹(사수대)이 형성됐다. 이로 인해 프락치가 숨어들거나 문제를 일으키는 것을 막을 수 있게 되었다. 일부는 의회 밖에서 진을 치고 있고, 보급팀, 법률지원팀, 의료지원팀 등등도 생겨났다.

지금까지 사람들이 어떻게 스스로를 조직하는지를 배워가고 있으며, 운동은 빛의 속도로 성장하고 있다. 어제만 하더라도 아테네 페이스북 접속이 9만이었는데 오늘은 11만을 넘고 있다.

사람들은 집단적으로 방송국들과 그 웹사이트들을 폐쇄하고 있다. 왜냐하면 방송이 현재의 폭발적인 상황을 보도하지 않고, 여론을 호도하기 때문이다.

어젯밤 정치인들은 보안요원들이 불을 비추는 동안 공원을 거쳐 의회 뒷문으로 도망쳐 나가야 했다. 왜냐하면 사람들이 정문을 봉쇄했기 때문이다. 약 20만 명이나 되는 사람들이 쏟아져 나와서 경찰들도 제지할 수가 없었다.

현재 우리를 가로막는 것은 없다. 모든 사람들이 변화에 대해 말하고 있다. 정치에 대해서 전혀 말하지 않던 사람들이 지금은 직접민주주의를 요구하며 뛰쳐나오고 있다. 정부는 깜짝 놀란 상태며, 무엇을 해야 할지도 모르고 있다. 총리는 최근 며칠간 전혀 나타나지 않은 채, 아무런 발표도 없는 상태다.

IMF와의 거래가 엄청난 스캔들이라는 것이 알려지고 있다. IMF와의 합의문에 대해 긍정적인 평가가 있어왔다. 그런데 지금 온라인에 공개된 상태에서 많은 헌법학자, 법률가들이 거리로 나서서 사람들에게 실제로 무엇이 일어났는지 알려나가려 한다. IMF와 정부는 우리에게 국제법이나 유럽 법에 비춰도 불법인 사항을 강요해왔다. 그들은 우리가 투표하러 가는 것도 허락하지 않고 있다. IMF 합의는 그리스 정부가 합의 파기 문제를 그리스 법원에서 다룰 수 없다고 규정하고 있으며, 그리스 정부가 자기 부채를 갚기 위해 부채를 채권으로 되파는 것도 할 수 없다고 규정하고 있다. 우리는 그리스 법원이 아니라 10-15개의 유럽 국가들이 채권국으로 있는 유럽 법정으로 가야하며, 거기서도 또 채권국 법원 각각에 위법성을 따져 물어야 한다. 채권국들은 반면에 부채를 다른 나라들에 마음대로 팔 수가 있다.

채권국들은 그리스의 모든 정당들이 IMF와 EU의 대출을 합법적이라고 인정하고, 서명까지 같이 하라고 요구했다. 만약에 그렇지 않을 경우 추가적인 지원이 없을 것이라고 압박했다. 이것이 바로 채권국들이 그리스인들의 투표권 허용을 거부하는 이유다. 그들이 어떻게 우리 스스로 우리나라의 대표를 뽑는 것을 막을 수 있는가? 물론 대출합의에 그렇게 쓰여 있다. 그러나 그것은 불법이며, 유럽이나 세계 법원 어디에도 그러한 조항을 인정하지 않을 것이다. 그럼에도 불구하고 우리의 멍청한 파산 정부는 속이 비었다.

우리의 체제의 의회주의 체제이다. 따라서 민주적인 대통령이 있다. 대통령은 기본적으로 의회에 있는 모든 정당들에 의해 선출된 사람이다. 그리고 현재 우리의 정치 체제 하에서 견제와 균형의 원리에 일조한다. 만약 대통력이 사임하면 우리 헌법과 마찬가지로 정부 역시 끝장난다. 지난주에 대통령은 그리스 의회와 정부에 의해 표결된 사항들에 대해 일절 서명을 거부했다. 우리는 대통령이 올바른 것을 행하고, 사임하기를 바란다. 대통령이 의회에서 통과된 합의나 법에 서명하지 않는다면, 그것은 효력을 발하지 않는다.

여러 가지 엄청난 일들이 벌어지고 있다. 사람들, 특히 젊은이들이 어떻게 능동화 되는가를 보면 놀랍다. 심지어 교회조차 – 비록 사람들로부터 동정과 인정을 얻기 위한 정치적 행동이겠지만 – 시위자들에 동조해 거리로 나오기 시작했다.

조만간 곧 새 소식을 전하겠다. 많은 일들이 일어나고 있고, 그런 일들을 상세히 설명하는 것은 시작조차 못하고 있다. 그리스와 똑같은 상황이 포르투칼에서도 지난 3주간 벌어지고 있고, 스페인에서는 2주전부터 진행되고 있다. 그리스는 이제 한 주가 지났을 뿐이다. 지금은 프랑스, 이탈리아, 영국, 그리고 다른 나라로도 확산되고 있다. 지난 일요일 유럽 전역의 수십 개의 도시에서 이런 일이 벌어졌다. 수백만 명의 사람들이 거리로 나오고 있고, 전 유럽 차원으로 조직되고 있다.

이번 일요일에 그리스 의회 밖에 그리스 전역에서 집결하는 대규모 시위가 있을 것이다. 아르헨티나처럼 정부가 헬기를 타고 빠져나오거나 도망가는 것을 지켜봐라.

정치적 방향성 : 자본주의 폐지를 향해

사회당 정부, 대형 은행, 그리고 IMF에 의해 강요된 긴축에 대항하여 분출하는 대중적 행동에 어느 누구인들 흥분하지 않겠는가? 하지만 이제 거리에서, 집회에서, 그리고 대중들의 “분노” 속에서 제대로 된 정치토론이 진행될 필요가 있다.  위의 편지는“지금 우리를 멈출 것은 없다. 모든 사람이 변혁을 말하고 있다”고 전했다. 하지만 정작 변혁의 실내용, 실체, 그리고 목표는 과연 무엇인가? 자본주의 폐지인가 아니면 “내각의 변화와 기존 정부의 퇴진”, 혹은 “자국 통화 드라크마로의 복귀”인가?

이 양자의 선택은 지금의 격변을 바라보는 전혀 상반된 정치적 관점의 표현이다. 후자의 선택은 비록 급진적인 것으로 보일지는 모르지만, 자본주의의 작동원리를 전혀 훼손하지 않은 채를 지금의 상태를 제자리로 돌려놓는 것이다(“선거 참여를 허용하지 않는다.”는 내용을 받아들이는 정도...). 또한 그 선택은 민족주의적 환상을 부치기는 것이다. 그리고 이 환상은 자본주의의 본질인 노동자 계급에 대한 공격을 방어하거나, 청년층에 특히 극심한 실업률 급증을 경감시키는 데 있어서도 아무런 역할을 못한다.

물론 지금의 격변은 매우 중요하다. 하지만 그 성과는 명확한 정치적 방향성에 따라 달라질 것이다. 그 정치적 방향성이 현재 이 운동에 절실한 상황이다.

직접민주주의를 넘어 자본주의 폐지로 !!!

<번역 : 사노위 해산선언자 모임 김병효>