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Our alternative : resist the capitalist regime!

As the government rains attack after attack on our living standards – whether through cuts in health, education, benefits and local services, through redundancies in both the private and public sector, through tuition fee increases or the abolition of EMA, or through the steadily rising price of basic necessities – the TUC has for months now been telling us to fix our gaze on the Big Demo on the 26^th March. The bosses of the trade unions have argued that a very large turn-out on the day will send a clear message to the Lib-Con government, which will start carrying out its spending review at the beginning of April, involving even more savage cuts than the ones we have seen already. It will show that more and more working and unemployed people, students and pensioners, in short, a growing part of the working class, are opposed to the government’s programme of cuts and are looking for an “alternative”.

And there’s no doubt that people are increasingly fed up with the argument that we have no choice but to submit to the blind laws of a crisis-torn economic system. No choice but to accept the tough medicine that the politicians assure us will, at some point in the future, make everything all right again. There’s also no doubt that a growing number of people are not content to sit at home and moan about it, but want to go out on the street, encounter others who feel the same way, and form themselves into a force that can make the powerful of the world take notice. This is what was so inspiring about the unruly student demonstrations and occupations in the UK at the end of last year; this is why the enormous revolts that are spreading throughout North Africa and the Middle East are such a hopeful sign.

But if these movements tell us anything, it’s that effective action, action that can actually force the ruling powers to back down and make concessions, doesn’t come about when people tamely follow the orders of professional ‘opposition’ leaders, whether people like El Baradei and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the TUC and the Labour Party in the UK. It comes about when people begin to act and think for themselves, on a massive scale – like the huge crowds who began to organise themselves in Tahrir Square, like the tens of thousands of Egyptian workers who spontaneously came out on strike to raise their own demands, like the students here who found new and inventive ways of countering police repression, like the school kids who joined the student movement without waiting for an endless round of union ballots…..

The TUC and the Labour Party, as well as the numerous ‘left wing’ groups who act as their scouts, are there to keep protest and rebellion inside limits that are acceptable to the status quo. The TUC didn’t say very much in the period from 1997 to 2010 while its Labour friends launched a vast array attacks on workers’ living standards, attacks that the present government is just continuing and accelerating. That’s because the social situation was different – there was less danger that people would resist. Now that this danger is growing, the ‘official’ opposition is stepping in with its expertise in controlling mass movements and keeping them respectable. The trade unions do this on a daily basis by handcuffing workers to the legal rigmarole of balloting and the avoidance of ‘secondary’ action. And now, with March 26, they are doing it on a national scale: one big march from A to B, and we can all go home. And during the march itself the TUC will be working directly with Scotland Yard to ensure that the day goes entirely to their jointly agreed plans.

True, some of the more radical trade unions and political groups call for more than a one-off march: they want the TUC to ‘coordinate strike action’, even call a ‘general strike’. But these approaches just reinforce the idea that the best we can hope for is to get the official opposition to act more effectively on our behalf, rather than organising and spreading the struggle ourselves.      

If there is to be a real opposition to the ruling class and its assault on our lives, it’s not going to be content with one big demo: it has to be part of a much wider movement of strikes, occupations, demonstrations and other actions, controlled directly through mass meetings and willing to defy laws aimed at rendering resistance passive and divided.

And when we are taking part in demonstrations, whether local rallies or big national marches, let’s use them to make links between different centres of resistance, different sectors of the working class. Let’s organise our own street meetings where instead of listening to celebrity speakers we can freely exchange experiences from our own struggles and prepare for the battles of the future. Let all those who stand for independent, self-organised workers’ struggles use them as an opportunity to meet up and decide on how to connect to wider numbers of their class.

And let’s also use such occasions to challenge not only the deadening methods advocated by the official opposition, but also the false perspective they offer us for the future. The TUC ‘alternative’ of ‘jobs, growth, justice’, for example, is completely misleading: this system is in an irreversible crisis and can’t guarantee anyone’s job; even if was possible without vast increases in state debt, capitalist growth can only be based on increasing workers’ exploitation and further despoiling the environment; and a society based on the exploitation of one class by another can never achieve justice. In sum: inside of capitalism, there is no ‘alternative’ except increasing austerity and barbarism. The only real alternative is to fight against this regime of capitalism and in doing so prepare the ground for a total transformation of society. 

WR 5/3/11

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Appeal for Korean Internationalists

사노련 재판에 앞서 열린 기자회견

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"나의 적(敵)의 적은  나의 친구이고, 나를 절실히 필요로 하는 친구가 정말 친구다" 라는 따위의 외교정책은 사회주의 외교정책이 할짓이 아니다. 사회주의를 참칭하는 차베스여!

a friend in need is a friend indeed…

David Broder’s thoughts on the cosy ruling-class ties being pulled apart by the Middle East uprising

Like many of the great revolutions in history, the current wave of democratic uprisings surprised all the intelligence experts and media pundits. Not only has the hated NUS chief Aaron Porter been displaced in a palace coup, but so too have dictators such as Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak.

This element of surprise in the Arab revolt has left many of the great and good caught with their pants down. If dictators are falling, it’s not the right ones, and the changed situation has left some cosy friendships rather exposed.

Neocons versus democracy

An article in today’s Times argued that the current democratic movement is a vindication of the ‘domino effect’ strategy for the war on Iraq (topple Saddam and other populations will struggle for democracy too): a view recently trailed in the Washington Post by Project For A New American Century ideologue Elliott Abrams.

Sadly this analysis has been rather undermined by the public statements on current events by the architects of the war, for example Tony Blair’s description of Hosni Mubarak (“Immensely courageous and a force for good”) or the views of Paul Wolfowitz (“It is wrong to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought to promote democracy… but once those regimes were removed we could not reimpose dictators”.)

Indeed, the currently-most-high-profile target of protest, Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, was until recently held up as the model of a ‘convert’ rogue state, a pariah brought in from the cold. His 2003 decision to scrap Libyan WMD was itself used as a justification for the war in Iraq, showing that Western pressure works. He became respectable again, meeting with leaders such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy. The now ‘anti-terrorist’ Gaddafi won further plaudits by building a string of detention centres along the country’s northern coast, the ‘front line’ of Fortress Europe’s battle to exclude ‘illegals’ migrating north across Africa. Last year’s release of Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi was no doubt in part a reward for Libya’s ‘good behaviour’.

The régime also sank roots in the UK establishment. My own university, London School of Economics, today announced the end of a programme in collaboration with the ‘Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation’, until now defended as “an NGO committed to the promotion of civil society and the development of democracy”. The university retracted this vile cant “in view of the highly distressing news from Libya over the weekend of 19-20 February”, as if this repression marked some sudden change of heart. Did these experts of political analysis not know of the 1996 prisoner massacre, which saw 1,000 deaths, or of Gaddafi’s personal attendance at his opponents’ executions? LSE went so far as to give the bloodsoaked dictator a platform: this lecture, by video link, took place just three months ago.

David Cameron has had to defend the UK’s record collaboration with the Libyan régime, to the point of selling it weapons. He advocates ‘peaceful reform’ only once the Arab crowd have already made a radical rupture a reality in the streets;  and elsewhere in the region blissful ignorance and arms trading can continue apace. They fear change more than they do the ‘calm’ of populations held in silence by terror. Still today the Saudi monarchy, the US’s most important Arab ally, goes unquestioned. Indeed, any other stance might somewhat torpedo Cameron’s current ‘trade mission’ around the Middle East, a whistle-stop tour of the region with former PM John Major in order to… sell weapons.

Formula 1

This morning at work I noticed a publication Computer Weekly, whose front page bore an image of protesting Egyptians and the headline ‘Will Egypt turmoil spark IT outsourcing crisis?’. Perhaps this glaring lack of perspective was connected with the fact that the magazine’s cellophane wrapper had as yet not been troubled by man or beast.

Recent debates over the fate of the planned Bahrain Grand Prix showed similar disregard for the gravity of events. Readers commenting on Formula 1 websites such as crash.net were split roughly half-and-half between those who advocated that the race be boycotted, and those who said it should be cancelled anyway because the track is “boring”.

Formula 1 ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone pointed to the hypocrisy of those who called for the motor racing circus to repudiate Bahrain only now that protests have broken out: “It seems as if people thought it was democratic a few weeks ago”. The implication was that at least he was standing by the dictator he had long supported, which hardly did him much credit.

The sport has strong commercial links with Gulf dictatorships, such as the Bahrain royal family’s part-ownership of the McLaren team (drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button were thus barred from commenting on the matter). Moreover, recent races in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi offered the spectacle of BBC journalists bowing and scraping before the desert kingdoms’ rulers – “thanks for putting on this lovely event”… never mind the brutal conditions of the pan-Asian migrant workforce who labour to build the tracks.

Many F1 personalities insisted on the need to “stay out of politics”, even though the desire to suppress protest before the race, a monument to the régime’s vanity, certainly did weigh on the Crown Prince’s mind. In fact, far from being apolitical, the sport has a long track record of association with far-right régimes: in the 1930s it was heavily based on Italy and Germany. Moreover, not only was the previous head of the motor racing governing body Max Mosley – son of blackshirt leader Oswald – but his predecessor Jean-Marie Balestre was a member of the Waffen SS.

Hugo Chávez

The Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA is a rather odd addition to the ranks of Formula 1 sponsors, although Hugo Chávez has been keen to champion a new driver from the country, Pastor Maldonado. This move is somewhat surprising given that in 2009 on live TV Chávez ordered troops to occupy two golf courses, on the basis that the gentle pastime is “a bourgeois sport”.

But unlike the Grand Prix set, who have now abandoned the Bahrain race, Chávez is no mere fair-weather friend of Arab tyrants. The International of authoritarians sitting on lakes of oil is closer-knit than that.

Of course, as yet we do not know if William Hague’s claim that Colonel Gaddafi has fled to Venezuela is true. But what do we know? First and foremost, that Chávez has repeatedly and unequivocally voiced support for authoritarian and far-right régimes, and that Gaddafi stands prominently among these.

In September 2009 Gaddafi visited Chávez in Caracas (at the same time as Robert Mugabe) and signed a series of bilateral military and trade accords. Chávez presented Gaddafi with a sword supposedly used by Latin American independence leader Simon Bolivar, and sealed a pact establishing Libya as his primary ally in the Middle East. The Venezuelan ambassador in Tripoli justified this alliance: “Libya is the gateway to Africa for us because it is a country well-known for its socialist policies that plays an important and strategic role for us.”

Perhaps all this was just an opportunist show of defiance: a finger in the eye of the United States. Maybe it was a gaffe. But if he offers refuge to the Libyan dictator as he is chased out by the just wrath of the people, then Chávez will show himself to be worse even than just a confused anti-imperialist, but as providing sanctuary for one of the world’s most reviled tyrants. ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ plus ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’ does not a socialist foreign policy make.

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On Egypt (3)

Three comments / excerpts from internet discussion lists.

…I would add …that the other “battle” within the ruling class in Egypt, within the army, that is now playing out, over the fate of Mubarak (and whether he should be removed immediately or not) also needs to become the subject of Marxist analysis of the events. Even if the army decided to support the “people” and remove Mubarak now, so long as it retains control as an institution, so long as it constitutes a “caretaker” government until elections can be “organized” (which seems to be the choice of the Obama administration), the mass movement will be neutralized by capital, and the time gained will be used to negate it. Only a movement that explicitly raises class demands can begin to avert that fate.

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…Yes, revolutionaries in Egypt must be on the street … but what’s really needed is analysis, not just “pride” — the kind of analysis that Marx made of the class struggles in France in 1848, an analysis of the actual political and class forces in motion, but one relevant to Egypt in 2011. When several days ago the Egyptian army rolled into the streets around Tahrir Square, most of the protester there, including the representatives of organized political groups, greeted them as allies. As a conscript army, its ranks filled with the sons of workers and the poor, the prospects for appealing to them is real. But the army is also the officer corps, the very socio-political force from which Mubarak (like Nasser and Sadat before him came), the veritable lynchpin of the capitalist class in Egypt since 1953. Marxist analysis can make clear that as a political force the army (not the rank and file soldiers) is the enemy of the mass movement, of the working class, and the behavior of the army today, permitting the government thugs to attack Tahrir Square, standing down as hundreds of protesters were assaulted, and several killed, is the outcome. The only question was whether the army would deliver the coup de grace to Mubarak in the interests of preserving its own power or choose to crack down on the protesters: we may be seeing the answer to that question now. As to the political organizations which seek a democratic Egypt, the immediate removal of Mubarak, the suppport of the Obama administration, and elections, none of them, not ElBaradei, not the “New Wafd,” are in a position to mobilize the mass of the population in a free election. Indeed, at the risk of historical analogies they seem to be latter day Miliukov’s and Kerensky’s. Far more likely to emerge in a powerful, perhaps leading position, as a result of free elections is the Muslim Brotherhood, which does have a real powerful base. Perhaps Washington can live with such a regime (after all the Brotherhood is now “moderate”), but can women, Copts, Marxists, workers? That’s not the concern of Obama, but it is the concern of socialists, which is why analysis and not just being in Tahrir Square is what’s needed.

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Though old formulas may no longer work, worker’s councils, soviets (neighborhood and work place), elected and revocable, are still the place to begin. By contrast, the democratic regimes that replaced the Stalinist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 legitimated capitalist social relations, preserved the value form (wage labor, commodity production, etc.) and reduced the working class (and the mass of the population) to passive spectators of political processess managed by professionals in the service of capital accumulation and power politics. Is Poland, Hungary, or Romania, post-1989 the model for Tunisia or Egypt? That is where the call for democracy and free elections will lead even if successfful, and not simply a prelude to military rule or religio-ethnic xenophobia. Revolutionaries have something other to propose in an historical epoch where democracy in the best of cases is the political framework to manage austerity and the planet of slums that is all capitalism can produce today.

Mac Intosh

On Egypt (4)

I think the army was for a time watching, unsure and divided on what course to take, as was Washington. It probably would have preferred a restoration of fear and gave Mubarak ample chance to try to accomplish it. But when in Suez, Cairo and elsewhere workers went on strike, it became clear that intimidation had failed. Mubarak had to go. The hope was that this would defuse the situation. I expected that it would indeed do so, at least for a while, but that was a mistake, reflecting an underestimation of the combativity of the workers in Egypt. I could have known though, given the intensity of class struggles in Egypt in recent years. It is a very hopeful sign that those strikes continue and even spread, it shows the workers realize the limits of the symbolic victory that the departure of Mubarak means. That they want ‘independent unions’ as means to give their solidarity an organized expression beyond the present struggle, is to be expected. That these ‘independent’ unions will become a voice of capital like their colleagues in the more developed countries is also inevitable. The intervention of pro-revolutionaries should perhabs focus less on the form –they should always advocate forms that express the collective ‘ownership’ of the struggle but they can do so only when there really is a collective struggle- and more on the content: the refutation of protectionism, nationalization, anti-imperialism and other ‘solutions’ which the unions and others advocate on the base of the illusion that these will improve the lives of the working population. Promoting these goals serves to obscure the sense of the struggle, which is pointing towards global solidarity, towards producing for needs instead of for profit, towards ending the dictatorship of the value-form over human life.

The Egyptian proletariat has advanced us all in this direction. As Raoul V observes in a recent text on the francophone side of this discussion-list, the international reverberation of its struggle is so great that the (“communist”) authorities of the People’s Republic of China deemed it necessary to censure all internet searches containing the word “Egypt”. As Raoul writes, the working class in Egypt has to wage a struggle on three levels: maintaining the freedom of speech and action conquered in the streets, snatching some improvements in their living and working conditions, and not letting themselves being hoodwinked and marshalled by ‘democratic’, ‘patriottic’, religious, syndicalist forces undertaking the task of massaging society back to normality. That is our fight too.

Sander

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Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt: The best solidarity is class struggle

The thunder in Tunisia and Egypt is being echoed in Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen. Whatever flags the demonstrators carry, all these protests have their root in the world wide crisis of capitalism and its direct consequences: unemployment, rising prices, austerity, and the repression and corruption of the governments who preside over these brutal attacks on living standards. In short, they have the same origins as the revolt of Greek youth against police repression in 2008, the struggle against pension ‘reforms’ in France, the student rebellions in Italy and Britain, and workers’ strikes from Bangladesh to China and from Spain to the USA.

The determination, courage and sense of solidarity being displayed in the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Alexandria and many other cities are a true inspiration. The masses occupying Tahrir Square in Cairo or similar public places have fed themselves, fought off attacks by pro-regime thugs and the police, called the soldiers to fraternise with them, nursed their wounded, openly rejected sectarian divisions between Muslim and Christian, between the religious and the secular. In the neighbourhoods they have formed committees to protect their homes from looters manipulated by the police. Tens of thousands have effectively been on strike for days and even weeks in order to swell the ranks of the demonstrations.

Faced with this spectre of massive revolt, with the nightmare prospect of its extension across the ‘Arab world’ and even beyond, the ruling class all over the world has been responding with its two trustiest weapons: repression and mystification. In Tunisia, scores were gunned down in the streets, but now the ruling class proclaims the beginning of a transition to democracy; in Egypt, the Mubarak regime alternates between beating, shooting, gassing and running down protestors and issuing similar vague promises. In Gaza, Hamas arrests demonstrators trying to show solidarity with the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt; on the West Bank the PLO has banned “unlicensed gatherings” called to support the uprisings; and in Iraq protests against unemployment and shortages are fired on by the regime installed by the US and British ‘liberators’. In Algeria, after stifling the first signs of revolt, concessions are made legalising timid forms of protest; in Jordan the King sacks his government.

Internationally, the capitalist class also alternates its language: some – especially those on the right, and of course the rulers of Israel – openly support Mubarak’s regime as the only bulwark against an Islamist takeover. But the key note is given by Obama: after some initial hesitations, the message is that Mubarak must go and go quickly. The ‘transition to democracy’ is put forward as the only way forward for the downtrodden masses of North Africa and the Middle East.

The dangers facing the movement

The mass movement centred in Egypt thus faces two dangers. One is that the spirit of revolt will be drowned in blood. It seems that the initial attempts by the Mubarak regime to save itself with the iron fist have been stymied: first the police had to withdraw from the streets in the face of the massive demonstrations, and the unleashing of the pro-Mubarak thugs last week has also failed to sap the demonstrators’ will to continue. In both rounds of confrontation, the army has presented itself as a ‘neutral’ force, even as being on the side of the anti-Mubarak gatherings and protecting them from assaults by the regime’s defenders. There is no doubt that many of the soldiers sympathise with the protests and would not be willing to fire on the masses in the streets; some have already deserted. Higher up in the army, there are certainly factions that want Mubarak to go now. But the army of the capitalist state is not a neutral force. Its ‘protection’ of Tahrir Square is a also a form of containment, a huge kettle; and when push comes to shove, the army will indeed be used against the exploited population, unless the latter succeeds in winning over the rank and file soldiers and effectively dissolving the army as an organised part of the state power.  

But here we come to the second great danger facing the movement: the danger that resides in its widespread illusions in democracy. The belief that the state can, perhaps after a few reforms, be made to serve the people; the belief that ‘all Egyptians’, perhaps with the exception of a few corrupt individuals, have the same basic interests. The belief in the neutrality of the army. The belief that the terrible poverty facing the majority of the population can be overcome if there is a functioning parliament and an end to the arbitrary rule of a Ben Ali or a Mubarak.  

These illusions, expressed everyday by the demonstrators’ own words and banners, disarm the real movement for emancipation, which can only advance as a movement of the working class fighting for its own interests, which are distinct from those of other social strata, and which are above all diametrically opposed to the interest of the bourgeoisie and all its parties and factions. The innumerable expressions of solidarity and self-organisation that we have seen so far already reflect the genuinely proletarian element in the current social revolts; and, as many of the protestors have already said, they presage a new and more human society. But this new and better society cannot be brought about through parliamentary elections, through putting el Baradei or the Muslim Brotherhood or any other bourgeois faction at the head of the state. These factions, who may be carried to power by the strength of the masses’ illusions, will not hesitate to use repression against these same masses later on.

There is much talk about ‘revolution’ in Tunisia and Egypt, both from the mainstream media and the extreme left. But the only revolution that makes sense today is the proletarian revolution, because we are living in an era in which capitalism, democratic or dictatorial, quite plainly can offer nothing to humanity. Such a revolution can only succeed on an international scale, breaking through all national borders and overthrowing all nation states. Today’s class struggles and mass revolts are certainly stepping stones on the way to such a revolution, but they face all kinds of obstacles on the road; and to reach the goal of revolution, profound changes in the political organisation and consciousness of millions of people have yet to take place.

In a way, the situation in Egypt today is a summation of the historic situation facing humanity as a whole. Capitalism is in terminal decline. The ruling class can offer no perspective for the future of the planet; but the exploited class is not yet aware of its own power, its own perspectives, its own programme for the transformation of society. The ultimate danger is that this temporary stalemate will end in “the mutual ruin of the contending classes”, as the Communist Manifesto put it – in a plunge into chaos and destruction. But the working class, the proletariat, will only discover its real power through engaging in real struggles, and this is why what is now taking place in North Africa and the Middle East is, for all the weaknesses and illusions that hamper it, a real beacon for workers everywhere.

And above all it is a call to the proletarians of the more developed countries, who are also beginning to return to the road of resistance, to take the next step, to express their practical solidarity with the masses of the ‘third world’ by escalating their own combat against austerity and impoverishment, and in doing so exposing all the lies about capitalist freedom and democracy, of which they have a long and bitter experience. 

WR, 5/2/11         

on egypt, and revolution

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The Maghreb, What Movements For Which Perspectives?

The deepening of the world economic crisis, since 2008, has caused a significant degradation of living and working conditions in the “poor” countries and frontal attacks through austerity plans, the increase in unemployment, and the revocation of many [long standing] “social gains” in the “rich” countries.

Class reactions have multiplied throughout the world, there are strikes, riots with violent confrontations with the forces of repression, demonstrations…

What is significant in the current movements is the mobilization of youth. Greek youth have been the cutting edge of contestation since 2008 but in their wake, French and English students and, now, Tunisian, Algerian and Egyptian are the motivating force of the movements. But these young people, in Tunisia, in Egypt seem to have forged a link to other demands. They have been set in motion

The movements unfolding in the Maghreb must be situated in this context of a major aggravation of the world economic crisis and its repercussions on the proletariat, working or unemployed. They express a revolt against the price increase, but also, and this is fundamental, against the complete absence of any perspective represented by the capitalist system. This absence of any perspective manifests itself more and more strongly and affects the whole planet.

These movement are important in other ways too: they constitute an experiment in collective struggle, in the capacity to oppose, the capacity to say “No”, to reject the established order. These experiences, combined with the questioning about [the lack of any perspective, will not fail to have an important impact on the future development of the political consciousness of the proletariat.

The risk exists that the current demands in Tunisia and Egypt will be swallowed up by the illusion that a change of President or of the government will give work to the young people, will fill the shopping baskets of the housewife, and will allow freedom of expression and of organization.

Remember that the transformation of Latin America dictatorships and the so-called “communist” regimes into more modern, “democratic,” political systems, corresponded to a change into regimes better adapted to the present needs of the accumulation of capital, and the need for a democratic control of the working class. But, if these political adaptations allowed a better exploitation of natural resources and some industrial development, they only very partially masked the overturning of existing health care, housing, educational, systems, and the creation of an even wider gap between a newly enriched class and an increasing mass of the poor consigned to unemployment, to poverty, to drugs, and to the violence of the shantytowns and the street.

Thus, the movements of revolt agitating Tunisia and Egypt express at the same time the refusal of the poverty generated by the capitalist mode of production, the search for new perspectives, but also the hopes invested in a change [in the mode] of political management. They reflect the difficulty, for the world proletariat, to envision a new society and thus to break with the economic, social, and political functioning of capitalism.

It is now clear that life in this system, under whatever form it takes, can only produce more poverty, wars, destruction of the environment, and, at the end of the day, a major degradation in the conditions of existence of human beings.

Only putting into question the very bases of this society on a world scale can open up a revolutionary perspective for the creation of a society offering radically different perspectives.

Internationalist Perspective

On Egypt (1)

IP is publishing articles and comments on the events in Egypt. This piece originally appeared on the Internationalist Discussion List.

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Greetings all

I assume most people on this list have been following the recent events in Egypt with interest. There are many sites on the internet which provide detailed factual accounts of what has transpired there since January 25. I have wondered, however, about the question of how (pro-)revolutionaries are analyzing the developing situation there, and what they/we would have to say to the working class in Egypt were they/we there. There are some who are saying that this is all just bourgeois politics, a movement to change the government/regime, to find a less corrupt one, maybe, at most, to bring about a representative democratic system of government with associated legal civil rights, on the model of the sorts of movements that took place around Eastern Europe 20 years ago following the collapse of the ‘Iron Curtain’. I am assuming that many here don’t share that perspective, and see that there is more going in Egypt than that.

The movement seems to be focused so far on one key demand: Mubarak (and his National Democratic Party regime) out! All of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Egyptians involved in this movement agree on this. These people are convinced that Mubarak and his regime are responsible for their plight. There is a common feeling that this plight is unacceptable, and they are demanding “No more!” When a regime is as totalitarian as Mubarak’s has been, it becomes the obvious focus for all who are dissatisfied with their situation, their socio-economic conditions. It becomes attractive to believe that if only the dictator and his regime were gone, things would be so much better. Of course, many people know better, since the world has seen many such dictators thrown out, only to give way to either another equally “bad” dictator/regime, or perhaps a slightly “less bad” regime, but general socio-economic conditions remaining the same as before or even worsening, specifically for the working class, depending on the overall state of the economic crisis.

The willingness and determination of masses of people (and I am assuming that at least a large minority of these people are working class) to stand up to a dictatorial regime and say “Enough! Get out!” surely must be inspiring for (pro-)revolutionaries everywhere. And the fact that they have accomplished this and held their ground for as long as they have, determined to continue until Mubarak is gone, is already a kind of victory, in that it is a major step forward from passive acquiescence. But of course, we know that for the working class to fight for their interests they need to go much further than just getting rid of Mubarak and his regime. So the question is: what else to do?

It would seem that there is a fledgling ‘independent trade union federation’ which has arisen from the various strikes and workers’ struggles since 2007 in Egypt (e.g. in Mahalla), and it has issued a call-out for a ‘general strike’ as part of this movement. Since it is new and thus far not recognized and legalized by the government, it may offer workers more room for autonomous activity than typically established trade unions do.

“Today [Jan. 30], representatives of the of the Egyptian labor movement, made up of the independent Egyptian trade unions of workers in real estate tax collection, the retirees, the technical health professionals and representatives of the important industrial areas in Egypt: Helwan, Mahalla al-Kubra, the tenth of Ramadan city, Sadat City and workers from the various industrial and economic sectors such as: garment & textiles, metals industry, pharmaceuticals, chemical industry, government employees, iron and steel, automotive, etc… And they agreed to hold a press conference at 3:30pm this afternoon in Tahrir Square next to Omar Effendi Company store in downtown Cairo to announce the organization of the new Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions and to announce the formation of committees in all factories and enterprises to protect, defend them and to set a date for a general strike.”

As far as I can tell, a date has not yet been set for the proposed general strike

On the other hand, this federation has apparently already gained the support of the AFL-CIO and the ITUC, so perhaps there will be no more room within it for autonomous workers’ activity than within established legally recognized unions.

The following brief sketch of the situation in Egypt was written on January 31, before the attacks by the “pro-Mubarak” thugs, who seem mostly to be non-uniformed police. I am assuming that people here are reasonably well informed of the “main” events since then.

People should feel free to discuss not just the question of what to do, but also to offer analyses of the balance of forces involved in the situation in Egypt now, both class forces and those of various factions within the Egyptian ruling class, especially within the military, dominant as it is.

This text offers some analysis of the different factions within the Egyptian ruling class, including within the military.

***************O***************

Now (or recently) in Egypt we have a situation of an uprising initiated by some young (well-educated) unemployed workers which has spread into a general cross-section of the population (i.e. all classes and strata except the ruling class), the principal basic demand of which is the ouster of Mubarak and his regime. The buildings of Mubarak’s NDP party have been torched in various cities. The police initially confronted the uprising, in some cases with lethal violence, and in others with less than lethal force. After 4-5 (?) days, many police forces were defeated or else withdrew on command from their various stations and sites. The army came into the key public areas prior to the defeat/withdrawal of the police. Prisoners (thousands, perhaps many such) were either released or not prevented from ‘escaping’. It has been widely reported (via blogs) that quite a lot of looting, especially of people’s homes, has been occuring and that many of those involved have been police/ex-police, (ex-) prisoners, and other criminals/gangsters. In various neighbouhoods (wealthy, ‘middle class’, and working class), the residents have organized themselves into what some have called “neighbourhood watch” committees.

Mubarak has sacked his cabinet and appointed a new VP and PM. The uprising has overwhelmingly rejected this ‘olive branch’ as unacceptable and is increasingly strongly demanding that Mubarak step down immediately. The army seems to be the key factor in this situation, the dominant player; and so far it has shown itself as prepared to act if (it decides it is) ‘necessary’, but thus far refusing to take sides. Some of the insurgents have taken the army’s refusal to (thus far) intervene with force as implicit support for the uprising and its demands.

So, in this situation, if we, as organized communists were to find ourselves there, what would we be saying ‘should be done’? It seems to me that the uprising has created an opening, a space, perhaps even a ‘vacuum’, as a result of the absence of the police. The police in some form or other — there were some reports of widespread ‘desertion’ by police to the side of the insurgents — will return, but likely not with the same authority they had before their defeat. By themselves they won’t be able to command the same degree of fear and intimidation as they could prior to the start of the uprising.

As I said, residents in various neighbourhoods have organized themselves for the purposes of defense and security of their residential property. Even if the army retains its position of holding supreme power in Egypt, it seems that the power of the state there has temporarily receded and that there is now or will be (soon?) space for workers to begin organizing themselves, both within their workplaces and within their residential neighbourhoods. Thus, I wonder if communists there should at this time be calling for workers — and all of the working class, including the unemployed, students, youth, retireds, ‘housewives’ — to organize themselves wherever they are, at work, where they live, in their schools and universities and colleges, in the ‘community’: organize into autonomous assemblies to discuss and decide what needs to be done, and which direction to move the uprising into.

Of course, I realize that this way of putting things is somewhat problematic, since if we were there, we would know a lot more specifics about the situation than we do not being there, we would be placed in concrete context, while the way I have posed it here is rather abstracted from that context. Perhaps there is already such organization going on. Perhaps other kinds of organizing has happened. Still, while we don’t know about any of that, we can at least consider what we think the best course of activity for organized communists there to be based on what we do know.

On Egypt (2)

Yes, communists should “be calling for workers — and all of the working class, including the unemployed, students, youth, retireds, ‘housewives’ — to organize themselves wherever they are, at work, where they live, in their schools and universities and colleges, in the ‘community’: organize into autonomous assemblies to discuss and decide what needs to be done, and which direction to move the uprising into” – but what direction should they point to? Self-organization doesn’t occur for the sake of itself but to obtain a goal. Right now, the overriding goal is the removal of Mubarak. Hated as he may be by the workers of Egypt, this is no specific working class demand, so this goal does not require from the workers that they organize themselves autonomously. There may be some autonomous organisation going on, like for the defense of working class neighborhoods and the apprioriation of use values but we have almost no information on that. If somebody does, please let us know where we can find it.

I think what communists should say in Egypt and elsewhere is that, despite its symbolic importance, the departure of Mubarak will solve nothing for the working class, that the horrible conditions that pushed them to this fight will continue to worsen, that the fight against them must continue and deepen.

The inhumane conditions of the working class (in the wide sense we must give to this term), aggravated by the crisis, were clearly the starting point of the uprising in Tunesia and the riots in neighboring Algeria. They had a clear working class content. This struggle to survive was subdued (for now) after the army ousted the hated dictator and allowed some democratic reforms. But that was not a victory for the working class. Certainly, the new regime will be careful in its dealings with the working population and that will allow the latter some more breathing room, but the conditions which sparked the revolt, the poverty, unemployment and corruption will not improve, quite the contrary. The real victory in Tunesia was the overcoming of fear, the experience of collective struggle which will not be forgotten.

The struggle in Egypt was different in that it, from the very beginning, not only expressed the refusal of the working class to accept its conditions but also a desire of a large part of the capitalist class in Egypt for regime-change. Theirs is a struggle over how to manage the country, in other words, how to manage the exploitation. A decisive part of Egypt’s capitalist class wants a more modern, more flexible management and is using the revolt of the working class to make itself indispensable for the restauration of order, and is opportunistically supported by the Islamo-fascists who have their own power dreams. With the support of the media they try to reduce the events to just that, a question of personnel change. They make of the departure of Mubarak the fetish of the movement: once accomplished, everything will become magically ok and we’ll all go back home, back to the factories and offices, then the cleanup crews will come and everything will be normal again.

Most likely they will win and Mubarak will have to go. It’s clear that his continuation at the helm is against the interests of the capitalist class in Egypt and elsewhere. That he hasn’t gone already can only be because the army, the backbone of the state, hasn’t told him yet. Why not? One possible explanation is that it might not want the movement to end on a note of triumph and self-confidence. If the real victory for the working class in Tunis and Cairo is the experience of having overcome fear and isolation in confronting the state, the deciders have maybe decided to weaken that memory with new fear and dispersment. Maybe that is why they let the thugs attack the demonstrators. Maybe they want to see the protests weaken first before they save the day by ousting Mubarak, for the sake of future discipline.

I admit that this is speculative. All this is complicated by the fact that the removal of a dictator with such an extensive network of patronage is no easy matter. But it has been done before and it will happen in Egypt too and this will most likely end the revolt for now.

This will not be a surprise. What we’re seeing in Egypt is not a revolution, but the appearance of cracks in the solid capitalist façade, cracks that are being glued with democracy but that will nevertheless widen and multiply, as capitalism’s crisis deepens. The reason why the fetishization of the departure of Mubarak is so successful is not just the weight of ideology on the working class. There is not a crystal clear working class consciousness beneath that weight. If the working class would be convinced of its own power and its goal, it would not look for support outside of it, to the army, to Islam, to democracy. It looks to them because it feels weak, atomized. Certainly, the revolts in the Maghreb-countries, in which proletarians massively overcame their fear of confronting capital ans its state, and overcame their feeling of impotence in collective struggle, are an important, even historic step in a revolutionary direction. But communists have to be clear that the democratic adjustments to the management of capital in these countries are no more than a reshuffling of the furniture on the Titanic. The new leaders are our enemies just as much as the old ones, the struggle against exploitation continues.

Sander

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Egypt: Labor and professional syndicates join popular uprising

 

These protests are said to be linked to the broader uprising against President Hosni Mubarak's regime which has concentrated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Protests re-deployed around the nation at a time when proponents of the uprising spoke of the importance of spreading it beyond the square’s territorial limits.

One face of protests on Tuesday was state media organization protests. Around a kilometer away from Tahrir Square, some 500 employees protested outside the headquarters of the state-owned Rose al-Youssef newspaper and magazine. Protesters denounced the operational and editorial policies of their editor-in-chief Abdallah Kamal and administrative chief Karam Gaber, both of whom have waged pro-regime and anti-uprising coverage.

Another protest involving around 200 journalists was staged outside the Journalists' Syndicate in downtown Cairo, where protesters demanded the recall of the syndicate's president Makram Mohamed Ahmed, a member of the ruling National Democratic Party and vehement advocate of Mubarak.

Meanwhile at the headquarters of state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper, Egypt's largest daily, around 500 print-shop employees protested demanding full-time contracts, benefits and bonuses. They continued their protest on Wednesday.

Employee protests also spread around the country. An estimated 5000 employees of the state-owned telecommunications giant, Telecom Egypt, staged protest stands in three different locations across the city--the Smart Village, Ramses Square, and Opera Square. Shady Malek, an engineer with the company said, "We protested today for the establishment of an adequate minimum wage and maximum wage for our company's employees and administrators."

Having concluded his protest stand in Ramses Square, Malek headed out to Tahrir Square to join the mass rally there. "Corruption is part and parcel of our company's administration," he said. "We have not raised any political demands at our workplaces, but the popular uprising has assisted many employees to overcome our fears."

"The employees at Telecom Egypt have also decided to protest in light of the [new' prime minister's announcement about the 15 percent pay raises. At this same time our administration has ordered that our bonuses and incentive pay be slashed. This is what angered us the most," he added.

Meanwhile, more than 6000 protesters belonging to the Suez Canal Authority also staged sit-ins on Tuesday in the cities of Port Said, Ismailia and suez, demanding salary adjustments. Suez Canal revenues are considered one of the top sources of income in the country.

Besides employees, laborers also pursued protests today. Over 100 workers at the state-owned Kafr al-Dawwar Silk Company and over 500 at the state-owned Kafr al-Dawwar Textile Company protested, before and after their work shifts, to demand overdue bonuses and food compensation payments.

Approximately 4000 workers from the Coke Coal and Basic Chemicals company in Helwan--home to several Egyptian industries-- announced a strike today, said sources from trade unions and syndicates.

The protesters called for higher salaries, permanent contracts for temporary workers, the payment of the export bonus and an end to corruption. They also expressed solidarity with protesters in downtown Cairo.

Around 2000 workers from Helwan Silk Factory also staged a protest at the company headquarters to call for the removal of the board of directors.

In the Nile Delta City of Mahalla, some 1500 workers at the private-sector Abul Sebae Textile Company protested to demand their overdue wages and bonuses on Tuesday morning. These workers are also said to have blocked-off a highway. While in the Nile Delta Town of Quesna, some 2000 workers and employees of the Sigma Pharmaceuticals company went on strike Tuesday morning, and the strike there continued Wednesday. These pharmaceutical workers are demanding improved wages, promotions, and the recall of a number of their company's administrative chiefs.

Also in Mahalla, Gharbiya, hundreds of workers from the Mahalla spinning company organized an open-ended sit-in in front of the company's administrative office to call for the delivery of overdue promotions.

The workers said all the company workers joined in the protest after the end of their shift to call for the dismissal of the board after the company suffered heavy losses since that board took charge even though the state has paid the company's debts.

More than 1500 workers at Kafr al-Zayyat hospital, also in Gharbiya, staged a sit-in inside their hospital to call for the payment of their overdue bonuses. The nursing staff started the sit-in and were joined by the physicians and the rest of the workers at the hospital.

Around 350 workers from the Egyptian Cement Company--whose factory is located along the Qattamiya-Ain al-Sokhna Highway--staged protest stands at their factory and outside their company's headquarters in Qattamiya on Tuesday.

According to Ibrahim Abdel Latif, they were "demanding the establishment of a trade union committee at our factory, a right which the company's administration has been denying us." He added, "I was sacked from the company one year ago while serving in the capacity of president of the workers' administrative committee. All 1200 workers at this factory have been demanding the establishment of a union committee, and my reinstatement. Yet not all the workers could join in these protests because of their daytime work shifts."

In Suez, more than 400 workers from the Misr National Steel company began a strike to call for pay raises, saying they have not received any bonuses for years and that the average salary at the company does not exceed LE600.

By Jano Charbel for Al-Masry Al-Youm.

The Cairo Commune

by Nigel Gibson

Quite remarkable (but not surprising) that after less than two weeks Tahrir square has developed a system of participatory. While constantly worrying about the reaction (along the lines Marx describes
in the 18th Brumaire) people are making history and coming up with working forms of decision making. My source is no lefty paper but the Guardian:

‘In Tahrir, the square that has become the focal point for the nationwide struggle against Mubarak’s three-decade dictatorship, groups of protesters have been debating what their precise goals should be in the face of their president’s continuing refusal to stand down.

The Guardian has learned that delegates from these mini-gatherings then come together to discuss the prevailing mood, before potential demands are read out over the square’s makeshift speaker system. The adoption of each proposal is based on the proportion of cheers or boos it receives from the crowd at large.

Delegates have arrived in Tahrir from other parts of the country that have declared themselves liberated from Mubarak’s rule, including the major cities of Alexandria and Suez, and are also providing input into the decisions.

“When the government shut down the web, politics moved on to the street, and that’s where it has stayed,” said one youth involved in the process. “It’s impossible to construct a perfect decision-making mechanism in such a fast-moving environment, but this is as democratic as we can possibly be.”

“Genuine opposition politics in this country has always relied on people taking the initiative, and that’s what we’re seeing here – on a truly astounding level,” said Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian author who has been closely monitoring the spontaneous political activity on the ground. “There is more transparency and equality here in Tahrir than anything we’ve ever seen under the Mubarak regime; anyone and everyone can have their say, and that makes the demands that come out of the process even more powerful.”‘
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/05/egypt-protest-demands-mubarak-departure

One example of the flowering of “groups”, discussions, statements, reminiscent of revolutions is below from the brilliantly named ‘coalition of youths of the wrath revolution’,

Press Conference in El-Shorook Newspaper Headquarters

Fellow great Egyptian citizens … We are your your daughters, your brothers and sisters who are protesting in Tahrir square and other squares of Egypt, promise you not to go back to our homes until the demands of your great revolution are realized.

Millions have gone out to overthrow the regime, and so the matter goes beyond figures in particular to the whole administration of the Egyptian State, which was transformed from a servant of the people to a master of the them.

We have heard the president’s disappointing speech. And really someone who has killed more than 300 youths, kidnapped and injured thousands more is not entitled to brag about past glories. Nor are his followers entitled to talk about the President’s dignity, because the dignity life and security of the Egyptian people is far more valuable than any single person’s dignity no matter how high a position he holds.

Our people live though tragedy for a week now, since Mubarak’s regime practiced a siege against us, releasing criminals and outlaws to terrorize us, imposing a curfew, stopping public transportation,
closing banks, cutting off communications and shutting down the internet .. But if it was not for the courage of Egyptian youths who stayed up nights in the People’s Committees it would have been a
terrible tragedy.

We want this crisis to end as soon as possible and for our lives and our families’ lives to get back to normal, but we do not trust Hosni Mubarak in leading the transitional period. He is the same person, who refused over the past 30 years any real political and economic reforms, and he hired criminals to attack Tahrir square and the peaceful demonstrators there, killing dozens and enjuring thousands –
including women, elderly, and children.

Also, we will not allow the corrupt to remain in charge of the state institutions; therefore, we will continue our sit-in until the following demands are realized:

1. The resignation of the President and by the way this does not contradict the peaceful transition of power nor the current constitution which allows and organizes this process.
2. the immediate lifting of the state of emergency and releasing all freedoms and putting an immediate stop to the humiliation and torture that takes place in police stations
3. the immediate dissolve of both the Parliament and Shura Council
4. forming a national unity government that political forces agree upon which manages the processes of constitutional and political reform
5. forming a judicial committee with the participation of some figures from local human rights organizations to investigate the perpetrators of the collapse of state of security this past week and the murder and injury of thousands of our people.
6. Military in charge of protecting peaceful protestors from thugs and criminal affiliated with the corrupt regime and ensuring the safety of medical and nutritional convoys to civilians
7. the immediate release of all political detainees and in their forefront our colleague Wael Ghoneim

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Beyond Bourgeois Barriers - For the Class Autonomy of the Egyptian and Maghrebian Proletarian Masses

The Crisis

The knock-on effects from the world capitalist crisis are far from over. The weakest countries of the so-called capitalist periphery are suffering the consequences. At present it is the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East which are in the eye of the storm. Amongst these is Egypt presided over by Mubarak the Satrap ⁽¹⁾. Mubarak has held uninterrupted power since 1981. Until the present storm burst out on the streets, he was preparing the juridical-constitutional ground for his son to succeed him; as if the Egyptian presidential republic was a kind of absolute monarchy with a family right to succession.

Despite an annual GDP growth of 6%, largely due to oil revenues (not much in absolute terms but enough to satisfy domestic energy requirements) and tourism, (prerogative of the hangers-on at the Presidential court), Egypt has an official unemployment rate of 17%. In fact the figures are an underestimate: at least 30% of the population who are theoretically in work are either unemployed or under-employed. 70% of those without a job include young people, workers, peasants, children of petty bourgeois graduates who, until a few years ago, would have been assured employment with the state. 40% of the population lives under the poverty line, calculated as having a disposable income of no more than two dollars per day. A further 20% is not much above this level, and in danger of falling below it at any time. The crisis has put the intrinsic weakness of the Egyptian ‘system’ into even greater relief. The country’s few exports have diminished while imports have increased both in volume and cost, resulting in a significant balance of payments deficit. The State has ceased providing employment opportunities to youth, many factories have closed down or else markedly reduced their activity, while agriculture — kept at subsistence level — has visibly contracted its productive capacity and opened the door to imports of commercial food products. Moreover, international speculation is once again focussing on strategic raw materials: beyond the usual speculation over oil there is now speculation over grains and cereals with repercussions for the conditions of life of the vast majority of the Egyptian population. With the almost total absence of social welfare and a low level of pensions the picture is complete.

The Response

The streets filled spontaneously. Many are young unemployed, casual, part-time workers and children of workers, disillusioned petty bourgeois becoming proletarian, the despairing of various types, and social sectors without craft or qualifications. In short the usual mixture always present in this type of capitalist reality. The slogans shouted against the dictatorship, against its corruption, have been for bread, work and democracy. At this point the political parties, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the old Stalinists, from the various old democrats to the new Movement for Reform of Mohammed El Baradei, who made a reckless dash from his Vienna residence to be solid with “his” people, were scarcely in sight. Repression was not long in coming. With the Army turning its back on the “Pharaoah” declaring the street protests legitimate, the regime turned to the police. They left at least 150 dead in the streets, decreed a curfew, and blocked all means of communication. Like all threatened regimes, especially where repressive and dictatorial behaviour is normal, it did its job of butchery.

The Imperialist Imperative

The Egyptian crisis, along with that in Jordan and Yemen, is threatening the region’s already precarious imperialist equilibrium. Faced with the tottering Mubarak government the USA and Israel are rushing to take a position. Both Clinton and President Obama have distanced themselves from their old “satrap” who has cost them a great deal. They gave him $1.3 billions a year to reinforce Egypt’s Armed Forces. So far this hasn’t changed. The Americans aim to keep a military and political presence in the southern Mediterranean basin whilst waiting for political change at the top which the revolt on the streets has now made unavoidable. Washington already sees a reassuring substitute in the “squeaky clean” and credible person of El Baradei. He is presented as “new” in a process of change which would leave things as before, both on the domestic front and on the Egypt’s foreign policy alignment. Given the delicacy of the strategic balance this will require some further financial help at the very least.

The Netanyahu Government has identical imperialist concerns but takes the opposite line. It is ready to support the old regime from fear that any new one would eventually contain the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter would tear up the Camp David Accord of 1978, which contains the historic article recognising Israel’s right to exist. Such a move would reopen a bloody front which for Israeli imperialism would be no small matter.

The Future?

For the Egyptian working class, as for all workers in revolt from the East to the West of the Mediterranean basin, the objective cannot be confined to simply overthrowing a corrupt dictatorial regime which is starving the overwhelming majority of the population. That is only the first part. The next target of their struggle has to be the capitalist mechanisms which have produced so much social devastation and so much poverty. One “satrap” gone another can take his place, or rather, it opens the way to a democratic solution more suited to re-establishing social peace which would win approval from many Western capitalist states. But once the dictatorship falls many outcomes are possible. Amongst these is the Islamic solution with its heavy burden of social backwardness and visceral anti-communism.

Any outcome that remains within the capitalist framework will end up responding to the usual need to preserve the dominance of the imperialist boss, in this case American, without removing the real cause of the crisis – capitalism – and without solving any of the problems which the working class masses are forced to put up with. The great Egyptian and Maghrebian revolt will exhaust itself and be reabsorbed by the system, in spite of all the blood shed, if it does not take the road to class struggle, overcoming all bourgeois obstacles, whatever form they take. In the process they need to become politically independent by building their own class vanguard with its own working class programme. Then, and only then, will the rebellious ferment of the whole area from Casablanca to Cairo, from Amman to Beirut, represent a significant step forward for proletarian internationalism.

(1) A satrap was a provincial governor or viceroy in the old Persian Empire. As the reference makes clear later Mubarak is the satrap of the USA.

Revolts in Egypt and the Arab states: The spectre of the development of the class struggle

At the time of writing, the social situation in Egypt remains explosive. Millions of people have been on the streets, braving the curfew, the state regime and its bloody repression. At the same time the social movement in Tunisia has not gone away: the flight of Ben Ali, the government reshuffle and the promise of elections has not succeeded in damping down the deep anger of the population. In Jordan thousands of demonstrators have expressed their discontent with growing poverty. In Algeria the protests seems to have been stifled but there is a powerful international black-out and it seems that there are still struggles going on in Kabylia.

The media and politicians of all kinds talk non-stop about the ‘revolts in the Arab world’, focusing attention on regional specificities, on the lack of local democracy, on the exasperation of the population with seeing the same faces in power for 30 years.

All this is true. Ben Ali, Mubarak, Rifai, Bouteflika and co. are true gangsters, caricatured expressions of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But above all, these social movements belong to the exploited of all countries. These explosions of anger are rooted in the acceleration of the world economic crisis which is plunging more and more of humanity into grinding poverty.   

After Tunisia, Egypt! The contagion of revolt in the Arab states, especially in North Africa, which the ruling class has feared for so long, has arrived with a bang. Populations who have been faced with the economic hardships caused by the world economic crisis have also had to deal with ruthlessly repressive regimes. And faced with this explosion of anger, the governments and rulers have shown their true colours as a class which reigns through starvation and murder. The only response they can come up with is tear gas and bullets. And we are not just talking about the ‘dictators’ on the spot. Our own ‘democratic’ rulers, right wing and left wing, have long been the friends and allies of these same dictators in the maintenance of capitalist order. The much-vaunted stability of these countries against the danger of radical Islamism has for decades been based on police terror, and our good democrats have happily turned a blind eye to their tortures, their corruption, to the climate of fear in which they have lorded it over the population. In the name of stability, of non-intervention in internal matters, of peace and friendship between peoples, they have supported these regimes for their own sordid imperialist reasons.

The social revolt in Egypt

In Egypt we have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of deaths, thousands wounded, tens of thousand more wounded or arrested. The fall of Ben Ali was the detonator. It stirred up a huge wave of hope among the population of the Arab regimes. We also saw many outbursts of despair, with a series of suicides in Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, western Sahara, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, particularly among young unemployed people. In Egypt, we heard the same slogans as in Tunisia: “Bread, Freedom, Dignity!” This was clearly a response to the principal effects of the world economic crisis: unemployment (in Egypt it affects 20% of the population); insecurity (in Egypt, 4 out of 10 live below the poverty line and several international documentaries have been made about the people who live by sorting through the Cairo rubbish heaps); the rising price of basic necessities. The slogan ‘Mubarak, dégage’ was taken directly from the Tunisians who called for the departure of Ben Ali. Demonstrators in Cairo proclaimed “It’s not our government, they are our enemies!” An Egyptian journalist said to a correspondent from Figaro: “No political movement can claim to have started these demonstrations. It’s the street which is expressing itself. People have nothing to lose. Things can’t go on any longer”. One phrase is on everyone’s lips: “we are no longer afraid”.

In April 2008, the workers of a textile factor in Mahalla to the north of Cairo came out on strike for better wages and working conditions, To support the workers and call for a general strike on 6 April, a group of young people had organised themselves on Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. This time, and in contrast to Tunisia, the Egyptian government blocked internet access in advance.     

On Tuesday 25 January, so-called ‘National Police Day’, tens of thousands of protestors hit the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Tanta and Suez and came up against the forces of order. Four days of confrontations followed; state violence only fuelled the anger. During these days and nights, the riot police used tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition. Standing by was an army of 500,000, very well equipped and trained, a central pillar of the regime, unlike in Tunisia. The power also made extensive use of the ‘baltageyas’, thugs directly controlled by the state and specialising in breaking up demonstrations, as well as numerous agents of the state security wearing civilian clothes and merging with the demonstrators.

On Friday 28 January, a day off work, around noon, despite the banning of public gatherings, demonstrators came out of the mosques and onto the streets in huge numbers, everywhere confronting the police. This day was named ‘The Day of Rage’. The government had already cut off internet and mobile phone networks and even landline telephones. Still the movement swelled: in the evening, the demonstrations defied the curfew in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez....Police trucks used water cannon against the crowds, made up largely of young people. In Cairo, army tanks were at first welcomed as liberating heroes, and there were a number of attempts to fraternise with the army; this was given a lot of publicity and in one case at least it prevented a convoy of armoured cars from supporting the forces of order. Some policemen threw off their arm bands and joined the demonstrators. But very soon, in other areas, armoured cars opened fire on the demonstrators who had come to greet them, or mowed them down. The head of the army, Sami Anan, who led a military delegation to the US for talks at the Pentagon, came back in a hurry to Egypt on the Friday. Police cars and stations, as well as the HQ of the governing party, were torched and the Ministry of Information ransacked. The wounded piled up in overworked hospitals. In Alexandria, the government building was also burned down. In Mansoura on the Nile Delta there were violent confrontations that left several dead. A number of people tried to take over the state television station but were rebuffed by the army.     

Around 11.30 at night Mubarak appeared on TV, announcing the dismissal of his government team and promising political reforms and steps towards democracy, while firmly insisting on the need to maintain the “security and stability of Egypt against attempts at destabilisation”. These proposals merely increased the anger and determination of the protestors.

A worry for the imperialists

But although for the demonstrators Tunisia was a model, the stakes involved in the situation are not the same for the bourgeoisie. Tunisia is a relatively small country and it holds an imperialist interest mainly for a second rate power like France[1]. It’s very different with Egypt which is easily the most densely populated country in the region (over 80 million inhabitants) and which above all occupies a key strategic position in the Middle East, especially for the American bourgeoisie. The fall of the Mubarak regime could result in a regional chaos that would have heavy consequences. Mubarak is the USA’s principal ally in the region next to Israel, playing a preponderant role in Israel-Palestine relations as well as relations between Al Fatah and Hamas. This state has up till now been seen as a stabilising factor in the Middle East. At the same time the political developments in Sudan, which is on the verge of splitting in two, makes a strong Egypt all he more necessary. It is therefore a vital cog in the US strategy towards the Israel-Arab conflict and its destablisation risks spilling over into a number of neighbouring countries, especially Jordan, Libya, Yemen and Syria. This explains the anxieties of the US, whose close relations with the Mubarak regime put it in a very uncomfortable position. Obama and US diplomacy have been trying to put pressure on Mubarak while saving the essentials of the regime. This is why Obama made it public that he had spent half an hour talking to Mubarak and urging him to throw off more ballast. Before that, Hilary Clinton had declared that the forces of order needed to show more restraint and that the government should very quickly restore the means of communication. The next day, probably as a result of American pressure, General Omar Suleiman, head of the powerful military security forces, responsible for negotiations with Israel, was brought in as Vice President.   The army has gained in popularity for having remained in the rear during the demonstrations and for having on numerous occasions taken a friendly attitude towards the crowds. This allowed it to argue in a number of cases that people should go back to their homes to protect them from looters.

And in other Arab countries...

Other expressions of revolt have appeared in Algeria, Yemen and Jordan. In the latter, 4,000 people gathered in Amman for the third time in three weeks to protest against the cost of living and to demand economic and political reforms, in particular the resignation of the prime minister. The authorities made a few gestures, some small economic measures were taken and some political consultations held. But the demonstrations spread to the towns of Irbid and Kerak. In Algeria, on 22 January, a demonstration in the centre of Algiers was brutally repressed, leaving 5 dead and over 800 injured. In Tunisia the fall of Ben Ali has not put an end to the anger, nor to the repression. In the prisons, summary executions since the departure of Ben Ali have added up to more deaths than during the clashes with the police. A ‘liberation caravan’ from the western part of the country, where the movement first started, has defied the curfew and been camped outside the PM’s offices demanding the resignation of a government still made up of the cronies and chiefs of the Ben Ali regime. The anger has not gone away because the same old people are holding onto the reins of power. A government reshuffle finally took place on 27 January, chucking out the most compromised ministers but retaining the same PM. This still didn’t calm things down. Ferocious police repression continues and the situation remains confused.

These explosions of massive, spontaneous revolt reveal that the population is fed up and no longer wants to put up with the poverty and repression doled out by these regimes. But they also show the weight of democratic and nationalist illusions: in numerous demonstrations, the national flags are being brandished very widely. In Egypt as in Tunisia, the anger of the exploited has been quickly pushed towards a struggle for more democracy. The population’s hatred for the regime and the focus on Mubarak (as on Ben Ali in Tunisia) has meant that the economic demands against poverty and unemployment have been relegated into the background by all the bourgeois media. This obviously makes it possible for the ruling class in the democratic countries to sell the idea to the working class, especially in the central countries, that these ‘popular uprisings’ don’t have the same fundamental causes as the workers’ struggles going on here: the bankruptcy of world capitalism.

Towards the development of the class struggle

This eruption of the social anger engendered by the aggravation of the world crisis of capitalism in the countries at the peripheries of the system, which up until now have almost exclusively been dominated by war and imperialist tensions, is a major new political factor which the world bourgeoisie will have to reckon with more and more. The rise of these revolts against the corruption of leaders who are pocketing vast fortunes while the great majority of the population goes hungry, can’t lead to a solution in these countries on their own. But they are signs of the ripening of social conflicts that cannot fail to burst to the surface in the most developed countries in response to the same evils: falling living standards, growing poverty, massive youth unemployment.   

We are already beginning to see the rebellion of young people in Europe against the failure of world capitalism, with the students’ struggles in France, Britain and Italy. The most recent example is Holland: in The Hague on 22 January, 20,000 students and teachers gathered in front of the parliament building and the ministry of education. They were protesting against the sharp rise in university entrance fees, which will in the first place hit those repeating their second year, which is often the case with students who have to work to pay for their studies. They will have to pay an extra 300 euro a year, while the latest budgets envisage cutting 7000 jobs in this sector. This was one of the most important student demos in the country for 20 years. It was also brutally attacked by the police.

These social movements are the symptom of the international development of the class struggle, even if, in the Arab countries, the working class has not yet clearly appeared as an autonomous force and is mixed up in a movement of popular protest.

All over the world, the gulf is widening between a ruling class, the bourgeoisie, which displays its wealth with indecent arrogance, and on the other hand the mass of the exploited falling deeper and deeper into deprivation. This gulf is tending to unite proletarians of all countries, to forge them into a common front, while the bourgeoisie can only respond to the indignation of those it exploits with new austerity measures, with truncheons and bullets.   

Revolts and social struggles will inevitably take on different forms in the years to come and in different regions. The strengths and weaknesses of these social movements will not be the same everywhere. In some cases, their anger, militancy and courage will be exemplary. In others, the methods and massive nature of the struggle will make it possible to open new perspectives and establish a balance of forces in favour of the working class, the only social force that can offer a future to humanity. In particular, the concentration and experience of the proletariat of the countries at the heart of world capitalism will be decisive. Without the massive mobilisation of the workers in the central countries, the social revolts in the peripheries of capitalism will be condemned to impotence and will fall under the domination of this or that faction of the ruling class. Only the international struggle of the working class, its solidarity, its unity, its organisation and its consciousness of what’s at stake in its combat will be able to draw all the oppressed layers of society into a fight to put an end to dying capitalism and build a new world in its place.  

RI 30/01/11

[1] France was one of Ben Ali’s main supporters although it has now made its mea culpas about this. However it is once again covering itself in ridicule by continuing to back Mubarak

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  북아프리카와 중동의 프롤레타리아 봉기의 국제주의적 연대

이번 봉기의 조류는 튀니지에서 알제리, 이집트, 그리고 요르단과 예멘까지 휩쓸고 있다. 시리아 정권은 봉기의 확산이 그들에게까지 번질 것을 두려워해 인터넷을 차단시켜버렸다.

그런데 이번에는 무바라크의 지지세력 이라 주장해왔던 이슬람교도는 움직이지 않았다. 오히려  종교문제에 대한 자신들의 엄격한 태도와 관계없이 모든 주민이 봉기에 참여했다. 이집트에서는 수천 명이 그들의 이맘(성직자)들이 거리시위에 나가지 말라고 지시하는 것을 거부했다 : 이것은 또한 이슬람교도와 기독교인 사이의 종파적 분열을 의식적으로 거부하는 본보기가 되었다. 그것도 아주 최근 후자의 소수파들이 학살당할 수도 있었던 나라에서 말이다.

(한편 전통적인 스탈린주의 강령을 채택하고 있는 튀니지 노동자공산당은 단계론에 기초해 먼저 부르주아 민주주의를 이룬 후 다음 사회주의 혁명을 주장하며, 이슬람 운동을 민주주의를 위한 정치적 투쟁에서 동반자로서 인정하며 그들 없이 민주주의로의 이행은 없을 것이라고 내다보고 있다)

하지만 그들의 운동은 비록 운동 참가자의 다수가 부르주아 민주주의의 환상에 방해받을 지라도, 의회민주주의를 위한 것도, 붕괴에 임박한 사회시스템의 허울뿐인 정치개혁을 위한 것도 아니다.

그들의 운동은‘중산층’운동이 아니다: 여기서 봉기를 일으킨 학생들과 마찬가지로 튀니지, 이집트, 프랑스, 그리스 대학생의 다수는, 오늘날 노동자계급의 일부이다.

(튀니지와 이집트의 봉기는 의심할 여지 없이 몇해전부터 최근까지의 유럽과 중동의 노동자와 청년 학생들의 투쟁과 연결되어 있다)

이 반란들은 착취 받는 프롤레타리아트, 노동자계급의 세계적인 운동의 일부이다. 자본주의 경제위기에 맞서, 지배계급의 비열한 부패와 위선에 맞서, 우파 혹은 좌파의 모든 정부들의 무자비한 긴축정책에 맞서 그리스에서, 프랑스에서, 이곳 영국에서 일어났던 같은 프롤레타리아트 계급의 운동이다.

(튀니지에서 무너진 정부는 벤 알리의 친위대를 포함 무장한 민병대를 풀어놓으며, 예전처럼 지역에서 두려움을 확산시키려 시도했다. 이에 맞서 튀니지 전역에서는 지역 주민을 보호하기 위한 자발적인 '주민평의회'가 조직되었다. 이집트에서도 이미 주민들의 자치기관인 '지역위원회'가 교통정리, 의약품 분배, 식량공급등 자치활동을 벌이고 있다. 하지만 아직 이들기관이 노동자평의회와 같은 혁명의 기관, 봉기의 중심이 되지는 못하고 있다.)

이것이 우리가 노동자계급과 실업자, 학생 그리고 이 반란들을 이끌고 있는 사람들과 우리의 총 단결을 선언해야하는 이유이다. 그리고 그 반란의 전진을 방해하려하는 모든 세력에 대해 강력히 저항하고,  프롤레타리아트의 봉기를 그들 자신의 목적을 위해  이용하려하는 이슬람 정치가들과, 부르주아 민주주의 제도의 거짓약속일뿐인 '독재자들'의 노골적인 경찰의 폭력에 대해 격렬하게 저항하는 이유이다.

이러한 운동들은 시위와 공공집회에서의 논의와, 그곳이 어디든 우리자신들의 투쟁을 시작하기 위해 아주 중요하다.

(종교적 차이를 극복하고, 부르주아 민주주의 환상을 깨트리고, 전체 프롤레타리아트의 단결과 무장력을 갖춘 노동자평의회의 건설을 통해 실질적으로 노동자계급이 권력을 장악하는 투쟁과, 프롤레타리아 국제주의에 입각한 주변국가와 유럽국가 노동자계급의 강력한 연대투쟁(자본가정부들의 압력이 아닌)을 통해 혁명을 지지, 엄호하는 투쟁들을 시작하는것이 무엇보다 중요하다)

과연 어떠한 계획들이 가능한지 유용한지를 논의하기 위해서는, 우리에게 이메일을 보낼 수 있고, 우리의 웹사이트상의 포럼에 게재할 수 있다. 또한 리브컴(http://www.libcom.org)과 같은 다른 계급투쟁의 포럼에도 문제제기를 할 수 있다.

World Revolution(WR), 2011.01.29   (번역 lee)

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Cancun World Climate Conference - Another Predictable Capitalist Failure

Many people might not even have noticed that the latest UN climate conference was held in the Mexican resort of Cancun during the first 2 weeks of December. It was hardly reported in the bourgeois press and where it was mentioned the expectations of success were well and truly damped down. After the fiasco of the 2009 Copenhagen conference, which was supposedly “the last chance to save the planet”, but which nonetheless ended in complete failure, this conference was a low key affair and major political leaders kept well away. The failure of Copenhagen was not, of course, accidental but clearly reflected the views of a powerful sector of the capitalist class who wish to carry on polluting as usual and have a direct interest in undermining the scientific basis of global warming.

The challenges, which their paid prize fighters have mounted to the science, have succeeded in taking the issue out of the headlines and producing a more widespread scepticism about climate change than existed before Copenhagen. Global warming now appears as something we don’t need to worry about any longer.1 This is absolutely not the case. There is general agreement among climate scientists that the threats to life on earth, posed by climate change, are now more severe than a year ago. Capitalist “civilisation” is like a juggernaut, out of control and heading for a precipice.

The Cancun conference was the 16th conference the UN has held to try to control man-made (anthropogenic) global warming and, like the preceding conferences, failed to do this. No binding agreement to do anything about emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) was reached. Today, the only international agreement for reducing the emission of GHGs, which are the principal cause of global warming, remains the Kyoto agreement. This agreement, which expires in 2012, and which covers only a quarter of global GHG emissions, because the US has refused to ratify it and countries such as China, India and Brazil were excluded from the start, is virtually useless. The Cancun conference committed the 200 participating countries to keep talking about the issues while agreeing to some fairly ill defined proposals. It is a measure of the inability of the main capitalist powers to address climate change that the pathetic outcome of this conference was described in the press as a “victory for multilateralism” or to quote UK Prime Minister Cameron a “significant” step forward.

The main conference agreements were:

• To limit the increase in average global temperature to 2oC during the 21st century, with consideration being given to a 1.5oC rise. However since the means of achieving this, namely a 15% reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 levels by 2020, remain completely voluntary such an ambition is virtually meaningless.
• The creation of a “Green Fund” to provide loans for developing countries. The fund is supposed to provide $30bn by 2012 and $100bn annually by 2020. Where the funds are to come from is not made clear but its creation was advocated by the World Bank and the World Bank is to manage it. It is intended to provide loans to peripheral countries to buy green technology or employ consultants from the central capitalist countries The fund is likely to operate as a type of export credit fund for the metropolitan capitalists and will principally benefit them. The World Bank funded $6.3bn of fossil fuel developments in 2009 so does not exactly have a record of combating climate change ⁽²⁾.
• A scheme for providing finance to developing countries for forest protection called “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation “(REDD) and another for Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM). These schemes serve to promote and prepare the ground for carbon offsetting schemes aimed at enhancing carbon trading. Finance to be provided to poor countries induced many countries to accept these schemes. Wikileaks has exposed the process of bullying and bribing by which the US and other metropolitan capitalist countries cajoled peripheral countries into accepting these schemes ⁽³⁾.
• To keep talking and hope that a binding agreement could reached at next years talks in Durban. This was undoubtedly the main achievement of the conference. However the minor agreements reached set the parameters for future negotiations and are likely to result in future agreements on GHG reduction being based on Carbon trading and offsetting.

Looming ecological disaster

Climate change is only part of a general ecological disaster which capitalism is inflicting on the planet. According to the US National Academy of Sciences report of 2002 the world economy’s demands on the planet exceeded the earth’s regenerative capacity in 1980 and by 1999 it had exceeded it by 20%. ⁽⁴⁾ The current figure is 30%. ⁽⁵⁾ This means it would take 1.3 years for the planet to regenerate what we use in a year! In other words regeneration is not occurring. It is little wonder that 60% of the world’s ecosystems, such as coral reefs, mangrove swamps and wetlands, are in now degraded and in decline. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that 15 out of the 24 natural processes on which our survival depends are in decline or are becoming unsustainable. Key processes under threat are provision of water via the water cycle, provision of food and timber, pollination of all types including crops, soil formation, photo synthesis and nutrient recycling. ⁽⁶⁾ Global warming, which itself represents a breakdown in another natural cycle, the carbon cycle, is making all this a lot worse. It is estimated, for example, that for each 1°C rise in temperature yields of major cereals’ such as wheat and rice will drop by 10%. If the Cancun ambition of a 2°C rise in temperature is achieved there is, therefore, likely to be a drop in food production of at least 12%. Many species alive only a few decades ago are now extinct, while others are heading for extinction and if we continue on the present trajectory Homo sapiens will also be added to the list.7 The simple truth is that instead of living in a sustainable metabolic relationship with nature, as we did in the hunter gather epoch or to a lesser extent in slave and feudal societies, capitalist society is trashing the planet, and this cannot continue indefinitely.

The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is now 390 parts per million (ppm) a rise of 3 ppm from the time of the Copenhagen conference. This concentration is 20% more than it was in 2000 and 40% more than it was in 1990. The principal concern of climate scientists is that if the concentration of GHGs rises above 450 ppm the process of global warming will spin out of control and nothing human beings do will any longer have any effect. The so called “tipping point” will have been reached.

This point is also, according to climate scientists, equivalent to a 2°C rise in temperature. This means the upper limit of temperature rise adopted by the Cancun Conference would put us at the tipping point. However, scientists calculate that even if the voluntary Copenhagen and Cancun reductions are met they will lead to a 4 to 5oC rise in temperature, and if they are not met we can expect a 7°C rise. ⁽⁸⁾ When one considers that the average temperature difference between that of the last ice age 12 000 years ago and the and average for the last 500 years is only 3oC9 one can imagine the catastrophic effects such temperature rises will create.

What exactly do the capitalist class propose to do about all this?

Capitalist responses to global warming

The capitalist class is divided in its response to this issue along three broad lines:

1. A powerful section of capitalists headed by the energy sector, particularly the oil sector, want to take no action whatsoever. This sector is behind the attempts to deny global warming even exists. They have succeeded in undermining the Kyoto protocols and sabotaging any meaningful agreements at the subsequent climate change conferences. At present they have prevented the US “cap and trade” carbon trading scheme being passed by the US senate.
2. Another sector, while recognising global warming is occurring; wish to combat it with green technology, carbon trading schemes and carbon taxes. Capitalist growth and accumulation, they argue, can continue as usual but must metamorphose into a “green” capitalism. Neo liberalism is to be coloured green.
3. A small minority wish to impose a state capitalist solution with state enforced GHG reductions worldwide. This group, championed by Bolivia which opposed the Cancun agreement, includes the peasant movement “La Via Campesina” and groups of indigenous peoples immediately threatened by climate change and its consequences.

The first grouping do not hold out any solution whatsoever to the ecological crisis and if they retain their grip on the global political response to this problem the world will probably reach the “tipping point” in one or two decades. It seems likely, however, that as the global situation deteriorates their influence will decrease and the second grouping will become the most important.

The second group wish to rely on carbon trading and green technology.

As we have pointed out in previous texts10 , carbon trading is a complete swindle. The key issue remains the consideration that emissions trading schemes are controlled by the capitalist class and it is they who determine the carbon caps. The way the world’s major scheme, that in the EU, works it is at present more profitable to pollute than to install non-polluting technology. The carbon market is a capitalist market like any other and prices of carbon go up and down. At present 1 tonne of carbon, which in 2008 was traded at €30, is valued at €15. This makes it cheaper to offset and keep polluting, which is precisely what is happening. The offset mechanism, far from increasing the carbon sinks in the developing countries, often results in destruction of natural forests by imported timber plantations and displacement of indigenous peoples.

It is also allowing the major polluting nations to gain control of swathes of land in the peripheral countries. The scheme serves mainly to transfer the burden of the effects of global warming from the metropolitan capitalist countries to the peripheral countries.

Green technology can, at best, mitigate the problems of ecological destruction it cannot prevent them. As will be discussed below, capitalist society demands continual accumulation of capital and consequently continual growth. There is thus an absolute contradiction between a social system which demands continual, i.e. infinite, growth and a planet with finite resources. The capitalist system is simply incompatible with preservation of the earth’s ecosystem and any solution of the problems we face must start with the overthrow of capitalist production. Green technology, under capitalism represents a new field of profit generation and a new field of capital accumulation and must inevitably run up against the same problems of continual accumulation versus finite resources. Green technology served up as a solution to global warming is a fraud.

The third group held an alternative Climate Conference of its own at Cochabamba in Bolivia in April 2010 and produced a manifesto. The main items the manifesto calls for are:

• 50% reduction in GHG emissions by 2017
• stabilising temperature rises at 1°C above pre industrial levels and reducing GHG concentrations to 300 ppm
• acknowledging the climate debt owed by developed countries
• full respect for the rights of indigenous peoples
• a universal declaration of the rights of Mother Earth
• establishment of an international court of climate justice
• rejection of carbon markets and commodification of nature and forests through REDD
• promotion of measures that change the consumption patterns of developed countries
• end of intellectual property rights for technologies useful for mitigating climate change
• payment of 6% of developed countries’ GDP to address climate change.

The demands for the reduction of GHG emissions and temperature stabilisation would have to be imposed by the state and would demand statecapitalist control of the economy on a global scale. While it is true that the demands for GHG reduction and limitation of temperature rise are ones which could reverse the trend towards runaway global warming, they remain reforms within the compass of the capitalist system of production.

They would not be able to overcome the contradiction between the need for continual accumulation and the finite nature of the earth and would not be able to solve the ecological crisis in the longer term. The Bolivian president, Morales and his Venezuelan counterpart, Chavez, have nationalised the energy resources of their countries in defiance of the US. This has enabled them to present their anti-Americanism as anti-imperialism, and their versions of state capitalism as different from that of the former Soviet Union, and as a movement toward socialism. But state capitalism remains capitalism and workers remain wage labourers separated from the means of production and the dynamics of capitalism remain intact. The Cochabamba demands were, needless to say, completely rejected by the Cancun Conference.

“La Via Campesina” group in its statement following the conference called again for acceptance of the Cochabamba manifesto but added its own demand for something called a “cosmovision”. They stated: “We must go beyond the anthropocentric model. We must rebuild the cosmovision of our peoples, based on a holistic view of the relationship between the cosmos, mother earth, the air, the water and all living beings. Human beings do not own nature but rather form part of all that lives.” Such a vision is one which predates class society. Unfortunately we live in class society and we cannot go back to previous forms of existence. To get out of the mess we are in we need to move forward to socialist production and a classless society. The amorphous nature of such statements illustrate how the peasantry is unable to see a future beyond their doomed way of life. Where the solutions they offer are not reactionary, they are utopian.

Capitalism — the real threat to humanity’s future

It is the capitalist system of production which has led us into this mess and continuing with capitalism will only take us into worse trouble still. The capitalist system is a system in which production is for profit not for human needs. One of the consequences of this is that capitalism has a continual need to accumulate capital. This means it needs to grow continually. When growth stalls the system collapses into crisis. Empirical studies have shown that since the start of capitalism in the late 18th century, capitalism has grown at an average rate of 2.25% per year. ⁽¹¹⁾ This means that the global economy doubles in size on average every 30 years. The period since World War 2 has seen much more rapid growth as shown in Table 1 below: In the 50 years since the war the world economy grew by a factor of approximately 7.

Table 1. Gross Domestic Product in $bn at 1990 purchasing power parity ⁽¹²⁾

Capitalism has always treated nature as a resource to be exploited mercilessly to maximise profits. Bellamy Foster, in his book “The Ecological Revolution” expressed this as follows:

The class/imperial war which defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly allencompassing, the product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalising economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion ⁽¹³⁾.

 

Exponential growth is not compatible with finite resources. This alone shows how futile it is to try and reform aspects of the system and deal with its worst excesses while the central dynamic tendencies of the system remain intact.

Any slowing down of emissions of GHG represents a threat to accumulation and a threat to growth. It is for this reason that even the more intelligent members of the capitalist class cannot countenance this. Nicholas Stern, for example, in his 2006 report for the UK government admits that GHG emissions are driven by economic growth yet he proposes to continue accumulation as usual and concludes that GHG concentrations will have to rise to between 500 and 550 ppm before they can be stabilised, because anything else would be too costly.

This level is, of course, well beyond the tipping point and would have catastrophic effects, but for capitalism doing anything about it is considered too costly.

The capitalist system is leading us to ruin and the task of replacing it is becoming ever more urgent. As we wrote in RP 53:

There is a glaring need for a new world order: a global community without national borders where production can be planned directly to meet human needs and can take account of environmental consequences of alternative courses of action; a community without the intermediary of money and commodity production, where economics becomes a question of social allocation of time, particularly working time, and no longer a question of what is immediately financially profitable….Capitalism remains, by definition, a system dependent on generating profit, the source of which is the surplus labour workers are obliged to yield to capital over and above the wages they receive. It is this system which has to be abolished and only the concerted force of an internationally unified and politically conscious working class will have the power to do so…. a new world is possible — and necessary. Perpetually campaigning to reform this or that aspect of capitalism is not the way forward. The only way to halt capitalist ‘business as usual’ and save the planet for humanity is by world working class revolution. The spark for that will come from the politically conscious minority who have organised to campaign in the only revolutionary way possible: amongst the working class for the communist political programme.

 

 

(1) Minor errors which have come to light in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 4th report such as locations of temperature readings in China or predictions of shrinking Himalayan glaciers have been used to discredit the whole report.

(2) According to Grace Garcia from Friends of the Earth Costa Rica, “Only a gang of lunatics would think it is a good idea to invite the World Bank to receive climate funds, with their longstanding track record of financing the world’s dirtiest projects and imposition of death-sentencing conditionalities on our peoples.” Quoted by Patrick Bond see links.org.au .

(3) See Patrick Bond links.org.au .

(4) Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences 99 No 14.

(5) See Water and Environment Management WEM Vol 14 No 8.

(6) See Millennium Ecosystem Assessment UN 2005 7 The latest update of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ shows that 17,291 species out of the 47,677 assessed species are threatened with extinction. The results confirm that 21% of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12 per cent of all known birds and 32% of all known gymnosperms (conifers and cycads) are threatened with extinction.

(7) “The scientific evidence of a serious extinction crisis is mounting,” says Jane Smart, Director of IUCN’s Biodiversity Conservation Group. “January sees the launch of the International Year of Biodiversity. The latest analysis of the IUCN Red List shows the 2010 target to reduce biodiversity loss will not be met.

(8) See Patrick Bond links.org.au node/2041 .

(9) See James Lovelock “Revenge of Gaia” pg 67.

(10) See RP 52 “Environmental Disaster or Communism” and RP 53 “After all the hot air at Copenhagen Global Warming is set to continue” available at leftcom.org .

(11) See David Harvey “The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism” pg 27.

(12) See David Harvey “The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism” pg 27.

(13) J Bellamy Foster “The Ecological Revolution” pg 46.