Communist Left 29-30

Through a hail of bullets, the Proletariat in North Africa is Rising up and taking on the Bourgeoisie

This generous, international revolt of the working class will only be consolidated by reinforcing its defensive organisations, the trade unions; by challenging the parties and the liberal and democratic illusions of the petty bourgeoisie; by reconnecting with the Marxist programme and political party, in solidarity with the workers in all countries and against the criminal global reaction of capital

Let the word ring out, so long mystified and prohibited: Communism.

Egypt is one link in the chain of social crises caused by the economic recession, which is hitting the proletariat in the countries of young capitalism as much as in the old, along with the poor peasant farmers. The recession has induced the bourgeoisie to withdraw even the little it had conceded over the past few decades, and this has forced the proletariat onto the offensive, in the south as in the north of the world.

In Egypt, in struggles taking place throughout the country for several weeks, more than 300 people have been killed and thousands more wounded or incarcerated.

Returning to the streets en masse on February 11^th to demand the removal from office of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian protestors have obtained what they asked for. At the time of writing the head of State had resigned and the government of the country had passed into the hands of a Committee set up by the General Staff of the military.

The Army, who participated in the repression even if it was a job left mainly in the hands of the police, finally decided to abandon Mubarak and take power into their own hands, even if only temporarily – or so they are saying. Certainly this has caused a split between the sectors of the bourgeoisie prepared to defend the government at any cost and those prepared to sacrifice Mubarak and his numerous ‘clients’, apart from his alliance with the Washington, that is.

The United States, following the Tunisian uprising and the hasty exit of their man, Ben Ali, were faced with a sharpening of the revolt in Egypt and the threat of it spreading to neighbouring countries. Considering that Egypt is a country of key strategic importance in the Middle East and North Africa, and the country which the USA throws most money at in the region after Israel, it finally decided to press for a change in the head of government. The CIA it seems was taken by surprise by the recent events, explaining the odd twists and turns of American diplomacy, but the Pentagon, meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, sent battle ships to defend that vital artery of capitalism, the Suez Canal.

As far as Israeli diplomacy is concerned, it fought, without success evidently, to the bitter end to keep its faithful ally Mubarak firmly in place. And it also comes as no surprise to us that the Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, reacted in the same way as the Israelis, and both of them, in the occupied territories and in Gaza, either repressed or contained the spontaneous manifestations of joy and solidarity with the Egyptians which burst onto the streets. Indeed Hamas actually took over the job of the Egyptian police by hermetically sealing the Rafah crossing.

The watchword of the bourgeoisie the world over, whether Arab, Egyptian or from elsewhere, is “change within continuity”, that is, the classic “changing everything in order to keep everything the same”.

In fact, what we are witnessing today in Egypt is a reinforcement of the regime. Mubarak’s government, after 30 years of open, brutal dictatorship and faced with an economic crisis ended up far too discredited in the eyes of all social classes. Leaving aside the working class, which is permanently rebellious, the petty bourgeoisie is no longer prepared to put up with a system which openly subjects it to the arbitrary decisions, corruption and the privileges of Big Capital, which for the most part is incarnated in a tiny minority of top officials and businessmen linked to the family of the president.

In Egypt, then, the big bourgeoisie, big finance and industry, centred mostly around the military hierarchy, is showing that it is prepared to make concessions to the people, who had taken to the streets, and to put a break on corruption and re-establish a certain ‘quantum’ of democracy and political liberty.

Given the lack of any bourgeois political party with a real programme of any recognisable interest to the masses, this ‘change’ can only be managed from above. And now, not only in the countries of young capitalism but everywhere else, the real party of the bourgeoisie looks for its base of support, in terms of power and intelligence, not from within the social mass but within the State apparatus itself and, in the case of Egypt, historically and in this particular case as well, within the army. Thus was it in 1953, with the national revolution of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his colleagues in the military.

Thus on the streets of the Egyptian cities there is a mixture of classes which are all colliding together. On the one side there is the lumpen proletariat of the capital, defending the supreme leader and the handouts they have come to expect from him. On the other hand there is the petty bourgeoisie, which is nationalist, in all its various sub-species and across its entire ideological spectrum, ranging from the Nasserites to the democratic liberals to the infinite varieties of Islamism, etc. Finally there is the working class, which takes the bourgeois watchwords of liberty and democracy to mean the possibility of trade union organisation, wage increases and reduction of the working day.

The only classes of any real significance in modern society are the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the big landowners. The others are either hybrids or historical relics. Only classes have a historical and, at the appropriate juncture, revolutionary capacity. In Egypt as well, as though a war was approaching, we find the main classes, whether they are aware of it or not and whether they want it or not, silently preparing for battle: the working class concealed behind the iridescent superfetations of the middle classes; the capitalists and landowners behind the coteries and families who have been making use of their time in power to line their own pockets.

Indeed, the petty bourgeoisie, in its quest for greater democracy, political liberty and freedom of expression, has obtained fleeting satisfaction only because it has received the backing of that veritable giant, in both numerical terms and in terms of its long history of struggle, which is the Egyptian proletariat; those millions of workers in industry, services and agriculture who work for a miserable salary and who, faced with massive unemployment, have managed to organise themselves in clandestine trade unions despite the threat of prison and torture, and to engage in formidable strikes up to the point of obtaining significant victories, even if only partial and temporary.

The working class, despite being the central factor in the crisis, and despite seeing its struggles ignored by the media, which wants to depict a unitary but indistinct movement of people fighting for liberty, has managed to maintain a separate presence by demanding the freedom to form trade unions and to strike. It was the mobilisation of workers which forced the Mubarak government into conceding a 15% increase in wages to State employees; a demand which was straightaway taken up by workers in the private sector.

But now, when every patriot and every bourgeois is calling for an orderly “return to work” for the good of the country and to “build a new Egypt”, the proletariat can hardly share in the exultation of petty bourgeoisie about some old pharaoh being put out to grass; such an outcome certainly doesn’t satisfy the demand for significant and general wage increases, for trade union freedom, for work and for an income for the unemployed.

The test of strength on those issues will be with the new military, and the rendering of accounts is already happening at the Mahala Textile Company, where 20,000 textile workers are still out on strike despite the deployment of forces by the military.

In order to delay the inevitable social clash with the working class, even though it will not be long in coming, the big bourgeoisie, both Egyptian and foreign, is counting on the uncertainty of the political situation, on the novelty of the electoral farce, on euphoria over the few scraps of freedom which have been recovered.

But when that clash happens, the proletariat, in Egypt as everywhere else, mustn’t be caught unprepared.

It should continue on the path it has already embarked upon, of organising itself into trade unions which are independent of the State and the bosses; organisations which are indispensable not only to defend living standards and working conditions but also to protect its members and leaders; organisations which are needed to unite the class by the overcoming of all divisions of trade, sex, religion, in order to move on to the constitution of economic organisations of struggle at the national level.

It will need to keep its eye on the army, on its general staff, which has functioned up to now and will continue to function as the truncheon of bourgeois power and as long as it remains will be used against the proletariat.

It will also need to keep its eye on false friends such as the Muslim Brotherhood who, even if for decades they have not escaped persecution from the regime themselves, they have nevertheless long constituted an arms length anti-worker, anti-trade union and anti-communist militia.

The workers also must not place any faith in the bourgeois parties, even the most ‘democratic’ ones or of the so-called ‘left’, like the ex Egyptian Communist Party, which has always shown itself ready to turn its back on the workers whenever they are determined to go their own way.

The workers must reconnect with their international and anti-capitalist programme of social emancipation, which is separate from and opposed to that of all other parties. In communism’s programme there is, on the historic scale, the proletarian revolution – the time for it is already ripe – and the simultaneous overthrow of bourgeois power in all the countries of the region.

It is not an easy task which awaits the proletariat. And in order not to lose sight of the way ahead, which is full of pitfalls and unknown challenges, it is necessary that the most conscious and combative proletarians reconnect to the invariant tradition and the party of Marxist revolutionary internationalism.

Without its party, as centuries of experience have shown, the proletariat can arrive at the point of mounting a violent revolt, but not of transforming it into a revolutionary process; into a social movement capable not only of replacing a government of the bourgeois State but of overthrowing the bourgeois power, of striking at the heart of the regime of wage labour.

The sole revolutionary programme is the communist programme. The sole revolutionary party is the Communist Party. Every other party is inevitably reactionary and counter-revolutionary.

For there to be a communist revolution there needs to be a Communist Party, an organ of political combat forged over centuries and founded on clear and immutable principles, with a pre-established plan of revolutionary action, with a unique, centralised global leadership connected to a disciplined body of proven militants, who are faithful and enthusiastic, and solidly rooted within the working class and the main countries. A party known to soldiers in the armies, who alone can direct military actions needed to defend the revolution.

Only with this indispensable instrument – moving as one man because able to predict events and the moves of its bourgeois enemy, and in the full knowledge of the homicidal fury and tricks the latter will resort to defend its privileges, but also of its inherent weaknesses – will the victory of the working class be possible.

Through a hail of bullets, the Proletariat in North Africa is Rising up and taking on the Bourgeoisie

This generous, international revolt of the working class will only be consolidated by reinforcing its defensive organisations, the trade unions; by challenging the parties and the liberal and democratic illusions of the petty bourgeoisie; by reconnecting with the Marxist programme and political party, in solidarity with the workers in all countries and against the criminal global reaction of capital

Let the word ring out, so long mystified and prohibited: Communism.

In Tunisia the proletariat has taken to the streets, forced into taking action by increasing poverty and growing unemployment. For over a month it fought the police and more than a 100 demonstrators lost their lives. What sparked the revolt was an increase in food prices. After a few weeks the petty bourgeoisie also joined the movement. The rise in prices was partly revoked.

Ben Ali, one of the many dictators in North Africa, has fled, urged on his way by his former collaborators and the army. He stood at the head of a system of corruption which was so vast that he had even become a dangerous liability to the country’s bourgeoisie, and was hated not just by the proletariat but by all social classes.

But of course corruption and nepotism are inevitable in all bourgeois societies. In Europe and America it also happens on a grand scale, with the recent expenses scandal in England just one example among many.

Tunisia is no stranger to social conflict. In 2008, following the sacking of miners in the Southern mining region of Gafsa, there was a protracted struggle against the forces of repression which lasted for 8 months.

Throughout the world we see confirmation of the Marxist thesis that capitalism is incapable of providing for humanity’s needs. The majority of African States have developed a ‘cash crop’ agriculture and monoculture which is geared to the export market. Although more profitable it has resulted in the ruin of the small-holding peasantry and it provides no nutritional benefit to the local population. What is more, a part of the global cereal production is dedicated to the production of fuel for motor vehicles. In a society based on capital and profit agriculture is inevitably neglected and food stocks are never sufficient.

In Tunisia today, the battle is between the members of the old government, who have been recycled as members of the new government, and the petty bourgeois parties. The bourgeois opposition is demanding a Provisional Government which includes all parties and new elections. The openly bourgeois parties like the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberty, the Islamic parties, and the ex-Stalinist Ettajdid all aspire to a democratic government on the European model. The Communist Party of Tunisian Workers calls for a Constituent Assembly and a ‘genuine democratic republic’.

Once again they are setting the trap of democracy to ensnare the working class. This vile, decrepit bourgeois confidence trick, this new superstition which has virtually become a religion, now performs the same function in the West as Islam does in the Arab world and the Middle East. Democracy has as its economic basis the exploitation of wage labour; it is the mask behind which lurks the dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and the big landowners. Under democratic regimes as well it is still they that decide the fate of all the millions of workers and their families.

It may well be that a new Tunisian government is formed and declares itself to be democratic, and yet, due to the grave economic and social crisis, it will not be long before it is inevitably transformed back into a dictatorship. But the Tunisian proletariat – deprived as it is today of its communist and revolutionary political party – will be powerless even if the opposition parties do win the election. The overthrow of the Ben Ali family is not enough to liberate the proletariat from capitalism and poverty. For that to happen the proletariat will have to organise itself into a vast network of trade union organisations, permeable to revolutionary activity, which regroup all workers on the basis of defending their immediate interests and which includes the unemployed as well. These organisations, same as everywhere else, will have to take up a position outside and against official trade-unionism, which in Tunisia’s case is represented by the UGTT, which is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

To prepare for the overthrow of capitalism in every country, the vanguard of the Tunisian proletariat, and that of North Africa as a whole, will need to enrol itself in the ranks of the International Communist Party.

But nothing can detract from the fact that the Tunisian proletariat, which flexed its muscles and overthrew this bloody regime, has provided an inspirational example and given hope both to itself and to the exploited of the Maghreb and, we could say, to the entire world. Egyptian proletarians have already risen up and ousted another dictator, other battles have erupted in the Yemen and Bahrain, and now a civil war rages in Libya.

But not only the gangrenous regimes of North Africa and the Middle East, but also those in ‘rich Europe’ have seen the writing on the wall in the events in Tunisia.

This crisis is in fact neither Tunisian nor North African but is linked to the crisis of international capitalism. It is part of a chain of events which include, amongst others, the social movements in Greece and the strikes in Portugal and Spain, which announce that the countdown to the overthrow of bourgeois domination has already begun.
 

Marxism views history as a series of modes of production and of relationships between human beings determined by them, from primitive communism, organic and natural, through to the societies based on class divisions. The capitalist epoch established itself on the basis of modern production techniques which utilised the discoveries of science and concentrated the workers in great factories. The modern proletariat, deprived of any means of subsistence, was to become a seller of its own labour power.

However, under capitalism improvement of the systems of production generates increasing misery and insecurity instead of being a condition for well-being. The enormous accumulation of commodities produced, for the most part useless or dangerous, and which the market cannot absorb, generates the phenomenon of over-production, of poverty amongst wealth, which is such a defining characteristic of capitalism.

In addition, the increased employment of machinery and relative reduction in the number of workers produce the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: the more Capital’s unrestricted growth seems to make it a force which entirely dominates society, the more its power and vitality is reduced. This mechanism which underlies the economic crisis means it is impossible to remedy.

It is this ‘agonal’ state of capitalism which forces States to have recourse to imperialist war: it is just to postpone its own demise that on the one hand the global bourgeois class pushes for an increase in the extortion of surplus value from the working class, and on the other, to precipitate humanity into a third imperialist war, in which the workers will be lined up against each other on opposite sides of the barricades; intimidated or brainwashed into fighting for ‘their’ country, and thus for ‘their’ bourgeoisie, rather than for their own, international class.

The crisis in 1929 led the imperialisms to declare war on each other during the second world massacre: only after destroying people, cities, machinery, commodities did they manage to get a new cycle of accumulation underway again. This demented cycle of growth drew to a close in the mid-seventies, when the current crisis really started.
 

AND THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS CAN AND MUST FREE ITSELF OF IT

There is only one force within capitalist society which can deal the death blow to this regime, the working class, the class that not only already produces all of the wealth but which also, having once freed itself from its political and economic subjugation to capital, is the bearer of the new society, communism, which from within the capitalist shell is pushing ever harder to emerge into the full light of day.

But today, due to the immense difficulties encountered on its centuries’ long path to emancipation, the global working class, despite the conditions being objectively mature, is forced to start once again from nothing.

The revolutionary bid for power in the first two decades of the last century produced a world communist party, the Third Communist International, and basing itself on the radical intransigent theses of left Marxism, it achieved victory for the revolution in Russia and took power in the name of the world communist revolution.

The revolutionary wave, the mainstay of which was proletarian defeatism in peace and in war, would eventually be defeated, thenceforth the working class would be assailed on all sides by lies and betrayals – worse even than those that caused the degeneration of the Second social-democratic International – which made it forget its class interests and the hard lessons of the past.

Stalinism, Maoism and Castroism, along with the theory of socialism in one country, would all end up concealing capitalist and bourgeois parties, states and economies, all of which were total capitalist, under the banner of communism.

In parallel the communist movement would support the demand to defend bourgeois democracy and would ally itself with the forces of anti-fascism, the degenerate communist parties turning into the most eager defenders of parliaments, constitutions and bourgeois justice.

The trade union movement was dragged into this vortex of submission to capitalist institutions too. If previously it had been inspired to fight not only immediate economic battles around jobs and wages but also to realise its true purpose by fighting for the long-term goal of the emancipation of the working class from capital, it would now jettison this view.
 

WHY THE CRISIS IS BOTH NECESSARY AND USEFUL

The crisis of capital doesn’t, in the final analysis, represent a crisis for the working class, even if it will be hardest hit by its consequences. Properly understood it represents the mortal crisis of its social and historical enemy and is the premise for the revolutionary overthrow of the present regime, and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Comrades! We must start again from square one!

The working class has its stock of theory, its vision of the world along with a century and a half of lessons learnt in the course of many defeats and a few, great victories. Everything it has been taught, by enemies and false friends, over the last eighty years has proved to be lies and falsehoods; however, it has never been betrayed or deceived by authentic Marxism, whose correct predictions about capitalism’s crash are before the eyes of all.

The present task is reconnection with the original communist doctrine and with the International Communist Party; the party which alone is the depositary of this doctrine, and which alone is capable of deploying it within the organisation and wielding it in the realm of political activity.

On the plane of the immediate struggle to defend working conditions, wage levels, etc, the international proletariat will need to find the strength to respond to the sustained attack it is being subjected to by reequipping itself with a class trade union organisation, which having as its aim the unconditional defence of the workers will once again reject any co-responsibility with the bourgeoisie for the economy in the name of ‘the national interest’. This union, organised on a territorial basis as well as by trade, will include workers of different trades, nationalities and political opinions, the employed and the unemployed, and bring together workers currently kept separate in individual workplaces. This will favour the coordination of battles fought for common objectives and lead to greater unity.

The great task that awaits present and future generations of workers is a stirring prospect; the communist emancipation of mankind from this thoroughly rotten and decrepit society.

The assault by the Israeli army’s crack troops on a flotilla of cargo ships hired by pacifists of various nationalities, who wanted to force the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and bring in essential goods for the people subjected to the embargo, is a new act of war in a region that hasn’t known peace for almost a century.

Whilst in the UNO’s sumptuous headquarters diplomatic talks between the States flounder in a mire of endless debates, providing further evidence of this institution’s inconclusiveness and hypocrisy, the bloodshed and suffering of war looms once again as the unique solution to the economic crisis which is presently strangling the bourgeois society of global capital.

The bourgeois state of Israel’s continual provocations against neighbouring states and peoples are nothing but an instrument of world capitalism’s imperialist policy, and in particular of the United States, which is interested in permanently stoking up tensions in this crucial region and keeping it politically and economically divided.

The bourgeois state of Israel, the same as, and maybe even more than, other industrialised states is also experiencing a profound domestic crisis, from the political and social as well as the economic point of view. The attack on Lebanon and the ‘molten lead’ offensive against Gaza has already shown that the Israeli government can see no other way of easing the crisis than war.

All these wars have had as their primary victim Palestinian civilians, and the proletariat in particular. But Jewish proletarians have also been its victims, forced into the army to act as jailers and tormentors, and at the same time to accept any sacrifice imposed in the name of ‘national defence’; the strategic interests of its own bourgeoisie in other words.

These continual wars have therefore not produced the security and peace promised over the course of three generations. On the contrary, they threaten to entangle the entire region in a new conflict, and one which would be disastrous for the proletariat as a whole, irrespective of religion, race or nationality.

What they fear most is that the proletariat in Israel, and in every other country for that matter, disorientated for decades by the warmongering propaganda of both the social democratic and the openly reactionary parties, will withdraw its solidarity from the dominant classes; classes which are increasingly corrupt, incompetent, and whose sole interest and abiding obsession is the maintenance of their privileges.

There is another road which the working class in all countries, Israel included, can follow, a road that goes in a very different direction to the one it’s been following up to now: that of the road to class solidarity and class struggle. In the Middle East this means the Israeli proletariat uniting and collaborating with the proletariat in Palestine and in the rest of the region in a joint struggle against the bourgeoisie, in order to defend its immediate and future class interests. For this to happen, the proletariat will need to rediscover its political independence, its own party, and internationalist and revolutionary communism.

And are the bourgeoisie’s solutions really ‘more realistic’? Is imprisonment within the Gaza Strip and the Left Bank, starvation wages with no prospect of a decent life, and thousands of young Palestinian proletarians putting their faith in the nationalist parties really the way forward? What can Palestinian micro-nationalism offer to the workers in a situation of crisis in which millions of unemployed, even in the big industrialised states, are going hungry?

Against war between states! For war between classes to achieve proletarian emancipation, real peace in a classless society and Communism! This prospect, which today seems a distant unrealisable Utopia is, in fact, the only realistic way of achieving proletarian emancipation.

Translated from a presentation at the party meeting in Viareggio on June 2006

The point of departure: Servants and Slaves

The story of the American labour movement, or, to be precise, of the labour movement in the United States, starts in the colonial period, at the time of the birth and development of those first settlements that would later evolve into colonies, and which at the end of the XVIII century would free themselves from the mother country.

It is important not to forget that the society founded on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean had behind it a social, economic and political history that it shared with the countries of the Old World, and in particular with England, which had emerged from the Middle Ages quite a while before, creating the social and political foundations for the development of bourgeois society and for the establishment of the capitalist system. These foundations were the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the enclosure of the common land, the development of the mercantile bourgeoisie and the rise of the country as a commercial and maritime power. Thus the American Colonies were populated by colonists who had already left the legacy of the Middle Ages behind them, and an entirely un-mediaeval atmosphere predominated there. The founders of the colonies, above all in New England, incarnated the most unscrupulous aspect of the English bourgeoisie, which precisely in those years was preparing to deal the final blow to the old absolutist and monarchist regime.

One of the reasons the English Crown favoured the colonisation of North America in the 16^th and 17^th centuries was certainly as an outlet for the surplus population and in order to alleviate the social tensions arising from poverty and unemployment, which in their turn were a by product of the development of society in a bourgeois direction. As far back as 1576 Sir Humphrey Gilbert had favoured colonisation as a means of alleviating demographic pressure. Others would portray it as a means of getting rid of ‘undesirable elements’.

The composition of the colonies was therefore very heterogeneous. Apart from the band of puritans referred to in the history books (concentrated mainly in New England) there was a conspicuous number of criminals, prisoners and of every other conceivable type of refugee from the law. To these was offered the possibility of escaping justice by emigrating to America, but on arrival in the New World they were expected to pay the cost of their transatlantic passage with their labour. This possibility of acquiring extremely low cost labour attracted the attention of many rich English families who moved to America with the intention of acquiring land and benefiting form this labour.

In fact, it soon became clear to everybody that none of the riches discovered by the Spanish in Mexico and Peru existed in the in the area in which the English were staking their claim. Captain John Smith would write: “Nothing is to be expected thence but by labour”. Thus the profits to which the English investors aspired would be obtained by cutting down forests and cultivating the soil rather than from mining. America would bring great profits, wrote the Virginia Company in 1616-17 to prospective investors, in the measure that ‘more hands’ were made available.

But where would these hands come from? The Indians could be captured and forced to work as slaves but escaping was easy, and in such cases they had the unpleasant habit of returning to their tribes and returning to remove their former master’s scalp in lieu of severance pay. Hence the governor of New Amsterdam (the city founded by the Dutch, which later became New York after passing to the English Crown) issued an order, much to the displeasure of those who hoped to gain massive profits in double-quick time, that native Americans had be paid a salary.

Thus there commenced a propaganda campaign amongst European workers (there weren’t enough convicts) conducted mainly in the British Isles but also in Germany, where William Penn, the magnate who would found Pennsylvania, would go on his preaching tour. In fact enticing people to leave wasn’t that difficult: in England in the 1600s most workers were living in the direst poverty, in conditions which were as desperate as much from the health point of view as from hunger, which perpetually haunted them. The worker was also subject to laws which, in substance if not in form, treated them like slaves: there was a maximum but no minimum wage; the worker wasn’t allowed to abandon his employer at will, and there were stringent penalties for ‘vagabondage’, that is to say, the measures directed against those peasants who, deprived of their land, hadn’t immediately flocked in to join the city slums; and, of course, it was strictly forbidden to ‘conspire’ with other workers to defend oneself against the rapacity of the employers. In the other European countries capitalism was less developed, but continuous wars, big and small, made life just as unpleasant over most of the continent.

Therefore the propaganda was lent a willing ear. The cost of the voyage, however, at £.6 to £.10, represented an enormous sum for a proletarian and it was simply too much. Thus there developed the system of contract servitude known as indentured labour. By this means the individual who embarked for the New World would serve as a bonded labourer for a number of years, usually from two to seven, but generally the latter. During this time he would receive no pay and was prohibited from abandoning his place of work. He did however have the right to be fed and lodged and to receive an indemnity at the end of his service, supposedly enough to start a new independent life when the contract expired, and even enable him, maybe, to go out and exploit indentured labour himself. That was the theory anyway but the reality wasn’t quite so rosy. One study shows that only 20% of indentured servants actually managed to settle a piece of land or become an artisan. None of them struck it rich because the all of the wealth was flowing into the hands of the big landowners and merchants, and it was they who became richer and richer during the colonial period. The other less fortunate 80% might simply die (many of them), return to England or else end up amongst the mass of poor whites, who lived from hand to mouth, sleeping where they could, without property (and therefore without a vote), and without any prospects.

The contracts were drawn up at the point of embarkation and retained by the ship’s captain, who sold them on arrival in America to recuperate the cost of the voyage and to derive an ample profit. To take advantage of this business companies soon set up branches in the two biggest settlements on the East coast, namely, the Massachusetts Company of New England, run by puritans who soon made it independent from London, and the Virginia Company, which instead continued to depend directly on the mother country. The puritans of Massachusetts, who were anxious to preserve their community’s religious and moral purity, were suspicious of this influx of people of not always exemplary morality; besides which it was mainly free men, who could afford the cost of their passage, who went by preference to New England. Indentured labour, on the other hand, was the principal source of labour power in the Centre (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) and particularly in the South (the colonies of Virginia and Maryland to begin with, then the Carolinas), at least until the end of the 17^th century.

Another aspect of the journey about which the emigrants were generally ignorant concerned the voyage itself; like the slaves making a similar, if longer, journey in identical ships many would die before reaching their destination. Conditions below decks were terrible, and amongst the things that had to be contended with were terrible hygiene, excessive promiscuity, sickness, food that was rotten and inevitably in short supply, and contaminated water. Survivors would tell how to keep from starving they had to eat mice and rats, which were bought and sold on board ship. There were even cases of cannibalism on journeys that turned out to be longer than expected. And on top of it all the survivors were often compelled to pay the travel costs of their deceased shipmates, paying the ship’s captain in the form of additional years of service.

Emigration to the New World guaranteed a constant flow of English paupers along with a lesser number of Germans, Irish and other nationalities. By 1770, along with half a million African slaves, a quarter of a million indentured servants had arrived in America and at least 100,000 of them had been transported against their will (either as convicts or kidnapped in their home port, the latter often children, who were captured in the cities of Great Britain in much the same way as the slaves in Africa, who would end up dying like flies). This means that at the time of the War of Independence out of the 2.5 million inhabitants, most of whom were farmers, the vast majority of the labour force was unfree. In the South, slaves soon replaced white servants: they didn’t go off when their contracts expired (nor would they have known where to go) and they cost half as much to maintain.

This wasn’t actually the case to begin with. Even if brought to America by force, it seems that the Africans as well were also indentured servants, freed when their contract expired. Thus the number of free Africans in the South was by no means insignificant even before the Civil War. Only around 1660 did the Slave Codes start to take effect in various colonies, laws which transformed servants into slaves: henceforth children born to slaves became the property of the mother’s owner, and for two centuries the slaves were deprived of their rights as free men (to meet and to vote, standing as witness, freedom of movement, right to bear arms, etc).

Mind you, the white servants weren’t much better off, on the contrary, some maintain that their situation was even worse. In fact a master, who was interested in keeping his slaves healthy since they constituted his capital and would remain such for the rest of their lives, might not be interested in the health of his servants, who would sooner or later leave; and for whom, if crippled, blind or ill on the expiry of their contract, the master wasn’t held responsible. A similar destiny, by the way, might easily befall those apprentices who, ending up with a greedy or cruel master, were exposed to dangers, harsh punishments and malnutrition and might not even end up learning a trade. Servants who married without their master’s permission were punished as adulterers, and their children deemed to be bastards.

From the 18^th century onwards, England, whose incredible economic ascent had begun, put severe restrictions on emigration to ensure there was sufficient manpower for its own nascent manufacturing industry. Thus, throughout the 1700s, waves of immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, including significant numbers of skilled craftsmen, would supplement the Anglo-Saxon elements disembarking on the Atlantic coast. In general, a new system of servitude known as the ‘redemptioner’ system was used. This was characterised by variable lengths of service according to the servant’s qualifications and skills, the nature of the job and related to the consequent length of time required to accumulate the sum necessary for him to redeem himself from servitude. These variations meant many different types of servant would arise with an overall tendency toward prolongation of the duration of contracts (often because many of these emigrants brought their families with them) but without altogether ruling out the possibility, which had attracted so many of these emigrants in the first place, that one day they would own a piece of land and be able to work it on their own account.

Without the system of bonded labour, however arbitrary and harsh it may have been, the colonies in the Centre and the South would have found it very difficult to get properly established.

At the mercy of their masters, who could be extremely cruel, servants would often abscond, whites and blacks frequently running off together to live with the nearest Native American tribe. The chronicles also tell of organised revolts by white servants, such as the one in Virginia in 1661-62 and the famous Bacon Rebellion, also in Virginia, in 1676, when the rebellion would include white servants, slaves and emancipated slaves, and small farmers. At least 40 revolts have been documented during the colonial period alone. Of these both the one around Charleston in 1730, which was particularly widespread, and the Stono Rebellion nine years later, also in the Charleston area, were both slave revolts. In the course of the latter, more than 200 slaves burned down houses and killed various slave-owners, sparing only those who had treated them decently. They had managed to obtain firearms, but before their march to freedom – which they sought in Florida – was concluded, they were overpowered and massacred by the white militia. This rebellion would endure long memory of the Southern slave holders giving them sleepless nights for many years to come.

Despite the laws outlawing them, there are numerous reports too of these labourers going on strike to obtain better living and working conditions. It was common for the white semi-slaves to run away; the punishment, along with flogging and other physical punishments, was an extension of their period of servitude. In the case of a revolt, which also occurred in the North (notably the one in New York in 1741, in which blacks and whites fought side by side) repression was ruthless. But brutal repression and exemplary punishments didn’t remove the danger of insurrections, which arose out of the real conditions of these first forced proletarians, and some concessions would eventually be made around food and clothing, etc. In the North, in any case, where slavery had never really suited the bourgeoisie, fear of slave revolts spread to all classes and many began to propose that slaves be substituted with free workers.

In Virginia, on the other hand, where forced labour suited the planters very well, the constant fraternisation of these workers across the divide of skin colour began to be viewed as extremely worrying, and they decided to take measures to combat it. In 1705 a law was passed that notably improved the condition of the white servant, the main measure being an improvement in the endowment the master had to render on termination of the contract (provisions, money and a gun); an endowment which had dropped considerably from the 1681 level: in fact up until that point 50 acres of land had been allotted as well. And it is from this period that we can trace the birth of a phenomenon which would be assiduously cultivated by the ruling class over the century that followed, racism; a sentiment which was actively propagated amongst the lowest strata of the white proletariat, corrupting them with a few miserable privileges which allowed them to feel somehow superior to their coloured co-workers and giving them cause to fear their own possible decline into a condition even worse than their own.

The servants had more rights than the African slave: as well being allowed to stand witness they had legal status and could take legal action. They therefore had a real prospect of being fully integrated into society with full rights. It was for this reason that workers of this type continued to flood into the Colonies, amounting to half of all emigrants before Independence. African slaves were utilised as workers in workshops and shipyards, usually hired out for a number of months or years to the industrial capitalist. But there was still a growing need for free labourers, above all in the North. Indeed if slave labour was economical convenient on the plantations, where there was work to be done throughout the year, this wasn’t the case in industry where the requirement for labour suffered from extreme seasonal oscillations. If servants and slaves both had to be fed, clothed and housed even in the off-season, the free labourer could simply be sacked. And, as we have seen, slaves and servants represented capital, which was lost if they took themselves off. Clearly great advantages attached to free labour, as Adam Smith would himself admit in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

The Eighteenth Century: Birth of the Urban Proletariat

Whereas in the Colonies of the North an economy was forming based mainly on small commercial production, essentially agricultural and craft based, with a few exceptions such as the shipbuilding and construction industry, those in the South were developing the system of great plantations which required a large and ever growing mass of labourers. In order to satisfy the demand for labour, which the influx from Europe was unable to satisfy, it was necessary to obtain immigrants from elsewhere. Alongside the white component there started to appear, from the second half of the 1600s, the African slave. The indigenous peoples, as had already become evident in the colonies of Latin America, had proved not to be suitable as slaves for numerous reasons. Not that this prevented them from being enslaved, and in 1730 25% of slaves were in fact Native Americans.

The Black slaves were forcibly imported from Africa by the Royal African Company (the first ever shipment – of 20 – were put ashore and sold by a Dutch man-o’-war in 1619), and the South’s vital need to ensure itself a massive supply of labour would predispose it to frame the previously mentioned Slave Codes, which differentiated the figure of the African slave from that of the white servant by gradually increasing the formers obligations until their period of service became virtually unlimited. Africans, after all, were always involuntary immigrants, and it wasn’t therefore necessary to treat them well to encourage others to follow in their footsteps: their bondage was permanent, not just limited to a few years; usually they were non-Christians; it was convenient to treat them as non-citizens, without the concomitant citizen’s rights; finally, the colour of their skin set them apart and made it easy to the implement the Slave Codes. Thus did slavery, in its North American guise, come into being.

The greatest concentrations of African slaves became localized in the tobacco plantations of Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland and in the rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina and Georgia. The working conditions of the black slaves were obviously harsh, but they weren’t that much better for the whites, who were subjected to severe restrictions even though officially ‘free’. Labour was regulated by ancient English laws which restricted the mobility of labourers, who had no power over their contracts, not even whether they worked or not. There was therefore the obligation to work, prices and wages were fixed by local laws, and both masters and servants were prohibited from making any adjustments to them. The period for apprenticeships was fixed at seven years, and often taking up another trade was prohibited as well.

But the regulations could not stop economic development, only slow it up.

In the mostly self-sufficient communities of New England the quality of craft production was deteriorating: in fact with so much land available it was very easy for badly treated workers to simply abandon their trade and become independent farmers. Thus rustic craft production arose, with the peasant farmer in the little puritan villages turning his hand to pretty much anything during the long boring winters.

From the beginning of the 18^th century, as the villages expanded into cities and as a certain specialisation of labour, favoured by generally high levels of education, became justifiable, the crafts began to assume greater importance. Whilst European products were still those most in demand, artisans and craftsmen started to be needed again, above all in the cities of the Centre and the North. The South, meanwhile, remained predominantly autarchic and rural.

Immigration started to rise again, part of which was composed of artisans who unlike indentured servants paid their own passage, and who often brought with them a small nest egg with which to set up in business in an environment which promised a lot more than their mother country. Naturally enough the first types of organisation formed by these craft workers were identical to the ones they had left behind in Europe, namely the guilds. Already in 1648 the coopers and cobblers of Boston had organised themselves in such a way, with the declared aim of establishing strict professional rules and thus of maintaining a craft monopoly within a few hands. Setting rates of pay and establishing the rules governing apprenticeship, the guilds only really developed in the great cities of the Central North, and even there it was with difficulty due to the social fluidity of the New World. The bakers came to an agreement amongst themselves to refuse to make bread, given the cost of flour, if official prices fell too low: and this led, in 1741, to what is held to be the first strike in American history. But in fact it wasn’t so much a fight between workers and bosses as a reaction by artisans and small masters against the regulation of prices by the authorities.

In fact, on the few occasions that workers acted in their own interests and took action seperately from the masters and master craftsmen, it was almost always prompted by a wish to eliminate competition from black labour, whether slave or free. What they achieved, or caused, was the abolition of slavery in the Centre-North. In the South, on the other hand, where the black population was far more numerous, they only succeeded in excluding the latter from the highly specialised trades.

Another struggle that left its mark on the chronicles of colonial America is that of the black chimney-sweeps of Charleston in 1761. Contemporary accounts relate, rather peevishly, that, “they had the nerve, after reaching an agreement amongst themselves, to increase the normal rates, and to turn down work if their exorbitant demands were not satisfied”. The slaves on the plantations could not, of course, resort to such measures; for them, same as for the indentured servants, the only effective form of protest was collective rebellion, it was either that or running away. The newspapers of the period give full and detailed accounts of the dramatic results of both these choices. Slave rebellions were nevertheless rare before the 18^th century, although becoming more frequent later on as the number of slaves increased, as they became more familiar with the environment increased and as better communications became established.

Following the events described above, relating to the first century of slavery, there was an explosion of revolts in the crisis-ridden period which led up to the colonial rebellion and independence. These took place from 1765 onward, in the wake of an extremely hard fought rebellion in Jamaica in 1760 (which the authorities only managed to repress with much difficulty) and of other rebellions which would tear through the Caribbean like a hurricane over the ensuing years.

Thus the slaves in the North American colonies would take advantage of the growing rift between the imperial and colonial ruling classes and revolts would break out pretty much everywhere: in Virginia (1767), New Jersey (1772), South Carolina and Massachusetts (1774), New York, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina (1775), and South Carolina (1776).

The Working Class Before Independence

Summing up the key characteristics of the proletariat in America in the period before Independence isn’t easy. Certainly there was an enormous difference between the standard of living of the Black slave on the plantations and the specialised worker in the Northern cities. The difference was such, indeed, that it would be perpetuated for a long time to come and become a defining characteristic of American society. But even amongst the free workers there existed a heterogeneity linked to geographical origin, class, race, religion, to the various types of proletarian employment and to the uneven economic development in the various parts of the country, which, along with the notable distances between the cities and the difficulties of communication, made it difficult for class consciousness to emerge. Such was also the case in the cities in which, in the seventeen hundreds, the various types of worker started to congregate.

A second important characteristic of American society at the time was its contiguity with the agrarian world; a world in which land wasn’t an object of speculation as in contemporary Europe but where it was there for the taking, for whoever wanted it.

A third feature, linked to the preceding ones, which distinguished the North American environment from the European was the relatively high lwages paid to the free workers. Despite repeated attempts to regulate wages, these still remained between around 30 and 200% higher than in England; and this was the case from the very beginning: even in 1639 there were complaints that if wages weren’t lowered, “the servants will become masters, and the masters servants”. But it was not just the remunerative side of things that European travellers would remark upon. They would also have cause to note, often with barely concealed disgust, the extreme familiarity between employees and bosses; this, too, an American peculiarity which would endure until the birth of large scale industry, and indeed, in a certain sense, one which has been customary amongst ‘yanks’ up to the present day.

But the life of the wage earner in colonial America certainly wasn’t all sweetness and light. The comparison above, as well as being made with the awful conditions of the European wage earner of the time, only held good when there actually was work. During periods of unemployment the worker was often unable to prevent his children from starving, or himself from ending up in jail. Real wages were often reduced by a high rate of inflation as well. If prices dropped the courts would order the workers to accept a proportional reduction in wages, if they rose, the same courts would set a cap on wages; and to ask for a raise was to risk being punished with a hefty fine, something which was far from uncommon during periods of economic upturn, or in the sparsely populated towns. If on the other hand the bosses offered more, in order to attract labour, it was still the workers who were punished by the courts. The employers’ associations, who would display a level of hypocrisy that would come to define the American bourgeoisie, maintained that such measures served to ‘save the American worker from himself’, it being taken as said that the worker, with money in his pocket and a bit of free time, would inevitably engage in activities which were ruinous to his physical and moral health.

Strikes and trade unions were strictly prohibited under laws dating back to 14^th century England, (we will see how it was not until the 1720s that the legal obstacles to the workers’ economic struggles were removed, although the bourgeoisie would still be able to count on the continuing support of the judiciary, the police, the national guard, the army and private police forces in their battles against the workers, and moreover to a greater degree than normal in the Western democracies). This prohibition has been described by an English historian as a conspiracy of the bourgeoisie and the public powers to keep the proletariat in its place and in a state of permanent poverty. Adam Smith himself would confirm that “whenever the government attempts to deal with the conflict between masters and workers, its counsellors are always the masters”. And he added: “There are no laws preventing agreements to lower the price of labour, but a great number that prevent any agreement to raise it”.

Of the actual struggles that took place between free proletarians and masters very little is known, both because not many of them occurred and because contemporary accounts are somewhat reticent. In 1636 a Maine ship owner announced that his workers and sailors had “mutinied” because he hadn’t paid their wages: the struggle took the form of a mass walk out. Five years later, also in Maine, we hear about carpenters engaging in a work-to-rule, protesting about the lack of food. Still in the same period there is the first lock-out in American history, when a Gloucester ship owner ordered his determinedly combative workers to stop work and take themselves off.

The first sector to be industrialised, and consequently to have a working class which to a certain degree was concentrated in one place, was the ship yards, and it was here that the trial of strength of the nascent North American bourgeoisie with its English and Dutch competitors would commence. Although carpenters predominated, it was an industry in which most types of craftsmen were required. Wage labour however was slow to develop within the remaining crafts and areas of production. The manufacture of consumer products was the prerogative of lone artisans, who would work from home and occasionally emerge to sell what they had produced in the surrounding countryside, or exchange it for agricultural products, either for personal consumption or to sell in the towns. There wasn’t really much of a market to speak of: every farm was highly self-sufficient and amongst the roles performed within the peasant household were those of carpenter, spinner, weaver, candle-maker, shoemaker and smith. Leaving aside the crafts based in the shipyards the skills most in demand were those relating to mills and foundries, to barrel-making and saddle-making, to carriage building and to the manufacture of metal and glass objects.

As demand rose, the artisan found he could only increase his output by associating his activity with the labour of others. For £.10 to £.20 he could purchase a contract servant, and have him work for seven years or so in exchange for board and lodging and a few items of clothing. Although acquiring or hiring an African slave was a possible alternative we have already seen how in actual fact it was the free labourer who would come to replace the contract servant, especially in the Central North.

Given the composition of the labour force, the trade union agitations of the seventeen hundreds consisted more than anything of lock-outs of artisans demanding better retribution for their independent labour: thus was the case in 1684 for the New York street cleaners, in 1741 for the caulkers in Boston, and in 1770 for the coopers in New York. In the case of the latter they would be tried and ordered to pay heavy fines and the ones working for the local authority were sacked. Historians generally refer to the Philadelphia Printers’ Strike in 1784 as the first real strike of wage earners in North America; but there was also a struggle that took place in the colonial period, that of the New York tailors in 1768, which could also credibly claim that distinction.

We cannot as yet say that permanent trade unions existed. Specialised workers continued to meet in societies they shared with master artisans and small masters. These were mutual aid societies that only rarely concerned themselves with wages and hours; and if they did, it was only to plead for better laws, often with corporative objectives.

But workers were in great demand, and a clear sign of this is the number of advertisements for skilled workers. The earliest ones date from 1715, whereas we have to wait until 1770 before the first employment bureau is founded, in New York City.

Thus did the American working class arise, fostered by the decline of indentured labour and by the arrival of free workers from Europe. From the very start these workers would fall into two clearly defined groups: the specialised workers, equipped with a trade learnt in an artisan’s workshop and with specialised tools, and the manual labourers, the non-specialised, who neither possessed the knowledge nor the ability relative to a given trade, and who had their muscle power alone to sell.

The following short articles, designed to be distributed as leaflets, and translated from Italian into several other languages so as to be accessible to immigrant workers, situate the issue of race where it belongs: squarely within the context of the international working class struggle against capitalism. The first was written in response to a revolt of immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno in the South of Italy. Rising anger about appalling working and living conditions finally erupted after two immigrant farm workers were subjected to a random airgun attack in early January 2010.

The second leaflet takes up the same theme in a more general way, and was distributed on March 1^st 2010 at a demonstration in Italy called in defence of the rights and conditions of immigrant workers.
 

A question of Class and Class struggle, not Race!

The immigrant farm workers have proved they can contain their anger no longer. Their explosive demonstration is a body blow to the apologists of the ‘progressive nature’ of capitalism. Their strike that exploded on the streets of Rosarno, for such indeed it was, wasn’t an episode in a racial war but a battle between the two opposed sides in a class war; a typical seasonal farm workers’ struggle bearing all the same tumultuous features of its centuries-old history. On one side stands a strata of completely proletarian wage-earners who, like the rest of their class, have nothing to lose and no country, whilst on the other side stand the landowners and the agrarian capitalists, with their state, their police and armed janissaries; whilst on the trees the ripening fruit waits to be harvested.

Just the fact of the class sticking up for itself was enough to terrorise the bourgeoisie and get all of its hired thugs to make a hasty exit.

Yes, certainly the farmworkers’ living and working conditions were ‘fit for slaves’, and their pay miniscule, as the bourgeois bleeding hearts have not been slow to point out. But such conditions are, in fact, the usual lot of the casual labourer. Starvation wages and unbearably long hours are normal and inevitable for workers under capitalism; as much the case now in capitalism’s decline and death throes as during its ascent in the eighteenth century. Is the condition of the young part-time worker in the ‘rich North’ really any better, even though they’re white Italian citizens? Do they earn more than the 30 euros a day that ‘the Negro’ gets? Aren’t they sacked without warning and without back pay as well, whenever the boss can get away it?

Racism, the fruit of a dirty campaign skilfully organised by the bourgeois regime’s clever tricks department, is the required instrument to divide the working class front. The other major rift is the one lying between old workers in ‘permanent’ jobs and young workers who are deprived of any protection or security. It isn’t a matter of fighting racism with anti-racism, of ‘integrating them’ into ‘our’ society, but of integrating them into our class and into our struggles. And clearly it is the Italian workers who need to be integrated, not the immigrant farmworkers!

Not a hint of this simple truth can be detected in the pronouncements of the regime unions. There is not a mention of it in either the FIOM or the RdB documents.

Everything is blamed on ‘local criminality’, as if instead of the problem being inevitable in capitalist society it was a question of ‘public order’, or was the result of a particular type of ‘immorality’ against which the workers should concentrate their efforts, side by side with the ‘honest’ bourgeois, of course, to make their state function better. The working class must fight against the bourgeois state not seek to ‘improve’ it. And indeed the ‘ndrangheta’ would be hard put to squeeze the workers any more than the state is already doing on behalf of the bourgeoisie.

The real responsibility for the harsh conditions of the farm workers and illegal immigrants in general is certainly to be ascribed to the discriminatory laws of the bourgeois state, who divide workers according to their passports. But this has only been possible because the regime’s unions, the Cgil-Cisl-Uil-Ugl, have never opposed this divide and rule tactic, and have done nothing for the great mass of workers forced into illegality. The defence of the working class includes the struggle to defend its weakest and most vulnerable elements, something that is necessary to oppose the bourgeois organisation of blackleggery by the utilisation of the most blackmailable and lowest paid workers, whether temporary workers or immigrants. The unions have abandoned the ‘illegal’ immigrants to the same degree they have accepted the ‘regularisation’ of temporary work, because they are unions which are betrayers of the working class as a whole. The common organisation of every type of wage worker and a joint trade union fight for common objectives, with the mobilisation and strength which the full timers would bring, would defend these particularly vulnerable workers and also the new generation of workers.

The anti-racists, who organise the immigrants as immigrants instead of alongside the Italian workers, regard racism as a kind of illness from which present society needs to be cured whilst we regard it as a weapon of the bourgeoisie in its permanent war against the working class. With its weak and moralizing tone, anti-racism is an expression of the petty bourgeois thinking which is totally extraneous to the working class. It is an anti-racism which does nothing to tackle the underlying causes of racism.

The more the conditions of workers of every nationality, race and trade come to resemble each other, the easier and more urgent will it become for them to reorganise as a unitary fighting trade union and for them to recover the old perspective of a common emancipation.

With that in mind we address the class – of Rosarno, and everywhere else in the world – and invite them to proclaim, along with us their, and our, one instruction: Workers of the world unite!

Throughout Europe the bosses and the various bourgeois governments are attacking the workers’ living standards, because increasing their exploitation of the working class is the only way they can keep the capitalist economy, inexorably heading towards a crash, afloat.

In ensure the success of these attacks the bourgeoisie is using every means at its disposal to divide the working class.

Racism, which is being cynically propagated in the media, is a weapon used by the bosses to divide the workers, as indeed is part-time work, the subcontracting of work by companies to external agencies, the split between old ‘guaranteed’ workers and young workers without any job security or protection, the competition between workers of various agencies and firms due to the progressive dismantling of national wage negotiations, and the competition between public sector workers and those employed by private companies.

The more the Italian workers neglect immigrant workers the more they weaken themselves and lay themselves open to being blackmailed by their bosses; the more they are forced to accept lower wages and worse working conditions; the more the competition between workers exerts its crippling effect. The true struggle of the working class corresponds with the defence of those most prone to blackmail: by fighting for them, the workers who are relatively less exploited defend themselves from a competitive downward pressure being exerted on their own terms and conditions.

It is in the interest of the entire working class to fight to see immigrant workers relieved from the threat of losing their residence permits if they are laid off and for an extension of the right of citizenship to their families.

It is likewise in the interest of the entire working class to fight the blackmail of unemployment by struggling, employed and unemployed together, for the reduction of working hours and for the right to full pay for workers who are laid off; to prevent suppliers of contract labour who employ workers on worse terms and conditions from entering the factory or workplace; to prevent the hiring of workers on short-term, lower paid contracts; and to defend the national contract for each trade.

In order to defend itself from the effects of the crisis and from the increasingly harsh attacks by the bosses, the working class needs a genuine working-class union which, setting out from its struggles in the workshop, factory, company and trade, addresses itself directly to the workers and prepares them to mobilise together for a general strike, for as long as necessary and in pursuit of clear objectives, namely: against sackings, for unemployment pay related to the cost of living, for the defence of national bargaining and contracts, for rights of citizenship for immigrant workers and their families, for the reduction of working hours without a reduction in wages. These have been the objectives of the working class movement throughout its existence and they are based on the principle that defending the working class means eliminating competition from lower paid workers, which includes immigrant and unemployed workers. Such objectives can only be attained by a general movement, organised and led by a true working class union.

Rebuilding such a trade union is therefore an unavoidable question for the entire working class. Today it could emerge from a unification of rank-and-file trade unionism, which for many years has been struggling amidst countless difficulties against the bosses and the regime unions, unreservedly taking up the cause of the immigrant workers as the cause of all workers. But this unification can only emerge ‘from below’, overcoming sectarianism and the career politicking of the present leaders. It is therefore incumbent on the most combative and far-seeing workers and delegates in all the trade unions to organise themselves within their respective organisations to combat the serious damage being caused by the current divisions within rank-and-file trade unionism.

Racism isn’t an illness from which capitalism can be cured. Fighting racism with anti-racism, on the abstract plane of morality and respect for different cultures, is not just ineffective but dangerous, since it attacks none of racism’s material foundations. The only truely anti-racist struggle is the class struggle, because it unifies workers beyond race and nationality, and because it leads them to pass beyond capitalism to communist society; a society free from the slavery of wage labour, and the only material basis possible for the elimination of exploitation, racism and all the other reactionary ideologies of this increasingly inhuman and anti-historical society.

Every defence of national and company interests is a defence of capital’s interests.
The old world must give birth to Communism but only the workers struggle can make it happen.

[In September and October 2010, a massive wave of strikes and demonstrations swept through France to oppose the government’s latest attack on worker’s living standards. This leaflet, translated into English, was produced by our Parisian comrades and speaks for itself]

Workers!

You are told the State is massively in debt (to the tune of E.1,500 Billion), that the Office administering benefits and pensions has an appalling deficit and that you must therefore make sacrifices to save the system. Notably to accept you have to work longer for a smaller pension.

The reality is that the capitalist system is an economic system which is outmoded and parasitic. This miserable system which relies on the mean and despicable exploitation of wage labour, just as feudalism uses to rely on the exploitation of serf labour, has become a hindrance to humanity’s future development. It has only survived up to now thanks to two world wars.

Ever since 1975 the capitalist economy has experienced cycles of expansion and recession every 5 to 10 years. That is to say that every 5-10 years there is a recession which lasts on average two years. After the cycle before last, which ended in 2000, and the recession which followed it, industrial growth in the European States and in North America has virtually ground to a halt: 1% average annual growth in the USA between 2000-2007; 0.47% in Japan; 0.5% in France; -0.6% in England; -0.2% in Italy. Germany is the only exception with growth over the same period of 2.3%.

With each recession “les prélèvements obligatoires ” (equivalent to National Insurance contributions in England) decrease and the deficit in the social security budget continues to rise to astronomical levels, not to mention all the exemptions from charges allowed to the bosses. And what does the future hold? In 2009 the world approached a recession of 1929-like proportions, a situation only avoided by getting further into debt. As for China, which shows us prodigious, although slightly embellished, figures for industrial growth, its current expansion is due to State investments of several billion dollars and a huge extension of credit. About half of this credit is used for speculative purposes. We can therefore say that China, just like Europe and the United States, is faced with a situation of over-production.

How does the bourgeoisie ensure the survival of this economic system which guarantees it its class privileges? By putting pressure on the proletariat, by keeping unemployment levels high so it can exert a downward pressure on wages, by replacing long-term with short-term contracts by making work more ‘flexible’ and by increasing workloads, etc, etc.

The upshot is poverty on the one hand (according to INSEE – the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques – 13.5% of the French population are living on less than E.850 per month) and immense wealth and parasitism on the other. And these measures, which for thirty years now have been applied as much by governments of the ‘left’ as of the ‘right’, how effective in fact are they? Have they actually brought about economic recovery? No! The only result has been the massive growth of a stratum of parasites (CEOs, shareholders, speculators) and States and private individuals getting into ever greater debt.

We are on the eve of a new crisis of over production deeper even than the Great Crash of 1929. The capitalist system came within a hair’s breadth of it in 2009 and avoided it only by getting even deeper in debt. And now it’s you they want to bail the system out!

And the measures proposed by the government, do you think they will solve the problem? Probably not, because they are totally ridiculous! They presuppose the assumption that the rate of unemployment can be brought down to 4.5% of the active population, and that this would result in a sufficient surplus to plug the hole in unemployment benefit funding. They must be joking! Since the 1980s, according to INSEE, unemployment has never dropped below 9%. And of course the INSEE’s unemployment figures, just like its inflation figures, are government figures, and thus rigged in the interests of propaganda. Basing our own figure on those of working age, and on those who actually have a job, one can arrive at a far more accurate figure: 5 million out of work before 2007, and almost 7 million today. As for the rate of growth in industrial production (along with agriculture the basis of all wealth) we already know it was virtually zero in the period which preceded the recession. That is why these measures really are not viable. Now they just want you to work until you are 62, but in a couple of years time, if the crisis hasn’t hit before then, they’ll want you to work until you’re 65, and then 67!

Why should we make sacrifices when the annual production of wealth per inhabitant is higher today than it was ten years ago and much higher than 20 or 30 years ago? Should we do so to save an economic system which is based on exploiting wage labour, and guaranteeing the privileges of a tiny minority of parasites?

We do well to remember the Moulinex workers, who accepted anything and everything to prevent the closure of their factories and ended up losing their jobs anyway.

The big industrial and financial bourgeoisie and its government are preparing a whole ‘tranche’ of austerity measures to get you to pay for the crisis.

Meanwhile there is a solution: Communism! Capitalism has now developed the economic basis for communism on a massive and global scale, but it has had its day. All production is now already organised collectively and is centralised. The means of production now require social organisation. Lone individuals are no longer able to control them and utilise them as was the case in the days of the artisan. The workers no longer own what they produce as their personal property or own their means of production. There is a contradictionbetween this economic base and capitalism’s mercantile relations of production.

This is why it is necessary to oppose the bourgeoisie and its State by rejecting its so-called ‘reforms’ and its austerity measures.

This must be done at first on the economic level by means of trade union struggle; in the process rediscovering the sense of solidarity and brotherhood between fellow workers by overcoming professional, racial and age divisions, and by rejecting the defence of national or company interests; capital’s interests in other words.

For this it will be necessary to set up a trade union that defends class interests; a union which, unlike the class collaborationist organisations such as the CGT, CFDT, and FO, won’t organise workers on the basis of job category but will rather try to overcome all divisions; a union which won’t hesitate to initiate radical struggles which go beyond company and regional boundaries; a union which will try to organise general strikes on a national scale and, when the moment arrives, on an international scale as well.

But to go beyond this economic system, which is leading us all to disaster, an organisation which fights economic battles will not be enough. It will be necessary to organise on the political level as well in order to overthrow the power of the big industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie and expropriate it. There is no other way.

For this you will need to enrol in the ranks of your party, the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST PARTY, which keeps itself firmly anchored in the programmatic foundations of revolutionary communism, and whose aim is to abolish capitalist relations of production (capital and wage labour) to allow a communist society to freely develop.

The old world must give birth to communism but only the workers’ struggle can make it happen.
 

Following the recent emergency budget in the UK, which outlines the government’s proposals for major cuts in welfare benefits, social services and in other state spending, there has been a remorseless campaign in the capitalist media to enforce their acceptance, which can be summed up in the oft repeated mantra: ‘the cuts are necessary; the cuts are necessary; the cuts are necessary’.

Once again we are being told that the ‘bitter pill’ of austerity and sacrifice must be swallowed to restore ‘the nation’s finances’ to ‘health’. But it appears not all will share the burden, and indeed an especial source of anger is the fact that the banking elite, recently baled out to the tune of billions of pounds from State income, is already back to awarding itself massive multi-million pound bonuses. Given that, and the palpable sense of injustice it has provoked, the proletariat this time round might not be quite so happy paying for the crisis. And the direct attacks on the wages of those in work, already suffering significant pay cuts along with an intensification of labour, is now to be compounded by an attack on the reserve army of labour – the unemployed and the sick, already condemned to a poverty-stricken half-life on the margins of society.

Discontent is already bubbling to the surface, but unfortunately the recent industrial action in the underground about staff cuts and rising discontent in the Public Sector has not met with a very robust response at the recent Trades Union Congress, which has merely come up with a few soporific measures to try and contain the situation, consisting of the same tired old remedy of ‘lobbying MPs’ and of course the obligatory ‘demo’; on this occasion postponed for six months until March 2011. No one can accuse the TUC of striking when the iron is hot!

An example of the proposed attacks by the Government on the unemployed is the introduction of a cut in Housing Benefits to 90% of full entitlement if a claimant is unable to find a job within a year of first signing on. This reduced payment is a truly harsh measure which effectively blackmails the unemployed into taking any job at all, even with dire working conditions and pay, rather than risk losing their accommodation and ending up on the streets.

The State’s campaign to cut the welfare bill will also attack the sick by extending the definition of those deemed ‘capable of work’ to large sections of those suffering from one type of illness or another. The government has set a target of half-a-million of those currently on Incapacity Benefit to be redefined as fit-for-work. The way this is being accomplished is by incorporating Income Support (sickness benefit) and Incapacity Benefit into a new benefit called Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) for which claimants will have to be reassessed. To re-qualify for ESA, current claimants will be asked to attend gruelling ‘medicals’, conducted by stony-faced interrogators, who are often very intimidating and have anything other than what can be described as a ‘bedside manner’. The new questionnaire is evidently designed to redefine people hitherto defined as ‘sick’ as ‘capable of (some form of) work’, despite the fact that most of this group will only be able to perform the most specialised jobs, in specialised settings and for specific periods of time, and will be competing against other workers in the job market who will be deemed by employers t be less of a risk.

Those claimants who are redefined as ‘capable of work’ then have to abide by the same regime as the rest of the unemployed.

Those already signing on as unemployed are finding themselves under increasing pressure to find work by the Job Centres. The latter, and the various companies to whom the Job Centres sub-contract the work, keep benefit claimants busy by filling in endless, often conspicuously short, CVs, and by sending their ‘customers’ off on various pointless ‘work placements’, which generally lead precisely nowhere for the individuals concerned: as often as not they find, at the end of a work placement into which they entered in the expectation of possible paid work at the end of it, that they are suddenly replaced by a new batch of unemployed hopefuls, and the realisation dawns that the have been used as cheap, nay free, labour.

Another indignity the unemployed have to put up with is the risk of being ‘sanctioned’. This consists of a reduction in benefit which is imposed, amongst other reasons, if the clamant is held to be not ‘putting his back into applying for work’ (the efforts made have to be evidenced and documented), or not attending at the designated time to ‘sign on’ for the benefit and declare oneself ‘available for work’, with or without good reason. This ‘sanction’ not only results in basic benefits being stopped but has a knock on effect on housing and council tax benefits, since the departments that administer these benefits are automatically informed of the claimant’s ‘change of circumstances’ arising from the sanction, with these latter benefits being abruptly withdrawn, producing consequent worry about rent and irate landlords. And now many of the charities and agencies, funded largely by the State, who currently help the unemployed unravel these various paperwork trails and to launch appeals are themselves at risk from the threatened cuts.

So, the unemployed, now forced to compete not only with each other but with the new influx of those previously designated as sick and incapable of work, will be especially hard hit. And those who do end up in employment will find, as often as not, that they are working for virtually the same amounts they received when on benefits! After jumping through all the hoops and straining every nerve to find a job, it is surely small comfort for these workers to find they still remain trapped in poverty.

The TUC’s position on the Unemployed

So what attempts to organise the unemployed have been made over recent years? A very revealing insight is given in an article, available on the internet, entitled ‘Why I resigned from the TUC’s ‘Consultative’ Committee of Unemployed Workers Centres’.

We note first that Unemployment Centres arose in the 1980s, during an earlier time of especially high unemployment, and that they sprang up all over the country and numbered 150 at their height, eve if by 2009 merely 50 remained.

These were useful up to a point by breaking down isolation amongst the unemployed, and by providing some support and advice around benefits along with a limited sense of solidarity in the best of cases. But these centres are certainly not a universal panacea, and our stance is that the most important organisational factor is that which enables the unemployed to be organised alongside the employed, and that this should be a core priority of any trade union which claims to have a classist outlook.

The running of these unemployed workers centres has varied in different parts of the country. The unemployed centre in Liverpool was run largely as a business enterprise, mainly as a Conference Centre, and definitely not for the unemployed. The tough management stance there would actually lead to industrial action by the cleaning staff. Indeed, the person who organised the cleaning staff (against management) was barred from the centre – and the police were subsequently called in to escort him out of centre’s trendily named “Flying Picket” bar!

Anyway, the author of the article cited above refers to how the unemployment centres were forced to go cap in hand to government agencies and local authorities to seek funding, and how funds were consequently made conditional on the centres adopting a ‘non-political’ stance and reducing their campaigning activities (the State demonstrating, thereby, that it was well aware of the potential for such centres to become potential centres of agitation, veritable ‘chambers of unemployment’ even). The author declares himself as the secretary of a TUC recognised unemployment centre and as such he was elected from his region to a body known as the National Consultative Meeting of the Unemployed Workers Centres (NCMUWC).

The author explains:

The author accordingly offers his resignation, offering a summary of his criticism in an accompanying letter:

     ‘I hardly think it necessary to describe what is happening in the outside world – rapidly increasing unemployment and a concerted attack on the unemployed, coupled with a TUC ‘consultative’ committee that is paralysed into doing nothing and captivated by its own inertia. It has adopted a trappist silence regarding New Labour’s Welfare Reforms, has produced no literature, leaflets or indeed anything of relevance and its only purpose or role would seem to be to preside over the gradual disappearance of a TUC network of unemployed centres.’

This, then, is the kind of support the unemployed can expect from the Trade Unions Congress. At the 2010 Congress in September 2010 the subject of organisation amongst the unemployed would be relegated to a fringe meeting on Saturday evening (and it appears the National Unemployed Centres Combine, whose existence the author of the article put in some doubt, is alive and well with its representative designated as one of the speakers).

So, whilst the TUC offers a few half-hearted palliatives to the unemployed, whilst at the same time letting its former unemployed workers centres wither away, others see it as a money making opportunity.

Divisions within the Ruling Class

Although there is wide-spread unanimity in the ruling class about the needs for cuts in state spending, it is only the scale of the cuts and how they will be administered that bothers them. And underlying these divisions is the perennial question of who is to make money out of the whole process.

The strategy for dealing with the (now greatly enlarged) unemployed population is a “welfare-into-work” scheme to be managed by private providers. An agreement has been made between the welfare reform and work ministers, Lord Freud and Chris Grayling, and financial institutions in the City of London about the possibility of providing these resources, these agreements being linked to the idea of the private sector deriving revenue on the basis of benefits revenue saved.

The Managing Director of welfare-into-work at G4S, the so-called security and support services group (which provides such private sector services such as moving prisoners between gaols and courts) thinks that a model “that allows investors to provide upfront payments, with the money coming back from the revenue streams as people move into work, is a challenge. But we think it can be made to work.” The private sector, facing contracting markets, is constantly looking for new ways of making money, and smells an opportunity here for doing so by exploiting the most disadvantaged sectors of the proletariat.

And the Treasury’s object of enforcing a 25% cut across most state sector budgets is causing concern across many sectors of the state. Even the Police are worried and are seeking to prove their indispensability by opportunistically unveiling worst case scenarios to frighten the bourgeoisie into backtracking on their recent proposal to cut an estimated 40,000 jobs from the Police force. At the recent Police Superintendents Association the association’s president argued that the Police should be protected from the worst of the cuts because a “strong and confident” Police force will be needed to deal with the rise in industrial and social tension that is likely to arise from the cuts: a tension, we read between the lines, likely to be exacerbated by 40,000 angry unemployed coppers!

And the ‘elephant in the room’ at this conference must surely have been protests called by the Police Federation (the lower ranking police officer’s staff association) a couple of years back; and indeed perhaps even the memory of the riots which occurred during the police strikes following the First World War, after which the police were forbidden from joining a union.

We cannot resist mentioning in this context that during these police strikes it was the army which was brought in to “maintain order” on the streets, but it looks like the armed forces, already significantly reduced, will also be affected by the present cuts; and with the prospect of the auxiliary fire engines, the renowned “Green Goddesses”, used by the army in the past to break Fire Brigade strikes also being phased out, who knows what the future may hold!

In general, where things will go from here is difficult to say, but the TUC has been forced to adopt a slightly more militant face and, along with the insipid measures previously mentioned it has be obliged to declare the necessity for an ill-defined ‘Joint Action’ between the various unions. Such joint action – when and if it happens – will only be effective if it escapes from the control of the union leaders, whose vision, if past experience is anything to go by, is severely restricted by their anticipation of an eventual seat in the House of Lords; by their hefty pay packets; and by a ‘Union Jackist’ outlook which seems unprepared to back any measure incompatible with the interests of the national economy; indeed ‘the country before the class’ seems to be their motto.

The workers, along with the unemployed, in order to launch effective actions, will be forced to transcend job category and work place and build a broader and broader alliance; this alliance (which the names of the big unions ‘Unite!’ and ‘Unison’ hint at but ever fall sadly short of) will eventually have to resort to illegal and wildcat measures and step outside official structures. Only by such means will the proletariat be able to build up sufficient force to act as a class and force the bourgeoisie to relent in its ruthless attacks, testing its strength for the final, inevitable battle with capitalism.

To trade union activists! Long-term Support for the unemployed, sick and disabled can only be provided by defending all members of our class, rather than by passing meaningless resolutions and engaging in publicity stunts. The bosses want a mass of potential workers who are “flexible”, a euphemism for working for next to nothing, and being at the beck and call of employers. The organising of the unorganised is a direct way of protecting those still at work. Look towards defending all the workers, rather than those who are members of the existing trade unions! This way forward is especially important when the public sector is facing whole-scale cuts in the work-force, with many facing the prospect of joining the ranks of the unemployed.

Comrades! Proletarians! Workers, employed and unemployed! State and private sector workers! Workers from Home and Abroad! Proletarians of all races! Sick and able-bodied! Unite to resist these cuts! Let the capitalists bear the consequences of their own crisis!

In Spokane Washington, USA, a stunning union struggle has been taking place with little national attention.

Workers at Ruby Ridge Dairy workers have been laboring under horrendous conditions: workers have had to work 12 hour days without breaks, drink from the same water barrels as the cows, and put up with abusive language and racial slurs. When finally they could put up with it no longer and demanded fair treatment, the owner, Dick Bengen, confronted them with a gun. This latterday Jay Gould has even been quoted as saying, “This rifle is for those people with the union”.

In pursuit of better working conditions, the Ruby Ridge workers approached the the factory creditor, Northwest Farm Credit Services asking them to cut funding until work conditions improved. Having met with no response the United Farm Workers union returned to NFCS with 30,000 signatures. As a result, 12 workers were fired from the dairy, and nothing has been done to help them.

To make a nightmarish situation worse even worse, on February 17 Ruby Ridge Dairy made good on it’s threat to sue 17 workers. This is clearly a campaign of intimidation to frighten the outraged workers into keeping their

mouths shut. The UFW, it must be said, have been highly ineffectual. Although a major union they are beholden to Democratic Party bosses, and have done little to help beyond providing a bit of publicity.

This is further evidence that the workers in the United States, as elsewhere in the world, will need to rebuild their unions so they are able to effectively express the class interests of their members. This means fighting to establish broader and broader connections between different sectors; reaching out beyond the narrow confines of the factor and the workplace; beyond particular sectors and regions in order to build once again the ‘one big union’. But unlike its illustrous predecessor, which forgot that the working class needs to fight both on the economic and poitical fronts, this class union will have to accept that the working class has its own political programme, and its own political party, and the goals of both will only be obtained when they both work together, and understand each others’ respective roles in the struggle.
 

At the time of the of the Trattamento di Fine Rapporto (severance pay) “reforms” in Italy, which effectively obliged employees to insure themselves against being laid off, we wrote a commentary entitled: “The TFR swindle: getting the naked to invest”. We could say the same about the so-called health reforms in the United States, recently signed off by Obama, capitalism’s puppet, on 21 March, 2010.

Bourgeois propaganda is pulling out all the stops to convince us that, despite the scale of the crisis, all we need to get us through is democracy; and someone who has the people’s interests at heart, in this case, Barack.

But you only have to scratch the surface to see this bombastic propaganda for what it is: pure hype!

Despite what they say there are already two public welfare systems in the United States which cover around 45% of American health expenditure and which represent around 16% of the USA’s GNP. These two systems, Medicare and Medicaid, provide assistance to around 17 million Americans who are without insurance cover.

Medicare was established under Lyndon Johnson’s administration in 1965 in order to guarantee the federal cover of medical expenses for those 65 years and older, although those under 65 are also covered if they suffer from certain specified illnesses. Medicaid, on the other hand, is administered not by the federal government but by the individual states and is strictly related to income.

According to figures for 2003 from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, the number of employees in that year was 122 million. Out of these, 41 million (21 million part-time, 20 million full-time) had no health cover offered them by their employers, 40 million were offered a choice between two private insurance schemes, and 41 million were offered just one option. All such schemes were chosen by the employer.

The average annual premium for those with families was $9,068. The worker – still 2003 figures – paid out an average monthly sum of $201.

All the company insurance companies provide specific and limited cover for the services they offer and almost always with supplementary charges attached, i.e., in 35% of cases of hospital admissions; in 90% of cases for the cost of medicine and 100% of cases for medical examinations.

More than 40 million employees are not insured, at least not by their employer, and data from the same sources tell us that there are at least 44 million citizens without any kind of health insurance whatsoever.

Even without the most recent figures we can safely say that that amongst the proletariat and under-proletariat, living conditions have significantly deteriorated. Since 2003 the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system of production have shown themselves to be implacable and unrelenting, just as Marxism predicted. In fact, company closures and what the bourgeoisie like to call ‘restructurings’, in other words sackings, have resulted in an exponential growth of the uninsured.

The reform was passed with the support of the fanatical anti-abortionists, who in exchange obtained a United States wide prohibition against the use of federal funds to pay the costs of abortions.

Obligatory insurance has been introduced, and on pain of a fine of around $695 for non-compliance. Those for whom the insurance premiums would cost more than 9.5% of their income will be eligible for a state subsidy of up to $6,000. The program predicts an expenditure of around 940 billion dollars over ten years, 500 billion of which will be recuperated from cuts in funding to … Medicare!

If the average cost of company insurance schemes in 2003 was $9,068, workers will have to up their payments significantly in order to be able to cover future premiums. It really is a nice gift for the insurance companies. In the new amendment there is a provision for fining companies $2,000 (but only those with 50 or more employees) for each employee who isn’t insured, even though the first thirty won’t be taken into account!

How can we doubt Obama when he tells us: “We are still capable of great things!”