Il Partito Comunista 389

Against Capitalism’s Wars
For Working Class Organization and Struggle
For Revolution and Communism

Capitalism, despite having developed a huge technical capacity and an enormous quantity of resources and machines which facilitate its frenzied production of goods, still impoverishes the vast majority of humanity and drives the world’s proletariat into an increasingly insecure existence.

The perpetuation and aggravation of the global capitalist crisis has demolished the illusion of progress for the proletariat and all the reformist false promises of a peaceful and gradual transition to a less inhuman society.

Capitalism takes advantage of this crisis to attack the living conditions of workers, who then find themselves crushed in their social role of proletarians without reserves, without any certainty in the future. In every country, whether of old or recent capitalism, their governments, with the complicity of trade unions servile to their master’s regime, require the submission of workers to the national interest, that is, to the bourgeoisie.

As unemployment increases, austerity policies affect the proletariat, lowering wages and imposing on them various kinds of precarious and underpaid work.

The bourgeoisie hopes the working class, lacking direction and disorganized, without its true party and its militant unions, will not react and will abandon itself to the increasingly fierce competition within the class itself.

* * *

The 2^nd World War, after its massive destruction and sacrifice of tens of millions of working class people on the altar of the bourgeois homeland, and a continuous series of atrocious “regional” conflicts  in Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Middle East…  allowed world capitalism a cycle of almost crisis free accumulation until 1975, when capitalism entered a new crisis of overproduction which since then has worsened, manifesting in periodic 7-10 year cycles.

„Globalization”, the fragmentation of capitalism into new big nations, in particular in Asia and above all in China, has helped to postpone the general crisis for at least 30 years, but at the same time it has increased its potential, when it does happen, to overwhelm all the great countries of the world, in all of which the capitalist mode of production predominates and the bourgeois class holds sway.

Today world capitalism produces more goods than it can sell. This general crisis of overproduction is the main cause of new wars. War’s only purpose is to destroy, to destroy goods and to destroy the workforce, rendering possible, after decades of further massacres, a new hellish cycle of capitalist accumulation and of vicious subjugation of the working class. War is therefore the bourgeoisie’s only solution to its deadly economic and social crisis; that of the capitalist mode of production.

This is because wars, in fact, are also used to divert the proletariat from its historic goal – the revolutionary overcoming of the capitalist society – by dispelling the danger of social revolt with the intoxication of nationalist danger.

Today the clash between the powers which followed the collapse of state capitalism in Russia and the growth of Chinese capitalism is becoming ever more devastating. The zones where the different concentrations of capital are entering into conflict are multiplying, leading us to believe that the outbreak of a third world imperialist conflict is not that far off.

The war in Syria, powered by both imperialist fronts, is entering its eighth year and shows no sign of ending. Using the hypocritical pretext of fighting terrorism, all of the States with economic and military interests in the region, desperate to get their hands on its wealth and aware of its strategic importance, are throwing themselves into it like vultures; no matter that this clash has resulted in hundreds of thousands of victims, millions of refugees and enormous destruction. On the one side the United States, France, Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia, on the other Russia, Iran and then Turkey. And China has also taken the opportunity to flex its muscles.

All States declare themselves in words to be defenders of peace, „human rights” and civil progress, but the world’s military spending is increasing year on year and has hit the astronomical sum of 1,800 billion dollars: an immense amount of labor employed to build instruments of destruction and death. All states are preparing for war, from which all of them count on emerging victorious: victorious over the working class and victorious over the communist revolution.

The progress of the crisis of global capitalism has already shattered the myth of free trade, and new trade barriers are being raised.

Any State which wants to divide the working class and push it towards militarism spreads the poison of nationalism, patriotism, racism and of religious war. But the proletariat will reject this infamy: the proletarians have no country and have nothing to defend in bourgeois society, nor anything they can expect from the bosses’ state. The factory, construction site or land on which they work is not theirs, and their enemy is the entire administrative, bureaucratic, judicial and military state structure, which is at the exclusive beck and call of the bourgeoisie.

The capitalist mode of production, now hopelessly archaic and doomed, has no further reason to exist, it lives on through inertia and the temporary passivity of the world’s working class, which alone can and should fight this abhorrent „civilization”, which will only be ended by means of its own class’s political revolution.

Capitalism has fulfilled its historic role, socializing the productive forces, that is, by developing the economic base of communism. There remains today only a difficult but necessary task to be absolved: overthrowing the bourgeoisie and its state by means of force, expropriating it and moving to a communist takeover of production and distribution, by abolishing the capitalist relations of production, wage labor and production goods.

To do this it is necessary that the proletariat deploys in an organized fashion on the scene of social conflict. Its economic battle organizations are trade unions, the real class unions used to defend by force of numbers and with the weapon of the strike their living and working conditions. But this movement must be directed, on the higher political level, by the conscious historical party of the communist revolution: The International Communist Party! 

It is not like the Nicaraguan government has become bourgeois and bloody today, all the sudden. The Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) was already bourgeois from its origins when, as a guerrilla movement, based on the oppressed masses, it overthrew the government of Anastasio Somoza.

Its government later managed the interests of the bourgeoisie, securing social control with propaganda, politicking, and violence.

With the imposition of Chavez in Venezuela, which waved the banner of „Socialism of the 21st century”, and the emergence of a series of equally characterized governments in Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, and Honduras, the bourgeois government of Nicaragua has not hesitated to align itself in spreading that populism and that demagoguery that have allowed the secure perpetuation of capitalist exploitation and the growth of corporate profits. The number of workers enrolled in the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (INSS) in March 2018 fell by 1.5%, with respect to the same month in 2017: 896,869 versus 910,621. In March, the nominal average monthly salary was 10,737.8 Córdobas, about 342 dollars. Between April 2017 and April 2018, the rate of inflation was 4.75%. However, in Nicaragua, illegal employment, with low wages and no social security, continues to be over 70%. Of the total population of 6,279,712, 50% are considered economically active; this also counts the unemployed and those who worked only one hour.

Agriculture is one of the main activities of the country, representing 60 percent of exports, a with strong employment, but there are also some industrial centers and the extraction of precious minerals.

The Government of Managua has also fulfilled its commitments with the IMF, signed in 2005, when it had remitted the debt, as long as it respected an adjustment plan for the economy, so much so that in 2012 the debt of Nicaragua to the IMF was reduced to zero. In 2006 the country also signed the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the Dominican Republic and the other states of Central America and the United States.

In an agreement with Chinese companies, the Government of Nicaragua in 2014 presented the „Great Inter-Oceanic Canal” project: a blueprint of 278 kilometers, from the mouth of the Punta Gorda river on the Caribbean coast to the mouth of the Brito river on the Pacific coast, in which 50,000 workers would have to work. This project opens a new space for trade and geopolitical confrontation between the United States and China.

Therefore, in Nicaragua the capitalists are fine, although with some contrast with the IMF regarding the policies to carry out regarding pensions and social security, and with the US government mainly due to the penetration of Chinese capital.

So, for many years Nicaragua has not come on the front pages of international newspapers: although the says only that which the bourgeoisie wants to make known, and with distorted versions of reality, the truth is that a lot of time has passed without it hearing anything of trade union conflicts, of the social situation and the repressive action of the government.

But, as in a volcano, underground pressure accumulates until the lava of social struggle explodes, pushed by the contradictions between capital and labor.

The government had announced a series of laws aimed at guaranteeing the financial sustainability of the INSS, reforms that it intended to agree upon with the representation of the businessmen, the Superior Council of Private Business (COSEP). However, without having reached an agreement with COSEP, it approved a decree that increased the contributions that companies and workers deposit into the national pension system. COSEP rejected the decree because it would have increased the cost of work, launching screams about the reduction of competitiveness and the employment ability of the companies. Obviously, it opposed the decree not in defense of workers, pensioners, and social security, but because of the threat to corporate profits.

The government then admitted that the INSS would not have had the funds to pay pensions before the end of the year. For this reason, the provision expected that the insured workers would have paid more (from 6.25% to 7%), employers from 19% to 22.5%, while to the pensioners the pension would have been reduced by 5% and the State would have contributed, although with a minimum.

But last April a spontaneous explosion of rage and protest surprised both the government and the various movements and political groups. The reaction of the workers was immediate. Only the National Employees Union supported the reform and saw some small concentrations of public sector workers who expressed their support for the government, against the „destabilizing violence of the right”. 

The bourgeois government, led by Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, then ordered a massacre across the country; proletarian blood once again flowed through the paved streets in Managua, where there were counted at least 27 dead, then in the cities of Masaya, Leon, Esteli, Matagalpa, and Bluefields, with a further 50 dead and more than 400 wounded.

The disproportionate military and police response against the demonstrators came after more than a decade of strict political and repressive control over the workers, of an intense action of suppression of their organizations of defensive economic struggle, to expand the corruption and capitulation of the existing unions. So That is why the reaction of the masses to the reform of the social security system has needed necessarily to occur in this manner, spontaneous and anarchic, since there do not exist forms of class-based organization that can channel and direct the struggles.

Naturally, the official version, like that of all the „workers” and „progressive” governments of Latin America, in line with „Socialism of the 21st century”, has proclaimed that in order to defend the workers that this reform was imposed on the employer, and to „not bend to the IMF”. In this propaganda, the Sandinistas are accompanied by international opportunism that repeats that Ortega has „faced the IMF” and the „imperialist right”, committed to destabilize his government, and defends the working class.

Thus, the government believed that to control the reaction of the masses it would have been sufficient, as in the past, its Collectives or its goon squads: it was not so. Although the university students have also publicly protested in their petty-bourgeois style, with them have united vast strata of workers who mobilized in the area. They erected barricades and there were street clashes. he government has turned off the free wi-Fi that since 2014 had been installed in all public places, since it was used to coordinate the protest actions.

The situation has reached such dimensions that the government has decided to call for dialogue and to review the reform of the INSS with the business community.

In the meantime, COSEP had announced a demonstration for April 23 in Managua; the population of the capital joined the procession of industrialists and the crowd overflowed.

Later they tried to broaden the negotiations also to the students and to the Church. On April 28 it was the Church that announced a „Pilgrimage for Peace”, that had had again a massive participation. The government for its part organized an event for the occasion of the 1st of May, ending with a speech by President Ortega.

The opposition movements have seen in this occasion the possibility to increase their weak forces. They know that if the bourgeoisie decided that the FSLN government no longer guarantees them the ability to exploit the workers in a climate of social peace, as in recent years, it has the possibility to choose between the opponents, who can equally guarantee their interests.

If COSEP rejects the reform of the INSS, because it damages the interests of the employers, the businessmen have however benefited from the government of a reduction of many taxes and have had facilitated the exploitation of the workers. Moreover, COSEP, like the businessmen in all the world today, push for an increase in the retirement age to 70 years and for the increase in contributions the burden of the workers.

The bourgeois solution that has taken up the negotiations is clear in the points of order of the day: investigations on the murders during the demonstrations; b) reform of the electoral system to guarantee „free and transparent” elections; c) institutional reforms that guarantee the „State of rights”, and elimination of corruption; d) resolution of the INSS crisis.

Both the bourgeois political fronts, the government and opposition, will act to prevent the masses of employees to join and organize on the basis of their goals, such as the request of a salary increase, a reduction of working hours, and a reduction in retirement age.

The president Daniel Ortega on April 22nd finally announced the repeal of the reform. But roadblocks, barricades and clashes continued in the month of May. Parts of the barricades were made by the „Movimiento Campesino Anticanal” (Anti-Canal Farmer Movement), against the expropriation of the land. Looting also began in stores. Therefore, the list of dead, injured and arrested has continued to grow. On May 13 a caravan of vehicles, with great attendance, left from Managua for Masaya, in solidarity with that city, where the clashes on Saturday the 12th had left at least 1 dead and about 150 wounded.

On May 12th, the Army in a declaration appealed to „non-violence” and to the resumption of „dialogue”. On May 14, the government announced to have authorized the Inter-American Human Rights Commission to come and observe the situation in the country, after the death of at least 54 demonstrators!

It is certain that it is due to the courageous revolt of the lower classes the success in the forced cancellation of the reform, at least for the moment. However, in all this clash, although violent and general, the independent participation of the working class has not yet emerged, nor have its exclusive claims been heard, nor have its forms of struggle been imposed, first of all the strike.

The opposition is now pushing for the resignation of Ortega or for the induction of elections. Whether after this crisis the government of the FSLN remains in office, or whether its opponents take control, Nicaraguan workers have nothing to foresee from either. As in the rest of the world, they must traverse the path of unity and organization at the base, to resume the claimed class struggle, outside of the unions of the regime and of the appeals to electoral solutions, the defense of the homeland, and the national economy, proclaimed by all the opportunists.

There have been some attempts in the past to organise workers well in fast food restaurants, but these have faced real obstacles in maintaining any form of organisation.

There is now a more determined campaign to publicise their campaign for organisation, recognition and pay rise to £10 per hour across the board, which means the end of youth rates of pay, as well as guaranteed hours of work. McDonald stores are in particular being targeted for campaigns and demonstrations. Information on this campaign can be found on the internet under #McStrike and @FastfoodRights.

Demonstrations were held in five centres, from Manchester, Cambridge and London, ending with a rally at Watford later on at the First May Rally. The campaign began shortly after midnight in Manchester on First May when the McDonald’s restaurant on Oxford Street store’s staff member (Blaz Mesner, a Slovenian worker) walked off his shift, to be greeted by those on the picket line. The pickets returned later in the morning to continue the picket line.

That same morning saw a demonstration outside a McDonald’s in Cambridge at which some workers walked off the job in support of higher pay and organising rights. Also at Crayford in Bexley, South-East London, a demonstration took place in support of workers who had walked out for a second time. The demonstrators came together at Watford, the home town of McDonald’s Boss.

This parallels similar campaigns in the US, which demands a minimum rate of pay of $15 per hour.

At the moment the campaigners are members of a small trade union, the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers [BF&AW], who are affiliated to the Trades Union Congress. The choice of this union is to give them some form of official status while keeping as much control in their own hands. Although the campaigners have banners with their union emblem on their banners, there is little sign of the resources of the Bakers Union being available to them. Also the fact that this same union is controlled by trotskists seems to make little difference to the lack of official support. The campaigners are clear that their movement is rank and file led, and it is likely to remain that way. That politicals and MPs are providing support at the moment is only to be expected, but how far that support will remain when the fight becomes determined remains to be seen.

The internet publicity is a way of communicating and organising themselves. It also keeps the campaign under their own control, for the moment at least.

These May Day demonstrations by Fast Food Workers was a bright example of the spirit of May Day and what it should be, rather than the subsequent rallies of the official Labour movement pleading for the lessening of the nasty politics of austerity and other aspects of a bankrupt society.

Done with the Tories or Done with Capitalism?

After May Day there were marches (7th May in Liverpool and 12th May in London) against the Tory Government to prove they will not tolerate any further cuts in wages, or the general and progressive deterioration of their living conditions. In the 10 years following the 2008 economic crash, workers have seen their purchasing power decline significantly, with the cost of living steadily rising and their wages staying put, when not actually decreasing. At the same time the amount of wealth amassing at the other end of society (latest example: Persimmon boss receives £75 Million bonus) has reached grotesque dimensions. As even mainstream media are forced to admit, the world now sees the worst levels of inequality since records began. No wonder Marxists are now starting to gain a wider audience.

What will come next?

A change of government will not bring any gain whatsoever to the working class. Once in power, the Labour Party, which claims to be defending the workers interests, will promptly drop all its promises in the name of the higher “national interest” (i.e., in the interests of capitalism and the fight of UK capitalists against those of other nations). The Labour Party, that is, once in power again, as is likely to happen, will deal with the declining rate of profit by ramping up the level of exploitation of labour by increasing its intensity and the length of the working day, and by making it easier to hire and fire through the use of part-time and agency workers, which has the additional effect of driving a wedge between full-time and ‘temps’ status. And on the latter issue, where solidarity between workers in full-time and those in precarious employment is an urgent necessity, we will not hear much from the trade union leaders.

Workers have seen this drama happening over and over again. To bring this perpetual ‘groundhog day’ to a close they need to build a real and strong movement that is decidedly based on class demands, which will mean leaving behind the illusion that their enemy, or false friends like the Labour Party, with its insipid brand of acceptable radicalism, are going to guarantee them a better life. What they need is to dedicate their energy to rebuilding unity of action, rebuilding a class movement in the trade union sphere on a territorial basis, focused on inter-sectoral actions, that chooses not to place any faith in the parties and institutions of the enemy class.

An Arduous but Necessary Struggle

The proletariat class has the ability to conduct and win difficult battles. In their daily resistance against a system based on ever increasing work exploitation, they should demand:

• Minimum wage for all workers linked to the cost of living;
• Reduction of working hours with wage levels maintained;
• A living wage for workers who have lost their jobs;
• A general increase in pensions.

With the unity of all working class and the guidance of its own party, the proletariat – the class that has to sell its labour, whether its individual members are in work or not – will be able to defeat capitalism and free itself and humanity from the yoke of wage labour and the ongoing farce of capitalist ‘planning’; which is so patently unable to resolve the huge problems of war, the environment, increasing population and, of course, the problems of unemployment, a living wage and perpetual insecurity.

Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.