In other posts, both here and over at Truth, Reason & Liberty, I have strongly advocated anarcho-syndicalist participation within trade unions. I still believe that, and still for the same reasons. Namely, that “mainstream trade unions, despite their flaws, have all the apparatus at hand to deal with the majority of day-to-day workers’ issues – disciplinary procedures, heath and safety, sickness / absence, and so forth – as well as a committed core of activists hampered in their potential only by the union leadership.” Thus, “there is no reason that we can’t reject the hierarchy and bureaucracy of the mainstream [union movement] whilst recognising those workers who agitate and struggle within those parameters as comrades.”

The only question, then, is one of limitations. In the post cited above, I said that “As well as building up [specifically anarchist] groups, we need to recognise the great potential of ordinary unions if only their members can reclaim them.” This was perhaps the wrong turn of phrase, as it implies that I believe trade unions can be reformed, and emerge as the kind of revolutionary unions that anarcho-syndicalists advocate. This isn’t the case, for a number of reasons.

Revolutionary unions, such as the German FAU, cannot be created from the reformation of traditional trade unions

The role of the trade unions within capitalism

The main limitation of trade unions was summed up by Anton Pannekoek in his essay Trade Unionism;

Certainly, trade union action is class struggle. There is a class antagonism in capitalism — capitalists and workers have opposing interests. Not only on the question of conservation of capitalism, but also within capitalism itself, with regard to the division of the total product. The capitalists attempt to increase their profits, the surplus value, as much as possible, by cutting down wages and increasing the hours or the intensity of labour. On the other hand, the workers attempt to increase their wages and to shorten their hours of work.

The price of labour power is not a fixed quantity, though it must exceed a certain hunger minimum; and it is not paid by the capitalists of their own free will. Thus this antagonism becomes the object of a contest, the real class struggle. It is the task, the function of the trade unions to carry on this fight.

Trade unionism was the first training school in proletarian virtue, in solidarity as the spirit of organised fighting. It embodied the first form of proletarian organised power. In the early English and American trade unions this virtue often petrified and degenerated into a narrow craft-corporation, a true capitalistic state of mind. It was different, however, where the workers had to fight for their very existence, where the utmost efforts of their unions could hardly uphold their standard of living, where the full force of an energetic, fighting, and expanding capitalism attacked them. There they had to learn the wisdom that only the revolution could definitely save them.

So there comes a disparity between the working class and trade unionism. The working class has to look beyond capitalism. Trade unionism lives entirely within capitalism and cannot look beyond it. Trade unionism can only represent a part, a necessary but narrow part, in the class struggle. And it develops aspects which bring it into conflict with the greater aims of the working class.

Thus, the key flaw of trade unionism is the flaw of all representative politics. A top-down structure develops almost of necessity, and the leaders “sit in conferences with the capitalists, bargaining over wages and hours, pitting interests against interests, just as the opposing interests of the capitalist corporations are weighed one against another.” As such, “they learn to understand the capitalist’s position just as well as the worker’s position; they have an eye for “the needs of industry”; they try to mediate.” That mediation means that they are not the voice of organised labour, but have the duty “to regulate class conflicts and to secure industrial peace.”

Brendan Barber, head of the British Trade Union Congress, is just one of many prominent bureaucrats whose role is to regulate class struggle and defuse the antagonism between the working class and the ruling class

Beyond the interests of the working class, labour leaders “own existence is indissolubly connected with the existence of the unions.” Thus, when “class conflicts become sharper,” they risk losing “the only source of security and power” in “the financial power of the union, perhaps its existence.” Thus, “they must act as spokesmen of the employers to force the capitalists’ terms upon the workers.” And “when the workers insist on fighting in opposition to the decision of the unions,” we reach the point where “the union’ s power must be used as a weapon to subdue the workers.”

For proof of this, you can examine innumerable sell-outs of the rank-and-file by trade union leaders. The Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) is a case study in the tensions between member militancy and leadership sell-out. But perhaps most revealing is the situation many trade unionists look to with nostalgia and longing – the closed shop.

In a closed shop, workers must join the union within a particular workplace in order to gain and keep employment. Its compulsory nature alone would raise objections amongst anarcho-syndicalists, who argue for voluntary workers’ organisation – not only on the basis of free choice, but also because such organisations have no requirement to respond to the interests of those with no choice but to be a member. It is also the partnership with capital taken to its extreme, the bureaucracy of the union essentially taking on the role of maintaining worker discipline and managing expectations in lieu of the bosses having to do it. The union is thus not just a mediator but middle management.

Returning to the broader question of trade unions, it is evident that they are not – and cannot be – revolutionary organisations. For one thing, if union leaders are willing to betray their members when they are simply pushing a more militant agenda, this will go ten-fold if they are seeking to restructure the organisation for rank-and-file control. It would perhaps even unite the right and left of the union in their efforts to extinguish the threat of self-organisation. Other approaches are needed.

The limits of trade union activity

So what, if trade unions will always be dependent upon the prevalence of capitalism to exist and thrive, is the point of having anything to do with them?

The answer, simply, is the rank-and-file. In Pannekoek’s words, the union “is not simply an assembly of single workers; it becomes an organised body, like a living organism, with its own policy, its own character, its own mentality, its own traditions, its own functions.” Thus, turning a trade union into a revolutionary union is a near-impossibility, given the interests it develops as an entity.

However, it is those “single workers” who are important. For they are part of the wider working class, whose interests lie not in a better managed, “nicer” capitalism, but beyond it – in a free, classless society. As such, within workplaces already organised by mainstream trade unions, an anarcho-syndicalist would seek to promote mass participation and collective decision-making.

This is done as a member or a rep of such unions for a number of reasons. As well as the protection being a union member affords in the immediate term, and the infrastructure already in place to deal with individual member issues (as mentioned earlier), there is the fact that trying to build a breakaway union could have detrimental effects such as splitting the workforce during a dispute, or union scabbing. Whilst we advocate rank-and-file independence from the bureaucracy, but this means nothing if done to the cost of class unity.

The limits of such activity are, ultimately, up to individual discretion. As an arbitrary measure, I would say that they correspond to the limits of rank-and-file influence within the unions.

So, quite obviously, a full-time official who is answerable to the bureaucracy and who makes decisions with no democratic mandate is beyond these limits. This goes for those appointed to their positions by an employer, but also those (such as general secretaries) who are elected. After all, their election is parliamentary in style – they are representatives, chosen to make decisions on behalf of the members, rather than delegates chosen to voice decisions made directly by the members.

Beyond that, I think it’s a case of what roles within the union structure you give credit to. Personally, I’m off the opinion that going beyond a branch level puts you in murky waters. This is not to say that it should be avoided at all costs, and certainly you should look to make connections beyond your own locale. But this should be with a recognition that, even if you still hold the same job and wage as other workers, the further you get from the grass roots, the closer you get to “becom[ing] the slave of [the] capitalistic task of securing industrial peace — now at the cost of the workers, though [you] meant to serve them as best [you] could.”

During the recent student protests, Aaron Porter became the epitome of the union bureaucrat trying to contain discontent, whilst the rank-and-file of his National Union of Students showed it was possibly to break away from - rather than just replace - the official leadership fulfilling that role

Revolutionary unions

From an anarcho-syndicalist perspective, the alternative to this approach is revolutionary unionism. A rank-and-file movement, across communities as well as workplaces, based on self-organisation, direct democracy, and a decentralised, federal structure.

I have explained this idea in depth in the series What is anarcho-syndicalism? But, if trade unions cannot be transformed – as it is political alchemy – into revolutionary unions, how do we reach that point?

Within communities, and unorganised workplaces, they can of course emerge from scratch. But where there is already a union presence, and particularly a strong one, trying to form a separate grouping and asking people to join will only cause splits, as already stated. That is why anarcho-syndicalists agitate within the trade unions. And it is precisely from that agitation that such new forms of organisation can emerge.

Making the arguments for a bottom-up structure, and for collective decision-making on the basis of workers assembly is only the start. Ultimately, we want to put that into practice.

This starts to emerge when we reach a point where we are able to call such mass assemblies, with all of those in the workplace – barring obviously scabs and management – taking part. Once this happens, we can see the rank-and-file of the union break away from the chains of top-down bureaucracy and act autonomously.

This will undoubtedly incur the wrath of management and union bosses alike, from which we will see union power attempt to pacify worker militancy. But, by organising in this way, workers gain a glimpse of their true collective strength and the confidence to combine and stand up for themselves without having to look to leaders or “representatives.” From which, the first spark of revolutionary union flares up.

This is by no means a guaranteed formula for creating such a spark. By definition, no such thing can exist for the creation of anarcho-syndicalist structures. But there are basic principles and ideas, which people can build upon, and in doing so stretch the limits of workers’ ambitions beyond the capital-partnership of trade unionism.

Socialism and Hope

SOCIALIST STUDIES: SPECIAL SECTION ON ROSA LUXEMBURG

Vol.6, No.2 (2010)
Table of Contents
SS/ES 6(2)

Editorial
‘I Class Struggle’: French Exceptionalism and Challenges for Socialist Studies
Elaine Coburn

Interview
‘You Are Here’: an interview with Dorothy E. Smith
William K Carroll

Special Section
Rosa Luxemburg’s Political Economy: Contributions to Contemporary Political Theory and Practice
Elaine Coburn

Social Classes in the Process of Capitalist Landnahme: On the Relevance of Secondary Exploitation
Klaus Dörre

Accumulation, Imperialism, and Pre-Capitalist Formations: Luxemburg and Marx on the non-Western World
Peter Hudis

Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Accumulation of Capital’: New Perspectives on Capitalist Development and American Hegemony
Ingo Schmidt

Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution in the Twenty-first Century
Helen C Scott

The current relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought
Estrella Trincado

Research Note: Rosa Luxemburg and the Global Violence of Capitalism
Paul LeBlanc

Review Essays

Honour Songs and Indigenous Resistance
Deborah Simmons

Book Reviews
Various Authors

Socialist Studies: http://www.socialiststudies.ca/

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Rosa Luxemburg

The year 2010 C.E. marked a point of human history characterized fundamentally by profound historical negation and regression; in many ways the year constituted a catastrophe of barbaric proportions.  Shortly after the year began an earthquake struck Haiti’s capital city of Port au-Prince, killing an estimated 300,000 people, leaving hundreds of thousands of others injured and maimed, and provoking the mass-destruction of city infrastructure, from housing units to medical clinics and hospitals. Faced with this cataclysmic event, the U.S. government promptly intervened and with its military took over the Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport, located in the capital city, where imperial controllers subsequently prioritized the landing of military hardware designed to pacify the traumatized local population over the arrival of desperately needed humanitarian aid-shipments; the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard was dispatched to the waters surrounding the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic to ensure that no mass-exodus of impoverished, desperate Haitians take place.¹ To date only a small fraction of the billions of dollars promised by donors for reconstruction efforts in the country have been made-available; instead, a million and a half persons remain homeless as a cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of thousands has raged in recent months, while parliamentary elections held on 28 November from which the populist party Fanmi Lavalas was excluded have been widely denounced as illegitimate.² The failure of rains in the western Sahel in June of last year moreover set in motion famine conditions in the countries of Niger and Chad that threatened to take the lives of millions, while unprecedented flooding last summer in Pakistan displaced 20 million people, killing an estimated 2000, and highly disrupted agricultural production over much of the country, particularly in the Sindh province. Fires in central Russia resulting from heatwave conditions not seen according to one estimate for the past millennium wiped out a third of the country’s grain crop last summer, leading its leadership to indefinitely ban grain-exports; the effects have been profound in food-importing countries such as Afghanistan and several African states.³ In September, the U.S. government finalized the single largest arms-deal in history, whereby $60 billion in warplanes and helicopters would be sold to the Saudi monarchy.⁴ A report published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in July found astronomically high rates of cancer and birth defects among the residents of Fallujah, Iraq, a city subjected to a frightful assault by U.S. forces in November 2004; the U.S. military’s use of depleted-uranium (DU) rounds in the attack has been blamed by many observers for the conditions observed in the report.⁵ Drought conditions reported in Brazil in October saw the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon’s primary tributaries, at its lowest levels in a century; billions of trees of the Amazon rainforest are said to have died as a result of the drought.⁶ The year closed with a decidedly catastrophic meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Cancún, Mexico, at which the privileged and powerful worked to ensure that no agreement remotely approximating a reasonable response to the horrors promised by climate destabilization would be considered, let alone enacted.

The enormity of negation experienced across much of the globe last year—a constant throughout much of history, though one that was particularly acute in the period under question—recalls the imperative that thought “be woken one day by the memory of what has been lost.”⁷ An answer to this call may well have been come by means of the radical praxis of subordinated ordinary people across much of the Arab world over the past two months. The so-called Jasmine Revolution that began in Tunisia at the close of 2010 and has carried on into the present has seen the remarkable entrance of disaffected populations into the public sphere; aroused by the self-immolation of 26-year old vegetable merchant Mohammed Bouazizi on 17 December, mass popular mobilizations across Tunisia succeeded in driving long-time dictator Zine el-Abidine ben Ali into exile in Saudi Arabia in less than a month. This ousting of a tyrant, itself a highly significant event, has since met with the efforts of the old guard to live on after the dismissal of the dirigente, and while mobilizations against the RCD (Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique, ben Ali’s party) and other reactionary institutions have continued in the weeks following ben Ali’s flight, they have seen less success in realizing their demands. The Tunisian événements have been replicated across much of North Africa and the Middle East: sustained protests in Jordan against inflation and governmental corruption have resulted in King Abdullah’s dismissal of his prime minister and the cabinet, while thousands of people have been rallying in Yemen for the resignation of U.S.-aligned President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Protests against Sudanese leader Omar Bashir have even been reported in Khartoum.⁸ Yet the example of Tunisia has been taken up in no other country more than in Egypt, where millions of Egyptians have taken to the streets in the past two weeks to demand the end of the three-decade reign of Hosni Mubarak, successor to Anwar Sadat and a key ally to the U.S. and Israel.

Protests erupted in Egypt on 25 January, a holiday established by Mubarak in 2009 to celebrate the country’s police forces. Demonstrations have gripped the cities of Alexandria, Suez, and Cairo; hundreds of thousands have been reported as mobilizing in the former locales, while Egypt’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square has been re-appropriated by crowds numbering into the millions. Clashes between demonstrators and Mubarak’s police forces have been fierce, with hundreds killed and thousands injured: the continuous occupation of Cairo’s central square, dubbed by some the ‘Tahrir Commune,’ was subject last week to violence on the part of pro-government agitators, some of them riding on camels and throwing molotov cocktails. The U.S.-financed Egyptian military, which deployed itself in Cairo shortly after the onset of the mobilizations, has been largely ineffectual in protecting protestors against such groups, its patriotic pledges not directly to use force against the crowds notwithstanding. Successive mobilizations planned to take place on the two Fridays since 25 January that have sought to compel Mubarak to resign and/or flee the country have not succeeded in their aims. Instead, Mubarak has appointed Omar Suleiman, former head of the secret police, as vice president and has pledged to enact reforms before exiting the stage following elections slated for September. Much like Nicholas II and other hegemons to be found throughout history, Mubarak has noted that he fears the consequences for Egyptian society were he to cede power immediately.⁹ He seems to share this position with the Obama administration, which has very ambiguously called for an “orderly transition” to begin “now,” as well as the Israeli state, which finds alarming the prospect of a neighboring Egypt not controlled by a friendly autocrat. Suleiman is reported to have initiated back-room talks with a handful of oligarchical representatives regarding the ruling class’ immediate response to managing the situation.¹⁰

The machinations of those who would hold prevailing power relations more or less constant notwithstanding, the radical interruption represented by the popular mobilizations carried out and sustained by the peoples of Tunisia and Egypt—and particularly, their martyrs—holds great promise. The material poverty to which the majority of Egyptians are subject is harrowing, unquestionably exacerbated as it has been by the neo-liberal regime administered by Mubarak. Millions of Egyptians find themselves within settlement-communities referred to in the main as slums; in one district of Cairo popularly known as the City of the Dead, the impoverished quite literally reside in mausoleums and other tombs. The need for what Hossam al-Hamalawy has termed a “radical redistribution of wealth”¹¹ is immense in Egypt, as it is more generally. The people of Egypt, indeed, could be well-served by appropriating the estimated $70 billion that Mubarak and his family are reported to have accumulated over the past thirty years.¹² Were a power to arise against Mubarak and Egypt’s bourgeois elite, it could perhaps engage in such schemes and enact a more humane policy vis-à-vis Israel/Palestine generally and the Gaza Strip in particular: it could, for example, reverse the Mubarak regime’s co-strangulation of the people of Gaza by affording the resumption of trade and the provision of necessary goods and perhaps even provide the people of Gaza a haven into which they could flee were Israel to engage in a brutal assault of the territory reminiscent of that engaged in by Israel in winter 2008-2009—an eventuality, it should be added, that has been contemplated by the Israeli military in the two years that have passed since that massacre.¹³

Constituted power is quite clearly mobilizing to stifle the expression of the revolutionary dreams of the subordinated and oppressed, both in Egypt and elsewhere. It is to be hoped that the efforts of the Tunisian masses and the Tahrir Commune can succeed in deposing tyrants together with the life-negating systems they represent and further, but it must be stressed that any Marxian faith for a rational outcome cannot be justified. The projection of people’s power against the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 was followed by the imposition of the brutality of neo-liberal capitalism, with decidedly negating results; the revolutionary efforts taken by slaves themselves directly against the institution of slavery in Saint Domingue/Haiti were cruelly punished by imperialism, directly responsible as it is for the current devastation suffered in Haitian society. Hopefully the Egyptian Revolution—if that is what it is to be termed—can serve as something more significant than a historical example of resistance to negation, or a demonstration of such. The need for popular mobilization in favor of radically reconstructive political projects is presently dire: the suffering of the starving in Sri Lanka, Mozambique, India, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere can never be justified; it must quite clearly be overthrown.

————————————————————————————————————–

Derrick Jensen here once again presents salmon and trees as notable victims of prevailing power relations; his marked lack of sensitivity to human suffering has him continue to argue for the collapse of ‘civilization.’  More reasonable commentators invited to the show include Vijay Prashad, Eric Mann, Chris Hedges, Frances Fox Piven, Cornel West, and Noam Chomsky.  In particular, Hedges’ pessimism regarding the prospects for the development of broad-based leftist movements in the U.S. is striking, reminiscent in many ways of the darkness evinced at times by Theodor W. Adorno and other German critical theorists, among others; it is to be hoped that the grounds for such pessimism can be overturned.

An archive of the week’s series can be found here.

Is a slightly different ruling political class of mediocre career politicians the best we can hope for?

Lately we’ve witnessed some crass but unsurprising opportunism from the Labour Party. Recent student and trade union demonstrations in Liverpool and elsewhere have been addressed by Labour politicians and officials cynically attempting to convert widespread public anger and uncertainty into Labour votes.

Some see the current attacks on our jobs, services and living standards as merely Tory cuts or Lib Dem sell-outs. This is fundamental mistake. In reality the attacks constitute a total onslaught by the entire political and economic elite on the working-class as a whole. As chancellor, Alistair Darling promised to implement cuts that would be “deeper and tougher” than during the Thatcher era if Labour won the last general election. Labour politicians were first in line to milk the expenses system, tax pensions, send young working-class men and women to fight neo-con wars, enact increasingly authoritarian laws, privatise public services through the back door, as well as introducing university tuition fees despite promising not to, and the list goes on. The fact is, the career politicians of the left are no better than those of the right, they both play the same corrupt and grotesque party political game. Right now, both conservative and supposedly socialist governments around the world are inflicting austerity measures on their citizens, making them pay for an economic crisis they did not create.

The cuts will not be defeated through the ballot box by voting for candidates offering voters lukewarm reforms and a few more crumbs from the tables of the wealthy. They will be defeated through mass, self-organised campaigns of direct action on the streets of our local communities, on the student campuses and on the picket lines. The current struggle must also be part of the longer-term fight against all forms of exploitation, wage slavery and social injustice. As anarcho-syndicalists, we believe a new society must be built based on workplace and community self-management, without bosses or bureaucrats.

For too long, the parties of the reformist and revolutionary left have suckered in and neutralised the efforts of decent working-class militants. By now it should be clear that these parties offer nothing but false hope and inevitable betrayal. Only when we take matters into our own hands as a class, and shun those who seek to lead and control us, will we have any chance of bringing about radical social change.

As the Liverpool-born trade union militant Jim Larkin said: “The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise!”

DON’T TRUST POLITICIANS OR BUREAUCRATS!

FOR SOLIDARITY, DIRECT ACTION AND LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM!

Liverpool Solidarity Federation (International Workers’ Association)

I, of course, fall in the latter camp. Writing of the march, I noted that “route stewards” will be tasked to “prevent any sit-down protests or direct action.” This will ensure that the event “will be a passive and uncontroversial march from A to B, and at the end we will hear some people spout rhetoric about exactly the kind of civil disobedience they are actively curtailing.” The fact that campaigning will climax in such an ineffective thing means that “the thousands of people looking to challenge the government’s agenda” will “go home utterly deflated, and believing that there is nothing they can do in the face of the attacks on our class.”

An article for the Solidarity Federation freesheet, Catalyst, adds that “the only way [the government's] plans can be derailed is if we simply do not accept their imposition, and make the country ungovernable.”

There is disagreement on the left as to whether gathering large numbers of activists together should serve only to demonstrate peaceful opposition, as part of a political lobbying campaign, or should lead to direct action where the working class take matters into their own hands

Contrary to that position, the Public and Commercial Services Union (for one) believes that “a big demo will rattle the government and give working people a glimpse of their strength and the confidence to take the battle forward – with co-ordinated strikes if necessary.” Anything else, as a post on Liberal Conspiracy argues, just “threatens to blot out our political message” with “continual violent confrontations with the police.” The only accomplishment is “losing the political message, losing support, and getting protesters injured, and arrested.”

For centre-leftists like Sunny Hundal, “laws get passed via Parliament” and the aim of protest is simply to win public support so that politicians will listen to our message. After all, “there is no substitute for political action in Westmin[ister],” simply because “we live in a Parl[iamentary] democracy” and the only reason “politicians don’t listen” is “because we are politicall[y] unorganised.”

I outlined the broad case for direct action here, as well as expanding upon my opposition to pacifism and what purpose “violence” against property can serve. I have also argued the case for a direct action approach in specific situations over at Truth, Reason & Liberty. I won’t rehash the arguments here. Although that is an ongoing debate, and one that needs to be had in order to convince people of the merits of taking matters into our own hands rather than pleading with our “leaders” to make changes for us, that is not the purpose of this post.

Instead, I want to take a look specifically at peaceful protests – not the role that they can, and do, serve as a pressure-release for popular anger, but at the situations where they can be useful.

Movement building

Perhaps the main way that passive actions prove useful is as a focal point for building up a movement. If you are looking to get more people involved with a cause, then getting out on the streets is the best way to do that. And, unlike a stall or simply handing out leaflets, a big event like a protest catches peoples’ attention.

It also allows people beyond already-dedicated activists to get involved.

Large and vibrant demonstrations can serve as a way to draw more people towards a movement or cause

If you are interested in politics and looking to get involved in activism, it is hard to know where to begin. Trawling the internet may provide you with some info on the organisation that best reflects your outlook, but it is much easier for most people to approach a human being than to offer their services to people they’ve never met via email. And whilst a stall or a leafleting session may also offer the same opportunity, the amount of people doing that to sell everything from cheap goods to religious enlightenment inclines even those who are seeking an outlet to steer clear. A protest, on the other hand, cannot be mistaken for a charity mugger.

The other benefit of such an event is that it allows people to join a movement or a cause without having to necessarily commit to paying subs to an organisation. Of course, political groups will always want to grow – some by appealing to those who agree with their aims and principles, others by aggressive party building at all costs – but not everybody wants to do that.

Instead, then, of pursuing people to join any given organisation, people can get involved in the cause. Protests and marches provide a focal point, to draw public attention to the fact that there is an ongoing issue, and to encourage people to join the fight. It also makes it easier for them to approach those already involved, to ask what is going on, and to engage in a dialogue. From there, they can walk away, dip their toe, or plunge right in. That is entirely up to them.

But the point remains: protests and demonstrations serve as a focal point to promote a cause and draw people into the movement supporting that cause. They are a precursor to – not a substitute for – direct action.

Demonstrating solidarity

Another use of protests, is as a very public way of demonstrating solidarity with other peoples’ struggles. Particularly in the case of the international arena, or those who are imprisoned.

There are numerous examples of this, such as the protests in support of the hunger strike at Yarls Wood detention centre, the IWA pickets for workers sacked when trying to unionise, or the Solidarity Federation’s national day of action against Subway.

One particularly powerful demonstration of such solidarity occurred when the Free Workers’ Union (FAU) of Berlin was effectively denied the right to act as a trade union by the German Courts.

Solidarity forever: members of the Polish ZSP picket the German embassy in support of the banned FAU

According to the FAU’s own website;

FAU-B and its group within the Babylon cinema have been fighting for a labor contract since the beginning of June 2009. Although the Babylon cinema is government funded, pay has been miserable and workers rights have been ignored. A large portion of the cinema’s staff is organized within FAU-B. This is the first significant labor dispute of the relatively small FAU-B. It has caused an uproar not only in Berlin, but in all of Germany. Anarcho-syndicalists in a labor dispute, an effective boycott that was prominent in the media, extensive and innovative demands, and the involvement of the workers themselves (which is rare in Germany) have made an impression on the public. When the pressure was at its height and the bosses could no longer avoid entering negotiations, not only did politicians intervene but ver.di (a big union in Germany, part of the umbrella organization of mainstream unions, DGB) took up negotiations with the bosses even though they had almost no members among the cinema’s staff and no mandate from them. The workers, who were obviously flabbergasted, were excluded from negotiations.

Apparently a deal was made between ver.di, politicians, and bosses to get rid of FAU-B and calm things down at the cinema. But the staff and FAU refused to be silenced. Neue Babylon GmBH reacted by flexing some legal muscle and ver.di by attempting to damage FAU’s image. Firstly, the boycott – one of FAU-B’s main forms of pressure – was banned, and doubt was cast on FAU-B’s ability to negotiate contracts (in Germany this is a prerequisite for being able to legally take collective action). At the same time, other court cases were brought against FAU-B relating to freedom of expression. But FAU-B did not back down. This led to the latest court decision, which basically bans FAU as a union.

However, the FAU are the German section of the International Workers’ Association (IWA-AIT). In response to this decision, solidarity actions soon sprang up across the globe. German embassies and consulates in Poland, Ireland, the USA, and elsewhere were picketed by anarcho-syndicalists in support of the FAU’s right to organise and to act as a union. This added pressure on the back of the group’s own campaigning, and helped to spur them on to victory and the right – once again – to call themselves a union.

Solidarity is not just a word or a sentiment – it is a weapon. It is the means through which the working class exercises its collective strength, providing a network of support for those in struggle. Even when that struggle is in another part of the globe, we should not doubt the power of this weapon.

The uprising in Tunisia and ousting of dictator Ben Ali is an example of what can be accomplished when people go beyond protest to open revolt

Beyond the demo

I hold firmly to the belief that the struggles of the working class will be won by direct action. As Gilles Dauvé once noted, “10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world.” Because “otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognize will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.” If we look to leaders and betters to resolve our problems, we will be yoked to their control, and sell-out is inevitable.

But even if you do not believe this, it remains a fact that peaceful protest does not claim victories. If you are a reformist, it has to be followed up with political lobbying, and winning the argument so that the “nice” politicians acting in favour of the common folk who have petitioned them. For revolutionaries, it is a precursor to direct action.

Either way, in itself a passive demonstration does not gain anything. It can be used to show solidarity with the struggles of others, to draw people into a broader movement, or to show the ruling class the strength of popular anger.

But, in itself, this will not free political prisoners, end wars, or stay the axe of austerity. For that, we have to follow up the protests with action, whatever form you believe that should take.

To my comrade G, for first having brought Deus Ex to my attention some years ago

NB: The following contains a great number of revelations regarding the happenings in Deus Ex

While reservations should surely be had regarding the place of simulated reality in the current world—and in particular with regard to computer and video games—it is not necessarily the case that all such simulations reproduce hegemonic social relations. Such an assertion should not of course be taken as belittling the highly destructive role that the vast majority of such simulations have had, especially on contemporary youth: little can be said in favor of games that have users create empires, enslave and exterminate other peoples (or players), or employ nuclear weapons—as a great number of games heretofore created allow for and even encourage. Nonetheless, games, like film, can rebel against the monstrosities that prevail today, following the long-established ascendancy of alienated existence, thus helping perhaps to introduce or develop within users oppositional perspectives to the actual world in which they find themselves. Deus Ex, a computer game released in 2000 that explores a highly dystopian future, arguably does precisely this; it can even be said that the game advances anarchist perspectives on society.

Players of Deus Ex take on the role of JC Denton, who at the beginning of the game works as a special agent for UNATCO, the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. A “planned organism,” JC, ‘brother’ to UNATCO special agent Paul Denton, was in fact created in a lab at Area 51, where, as had been done some years earlier with Paul, he was engineered using highly experimental methods that would eventually allow his handlers to equip him with nanoaugmentations—special abilities that would greatly enhance his ability to kill for UNATCO, thus becoming their “superweapon.”

Constituted power in Deus Ex is shown to be horrific in its maxims and behavior. Beyond the specific case of JC and Paul Denton, created by a “cabal of technophiles” who would even manipulate “the chemistry of our bodies” in their desire for power, world society in Deus Ex is depicted as being strongly hierarchical, with highly militarized institutions dominating “the underclasses,” who in large part seem to be materially impoverished and socially excluded; the various homeless individuals encountered by JC in New York City attest to this, as does the community of so-called Mole People who, forgotten by the rest of society, reside in tunnels below the city. The peoples of the world in Deus Ex are threatened by the Gray Death, a highly lethal virus produced by the Versalife Corporation, which also holds as its intellectual property the vaccine Ambrosia designed as an antidote to the virus. Resistance against the depredations of Versalife come by means of the “terrorist” National Secessionist Force (NSF), which at the opening of the game has taken control of a number of Ambrosia vials so as to distribute them to “the people.” As is to be expected from the State, JC Denton is ordered by UNATCO to recover the expropriated Ambrosia, in the process killing or rendering-unconscious a great number of NSF operatives (players can choose to employ non-lethal tactics against those who would oppose JC’s actions). While searching for the Ambrosia containers, JC learns that his brother Paul has in fact been aiding the NSF for some time, following his discovery that the Gray Death virus was indeed developed consciously by humans for repressive-genocidal purposes. Paul’s defection to the NSF sets in motion a frantic man-hunt by UNATCO, during which Paul suggests to JC that he “join the resistance” by sending a distress signal to his French counterparts from the radical group Silhouette.

Heeding Paul’s recommendations, JC sends word to Silhouette, and subsequently joins his brother as a wanted man; he is eventually captured and taken to a UNATCO prison, following the activation of a 24-hour “kill-switch” introduced into his body by his developers. JC is aided in his escape by the rebellious artificial intelligence construct known as Daedalus, a being originally developed to process data for constituted power, and comes to meet computer specialist Tracer Tong in Hong Kong, who deactivates his kill-switch. Hong Kong, of course, is the site of a major investigative center maintained by Versalife; JC breaks into this facility, there to witness the macabre experiments and research carried out by scientists working for the corporation: the development of ‘transgenic’ beings, testing on humans, and so on. JC is guided by Daedalus and Tong to the location of the Universal Constructor in the Versalife building that is used for the production of the Gray Death virus and, in a Hegelian reversal, destroys it.

JC’s resistance activities against Versalife, denounced by UNATCO as terrorism, take him to Paris, where he meets members of Silhouette, a revolutionary association made up of “intellectuals, artists, and labor organizers” who have for some time been emitting subversive communiques to the public via their so-called Ministry for True Lies—an amalgam of Orwell and Situationism. By the time JC reaches them they have resorted to hiding in the catacombs of Paris, threatened as they are by their association with JC and the NSF during the events depicted in the game, which follow the blame placed on them for the bombing of the Statue of Liberty of New York—an act that is revealed as having been perpetrated by UNATCO precisely to justify their establishment and ill-fated expansion. During this time at least, Silhouette’s left-Hegelian motto of Tandis qu’ils dorment, nous gagnerons (“while they sleep, we prevail”) seems rather out of place, as do similarly optimistic accounts in the present day, barring the option of engaging in the revolutionary resolution at game’s end, as discussed below. Silhouette’s ties to the Illuminati, the purported group of super-wealthy elites that in fact appear in the world of Deus Ex, are quizzical, given the highly conflicting visions of the two groups: a ludic social anarchism against the restoration of “twentieth-century capitalism: a corporate elite protected by laws and tax-codes,” as Paul Denton has it. It may be that Silhouette believes it needs the Illuminati to succeed in the struggle against UNATCO and the monstrous totality it defends, but any victory in which such an elite group holds sway would surely be no victory at all; capitalists are not to be included in the multitude.¹

The dreams of those who in the world of Deus Ex militantly oppose the existent—as well, indeed, as those who rage against it in the actual world—could perhaps be said to be embodied in one of the paths by which the game can be ended, when JC travels to California to liberate a formerly abandoned Air-Force base at which a group of dissident scientists have constructed an alternative Universal Constructor, one that could be used to mass-produce a cure to the Gray Death. After defeating the occupying force of robots and highly trained soldiers, JC proceeds to his place of birth, Area 51, to confront the owner of Versalife, Bob Page, who is attempting to merge his being with that of Helios, an artificial construct created through Page’s efforts to bind Daedalus to his nefarious successor, Icarus. Players are faced with the choice of killing Page and joining the Illuminati in their quest to “govern the world”; merging with Helios; or, as recommended by Tracer Tong, inducing a reaction in the facility’s nuclear core that would destroy the world’s central electronic-communications hub, known as Aquinas, which is located at Area 51. This last option would, in Tong’s estimation, radically disrupt the centralization of power that follows from the ability to control and censor global communications, as allowed by prevailing technologies; Tong states that destroying Aquinas could bring about “government on a scale comprehensible to its citizens” and “genuine self-rule.” Humanity would be afforded the chance to “start again,” to develop “a new moral philosophy.”

This third option, which borders on being primitivist, is surprising for its radicality. Confronted with the profoundly horrible nature of the world as upheld by hegemonic power, players of Deus Ex are granted the option of exploding world-destructive inequality and hierarchy at a stroke. Such a perspective militates against that of social democracy and reformism generally vis-à-vis the world’s political predicament, whether that of Deus Ex or of the present world; surely only revolution can be considered the deus ex machina by which exit and survival are assured.

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CALL FOR A NEW CLASS STRUGGLE IN CANADA

The proletarian movement we need

The following call is an invitation to all revolutionaries, activists, proletarians and all collectives or groups of the extreme-left in Canada who aspire to build a genuine proletarian movement. A movement that will oppose the bourgeoisie, the capitalists and their power; a movement that will push forward the class struggle on completely new foundations. It is an invitation to debate and discuss
the proposals contained in this declaration and establish some common perspectives for the purpose of unifying and mobilizing in Canada in the coming year. The call, initiated by the Revolutionary Communist Party (PCRRCP
Canada), will be discussed at the Canadian Revolutionary Congress to be held in Toronto on December 11th. All those interested in participating can register by writing to info@pcr-rcp.ca.

THE CRISIS IS THAT OF CAPITALISM…AND IT WILL CONTINUE!

Capitalism is exploitation and misery. This simple truth reveals and highlights the instability of the whole system: the crisis gave way to new crises, sharp declines in expansions that seem limitless, short-term progressions followed by
spectacular falls.

Four years ago, the document submitted to the first Canadian Revolutionary Congress, held in Montreal, that lead to the formation of the Revolutionary Communist Party stated:

“A series of crises of overproduction will totter the most fragile equilibrium. Around the world, partial crises of overproduction will take place in the coming years. There is an overproduction of buildings in China; a real estate bubble waiting to burst in North America, an overproduction of manufactured goods (‘overheating of the economy’ in the developing countries). There’s a dangerous increase in household debt loans and a drop in mass  consumption; and a partial overproduction crisis in the forest industry and other sectors in Canada. There is the coming overproduction in raw materials that pay for investments in fixed capital, in buildings, public works and industrial production; an increase in demand and a rise in energy price; and then a slow-down in industrial production.”

Two years later, the fragile and unstable equilibrium of the capitalist world has actually broken and has not spared the Canadian economy. To make history, the crisis would have to arise in the “heart of the beast,” the strongest citadel of
imperialism: the United States. Soon, the world economy collapsed and the possibility of a strong enough recovery remains highly unlikely. Clearly, the crisis has opened a period of disorder and turbulence which disturbs all alliances, breaks all benchmarks and all old habits.

We should not be blinded: what lies before us will be one of the most dramatic episodes of the class struggle around the world and here in Canada. Using the “recovery” and now austerity measures that are being implemented everywhere,
the brotherhood of thieves that is the bourgeoisie has begun its offensive against the proletariat. They have basically declared war against the majority, against the proletariat, against the oppressed peoples of the world.

Already, beginning in Greece, Portugal and Italy, and now in France and Great Britain, the imperialist states have triggered the offensive and axed social spending. To successfully cope with future attacks, the Canadian proletariat must learn to fight back. To fight the bourgeoisie certainly, but to also struggle against it’s own limitations and illusions that still persist regarding the idea of the possible better distribution of wealth under capitalism; to fight illusions about the role of the state that will always remain an instrument in the hands of the ruling class. The state will never serve the cause of the people as long as the proletariat does not hold power. These illusions are but chains hindering the possibilities of proletarian organization and struggle and allow the collaborators
of capital to maintain themselves in their place.

We cannot be surprised by the current weakness of the proletarian movement because capitalism does not only produce goods, it also produces ideas. Ideas and illusions that are realized in acts, practices, organizations, institutions and
obviously in the way it represents itself.

One of these illusions is the belief that the world economy went into recession in 2008 following the U.S. housing crisis.

Analysts of the crisis naturally took as a starting point the collapse of the banking sector and securities markets as the cause and the epicenter of the crisis. While everyone agrees on the seriousness of the situation, it was seen as an isolated phenomenon restricted to problems in the financial sector. In doing so, almost without exception, they ignored the long and constant aggravation of problems in the real economy.

Unlike economists who talk about the crisis in terms of market dysfunctions, it is in the normal functioning of markets in which answers are to be found.

In the 1970s, we witnessed a reversal of the economic cycle in the advanced capitalist countries: after a long expansion starting with the post-World War II years until the mid-70s, the period that followed and that continues till today is characterized by a long-term and constant weakening of capitalism.

The most recent economic cycle was the weakest of the last 50 years in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, all this despite state sponsored revival programs. Not having the capacity to stimulate the economy once the housing bubble broke, the entire economy went into recession. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the average annual growth of world GDP in the years 2001-2007 was lower than any comparable period since 1950. One exception, the period between 1991-2000, but it never surpassed the results from the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

This inability of capitalism to restart the machine again can be verified by the situation in Canada. Long before the housing bubble, the economy had already entered a downward trend, whereas GDP growth was 4.06% in 1971-80, it had dropped to less than 2% for the 2001-2010 period. (World Bank, World Development Indicators, International Financial Statistics of the IMF, 2010)

According to an OECD report published in September 2010, the global economic recovery could be slower than expected, without knowing whether this “slowdown” will be permanent or temporary. The difficulty for the bourgeoisie to control its own economic movement confirms that the present  crisis is more than a cyclical crisis of overproduction. It is an extension of the deep crisis of the capitalist mode of production.

Summarily, this crisis had, in its early days, consisted of a rapid and catastrophic reduction, almost a complete collapse of economic activities which directly employed salaried workers, especially the proletariat. The crisis is primarily a
crisis of absolute capital overproduction. Everything else, that is to say, the political (in parliaments, in domestic and international politics), cultural (intellectual, moral) and environmental disorders were caused by the crisis of capitalism. They are derivatives that end up adding to the general crisis which will further intensify.

THE BOURGEOISIE IS ON THE OFFENSIVE

With the crisis, each capitalist is forced to try to increase the rate of  surplus-value and thus the rate of exploitation. The weaker companies are either bought or disappear. Prices for raw materials collapse temporarily or fall. Naturally, the tendency for wages is to diminish while the highest paid industrial jobs are replaced by lower-wage jobs. This phenomenon has worsened under the pressure of increasing unemployment. But this is not enough to get capitalism out of the crisis.

Thus, the States will initially adopt short-term plans to rescue the financial  system and begin to implement policies to rectify the situation. Increasing the rate of profit is the main objective: this is the period before us. Indeed, bringing the situation in order and increasing the rate of profit (especially during crises) are the main concerns of all capitalists and therefore states must then ensure the reproduction of the society they organize by maintaining and protecting as much as possible their capital, profits, employment, means of production, etc. For each state it is essential to defend and ensure that its own capitalists are not those that will be eliminated by the crisis, but those of other states.

In Canada, this offensive motion on behalf of capitalists began in the 1990s before the crisis, whilst under the Liberal government the state has ceased to be in deficit and went from annual deficits (64 billion in 1992) to a new era of sustainable surpluses (28.6 billion in 2001).

The restructuring of the Canadian economy to generate surpluses is far from trivial. In fact it is at the heart of the general offensive of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. First of all, for capitalists, it has set up increasingly favorable
conditions for capital to grow by ensuring the highest rate of
return.

During the period in which it has flourished, capitalism has ensured its stability by its apparent ability to reconcile the benefits and economic prosperity for the larger community and for the bourgeoisie. However, such reconciliation has
always been, at best, problematic for the bourgeoisie; as the impoverishment of the proletariat was a prerequisite for the continued prosperity of the capitalists, thus this illusion has proven increasingly difficult to maintain.

The multiple forms the capitalist offensive has taken are well known and affect all sections of society, beginning with the workplace to belt-tightening measures imposed on both public and private sectors; the restructuring of Unemployment
Insurance and use of unemployment as a tool to fight against inflation; cuts and reduced public services and the introduction of new user fees have become widespread; new labor regulations and State intervention in significant industrial
disputes to force people back to work and to prohibit in practice the right to strike.

While the State is proceeds with these attacks, the proletariat sees it’s living and working conditions deteriorate. From 1997 to 2007, the growth in real wages was almost nil, the average hourly earnings rising by about 0.5% per year! The
first 20% of the poorest workers suffered a net decline of 20% of salary (in constant dollars) between 1980 and 2005.  For the second 20%, it was a meager increase of 0.1%.

A major consequence of the growth in low-wage jobs for the proletariat has been its being forced into increasing the number of hours worked. The average workweek for hourly employees averaged less than 31 hours in the first half of
1990. From 1997, it rose to 31.5 hours and has averaged slightly above this mark from 2007, to 32.9 hours in 2009. Declining incomes for the majority of the proletariat has meant ever-growing personal debts. With a negative rate of personal savings, credit debt for consumption (excluding mortgages) rose from $130 billion in 1996 to $203 billion in 2001 (an increase of 56% over five years). This expansion in debt has only intensified. From March 2003 to March 2008, consumer credit increased by 65%.

Unlike the 1970s when the proletariat had experienced two decades of sustained growth in real wages combined with low debt, the proletariat in 2010 is in a far more fragile situation. The last 20 years have been years of impoverishment.

In order to redevelop the conditions necessary for the reproduction of capitalist society, the first move must be by the most complete valorisation of capital. The bourgeoisie will have to further cut what is not profitable for its reproduction: either through the wages of workers, and/or what it consents to “public expenditures.”

The Canadian bourgeoisie will thus use all of the machinery of the state whose role becomes paramount. As it is only the State that can use force to impose the changes that further aggravate the situation for the proletariat in Canada.

DEMOLISHING THE SMOKESCREENS

To respond to the extent of these attacks and more importantly, to move forward rather than endure more exploitation, the proletariat must clear the smoke screens that hide the reality of the Canadian bourgeoisie.

One of these screens is the idea that foreign multinationals decide the fate of the Canadian economy. There exists the idea that the Canadian State follows the dictates of the IMF or World Bank and is no longer able to take its own  decisions. There exists this idea that Canadian capitalists are players who have little to do with the exploitation of poor countries. There is also the mistaken idea that the United States decides for us and that we must defend “our  sovereignty” against them.

The truth demonstrated by reality is that in Canada we are poor and Canadian capitalists are rich, immensely rich. The truth is that they are in full control of the Canadian economy and that they have more assets abroad than foreign capitalists do in Canada. The truth is that they now occupy a prominent role among the imperialists who destroy, plunder and exploit the world’s population from one end of the planet to the other. The truth is that the Canadian State and its parliament belong to them.

The Canadian bourgeoisie’s imperialist offensive

With regards to the connection with the global economy, Canadian imperialism is far from being an innocent player: it has enormous interests to protect. Canadian firms have—and this is in over 62 countries—assets amounting to approximately the $515 billion, whereas assets held by foreign companies in Canada are now value at $500.8 billion. This demonstrates the offensive character of Canadian imperialism: its companies own and control more assets in the global economy than foreign companies do in Canada.

Canadian capitalists hold an enviable position within the select club of exploiters of the world’s proletariat. In 2004-2005, Canada was home to 1,439  multinational companies which controlled 3,725 foreign subsidiaries that  employs 1,029,000 workers abroad, and generates revenues of $385 billion in sales of goods and services.

Canada is a major world producer. In 2007, Canada’s gross domestic product was about U.S. $1,432 billion, making Canada the ninth largest economy in the world.

In international trade, Canada was ranked the ninth largest exporter of goods worldwide (3% of total exports), and ninth in terms of imports.

Moreover, there are 72 companies in Canada that rank among the five largest in the world within their specific areas of expertise, as compared to 33 in 1985. These world-class companies have increased in number and size, with average
annual revenues of $3.7 billion, up $2 billion from the early 1990s. According to Forbes magazine, in 2006, Canada ranked 5th in the list of countries with the largest companies in its annual “top 500.”

Canadian imperialism is a major exporter and concentration hub of capital. Canadian direct investment abroad surpassed foreign investment in Canada.

Canadian capitalist investment also demonstrates that it is strong enough to extend beyond regional markets and the economic bloc of the NAFTA zone while adopting a strategy and global approach of expansion and accumulation of
capital.

Canada is also a concentration hub of capital in the formation of giant corporations:

• Barrick Gold Corp., the largest global mining company in the field of gold (27 mines worldwide on five continents).
• SNC-Lavalin, one of the leading engineering firms in the world (SNC has offices in over 35 countries and works on projects in over 100 countries).
• Bombardier is in the top 10 list for aircraft production.
• Suncor Energy, Inc., a Canadian company specializing in the extraction, processing and distribution of oil. It and Syncrude Canada are the only two large companies that exploit the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta.
• Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (oil and natural gas), ranked 251st in the world;
• EnCana: in 2003 and 2004, was the Canadian company that posted the most benefits and reported nearly $6 billion in profits in 2006.
• Petro-Canada and Suncor Energy announced the merger of their activities, giving birth to a global energy giant whose value will total approximately $43.3 billion.

Canadian imperialism is both a hub for Canadian capital and a purchaser of  companies around the world. In recent years, Canadian capitalists are net acquirers of foreign companies. Examples include the purchase of Centura Banks (U.S.) by Royal Bank, of Adtranz (Germany) by Bombardier, of Homestake Mining (USA) by Barrick Gold, Orion Gold (Australia) by Placer Dome (Canada now controls 25% of gold production in Australia), Wisconsin Central (USA) by Canadian National, etc.

Canadian imperialism’s financial capital is also powerful and highly  concentrated. The global economy has transformed over the years, causing a reorganization of power relations between imperialist countries and within the ruling classes of each country. Although post-war industrial and commercial
sectors still dominated the ruling class in the past, today it is financial capital that has the upper hand.

The major Canadian banks, which have integrated the majority of activities on financial markets throughout the 1990s (trusts, mutual funds, investment banks, etc.), are now large concentrated financial groups. They centralize small capital to finance the expenses of external accumulation and also operate a centralized policy of decision-making within the Canadian bourgeoisie. These financial groups control assets of over $1,700 billion. One-third of their income comes from outside of Canada.

This allows the highly concentrated Canadian bourgeois capital to have full  control of the country’s economy. According to Statistics Canada in 2005 (the last year for which data is available), Canadian companies controlled 87.4% of the mining sector, 61.1% of the production of oil and gas, 93.4% of public services, 95.1% of construction, 62.7% of wholesale trade, 79.1% of retail trade, 74.2% of transportation and warehousing and 84.9% in finance and
insurance.

In light of these facts and the current crisis, we can draw the following conclusions:

1. On the international scene, the Canadian state, far from being at the mercy of foreign multinationals, defends its own interests, which are those of a strong Canadian bourgeoisie that is a concentrator and holder of staggering wealth, here and abroad. In doing so, Canadian capitalists play a significant role in the exploitation of millions upon millions of workers and peasants around the world. As exemplary imperialists, they plunder the economies of dominated countries by appropriating natural resources through their huge capital, turning a blind eye to the damages they cause whether it be the environmental or human costs of their activities.
2. That force—always relative because it is based after all on volatile financial capital—enables it to act as a “referee” in the currency war now raging in the G20.
3. In this country, this enrichment of the financial bourgeoisie has already resulted in a deterioration of conditions for the proletariat and the exploited, be they young, old, immigrants or refugees. And the enrichment of Canadian capitalists will continue to leave behind a growing number of depleted workers. By centralizing its capital in areas that generate the highest added value, the Canadian bourgeoisie has systematically abandoned sectors considered least “profitable” for it (manufacturing, textile, automotive) and decreased the number of stable and full time jobs. The capitalists do not want to “create jobs,” they want “productivity”. This productivity is gained through methods that require a more specialized, but less labor-intensive, workforce. For most of these workers, it means less work, more uncertainty, constant job change, lower wages and an overall deterioration in living conditions.
4. The redeployment of Canadian capital in sectors such as energy and mining will have crucial consequences, particularly the issue of territorial control, not only in relation towards other imperialist powers, but also in Northern Canada when dealing with the First Nations. They (the First Nations) may suffer further attacks from the Canadian state that is seeking to guarantee the possession and exploitation of natural resources buried in their territories. In other words, we can expect a genuine offensive to plunder the North by Canadian capitalists.

Faced with these all-out offensives by the bourgeoisie, how can we not ask whether we really have the movement to resist? All of us that come to the defense of the proletariat and who want a just, egalitarian, classless society and aspire to be free from exploitation must ask whether we have the movement needed to completely transform this nightmare and overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie which operates and controls everything? When we look closely, it must be noted that no change will come if we stick to the current movement.

THE FAILURE OF THE CANADIAN LEFT

In Canada, while strengthening itself, the bourgeoisie has not solved the political crisis it has faced for several years. This crisis, which has recently resulted in the election of two successive minority governments, can be explained both by the difficulty for the ruling class to develop and implement a common policy that reflects the common interests of its various factions (while taking into account their specific interests), and by the loss of credibility of the major bourgeois parties.

This “political disorientation” of the bourgeoisie particularly affects its left flank, which includes the various Social Democrat strands posing as alternatives to the major bourgeois parties.

In Europe, the experience of social democratic governments has been disastrous for the proletariat and the toiling masses. Despite its claims to be different from the traditional bourgeois parties it has attacked the working class as fiercely. In the name of “national security,” it applied the same racist policies. The Social Democrats have shown unwavering solidarity with the big bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries involved in wars and occupations, whether in Iraq or
Afghanistan.

Of course, this betrayal is not new: it has been a century since the Social Democrats have joined the bourgeois camp. Nevertheless, it still has some influence on the proletariat, especially on the more privileged sections within it, since they could still appear to be able to contain the “excesses” of capitalism and defend a certain idea of the “common good”: this is why, in fact, the bourgeoisie supported them as a realistic and credible alternative. But for the Social Democrats to play this role, it was necessary that capitalism provided them with the opportunity to do so.

But the need for a greater profitability of capital, in the context of imperialist globalization and inter-imperialist competition, and the intensification of economic warfare between the various national bourgeoisie have greatly reduced the possibility for a Social Democrat alternative. It is harder for Social Democrats to claim that they are capable of “civilizing capital” and giving a “human face” to the bourgeois power. All they can offer is to act as better managers of capital and the state apparatus.

In Canada, even though the New Democratic Party succeeded in achieving its second highest electoral results in the 2008 federal elections (with 37 seats out of 308), they have ceased to show progress. Having been in power in five Canadian provinces the NDP has had ample opportunity to demonstrate, despite its claims to rule for “ordinary people”, (if they still pretend to do so) that they are at best illusory and at worst hypocritical.

Due to its willingness to serve as a refuge for disillusioned Liberal voters, the NDP no longer appears to be the bearer of a social project qualitatively different from the traditional Canadian model. More so than ever before, the NDP is positioning itself as a party capable of leading the bourgeois state and promote the “Canadian way” of doing things. The problem they face is that they have no chance of winning an election and gaining power in Ottawa for the foreseeable future. The best scenario that they can hope for is a coalition with the Liberal Party, and perhaps eventually the Bloc Quebecois, in which they would play a minor role as a junior partner, like the one that fizzled out in December 2008 under the tutelage of then Liberal leader Stéphane Dion. This demonstrates just how bleak the future is for this party.

The NDP is forced to use the same themes as those traditionally used by the Tories: law and order, good management of public funds, promotion of “Canadian values,” etc. On June 26, during the G20 summit in Toronto, its leader Jack Layton was one of the first public figures to condemn the “unacceptable and criminal vandalism” of protesters and to provide support to Police Chief Bill Blair, just before he gave orders to his hordes of pigs to hunt for youth dressed in black. That says a lot about what happened to the Canadian
branch of the Socialist International.

The NDP has always been a bourgeois party, whose will for social change never exceeded the horizon of capitalism. But there was a time when it could claim—at least to some extent—to reflect the aspiration of many people for an egalitarian society, more or less akin to socialism. This is really not the case anymore.

The NDP’s evolution is similar to that of the trade union movement, with whom it shares the same social and organizational basis. For many years now the major Canadian unions [we are not necessarily talking about all trade union locals] no longer defend the interests of workers. In a detailed study published in 1994 (Perspectives pour le prolétariat canadien, November 1994), the Action Socialiste Group (forerunner of the RCP) had already showed how the Canadian labor movement had become an auxiliary of big business. Fifteen years later, this is now obvious.

We are still looking for a shadow of an embryonic response, worthy of the name, to the emergence of the recent crisis, which has yet again upset the living and working conditions of hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the  country. Complete industrial sectors have been damaged and hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. The capitalists have used the crisis to impose major setbacks onto workers: wage cuts; longer work hours;  requirements of increased flexibility and job insecurity, etc. But not once have the big unions opposed the will of the capitalists by refusing to bear the burden of their crisis on the backs of the workers. Quite on the contrary, they have supported the so-called “economic action plans” of bourgeois governments which consisted mainly in diverting billions of dollars in taxes coming primarily from workers’ wages as a gift to the capitalists.

The idea that workers share a common interest with capitalists—that the plight of wage slaves depends on the good fortunes of their masters—is so ingrained in the minds and speeches of the trade unions leaders that it never occurred to them that the crisis could be an opportunity to break with the capitalist system.

The lack of a decent workers response to the crisis and the utter inability of the trade union movement to formulate such a response confirm the view expressed in the RCP Programme to the effect that the Canadian labor movement, as a whole, no longer represents the fundamental interests of working people and that it has become an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie to control and suppress the working class.

Overall, the Canadian left is deeply marked by bourgeois nationalism. The idea that Canada is a sort of “colony” in relation to U.S. imperialism, that it is a “small country” whose social and economic policies are distinct from the ones of its big neighbor and that the main enemy of Canadian proletariat is somehow “foreign” (nothing is further from the truth, as we have seen) has always wrecked havoc within the Canadian left. This idea pushed the Canadian left to position itself as an auxiliary of Canadian imperialism. It marked the evolution of the Communist Party of Canada in the 1930s from a revolutionary party to a reformist one and continues to base itself on this revisionist policy. During the 1960s and 1970s, the New Left inspired by Cultural Revolution and the anti-revisionist struggle failed to get rid of this defect (see the influence of the Three World Theory on the Workers Communist Party and the support it gave to the strengthening
of the Canadian military, in order to reinforce “Canada’s independence”). The same idea also heavily influenced the left currents within the NDP, especially the Waffle, whose real name also showed the primacy of that goal: Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada.

In Quebec, the left has traditionally suffered from the same defect. But because of the influence of the national question, its support to the national bourgeoisie took the form of support to the French bourgeoisie and the Quebec state. The
political space occupied by the NDP in the rest of Canada has been filled by the Parti Quebecois, though the PQ has never really defined itself as a social democratic party—at best it claimed to have a “bias in favor of working people” in the aftermath of its election in 1976.

As was the case with the NDP in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia, the experience of the Parti Quebecois in power revealed its true nature. Between 1976 and 2003, the PQ led the Quebec government for two successive periods of nine years each, during which it has clearly shown which side it stood on: implementing massive cuts in social programs, adopting antiunion laws, giving support to free trade and  globalization, etc. In 1990, when it formed the official opposition, it was even
the first party to call for the deployment of the Canadian army against the Mohawk Nation during the uprising in Kanehsatake.

Bourgeois nationalism—be it Quebec or Canadian—that characterizes the left throughout the country has lead it to the adoption of a social-imperialist standpoint with regard to indigenous nations, to whom it has always denied the right to self-determination (which must necessarily include the right to  secession). A new and genuinely proletarian revolutionary left must break with this deviation and instead uphold that basic right if it wants to overturn the Canadian state and achieve its goals of liberation and emancipation.

A huge political vacuum

Currently, the Canadian working class suffers from a huge political vacuum caused by the marginalization of forces that have traditionally spoken for it. Till date no one has yet managed to fill this vacuum. Although it is neither systematic nor widespread, there exists a will to fight among the proletariat—a willingness to fight the capitalists and their system. But this will has had a hard time expressing itself as it lacks a vehicle of political expression.

More and more workers are rejecting this fake bourgeois democratic framework and the parties that are working within it. The need for an alternative,  comprehensive and coherent response to the bankruptcy of a system that is destructive and moribund has never been greater than now.

Some want to fill this political vacuum by trying to recreate that which has  already existed. The NDP is not what it used to be and seems to be more and more disappointing? Then we should create a sort of “new and improved NDP” that will fight more seriously for Canada’s independence, for the extension of bourgeois democracy and to return to “welfare state,” within the electoral and parliamentarian framework. The Parti Quebecois no longer has the same influence over the masses? Then we should go with a new party (Quebec
Solidaire), which proposes to make the current bourgeois state an independent state of Quebec—an independent state that will serve the common interests of all classes.

These projects rely on the same old illusions that have proved to be so damaging for the Canadian proletariat and have contributed to its weakening and even its political disappearance. They do not take into account what has changed in Canada and around the world, nor of the developments of the global capitalist system that demonstrate that the era of the welfare state is well and truly over.

In fall 2000, over 700 Left activists from Ontario gathered in Toronto, as part of the Rebuilding the Left conference. The organizers of this event wished for the emergence of a new type of anti-capitalist movement, “a ‘structured  movement’ of the Left,” “a novel type of political organization” that would be “something more than a coalition but less than a Party.” (Sam Gindin, “Comment: Rebuilding the Left: Towards a Structured Anti-Capitalist Movement”, Studies in Political Economy 64, Spring 2001, P. 91.)

In Quebec, a similar process was underway with the “Rassemblement pour l’Alternative Progressiste” and the “Parti de la Démocratie Socialiste” (which subsequently gave birth to the “Union des Forces Progressistes”) and with Françoise David’s “Option Citoyenne.” Unlike “Rebuilding the Left” in 2006 this process, resulted in the creation of a new party, Québec Solidaire. Furthermore, unlike the NDP, this party presents itself as being a little different from traditional parties: it claims to be a party “from both the ballot box and the streets” and aims to provide a political expression for various social movements.

Those who want to rebuild the left must obviously take into account the various resistance movements that have emerged since the late 1990s with the  emergence of the antiglobalization movement. So they are talking (well, not always openly for electoral reasons…) of anti-capitalism, antiimperialism and fighting against patriarchy. But basically, their perspective remains the same as usual: a political alternative that will act in the electoral arena and within the current system with the objective of “conquering” the bourgeois state and doing something better than the bourgeois parties themselves by trying to go back to the “good old days when the state was caring for everyone, not just the rich” (sic).

This idealistic view is still present in the ranks of the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly—a gathering of Toronto militant left that was established in Autumn 2009. A bit like the former Rebuilding the Left project, the group seeks “to move beyond coalition and network politics” and wishes create “a new politics”. (Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly, Vision Statement.) Some of its supporters are already dreaming of a new municipal or provincial party, while conceding that this is actually premature in Toronto or Ontario context. (Xavier Lafrance, “Fondation de la Greater Toronto Worker’s Assembly: vers un renouveau de la gauche militante torontoise,” January 26, 2010.)

Proponents of these various “alternatives” confuse “genres”: while they rely on and promote a traditional conception of the state, they also want to “revitalize the social movements.” This makes possible a certain convergence with  anarchist currents for whom the movements are the end-all be-all and do not want to fight for a new kind of state.

But the question remains: why and for whom social—or resistance—movements exist? What the workers need now is not to recreate what has already existed and failed. We need a break with the strategies of the past. We need a new class
movement based on the most exploited among us—a movement that will unify all the oppressed, that will attack the roots of the ruling system and will adopt the forms of action that meet the requirements of the moment and thereby will raise the question of power.

The new class struggle in Canada: A new and revolutionary proletarian movement

In Canada, the political power of the bourgeoisie is materialized in the government. The parliament, including all parties there, are first and foremost united behind the defense and protection of the capitalists and of the Canadian capital. The apparatus of democracy that the bourgeoisie has endowed itself with doesn’t serve any other purpose. Its army, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere doesn’t serve any other purpose.

Its police—as so obvious at the G20 in Toronto!—doesn’t serve any other purpose. It’s justice, when it treats refugees, Native people, anti-imperialist opposition as if they were criminals, while the bankers and fraudster capitalists are left free, doesn’t serve any other purpose. Parliament, which votes in these unfair measures, doesn’t serve any other purpose.

The proletariat, the exploited class, is trying to oppose, defend itself against, resist, and ultimately, change the system. Whilst what we need a Canadian  working class that is combative, powerful and dynamic, it currently is weak,
poorly defended, passive, and pessimistic. Even the most organized among them: the trade unions, left reformist organizations, most people’s organizations and even, most communist groups, Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists—cannot imagine acting outside the legal framework imposed by the bourgeoisie. This fraction, although organized, is sticking to bourgeois politics.

Because of the inability to act outside the framework imposed by the ruling class, the proletariat has no political autonomy when facing the bourgeoisie. There exists no proletarian party at the national level, very low-levels of political action and even less revolutionary action being done within these mass
organizations.

When these organizations exist, they have few other prospects than to oppose the very worst. And with only 30% (4.5 million) of workers in Canada being organized—including a significant proportion of the public sector—it means that more than 10 millions workers do not have any organization to regroup and defend themselves with in their workplace.

The more traditional movements, whether trade unions, grassroots groups, community groups are becoming more institutionalized, co-opted by the state, or worse, more and more “interested” by capitalism: Some unions have become
themselves managers of investment funds, and have put their financial  performance before the defense of workers’ jobs.

In all cases, the labor movement has become… motionless. They are unable to act outside the framework imposed by the bourgeoisie. They defends the law instead of defending the workers; bourgeois “democracy” instead of the right to rebel. They defend capital, instead of defending labor. Community groups are so overwhelmed by “front line” services they give to an increasing number of unemployed and poor people that they don’t even consider political struggle. Clearly, their current structure and mode of organization are not designed to educate the proletariat for revolutionary action, or any action that would allow them to truly transform the current balance of power in which the bourgeoisie retains all benefits. Even the Communists who work among the mass  organizations are sticking to traditional trade union or community work.

In the political sphere, it is even worse. It is as if the only possible horizon for politics is the parliament and the institutions of the capitalist system which we already know, are fully controlled and managed by the bourgeoisie. Yet never in the history of the Canadian parliamentary system, have the proletariat—the most numerous class in society—been able to exist as a political force. When they did, it was always marginal, almost by accident thus making any change to “parliamentary democracy” impossible. For the bourgeoisie, there was nothing to fear. On the contrary, it lent peoples’ support to this regime—a dictatorship! —And gave it a “democratic” veneer. The numerous “radicals” in the NDP’s history has done nothing else but that; Amir Khadir from Quebec Solidaire party can do nothing else but that. The 1-2% of votes that Marxists, Trotskyites and Communists may get is doing nothing else… but that.

There is no place in the Canadian parliament for the poor, the immigrants, the exploited and even less so for Native people. When looking at the parliamentary history in this country one can see that bourgeois democracy is the name given for the bourgeois dictatorship over the proletariat. Between 1867 and 1921, only property owners, religious, professionals and teachers were entitled to vote. It is this section of the population that has forged the two parties of government in Canadian history and the current parliamentary system.

Women, workers, and indigenous people were excluded. After women and white workers, Asian Canadians only got the right to vote in 1948 and Aboriginals in 1960!

By integrating the farmers’ demands, by disciplining leaders and organizations of the proletariat and by repressing the workers, their struggles and their party—the Communist Party at that time—the bourgeoisie has managed to adapt to universal suffrage since the 1920s. Let us remember that the Communist Party of Canada—now non-existent, peaceful, harmless—was illegal then! This was simply because they resolutely defended the proletariat at the time. The
revolutionary organizations of the working class were repressed and banned under the War Measures Act because they led the struggle against the bourgeoisie. These organizations conducted their struggles, their strikes and their demonstrations outside the framework imposed by the bourgeoisie. Even if they were not coordinated by an organization that could conduct a real political struggle, these struggles and strikes are still a legacy 100 times more heroic and inspiring experiences that all parliamentary elections that have followed since.

In imperialist countries such as Canada, the electoral process has been and continues to be a dead end for the workers and they are increasingly aware of this. The steady decline in the rate and historical turnout in advanced capitalist societies expresses much of this reality. In 2000, while the rate reached a historic low of 61%, Elections Canada commissioned a study to Decima Research. It noted that the vast majority of non-voters interviewed gave the following reasons: a negative attitude toward politicians, government officials, candidates, parties and/or leaders and a lack of competition thus making their participation futile.

How can one, especially among those who claim to work for the exploited and the poor or who call themselves revolutionaries, blame them for that?

In fact, we must support this just feeling, which is based in the lived experience of the masses. But instead of turning it into passive defeatism, we must direct this feeling towards an active political force. We must use it to serve a movement for change, rather than bring people back into the bourgeois trap. Through involvement in immediate struggles and the struggle for revolution and social change, we must build proletarian political activism and break with bourgeois political action.

In that sense, every gesture, every action being waged by those who struggle together with the proletariat and the Native nations, must break with all forces that strengthen the ruling class. Our role as revolutionaries and activists who side with the proletariat is to support, organize and develop slogans and actions that can weaken the bourgeoisie and build unity with all sections of the proletariat and the First Nations. The essential starting point is to break with the
bourgeoisie and its apparatus of domination. This is the first thing we must do to make revolution and end to capitalism.

Based on these key breaking points, we must wage today a new class struggle in Canada.

The bourgeoisie has already started this new fight against us. It has done so for a long time, through attacks by the capitalists, through politicians and  parliamentarians, senior officials, judiciary, through the police, and the army. Today powerful and dominant, they control and manage the whole capitalist system.

We must ready the Canadian proletariat for the class struggle. Seek unity among the youth, the farm workers, the unemployed, poor students, poor women and workers, immigrants of all nationalities, refugees, undocumented workers and Natives. This unity is necessary in order to fight against the bourgeoisie and its system. It will allow the proletariat to exist as a conscious and active political force, which can truly threaten the capitalist order, undermine bourgeois power and replace it with a new, revolutionary communist rule by the proletariat.

We must restart a new class struggle in Canada in order to develop revolutionary proletarian actions:

• By uniting proletarians all across the country on the basis of breaking with bourgeois politics, on the basis of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism and for the goal of communism;
• By supporting the struggles of the Native nations against the  Canadian state and by recognizing their unconditional right to self-determination;
• By denouncing Canadian imperialism and its companies, which loot and destroy the peoples and resources of the oppressed countries through economic exploitation and war.
• By calling for the defeat of the imperialists all over the world and by defending and supporting people’s wars.

In order to develop these revolutionary proletarian actions and make them a reality, we call the Canadian Revolutionary Congress to adopt the following perspectives:

1. A Canada-wide boycott campaign during the next federal elections:

Boycott the Elections! is a slogan that is anything but passive. Driven by the forces of the militant proletariat, led by activists working for revolution and for the destruction of the exploitative capitalist system, this slogan is a call to fight
against apathy and indifference, and against what will be an inevitable defeat otherwise.

This slogan is a call for unity among the proletariat, whether they be young, old, unemployed, immigrant or refugee.

This slogan is a call to unite with the most militant layers among the Native nations who refuse to recognize the Canadian Parliament, except than to be the organizer of their own oppression. This slogan when carried forward by the most conscious forces among the proletariat, can offer the proletariat a real political perspective: the actions of the revolutionary proletariat to transform society. This action must be first and foremost the expression of the rejection of bourgeois politics in a conscious and unified way. By organizing actions, through meetings and protests, through the massive distribution and publication of leaflets and newspapers throughout the country, these revolutionary actions
represent a real threat to the apparatus of domination of the bourgeoisie. They reveal and expose to the eyes of many the deeply unfair nature of this system ruled by a tiny minority.

There will be those that will criticize us who boycott by saying that we are playing the game of the rightists. Some forces on the left often use this argument: “One can try to rebalance bourgeois parliamentarism by calling for proportional representation”. In either case, whether it be twoheaded or three-headed, it remains the party of the bourgeoisie. What really matters is that in all cases, the same interests prevail, both in government and in opposition. Regardless of parliamentary representation, the nature of Parliament itself remains the same.

2. A call for revolutionary May Day demonstrations in Montreal and Toronto in 2011:

For several years, the Revolutionary Communist Party, along with various radical forces, is actively participating in an anticapitalist and revolutionary demonstration in Montreal on May Day. As the trade unions have given up with the revolutionary and internationalist tradition of May Day, the initiative must be spread to other Canadian cities as expressing the unity of the combative proletariat.

3. A Call to set up proletarian revolutionary action committees in Ontario and across Canada, wherever possible.

These committees will do things like:

• participate in the writing and circulation of a Canada-wide newspaper to serve the proletariat and the oppressed masses;
• organize local campaigns put forth by the Canadian Revolutionary Congress (the Boycott the Elections campaign, May Day demonstration, distribution of leaflets and newspapers);
• support the peoples’ wars in India, in the Philippines and in Nepal;
• establish links with organizations and/or Native activists;
• and will be the embryo of a new proletarian movement which will unite different circles, among youth, women and workers of all origins, etc.

4. Make THE RED FLAG/LE DRAPEAU ROUGE newspaper a Canada-wide publication whose purpose is to spread communism and proletarian revolution all across the country:

For over 15 years, Le Drapeau Rouge/The Red Flag newspaper has sought to build and organize the working class by sharing in their struggles, by  popularizing revolutionary and anti-capitalist slogans, by spreading communist views and defending people’s wars and people’s struggles from all over the world. This paper is essential to unite and organize the revolutionary forces around slogans and campaigns that will have a real impact across the country. The Political Information Bureau of the RCP, which publishes this newspaper, calls on all activists to contribute and to disseminate it throughout the country.

Support these proposals for creating a movement and for building the class struggle!

By adopting these proposals and slogans, the Canadian Revolutionary Congress will mark a real break with a leftist movement that no longer meets the needs of the struggle for the proletariat and the oppressed, whether here in Canada or
elsewhere.

This struggle requires a movement that will learn to fight. This is what is meant by a movement to defend the oppressed masses, the proletariat and the exploited. This will be everything but bourgeois politics, where there is no democracy for the poor.

We will learn to fight, to organize, to act and to participate in revolutionary actions in whatever forms they may take. We will no longer separate the immediate struggles from the political struggle of the proletariat, which is to make revolution against the bourgeois dictatorship of the capitalists.

We will go into the deepest strata of the proletariat through propaganda and by the revolutionary actions.

We will prepare a new class struggle in Canada!

(Text submitted by the CRC Organizing Committee)

The second day of the sixteenth Conference of Parties (COP-16) summit in Cancún follows much the same as the first, a day that saw Mexican President Felipe Calderón assert in remarks before the delegates assembled in Moon Palace—a highly exclusive hotel, center of the COP-16 talks—that the potential failure of the Cancún talks—that is, their failure precisely to look beyond dominant individual and national interests—would be a “tragedy,” and that climate-negotiators should act during the summit’s two weeks with the interests of humanity in mind.  He stressed in particular the concern that should be evinced in Cancún for existing children and future generations.  In his address to delegates on the same day, Mario Molina, a Mexican scientist awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, declared it to be “necessary and urgent” that COP-16 produce a climate-agreement—this, amidst a widespread lack of confidence among country-governments and commentators that Cancún will produce any agreement at all.

As was the case on Monday, COP-16’s second day saw dozens of members of international organization “Ching Hai SOS,” a branch of the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association, protesting outside the Cancunmesse, a conference center that has been set aside as one of COP-16’s halls of negotiation.  The SOS protestors, present outside the Cancumesse throughout the day since the early morning, advocate the general adoption of an organic-vegan diet, claiming such a move to be essential to “save the planet.”  They also rather bizarrely maintain such diets to produce good karma, and are likely mistaken in arguing for such a singular solution to the specter of climate catastrophe—the stress on diet seems to overlook the rather pressing issue of capitalism, for example.

In an attempt to spread its message, the SOS has bought advertising space on billboards and taxi in parts of Cancún; this marketing-strategy has also taken up by Greenpeace, which has purchased advertisements on buses in addition to billboards in the city that remind observers of the recent disastrous experience with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a reason to abolish the use of petroleum—reason, that is, beyond petroleum’s inescapable contributions to dangerous anthropogenic interference with the Earth’s climate systems.

It seems that no protests other than that carried out by the SOS were had in Cancún today.

The present author visited Klimaforum10’s campus today.  Klimaforum10, the successor of last year’s Klimaforum09 held during COP-15 in Copenhagen, is being held at the El Rey Polo Country Club, itself located a number of kilometers from Puerto Morales, a city some 40 kilometers south of Cancún.  Klimaforum10 has installed itself on a pasture within the confines of the country club; it is made up of a number of tents at which workshops, discussions, and film-screenings are had.  A number of the events planned to take place at Klimaforum10—a discussion on climate and human conflict; a presentation on the status and possible fate of the ‘Third Pole,’ or the glaciers to be found in the Tibetan highlands; remarks by Polly Higgins, advocate of the introduction of the crime of ecocide into international law; a speech on the impacts on indigenous peoples of glacier-retreat in the Andes; a workshop on the importance of the place of commons in place of statist and private-property regimes; popular reflections on the question of science and responsibility; a panel on the rights of climate-migrants—seem rather compelling, but the location and ethos that seemed there to prevail—one of lifestylism—proved rather disconcerting.

The six Via Campesina caravans that are currently touring various sites in Mexico to highlight the very real damage climate change has to date had on the country—evident above all in the unprecedented rains and floods suffered this year in the country’s south—are expected to arrive in Cancún on either 2 or 3 December, so as to be present for the beginning of the Meeting “For Life and Environmental and Social Justice” on 4 December.  In addition to the mass-protest planned for 7 December, Via Campesina is also organizing a march “For Life and Climate Justice” for 5 December.  The Espacio Mexicano-Diálogo Climático (Mexican Space for Climate Dialogue, or EsMex), another counter-summit to the COP-16, is currently setting-up its installations in downtown Cancún; the space is to be provided solar energy from a Greenpeace truck, the “Sunflower.”

Today it was revealed that neither Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva nor British Prime Minister David Cameron plan to attend the COP-16 talks at all.  In contrast, and in accordance with government-representative José Crespo Fernández, Bolivian President Evo Morales is slated to arrive in Cancún on 9 December, when he is expected to present a speech to international civil society.  Though the U.S. plans to send Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to the talks, it still remains unclear whether U.S. president Barack Obama will deign COP-16 with his presence.

The wind power-generator inaugurated by Calderón on the eve of the summit’s opening, located in an air corridor between Cancún and the Cancunmesse, has been denounced in recent days as having failed to meet governmental environmental standards during its construction.  Its fate is unclear, but the installation—purportedly erected so as to provide electricity for COP-16—may well have to be removed following the end of the conference, in accordance with existing regulations.

With regard to the state of repressive statist forces in Cancún, the Mexican police and military continue in full force, deployed at several sites in the city and its environs and continuing their patrols.  It seems that the federal government has rented from Israel an unmanned aerial vehicle for use in Cancún; it is claimed that the drone will be employed for the monitoring of traffic both vehicular and human in the area.

Published in the U.S. last December with the intention that its release coincide with the beginning of the Copenhagen climate summit, James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity has an impressive-sounding title, however less than impressive its content at times is. Currently a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen is a world-renowned climatologist widely regarded as having been instrumental in bringing the specter of anthropogenic climate change to public attention with his remarks on the question before the U.S. Congress in the late 1980s, and he has engaged in lesser and greater forms of public advocacy on climate issues since then: he has denounced the liberal-parliamentary process for its failures meaningfully to address climate change to date,¹ written an open letter to U.S. President Obama stressing the absolute imperative of taking urgent action on climate change within the new president’s first term,² been arrested at a protest against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia,³ and most recently seen what he calls the “fundamentally wrong” approach taken at the current Copenhagen negotiations as necessitating the summit’s failure.⁴ Hansen is, then, a decidedly important voice whose contributions should be thoughtfully considered; as we shall see, though, his Storms of My Grandchildren is flawed in many ways, despite the rationality of many of its claims.

In Storms, Hansen casts himself in the role of a “witness”: someone, he quotes Robert Pool as saying, who “believes he [or she] has information so important that he [or she] cannot keep silent.” As a witness, his general claim is that, due to the historical and contemporary mass burning of fossil fuels, “Planet Earth […] is in imminent peril,” “in imminent danger of crashing.” Hansen finds the urgency of the matter to be absolute: the very survival of humanity and millions of non-human species is in question. He spends much of the book reviewing the evidence for climate change, finding human-induced contributions to increased average global temperatures to be in “total dominance” over naturally occurring ones; as such, he claims those who deny such realities—global-warming contrarians, as Hansen refers to them—to have no basis for their views. In reflecting on the seriousness of the present situation, Hansen reserves much of his ire for what he calls “scientific reticence”—positivistic approaches that undermine the relevance and necessity of applying the precautionary principle as well as a marked reluctance among individuals knowledgeable about the present predicament to take public stands on this most important of issues. His discourse, furthermore, mirrors a growing disappointment among self-styled progressives with the ascendancy of the Obama administration in the U.S.: Obama, in Hansen’s estimation, “does not get it,” and Obama’s approach of greenwashed compromise is seen here as fundamentally flawed, since, as Hansen writes, “nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise.”

The gravity of the present situation notwithstanding, Hansen believes that hope for a “brighter future” has not yet been entirely stifled. Transitioning from the current atmospheric carbon concentration of 387 parts per million to the “appropriate initial target” Hansen finds in 350 ppm is in his view still practically achievable, though “just barely.” (Strangely enough, Hansen does not address the question of an appropriate CO2-equivalent concentration—that is, a measurement of atmospheric concentrations that includes greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, such as methane, etc.; a CO2-e target of 350 ppm would call for a carbon-dioxide concentration of much lower than 350.) Central to the project of realizing a peak in global carbon emissions and a concomitant return to 350 ppm is the phasing-out of coal emissions as rapidly as possible, says Hansen: slowing down the rate of such emissions, in his view, does no good; all such emissions must end by 2020 in the ‘developed’ world. Hansen tells us that most of the world’s remaining supply of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas, as well as tar sands and shale oil—must be kept in the ground if future generations are to have a “livable planet.” He sees oil and gas as having to play a role in the transitional period that must begin immediately, but emissions from coal, tar sands, and oil shale are to eliminated—which is not to say that the use of the latter sources is to be discontinued, for Hansen feels that they can be allowed to continue if adequate capture and sequestration technologies can be developed and implemented on a mass scale. He does stress the importance of energy-efficiency gains and renewable-energy sources, but he finds it “extremely irresponsible” to depend entirely on these two strategies to combat global warming; instead, he writes favorably of the prospect of a “nuclear renaissance” driven by the development of fourth-generation nuclear power plants, which he seems to find to be the only viable means by which drastically to reduce carbon emissions in the near term. Both forest preservation and reforestation, moreover, are to play a role in his favored carbon-reduction trajectory, though he warns that tree-planting cannot be taken as a substitute for—an offset of—existing carbon emissions. Though initially skeptical about the place that geo-engineering schemes should have in the struggle against climate change, Hansen does conclude that such options may become necessary if business-as-usual is continued for the foreseeable future, and as such he suggests that research be made into exploring such schemes. Furthermore, he eschews the hegemonically favored cap-and-trade approach for what is referred to as “fee-and-dividend,” a framework whereby fees are collected at the mine or port of entry of a given fossil fuel and then divided equally among legal adult residents of the public, the idea being that those who outstrip their share of carbon-emissions—in most cases, Hansen assures us, economically wealthier individuals—will be financially penalized and hence face incentives to reduce their carbon footprints. Hansen envisions these fees as rising over time, so as to allow households and individuals to adjust their lifestyles accordingly; to prevent more carbon-intensive production from simply shifting their operations to a location where such regulatory frameworks are non-existent, he also insists that the fee-and-dividend approach be globalized.

His questionable views on nuclear power aside, much of what Hansen proposes in Storms of My Grandchildren seems reasonable, and as such certainly can be considered useful for informing action aimed at working to mitigate some of the more catastrophic life-negating realities that the prospect of climate change promises, however foreign many of his recommendations seem to be to the approaches favored by those currently negotiating in Copenhagen. Much of Hansen’s commentary on matters not directly related to his programmatic vision for the necessarily urgent reduction in carbon emissions, though, is both frustrating and misleading, and as such merits discussion and refutation. To begin with, Hansen discloses that he is, within the spectrum of mainstream U.S. politics, a “registered Independent” who has cast votes in the past for both Democrats and Republicans. He tells us that he supported the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign in 2000 (adding unnecessarily that he contributed a thousand dollars to the campaign), felt “enthusiasm” at one point for the candidacy of John McCain in 2008, and experienced “moist eyes” during Obama’s Election-Day speech in November of that year. Despite his disappointment in the remarkable lack of action on climate change that Obama has thus far taken, Hansen still maintains that the current U.S. president is “still our best hope.” Moreover, Hansen claims rather bizarrely that he feels the “captains of industry” have to be a “big part of the global warming solution”; he claims that the realization of his carbon-reduction vision “require[s] their leadership.” He also writes elsewhere that he finds the U.S. Constitution to be “remarkable,” and he claims it to have been designed with an eye to preventing the “subversion of the democratic principle for the sake of the powerful few.”

That a document written in large part by slaveholders who decided to count some 700,000 enslaved former Africans as three-fifths of a human being—or, indeed, that allowed for the continued existence of formal slavery in the first place—can be considered remarkable is astounding, as is the faith Hansen seems to have in the U.S. oligarchy. Expressing enthusiasm for the prospect of a McCain presidency is clearly a horrifying position; little more need be said on that. Hansen’s final take on the newest occupant of the White House, though, is similarly of marginal value: claiming that Obama—who, to briefly review, has overseen the transfer of trillions of dollars to the very financial institutions that precipitated the current economic downturn, entirely jettisoned hope for transition to a single-payer health-insurance program in the U.S., requested a ‘defense’ budget larger than that of Bush, backpedaled on curbing Israel’s ongoing colonization of the West Bank, moved toward normalizing relations with the very leadership that has overseen genocide in Darfur, escalated war in Afghanistan, and endorsed the Congress’s pathetic proposals to reduce carbon emissions by around 4 percent by 2020 relative to 1990 levels—is “still our best hope” is entirely unjustified and obfuscatory in the extreme.

Indeed, Hansen’s fairly uncritical view of the representatives of the present system is reflected in a lack of expressed criticality toward the totality of that very system. There is in Storms of My Grandchildren no critique of the environmentally destructive consequences of consumerism, as stressed in Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich are Destroying the Earth; ⁵ of economic growth, which James Gustave Speth denounces in his The Bridge at the End of the World;⁶ or of capitalism and its myriad manifestations, all of which various Marxist and anarchist critics have long sought to abolish. It is probable that Hansen, who fashions himself an “objective scientist” who should refrain from disclosing “personal opinions,” feels that explicitly making such conclusions may prove to alienate his intended audience—the U.S. public—or, perhaps, affect book-sales or even result in his being publicly discredited and his concerns for the climate dismissed. It may also be the case that Hansen himself does not share these critical views on the present state of affairs; he did, after all, see grounds for enthusiasm in the presidential candidacy of John McCain. It should be said, though, that Hansen may well be doing a disservice to his readers in not making linkages between the profundity of the climate predicament and the necessity for a radical politics: the clear responsibility that capitalism and the State bear for the specter of climate catastrophe should be taken as representing the very limits of their continued existence, not as grounds to re-affirm such. Not to find currently prevailing power relations illegitimate in the extreme is simply absurd, and to see in the madness propagated by presently constituted power “our best hope” is in the view of the present author to consign the future of life on Earth to what Hansen calls “the Venus syndrome”: runaway catastrophic climate change that violently transitions the Earth’s climate to one similar to that of Venus, where life simply cannot exist.

Perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of Storms of My Grandchildren is the selective concern expressed in the text by Hansen for the victims of climate change, both actual and potential, present and future. The main subject of Hansen’s concern seems to be the recently born eponymous kin of his, whose pictures we find in several of the work’s chapters. Fear for the possible future that the children of his own children will likely have to face because of dangerous anthropogenic interference with global climatic processes is entirely legitimate, but it seems deeply limiting and even reactionary to find in the prospect of climate catastrophe grounds for concern only or primarily for one’s family members, who in Hansen’s case happen to be white Americans. To his credit, it is true that Hansen recognizes that millions of non-human species are similarly threatened by global warming, but one strives in vain to find in his argument a serious acknowledgment of the profoundly unjust effects climate change stands to have on human society in geographical and socio-economic terms. There is no mention in Hansen’s book, for example, of the Global Humanitarian Forum’s May 2009 report that estimated that some 300,000 humans, living almost entirely in less materially wealthy Southern societies, are being killed annually in the present day as a result of the 0.7-0.8° C increase in average global temperatures that has already occurred because of past emissions,⁷ nor is any concern other than vague generalities expressed for the plight of the billions of presently impoverished, oppressed peoples whose very continued existence is problematized by climate change. Significantly, Hansen does not endorse or even consider the concept of ecological debt,⁸ a framework whereby ‘advanced’ industrial-capitalist societies are to engage in massive redistribution schemes to the ‘developing’ world due to their historical and contemporary appropriation of far more than their legitimate share to the world’s commons, especially the atmosphere. These omissions may again speak to his worries regarding public support in the U.S., where racism and imperialism unfortunately seem to hold hegemonic positions, but they should serve as reminders that one’s obligations with regard to climate change should be general rather than particular, that what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as responsibility for the Other should be limited to nothing less than life itself—Eros, in Herbert Marcuse’s formulation.⁹

This review of Storms of My Grandchildren should not be taken as dismissive of Hansen’s contributions in the book as a whole: while it seems clear that Hansen should not have the last word on the present crisis, there is certainly much of value to be found in Storms. Many of Hansen’s practical recommendations for stepping away from the climatic abyss surely merit attention and implementation, as do some of the perspectives advanced in the fictional future-historical account with which he closes the work’s final chapter: Hansen there has one of his characters, a member of a human-like species that developed on a distant planet called Claron, dismiss humans as “primitive,” given the “irrationality in their politics,” the “dividing lines they draw on maps,” their “abuse of animals,” “the fighting” they engage in, and “the starving people” they ignore. Against the life-negating realities that he correctly criticizes as having long plagued the human condition, Hansen offers the beautiful possibility that Earth be made “an intergenerational commons,” a world which would make available its “fruits and benefits” to “every member of every generation.”

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He’s a member of Professors for a Strong Israel, used his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture to argue that “the swords must continue to be there – they cannot be beaten into ploughshares”

He has, in interviews and articles, presented negotiations betweens Israel and “the Arabs” like this:

Someone offers Reuven and Shimon NIS 1,000 together, if they can manage to agree on the question of how to split the money between them. Reuven says to Shimon: ‘Great, let’s split it half and half.’ Shimon says: ‘No. I am not leaving here with less than NIS 900. You will get 100. Take it or leave it.’ Reuven says to him: ‘Be rational. What is the difference between us? Why should you get more?’ Shimon says: ‘Rational or not, do what you want. Either I leave here with 900 or with nothing. You decide.’

Reuven thinks and says: ‘Okay, NIS 100 is money nevertheless. What am I going to do with this irrational mule? I myself am rational and I will take the 100. I need to advance my goal of getting as much money as possible, and my choice is between zero and 100. One hundred is still something.’

What is the paradox? That the irrational person gets more than the rational person.

[...]

The Arabs present rigid and unreasonable opening positions at every negotiation. They convey confidence and assurance in their demands, and make certain to make absolutely clear to Israel that they will never give up on any of these requirements. Absent an alternative, Israel is forced to yield to blackmail due to the perception that it will leave the negotiating room with nothing if it is inflexible.

[...]

There isn’t anything that we can convince the other side is sacred to us, that we’re willing to ‘be killed for it, rather than transgress.’ If there were something like that, then we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in today.

[...]

When did we get a lot of respect? When we bombed the reactor in Iraq, in Operation Entebbe, in the Six-Day War. Gestures don’t bring respect, but rather scorn, not just here but everywhere in the world because that’s human nature. Anyone who remembers the expulsion from Gush Katif relates to it with a shrug: ‘You expelled your own people.’ We didn’t get points because of the expulsion.

Nonetheless it often happens that the far right-wing observer is willing to admit truths that the centrist or left-liberal cannot stomach.

In volume 2 of Aumann’s Collected Papers, I recently came across “Power and Taxes”, an Econometrica paper from 1977, co-authored with Mordecai Kurz. The authors analyse “the actions of the government…as an endogenous consequence of the political forces that enable it to maintain power.”

This leads them to the following point:

[We] will make an assumption that we consider a basic ingredient of a democratic society, namely that

every agent can, if he wishes, destroy part or all of his endowment.

It goes without saying that the part that is destroyed cannot be taxed. If one thinks of one’s endowment as labour, then the above means that there is no forced labour: an individual may, if he wishes, “destroy” his labour, by simply working less (or not at all).

It may not be immediately clear why this assumption changes anything – after all, who would want to destroy his endowment – what good would it do anybody? The answer is that it gives the minority considerable threat power – power that is vital in determining taxes…[A] strike involves the destruction of endowment (in the form of labour services) in the face of what are considered unfavourable terms of trade or excessive taxation.

While Aumann and Kurz focus on labour strikes, in reality the level of private, taxable economic activity (and thus the level of government revenue) is far more sensitive to the willingness of asset-holders to invest.

Private property ensures that owners have the right to withhold their “endowment”  – i.e. not invest in productive activity – if they don’t expect an adequate rate of return, due to high tax rates or low confidence in the “business climate”.

Governments are thus vulnerable to capital strikes, as explained by Fred Block in his article (also from 1977) on the class character of the state:

[Those] who manage the state apparatus – regardless of their own political ideology – are dependent on the maintenance of some reasonable level of economic activity. This is true for two reasons. First, the capacity of the state to finance itself through taxation or borrowing depends on the state of the economy. If economic activity is in decline, the state will have difficulty maintaining its revenues at an appropriate level. Second, public support for a regime will decline sharply if the regime presides over a serious drop in the level of economic activity, with a parallel rise is unemployment and shortages of key goods. Such a drop in support increases the likelihood that the state managers will be removed from power one way or another. And even if the drop is not that dramatic, it will increase the challenges to the regime and decrease the regime’s ability to take effective actions.

In a capitalist economy the level of economic activity is largely determined by the private investment decisions of capitalists. This means that capitalists, in their collective role as investors, have a veto over state policies in that their failure to invest at adequate levels can create major political problems for the state managers. This discourages state managers from taking actions that might seriously decrease the rate of investment. It also means that state managers have a direct interest in using their power to facilitate investment, since their own continued power rests on a healthy economy. There will be a tendency for state agencies to orient their various programs toward the goal of facilitating and encouraging private investment. In doing so, the state managers address the problem of investment from a broader perspective than that of the individual capitalist. This increases the likelihood that such policies will be in the general interest of capital.

Block took this to mean that there are structural mechanisms, beyond the conscious identification of state managers with capitalist interests, that discipline them to act in certain ways.

Whether they are bureaucrats or elected politicians, whether their goals are to expand military capacity or implement social reforms, state managers are reliant for income on firms making productive investments, and rentiers giving credit. They (state managers) thus face constraints that reduce their feasible set of actions: they can’t for long implement policies that harm the confidence of owners of capital.

The nature of this dependence was also conceded in a recent speech by the Australian Prime Minister. After listing her “values” – “the things I still believe in; the things that drive me on” (stale banalities like “respect”, education and “hard work”) – Julia Gillard explained her government’s “policies and plans”, and “why my government is doing it”:

Because we know that we can’t deliver on any of those values without a strong economy and because we know that we can’t deliver on a strong economy without economic reform: significant fiscal consolidation; leveraging new investment in human capital; restructuring markets untouched by earlier waves of reform; right through to economic reforms in areas as diverse as carbon, water, and skills.

This says much about the limits of reformism and the trajectory of parties such as the ALP and the Greens. Even those state managers with sincere reformist objectives must maintain the level of economic activity (especially when government expenditure is the means by which they hope to achieve progressive development). This means support for policies benefiting the national capitalist sector.

And the latter inevitably leads, especially in times of downturn, to support for welfare cuts, austerity budgets, attacks on the labour movement, military expeditions to Afghanistan or East Timor, etc. For those who want better, neither keeping the bastards honest, nor “replacing the bastards” (the Greens’ declared aim) will do.

In his rather terrifying 2008 book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, British environmental journalist Mark Lynas—a writer whose works and findings would surely tie him to some sort of eco-socialist politics, were he not presumably to be ideologically and materially tied to the hegemonic state of affairs—reflects on the present climate catastrophe by asserting that humans are “indescribably privileged” to be born into the only planet on which life is known to exist in the universe¹. In a sense, of course, Lynas here has a point: human existence and consciousness in theory and in practice allow for wonderful possibilities. Nonetheless, his assertion here by itself could well be taken as legitimating the various injustices and horrors of existing society—or can it be said that a comfortable Western journalist and a starving Nigerien child are similarly privileged in life-circumstances?

What can be said is that human existence potentially permits for the creation of specific social conditions that could perhaps justify Lynas’ claims regarding the privilege of experiencing human life—that is to say, a classless global society governed by principles of liberty, equality, justice, and solidarity. Clearly, present society is rather far-removed from such ends; more worrying than this consideration is the fact that the spectre of catastrophic climate change promised by the perpetuation of prevailing social relations threatens forever to make impossible the realization of such a society, let alone the existence of any society at all.

The present state of the Earth’s climate systems is not likely terminal as regards the human prospect; it is, for all that, surely urgent. Some 20 million Pakistanis were displaced this summer by unprecedented floods resulting from unprecedented rains—one of the many effects of the higher average global temperatures provoked to date by anthropogenic climate change, since warmer air holds more moisture. Some 10 million residents of the Sahelian countries of Niger, Chad, and Mali were reported in late June to be at serious risk of dying of starvation as crops failed for the second consecutive year—likely to be due to increased average temperatures. The most severe rains in living memory have pummelled the lands of southern Mexico and Guatemala in recent weeks, flooding homes, inundating crops, and provoking landslides. The minimum summer extent of the Arctic’s sea-ice was this year the third-lowest since records began; in August, an ice-island with an area of 100 miles broke off Greenland’s Petermann glacier—the most momentous of such developments in the region in nearly 50 years. These effects are being felt with the 0.8ºC increase in average global temperatures beyond those that prevailed inpre-industrial times; were such temperature increases to reach 2ºC, though, the totality of the Andes glaciers that presently provide water to millions in South America would no longer exist, and the Greenland ice sheet would be in terminal decline. With a 3ºC increase, the Kalahari Desert can be expected to expand considerably, dispatching millions through famine, and the Amazon rainforest will likely collapse in a giant self-conflagration. At increases of 4ºC and beyond, the viability of human society itself is placed into question.

Among many other effects, then—other, that is, than dramatically increasing starvation rates among the world’s peoples, radically diminishing available fresh-water supplies, and rendering uninhabitable low-lying coastal zones the world over—climate change will provoke mass human migration movements. One group of such migrants are those coming to be known as climate refugees – individuals forced to abandon or flee their places of residence due to the various consequences of anthropogenic climate change. (As far as one understands, the concept of climate refugees carries with it no distinction between refugees and internally displaced people; international law considers refugees to be those who cross state boundaries following their displacement, while the internally displaced remain within the same country.) The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), responsible in the past 20 years for releasing a series of reports on climatology and global warming, estimates in its latest report (2007) that some 200 million individuals will be forced into exile by climate change before the end of the current century. Such an estimate, like much else to be found in the IPCC’s 2007 report, is undoubtedly a conservative under-estimate: if average global temperatures increase by 6ºC relative to pre-industrial levels during the twenty-first century—as climatologists are warning could well occur, given the grossly inadequate response presented by constituted power to the various threats posed by climate change—the number of persons displaced will certainly be in the billions, not hundreds of millions; it is to imagined that the number killed will be of a similar amount.

The policy recommendations that follow from consideration of the “problem” of climate refugees range from institutional-reformist to totally revolutionary. Former approaches seem to call for the codification of the concept of ‘environmental persecution’ into international law and the global institution of national climate-refugee immigration quotas proportional to the greenhouse-gas emissions historically produced by the state in question, whereas the latter see in the devastation likely to be produced by climate-displacement yet another reason to fundamentally re-order existing society. Of course, neither reformism nor radicalism should be expected from the world’s states on this question, as on a myriad of others; the same entities that today deport thousands of members of ‘lesser peoples’ (France), criminalize unauthorized immigration (Arizona), suspend refugee applications for those fleeing the war-zones of Sri Lanka and Afghanistan (Australia), and construct large separation-barriers to cut-off populations vulnerable to climate change (India, following Israel’s example) cannot reasonably be considered actors that will treat the problem of climate-displacement in rational or humane fashion. Indeed, one need only consider the likelihood that the Republican Party will make significant electoral gains in the U.S. Congress this November to know that no progress will be made in the foreseeable future on official global climate-change policy, especially given that the oppositional Democrat-majority Congress has itself failed to pass legislation aimed at mitigating U.S. contributions to the catastrophe presently being enacted. Were a Republican controlled government to work toward the chilling future Gwynne Dyer sees for the U.S.-Mexico border on a climate devastated Earth—mined areas leading up to dauntingly-sized walls armed with auto-targeting machine guns²—it would, for all its horror, be nonetheless unsurprising. The current president, a Democrat, has already authorized Predator-drone overflights on the U.S.-Mexico border in addition to the deployment National Guard troops.

The urgency of the intersection between looming climate catastrophe and the world-historical failure of hegemonic politics on this question potentially opens space for a radical eco-liberatory politics—anarchism. Anarchism’s central tenets, of course, are an opposition to capitalism, and to the State: these institutions are principally responsible for anthropogenic climate change, the former by means of its inherent need for growth (profits), the latter through its protection and advancement of such. Many thinkers associated with libertarian socialism, moreover—for example, Murray Bookchin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Cornelius Castoriadis—have developed rigorous critiques of the domination of nature demanded by liberalism, Marxism, and, it would seem, Karl Marx himself³— espite the recent efforts made by John Bellamy Foster to rehabilitate him on these grounds. Importantly, furthermore, anarchism does not share orthodox Marxism’s belief that capitalism will necessarily and inevitably be abolished; in this sense, perhaps, anarchism is more sensitive to the threat of relapse and regression into barbarism promised by climate change and can hence contribute to the displacement of theories and practices that defend the status quo and its likely futures better than can celebratory theories. Similarly, anarchism has rightly long expressed concern about the place of Marxist-Leninist politics in contemporary society; a brief review of the various negations overseen by Lenin and Trotsky before the formers death in 1924—the destruction of worker- and soldier-run soviets, the mass-imprisonment of anarchist critics, the suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt Commune as well as of the libertarian efforts of Nestor Makhno’s Cossack bands in Ukraine—is instructive in this sense.

Anarchism, in short, has a great deal to contribute to political reflection and action in light of the threat of climate catastrophe. Its stress on autonomy (literally, ‘self-legislation’) is crucially important at present, given the entirely barbarous approaches to climate change advanced to date by the State in its defense of capital. Bookchin’s concept of libertarian municipalism and Hannah Arendt’s advocacy of the council system, if somehow realized in history somewhere in the near future, could theoretically allow for the development of a counter-power to the climate-barbarism presently being promoted by State and capital, were such participatory institutions to be governed by both reason and compassion. Recent efforts made by leftist political organizations in Montréal to close off certain areas of the city to car-traffic represent an example of what can be achieved in this sense, as does Ernest Callenbach’s portrayal of what a participatory-ecological society could amount to in his 1975 novel Ecotopia: though the society he there describes is not anarchist, the work’s importance as testimony to the necessity of throwing off the yoke of liberal-capitalist society as a precondition for ecological rationality is not to be underestimated. Moreover, the emphasis made by Peter Kropotkin, among other anarchist theorists, on the need for expropriating capital as a means by which to advance the project of anarchism is also direly crucial today: the resources presently afforded to capital and the State could of course much more reasonably be employed toward the development of a post-carbon global society in which people are afforded the material conditions needed to lead decent lives, free from the regressions of catastrophic climate change, than is the case with presently hegemonic consumerist and militaristic tendencies. In addition, Kropotkin’s stress on mutual aid and solidarity should not readily be dismissed, in light of the various horrors to which climate change will subject humanity—and, it should be added, the non-human world—until and unless that which Adorno calls a “global self-conscious subject”⁴ intervenes to overthrow prevailing barbarism.

If allowed to continue, capitalism will induce climatic changes that threaten the world with mass-extinction of life and the collective suicide of humanity; such a monstrous system must undoubtedly, then, be suppressed, with socialism making a dramatic encore into history. It would be better that such socialism, in place of emulating the authoritarianism advanced by Lenin and Trotsky after October 1917, be libertarian, and follow fromthe examples of Catalunya 1936, Paris 1968, and Chiapas from 1994 to the present.

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1(Washington, D.C.: National Geographic), p. 302

Empire's diabolical assemblage

“At no time has the poverty of humanity stood in such crying contradiction to its potential wealth as in the present—at no time have all powers been so horribly fettered as in this generation, where children go hungry as the hands of the fathers are busy churning out bombs.”¹

The Obama administration has reportedly finalized a proposal for the largest single arms-deal in U.S. history—one valued at $60 billion, to be sent to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) over the next 5 to 10 years. This mass arms-sale would see the U.S. upgrading 70 of the KSA’s aging Boeing-manufactured F-15 fighter-jets and selling it 84 new ones, in addition to 70 Longbow Apache attack helicopters, 72 Black Hawk transport helicopters, and 36 multi-purpose Little Bird gunships.² (The proposed deal stipulates no further sales of transport or attack helicopters outrageously bearing the names of Native-American groups nearly exterminated historically by settler colonialism, such as the Comanche or Chinook.) Israel is said to have been involved in the drawing-up of the arms-sale; indeed, the deal seems to have proceeded only with Israel’s support, for neither the KSA-owned F-15s that are to be upgraded nor their new counterparts are to carry what are termed as standoff systems, which are said to permit these death-machines to target long-range land- and sea-based targets.³ Of course, not on offer to the KSA are the next-generation F-35 aircraft, 20 of which Israel reportedly spent $3 billion on last month.⁴ The F-35s, said to be expected to be available in 2015 at the earliest, are being termed the “costliest and most technically challenging weapons program the Pentagon has ever attempted.”⁵

In addition, U.S. officials are said to be contemplating putting together a further $30 billion deal aimed at upgrading the KSA’s naval forces.⁶ Furthermore, negotiations are reportedly underway between the U.S. and the KSA toward enhancing Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities against short- and intermediate-ballistic missiles: this would entail upgrading its existing Patriot-missile batteries and potentially even the purchasing of the Terminal High Altitude Defense system (THAAD), a joint Lockheed Martin-Raytheon production said to be the first weapons-system designed to provide defense against missile attacks from both within and beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.⁷ It should be noted that a similar arms-deal was negotiated with the KSA in the closing days of the Bush administration, though the difference in cost and scope—the package provided by Bush was valued at $20 billion⁸—is striking.

If the purported contents of this proposed weapons-deal have been reported correctly, it would seem that the U.S. is not attempting to arm the KSA in preparation for an attack the Islamic Republic of Iran—the same, of course, cannot be said of the F-35 sales to Israel. The deal instead appears to largely promote of the KSA’s defense capabilities, although it must be said that various components of the proposed package could well serve the U.S./Israel against the Islamic Republic if war were in fact to break out: it is to be imagined that the KSA’s upgraded air force could serve as a double to that of the United Arab Emirates, described by General David Petraeus in 2009 as a force that could “take out the entire Iranian air force” by itself—this before the UAE had 80 F-16s delivered from the U.S.⁹ Writers for both The Guardian and The New York Times expect the proposed arms deal, brainchild of Obama, to pass through Congress easily, considering that it is estimated to provide for some 77,000 jobs across 44 states¹⁰—this in the midst of a formidable recession.

Although its scale is perhaps considerably greater than pre-existing arrangements, this proposed deal conforms with long-standing U.S.-government designs to project its hegemony over Southwestern Asia, ones that have been helped along by efforts made by Bush and Obama to tie the “moderate Arab” regimes into a de facto military alliance against the Islamic Republic; the most recent manifestations of such policy would be the deployment of Patriot missile batteries in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.¹¹ What is more, Pentagon officials cited by Thom Shanker and David Sanger of the New York Times report that the RKSA deal would further promote the ability of the U.S. military to engage in “power-projection”¹²—that is to say, to further assert its barbarous domination.

To summarize, then: the largest single arms deal negotiated by the U.S. during its short but thoroughly nasty history—one that will likely meet approval, even a warm embrace—would award one of the world’s most reactionary regimes with arms that could well significantly increase tensions among the various states of Southwestern Asia toward the possibility of open war. Such a war, like all wars, would be terrible, a “monstrous act of imperialist criminality,” as Alex Lantier of the World Socialist Web Site has it.¹³ “Countless thousands of Iranians would be killed in the first hours of [such] a war,” with thousands if not millions more victims to come after the opening salvo, and it would surely “bring the entire world closer to the day of a global nuclear conflagration.” In addition to the horrifically catastrophic direct human toll such a conflict would bring with it, it would likely also result in the cessation of hydrocarbon-export from Iran, with severe consequences for those who depend upon such for such things for fertilizers, transport, and so on.

Assuming that plausible alternatives to the alarming present tendency advanced by hegemonic powers exist, as they clearly do,¹⁴ it would seem to follow that they be adopted. One alternative could simply be not to have the deal to begin with—given the present array of forces, this would of course in practical terms necessitate the intervention of a “global self-conscious subject.”¹⁵ Another alternative would be to dedicate the between $60 and 90 billion currently being considered to things other than militarism and the promotion of catastrophe. One reasonable such project would be to dedicate significant resources to the development of solar power and other non-hydrocarbon-based energy sources, given the severity of the climate crisis. Another worthy project would be to provide more resources than have been afforded the peoples of Pakistan and Haiti, devastated as they have been by severe disasters in recent memory—that of the former undoubtedly largely the result of the anthropogenic climate change caused to date by industrial capitalism. Perhaps the $60-90 billion could be employed toward providing food-supplies to the approximately 1 billion humans who currently starve¹⁶—or in particular, to the millions of Sahel residents who presently run the serious risk of dying from starvation¹⁷—or medicines and health-care access to innumerable number of people who suffer and die from diseases and lack of medical treatment. Moreover, there clearly exists a dire need to provide Southern societies resources with which to attempt to mitigate the catastrophic effects that climate change is wreaking on their lives: principal among these would be the radical disruption of the potential for agricultural production, the drastic reduction of fresh-water supplies, and the provocation of severe floods and landslides.

Such projects, reasonable and humane as they may be, are naturally not on the minds of State functionaries; they are particularly absent in the U.S. government, imperial defender of reified, pre-historical existence. This barbarous entity is complicit with an innumerable number of first-order failures: inter alia, it has dramatically failed to come anywhere near the pathetically minimalist international norm calling on industrialized societies to provide 0.7 percent of their annual GDP to official-development assistance to what is termed the Third World, still refuses to become a member of the International Criminal Court, and stunningly continues to bankroll fascist Israel in its colonial project against the Palestinians—it should be remembered, of course, that the U.S. House of Representatives voted 390 to 5 to back Israel’s winter 2008-2009 assault on Gaza¹⁸; a similar resolution in the Senate met with unanimous support.¹⁹ It is at present unclear whether the Obama administration and the present Congress have yet repudiated the Clinton administration’s 1996 rejection of the international right to food, but one imagines this not to be the case. The U.S. government is furthermore remarkable for the lack of social protection it renders to its own citizenry, as Chris Hedges²⁰ and John Sargis²¹ have compellingly argued on the recent health-care ‘reform’ advanced by Obama and mandated by Congress.

Among the various negations and crimes for which the U.S. government is responsible, both past and present, few can be said to approach the U.S. Senate’s tabling in July of consideration of legislation putatively aimed at mitigating U.S. contributions to anthropogenic climate change. This act—far graver than the Waxman-Markey bill passed through the House of Representatives in June 2009, which, in mandating a 4-7 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions on 1990 levels by 2020, fails even to meet the entirely inadequate reduction-trajectory called for by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol—is simply an abomination. It radically undermines the possibility of moving toward an international accord that could in theory begin to address the unfolding climate catastrophe, to step back from the brink of oblivion—though one must not put one’s faith in proposals endorsed by capital and the state. This prima facie failure on the Senate’s part is radically removed from the mass-suffering that anthropogenic interference with the Earth’s climate systems is already imposing on the peoples of the world, to say nothing of its non-human inhabitants; it amounts to a radical rejection of the recommendations made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report—itself highly conservative and based in part on largely dated data—which call for a global peak in anthropogenic carbon emissions by 2015 and an expeditious decline thereafter. The IPCC’s proposed plan of action, it must be said, would itself only provide a 50 percent chance of limiting average-global temperature increases to 2ºC beyond pre-industrial levels—”a death sentence,” write David Spratt and Philip Sutton,²² “for billions of people and millions of species.” The Senate’s astounding decision not to consider climate legislation essentially renders the upcoming Cancún climate negotiations, as well as the subsequent South Africa round, totally hopeless, at least as regards progress toward a global climate-change accord. The potential dialectical importance of the Cancún and South Africa talks for the development of anti-systemic movements within international civil society—Adorno’s “global self-conscious subject”—is a different question.

It must be remembered, of course, that the Senate’s denial of a bill aimed at regulating carbon emissions as well as the proposed mass-arms sale to the KSA—two aspects of the appallingly monstrous present state of affairs—have been prosecuted by a Democrat-majority Congress and a Democrat-occupied White House. The prospect of further regression in light of the possibility that the Republican party make significant electoral gains in November is absolute. The necessity for revolutionary praxis directed at dismantling the present system—one that Fidel Castro rightly indicted in his desperate comments during a 3 September speech as “jeopardi[zing] the very survival of humanity”²³—is similarly absolute.

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Bloody Sunday, St. Petersburg, 1905

NB: Also published on Countercurrents

As has been reviewed on these pages recently—as can be seen through basic knowledge of some of the various disasters that have befallen many of the world’s peoples in recent memory—anthropogenic climate change is becoming something of a catastrophe. To term the catastrophe currently being enacted a “disaster,” as did Mexico KlimaForum 10 in July,¹ would be a gross understatement. To paraphrase Elizabeth Kolbert,² ‘advanced’ industrial societies are essentially destroying themselves by means of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the Earth’s climate systems—though it must be added, rather significantly, that such societies are also destroying humanity in general, as well as life itself. Basing his recommendations on various reports published by climatologists, Mark Lynas concludes that global greenhouse-gas emissions must peak by the year 2015 if there is to be a chance for a stabilization in the increase of average global temperatures at 2C beyond those that prevailed before the onset of industrial capitalism in 1750.³ Progress toward this goal was violently negated by the U.S. Senate’s tabling in July of consideration of legislation aimed at reducing U.S. society’s contributions to global warming; in light of such, little can be expected to be achieved at the 2010 Cancún and 2011 South Africa Conference of Parties (COP) climate-negotiations. Humanity, in sum, is losing; it is being sacrificed in a rather final manner to capitalism and the state: if the climatological reports Lynas cites are to be believed, an average-global temperature increase of 2C, for example—a warming-target far lower than that which can be expected to follow from the alarmingly inadequate response taken to date by global society vis-a-vis the specter of climate catastrophe—would see dramatically more acidified oceans, the complete disappearance of the Andean glaciers, and widespread starvation in much of the world—that is to say, starvation far more widespread than today, when over a billion people starve.

How one is to approach the prospect of such horrors is certainly an open question. For his part, Bill McKibben, environmental writer and founder of 350.org, declares in his most recent public communiqué that he’s writing to “get [his readers] fired up,” announcing that he’s presently engaged in a “Solar Road Trip” (his means of transportation does not seem to be solar-powered) that aims to deliver to President Obama a solar panel installed in 1979 on the White House roof by the Carter administration, with the hope that doing so will “spur Obama to pick up where Carter left off.”⁴ It is unclear what McKibben means by this: it is to be hoped that he does not wish Obama to emulate Carter’s support for Shah Reza Pahlavi, opposition to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and the dispossession by Indonesia of East Timor or his rejection of calls for reparations to brutalized Vietnam. McKibben seems to hope that presenting the solar panel to Obama will remind him of the years before the accession of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, an era before the time in which “we” reportedly “stopped thinking carefully about the future.”⁵

This latest circus act on McKibben’s part is nothing short of moronic and infantile. The fact of the matter is not that the rationality of transitioning toward a post-carbon society run on renewable energy is merely a consideration that has slipped Obama’s mind but rather that Obama’s institutional position as defender of the “petroleum civilization”⁶ and the capitalist mode of production precludes him from considering rational plans to address looming climate catastrophe. This should be obvious, especially to someone who has spent as much time and effort reflecting on the climate predicament as McKibben seems to have; unfortunately, such considerations do not seem to be obvious, whether to McKibben or more generally. To be clear, then: Obama is not the agent to whom one should be addressing her or his concerns regarding climate change, let alone any other significant threat to human welfare. He is, as Max Ajl has rightly observed, a “world-killer”⁷: an uncaring, reactionary force—Benjamin’s Enemy.⁸ He is as disconnected from addressing pressing world-issues as Tsar Nicholas II was vis-a-vis the urban poor of St. Petersburg who in 1905 thought they would petition their grievances to the tsar and were subsequently massacred.

Of course, such criticisms of constituted power are not to be found in McKibben’s writings. Rather against all evidence—indeed, in light of considerable evidence to the contrary—McKibben asserts in his 2010 book Eaarth that “in Barack Obama we’ve finally got a president using centralized power to good ends,”⁹ and similarly claims “Obama [to be] doing lots of good practical things already” on climate change in a 7 September article on the “symbolic solar road trip” to Washington, D.C.¹⁰ Any attempt by McKibben to justify such positions would be absurd: they are clearly refuted by Obama’s horrific treatment of the Copenhagen climate negotiations last December.

Just as the hegemonic system McKibben mystifies—capitalism—must be dislodged and abolished, so must McKibben himself come to be displaced as leader/father of contemporary movements against climate catastrophe. His politics are legitimational and reformist; they are inappropriate for the scope of the present catastrophe. This should not, though, be taken to mean that the masses of individuals presently involved with McKibben’s 350.org—those, that is, rightfully concerned about anthropogenic climate change—are necessarily tied to the perspectives he advances. Indeed, it should be said that the human prospect could be served well by the development of rhizomatic movements comprised of ‘climate radicals’ that leave behind the politics endorsed by McKibben and all other reformist apologists.

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[Note: Revolutionary Initiative does not have a position on Freedom Road Socialist Organization and cannot vouch for the accuracy of the author's criticisms of that particular organization.    However, the letter raises many important issues for people and organizations committed to making revolution in imperialist countries, particularly regarding how engaging in mass work relates to building a revolutionary movement.]

[Edit: This letter has been responded to by a supporter of FRSO here.  That response was criticized by a supporter of the FIRE Collective here.]

• To form study groups to develop a new communist coherency. The FIRE Collective in Houston, TX is leading this example. Studies should introduce communist politics to new audiences with the process of study, engagement, affirmation and negation of past experiences. We need to look at new ideas that are being introduced. Study groups, blogs, and many other forms will have a role to play in developing a new communist coherency.
• To vociferously promote the revolutionary struggles internationally, specifically the most advanced movements in Nepal, India, Philippines, and Turkey. We need to organize and educate people about the oppression and struggles of the tribal people in India and the repression of Operation Greenhunt. This has been done in San Francisco. Both of these points have the intended message that communism is not dead, but remains the solution to our problems.
• To expose loudly every instance of injustice that occurs at the hands of this system such as the Oscar Grant murder. We need to interact, exchange and debate with other revolutionaries. Kasama has hosted many such interactions and debates.

Since the proletariat is not in the position to seize power in any other way than “prematurely,” since the proletariat is absolutely obliged to seize power once or several times “too early” before it can maintain itself in power for good, the objection to the “premature” conquest of power is at bottom nothing more than a general opposition to the aspiration of the proletariat to possess itself of State power.

–Rosa Luxemburg

(Source: Reform or Revolution, Part Two, Chapter VIII, “Conquest of Political Power”)

WORKSHOP ON AGRARIAN REFORM

22^nd – 25^th SEPTEMBER 2010

PARIS

http://actuelmarx.u-paris10.fr/cm6/index6.htm

La Réforme agraire, au passé et au futur

coordonné par Pablo F. Luna (Université Paris Sorbonne): pablo-fernando.luna@paris-sorbonne.fr

La Reforma Agraria, en pasado y futuro

Agrarian Reforms: Past and Future

La Section histoire du Congrès Marx International VI, Crise, révoltes, utopies propose la réunion d’un Atelier de travail consacré a la discussion, dans une perspective historienne et marxiste, de cette problématique du monde contemporain. Il est ouvert aux spécialistes de l’étude de la réforme agraire de par le monde. Mais il voudrait aussi amorcer une réflexion sur la réalité des mondes ruraux actuels et des désastres humains et naturels provoqués dans les campagnes par plusieurs décennies d’un néolibéralisme mondialisé et impitoyable. Il voudrait également s’interroger sur le futur d’une lutte pour la réforme agraire, dans son sens originel, qui semble désormais plus actuelle que jamais.

La réforme de la possession des terres est une aspiration moderne. Après les projets des philosophes, des théologiens et des penseurs, les hommes politiques réformateurs ont essayé de la mettre en pratique avec toutefois des objectifs différents, que ce soit dans le monde britannique ou en Europe continentale (les pays germaniques et nordiques, la France, la Péninsule ibérique, la Péninsule italienne). A la fin du 18e siècle, la Révolution française a eu, tel que nous le savons, une forte composante agraire et paysanne. La nationalisation et la vente des biens du clergé et de la noblesse, pour s’attaquer aux forces hostiles au processus révolutionnaire, a pu ouvrir la voie à un important transfert de terres dans le court et dans le moyen terme, qui a également favorisé certains segments sociaux du monde paysan.

Sous des formes diverses, tout le 19e siècle a été marqué ici et là, y compris en Russie et en Amérique, par la question agraire et par celle de la possession de la terre. Ces deux ambitions ont été en même temps des revendications socioéconomiques et politiques, rattachées souvent, dans le cadre des empires, à la reconnaissance des peuples et des nations sans Etat et à la lutte contre l’oppression nationale, pour la liberté. La paysannerie et sa lutte pour la terre et contre les propriétaires fanciers et les hobereaux, étrangers ou autochtones, se sont ainsi régulièrement situées au cœur du mouvement national.

Mais il a fallu attendre 1910 — il y a tout juste un siècle —, pour voir vraiment apparaître le mot « réforme agraire » dans sa signification contemporaine. Et avec le mot son contenu et avec le contenu son application politique concrète, dans le contexte d’un mouvement populaire victorieux. C’est au Mexique, — où se produit la première révolution du 20e siècle — et dans la pratique des mouvements paysans puis des gouvernements révolutionnaires, que la réforme agraire a pris tout son sens de lutte pour le changement de la propriété de la terre, pour la réforme du régime de travail, pour la transformation du système de production et de distribution de la richesse, et aussi pour le pouvoir politique de l’Etat. Le mot d’ordre Terre et liberté qui synthétisait alors, et durant plusieurs décennies, les aspirations des Indiens et des paysans mexicains est devenu depuis la pierre de touche des projets de réforme agraire formulés et mis en pratique.

Le 20e siècle a connu des réformes agraires, au pluriel, les unes plus radicales que les autres, proposées soit par la lutte paysanne et ouvrière révolutionnaire, soit par des Etats réformateurs (parfois militaires et/ou nationalistes), et même par des projets politiques qui ont voulu preserver la société et le système en vigueur et contrecarrer des mouvements révolutionnaires en perspective. Cette tendance, mondialement transversale, n’a pratiquement épargnée aucune région du monde: l’ancienne Russie devenu URSS, la Chine populaire, l’Europe centrale, orientale et méridionale, l’Inde, l’Indochine, l’Amérique latine, et meme l’Afrique d’avant et d’après les décolonisations.

Les propositions d’intervention peuvent être envoyées jusqu’au 30 juin 2010 à pablo-fernando.luna@paris-sorbonne.fr

Pablo F. Luna (Université Paris Sorbonne)

La Reforma Agraria, en pasado y futuro

La reforma de la posesión de la tierra es una aspiración moderna. Luego de los proyectos esbozados por filósofos, teólogos y pensadores, los hombres políticos reformistas intentaron ponerla en práctica —aun cuando fuera con objetivos distintos—, ya sea en el mundo británico o en Europa continental (Los países germánicos y nórdicos, Francia, la Península Ibérica o la Península Italiana). A finales del siglo XVIII, como sabemos, la revolución francesa tuvo un fuerte componente agrario y campesino. La nacionalización y venta de los bienes del clero y la nobleza, para neutralizar a las fuerzas hostiles al proceso revolucionario, desencadenó a corto y a mediano plazo una importante transferencia de tierras que también favoreció a determinados segmentos sociales del mundo campesino.

Bajo formas distintas y en diversos lugares, incluso en Rusia y en el continente americano, todo el siglo XIX estuvo signado por la cuestión agraria y la cuestión de la posesión de la tierra. Estas dos ambiciones fueron al mismo tiempo reivindicaciones socioeconómicas y políticas, muy ligadas en el contexto de los imperios al reconocimiento de los pueblos y naciones sin Estado y a la lucha por la libertad y contra la oppression nacional. El campesinado y su lucha por la tierra y contra los terratenientes e hidalgüelos, oriundos o extranjeros, se situaron muy a menudo en el corazón de los movimientos nacionales.

Pero hubo que esperar 1910 —hace exactamente un siglo—, para asistir a la aparición verdadera de la palabra « reforma agraria » en su acepción contemporánea. Y con la fórmula el contenido ; y con el contenido su aplicación política concreta, en el cuadro de un movimiento popular victorioso. Fue en México —en donde se produjo la primera revolución del siglo XX— y en la práctica de los movimientos campesinos, primero, y luego en la de los gobiernos revolucionarios, donde y cuando la réforma agrarian adquirió todo su sentido de lucha por el cambio en la propiedad de la tierra, por la reforma del régimen de trabajo, por la transformación del sistema de producción y distribución de la riqueza y también por el poder político del Estado. La consigna Tierra y Libertad que concretizó entonces, y durante varias décadas, las aspiraciones de los indios y campesinos mexicanos, se volvió la piedra de toque de los proyectos de reforma agraria concebidos y puestos en aplicación.

El siglo XX asistió a reformas agrarias, en plural; unas más radicals que las otras. Algunas propuestas por la lucha campesina y obrera revolucionaria, otras por Estados reformistas (a veces militares y/o nacionalistas), e incluso algunas fomentadas por proyectos políticos que quisieron preservar el orden y el sistema vigentes, contrarrestando movimientos revolucionarios en ciernes. Fue una tendencia mundialmente transversal, que no dispensó a casi ninguna región del planeta: la antigua Rusia, transformada en URSS ; China popular ; Europa central, meridional y oriental ; India e Indochina ; América Latina ; e incluso la Africa de antes y de después de las descolonizaciones.

La Sección Historia del Congreso Marx Internacional VI, Crisis, Revueltas, Utopías (http://netx.u-paris10.fr/actuelmarx/cm6/index6.htm), que tendrá lugar en París —entre el 22 y el 25 de septiembre de 2010—, propone reunir sobre esta problemática del mundo contemporáneo un Taller de trabajo y discusión, en una perspectiva histórica y marxista. Un encuentro abierto a los especialistas del estudio de la reforma agraria en el mundo. Pero también un encuentro para reflexionar sobre la realidad de los mundos rurales actuales y los desastres humanos y naturales provocados en el campo por varias décadas de un neoliberalismo mundializado y despiadado. También desearía interrogarse sobre el porvenir de una lucha por la reforma agraria, en su sentido original, que parece de aquí en adelante más actual que nunca.

Pablo F. Luna (Université Paris Sorbonne): pablo-fernando.luna@paris-sorbonne.fr

Agrarian Reforms: Past and Future

Reforms related to land ownership is a modern hope. After Philosophes, theologians and thinkers had earlier made their own proposals for change, political reformers then tried to implement their own specific reforms, their objectives being however different, whether in Britain or in Continental Europe (German and Scandinavian countries, France, the Iberian and Italian peninsulas). At the end of the 18th century, the French Revolution had a significant agrarian and peasant component, as we all know. The nationalization and sale of clergy and aristocratic land and property, which aimed at suppressing the forces hostile to the Revolutionary process, opened the door to important land transfers as a short-term or medium-term phenomenon, which also favorised some groups within the peasantry.

In different ways in the 19th century, various places, including Russia and America, were affected by issues related to land distribution and land ownership. These two phenomena also reflected socio-economic and political demands which within empires were often associated to the recognition of the peoples and nations without State deprived of self-determination and to their fight against oppression towards liberty. The peasantry and its fight for land against large land owners and foreign or national squires and hobereaux were thus recurrently caught in the middle of national movements.

It was however in 1910 —one hundred years ago only— that the concept of “agrarian reform” was for the first time formulated and given its contemporary meaning. And with the word, there followed its concrete political implementation, within a victorious popular movement. It was in Mexico that the first twentieth-century revolution took place with the development of peasant movements and the establishment of revolutionary governments. There, agrarian reforms reflected the fight for land ownership changes, for labour reforms, for the transformation of the production and redistribution of wealth, and also for state power. The slogan “Land and liberty” which symbolized then and for several decades Indian and Mexican peasants’ aspirations became the touchstone of all the agrarian reforms which were then proposed and implemented.

The 20th Century knew several agrarian reforms, some being more radical than others, proposed either by peasant or working-class revolutionary groups or by reformatory States (sometimes military and/or nationalist ones) and even political projects whose programs aimed at preserving the status quo in their current society and government in an attempt to counteract and downplay growing revolutionary movements. This world trend spared almost no part of the world from old Russia (now USSR), the People’s Republic of China, Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, India, Indochina, Latin America, and even Africa before and after decolonization.

The History Section of the VI International Marx Conference entitled Crisis, revolts, utopias (http://netx.u-paris10.fr/actuelmarx/cm6/index6.htm), which will meet in Paris — September 22nd – 25th, 2010 — proposes a workshop to discuss these contemporary issues using a Marxist and historical perspective. It welcomes specialists of the study of agrarian reforms in the world. The intent is also to engage in discussions on today’s rural reality and on human and natural disasters taking place in rural areas which experienced several decades of ruthless global neoliberal governance. The organizers will also encourage debates on the future of the campaign for agrarian reforms in its original form, one which seems more topical than ever.

Pablo F. Luna (Université Paris Sorbonne): pablo-fernando.luna@paris-sorbonne.fr

Organisateur  : Pablo F. Luna, pablo-fernando.luna@paris-sorbonne.fr 
Maître de conférences, Histoire, Université Paris Sorbonne, Paris IV

Président de séance : Béaur Gérard, Professeur, Histoire, GDR 2912, CRH – EHESS, CNRS
Président de séance : Piel Jean, Professeur, Histoire, Université Denis Diderot, Paris 7

Barkin David, barkin@correo.xoc.uam.mx  Professeur, Economie, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana de México, Xochimilco, Mexique

Pour reconsidérer le nouveau rôle de la paysannerie en Amérique latine: Les nouvelles réalités communautaires rurales

Partout où elles se trouvent en Amérique latine, les communautés agraires et indigènes réagissent devant le rétrécissement de possibilités résultant de l’effort gouvernemental d’internationalisation économique. Leur réponse articule des stratégies locales et régionales d’autonomie visant l’autosuffisance à plusieurs niveaux, pas seulement sur le plan alimentaire mais aussi sur le plan des infrastructures, des services sociaux (par exemple, la santé et l’éducation), de la préservation et de la réhabilitation de l’environnement. Cette communication voudrait apporter, à partir des expériences locales concrètes, une discussion sur les notions analytiques qui permettraient de comprendre ces stratégies productives et politiques, confrontées aux defies lancés aux communautés. Et ceci afin de mettre en relief une nouvelle approche pour élaborer des réponses « post-capitalistes ».

Bregianni Catherine, cbregiann@academyofathens.gr, Chercheuse-enseignante, Histoire, Université Ouverte Grecque, Grèce

Réforme agraire et monétisation de l’économie agraire en Grèce (de la fin du XIXe siècle à la Seconde Guerre mondiale)

Dans le but d’examiner la réforme agraire en Grèce, ayant eu lieu pendant la période de l’entre-deux-guerres, exprimant les objectifs politiques de la Première République Grecque, il a fallu observer premièrement l’évolution de la question rurale qui dans le pays s’est posée en même temps que celle de l’expansion territoriale. Ainsi, une première réforme a été appliquée au cours des années 1870, quand les terres nationales ont été partiellement divisées et octroyées aux paysans sans terre par le gouvernement libéral. La formation d’une classe sociale de petits propriétaires fonciers, orientée vers la culture des produits commerciaux, a ainsi été mise en œuvre, laquelle — en alliance avec les élites du Royaume — aurait pu soutenir les efforts de modernisation. Néanmoins, l’annexion de la Thessalie, en 1881, et ensuite celle de la Macédoine grecque en 1912, ont donné naissance à la question rurale, puisque le mode de production dominante y était la grande propriété foncière. Outil des Etats réformateurs grecs, la reforme agraire des années 1920 a provoqué la création de mécanismes d’incorporation de l’agriculture à l’économie nationale, tels que les coopératives agricoles et la diffusion du crédit agricole. Ainsi, dans le secteur agricole ont été créés des réseaux techniques qui avaient en même temps une fonction sociale, tels les réseaux bancaires et les réseaux de coopératives agricoles. La protection de l’agriculture a également induit l’articulation des instituts étatiques visant à implanter dans le monde rural les méthodes de culture rationnelles. Sans doute, la politique modernisatrice de l’Etat grec pour l’économie agraire visait aussi à anticiper les protestations paysannes et à contrecarrer l’influence croissante du parti communiste à la campagne (étant donné qu’en Grèce la classe ouvrière était fortement liée au monde rural). La faillite du schéma linéaire « réforme agraire – monétarisation de l’économie rurale – expansion des coopératives agricoles » à la fin des années trente a été souvent approchée par l’historiographie moderne grecque comme étant le résultat de l’activité bancaire. Ι lest néanmoins clair que les mécanismes bancaires ne sont pas autonomes vis-à-vis du marché. Cet aspect nous aidera à formuler nos conclusions afin de nous approcher au présent, en ce qui concerne la situation actuelle de l’agriculture grecque, sous le prisme du néolibéralisme.

Brocheux Pierre, pib531@wanadoo.fr  Professeur, Histoire, Université Denis Diderot, Paris 7

Réforme agraire et Développement au Viet Nam : contradiction ou complémentarité? (1953-1989)

Dans un but à la fois politique et économique les gouvernements au pouvoir dans le nord (République démocratique du Viet Nam) et dans le sud (République du Viet Nam) ont changé l’assiette foncière de leur paysannerie en appliquant des méthodes différentes. Les communistes du nord ont fait une révolution agraire à la manière chinoise avec reference à la lutte des classes, la mise en place de tribunaux populaires et sociodrames, expropriations et exécutions des personnes. Cette revolution agraire qui débute en 1953, utilise la violence physique et engendre des « erreurs » qui sont corrigées en 1956-1957. Cette « correction » donne lieu à une redistribution des terres, qui n’est que le prélude à la collectivisation des campagnes jugée nécessaire à l’essor de la grande agriculture moderne qui doit accompagner et soutenir l’industrialisation. Le gouvernement du Sud Viet Nam applique tardivement (1970-1971) des procédures légales et non violentes (sur le modèle japonais et taïwanais). La réforme renforce les rangs et le rôle économique de la petite et moyenne paysannerie qui fait échouer la collectivisation que les communistes veulent introduire dans le sud après avoir conquis et réunifié le pays (1975-1976). La réforme agraire du sud qui avait pour but politique de couper l’herbe sous les pieds des communistes, révèle son efficacité, elle est l’une des raisons déterminantes de la politique dite de Rénovation du gouvernement socialiste du Viet Nam. La Rénovation débute dans les campagnes et enclenche la dé-collectivisation, autrement dit un deuxième partage des terres. Le retour à l’exploitation familiale est aussi celui à l’économie de marché et à la spéculation commerciale et foncière. Cette évolution pose la question : le développement dans son sens classique ne favorise-t-il pas le retour à la concentration foncière et à la différenciation sociale dans campagnes ?

Cohen Arón, acohen@ugr.es  Professeur, Géographie,  Universidad de Granada, Espagne
Ferrer Amparo, aferrer@ugr.es  Maître de conférences, Géographie, Universidad de Granada, Espagne

Des « sans terre » aux « sans papiers » ? Réflexions à propos des campagnes andalouses

Au lendemain de la mort de Franco la revendication d’une réforme agraire restait un des signes programmatiques de l’opposition antifranquiste la plus active. Au début des années 1980, au cœur de la Transition politique, le PSOE cumulant le gouvernement central et ceux des toutes récentes «autonomies» de l’Espagne méridionale, inspirait la Carte de l’Autonomie Andalouse. Un des objectifs affichés était la « réforme agraire entendue comme la transformation (…) des structures agraires » dans la région. Cet objectif est resté complètement inédit, et assez vite la remise à jour du vocabulaire, dans le discours politique dominant et dans les normes, a effacé la moindre source de malentendu : point de recours désormais à d’autres catégories que celles de la « modernisation » et de l’ « entreprise » agricoles. Parallèlement, avec l’émergence de l’Espagne comme pays d’immigration, l’ « immigré » s’est quasiment substitué au « journalier » dans les discourse en vogue… et comme objet d’analyse. Les sujets sociaux et la nature des dossiers ne sont plus les mêmes. Les réclamations des « papiers pour tous » et contre l’ « exclusion sociale » ne laisseraient-elles plus de place aux « questions agraires »?

Estevam Douglas, douglasestevam@mst.org.br Représentant du MST, Brésil, Mouvement des paysans sans terre, Brésil

Les limites de la reforme agraire au Brésil et les conséquences du renforcement du modèle de l’agrobusiness

Cette communication analysera les conséquences du modèle brésilien de l’agrobusiness, à partir de plusieurs points de vue. D’abord, du point de vue social, avec la reproduction d’une population de paysans sans terres. Ensuite, du point de vue économique, en fonction de la concentration de richesse qu’un tel modèle engendre, de la réduction du nombre de travailleurs agricoles, des problèmes concernant les conditions de travail, ou à propos de l’absence d’une politique publique pour la production vivrière, mais aussi du point de vue du rôle du capital financier dans la production agricole et dans la concentration des terres. Ce modèle se configure dans le cadre d’un marché de plus un plus internationalisé et dans un contexte de crise énergétique où la production d’agro-carburants se présente comme un secteur économique de grande importance.

Figueroa A. Víctor  Professeur, Histoire, Universidad Marta Abreu, Las Villas, Cuba

Cuba : une expérience de développement rural

Cette communication présente et résume l’expérience cubaine dans la mise en œuvre de la Loi de la réforme agraire de 1959. Elle explique les conditions objectives historiques qui ont conduit à cet événement; elle présente aussi une analyse des premiers résultats obtenus. Cette communication fournit également les données statistiques illustrant la
situation avant et après la mise en œuvre de la loi, ainsi que les principales caractéristiques particulières du cas cubain.

Jacobs Susan, S.Jacobs@mmu.ac.uk  Reader, Sociologie, Manchester Metropolitan University, Grande-Bretagne

Gender and agrarian reforms : Critical reflections

Au cours des dernières années, lorsque l’on a parlé de la réforme agraire ou de la redistribution des terres, ce sont des sujets tels que la hausse des prix ou la sécurité alimentaires, ou l’appropriation des terres, qui ont concentré l’attention des spécialistes. Cette communication voudrait examiner l’impact des processus de réforme agraire sur les femmes, en particulier dans le modèle familial individuel. Dans des nombreux contextes et sous l’optique de la tenure et de la conduite des terres, les femmes se sont trouvées dans une situation défavorable, que ce soit du point de vue de la concession des titres de possession ou par la préférence accordée aux hommes comme chefs de famille. Cependant, des groupes familiaux conduits par des femmes ont souvent obtenu des terres et dans certaines réalités, en Chine, au Viet Nam ou dans certains pays d’Amérique latine, on a essayé de garantir les droits à la terre des femmes mariées. L’exploitation des terres ouvre aux femmes la possibilité de la réussite mais il leur est toujours difficile d’accéder à la terre sur un même plan d’égalité que les hommes. L’une des questions posées est celle de la forme que ces droits devraient prendre : la coutume traditionnelle est fréquemment défavorable aux femmes, mais l’accès individuel aux titres de possession débouche souvent, surtout parmi les pauvres, à la dépossession des terres. Cette communication examine ces faits et les tensions qu’ils ont provoquées, à partir de plusieurs études de cas, au Viet Nam, au Zimbabwe et au Brésil. Quel a été le rôle joué par le mouvement des femmes et les autres mouvements sociaux et comment devront-ils se consolider pour assurer, à l’avenir et sur le terrain, les droits des femmes?

Mesini Béatrice Mesini@mmsh.univ-aix.fr  Chargé de recherche, Sociologie politique, CNRS Telemme, Université d’Aix-en-Provence

Dynamiques et enjeux de la réforme agraire dans les forums sociaux 2000-2008

Inscrite dans une sociologie des mobilisations collectives, cette analyse décentrée sur des segments de luttes locales et globales, se propose d’explorer la diversité et l’originalité des revendications portées par les acteurs paysans et ruraux dans les forums sociaux – locaux, nationaux, régionaux, continentaux et internationaux – mais aussi « généralistes » et « thématiques » entre 2000 et 2008. C’est suite au tournant neoliberal opéré dans les années 1990 sous l’effet des programmes d’ajustements structurels impulsés par les grandes institutions financiers internationales (Banque Mondiale, Fonds Monétaire International, OMC…) que les sans-terre, journaliers, paysans familiaux, pêcheurs, peoples autochtones menacés, ruraux déplacés, femmes exploitées se sont en effet mobilisés sur la définition de leurs droits d’existence. Ils ont progressivement investi les forums sociaux, arguant de la centralité de leurs luttes dans les divers ateliers, plénières, séminaires, notamment autour des questions de domination et d’exploitation, dans les rapports de classe, de caste, de race et de genre. Autour du thème de la réforme agraire, les associations, organisations et collectifs structurent et amplifient le cadre interprétatif d’une negation globale des droits humains fondamentaux mais aussi de la disparition orchestrée des usages communautaires et droits collectifs – économiques, sociaux, culturels, cultuels, environnementaux – sur les terres. Dans un premier temps, nous montrerons comment ces acteurs ruraux hétérogènes ont accompli, à partir des années 1990, un travail de convergence et de transnationalisation des luttes, sur la base de diagnostics partagés en termes de privation, d’exclusion, de pauvreté, d’exploitation et de misère. Sont en particulier incriminés la privatisation des ressources et des terres, la concentration et l’internationalisation du capital foncier, le maintien de structures sociales agraires héritées de la colonisation et/ou recomposée de façon multiforme par le développement durable, le développement de l’ « agrobusiness », le brevetage du vivant, la destruction des communautés de vie, les migrations forcées – internes et
internationales -, l’exploitation et la violence dans les champs, ou encore la criminalisation et la répression des mouvements sociaux et des luttes syndicales. En second lieu, nous mettrons au jour le double processus d’intrication des luttes paysannes, indigènes/autochtones, mais aussi d’articulation des luttes rurales et urbaines, réactivé dans les Forums sociaux en termes d’autonomie, de sécurité et de souveraineté alimentaire, gagnant progressivement l’ensemble des nations, des continents et des régions. Enfin, nous montrerons que l’expressivité des revendications dans ces tribunes relève d’une pluralité de luttes locales, singulières et diversifiées et que la « co-vision » de la Pacha Mama redessine, à partir de la définition de devoirs envers la « Terre commune », le contour des droits d’existence civils, politiques, économiques, sociaux, et culturels.

Martínez Luciano (Intervention à confirmer)  Chercheur, Sociologie, FLACSO – Universidad de Quito, Equateur

Equateur, les nouveaux propriétaires après la réforme agraire

Mignemi Niccoló, mignic@gmail.com  Doctorant, Histoire, EHESS Paris – Università degli Studi di Milano, Italie

Italie 1920-1950 : Vers la réforme agraire ou la réforme de l’agriculture ?

Les lois de réforme agraire de 1950 en Italie ont été adoptées sous la pression d’un mouvement paysan qui a débuté dans le Mezzogiorno en 1943-1944 et s’est diffusé dans toutes les campagnes du pays. Le fascisme, ruraliste dans son discours, l’était beaucoup moins dans ses pratiques, en dissimulant le progressif appauvrissement des petits paysans derrière la propagande du retour à la terre. C’est donc en suivant le sort des paysans, au moins depuis le début des années Vingt, alors qu’ils vivent une période de prospérité, interrompue par les décisions prises par le régime et par la crise des années Trente, que l’on pourra comprendre dans la longue durée la signification de l’explosion sociale des campagnes dans l’après-guerre. Ici par ailleurs, si les forces antifascistes ont pris conscience que la résolution de la question agraire, toujours renvoyée depuis l’unité politique de 1861, ne pouvait plus être esquivée, deux conceptions s’affrontent alors : d’un côté la perspective d’une réforme agraire générale, avec la réorganisation du secteur primaire dans son ensemble qui pouvait remettre en cause son rôle même dans le modèle de développement, de l’autre côté l’idée d’une réforme minimale, voire seulement foncière, limitée soit au niveau géographique, soit dans ses ambitions.

Oliveira (de) Batista Fernando (Intervention à confirmer) Professeur, Agronomie, Universidade Politecnica de Lisboa, Portugal

La question de la terre aujourd’hui : Pour une comparaison entre le Portugal, le Brésil et l’Angola.

Robledo Ricardo, rrobledo@usal.es Histoire Professeur Universidad de Salamanca, Espagne

La réforme agraire de la Seconde République espagnole : Une question déjà vue ?

La recherche sur la réforme agraire, qui a été une sujet central dans l’historiographie espagnole, plus ou moins jusqu’en 1980, a été ensuite peu à peu négligée voire oubliée ; ce qui n’a pas été par ailleurs l’apanage de la seule Espagne. D’un côté, le travail d’Edward Malefakis (Reforma agraria y revolución campesina en la España del siglo XX, Barcelona, Ariel, 1972) a joué jusqu’à un certain point un rôle dissuasif, ce qui a fait que certaines recherches ultérieures se sont souvent contentées de paraphraser une œuvre qui a été publiée il y a environ quarante ans. D’un autre côté, l’orientation internationale de la politique économique, mettant en question les réformes agraires latino-américaines, n’a pas été un facteur favorable pour encourager une telle recherche. L’un des nombreux reproches adressés à la réforme agraire de la Seconde République espagnole a été son choix anti-latifundium, tout en mettant en opposition la rentabilité supposée de la grande exploitation face à l’inefficacité imputée au partage des terres. Ce serait l’un des aspects de la réforme agraire que les ingénieurs agronomes auraient mis en cause dans leurs rapports —des rapports très peu utilisés, par ailleurs. Mais il y aurait aussi un autre aspect, celui de la fonction sociale du latifundium, que l’on n’étudie pas d’une façon simultanée avec l’examen du fait réformateur, ce qui donne lieu à des perceptions partielles de la problématique. On néglige de préciser les avantages sociaux découlant de la perte par les propriétaires de leurs prérogatives politiques. En tout cas, la réforme agraire ne peut et ne doit être présentée comme une panacée et l’on peut tout autant apprendre de son échec — dans sa mise en application — que de son succès.

Roux Bernard, bernard.roux@agroparistech.fr Chercheur, Agronomie, CESAER – INRA Agrocampus Dijon

Au Portugal: Vie et mort d’une réforme agraire prolétarienne

La « révolution des œillets » d’avril 1974 au Portugal a été suivie par des mouvements sociaux et des réformes qui, dans un premier temps, orientèrent la société portugaise vers le socialisme. L’évolution rapide des rapports de force politiques, en faveur des conservateurs, ne permit pas que cette orientation perdure. La réalisation d’une réforme agraire puis sa destruction, tout cela dans un bref délai de quelques années, doivent s’interpréter dans ce cadre. C’est au cours de l’année 1975 que les ouvriers agricoles, dont une majorité de journaliers, de l’Alentejo et du Ribatejo, dans la moitié sud du pays, soutenus par les forces progressistes au pouvoir, ont réalisé l’occupation de plus d’un million d’hectares des latifundia et des grandes exploitations capitalistes. Cette réforme agraire peut être qualifiée de prolétarienne pour deux raisons : d’abord parce que son principal moteur a été le proletariat rural, depuis toujours soumis à l’exploitation de la bourgeoisie agraire mais auteur de nombreuses luttes pour l’amélioration des conditions de travail et des salaires ; ensuite, en raison de la nature collective des nouvelles unités de production créées, certaines d’entre elles dépassant 10 000 ha. Avec le basculement du pouvoir à droite la contre réforme agraire fut mise en œuvre dès 1977. Les terres furent rendues aux grands propriétaires et les unités de production des ouvriers agricoles détruites.

Siron Thomas, thomassiron@gmail.com  Doctorant, Anthopologie, EHESS Marseille

« Je ne demande pas d’argent pour cheminer ! » Le dirigeant paysan, la redistribution foncière et l’échange de loyautés politiques en Bolivie

« No pido plata para andar » : un dirigeant de la communauté Tierra Prometida signifait ainsi à ses « bases » qu’il n’exerçait pas sa fonction par intérêt pécuniaire et qu’en retour il était légitime à recevoir leur « appui ». C’est sur la dimension morale et politique du partage foncier, au sein d’un processus de réforme agraire, que je voudrais insister dans cette présentation. Je m’appuierai sur une recherche menée dans une communauté de « paysans sans terre » bolivienne (Tierra Prometida), fondée à la suite de la « prise » d’une propriété mise en vente par un « trafiquant de terre » et mobilisée depuis pour obtenir de l’Etat central un titre foncier et une personnalité juridique. Ce sont les deux buts ultimes de l’andar (cheminement) du dirigeant « au dehors » de la communauté (dans le monde de la politique). La « redistribution » de la terre se présente donc à la fois comme un transfert de droits fonciers entre une classe de possédants et une classe de travailleurs et comme un procès de distribution de droits et d’obligations au sein d’un corps politique. Le dirigeant paysan joue un rôle central dans le rapport redistributif qui s’instaure et se noue simultanément à l’échelle communale et nationale, rapport qui conditionne la transformation de la structure foncière à un échange de loyautés politiques parfois fluide et imprévisible.

Thivet Delphine,  Doctorante,Sociologie, IRIS – EHESS

Dynamiques et enjeux de la réforme agraire dans les forums sociaux 2000-2008

Inscrite dans une sociologie des mobilisations collectives, cette analyse décentrée sur des segments de luttes locales et globales, se propose d’explorer la diversité et l’originalité des revendications portées par les acteurs paysans et ruraux dans les forums sociaux – locaux, nationaux, régionaux, continentaux et internationaux – mais aussi « généralistes » et « thématiques » entre 2000 et 2008. C’est suite au tournant neoliberal opéré dans les années 1990 sous l’effet des programmes d’ajustements structurels impulsés par les grandes institutions financiers internationales (Banque Mondiale, Fonds Monétaire International, OMC…) que les sans-terre, journaliers, paysans familiaux, pêcheurs, peuples autochtones menacés, ruraux déplacés, femmes exploitées se sont en effet mobilisés sur la définition de leurs droits d’existence. Ils ont progressivement investi les forums sociaux, arguant de la centralité de leurs luttes dans les divers ateliers, plénières, séminaires, notamment autour des questions de domination et d’exploitation, dans les rapports de classe, de caste, de race et de genre. Autour du thème de la réforme agraire, les associations, organisations et collectifs structurent et amplifient le cadre interprétatif d’une negation globale des droits humains fondamentaux mais aussi de la disparition orchestrée des usages communautaires et droits collectifs – économiques, sociaux, culturels, cultuels, environnementaux – sur les terres. Dans un premier temps, nous montrerons comment ces acteurs ruraux hétérogènes ont accompli, à partir des années 1990, un travail de convergence et de transnationalisation des luttes, sur la base de diagnostics partagés en termes de privation, d’exclusion, de pauvreté, d’exploitation et de misère. Sont en particulier incriminés la privatisation des ressources et des terres, la concentration et l’internationalisation du capital foncier, le maintien de structures sociales agraires héritées de la colonisation et/ou recomposée de façon multiforme par le développement durable, le développement de l’ « agrobusiness », le brevetage du vivant, la destruction des communautés de vie, les migrations forcées – internes et internationales -, l’exploitation et la violence dans les champs, ou encore la criminalisation et la répression des mouvements sociaux et des luttes syndicales. En second lieu, nous mettrons au jour le double processus d’intrication des luttes paysannes, indigènes/autochtones, mais aussi d’articulation des luttes rurales et urbaines, réactivé dans les Forums sociaux en termes d’autonomie, de sécurité et de souveraineté alimentaire, gagnant progressivement l’ensemble des nations, des continents et des régions. Enfin, nous montrerons que l’expressivité des revendications dans ces tribunes relève d’une pluralité de luttes locales, singulières et diversifiées et que la « co-vision » de la Pacha Mama redessine, à partir de la définition de devoirs envers la « Terre commune », le contour des droits d’existence civils, politiques, économiques, sociaux, et culturels.

Tortolero Alejando, (Intervention à confirmer), Professeur, Histoire, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de México, Iztapalapa, Mexique

La réforme agraire de la révolution mexicaine

(Sous réserve)Syndicaliste,  FRONT EZEQUIEL ZAMORA

Une réforme bolivarienne au Venezuela

Pablo F. Luna
Institut Hispanique
Université Paris Sorbonne
Pablo-Fernando.Luna@paris-sorbonne.fr

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Anarchist communism would seem to be precisely the philosophy that encourages charity. The basic mantra of “from each according to his faculties, to each according to his need” gives many this impression. Charity also often goes hand-in-hand with the anarchist principle of mutual aid.

The two things, however, are very different.

After helping out at a relief clinic in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, Molly McClure pondered the difference in concepts for Infoshop;

A big slogan at the Common Ground Clinic was “Solidarity not Charity,” which is easy to say, but what does it mean? And how do we know if what we’re doing is charity or solidarity— is it as simple as choosing to work with Common Ground instead of the Red Cross? This was one of the biggest lessons for me, and something I’m still thinking a lot about.

A definition of solidarity I’ve heard is that it’s about providing concrete support to an oppressed group so that they can more easily use their own power to change the conditions of their lives. As I understand it, solidarity is about working with people who are struggling for their own liberation in a way that means my future gets bound up with theirs.

On the other hand, charity is about me feeling good, assuaging guilt, feeling like I’m doing something about injustice but without actually threatening the status quo. Charity doesn’t really cost me anything, especially my self-image as being someone who’s down with the struggle and on the side of the oppressed. With charity I don’t have to acknowledge my privilege in a situation, and in the case of work in New Orleans, I don’t have to take responsibility for the fact that my family and I have materially benefited, historically and presently, from the racism that bludgeoned the south long before the hurricane. With charity, I don’t have to connect the dots between sudden catastrophes like Katrina, and the perhaps slower but very similar economic devastation happening in poor communities and communities of color, every day, right here, in my city. And most importantly, with charity, I don’t have risk that what I’m doing might truly transform society in such a way that white folks like me may not end up on top anymore, because charity actually reinforces existing relationships of power.

Charity has its limits as a way of helping people within the current system, which remains unchallenged. Solidarity and mutual aid, on the other hand, offer ways of helping each other not only to improve our situation within existing socio-economic structures, but to offer a tangible challenge to those structures. The parallel that springs to mind is the difference between reformism and radicalism.

David Cameron's "Big Society" uses the language of charity and community self-management as a cover for privatisation and class warfare

But, though limited in important ways, surely charity can still do good?

Well, yes, it can. I’m not going to suggest that the starving child who receives a food parcel doesn’t benefit from it. Or that Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross, for example, don’t do good things for the victims of human rights abuses, war crimes, and natural disaster.

The problem is that the term “charity” is very broad, and doesn’t just apply to those examples.

When David Cameron came to Liverpool to unveil his vision for a “Big  Society,” Merseyside Anarchists made the following observation;

Oh yes, charities. I’m not going to say they’re all a bunch of profiteering hucksters who line their founders’ pockets by tugging at the heartstrings and the purse strings of the people who can least afford it. Some of them are genuinely well-intentioned and do difficult and necessary jobs, as well as they can, taking only the minimum out of donations to cover their own administration. Some of them.

You have to wonder, though, why we need charities to rehabilitate offenders, provide legal advice to citizens in need, research cancer and heart disease and rescue and rehabilitate children from abuse when we pay taxes that are supposed to cover all of these things as basic necessities.

There is also a concern about who controls the charities. Corporate funding is the major part of most large charities’ income, and corporations don’t give out of the goodness of their hearts. When we give to, say, a charity researching cures for a particular disease, what happens when they find that cure? Will it be distributed for free, charitably, to all those who need it? Or will the patent mysteriously be held by a drugs company that was part-funding the charity, and so part-using public donations to fund research that it will ultimately use to profit from the very people it claimed to be altruistically helping?

This is the kind of manipulative use of “charity” we can expect to see from businesses wanting control over our public services for their own profits.

In this case, as the Liverpool Solidarity Federation affirmed, “charity” is “a veil for predatory capitalism to hide behind as it attacks the working class.”

Even without the “Big Society,” we can see the parasitic influence of the corporate on the charitable in the world of “chugging.” That is, the industry of charity mugging. On LibCom, one former worker fleshed out their personal experience with the following observation;

On one hand you have charities seeking to raise money motivated by global or local concerns, and on the other you have private companies offering a service on a commission basis. Last year in the UK an estimated 690,000 people were persuaded by “chuggers” to give financial support to a charity, according to figures from the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association. At an average fee of £50 per sign-up, that suggests £34.5 million of donations going as income to the businesses. The big five are the Dialog Group Ltd, which runs the Face 2 Face Fundraising and Dialogue Direct agencies, Push Ltd, Gift Fundraising Ltd, Caring Together Ltd and Fruitful Fundraising UK Ltd. These are the commission sucking companies who’s prominence has unleashed the current wave of anti-chuggger backlash prompting some of the more major charities to set up in house companies to do the work directly.

In an edition of their magazine Rolling Thunder (PDF), CrimeThinc point out that “The philanthropist gives, but on his terms, thus emphasizing his property rights and position of privilege.” For them, “charity is the opposite of sharing.” They note that “as a rule, the less people have, the more they are willing to share.” Thus, “in place of charity, we would do well to develop ways of assisting one another in which we share not only resources but also, more importantly, control over them.”

How do we do that? In Liverpool SolFed’s words, “we need to build up a culture of self-management from below, and challenge attempts by government and capital to control our lives.” This is “the substance lacking from Cameron’s hollow words” – mutual aid.

In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Peter Kropotkin explains that “besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is in Nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest.” That is, that mutual aid is not merely a vague and utopian communistic theory, but a driving force in evolution and a natural instinct.

There are several tangible forms that this force or principle can take.

In terms of finance and money, the most prevalent today are co-operative banks, and credit unions. Workers cooperatives are an example in industry, the principle of democratic worker-ownership in action. However, whilst each of these examples has their merits over more traditionally capitalist institutions, they still have their limitations.

As the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) argue, “collectives are not inherently revolutionary”;

For example, the closest example of a workers’ revolution involving collectives is the Spanish Revolution of 1936. But there it was not collectives that brought about the revolution but rather the revolution that brought about the collectives. Workers in private businesses joined the revolutionary CNT which had a few collectives and some self employed workers. Together they pushed and rode the revolutionary wave that resulted in the overthrow of the liberal capitalist government. After that, many of the shops collectivized. In other words, it was the class struggle of the militant, radical CNT union that sparked the revolution. No economic revolution has EVER been organized by workers’ collectives alone.

If we are arguing for a radical, anarchist communist version of mutual aid, we cannot “confuse the slogan “Abolish Wage Slavery” with the more contemporary slogan “Fire Your Boss”.” The latter assumes that, if workers have direct control, then the economic system of capitalism will suddenly cease to be unequal, based on privilege and injustice.

To the contrary, “the employing class controls most of the market share and therefore sets the economic conditions in which collectives have to compete.” That is why “it is not just the boss that we seek to overthrow, but the entire capitalist class.”

The kind of mutual aid that sees community resistance to capitalism, such as rent strikes, is far more revolutionary than a workers' cooperative within a market economy

If we want to go beyond the limits of charity and “share not only resources but also, more importantly, control over them” then mutual aid needs to be not just an option but the foundation of societal organisation, in both the workplace and the community. Clearly, having institutions organised on a democratic, cooperative basis is not enough if they still interact with each other on the basis of capitalist ideals of profit and competition.

In fact, as an article in the Economist has argued, “lay-offs, short hours and wage cuts can be achieved without strikes, and agreements are reached faster than in companies that must negotiate with unions and government bodies.” In effect, workers are imposing austerity on themselves and class struggle is bypassed altogether.

Obviously, that magazine was in favour of this as an organ of the bosses. In Freedom newspaper, the LibCom group argued the same point from a workers’ perspective;

Self-managed exploitation is not just a neat turn of phrase, it is a recognition of how capital rules social life. It does this both vertically through the person of the boss, and horizontally, through market forces. Many anarchists focus mainly on the vertical rule of workplace hierarchy, and so see workers’ control as a stepping stone towards libertarian communism.

However, it’s not a stepping stone, but a cul-de-sac. For example, I work in financial services. As you would expect during a financial crisis, we’re feeling the squeeze. There have been redundancies, and the ‘lucky’ survivors are being made to work harder and longer to make up. If we were to turn it into a co-op, those same market forces causing my boss to make cuts would still be there, but we would have nobody to say no to when under pressure to increase the rate of exploitation to survive in a hostile market.

Thus, “success in establishing a co-op is success in swapping one form of alienation for another, proletarian for petit-bourgeois.”

This is an important point, because it is one that some on the libertarian left can get very wrong. For example, in The Commune, Steve Ryan wrote that the last PCS delegate conference “passed , despite NEC opposition, a motion expressing support for workers’ self management (moved by a supporter of The Commune!) Interestingly, support was overwhelming and a call for remittance voted down!”

In reality, the motion was to “seek engagement and influence within the commission” that was “set up by Tessa Jowell MP in her speech on 16 December 2009 on Mutualism.” It is, of course, correct that “steps towards a socialist society based on workers self management are desirable.” However, Tessa Jowell’s Commission on Ownership offers nothing of the sort.

Not only does it still fall to the criticism of “self-managed exploitation,” but it arguably fits into the same category as Cameron’s “Big Society,” the language of the libertarian left serving as “a veil for predatory capitalism to hide behind as it attacks the working class.”

Like Steve, I am both a member of PCS and a libertarian communist. I can also agree that we “should be arguing and debating with members as to the tactics and strategy needed to fight back against the cuts, and linking up with other workers in their locality, forming solidarity committees.” But I disagree that we should take cooperatives, especially when offered up by neo-liberal politicians whose interests are in opposition to the working class, at face value.

Instead of arguing for cooperatives as a revolutionary mechanism, when they aren’t, “our activity should be aimed at increasing the confidence, power and combativity of the wider class.” As I wrote over at Truth, Reason & Liberty, mutual aid institutions need to operate “alongside community organisation to resist the bailiffs, the landlords, and corporations buying up our land,” if they are to “allow us to defend ourselves as a class from the vultures of capitalism.”

Ultimately, the way we organise ourselves should be based on mutual aid and cooperation. But it should not be mutual aid that fits into the norms of the present society, or cooperation that forgoes revolutionary struggle.

In rebuilding a culture of mutual aid across the working class, “we have to learn to stop trying to manage capital and instead try to fight it.”

How Capitalism is Making Us Sick: Part One.

“Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny.” -Noam Chomsky.

In this part, we shall examine how the major variants of capitalist ideology are comparable to mental diseases and what their effects are on the individual and human society itself. The primary variants of capitalist ideology we shall cover are libertarianism, laissez-faire capitalism, conservatism, objectivism, and fascism. We shall also examine how capitalism leads to other diseases such as racism, sexism, and homophobia and how the beliefs of the common capitalist such as the necessity of privatization are false “freedoms.”

Libertarianism: Libertarianism claims freedom. Freedom from the “heavy burdens” of regulations and taxes. But then libertarianism replaces those “burdens” with bigotry, poverty, and wage slavery. The entire ideology is inherently routed in reactionary tendency. It has recently seen a growth spurt upon the “socialist victory” of Obama, and as such, libertarians are incredibly bigoted and misinformed. Libertarianism remains a more radical version of liberalism, in that it is a “radical life-style” which promoted individual autonomy in the extreme sense. Although there are similarities between libertarianism and anarchism, even anarchism tends to focus more on society than libertarianism. Because libertarianism places a more excessive value over the individual than the collective, it is routed in bourgeois ideology; it is not freedom.

Libertarians are “concerned with justice” but merely for those who own property, labor employers, and petty bourgeois. When we become subject to markets like in a libertarian society, we lose our humanity and become mere wage slaves. Regulation is necessary, and many economists argue against laissez-faire; there are not all that many economists who simply advise to leave the market alone. Just as well, Libertarians very conception of economics are oversimplified and weak at best. For example, when Chile adapted libertarian-esque policies similar to Friedman’s between 1973 and 1989, disaster occurred. Privatization of welfare and social programs, excessive deregulation, destroying labor unions, liberalizing trade, and rewriting Chile’s constitution, all of which resulted in a far less stable economy for Chile. There was economic stagnation for sixteen years, income inequality more and more severe. Workers earned less by 1989 than in 1973 prior to the attempts at a libertarian-style society. Without regulations, Chile become the most polluted country in Latin America. Democracy ceased to exist, numerous human rights being violated.

Another example of libertarian policies applied to society was in 1984 in New Zealand. Roger Douglas became the minister of finance and began radically shifting the economy for libertarianism. Over the next 15 years, New Zealand’s economy declined. Suicide rates increased into one of the highest in the world. Proliferation of food banks increased, crime increased, poverty increased by 35%, and health-care became less accessible. The overall standard of living decreased significantly in this time period for the working class. Meanwhile, the proponents of libertarianism and bourgeois ideology were living comfortably and idle at the expense and exploitation of the workers. This is libertarianism applied; this is in a sense worse than American capitalism. In actuality, I think far more people are comfortable with regulations and mixed-market economy than pure, unregulated laissez-faire style society. Corruption and inefficiency will run rampant in a libertarian society, without doubt. Libertarians are generally blind to this, and ironically themselves believe everyone who isn’t a libertarian is a sheep. I don’t even necessarily think we should worry about libertarianism, though. More often than not it is merely a fad for idiotic reactionaries and university students who have “reached a higher level of enlightenment than every other sheep.” We see therefore that the disease of libertarianism leads to excessive individualism, egoism, and a lack of concern for society. So long as the market remains unrestricted libertarians will have their “Utopia.”

Laissez-Faire: Like Libertarians and other capitalists, supporters of laissez-faire capitalism believe that the government should reduce its interference in the economy to the lowest extent possible, preferably zero percent. Laissez-faire style capitalism was particularly prevalent in practice and belief in America and European countries during the 19th century. Supporters argued that the “invisible hand,” a metaphor coined by Adam Smith, would operate the markets rather than governments. However, there were little economists that supported the belief of laissez-faire; political economists of the time generally argued that government intervention is necessary in one form or another. The criticism of laissez-faire came from both ends of the political spectrum, but during its earlier years most of the criticism was coming from capitalists themselves, who were primarily followers of Hamilton’s ideas and American school economics. Therefore laissez-faire was seen as radical and immature even by many capitalists themselves. Wherever laissez-faire proved failure, supporters argued it was not laissez-faire that was failing it was regulation that caused the failure. The same sense of denial can be attributed to today’s reactionaries and others such as Rand. After numerous panics, recessions, exploitations, and of course the Great Depression, laissez-faire policies in America as well as Europe were finally reduced. Keynesian economics and other economic schools of thoughts became more preferred among American economists. Despite outcries from the laissez-faire supporters that politicians such as F.D.R were violating freedom by intervening in the economy, it was not until the 1970s in America that laissez-faire supporters enjoyed a mild resurgence and new found influence on American economists, given the failures of Keynesianism (which is merely a way to save capitalism from itself). The major supporters of laissez-faire such as Hayek and Friedman rallied against steps taken away from laissez-faire, but failing to realize it was those steps that made capitalism more bearable for the working class (even despite the current exploitation and negativity of today’s capitalism). Today, supporters of laissez-faire are on the rise. Much like Libertarianism, laissez-faire gains more supporters when reactionaries come to power and respond to “democrat socialist Marxists” such as the Obama administration; many of today’s radical capitalists are merely frustrated that their eight year reign during the Bush administration is over, which is ironic given the failures and similarities between Obama’s polices and Bush. It is people like Glenn Beck who spread libertarian and laissez-faire type ideas who create mindless followers of such nonsensical, radical ideologies, merely to gain lobotomized puppets. Laissez-faire capitalism merely means rampant exploitation, no environmental legislation, no minimum wage system, no way to check powers, huge gaps between the wealthy and the working class, inevitable monopolization, and a myriad of other extremely detrimental problems. It is therefore logical to conclude laissez-faire is illogical. Upon the breakup of the Soviet Union, even the former Soviet Republics began adapting laissez-faire policies, which were equally detrimental to society, coupled with Gorbachev’s liberal capitalist reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost which introduced nationalism and other negativity into the republics.

Conservatism: As another set of reactionary political beliefs dedicated to resisting change, favoring low levels of restriction in free-market enterprise, conservativism establishes itself in the hearts and minds of many bourgeois politicians; those parasites hosting parasites themselves. Conservatism contradicts itself in that opposing changes, conservatives are therefore introducing radical changes in order to sustain their “capitalist nostalgia” if you will. Conservatism widens the gap between the wealthy and the working class, results in more rigid restrictions and bureaucracy, and an inherent social standard to follow obediently, often rooted in a perverse understanding of Christian dogma. The policies of conservatives that have held political power, such as Reagan and Thatcher, have been to refuse change, even when the change is in favor of capitalism. The Conservatives therefore are grounded in their pathetic and ill-conceived visions of reality. Conservative parties often end up dividing themselves into numerous factions, be it the more liberal and radical conservatives or the traditional conservatives, but either way, they hurt everyone in their actions, society and even themselves. Conservatism is literally a form of psychosis and a threat to humanity. The fact of the matter is that conservatism itself is inherently less of a serious political ideology than a (perverted) status of mind. Today’s Neo-Conservatives, dogmatic Christian rightists, and the like have provided aid to corporations and politicians to more easily trample upon us, acquiring more and more wealth and generating increased poverty, alienation, and blood-spill. Conservatives also tend to bash any form of regulations, especially ones that take power away from business, because they see it as a threat to capitalism and their existing society. They demonize intervention but fail to realize the current government merely intervenes to save itself and to save capitalism, and intervenes only where its interests will be met.

Fascism: Fascism is capitalism in decay; it is the ultimate and most authoritarian output of capitalistic disease. Fascism’s policies include vicious nationalism, totalitarian military control, and often times include sexism and racism. It is the most reactionary form of capitalism and petty-bourgeois ideology. Fascism is able to gain support among the people for its rhetoric, and highly effective propaganda methods, uniting selected people against a common scapegoat. Fascists do not always come to power merely through violence, but through funding via capitalists. Given the right conditions, fascists can gain the support of bureaucratic bourgeois and receive power from them as well. Like any ideology that has numerous positions (e.g. ultra-left, rightist, etc) there are different “forms” of fascism as well. Historically the major comparison lays between Mussolini, the father of modern fascism, and Hitler, the father of Nazism. Both were incredibly ruthless monsters, but Mussolini’s fascism supposedly rejected Hitler’s racism. But Mussolini remained Hitler’s lap-dog and where he didn’t call for the excessive racism of Hitler’s policy, he did call for “Italianization and fierce nationalism. The Manifesto of Race were a set of laws that stripped Jews of their citizenship as well; in these regards we see the hypocrisy of fascists, but even the brutality used to keep “less powerful” fascists willful servants to the leaders. Regardless of Hitler and Mussolini’s views of race, both engaged in imperialist conquest throughout their leadership, particularly in Africa (Mussolini and Hitler collaborated in Ethiopia starting in 1935). Their conquests were aided by the Western governments in the hopes that the fascists would help destroy the Soviets. Of course, it was not until Nazi Germany began to mobilize toward England and France that the West changed their views, as Nazi Germany threatened their imperialism. Speaking of alliance with fascist and Nazi forces, the West numerously allied themselves with pro-Nazi groups in order to undermine the Soviet Union, the GDR, and so forth. General Patton even had dreams to take the Nazi army and utilize it against the Soviet Union. Not to mention the majority of “anti-Stalin” propaganda is borrowed from Nazi Germany as well. And of course an anti-communist will assert that Stalin formed alliances with Hitler via the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, but this completely ignores the previously mentioned American support for Nazi Germany as well as Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan which occurred even before the war and even after the war. Plus those who argue that Stalin was somehow “pro-Hitler” are incredibly superficial and make no attempt to examine the context of the agreement. But back to fascism as an ideology. While Mussolini had once been a socialist, he was an inherently perverse socialist and one who was expelled from his Party for confused views and support of World War I, the first war fought by capitalists, and he of course allied himself with Hitler, who despised socialists and other leftists, so the point that “Mussolini was a socialist” is therefore invalid and baseless. But what is fascism’s relation to socialism, especially given that Nazism means national “socialism?” Fascism supports a sense of unity and emphasis on community to extent, but not in the form of democracy and working-class leadership. Instead fascism calls for obedience to the state coupled with strong nationalism to justify state violence. The Neo-Fascists completely scorn upon anything socialistic however, and call for workers to become more wealthy and stronger than other workers on the basis of social Darwinism, not class unity. Furthermore, corporatism is at the base of fascist economics. Bosses in certain industries determine wages, working conditions, and so forth. The bosses control everything without government regulation. Fascism also destroys unionization and workers democracy. Representative bodies of government are reduced if not eradicated and often times leaders are chosen through favoritism or through buying their power. In the education system students are taught to be obedient little workers and strong, unquestioning supporters of the military and the fascist state. All that is deemed as an enemy to the state such as Marxism, anarchism, communism, are to be destroyed. A large level of conditioning, opportunism, and control ensues in order to ensure these “harmful leftist trends” are destroyed. Nationalism and patriotism play the leading role of conditioning, and those who do not support their country, their wars, and so forth are considered as threats; those who dare think are considered as threats! Imperialism in fascism is excessively rampant, and wars create markets in the countries they are fought in that would not otherwise exist. In fact, fascist countries may tend to spend more of their money on war than providing for their citizens. Dually, fascism places “hero-worship” on those who volunteer for specific tasks, but this is merely to say that the people who do are awarded for being obedient dogs. Finally, fascism destroys all forms of creativity that do not make positive reference to the military, the state, or to fascism itself: it is anti-intellectual, as it wishes to substitute individual thought process for state-based thought. If we examine our own society we can easily draw comparisons between fascism and capitalism, if there is really even a different at all in the end. Rampant imperialism, excessive military spending on wars, growing reactionary trends, emphasis on patriotism and nationalism, media control in order to create slaves to the market, inherent systemic racism, violent corporatism, and a myriad of other similarities, even in our “liberal democratic capitalist” society.

Objectivism: Whereas fascism is a radical form of subjectivism, objectivism is the extremely disgusting philosophy of capitalist pseudo-philosopher and cult like figure, Ayn Rand, whom many capitalists themselves even despise as the ultimate in ultra-radical ideology. Objectivism is, like fascism, extremely reactionary, claiming selflessness as virtue, and all forms of loyalty are slavery. Rand was born into a wealthy family and when the Bolsheviks came to power she obviously felt her wealth was being threatened, and therefore began formulating her “philosophy” on how to remain wealthy. The objectivist philosophy refrains from making judgments and does not recognize that subjects are part of objects. Rand’s objectivism is first and foremost grounded in metaphysics, which are opposed to Marxist dialectical materialism, but even so, this is not the full reason for why Marxists view objectivism in such a negative light. Ultimately, Rand’s epistemological “arguments” fail to explain why one should be convinced an objective world exists outside of our consciousness. She fails to adequately explain her theory of radical “ethical” egoism, that humans are compelled by “rational self-interest,” and she contradicts the fact that human beings in recent times have become more sociable than any other period in humanity. Rand takes the fundamentals of capitalist ideology and perverts them to become so crude that she completely undermines what legitimacy capitalism had in the first place. Rands capitalism would mark the end of capitalism; selfishness removes the Utilitarianism of Smith and the Invisible hand concept. Her brand of capitalism is merely ultimate power; and thus she exposes what capitalism is: Lust for power without regards to society, without regulation, and without any compromise. For objectivists, pure laissez-faire capitalism is absolute freedom, and any form of socialism is seen as “mystic altruism” or an act of coercion. Later capitalist philosophers such as Austrian School economist, Murray Rothbard, would exhibit sympathetic views and influence to Rand, but dismissed the notions that altruism is “repugnant,” and dismissed the overall radicalism of her theories, such as her lust for big buisness. Rand and many objectivists claim that most if not all other ideologies are diseases themselves, including libertarianism, liberalism, social-democracy, and so forth. Rand made numerous contradictions in her theories as well, claiming to be completely for the rights of the individual, but her social philosophy did not realize that “free markets” disables freedom.

Now let us examine how capitalism inherently leads to racism, homophobia, sexism, and the like. Racism as an ideology is merely a form of biological determinism and often manifests itself into Social Darwinism depending on the extent of its nature. It lies in the belief that races are only capable of specific things, one race being superior to the other often due to supposed genetic makeup. However, this completely ignores scientific evidence that more than 75% of genes are the same in every human being. Therefore racism, xenophobia and racial-supremacy are merely socially created phenomena by capitalism, a system of inequality bent on dividing the people. Race becomes merely an enabler of exploitation in the capitalist system. Racism justified slavery, the holocaust, and a myriad of other results of human ignorance; the ruling class uses racism to further divide the people and benefit their self-interests! And what of sexism, and homophobia? Capitalism inevitably leads to exploitation of women and LGBT as well. It is therefore the duty of Marxism to serve as a revolutionary emancipating force to oppressed and exploited working class woman and LGBTs, for true equality and for freedom. The ruling class creates a false portrait of the “nuclear family,” obedient and plastic workers, dressed in conformity and adhering to perverse religious dogma and falsifications of reality such as the “American dream.” Deviations of their twisted views are seen as abhorrent abominations, and through conservative elements of society, the people become divided against one another, prolonging class struggle and systemic exploitation of the working class. Dually in regards to conservative elements, capitalism shows its contradictory and repugnant nature by both upholding promiscuity and denouncing it. Whatever the view on promiscuity is, it generally relates to whether or not profit is being made off of it. Marxism recognizes that emancipation of LGBTs and women is connected to the emancipation of the working class and humanity, for a better and more free world. The output of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, and the like are the outputs of imperialism and of capitalism. Despite the efforts to end these harmful ideologies through identity politics, so long as capitalism remains intact these ideologies will remain as well, grounded in the same material conditions.

Finally, let us conclude by discussing the capitalist’s perceptions of freedom. Capitalists often inevitably conclude that freedom comes from being able to buy and sell, or to work and employ as one pleases. But is this truly freedom? And to what extent does this “freedom” actually occur in capitalism? Truly, in capitalism, only the wealthy can have real “freedom.” The working class sells their labor power in order to have freedoms, but these are always restricted: It ultimately boils down to the freedom to sell yourself to whichever employer you choose, thenceforth having no access to the means of production, no democratic management in the workplace, and so on and so forth; work or starve. Capitalism’s notion of freedom is merely wage slavery, and yet the capitalists continually assert theirs is the system of perfect liberty. Workers have no say in their work, their products belonging to their employer; the workers pay their boss in products! Surplus’ are therefore stolen from the working class and put into the hand of parasitic bourgeois in order to fund imperialism, and as Lenin said: “Can a nation be free if it oppresses others? It can not.” Capitalists also naively assert that having the right to private property equates to freedom, but as any Marxists knows, only through the abolition of private property can individuals retain freedom. Private property referring to productive forces of capital such as factories, land, and most importantly the means of production; when these are privatized inequality ensues, and the potentiality for monopolist tyranny does as well. The abolition of private property is the emancipation of humanity from exploitation. The bourgeoisie already retain a large amount of private property at an extremely disproportionate level to the working class, so why should the working class fear the abolition of private property? Through “socialization,” property and the means of production can be put into the hands of the people themselves, and can be organized from each according to their ability to each according to their needs and work. On the other hand, in capitalism, society is organized from each according to his ability to each according to his greed.

Art by Glowstick.

Results of Laissez-Faire and Capitalism.
Capitalist Perspective: Why Laissez-Faire Capitalism Doesn’t Work.
The Essence of Neoliberalism.
Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR.
Perestroika.
Glasnost.
Conservativism.
The Vice of Selfishness.
Criticisms of Objectivism.
Capitalism and Racism.
Capitalism and Homophobia.
Capitalism and Women: An Anarchist Perspective.
Identity Politics.
Women and Marxism.
Capitalism is a Disease: Anarchist Perspective.
Marxism and Freedom.
Explaining Wage Slavery.
Private Property and Communism.
On the Origin of Inequality.

~Written by Glowstick.

By Glowstick.

4. The State in a Capitalist Economy: The total labour performed in the capitalist sector results in a product that is distributed among the agents in Figure 1. People who administer the state hold a position in the economy that gives them opportunities to privileges, wealth and power through its capacity to levy taxes. The state provides the capitalist sector with a juridical system and laws without which it could not operate, but at the same time the state is dependent on tax revenues from the incomes in the sector and credits in order to act in the world economy.

This dependence forces state managers to be concerned about maintaining the economic activity, irrespectively of whether they are bureaucrats or elected professional politicians; regardless of whether their goals are to build military capacity or implement social reforms. At the same time they have to assume an economy-wide perspective in order to keep the destructive effects of the capitalist sector—e.g. crises and unemployment—in check, or else the state rapidly risks losing political support from other sections of the population on which it is dependent to various degrees.

Economic activity is highly dependent on the level of investments in the economy. This fact gives individual capitals a collective veto over policy: Firms make productive investments and rentiers give credit depending on how they perceive profitability and the political-economic climate, i.e. if society is stable; if the economy is expanding; of the workers’ movement is kept under control; if the level of taxes do not rise, and so on.

If the business confidence of capitalists falls, the level of economic activity and the scope for state policy does too. This occurs in the context of rivalling states, that historically predates capitalism, which act in a world economy. An investment strike is followed by capital flight to other states and difficulties in obtaining credits for foreign exchange. This structural mechanism disciplines individual states under stable conditions to implement policies that do not harm the confidence of owners of capital and, on the contrary, act to maintain a stable development of the entire capitalist sector.

5. Economic growth and scope for social-democratic reform: During certain historical periods – war, international crises, reconstruction, mass mobilization – the balance of forces between the agents in the economy are altered and the individual capitalists’ confidence carry less weight. This increases the scope for the state to conduct an alternative set of policies depending on the other forces in society.

But as the situation stabilises, the weight is shifts back to the dependence on the incomes in the capitalist
economy. This creates sooner or later insuperable problems for the reformist strategy. The only way to reduce the dependence then is to increase the non-capitalist sector’s share of production from which it is posible to redistribute resources in order to implement progressive reforms.

Within the early workers’ movement it was clear that this meant some form of common ownership but it did not have a worked-out theory for how the economy would be run and political strategy for how to organise it [5]. The policies that social democracy mainly applied was nationalization of industries, methods that had grown out of a period of global mobilization for war and economic catastrophe 1914-1950.

The question of the structure of the political economy was, however, not central to the reformist strategy that was established immediately after WWII, when the nation-states prioritised reconstruction and industrial development. The balance of forces in the economy shifted to the benefit of industrial capital and workers at the expense of the rentier capital; whose movement and ability to extract interests and dividends were restricted to maintain high levels of investment. Under these circumstances social democracy in power could be a progressive force without having to challenge the economic order.

The high investment levels contributed to an enormous growth of wealth and facilitated full employment in Western Europe while avoiding to severely damage the confidence of industrial capital. The dependence on the incomes in the capitalist sector did not appear to be an obstacle, on the contrary the scope for social democratic reform was wide. The capacity that the workers’ movement had built since the days of the foundation of Second International in 1889 finally yielded political dividends on a scale that was impossible before 1945.

[5]See for instance SAP’s first ‘general thesis’ up to 1990 or the British Labour party’s Clause IV from 1918 to 1995:
“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.” (Emphasis added)

What follows is a paper presented by Dave Zachariah to the conference for the Swedish labour movement’s researcher network. Today’s article includes chapters 1 and 2, Introduction and Conceptions of the State. Chapters 3, 4 and 5, 6 then 7 will follow at intervals on this blog. Dave asked to have this posted here to see if an activist feedback would be forthcoming.

1. Introduction: How did social democracy turn from being one of the most successful political mass movements in history into a series of national parties in political crises and deep ideological confusion within one hundred years? The thesis in this article is that the crisis of social democracy is a long-term result of the fundamental problems that the political strategy of any reformist workers’ movement inevitably encounters in relation to the state and the economy, and which it has yet to solve.

These problems will increasingly bring the question to the fore: is the goal of social democracy to be a party in government or an organization for social transformation? Whilst this may at one point have been synonymous to its members, it will be argued why it necessarily ceases to be so with the passage of time.

2. Conceptions of the State: The struggle of early social democracy for the modern democratic rights and universal suffrage in particular rested on an impulse that went back to antiquity, best summarised by Aristotle’s observations of ancient Athens:

A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well off, being in a majority, are in sovereign control of the government, an oligarchy when control lies in the hands of the rich and better born, these being few.[1]

It was this class aspect that was the basis of the struggle by the upper classes to prevent or undermine democracy throughout centuries. Bourgeois thinkers, such as the liberal John Stuart Mill, worried about the “danger of class legislation on the part of the numerical majority, these being all composed of the same class”[2] and could therefore not accept equal votes.

The struggle for democratic rights by the workers’ movements was a precondition for it to become a strong mass movement with a base in the industrial working class. As long as organizing was illegal this strategy for social transformation would remain impossible. The struggle for universal suffrage was a part of the strategy. The spectacular membership growth of social democracy strengthened the belief that seizure of state power through the parliamentary road was inevitable. State power would be used for progressive reforms with the longterm goal to “transform the organization of bourgeois society and liberate the subjugated classes, to the insurance and development of the intellectual and material culture”.[3]

The split of the labour movement after the outbreak of World War I and the October revolution also implied a theoretical split in the conception of the state and thus different political strategies. In the social democratic conception, the existing state was an instrument that could be conquered by the workers’ movement while the followers of the Bolsheviks contended that the state always was an instrument for the ruling classes to uphold their domination.

The gains made by European social democracy would eventually show that the communist parties’ conception of the state in capitalist economies was mistaken. The altered political balance of forces after World War II brought social democracy to governments in several countries, in which it could implement a series of important working-class reforms.

Even in a country like Great Britain, whose parliamentary system was long considered to have kept the state safe from the workers’ movement, the Labour party could implement a series of nationalizations of industry and the country’s most important reform during the 20th century: the introduction of a National Health System that provided the population with health care according to socialist principles.

At the same time it became evident for the Western European communist parties, for instance the large Italian PCI and French PCF which had grown through their instrumental role in the anti-fascist struggle, that the revolutionary strategy based on the Comintern model was fruitless in societies with a stable capitalist economy and working parliamentary state with universal suffrage, as they all gravitated towards a reformist position during the postwar period. Only in parts of Asia, Africa and South America, where such social conditions did not pertain, did the original strategy still have relevance.

1-Aristoteles och Saunders [1, p.245].
2-Mill [9, ch.7,§.1].
3-Party programme of the Swedish Social Democratic
party (SAP) from 1911, [12, §.1].