The internationalists

Up to the present, the Israeli operation “Cast Lead” has produced almost 500 dead, many of them civilian, and 2000 wounded, of which half are in a serious condition. It is a butchery which has had few precedents in the unending conflict in the Middle East. The ferocious Israeli reaction to the launch of Qassam and Katyusha rockets by Hamas after 18 months of political and economic isolation has inexorably destroyed everybody and everything. The missile launches served as a pretext to execute an operation which had already been prepared and planned down to the smallest detail. It was carried out with the greatest determination using new and sophisticated weapons. The operation appears to have no particular purpose but in fact it has a series of aims, some old, some new.

1. With this action the Jerusalem government aims to finish off its game with Hamas.

We are publishing here a document we have received by a circuitous route from a group in Athens. We as yet know nothing about this group or the authors but we are making this document more widely known, partially to combat the bourgeois propaganda that what is happening in Greece is just the “mindless violence of people who call themselves anarchists”, and to contribute to a wider struggle against the attempts by capitalist everywhere to make us pay for their crisis. The version here is translated from the French.

Declaration of the General Assembly of Insurgent Workers of Athens in the liberated building of the GSEE (General Confederation of Greek Workers)

We either decide our own history or we allow our history to be determined by others.

We manual workers, employed and unemployed, temporary and casual, native and migrant, are not mere passive spectators.

Massacre in the railway station

The appalling carnage in Mumbai was unfortunately not an isolated incident. In Indian terms alone there have been a mounting wave of attacks which since 2004 have killed over 3,600 people. But the phenomenon is global. Since the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, we have had the London bombings, bombings in a packed commuter train in Madrid, the school massacre in Beslan, and more bombings in Bali, Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt, Delhi, Benares, Bangladesh. This list does not even count the almost daily death tolls of Iraq and Afghanistan.

These are not the only countries where the “war on terror” has backfired spectacularly. Pakistan is a social, economic and political basket case. It is the “sick man of Asia”. Today the US has managed to get a new pro-western regime in Islamabad in the form of the government of Asif Zardari.

We are reproducing here for readers of English three contributions made by our Italian comrades of Battaglia Comunista to the current fight against the so-called “reforms” of the right-wing Berlusconi Government. Readers in Britain, and elsewhere, will recognise the nature of the cuts in a state school and university system which has served its purpose for the ruling class. The difference is that the British system was slowly destroyed over twenty years of so-called “reforms” under Thatcher and Blair. As the texts make clear, similar things have been going on in Italy under governments of both left and right, but it is a sign of the new desperation of the ruling class that they have just gone for the cheapest option in an attempt to balance the state budget. The cuts hit every sector of the system from primary schools to universities. The resistance by parents, teachers, pupils and students has certainly caught the state and the unions on the hop.

Education Minister Gelmini’s Lies

Perhaps it is really true that the only reality we are allowed to see is the false one put out by the television channels, as no-one is surprised any more if tacky television shows, where everything is scripted, are called “reality”. If this is so, why not go so far as to believe Minister Gelmini when he declares while announcing, just before the school year, measures aimed at unhinging the teaching system, that “we are making better schools with less money”? Perhaps, he thinks he is the good fairy, since it is only in fables or in well-constructed frauds that such wonders occur.

After the deadly police shots aimed at 15 year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, there have been a wave of uprisings across Greece. In almost all cities and every part of the country, the anger at the shots and the cynical attempts by the ruling class to hide the circumstances of Alexandros Grigoropoulos’ death has found an outlet in street battles with the police. It is not the first time that protesting youths in Greece have had to die on the receiving end of police bullets. The Greek police apparatus, notorious for its brutality, is shot through to an exceptional extent with fascists and reactionaries, and can look back on a long tradition of repression. Again and again, the police act against the struggles of workers, students and migrants with extreme violence.

We want only the best human capital at the lowest possible cost.

So Sabelli, the Alitalia manager, succinctly but clearly expressed the firm’s point of view to a large union delegation a few days ago. The bosses have the unique merit of saying little but saying it clearly. The so-called representatives of the workers instead indulge in endless chatter on the company’s terms. “Excess workers”, “decoupling” “good and bad company”, “quotas of temporary workers”, “part-time working” etc and in so doing they lose sight of the views of the mass of workers on the key issue.

The academic world is in uproar. At last! – we say — after so many years of torpor despite the many reforms that have gradually increased the class character of that world. The protests in various forms are multiplying throughout the peninsula. While the government is trying to calm the situation, behind the facade it clearly sees the agitation for a situation that could get out of hand. If Sacconi, has spoken of a “presumptuous” few, Berlusconi said that the occupation “is violence” and would have called upon “Maroni to give guidance on how they should intervene to enforce the law.” And while we can all prepare ourselves for the next instalment of Tiananmen Square (the Italian version), students in Milan, who tried to occupy the Cadorna station, have already felt the first blows. The violence, the real violence, has been used so far only by the police.

In every society divided into classes, as is the present society, the ruling class has always restricted the dominated and exploited the right to education and study. What they give is only provided because it corresponds to ruling class interests.

Only in the second half of the sixties, when the growth of big business and mass consumption became necessary, access to education was facilitated and the public school opened to children of workers (comprehensive schools, liberalization of access to university, grants, low fees etc.. etc.).

Of course, the capitalist system has adopted such policies in response to struggles fought by the working class and large sections of the rebellious petty bourgeoisie. They still go on, — sometimes with difficulty — from various trade unions and leftist forces within the limits of compatibility with capital.

State intervention won’t kick-start production but it will add to the production of fictitious capital — From Battaglia Comunista 10 — October 2008

On 3 October 2008 the US legislature approved the $850 billion salvage plan thought up by Treasury Secretary Paulson. This plan is his way of dealing with the dramatic crisis which is bringing the entire world financial system to its knees. The sum provided by Congress will be enough to buy a whole series of shares from the banks which are, in fact, worth about as much as a roll of used toilet paper.

After more than a year of increasing “turmoil” throughout the world’s financial markets and banking systems the United States — that champion of the free market — has been obliged to resort to state intervention to avoid “financial meltdown”, i.e. a total collapse of the banks, financial institutions, the stock market and eventually a run on the dollar.

The formal state takeover of America’s two biggest mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (whose debts were in any case backed by the state) was not enough to bring back that elusive lost confidence in the markets that central bankers the world over are having nightmares about.

Is it the end of an era? This is the question that spontaneously occurs to you when you observe the accumulating excitement over the events in the Southern Cone of the American continent. From Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego almost all the governments in what has always been seen as “el patio trasero” (backyard) of US imperialism are lining up in defence of the Bolivian President Evo Morales against the underhand attempts, supported, if not actually incited by Washington, to destabilise his government. The facts are known. Bolivia is a country with a huge gulf in social inequality, and, in a paradox that only capitalism can apparently produce, has in its subsoil huge resources of primary products, especially gas.

Presented by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) to the May 10^th 2008 Bureau meeting and amended by the meeting

The Bureau has now existed for 25 years, long enough for us to draw up a political balance sheet and to attempt to identify its achievements and strengths, but above all, the limitations of this experience. We don’t intend to hold a celebration for reaching a quarter of a century as for revolutionaries it is our duty to read and interpret the ever more complex reality which capitalism lays before us and to seek at the same time to represent a reference point for the continuously pummelled international working class.

A revolutionary vanguard which doesn’t critically review its own experience is not worthy of the name and is destined to be swept away in the contradictory dynamic of capitalism.

The text which follows was drafted by the comrades of Battaglia Comunista for a European meeting of the Bureau held in Parma last May. We were unable to translate it in time for our last issue so we are publishing it here. The meeting gave us the opportunity to welcome the delegates from the Gruppe Internationaler Socialistinnen which had adhered to the Bureau in February (for a report on this, see Revolutionary Perspectives 46). The need for this meeting had actually been foreseen for some time. The Bureau has in the last few years expanded both its adherents, and its international contacts with groups and individuals, in many countries around the world. The meeting also gave us the opportunity to re-evaluate our perspectives and our organisational framework. In light of our perspectives the meeting fully endorsed the contents of the draft text. As a Bureau we are agreed that capitalism entered its imperialist phase at the end of the nineteenth century.

African Economic Revival?

In the last decade of the twentieth century the African continent was torn apart by wars, with millions of refugees, and half the population living on less than $1 per day. The continent had become a net exporter of capital to the central capitalist countries and its share of world trade and foreign investment has declined relentlessly [1]. The Western capitalist powers who controlled the flow of capital to Africa had imposed Structural Adjustment Plans as conditions for loans. In most cases these plans had led to Western capital taking over the profitable sectors of the economies, and had only made the situation of poorer African states worse. The debt forgiveness programmes adopted by the G8 group of major capitalist powers [2] is an implicit recognition of this.

Beyond the Caspian

Georgia may have driven Iran off the front pages this summer but the stand-off the Islamic Republic’s alleged plans (which are probably true) to develop nuclear weapons continues. The Mullahs and their current mouthpiece Ahmadinejad are playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship, behind which stands the imperialist interests of the US and the Western powers on one side, with Russia and China on the other. We have already argued1 that the US military is currently in no position to hit Iran itself but the US is still using its ally, Israel, to ratchet up the pressure on Tehran as the article (from Battaglia comunista) which follow this shows.

As the Russian Army swept into Gori from where the Georgian Army had launched its assault on Tshkinvali they came face to face with its most infamous son. The statue of Josef Vissiaronovich Djugashvili, aka Stalin, still gazes down on the town of his birth. Stalin would have absolutely approved of the iron response the Putin-Medvedev regime gave to the reckless attack on South Ossetia by the Saakashvili regime. Stalin, despite his birth, was one of the great oppressors of all minority groups, but with particular ruthlessness towards Georgia.

Lenin, Luxemburg and the National Question

Many are aware that, in his final months, Lenin became aware of the danger posed by Stalin and began to take steps against him. What few remember, however, is that it was over the issue of Georgia and the Caucasus that Stalin’s real political character was fully revealed to him. Lenin’s position on nationalism was a complex one.

Since 1992 the question of Ossetia has troubled the Caucasus. Along with every other nationalism, Ossetian nationalism is part of an imperialist game that is being made increasingly difficult by the international crisis. The motive forces which have induced Georgia to attack the small autonomous region in the Caucasus and those which have impelled Russia to employ its army in favour of the Ossetian secessionists against the Tbilisi government lie well beyond what the immediate tale of local events would tell us.

First of all the Ossetian question involves the struggle between Russia and Georgia. The former cannot tolerate the Saakashvili government moving closer towards the United States, much less its declared aim to become part of Nato as a pawn of Washington in the area of the ex-soviet empire. That, along with Ukraine, would comprise an anti-Russian front along the mid-southern border.

This was the first statement issued by the Bureau at the start of the war and has been translated into several languages as has the article on South Ossetia which follows.

Probably the words which best describe the present situation in the southern Caucasus — as well as the divergent standpoints of the opponents — are those attributed to a private conversation between Putin and Bush at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. The Russian premier is supposed to have said in no uncertain terms that “in fact war has broken out in South Ossetia”, adding, however, that the intervention will only be for limited aims, but also that “in Russia many volunteers intend to go there and it is undoubtedly very difficult to maintain peace in the region”. Bush seems to have limited himself to replying that “nobody wants a war”.