The internationalists

In the space of a few months, the myth that there not only is no alternative to capitalism, but that there is no need for change has been shattered. The image of a high-tech, global, self-confident capitalism which promised indefinite prosperity for everyone, even if the gulf between rich and poor is getting wider and wider, has suddenly given way to a world of rocketing food and fuel prices and growing protests against the impact on people’s lives.

Even if in Britain the effect of rapidly increasing prices has so far only put Gordon Brown’s premiership into question, there is no doubt that the prospect of a revival of class struggle haunts our political and economic overseers. As we said in our last issue, they are right to be worried because workers are no longer being taken in by the official inflation figures.

Persepolis is the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic

autobiographical novel (i.e. comic book ) of the same name. It tells the story of Marjane and her middle class leftist family, from the overthrow of the Shah, through the heady days of the “February Revolution” of 1979 [1] and the creation of the Islamic Republic, to the Iran-Iraq war, and Marjane’s subsequent self-imposed exile in Europe.

Marjane is a wilful and adventurous child who displays a passionate loathing of injustice from an early age. Her Uncle Anoush, who we assume is a member of the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, becomes an important influence on her after he is released from the Shah’s prisons. The euphoria of the early post-Shah days with its mass movements, begins to be replaced with a growing concern over the rise of the Islamists. Yet Uncle Anoush remains optimistic and comments that the Islamists are not as bad as the Shah.

The Importance of Zimbabwe

The Zimbabwe elections in March have once again brought the Zimbabwe situation onto the front pages of the bourgeois press. Our rulers would dearly love to see the end of the Mugabe regime and cataloguing its repressive savagery, its attempts to rig, then amend, the election results serves this purpose. The European and US ruling class, however, despite their pretended outrage at the brutality of Mugabe’s regime, have no concern for the violation of human rights in Zimbabwe or indeed anywhere else in the world. This is clearly demonstrated by their own violations of human rights and international law in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and numerous other places where they torture and murder their enemies without hesitation. Nor have they any concern for the desperate situation of the Zimbabwe working class.

At a time when global food prices are rising anyway, due to the short-term effects of freak weather conditions1 in key crop-growing areas like Australia, Canada and the Ukraine, and the long-term effects of the increased demand for meat and dairy products (which require far more grain for animal feed than would be needed to provide the same amount of energy if humans directly consumed the grain) by better-off sections of the populations of China, and, to a lesser extent, India, the competition for land for biofuels can only exacerbate the rise. All this, as the declining value of the dollar, the currency of international trade, pushes up food production costs and “farm gate” prices while speculative activity shifts from the subprime and associated sectors to the food sector.

Even though we knew that it was something more devastating than a mere soap bubble, when the subprime crisis first broke out we could not have envisaged how much worse it would get in such a short time.

Unprecedented State Aid …For the Bankers

A few weeks ago the US monetary authorities took the unprecedented decision to lend Morgan Chase a stack of dollars at an almost zero rate of interest so that it could purchase Bear Stearns — one of the biggest investment banks in the USA but now on the edge of bankruptcy — at a knock-down price. Given that this is a commercial bank which is listed on the stock exchange and whose shares are held by the major institutional investors (pension funds, other big investment banks, municipal investment funds, etc.), there was in fact a risk that the collapse of Bear Stearns would unleash a chain reaction that could have drawn in the entire American financial system and with it a good part of the rest of the world.

A long-time correspondent recently wrote to us asking us if we intended to send any delegates to a meeting in London at the end of June organised by the “Campaign for a New Workers Party”. We had received no invitation to the meeting but we have been aware for some time of this initiative. One of the great needs of our time is for workers to create a political instrument which can give organisational form to an anti-capitalist consciousness. As an affiliate to the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party the CWO is obviously duty-bound to comment on such an initiative.

Love Labour’s Lost

However, it does not take much of a glance to see that this so-called “New Workers’ Party” already has an ancient and sorry history. In the first place it is the initiative of the Socialist Party. Older readers will know that this was the label the old Trotskyist Militant Tendency took when it was expelled from the Labour Party in Neil Kinnock’s spell as leader.

Last April 28^th, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) announced that they had just signed an agreement in principle with Ford, renewing the collective agreement for three years, five months before the current one was to expire. This agreement provides for a three year wage freeze, a freeze of the cost of living allowance for four years, the loss of 40 hours of vacation per year, a reduction in pensions, cuts to drug insurance and other health programs. Perhaps worst of all, it puts in place a two tier system by which new employees will start working at seventy percent of the base salary and will only receive the base salary after three years of work. Also, certain clauses open the door to new layoffs, which is a bad omen in an industrial sector where layoffs are the order of the day and are splashed regularly over the economic pages of the major media.

Education Strikes

More than a Pay Dispute

On the 24^th April approximately 400,000 public sector workers came out on strike, mainly teachers, lecturers, civil and public servants, angry at the government’s pay policy which everyone knows is way below the real rate of inflation and therefore represents pay cuts. For schoolteachers it was the first strike in over twenty years.

No doubt the barrage of bad news for the economy is eroding the capacity of the government to maintain the confidence of the working class in the system and inevitably there will be further episodes of class struggle. There may even be an escalation of this strike movement as the unions are finding it harder to contain the anger of their members. These strikes, as well as that of the oil refinery workers at Grangemouth a week later, show that the capacity for determined workers to halt the economy remains intact.

Another May Day surrounded by conflict — imperialist wars between capitalist rivals, and class war, with the world’s rulers united against the working class, and the poorest people on the planet.

Peace, prosperity and freedom — heavy sacrifices are demanded for these objectives in the form of blood, sweat, and a reduced quality of life. Not only are these ideals more distant with every passing year, but time reveals them for what they are: a cynical deception. However things cannot be any different as what we see is a result of the crisis of the cycle of capital accumulation which, for more than thirty years has not gone away.

…the focus of the class organisation of the proletariat lies in the International…

Rosa Luxemburg

Billions are being pumped into the swirling financial markets to prop up stricken banking houses and to stem the effects of the crisis. On the other hand, across the world, new programmes of cuts are always being developed, social benefits are being cut, wages lowered and jobs phased out. Now, as before, the world situation is marked by growing polarisation and increasing instability. The crisis in the financial markets, hunger revolts in Haiti, Africa and Asia, global warming, the terrifying implications of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — there can be no talk of the “end of history” (F. Fukuyama). Even the most eloquent apologists of the “markets’ powers of regeneration” are expressing themselves in an increasingly restrained fashion.

In February this year the comrades of the German group, Gruppe Internationaler Sozialistinnen (GIS), and representatives of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party met in Berlin. After two days of discussion the GIS agreed to become the German affiliate of the Bureau. This important step was as inevitable as it was welcome as we have all been working together for a number of years and in the course of that time the GIS has come to be a defined force in German revolutionary politics. Groups do not join the Bureau, they help build it, and in so doing help to forge nuclei of a future revolutionary world proletarian party. We are confident that the GIS will bring another new element with clear ideas on how to strengthen and deepen the Bureau as a specific international and internationalist tendency within the proletarian political camp. The GIS was formally welcomed into the Bureau at the meeting of its European members in Parma in May.

1. The Right might change its clothes but it can’t change its habits. No sooner had it returned to power that the Berlusconi government launched an unbelievable campaign of repression against the Roma population in Naples, Milan, Florence and in many other places throughout Italy.

Dossier on the Strike at FIAT Pomigliano d’Arco (Campania, Italy)

CWO Introduction

We are presenting here some of the documents issued by the Naples section of our Italian sister organisation, Battaglia Comunista who were involved with the strike of workers who were fighting their transfer to a new facility at Nola. The fact that FIAT had just invested massively (via structural money from the EU regional fund) in new plant at Pomigliano meant that they had to increase productivity by cutting the workforce. The trick the management came up with was to send 316 (among them many known to be either politically active or for their class militancy) for “re-training” on a course at the FIAT transport (logistics) centre at Nola under the auspices of “World Class Logistics”. The course was all about security and discipline in the factory but its aim became clear. It was to get them out of the plant and subsequently to lay them off.

Since the Great Depression there have been eleven small to medium recessions, the most severe one lasting roughly from 1979 to 1982. Unlike these relatively small cyclical recessions the current foundations of the US economy are far less stable. Mortgage debt now exceeds home equity for the first time since 1945. Housing prices dropped 10 percent nationwide over the last year. So while the real economy is staggering, Wall Street finance houses are now pleased with Washington’s intervention through the Federal Reserve.

Correspondingly the US dollar denominated share of world currency reserves has shrunk from 80 percent in the 1970s to its present level at 65 percent. The economic growth figures have for years been fuelled by debt paid for in credit or the sale of assets.

In the US left capitalism is using the rabidly militaristic Bush regime as a rallying cry to mobilize massive layers of the population behind a more articulate voice for American imperialism. Barack Obama, who is nothing more than a replacement hood ornament on the machine of American capitalism. One that is far more polished and palatable to the capitalist class than the current occupant of the White House, whose sole claim to enter into political life was based on the fact that he owned a baseball team and was well connected to his fellow capitalists.

The Democratic Party’s pro-war record is undeniable. As is Obama’s record in support of the war, through his votes in favor of massive war appropriations, for both the war in Iraq and the more nebulous “War on Terror”. By giving his yes vote to Senate Congressional Resolution 70, House Resolution 4156, House Resolution 1591 and, House Resolution 4297, he has voted in favor of some $3.8 trillion dollars in war spending. [1]