The internationalists

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.

Brazil

The inflation gripping the country and constantly reducing wage levels is provoking a response from metal workers in different areas of the country. Inflation has risen in recent months and now runs over 6%. The workers of auto companies, well aware that the sector has been enlarged and how high profits have been in recent years, have taken to the streets to get real wage stability.

The workers of the production lines of Nissan, Renault and Volkswagen in the state of Parana in southern Brazil have been on strike since Aug. 29. The agitation involves more than 9 000 workers and is centred on an immediate increase in wages, 8, 5% ,plus a bonus of 800 reais that should at least partly offset the high inflation in the country. In the same state, Volvo employees (about 2000) will receive an increase of around 7% in November and a one-off bonus of about 620 euros.

Turkey

The strikes over previous months involving workers of the Port of Istanbul have extended to the neighbouring naval dockyards of Tuzla. At those enterprises the struggle has also had the objective of putting an end to what is a real nightmare caused by unsustainable rhythms of work in conditions of total insecurity. On 14^th of June hundreds of strikers, with the support of thousands of other workers and many political militants, demonstrated in front of the naval dockyards. The situation they are struggling against is unacceptable, only in recent months in the Tuzla district have 25 people been killed in various incidents at work. Last May two workers died in the space of a single week. The struggle for competiveness in a market in profound crisis has led the naval dockyards to subcontract much of the labour force from other companies, and they in turn impose a criminal level of suffering and working conditions.

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”.

We have been writing for some time about the New Great Game in Central Asia and the Caucasus and about the connection between all the conflicts there and the Middle East. The common denominator is the world’s energy supplies and in particular oil and gas pipelines [1]. The two wars in Chechenya in the 1990s, the Beslan massacre in September 2004, the local wars that broke out in 1993 in Georgia with South Ossetia, Abkhazia and other former autonomous regions of the USSR are all part of the same struggle as are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the constant pressure on Iran to wind up its nuclear energy programme.

This article was written before the US Government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae but the purpose of it is explained clearly here. This is the biggest financial bailout in capitalist history. The cost of bailing out the two home loan corporations is equivalent to more than twice the entire GDP of the United Kingdom and more than 17% of US GDP. And it won’t be the last …

Even without sharing our view that the present economic “downturn” marks another stage in capitalism’s long-running post-war accumulation crisis it is clear that times are changing for the working class, and not for the better.

Holding the Olympics in Beijing is wasting manpower and money, the country is still poor. The Olympics could only put powder on the false face of the regime. The communist regime stole the land from the villagers by cheating; now it will cheat the foreigners. [1]

Thus spoke a Mr. Li, a retired Communist Party cadre, one of the thousands forcibly evicted from the heart of the 2008 Olympics site, the residents of Datun village, Chaoyang district, Beijing.

And it is easy to see how this accusation of “powdering” an ugly reality [2] goes far beyond the present moment in China. Very much like that other great compensation for daily misery, the Roman games, the Olympics offer escapism on a grand scale, and an arena for the contending nation states to assert their supremacy and revive that great reactionary opiate, patriotic pride, one of the most effective antidotes to emerging class consciousness known to our rulers.

Another trend is happening, simultaneously: The worldwide rise of anxiety, despair, self-harm and general malaise. Children as young as three are diagnosed with depression. [1]

Although the scope of this article is restricted mostly to exposing national events and conditions, there is absolutely no doubt that the root cause of these events lies in the machinations of a savage globalised capitalism that manifests itself in a myriad of social ills the world over. The situation is negative throughout the capitalist heartlands, for example some 19 million children live in poverty in the EU, about a fifth of the bloc’s citizens below the age of 18. However, a case could be made to show that the United Kingdom does demonstrate a more advanced version of the problem, for here, at least according to Ian Duncan Smith, “Family breakdown is the worst in Europe”.

Bologna Debate — In our last issue we produced an extensive dossier on the strike at the Fiat Pomigliano factory near Naples and on the intervention there of our comrades from the Napoli section of Battaglia Comunista. This short piece taken from the July-August edition of the paper Battaglia Comunista updates that report and indicates that something small but positive may yet come out of the events at Pomigliano.

On Saturday 21^st June, at the “Iqbal Masih” Circle in Bologna, the Battaglia Comunista section in the city organised a meeting and debate on the theme of the recent workers’ struggle at Pomigliano Fiat.

“In mid-April”, the opening address said, “while the election was in full swing, 316 Fiat workers at Pomigliano d’Arco (Naples) were effectively moved from the plant and transferred to the new Nola establishment.

As the economy unravels before our eyes, with the credit crunch opening the door to a housing crisis and ever higher food, fuel and living costs, the usual suspects are trotted out for blame. Or rather, usual suspect, for as ever it is the working class which is seen as the culprit for an ever worsening situation. City analysts cannot accept that the years of so called economic growth were built on foundations of sand and therefore bound to crumble in spectacular fashion. Instead they lay the blame for the origin of the credit crunch squarely at the feet of those American workers who ‘greedily and recklessly’ tried to buy their own homes and then came unstuck when they couldn’t afford the payments.

And as in the rest of the world, workers in Britain are being held responsible for the effects of the domestic economic crisis. No matter they are the ones feeling the brunt of the downturn most severely.