No future for Capitalist work

Main themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.

- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.gaNile6R.dpuf

Main themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.

- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.gaNile6R.dpuf

Main themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf

Main themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf

Main themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf

http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/

Corbyn and Sanders: Reformism and Social Imperialism

We don’t suppose Jeremy Corbyn had to pay much of a political price for the flap caused by former London mayor Ken Livingstone, but it does highlight the creepy racist thinking of British ruling class circles that even the Labour Party “left” has entered into.  Along with the anti-Jewish sentiments one finds under their carpet, the dirty open secret is how they support imperialist wars maintaining the “special relationship” between Britain and the U.S.A.  Many reformists in the U.S. point to the rise of Corbyn and liken this to the mass support for the Democrat Bernie Sanders. 

We think there is more identity here between these two than the Sanders supporters would want to acknowledge. These two are social imperialists.  What we mean by that is the generation of an illusion of championing a socialist “political revolution” by means of bourgeois electoral contests, while in fact supporting imperialist military, investment and political projects aimed expressly at crushing anti-imperialist revolts by workers and peasants overseas. We will discuss some of the economic theory supporting this political identity further below.

While the vanguard of the Mexican-American population, overwhelmingly working class, blocks and disrupts  Donald Trump’s ‘know-nothing’ rallies, the true “Carlton Cliquers” of the SWP seek to recruit Trump supporters, hawking their press and Pathfinder literature with ‘tables’ at Trump events. One variety of Barnesites-without-Barnes rallies to the reformist North Star e-magazine.  In its latest number, Louis Proyect retails a reformist wet-dream where Bernie Sanders can form an independent third party that runs for offices and presumably president in 2020 to effect their “political revolution.”[1] 

We can assume this means that Bernie’s politics will get a branding as “progressive” for some supporters and “socialist” for others. For unrepentant Barnesite-of-old Proyect, such a party would be all about defense of his own “middle class.”  Proyect dreams of the social imperialist past, the 1932-72 era spanning the New Deal to the end of the Bretton Woods Agreement.  We in the labor movement have had to deal with the pro-imperialist bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations from the Meany era down to the Trumka-Hillary crowd we are saddled with today.

They have uninterruptedly handed us the idealized vision of rising living standards without connection to the real world situation where U.S. imperialism is in decline and confronted with new rivals, economic and military, in the form of the China-Russia alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS project, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB.)  These counters don’t weigh for Proyect, who is dreaming.  What matters is the belief in reform.  We say that lasting reforms cannot be won from imperialism in decline.  Not in Britain and not in the U.S.A.

Ranked alongside Proyect’s dream are the more serious offenders, the reformist economists who know what Marx said and wrote and still peddle a patch-up for capitalism or a socialism arrived at by parliamentary cleverness, legislative stealth or triangulations.  We see Richard Wolff saying the answer to capitalism’s ills are to be found in the Basque Mondragon experiment, in ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Programs), worker cooperatives and smoking a lot of pot on Fridays.

Wolff idealizes the New Deal.  Wolff does not tell you that the New Deal hid behind the wall of Smoot-Hawley tariffs and sold “recovery” until the real recovery came along with the war clouds and employment at producing “the Arsenal of Democracy”. But what Wolff does tell you is just as nationalist.  He calls for municipalities to invoke eminent domain against runaway employers who seek cheaper wages overseas. Lest you think this “Marxist” is suggesting seizing the means of production, a joke among Bernie supporters, Wolff supports burdening the tax-payers with buying out the fleeing bosses with ‘fair compensation.’[2]  We say thanks for nothing, Wolff.

Likewise, Professor Jack Rasmus of St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA, wants to sell us reformed capitalism, contending just like the New Dealers that the cause of economic crisis is not the Law of Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPTF), but insufficient consumption by the masses.  We wonder what world is responsible for such an ivory-tower view, because all the masses we know spend everything they get and borrow every dollar they can to try to hold the line of their living standard at some level where they can reproduce themselves and house, clothe and feed their offspring.  The masses are consuming all they can and should their children wish to be educated for 21^st Century employment, they have to incur colossal debt to pay for it.  Therefore the underconsumptionist view embraces an idealist picture where a $15 minimum wage will be a panacea if only it were adopted.

The Bernie crowd almost universally endorses the “Fight for $15” campaign.  We declare that a Living Wage is determined by the area standards of the labor movement in its struggle with Capital.  The “Fight for $15” is only the latest version of the Democrat Party promise to the ruling class to exclude many millions of U.S. workers from the American Dream with a new, revised, sub-living minimum wage.  Labor lieutenants of Capital, like the Trumka AFL-CIO bureaucracy, endorse the “Fight for $15” and underconsumptionism out of one side of their mouth, even while admitting that this is a sub-living wage, they admonish class struggle militant rank-and-filers that more is not achievable. 

This last part is what makes them valuable to the ruling class.  They support the “Fight for $15” exactly to forestall or prevent a fight for jobs for all at union wages. They lamely answer Marxist critics saying the proof of the impossibility of delivering more in the pay envelope is the existence of what are in fact ‘sweetheart’ contracts where union members make less than $15 per hour.  The union bureaucrats cynically pose as the heroes of these most oppressed workers; they will get them a big bump up to $15.  When?  Someday.[3]

The real record of reformism is a collapse into the Democratic Party leaderships’ arms every four years. The real record shows the “Fight for $15” takes no account of inflation during the years it will take to win and gain this wage and they have been calling for $15 since 2012 (in some places, before then.)  Furthermore, the bureaucracy is urging you with no subtlety to vote for the Democrat office-seekers who say they will give you the $15 in 2020 or 2022! 

Where union representation has been one of the demands of this movement, this has turned into a separate fight to no one but the reformists’ surprise, and where the workers have won a cost-of-living allowance, this was also won after another battle. No automatic applications of COLA’s to contracts appear in the Democrats’ national plans and no mention of any is to be found in the Administration’s new overtime law. We recall all the ‘Obama is our best bet’ verbiage of bureaucrats and reformists at the January, 2009 Workers Emergency Recovery Conference, and we have to ask, “How is that working out for you?  Do you think everybody has amnesia?”

You can be sure that the bureaucrats’ idealized vision of the 1930’s includes a big rise in dues checkoff dollars, but what this vision absolutely excludes is the truly mass organizing drives, general strikes and sit-down strikes and factory occupations which were the true history of the 1930’s.  The economic emancipation of the oppressed black and brown populations is not in fact on their agenda even as they promote black and brown “pro-labor” operatives of the Democratic Party. These will be future minions of a new Clinton administration that promises to be more aggressively imperialist.

Professor David Harvey gives Capital classes at New York University and is the darling of self-styled Marxists in and around the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Professor Harvey is the sophisticates’ underconsumptionist.  He uses Marx against Marx and derates the centrality of the Law of the TRPTF from Marx’s explanation of capitalist crises in Volume III of Capital.  Harvey doesn’t care if you become a Marxist, he says.  He just wants you to know what Marx wrote (i.e., according to him.)  The Law of the TRPTF has a fundamental existence irrespective of these self-styled opponents of Wall Street and in fact was the cause of the rise of the hedge funds that were the mechanism the capitalist bourgeoisie used to tank the U.S. and world economy for private profit in 2008.  Profit we may add from looting banks that were deemed by them and their political operatives to be “too big to fail.”  This put the public and in particular the tax-paying working people on the hook for debts upwards of $60 trillion. 

To expect lasting reforms that ameliorate the living conditions of the working class or even of Proyect’s beloved “middle class” from the political institutions who legalized this staggering robbery is certifiable self-delusion.  But that is the hope-for-the-best mantra of Bernie-ism which does nothing to acknowledge, never mind resist the slide toward inter-imperialist world war. Inter-imperialist world war and not consumer spending is the capitalists’ last resort for restoring the rate of profit.  World wars destroy capital, solving for a time the problem of non-productive capital, both fixed and variable, which is to say destruction of factories and people.  We should point out that inter-imperialist world war and the permanent arms economy were the signature events of the heyday they are pining for.

[1] The North Star,“Bernie Sanders announces plans for a new left party”, Louis Proyect
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12557
[2] Economic Update, “Economic Update: Worker Coops: Why and How”, Richard Wolff
http://www.democracyatwork.info/eu_worker_coops_why_and_how
[3] “A Workers Fight for a Living Wage? vs. a $15/hr Poverty Sub-Living Wage!”, Communist Workers Group – US
http://www.cwgusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2013-0403-LEAF-CWG-LaborNotes.pdf

Reblogged from CWG-USA http://www.cwgusa.org/?p=1636 

Capitalism on FIRE

Jane Kelsey’s new book The Fire Economy: New Zealand's Reckoning is all about ‘neo-liberalism’ and almost nothing about capitalism. It’s the same theme that Kelsey introduced in her 1995 book The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment that blamed the deregulation of the Fourth Labour Government on the ‘neo-liberal revolution’ which replaced Keynesian ‘intervention’ with the rule of the market.

Neo-liberalism gave rise to ‘financialization’ as the FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) became separated from society and the ‘real’ economy. Today neo-liberalism and the FIRE economy is ‘embedded’ and difficult to remove. Yet the GFC exposed neoliberalism as bankrupt and open to challenge. Neoliberalism having replaced the ‘epoch’ of Keynesian intervention in the 1970s is today facing a challenge to its existence. Kelsey outlines how the unique brand of neoliberalism in NZ can be politically contested and ‘disembedded’ to re-regulate the market to make it serve a more equal society.

Against Kelsey, we argue that capitalism is the problem not neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is a symptom of capitalism facing a terminal crisis having long ago reached the limits of its historic role in advancing human progress. For the last 100 years or capitalism has gone into decline and is threatening to destroy not only the social basis of human freedom but also the extinction of the human among many other species. We cannot put out the FIRE economy without replacing capitalism with a new society that serves the needs of humanity and nature.

The Neo-liberal counter-revolution

First, we argue that neo-liberalism, like Keynesianism before it, is a symptom of capitalism in crisis. These are not sequential ‘epochs’. They are attempts to resolve the fundamental crisis of capital caused by the contradiction between private property and social production that manifests itself as a crisis of falling profits, or the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF). See Michael Roberts defence of the LTRPF against David Harvey.

The LTRPF causes a shift of surplus capital from production to speculation. But such crises cannot be resolved until sufficient surplus capital is destroyed to restore profitable investment in production. Kelsey recognises that there was a shift in capital investment from industry to finance since the 1970s but offers a Keynesian explanation for this.

“The FIRE economy is a metaphor for the fundamental shift in global capitalism since the 1970s. Finance has replaced industry as the driver of wealth creation in affluent countries –a transformation known as financialization. Neoliberal ideology rules and institutions acted first as the midwife and then as the guardian of this economic order...Why did people, companies and institutions with spare capital become increasingly reluctant to invest or re-invest in manufacturing which was plagued by low profits, delay and risks?”

What accounted for such “poor returns on productive investment” leading to ‘financialisation’? Kelsey opts for the Keynesian ‘underconsumptionist’ explanation of the late Bruce Jesson, and the US ‘Marxists’ John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff. They argue that low wages lead to falling demand and a move of capital away from production to finance. Keynesians claim that capitalist crises are caused by wages being too low depressing consumption and resulting in the overproduction of goods and hence a falling rate of profit on capital invested. Keynes answer to falling profits was to use the state to create employment, boost wages and consumption and thus encourage capitalists to invest in production.

Marxists proved that the underlying cause of crises was not low (or high) wages but a fall in surplus value relative to capital invested. That is, capitalists could not exploit workers hard enough to get a satisfactory profit on their investment. The only way that such a crisis could be resolved for the capitalists was by the massive destruction of old plant and machinery and the driving down of workers living standards by depression and war. This allowed the modernisation of plant and machinery combined with low wages to drive up the rate of exploitation and hence the rate of profit and accumulation of capital.

Marxists proved that in NZ, like the rest of the world, low wages were not the cause but an effect of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Keynesian intervention before, during and after WW2, did not result in the post-war boom, nor could it prevent its collapse in the 1970s. What made the post war boom possible was the depression and war which destroyed old technology and replaced it with new, and defeated the international proletariat driving down its wages and conditions. And Marxists proved that the post war boom ran out of steam not as a result of falling wages but falling profits. Profits fell because the production of surplus value (the rate of exploitation) could not keep pace with total capital expenditure.

The crisis leads to depression and war

The only solution to a structural crisis of falling profits is to destroy or devalue surplus capital (both constant and variable) sufficient to increase the rate of exploitation. These are collectively called ‘counter-tendencies’ to the LTRPF. Historically they mean a pattern of activity by which surplus profits in the imperialist countries are exported to colonies and semi-colonies to realise super-profits by exploiting cheap raw materials and labor power first by means of trade and then by establishing capitalist production. To reap the full potential of such super-profits all national barriers to the free movement of commodities and capital have to be broken down. During the Great Depression and WW2 many colonies and semi-colonies began to adopt economic nationalist barriers to free trade and capital flows in an attempt to ‘protect’ their economies from the dominance of imperialist super-exploitation.

This is what neo-liberalism is – the de-industrialisation of old technology in the imperialist countries and the breaking down of national barriers to the shift of production to semi-colonies to exploit cheap raw materials and labour power. The countries of the indebted ‘South’ and ‘East’ had their assets stripped and workers living standards destroyed – just like Greece today. This process also included the SU and China as they opened up to capitalism.

In NZ this is what happened when the Fourth Labour Government replaced Muldoon in 1984. Muldoon had attempted to resist IMF ‘structural adjustment’ imposing conditions on managing the national economy. He did this by trying to substitute for imports such as oil and control the flow of capital, but the IMF pulled the plug and threatened to foreclose on NZs debt. The Labour Government got the message and began to follow the dictates of the IMF to open the economy to force it to compete on the global market. This was not an ‘experiment’ as Kelsey continues to call it, nor was it a ‘revolution’. Like all capitalist attempted solutions to crises of overproduction, it was a counter-revolutionary attack on a sovereign nation’s ability to manage its economy through capital controls, import substitution and the nationalisation of key assets.

Yet on a global scale the forced ‘recolonisation’ of capitalist production in the ‘South-East’ was insufficient to soak up the trillions of surplus capital which continued to ramp up speculation in existing commodities and assets to new heights. This is what underlies ‘financialization’ – it is not a structural change in capitalism away from industry, but the failure of depression and war to create the conditions for a return to profitable production in industry.

It was the failure to turn Russia and China into semi-colonies capable of soaking up these surplus trillions allowing these countries to harness their own cheap raw materials and labor power and emerge as new economic powerhouses. With the bursting of speculative bubbles in the West in 2007, the productive growth of the new imperialists in the East (with their BRICS attachments) temporarily prevented the GFC from becoming a massive global depression.

FIRE and the GFC

The FIRE economy therefore is living proof that capitalism failed to overcome the structural crisis of overproduction in the West that began in the 1970s. The return of capitalism to the former Soviet union, China and Indo China in the 1990s contained the Asian Crisis and DotCom collapse but dould not stave off the GFC in 2008. The GFC is the surface expression of the explosion of the speculative bubble that could not be resolved earlier by the ‘neo-liberal’ counter-tendencies to the TRPF. So the GFC was not the result of ‘deregulation’ as agued by the Keynesians. Kelsey relies heavily on Bellamy Foster and Magdoff. Let’s see what they have to say about the GFC and then look at Roberts critique of the Keynesians.

Bellamy Foster and Magdoff think that the stagnation of production is behind financial speculation. The stagnation is caused by falling consumption which leads to falling profits. They are wrong on what causes that initial stagnation. The authors draw on Baran and Sweezy and even claim to go back to Marx. However, anyone who followed Baran and Sweezy in the 1940s and 1950s knows that they junked Marx for Keynes. For them the crisis of falling profits resulted from monopoly finance capital squeezing wages and consumption.

Marx treated under-consumption (of commodities and capital) as due to a deeper cause of crises - the LTRPF. Michael Robert’s shows that the LTRPF caused the onset of crisis in the 1970s not lack of consumption. The Keynesian policy of inflating wages to boost consumption ended in stagflation as profits were squeezed out of existence. Because the Keynesian policy only addressed an effect of crisis it could not counteract the cause of crisis, the LTRPF.

It was the failure of neo-liberalism to cut costs sufficiently to restore the post-war boom level of profits is what led to ‘financialization’ – the speculation of surplus capital in existing assets, driving up their prices and creating asset bubbles. The expansion of credit fuelled consumption further until the speculative bubbles burst in the GFC.

Michael Roberts also shows how the QE (quantitative easing) since 2008 has led to hoarding and further speculative investment rather than the destruction of surplus capital and a return to pre-crisis capital accumulation. All this means that there is no way capital can spend its way out of its crisis. Sooner or later the $trillions of fictitious capital has to be devalued and destroyed until the conditions for the return to profits are restored. We are back at depression and war as the only solution for capital to temporarily resolve its crisis.

Reform and Revolution

It becomes clear that Kelsey’s solution to the FIRE economy does not go to the roots of the problem. Because she adopts the Keynesian view that crises can be overcome by a policy of redistribution and state regulation she expects that neo-liberalism and the FIRE economy can be re-regulated and ‘disembedded’. This raises the question as to how far the capitalist state can be reformed. Kelsey agrees that the capitalist state ultimately serves only capital. But neo-liberalism is a ‘paradigm’ or ‘model’ of capitalism that Kelsey thinks can be regulated out of existence without the need to overthrow capitalism. For that reason, and perhaps for deeper reasons, revolution is off the agenda. So let’s see how revolutionaries prove that reforms such as Kelsey advocates in Aotearoa/New Zealand can only be implemented by socialist revolution.

We need to explain the difference between the parliamentary ‘political contest’ and the revolutionary Transitional Program that advances immediate demands to empower the proletariat to go beyond reforms to overthrow capitalism. Parliament is the democratic facade of the capitalist state. Social democracy was born to contain the rise of militant labour movement that threatened to overthrow the state. Ever since, parliament and its laws, have been a leg-iron on militant labour. Social reforms have always taken second place to profits. When profits fall, social reforms are repealed.

Today global capitalism is facing a crisis over its future existence and can only survive by destroying all the past social gains won by working class struggle. There is no room for reform or bourgeois democracy. Capitalism must be destroyed or humanity will be destroyed. We can see evidence of this everywhere where moderate struggles are met with armed repression driving workers to militant resistance.

The road to revolution is mapped out by the Transitional Program that draws on the transitional method of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. It starts with immediate demands for what workers need to live, such as jobs, a living wage, free housing, health and education etc. As these demands are met by state repression at every point workers illusions in a peaceful, parliamentary road are put to the test, proving that the struggle for these demands can only be won by the seizure of state power.

As these struggles develop workers become fully conscious that to live, even to survive as a species in the face of global warming, capitalism must die. The problem is no longer seen as neoliberalism or the FIRE economy; capitalism is on fire, threatening to destroy humanity and nature. The fire can only be put out by an international socialist revolution.

Climate Change: The Workers Revolutionary Socialist Solution or a Class Peace Planetary Suicide Pact?

   Climate Change: The Workers Revolutionary Socialist Solution or a Class Peace Planetary Suicide Pact?

USA | The BART Strikes | Once again on the relevance and method of Trotsky’s Transitional Program

   THE BART STRIKES: Once again on the relevance and the method of Trotsky's Transitional Program by JohnnBrown

Marx is Right, Again!

Is Marxism a new anti-viral drug prescribed by bourgeois spin doctors to keep the revolution at bay? Is Marx the new black and white? Why is it that Marx is the only thinker to explain what is happening to the capitalist system today? More and more bourgeois thinkers are asking that question. They have a struggle to understand Marx. In their haste to rob his grave they usually find Keynes body. Who was the real Marx? Does he have the magic bullet for the global capitalist crisis today? No, if we think Marx is Keynes and can save capitalism. Yes, if we mean he explains that capitalism has exhausted itself and is ready to give birth to socialism.

Marx discovered the laws of motion of capitalism much as Copernicus discovered the Earth’s orbit, Newton gravity and Einstein, relativity. He therefore made the definitive scientific analysis of capitalism. He advanced beyond the discoveries of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and left a legacy that is rich in its development by his successors like Kautsky, Lenin and Trotsky. But Marx’s science of capitalism was revolutionary in its implications predicting its end and replacement by socialism. So Marxism as a scientific theory was constantly challenged by neo-classical economic theory in his lifetime. Marx called this ‘vulgar’ political economy because it reverted to a crude ideological simplification of the classical theories of Smith and Ricardo (and Marx in one sense) as a market theory of value.

On the left Marx main rivals were first, the Proudhonists who mistook money to be the main problem of capitalism. In Aotearoa Te Whiti developed a similar view, blaming colonisation on the worship of money. But money was only the universal measure of the labour value of all commodities the basis of capitalist production. The Proudhonists treated the symptom not the cause and could not develop a revolutionary critique of capitalism. Marx was right then.

Second, were the anarchists around Bakunin who were expelled from the first Communist International after the Paris Commune in 1871 over the dictatorship of the proletariat. They opposed the working class forming a centralised workers state after the revolution. Marx critiqued anarchism as incapable of destroying the bourgeois state and therefore open to joining it. Anarchists subsequently participated in revolutions and despite their hostility to the state joined in bourgeois government as in Spain in 1936. Marx was right then too.

Third, Marxism itself was exposed to various schools of revisionists like Lassalle who backslid from value theory to exchange theory and reformism. In his own life time he disowned these so-called ‘marxists’ including his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue. He was right then, again.

Today these ersatz ‘marxists’ follow in the footsteps of legions of others from Bernstein to Stalin who have distorted or dragged Marxism in the mud. Wallerstein, Zizek et al talk about the current world situation without reference to the basics of Marxism and ignore the historical dynamics of the bourgeois and socialist revolutions! Marx is still right today.

And finally there are those who come back to Marx to join the “He’s back!”bandwagon claiming Marx was right all along. But this doesn’t mean he is right for the right reason when the Marx of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ is ‘updated’ to be more presentable to the ‘middle class’, as in Terry Eagleton, or others celebrating Marx new found resonance with the 'chattering class'. 

So keeping the Marxist legacy alive was always a battle both with those who defected as well as its traditional enemies. Sometimes these were the same person as in Kautsky, the main German defender of Marx until the Russian revolution which he repudiated. Wars and revolutionary crisis tested Marxist orthodoxy to the limit; some regressed like Kautsky, some became victims of their failure to build a Bolshevik-type party like Luxemburg and Gramsci, some vacillated as centrists like Trotsky, and others remained steadfast like Lenin.

Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

The Great Imperialist War was the first major test of Marxism that found the 2nd International wanting. The big majority betrayed Marxism and backed their capitalist classes sending their workers to kill one another. A tiny minority, the Zimmerwald Left around Lenin and Luxemburg defended Marx and Engel’s internationalism and kept a living link to Marx that carried over to the Bolshevik Revolution.

This revolution was the supreme test of Marxist orthodoxy because it necessitated a major change in Marxist theory at a time when Marxism taught that socialist revolution would arise only in the developed industrial capitalist countries. Karl Kautsky was the main defender of this position which we call Menshevik. Lenin and Trotsky became the main critics giving rise to a new flowering of Marxism as a program for revolution not limited to particular countries but of the global capitalist system. We call that position Bolshevik. Luxemburg and Gramsci took positions close to the Bolsheviks although they arrived late at the need for a Bolshevik party. Had Luxemburg lived, she would have become close to the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky. Gramsci however shifted from left to right like a centrist and during his years in jail moved away from the Bolshevik camp.

Lenin and Trotsky developed Marxism by applying the dialectical method. They understood the material basis of ‘backwardness’ as a one-sided aspect of global capitalism. There could be a revolution in a backward country but there could never be socialism in one country alone. Kautsky and Luxemburg couldn’t see it. Kautsky rejected a revolution in backward Russia outright. Luxemburg said that the revolution in Russia was premature because the conditions were lacking for realising socialism after the revolution. Gramsci developed a crude typology of backwardness and types of revolution justifying the October revolution and eventually Stalinist revolution in one country.

While the Bolshevik revolution sorted the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks it left the non-Marxists floundering in its wake. They failed to understand the contradictions of Russia and the revolution, and wound up on the counter-revolutionary side. The Proudhonists had become Fabians who wanted to nationalise the banks. They mistook the Bolsheviks for state socialists. The Webbs went to Russia in the 1930s and lauded Stalin. The anarchists welcomed the October Revolution but then quickly rejected the single party state. They sided with the Peasant leader Makhno against the Red Army during the civil war, and backed the sailors of Kronstadt who staged an insurrection against the state for new elections without the Bolshevik party.

Logically, then these opponents of Bolshevism had become anti-Marxists and counter-revolutionaries adding to the isolation and defeat of the revolution in Russia. Therefore they have no credibility in events since then including the attempts by Marxists to defend the Russian revolution from degeneration under Stalin, the defence of the Spanish Revolution, the fight against fascism, the tactics against social democracy etc.

In class terms these currents are petty bourgeois. Their view of capitalism is one of unequal exchange where the capitalists cheat workers of part of the value of their wage. It falls to the petty bourgeois to correct this by reforming the state. We call this petty bourgeois current that uses Marx’s name in vain centrists.

Reformists and Centrists

Trotsky defined centrism as those currents that vacillate between revolution and reform. In reality any shortfall from revolution makes you a reformist. But centrism tries to disguise this fact with Marxist phrases. So ‘born-again marxist’ Wall St journalists who claim that Marx was right about capitalism but wrong about socialism, are liberal reformists posturing as centrists, distorting and neutralising the revolutionary heritage of Marxism. We can dispense with them as impostors. They are saying that capitalism has to be saved from those who corrupt it. Centrists who hold this position mask it as anti-capitalism based on equalising exchange. David Harvey’s take on Marxism is very popular among centrist groups because while it argues that the crisis is caused by a surplus of capital, it is caused by ‘feral’ capitalism that ‘loots’ wealth (unequal exchange). So the political conclusions he draws are about reforming the unequal distribution of wealth.

For Marx however, unequal exchange is a secondary phenomenon that affects the fluctuation of prices of commodities around their value. It cheapens the costs of production of value because it is essentially theft. Capitalism got its start by theft (primitive accumulation), and grew by sucking slave and unpaid labour into its system. But it developed as a highly productive system only when it could pay a living wage to sustain life and began applying new machinery to increase labour productivity. This reduced necessary labour time and brought down the value of commodities.

Nevertheless capitalism still resorts to unequal exchange (theft) at the margins in the neo-colonies and semi-colonies (like NZ) to boost profits especially when defence of labour’s historic gains prevent devaluation of living standards.

But the basic point is that the system does not function by buying cheap and selling dear except at the margins. At the centre of all the big capitalist powers is highly developed monopoly industry that sets the value of commodities by the value of the labour power expended in production at a level set by a historic compromise between labour and capital.

Capitalist Crisis means socialism or death!

The inherent crisis of capitalism is that it cannot exploit workers enough to extract sufficient value in the process of production to maintain an adequate return of profits over all the capital in existence. So as the rate of profit falls capital is not re-invested in production and overproduction of capital is the result.

This is where Keynesian state intervention comes in, substituting for capitalists who want to hoard their excess capital (or these days engage in casino capitalism betting on future prices of existing commodities or buying future prices of commodities that do not yet exist) to stimulate demand and therefore productive investment. But the fact is that the capitalists control the state and make sure that they receive the bailouts to cover their debts and finance a return to hoarding and speculation rather than invest productively.

It follows that both the banks and corporates have to be socialised, not by a state that consists of corrupt capitalist cronies, but a state that represents the interests of the working class that produces the wealth. Only such a workers state can make sure that capital is socialised and invested in production to meet needs rather than profits. The market is a total handicap to this so no mixed system is feasible.

The crisis of capitalism is now a crisis of human survival so the stakes are high – for workers to survive, capitalism must die. Capitalism depends on drawing down nature’s bounty which includes the labour power of its workers. It destroys nature. We have little time to smash capitalism and rescue humanity and the rest of nature. We can only do that by uniting workers all around the world. This means that Marxists must take the lead in the socialist revolution drawing on the lessons of ‘Why Marxism is Right’.

Capitalism as a system is in a terminal crisis unable to develop human society but rather is destroying it. The crisis can only be resolved either by capitalist barbarism or proletarian socialism. Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”. They were right. They are still right. It is up to us to make it come true.

Perspectives on the Greek Revolution

Solidarity march with migrant workers

The Greek tragedy is the lack of revolutionary leadership of the workers movement!

For Workers’ Councils, Workers’ Militias and a Workers’ Government!

1. Greece is currently the mirror image of the future of many countries in Europe and beyond in two senses. First, Greece has shown with what brutality and what devastating consequences monopoly capital in the stage of decaying capitalism tries to shift its economic and debt crisis onto the backs of the masses of the working class and peasantry. Second, we see that the existing reformist bureaucracies that control the labor movement lead our class to disaster. Either they execute the orders of the capitalist class as stooges, or they help these stooges indirectly by leading the workers with a strategy that cannot possibly win. Centrism in Greece demonstrates again its adaptation to bourgeois ideology and to the reformist bureaucracy. One must say outright: Greece proves again that without a revolutionary workers party based on a Bolshevik program the proletariat is helpless to defeat the blows of the ruling class.

Capitalist crisis and Politics of plunder

2. The crisis of capitalism pushes Greece to ruin. Already in 2010 the Greek gross domestic product shrank by 4.5% and by the end of the second third of 2011 a further 7.5%. In 2011 it is expected that there will be not enough tax revenue to service the current debt repayment. By March 2011 the debt of the country was over 340 billion Euros. This is against this background of a dramatic rise in unemployment and poverty. At the end of 2009 there were approximately 9.6% unemployed; today the official figure is 16.3%. According to the trade unions there are one million unemployed, i.e. 22% of the workforce! Among 15 - to 29-year-olds, nearly one third are without a job. Moreover, up to 30,000 wage earners in the state sector are threatened with dismissal till the end of the year. Public sector workers wages shall be cut on an average of 30-40%, and pensioners face a reduction of their pension by a fifth. The employers can now legally take advantage of high unemployment to undermine the industry collective agreements: the absolute lower limit of about € 740 gross wage for a full time job no longer applies for newly hired young adults under 25 years. You have to make do with just under €600 gross per month. At the same time the rich get their money out safety: according to the German news magazine Spiegel Greek millionaires in Switzerland alone, have deposited € 600 billion.

3. The attacks on the Greek working class are justified by the bourgeois governments, the EU bodies (including the Social-Democratic parties) and the media, by blaming allegedly high wages and government spending in Greece. This is of course one of the many lies the bourgeois ideological apparatuses uses to justify their austerity attacks. According to the French bank Natixis, the annual working time in Germany is on average 1390 hours yet in Greece it is 2119 hours. The gross wages in Greece are 30% less than in Germany. The share of government employment to total employment is in Greece (8%) below that of Germany (just under 10%) and is just over half the average of industrialized countries (15%). Similarly, the share of social spending of GDP is 36% and well below that of Germany (45%). The argument that Greece has taken too much debt and lives "beyond its means" is nonsense. It is in fact a prisoner of imperialist finance capital: in just the last 20 years the country has paid more than €600 billion in interest to the banks - twice as much as its national debt.

4. The actual cause of the devastating economic crisis and the massive austerity attack is not that of wrong neo-liberal policies as the leaders the left Social Democrats and Stalinists insist. For about 40 years global capitalism has been in a period of weak economic growth and crises, the result of the inevitable over-accumulation of capital and the tendency of the falling rate of profit. The neo-liberal policies were not the cause of this crisis because they arrived a long time after it began. There are and have been in the capitalist countries all imaginable forms of government – from a bourgeois government with the participation of radical right-wing forces (e.g., Italy with the National Alliance, in Austria, the FPÖ / BZÖ); Social Democratic governments ruling alone; governments with the participation of "communist" parties (the Jospin government in France, the PCF or twice the Prodi government in Italy with the Rifondazione Comunista); and the dictatorship by a Stalinist party (China, under the leadership of the CPC, where in the early 1990s there was a transition first from a degenerate workers' state to a capitalist state, and in the late 2000s to an imperialist power). But despite the differences in these forms of regime, they all reacted in the same way to the crisis of capitalism with the intensified exploitation of the working class and a massive redistribution of wealth in favor of the bourgeoisie.

Greece put on starvation rations

5. The crisis of the capitalist world system that erupted in 2008 with the worst recession for a long time has gone to a new level. The system has passed the stage of a crisis on its death bed and now approaches its grave where the only alternative is socialism or barbarism. During this period characterised by monopoly capital – the survival of the banks and corporations that dominate the state and economy depends on drastically cutting the value of labor power, screwing up the interest rate and looting the raw material reserves etc. to increase their profits. Weaker capitalist countries – like Greece – are the first victims of the relentless politics of this imperialist plunder. But ultimately it makes the working class and oppressed peoples of all countries pay for its crisis.

6. The aim of the imperialist EU in Greece is to put the workers and oppressed on starvation rations and to privatize the remaining state assets (and sell them mainly to large foreign corporations). So the Greek State offers for sale 39 airports, 850 ports, railways, highways, two energy companies, banks, thousands of hectares of land which the state lottery, etc. with a total value of US$71 billion. Furthermore, a significantly higher proportion of the Greek economy is transferred into the ownership of imperialist capital (so far around 90% of bank capital is still in local hands) and the rights and organizations of the working class are weakened to create a much cheaper labor force for the capitalists to exploit – not only by Western European capitalists but also Greek employers. Therefore, the Greek capitalists essentially support the EU's brutal austerity policies even if they ask for, of course, better terms for them from Brussels.

7. The political crisis in Greece and the events in the EU underline once more the thesis of Marxists that bourgeois democracy is not democracy for the workers class and the broad masses, but in reality a disguised dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The "socialist" government in Athens can be commanded by the stock exchanges and the Greek capitalists in parliament to adopt the austerity package of the EU Commission, when it is obvious that the people are against it. Nor will the peoples of Europe have the slightest say in the austerity measures. So the government in Athens has just ruled against the so-called democratic or sovereign will of the people. The leaders of PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) and ND (New Democracy – the conservative party) vote to change the government, set the date for new elections, and decide the future of the people. How hypocritical were the "democrats" of Western governments (including the Social Democrats) and the monopoly capitalists, when in early November the then Greek President Papandreou dared to announce a referendum on the austerity package. An outcry over the "irresponsibility" of the government arose in the EU and the stock market tumbled down. Democracy for the capitalists is only viable as long as long as it does not affect their profits. Petty-bourgeois democrats a la ATTAC or the ideologues in the "Democracy Now" movement think that within capitalism a true democracy is possible. This is a childish illusion. In a society in which classes exist and one class exploits the other, there can be no true democracy. The state apparatus, the parliament, the government - they are all in a ‘bourgeois democracy’ controlled by the numerically small class of capitalists. Lenin's statement that "even the most democratic [of] democratic republic[s] is nothing but a machine for the oppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, the masses of working people by a handful of capitalists" (‘Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, 1919), is valid today than ever .

The class character of Greece

8. All this shows the hopelessness of bourgeois nationalism. It is a reactionary dead end, and chains the working class politically to the bourgeoisie. Bolshevik-Communists therefore reject the "patriotic" orientation of the Stalinists of the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and many other left-wing reformists, towards the formation of an anti-EU "national bloc" in common with bourgeois forces, as completely reactionary and utopian.

9. In the Greek population there is a widespread mood that sees the EU as dictating a foreign austerity policy (not least Berlin-controlled) onto the country. This is reflected in numerous patriotic expressions at demonstrations and also at the celebrations marking the anniversary of the famous "NO" against Mussolini's dictatorship on 28 October 1940. Without doubt an element of national oppression exists in the current crisis, insofar as there are not equal relations between states, as the major powers in the EU – especially Germany and France, but also smaller imperialist powers such as Austria or the Netherlands – treat Greece unashamedly as a developed semi-colony whose government policy it can dictate.

10. At the same time the patriotic Stalinists of the KKE and other leftists, "forget" that Greek capitalism has also striven to take its place as an internationally active exploiter class. The Greek capitalists have traditionally been among the largest owners of ships (with a share of almost 16% of world shipping tonnage in 2010). Also since the early 1990s, Greek capital has established itself as a leading foreign investor in South Eastern European and Balkan countries and in Serbia, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria it even takes the first place among foreign investors. Greece's leading four banks –National Bank of Greece, EFG Euro Bank, Alpha Bank and Piraeus – now control about 20% of the financial sector in Southeast Europe. In short, Greek capital is exploiting the proletariat not only domestically, but also through the super-exploitation of workers in poorer semi-colonial countries. It is however noted that part of the officially recognized "foreign investment" (referred to as capital exports) is in reality more capital flight in the face of severe economic crisis in Greece and represents less a sign of strength but of weakness of Greek capital. This shows incidentally, that the patriotism of the ruling class serves only as an ideological veil to fool the oppressed classes, but if it is conducive to their profits, they will – without batting an eyelid – readily submit to foreign masters.

11. Greek capitalism therefore has a contradictory character. While it has historically been oppressed by European and U.S. imperialism it has also made efforts to make parts of the Balkans its own semi-colonial hinterland. An overall picture of Greek capitalism is that – given the relatively low importance of the role of capital exports and repatriation of super-profits in proportion to the overall economy and the overall relatively underdeveloped nature of capitalist development in the country –Greece has no imperialist character. We reject the use of categories such as "sub-imperialism" (as used by the centrist IS/SWP tradition of Tony Cliff) as un-Marxist, because in the modern era of imperialism they blur and render indecisive the characteristic contradiction between oppressor and oppressed countries. Rather, Greece is an advanced semi-colony in subordination to the imperialist powers – especially the EU and the USA, and increasingly China. The current crisis in Greece and its open submission to the dictates of the big powers show that the efforts of the Greek capital in the past 20 years to become a small regional imperialist power were not crowned with success. The last years have confirmed the semi-colonial status of Greece.

12. The example of Greece also confirms the thesis of Bolshevik-Communists that China has now become a new imperialist superpower. The dramatic increase in its capital exports – China is now the world's fifth-largest foreign investor – shows that the country is neither a semi-colony nor a degenerated workers' state, and certainly not a socialist state. In the recent past, China has won through massive investments an influential role in Greece and thus gained a springboard into the EU. The state capitalist Chinese company Cosco controls with a US$5 billion investment the largest port in the country. China plans a number of other major investments in Greece and has already signed contracts for projects totalling more than US$5 billion for the purchase of larger sectors of the major trading fleet, telecommunications, railways, etc. For the Greek working class Chinese investment brings heavy attacks. For example, Cosco prohibits in “its” Piraeus harbor any union activity or even collective bargaining agreements. What a bizarre nonsense that many Stalinists and Chavez supporters admire China as a socialist, or at least still a progressive country!

13. The reactionary character of Greek chauvinism is also reflected in its history of oppression and partial expulsion of national minorities (Turks, Albanians, Macedonians, etc.). Founded in 1991, even the independent Republic of Macedonia was not recognized by Greece for many years. At the same time Greek chauvinism is also used to justify the exploitation of the many migrants and thus to deepen the split in the working class. This is even more serious given the fact that the migrants number officially a million (2 / 3 are Albanians) and amount to 20% of the total labor force.

Patriotism - the dead end of reformism

14. Shamefully, a large part of the reformist Left (left wing of PASOK, KKE, Synaspismos, etc.) subscribes to Greek patriotism. The KKE, for example, refers to itself in its program as a "patriotic party" and is committed to "defending the territorial integrity of the country against the new imperialist world order." The only "dangers" of the "territorial integrity" of Greece in the past few decades were the conflict with Turkey and some demands by the Macedonian minority in Greece to secede. In fact, the KKE on the Macedonian question supports "the safeguard of inviolability of borders; the avoidance of every irredentist propaganda and of actions that hinder the approach and cooperation of the two countries." (KKE Resolution 19.2.2008). In general, the KKE denies the existence of any national minority in Greece (Interview with the longtime KKE Secretary General Aleka Papariga, 02/26/2011). The commitment of the KKE to patriotism and the defense of the capitalist state against other states and against the self-determination of national minorities is nothing more than social-chauvinism and subordination to the capitalist fatherland.

15. Today the KKE calls for the withdrawal of Greece from the EU and the euro currency and the restoration of "independence" for Greece and the drachma currency. But in reality, the solution of the Greek crisis can only be international in character. A capitalist Greece outside the EU will face at least as tough austerity measures as those imposed by the present government. The reformist bureaucracy of the KKE preaches the illusion that Greece could be an independent nation because the country "has conditions to create a self-supporting developing national economy." (Aleka Papariga, 5.7.2010) Such a nation existing in isolation is not possible.

16. The struggle against the imperialist dictates of the EU must be fought internationally. The West European workers' movement must fight on the streets and in parliament against all austerity policies to “rescue” Greece and against anti-Greek chauvinism. Revolutionaries in Greece must reject the bourgeois-nationalist perspective sharply and the demand for withdrawal from the EU7 or the Euro zone and the reintroduction of the drachma. The slogan for Greece’s withdrawal from the EU and euro should be made only in connection with the slogan of a workers' government and as part of the process of socialist revolution.

17. We are opposed to ultra-left positions, which – because of the presence of Greek national flags in demonstrations and site occupations or the organized right – conclude that these mobilisations have a reactionary character. Of course, in a real popular movement, which is directed against the brutal subjugation of the country under the dictates of the imperialist EU, patriotism is understandable, in particular given the fact that the workers vanguard still does not have a revolutionary consciousness and therefore cannot decisively influence these mobilization with an internationalist perspective. Bolsheviks-communists argue against patriotism as such not with abstract teachings about the myth of the homeland and the moral superiority of internationalism. Rather, we point out that Greece can be saved only a) if it is free of rule by Greek and international capital, b) if the fight is on the basis of complete equality with the non-Greek parts of the working class in the country (immigrants, national minorities) and c) if it takes place as part of a common international struggle of the working class in the Balkans, in Europe and the Mediterranean, for a socialist federation.

18. It is particularly important, therefore, to underline the reactionary role of Greek capital in the Balkans and in the over-exploitation and national oppression of the migrants in their own country. To combat Greek chauvinism consistently, we make our program for the national self-determination (including the right of secession) for the minorities in Greece; for the full equality of migrants (full citizenship rights, equal pay, recognition of their language as equal at work and education, abolition of the official State language, etc.); for a socialist perspective for a Balkan Federation and the United Socialist States of Europe, a priority. Equally urgent is the unity of the Greek Revolution and the Arab revolution.

19. The importance of the revolutionary struggle for complete equality and integration of migrants is reflected especially in Greece. They are an important part, especially of the most oppressed sections of the working class. The struggle of the union of cleaners and domestic helpers in Athens (PEKOP) shows that migrants can play an important role in the class struggle. Its most famous representative, the Bulgarian migrant Kostantina Kuneva, was attacked in late 2008 during a labor dispute by paid assassins of the company concerned who threw sulfuric acid all over her face. She survived despite severe injuries and PEKOP – supported by a large wave of solidarity from other parts of the working class and the youth – was able to win the strike. The organization and mobilization of the lower sections of the working class – among which the migrants play a key role –is a crucial precondition for the victory of the Greek revolution.

Widespread pre-revolutionary crisis

20. The central question is: Why has the government been able to stay in power even after a string of very brutal austerity policies forced on the people against their will? Is it the lack of combat readiness of the masses? Certainly not! The massive attacks of the capitalist class were answered by the working class with a series of general strikes, demonstrations and site occupations. The statistical average in 2010 was two demonstrations per day in Athens!

21. Is Greek capitalism in such a strong position? No. Not only are the workers and the oppressed no longer willing to accept the series of savage packages. The ruling class cannot continue its existing politics unchanged. Greece is facing national bankruptcy. The political system is totally discredited in the eyes of the people. Each government crisis is followed by the next. No wonder that there is speculation among the political elite of Greece and the EU already about the need for a civil war, a military coup and a Bonapartist regime.

22. Greece is definitely facing a pre-revolutionary crisis. If we disregard the rebellion in Albania in 1997, we find in Greece the most advanced revolutionary development in Europe since Portugal 1974-75. Lenin's classic definition of a revolutionary situation clearly applies to Greece: "(1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action." (VI Lenin, ‘The Collapse of the Second International’, 1915). From the Greek revolution to the Arab revolution since January 2011, the August uprising of the poor in Britain a few months ago, and the world-wide Occupation movement, there is further evidence for the Bolshevik-Communists assessment that the historical crisis of capitalism has opened a revolutionary period.

23. So the ruling class holds on to power not because of their strength and not because of the lack of combat readiness of the working class. The cause lies rather in the fact that the proletariat and the oppressed have no revolutionary leadership. Instead, at the head of the labor movement stand the reformist bureaucracies, with their policies to betray and sell out the struggle of the masses. Either they execute the orders of the capitalist class as direct agents (PASOK), or they help these lackeys indirectly by misleading the proletariat with a reformist strategy which must inevitably end in defeat (KKE, Synapismos). Centrism (which vacillates between reformism and revolution) is incapable of a raising a truly revolutionary program as a political alternative to the bureaucracy, such as the pseudo-Trotskyist forces (Marxistiki Foni / IMT, DEA) and Maoist organizations (such as KOE), with Synapismos/SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical reform left) or Antarsya (a coalition of SEK/IST, OKDE-Spartakos/Fourth International) and others. (Xekinima / CWI belonged to SYRIZA until a few months ago).

24. The pre-revolutionary crisis threatens to degenerate. A pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation cannot last forever. The masses are weakened by loss of momentum and lose faith in the possibility of victory. At the same time, the ruling class can prepare for a decisive counterattack and for the establishment of a Bonapartist regime with wide-ranging executive powers. Against the backdrop of a deep economic and social crisis, the continued inability of the labor movement to take the initiative inevitably leaves space for the growth of a rabid nationalism and fascism. (e.g. LAOS and Chrysi Avyi). Only the timely construction of a revolutionary workers party based on a Bolshevik program can ensure that the resolute struggle of the masses leads to the proletarian seizure of power and not to a heavy defeat.

The Crisis of Leadership – treachery of PASOK, KKE and SYRIZA

25. The working class in Greece is bound on several sides. The ruling party PASOK in this crisis proves once more to be the direct agent of domestic and foreign monopoly capital. It plays a leading role within the big trade union federations - the Federation GSEE and the public sector union ADEDY. At the last congress of the Greek General Confederation of Labor (GSEE) in March 2010, PASKE – the trade union group close to PASOK – 48.2% of the delegates voted to unite behind PASOK’s social-democratic program to weaken and limit the struggle against austerity. The PASOK government does not shy away from using military repression to discipline the workers. It used the civilian mobilization orders to break the 17-day strike of the garbage workers by force out of fear of a solidarity strike by millions of workers against their policy. This law dates from the Second World War and allows the forced provision of government services. The striking workers were effectively subjected to military discipline. If they refuse, they can be thrown in jail for up to five years.

26. However, at the same time the internal contradictions intensify in the face of growing anger among the masses. A number of leading trade union officials now sees itself forced to break with PASOK. In different unions (teachers, municipal employees, railway workers) PASKE even splits from PASOK.

27. It is significant that PASOK is part of the Socialist International. It is a counterrevolutionary instrument like the other European social democratic parties that support the imperialist policy of robbing Greece through its various EU "aid packages".

28. The Communist Party (KKE) is a classic Stalinist party i.e. it is a bourgeois workers party, which is ruled by a bureaucracy that serves the maintenance of capitalism by promising reforms to its working class social base. Its union faction PAME won 20.9% of the delegates’ votes at the last congress of the GSEE. It has important bastions of support in the traditional core layers of the proletariat like the port and construction workers - and exerts an important influence on the class-conscious workers. However, PAME is does not have the strength of the GSEE and the ADEDY (Civil Servants Unions) to organize general strikes. The KKE played a central role in the anti-fascist struggle for liberation during the Second World War. In 1944 it formed a coalition government with the bourgeois and monarchist forces to disarm the partisans and install a capitalist regime during the revolutionary crisis of 1944-45. Also in 1990-91, the KKE participated in a coalition government with PASOK and ND. It now pursues the Stalinist strategy of establishing a "social popular front" - also called the "anti-imperialist, anti-monopolistic, democratic front of the people". To this end the KKE organizes not only workers and peasants, but also the petty bourgeoisie (it has created the PASEVE –the Anti-monopolist Protest Movement of All Greeks to organise “the Self-employed and the small Tradesman”).

29. The KKE bourgeois role was also evident during the uprising of the youth in December 2008 (a weeks-long mass revolt - not unlike the August uprising of the poor in Britain - after the murder of 15-year-old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos by two police officers). While tens of thousands of youths were fighting in the streets against the police, the KKE Secretary General Papariga slandered the militants as "hooligans" and "hoodies" led by “foreign intelligence." (Interview 17.12.2008)

30. The reformist policy of the KKE is based primarily on strengthening its position in Parliament. The class struggle in the streets and in the factories is subordinated to its parliamentary position. Papariga said in the 2010 "Proposal for Resolving the Crisis" that the party only puts its emphasis on the extra-parliamentary struggle if it sees no possibilities for parliamentary coalitions and maneuver; "...if the political balance of power allows us no effective intervention in favor of the people, then we focus on the extra-parliamentary movement." The KKE is often radical and likes to talk of socialism and the power of the working class. But instead of taking advantage of the present revolutionary crisis to orient the wave of strikes and general strikes and occupation movements to organize an uprising and the revolutionary seizure of power, it demands – along with the other reformist and centrist forces (e.g. SYRIZA) – the formation of a "transitional government" and new elections.

31. Bolshevik-Communists reject the slogan for new elections as it means in the present phase of the heightened class struggle and mass mobilizations nothing but a diversion from the revolutionary struggle on the streets and in the factories back onto the parliamentary road. It reflects an orientation of the reformist bureaucracy that solve the political crisis and the mass mobilizations of popular protests by electing a new civil government to parliament, rather than by an uprising and the overthrow of the ruling class.

32. Against this background we can assess the clashes during the two-day general strike on 19./20 October. The KKE used their forces to form a barrier of people to protect the Parliament and allow the deputies access so they could vote for the recent brutal austerity package. The radical forces of “The Plirono” (We do not pay) movement, the militant Union of Municipal Employees POE-OTA, the radical Left, and the autonomous/anarchists were trapped in Syntagma Square. In response to the bureaucratic and sometimes violent actions of the KKE security forces there were violent clashes between the KKE-stewards and radical parts of the demonstrators. This was the result of the role that the KKE on 20 October played: that of a middle-class auxiliary police who guarded the Parliament against the masses, while the new austerity package was agreed. (That is why the KKE/PAME security forces are often called "KNAT" –a combination of the terms KKE youth organization KNE and the special police MAT)

33. The KKE denounced the radical forces as "anarcho-fascists." Many centrists condemned both the KKE and the radical forces. Doubtless the autonomous/anarchist forces repeatedly caused a counter-productive escalation with the police. But this should not detract from the overall political context. Against the background of many general strikes and the widespread hatred of the people for parliament and the government, the repeated attacks by protesters against the parliament building in the past, it is absurd to justify the KKE/PAME behavior against the workers' demonstration on the pretext of stopping some ‘crazed anarchists’. No, the Stalinist bureaucracy wanted to prove to the ruling class its loyalty in the face of the government crisis and possible new elections. "We are a reputable, state-supporting force, protecting the Parliament in times of crisis and we can control the movement". The policy of the KKE is clearly reminiscent of the role of the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil war 1936-39, where they defended the bourgeois republic against the radical forces of the time. But if the KKE has played out its role, the reactionary forces will sweep it away as it happened in Spain also.

34. The “Coalition of the Radical Left” – SYRIZA – is dominated by the left-reformist party Synaspismos, a Euro-communist split from the KKE in 1991. The founding leaders of Synaspismos were at the forefront of the government coalition with New Democracy and PASOK of 1990-91. Synaspismos is now part of the European Left Party and follows a left-social democratic politics, which sees neoliberal policies as the cause of the crisis and advocates a reform program and government participation in the management of capitalism. Significantly, in the 1990s Synaspismos supported extremely chauvinistic propaganda towards Macedonia and mobilized with the Conservatives, PASOK and the church, for joint demonstrations under the slogan "Macedonia is Greek".

35. In 2010 there was a separation of the right wing of Synaspismos under the former Minister of Justice Fotis Kouvelis (in the coalition government of 1990-91), which formed the reformist Democratic Left party (DIMAR). DIMAR follows the logic of social democracy more consistently than KKE and SYRIZA. Kouvelis calls for new elections so that "the political crisis does not turn into a crisis of democracy". In early November the DIMAR deputy Grigoris Psarianos along with PASOK and ND called for the formation of a transitional government to restore “normal democracy” and to keep the country "on European course". Here speaks a party appealing to the bourgeoisie as a serious coalition partner to administer the capitalist state business.

36. Even if SYRIZA today is sometimes radical and may resonate with some layers of the militant workers and youth, it is basically a left-reformist force. Significantly SYRIZA in recent months did not demand the resignation of the government, but called for a referendum on the debt and the establishment of a committee to review how much of the debt should be paid and how much should be canceled. Similar to the KKE calls for new elections, it has a reformist-parliamentary strategy in response to the crisis. Its goal is to find a place in a bourgeois government ("a new coalition of power", SYRIZA president Alexis Tsipras 04/11/2011) is. That is why Tsipras appealed to President Karolos Papoulias to hold elections to defend the Constitution. Everyone had an obligation under the Constitution to undertake initiatives to preserve social cohesion and national integrity." One should take initiatives “avoid finding ourselves faced with unpleasant events that some times wrong people, institutions and our democracy.” (31.10.2011) Such statements of the supposedly "radical left" in times of severe crisis of capitalist democracy tells us much more about the thoroughly bourgeois-reformist character of SYRIZA than hundreds of rhetorical speeches about anti-capitalism and socialism. Those who think that SYRIZA is more left-wing than the KKE’ make a big mistake. Equally significant is the fact that for years several centrist organizations like Marxistiki Foni / IMT, DEA and KOE have been part of the left-reformist SYRIZA, afraid to break with the reformist Synaspismos and thus carry responsibility for its betrayal.

37. In Greece, anarchism is traditionally relatively strong. Its strength is a consequence of the bureaucratization of the labor movement and the treachery of its leaders in the past. Given the weakness of the revolutionary forces, it is no surprise that many young people and probably some workers turn to anarchism. What they see as ‘communism’ is nothing but the Stalinism of the KKE "Leninism" and the "working class discipline” of KKE stewards calling the rebellious youth "hooligans" as a pretext for protecting parliament. At the same time we must also see that many young activists are misguided in their involvement in the ranks of anarchism. For without a revolutionary (not Stalinist!) party no revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is possible. Without turning to the working class in the factories, without tactics against the organizations of the labor movement, the working class cannot be won to the revolution. Without a disciplined approach to demonstrations and street fighting the ranks can be mislead into police provocations and other counter-productive actions. In short, we are appealing to the anarchist activists to join the ranks of the working class party in the revolutionary struggle for the abolition of classes and the state.

Return of spontaneous movements

38. The massive upsurge of class struggle in recent months has brought very important and promising developments among the masses. Out of the dissatisfaction with the unsuccessful protests organized by the bureaucracy of the unions and the KKE, there arose the spontaneous mass movement Kinima Aganaktisménon Politón (KAP –Indignant Citizens' Movement) starting with the demonstration on 25 May 2011. The movement reached its climax in the summer when tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands attending their meetings and demonstrations. It calls for the cancellation of debts and the expulsion of the Government, the EU Troika, the IMF, the banks "and all who exploit us." Like so many spontaneous mass movements it is also politically contradictory. On the one hand it embodies a desire for "true democracy", a frontal rejection of government, EU, IMF and "exploiters" and its use of bourgeois legality to square occupations has an enormously progressive potential. On the other hand, it lacks roots in the factories and refuses to allow the formal participation in the meetings of political organizations, which is a petty-bourgeois element in this movement.

39. Because of the radical-democratic nature of the KAP and thus their lack of control by the bureaucracy, the KKE leadership sees this movement as a threat. Shamefully, they condemn it as "apolitical" and reject any involvement in, and support for the movement.

40. The attitude of Bolshevik-Communists to such spontaneous bourgeois-democratic protest movements is characterized by the combination of a) an active participation in, and support for the movement, b) a politically clear and educational criticism of its petty-bourgeois orientation, anti-party sentiment, etc., c) the open advocacy of an orientation to the working class and the establishment of action committees in the factories, neighborhoods and schools, and d) a clear perspective on the necessity of socialist revolution and the building of a revolutionary combat party of the working class.

41. Another very important phenomenon is the spread of rank and file assemblies and the formation of actions in many enterprises and neighborhoods. These committees are spontaneous and are barely linked together. Related actions are also the numerous occupations of public buildings.

Program of the Revolution

42. In the past year and a half Greece has gone through a pre-revolutionary development; numerous ‘general strikes’ (12 until now), occupations and demonstrations have proven beyond doubt the fighting spirit of the masses. But so far these heroic struggles have had no success: the PASOK government has been able to push through the brutal austerity packages in parliament.

43. The reason for this failure lies in the fact that at the head of the mobilization there is no revolutionary combat party of the working class, but rather, reformist bureaucracies with centrist appendages. They pursue a strategy of impotent dead-end mobilisations which are directed at winning lucrative power and privileges via new elections.

44. The key condition to overcome the current crisis is the building of a revolutionary party. Only with such a party at its head can the working class be won to a program for the socialist seizure of power and the road to liberation opened. The first step in this direction is the creation of a revolutionary party-building organization to develop such a program and to unite activists on the basis of this program.

45. The central tragedy of Greece to date lies precisely in the huge gap between the struggle and determination of the working class on the one side and the terrible political backwardness of the leadership of the workers' movement on the other side. There is no revolutionary party capable of leading the proletariat to take power. Today many militant workers and young activists support either reformist or centrist forces (e.g. trade unions close to PASOK, KKE/PAME, SYRIZA, DIMAR, Antarsya), the Autonomists/Anarchists, or they are unorganized. From this fact follows the centrality of the united front tactic. The battle for winning over first the vanguard and then the entire proletariat requires that the revolutionary forces do more than strike together with the workers. They must also direct their demands to the existing organizations and that includes also their leaderships. To direct demands to the leaderships does not imply we have any illusions in their reformist and centrist programs. On the contrary, revolutionaries explain openly to the working class why these leaders are not able to lead the liberation struggle to victory, why they are an obstacle to the revolution and why they must therefore be replaced by a revolutionary party. In a revolutionary crisis the working class can learn ten times as fast as in normal times of relative class peace. But the working class cannot be won over to the revolutionary program solely by means of propaganda - they must go through their own experiences with their leaders’ betrayals. Therefore it is necessary to direct the calls for the establishment of action committees, workers 'militias, etc., up and including the workers' government also to the current leaders of the Greek labor movement such as the pro-PASOK unions, KKE/PAME, SYRIZA, DIMAR and Antarsya.

46. A revolutionary program for the crisis in Greece must first of all explain the character of the current crisis and draw the correct conclusions. This crisis cannot be overcome by reforms and governmental coalitions within the framework of capitalism. The working class and the popular masses will experience a social massacre, a social and historical defeat, if the ruling capitalist class – regardless of whether ND, PASOK, KKE or SYRIZA administer their businesses – is not overthrown in time. The most important element of the current situation is therefore the question of power. Which class rules - the working class or the capitalist class?

47. This is understood by the parties and felt by the masses who want to get rid of the politicians and the government. Therefore the reformists and centrists put forward their answer to the question of power. They demand new elections and a "left" or "anti-monopoly popular government". Several centrists (e.g. CWI, IMT) do not share this orientation towards new elections. They propose a prolonged or even indefinite general strike to overthrow the government and the formation of a workers' government. Their rejection of the reformist electoral orientation is correct but their concept of the struggle for a workers' government is wrong and naive. It is a characteristic of centrism that it presents the seizure of power in a (pre-) revolutionary situation as a relatively peaceful transition, without rupture, in other words, in an opportunistic, non-revolutionary way. The indefinite general strike is seen as a weeks-long strike which forces the government to resign and then a workers government based on trade unions, leftist parties, action committee etc. delegates, emerges. In a (pre-) revolutionary situation this is a completely unrealistic view of the proletarian seizure of power. Moreover, it is a dangerous opportunistic illusion which is spread by centrism in the ranks of workers vanguard.

48. Not coincidentally, several centrist groups such as the CWI or the IMT share the revisionist theory of a peaceful transition to socialism. The scenario of civil war and the appropriate political and military preparation is outside of their horizon. But the ruling class will not voluntarily give up their power and a few street fights are not sufficient to win. Already the CIA speaks openly of the possibility of a military coup and the U.S. business magazine Forbes is acknowledging their sympathy for a coup in an article with the headline: "The Real Greek Solution: A Military Coup" (26/10/2011). We warn that the Greek proletariat is threatened by that terrible prospect like that of Chile in 1973. Whoever does not consistently promote the revolution is punished by a counter-revolution. Bolshevik-Communists do not conceal their views of the necessary steps to resolve the question of power. They openly say that power can only won by means of a socialist revolution. Revolution means the armed revolutionary uprising and civil war of the organized working class, led by a revolutionary party. Revolution means the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only under such a regime can the masses of the people be freed from the yoke of capitalist domination, can industry be planned according to the interests of society, and can the class enemies of the revolution be suppressed and the revolution spread internationally. To propagate a workers 'government in a (pre) revolutionary situation as a concrete objective, without preparing the working class for the inevitably of civil war and armed rebellion won by a workers' militia, is to spread reformist illusions of a step-by-step, peaceful transition towards socialism. Bolshevik-Communists reject decisively such a policy of centrism.

49. The question of power is the central axis of the Programme of Action at the present stage of Greek politics. From this several consequences follow. The working class can take power only when it is organized accordingly, and learns to fight for power. The revolutionary action program must take up the most urgent questions of the immediate struggle for survival and demonstrate that they can be answered only by the seizure of power.

50. In order to take control of the defensive struggle themselves, the working class and the oppressed must form Action Committees in the factories, neighbourhoods and schools. At regular assemblies of employees, residents, school students, university students, etc., the most important local and national issues shall be discussed. The decisions will then be implemented by elected delegates who are held accountable to these assemblies and can be voted out by them at any time.

51. Such Action Committees are the first step to Councils (or Soviets as they were called in Russia in 1917). Councils/Soviets are the instrument of the working class by means of which they build their counter-power and lead the fight for workers’ control in the enterprises and the education system. Such Action Committees/Councils will then elect delegates and join together locally, regionally and nationally. Demand a national conference of delegates from all the action committees/councils! Demand that the KKE, SYRIZA, DIMAR etc mobilise for the establishment of such councils!

52. Especially in the current phase of economic collapse, where many enterprises dismiss workers or close down, the slogan of workers' control is of crucial importance. All companies that want to cut wages, lay workers off, or threaten to close down, must open the books. We advocate immediate nationalization of these enterprises under workers' control. Equally important are the slogans of factory occupations and the continuation of production under workers' management. The already existing initiatives to refuse payment of higher duties, taxes, rents, etc. are a very important step. They must be coordinated through Action Committees/Councils and expanded to an effective mass campaign.

53. Hardly a demonstration passes without the attacks of heavily armed police. We know the ruling class is already publicly talking about the possibility of a military coup. All this underscores the urgent necessity of arming the organized working class and youth. Immediately, of course, the construction of powerful self-defense units is needed to protect demonstrations, strikes, immigrant communities, etc. against police raids, fascists and provocateurs. But in the current situation where the question of power is clearly posed, it is necessary to go beyond the centrist slogan of self-defense committees. State power can only be conquered when the working class creates its own armed forces – i.e. workers' militias. Instead of protecting parliament against militant demonstrators, the KKE/PAME should put their forces in the service of the workers' militia! At the same time revolutionaries must organise subversive activity in the armed forces (army, police), to prevent them being used as a decisive blow against the people.

54. No demand for new elections, but for the overthrow of the government by an indefinite general strike and an armed uprising! For the formation of a workers government based on Workers' Councils and militias! As a first step: demand that the dominant labour organizations today – GSEE, ADEDY, PAME, KKE, SYRIZA, DIMAR and Antarsya – form a workers' government based on the mobilization of the masses! Down with the PASOK/ND-conspiracy against the people! The power lies not in parliament, but on the street! A real workers' government is based on the organs of workers’ power (Councils, Militias, etc.), and must expropriate the bourgeoisie and smash the state apparatus. Of course the creation and maintenance of a workers' government that implements such a revolutionary policy will face the determined and violent opposition of the ruling class. Therefore, a workers' government without armed organs is an impotent caricature that would fall immediately to a military coup as it happened in Greece in 1967 or in Chile in 1973. Although the sequence and pace of development cannot be predicted, it is obvious that the questions of the indefinite general strike, the armed struggle for power and the workers' government are inextricably linked.

55. Against the vice of the debt trap we raise the slogan of the cancellation of all debts. No halving of the debt, no moratorium (postponement of repayment), no committee to review the debt - but simply cancel all debt! Not only the public debt, but also the debt of private households, small traders and self-employed should be deleted immediately.

56. The economy must no longer be the victim of a small group of corporate masters and financial jugglers! For the expropriation of the super rich - this elite group of monopoly capitalists! For the nationalization of the domestic and foreign banks, large industrial and service companies as well as the large landowners (including the church property!) under the control of the workers! The labor movement must develop an economic emergency plan to secure the survival of the population and the country against the extortions of monopoly capital.

57. 35% of the workforce in Greece is self-employed. Many of them are non-exploitative peasants or small traders, who can be won as allies for the socialist revolution. This requires, however, that the working class takes the path of socialist seizure of power. A workers' government needs a program for the peasants and the lower middle classes: For the nationalization of the land! No small farmer and small trader will be expropriated against his/her will. For the cancellation of the debts of farmers and small traders - instead interest-free loans! Promotion of voluntary associations with the longer-term goal of voluntary collectivization!

58. International solidarity! The international workers' movement – first of all in Europe and the Balkans - must rush to their brothers and sisters in Greece to help. The unions and workers' parties of Europe and the Balkans have to organize an immediate campaign for total cancellation of all debts of Greece. Fight the governments and the EU Commission which openly tries to blackmail Greece! For a campaign within the labour movement against anti-Greek chauvinism in the media and Social Democracy! The international trade union of bank employees must initiate independent investigations and make public both the flight of capital of the Greek capitalists and the speculation and profit rip-off of international banks at the expense of Greece.

59. No to Greek chauvinism! For the recognition of full equal rights of national minorities and migrants! For the right of self-determination of national minorities up to and including the right to secede! For full citizenship rights for immigrants, equal pay, equal recognition of their language as in offices and schools, for the abolition of the state language! For the massive organization of migrants in the unions! Equal representation of migrants at all levels of management! 

60. Fight the oppression of women! Equal pay for equal work! Instead of cuts in public services, we demand a massive expansion of public child care facilities and public and inexpensive restaurants and laundries as a step toward the socialization of housework!

61. A workers' government would immediately break with the imperialist EU and the euro-zone and instead promote the building of socialism in Greece and the international spread of revolution to the Balkans and throughout Europe. For a socialist federation of the Balkans! For the United Socialist States of Europe!

62. Let us repeat: the Greek revolution will end in a serious defeat if a revolutionary combat party of the working class based on a Bolshevik program is not built in time. Time is short! The Bolshevik-Communists of the RKOB seek discussion and unity with all serious revolutionaries in Greece. Forward to the Fifth Workers International, the international revolutionary workers party!


Resolution of the Revolutionary Communist Organization for Liberation (RKOB-Austria), 11/10/2011

Endorsed by Communist Workers Group (CWG-Aotearoa/New Zealand)

[Note: CWG endorses the RKOB statement on Greece in all its fundamental points. At the same time we acknowledge programmatic disagreements over the question of Stalinism, capitalist restoration and centrism which we are continuing to discuss with a view to resolving]