Class Struggle 132, Autumn (March-May) 2020

   CS 132 Autumn 2020 by Dave Bedggood on Scribd

France: How to defeat the ruling class!

Firefighters battle the CRS exposing class divide

The latest wave of strikes in France that has been building for at least two months threatens the Macron regime. Macron is facing a worsening economic crisis as France falls behind its main economic rivals, Germany, Russia and the US. It is in danger of further decline as an imperialist power if it does not extract more productivity or surplus-value from its workers. But each attack to increase the exploitation of the workers – against the 35-hour week, imposing the fuel tax and now raising the pension age – has met an increasing resistance from the unions and new social movements such as Yellow Vests. Clearly growing numbers of workers of all description, self-employed and exploited petty bourgeois, have the will and the capacity to refuse to pay for France’s capitalist crisis.

But has the crisis of the French ruling class created a workers’ movement sufficient to bring about a pre-revolutionary situation which poses the question of which class rules? We argue that the movement so far has failed to break decisively from the bureaucracy and the treacherous reformist parties, let alone create organs of independent workers power capable of staging an indefinite political general strike that poses the question of power. Despite the will and capacity to mount a general strike, workers organisations are still held back by the union bureaucracy, reformists and fake Trotskyist parties, and ultimately the absence of a revolutionary party and program capable of leading a political general strike to victory.

The Yellow Vests Social Movement

The Yellow Vests began as a spontaneous social movement against paying a new diesel tax that Macron imposed to fund France’s obligations to the Paris Climate Accord. It put the burden of the cost of climate change onto workers, self-employed and farmers, rather than the big capitalist polluters. Its spontaneity was dramatically expressed by protestors wearing the mandatory Yellow Vest kept in every car for any emergency.

The Yellow Vest program includes some democratic demands we certainly support, but most of the immediate demands are not transitional because they do not involve workers directly in fighting for them. For example the minimum wage begs the state to construct a poverty trap rather than motivating workers to get rid of the wage system. The program is a visionless list that assumes no fascist danger and no international collision between France, as part of the U.S.-led bloc, and the 21st century China-Russia imperialist bloc on the rise. Without a plan for taking power this program leaves the initiative in the hands of Capital. The question of class power is debased as that of ‘direct’ or ‘popular’ bourgeois democracy. They implicitly accept the bourgeois-parliamentary expropriation of the workers’ franchise, the dictatorship of Capital in the workplace and society at large, and the exploitation of the semi-colonies of the former French empire.

The Yellow Vests began, and survives, as a militant social movement as it was not under the influence of the reformist left parties and the top union bureaucrats. Most of the reformist and centrist left characterised it as a petty bourgeois populism inherently leaning towards the fascist right. As the Yellow Vests protests grew and were met by state forces causing many severe injuries, the class basis of the populism became clearer. Fascists were thrown out of demonstrations, and unelected petty bourgeois leaders stood up in place of “grass roots” democracy. The Yellow Vests list of demands became focused on popular citizen assemblies, a utopian petty bourgeois form of democracy, which of course Macron seized upon as a solution to get the movement off the streets. He failed, as the Yellow Vests are now joining in the strike movement kicked off by the pension “counter-reform” at which point they become part of the “balance of forces” much loved by reformist parties not least the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA – New Anti-capitalist Party), and subject to the same revolutionary criticism.

The New Anti-Capitalist Party

The influence of the reformists’ control over the labour movement is demonstrated by the NPA which has its roots in the reformist history of the post-WW2 Fourth International and is no longer associated with Trotskyism. It has some influence in the unions. It backs the RAJP and SNCF unions’ fight against Macron’s pension “counter-reform”. It reports that the January days of action drew increasing support and exhibited an “atmosphere of joy, combativeness and strong determination”. Further, hostility towards the “counter-reform” is growing as “two-thirds of the French people want the project withdrawn outright.” It argues on the one hand that “Macron has lost this political battle”, yet on the other that the mobilization of workers, social movements etc., have not created the “balance of forces sufficient to make Macron yield”. Yet all is not lost. There is a new realization of the disastrous consequences of the project awakening more resistance in the ports, energy, national railways, and Paris transport, that could alter that “balance of power”.

The language of reformism reeks of class compromise. Counter-reforms already imply reforms. There is no conception of the need to go beyond countering reforms to defend them. No mention of a general strike, only disparate sectorial actions culminating in a “national mobilization.” All the NPA has in mind in its program is forcing Macron to retract his attack on pensions. The growing balance forces as measured on the street will be no more than a bargaining chip to strengthen the hand of the labour bureaucracy in negotiations with ministers of state. So long as the revolutionary left does not actively contest the rule of the labour bureaucracy in government and the unions, the potential of the working class to mount a revolutionary defence of its interests will be stillborn.

The problem is that the crisis of revolutionary leadership means there is a vacancy for the position of a revolutionary party capable of fighting for a revolutionary program. We explain what we mean with the examples of the FLTI and GMI, each describing themselves as engaged in building a new international revolutionary leadership, yet demonstrate from opposing perspectives, centrist solutions to the workers struggle in France.

FLTI (International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction)

The FLTI[*] explains that the cause of the current crisis is France’s loss of competitiveness with Germany. It sees the crisis as a part of a wider European crisis and that the French workers are in the “vanguard” of the European class struggle. But there is no mention of the wider inter-imperialist struggle between the US and Russia which has an impact on the further decline and potential break up of Europe.

The FLTI critiques reformist currents like NPA who do not see the recent strike waves as a “mass political struggle” of “class against class”, “paralyzing the economy”, and so fail to recognise that “the working class has taken France over”, and have “imposed” an independent General Strike “on the bureaucracy” which “calls into question who rules the country”. The FLTI claims Macron has lost control of workers because they broke from the bureaucracy and took control of the strikes themselves. The symbolic occupation of the CFDT union headquarters, cutting the electricity, “demonstrated their power and […] that the government can be defeated.”

So far, the FLTI’s analysis could have been written by syndicalists. Its political demands to build factory committees; co-ordinations of all local, regional and national struggles; self-defense committees; dissolve the police and state forces; free all fighters; culminating in a National Coordination for an Independent, Revolutionary General Strike to bring down Macron and the Fifth Republic, to nationalize factories, refineries, ports, industry, and banks under workers control, are all demands raised by syndicalists. And these are fine demands, but they don’t follow through to the class fight for state power. Even if it were true that the FLTI’s description of events were as advanced as it claims, it would have a duty to raise the full Transitional Program for a Workers’ Government. And even if events are not as far along the revolutionary road as they claim, the party of revolution would still be obliged by history and the Marxist method to raise a transitional program for a workers’ state!

Instead it calls for a “new [Paris] Commune” in all of France, and doesn’t mention Marx’s critique of the commune and those of Lenin and Trotsky, or the lessons they directed at the anarchists, syndicalists and other currents, about the need for a Marxist party to organise the insurrection to smash the bourgeois state. The FLTI fails completely to raise the critical question of how the General Strike, while posing the question of power, can organise for the insurrection, take power and impose a Workers Government to plan for socialism in a workers’ state.

‘Internationalizing’ a General Strike in France to a Revolutionary General Strike of all Europe hardly makes the French struggle a “bastion” of the “European and “world” working class.  If there is no program for the General Strike to succeed in France how can the EU General Strike bring down “Maastricht”? Nor can the question of power be solved in the French semi-colonies occupied by French troops. Instead of internationalism, the export of bourgeois syndicalism opens the road for counter-revolution.

We conclude that the FLTI poses the question of power in advance of the General Strike, but does not warn workers that a Political General Strike must end in revolution or counter-revolution. It does not challenge the trade union consciousness of workers, the populism that is rife in the social movements, nor the abstract idealism of youth, by putting forward a revolutionary program that spells out the need for political councils (soviets) and workers militias, and the split of the ranks from the officer corps, all of which are necessary for an insurrection and putting a Workers’ Government in power.

What takes the place of Macron if his government falls? What happens if the 5th Republic falls? Without the struggle for a Workers’ Government it will be the 6th Bourgeois Republic. Instead of challenging reformist consciousness with the Leninist Trotskyist program, the FLTI is sowing illusions that nationalization of bourgeois property is possible without the smashing of the state. The FLTI has no claim to call itself Leninist, Trotskyist or Internationalist. Moreover, without making the call for a new revolutionary international based on a Leninist/Trotskyist program, it is not even claiming to be a “fraction” of that future party.

GMI (International Marxist Group)

The GMI (French section of the Permanent Revolution Collective) analysis refutes the FLTI position that the workers have taken control of the unions in preparation for a General Strike. Moreover, the reformist left parties serve to “rescue” the union leaders. The GMI argues that the bureaucracy is still intact and there can be no successful preparation for a Political General Strike which does not involve the intervention in the unions of a revolutionary workers party which as yet “does not exist and must be built.” Partial and holding actions instead of mobilising resistance are designed to make workers’ pay for their pensions and lead to passivity and demoralization. The results of the ‘days of action’ are isolation and exhaustion of struggles. The GMI intervened in mass meetings to call for a General Strike to unite all the sectors including students and youth, but without success. The struggle is now in a downward phase because the rank and file did not win against the bureaucracy and the reformist political parties.

Unlike the FLTI which sees the workers in control of the unions, and a political general strike on the near horizon, the GMI sees its main task as building the revolutionary workers party that can intervene in the unions and lead the break with the bureaucracy. “All conscious workers, all revolutionary proletarian nuclei must unite in a single communist organization capable of facing union bureaucracies, determined to fight for class independence, class struggle, socialism.” Yet, its immediate perspective is to build for a “General Strike until withdrawal [of the pensions ‘reform’].” The need for a party is clear, but where is the Transitional Program to overcome the crisis of revolutionary leadership? What use is the revolutionary workers party that understands that the class struggle is raising spontaneous struggles to such a level that support for a Political General Strike is on the agenda, yet does not raise the full Transitional Program to go beyond the “withdrawal” of the pension reform to the seizure of power?

Any revolutionary workers party  has to say in advance that a Political General Strike cannot succeed without raising the class consciousness necessary to build workers’ councils and militias capable of taking advantage of the defeat of Macron and to go on to defeat the bourgeois state and install a Workers’ Government. Again, this is elementary Marxism after the Paris Commune and the Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky. For a group that is part of the Permanent Revolution Collective, it betrays that theory/program with a centrist adaptation to the conception of what is ‘possible’ rather than what is ‘necessary’ to advance the revolution – the Transitional Program and Permanent Revolution!

Proletarian Demands are Transitional Demands:

Trotsky’s Fourth International was founded on the Transitional Program for socialist revolution, concentrating the lessons and method of advancing the socialist program, of developing the class consciousness of the workers and mobilizing for the fight for state power.  He fought every alien class force the workers’ movement experienced in his time and fought the expression of those forces when they took programmatic deviation forms, just as Marx, Engels and Lenin had.

“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.

The strategic task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie. However, the achievement of this strategic task is unthinkable without the most considered attention to all, even small and partial, questions of tactics. All sections of the proletariat, all its layers, occupations and groups should be drawn into the revolutionary movement. The present epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution.

The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, “minimal” demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism – and this occurs at each step – the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old “minimal program” is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”

Trotsky was very clear that the program was the means for developing proletarian leadership and raising the class consciousness of the working class (Leon Trotsky, “The Political Backwardness of American Workers (1940)“):

“…What can a revolutionary party do in this situation? In the first line give a clear honest picture of the objective situation, of the historic tasks which flow from this situation irrespective as to whether or not the workers are today ripe for this. Our tasks don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to develop the mentality of the workers. That is what the program should formulate and present before the advanced workers. Some will say: good, the program is a scientific program; it corresponds to the objective situation — but if the workers won’t accept this program, it will be sterile. Possibly. But this signifies only that the workers will be crushed since the crisis can’t be solved any other way but by the socialist revolution….”

 Stand with Trotsky!

For the ruling class their right to private property is congruent with the workers right to homelessness, to limited education, to unaffordable healthcare, to climate catastrophe. We reject the capitalist claim to superior bourgeois right!

                 Bourgeoisie has one right for workers…the right to a police bullet

Firefighter shot by police pulled to safety by workers under Red Flag

For the survival of the one productive class in society, the working class, the capitalists control of production and private accumulation of surplus value must be ended by the socialist revolution. The fight for socialist revolution begins with every minimum demand and advances through the intervention of vanguard and revolutionary workers to transitional demands and the conquest of all power by the workers and the oppressed. The program must be “indissoluble” (Trotsky), popularized at every opportunity by the workers’ revolutionary party.

End wage slavery! The minimum wage is a slave wage! We do not fight for a poverty trap!  We say make the bosses pay!

For Safe and Healthful Jobs For All With Living Wages!

Safe, healthy habitation for all! We must establish housing as a human right.

For massive investment in slum clearance under local workers’ council control!

Share the work!  Share the gains in productivity! For 28 hours work for 35 hours pay! For a Sliding Scale of wages and hours to spread the available work!

No to “externalities!” Make the bosses’ pay the tax burden of environmental remediation, not the drivers, truckers or small farmers! Those who profited from fouling the planet must pay now! Open the books! Accept no cries about bankruptcy! Profit is not a right superior to life! Collect the environmental debt the capitalists’ power and privilege rest on. 

The bosses want to work you till you die so the banks can save on pensions!

Defend and expand social medicine and public education!

For fully funded, nationalized education and healthcare under workers control!

Socialize big pharma and the whole for-profit healthcare industry without compensation to big shareholders.

Significantly reduce the retirement age! Pensions for all and more time to enjoy it! Because the workplace is not under workers control and as such imposes severe financial and physical stress on manual labor it robs life of six to seven years during labour’s production of goods and services.

Down with Social Chauvinism! Defend the Roma and all minority and immigrant populations from right wing, racist and fascist attacks! FREE ALL political and class struggle prisoners! Abolish the “anti-terrorism” laws, the rulers’ racist measures against immigrant rights! Full citizenship rights for all!

For a victorious Paris Commune the revolution must be international! Our class enemy is at home! For solidarity labor action with anti-imperialist forces in the semi-colonies and former colonies. Publish all of Paris’ secret treaties! Free Martinique and Guadeloupe and all the colonies! 

Down with Imperialism! Defeat French military interventions! 

Since 2001 France has intervened in Afghanistan; Ivory Coast; Chad; Libya; Somalia; Mali; Central African Republic; Syria and Iraq.

Defeat Fascism! Against the danger of fascist preparations and anti-union and anti-immigrant terror, we need  troops and veterans to train workers militias, to make every picket line the front line and conduct comprehensive  fraternization and propaganda to win the troops to the workers’ cause! Police are not “uniformed service” workers but state brutalizers and killers! Abolish the police! Form neighborhood Committees!

Our class enemy is at home! Fight the class war at home not the imperialist wars abroad! Bring troops deployed abroad home now! For rank and file military committees! For rank and file election of officers! Arrest the capitalist state’s officers!

France Out Of NATO! Down With Imperialist Blocs East And West!

Down with the EU! For A Socialist United States Of Europe!

Build workers’ councils and self defence committees! Elect recallable delegates to a national workers’ council!

Down with the labour bureaucracy! For rank and file control of the unions!      Build strike committees and coordinate regionally and nationally! Prepare the political general strike to bring down the Government!

For a Workers’ Government based on Workers Councils and a Workers Militia to expropriate industry and banks! For a planned socialist economy under workers control!

For a Revolutionary Workers Party and a new Workers International, the World Party of Socialism, based on the method of the 1938 Transitional Program!

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (02/09/2020)

[*] We have corrected our mistaken reference to FLTI's French section 'Permanent Revolution' . The FLTI does not have a French section. Our apologies for the error.

Nous ne somme pas Charlie Hebdo!

Charlie Hebdo Rally unites  hypocrites and Zionist butchers Netanyahu with  social imperialist Hollande, with Palestinian capo Abbas

Most of the Left publications we have seen identify the violent attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as an attack on the sacrosanct free press. We do not. All historical evidence says the “Free Press” is a fiction in class society.  CLASS WAR and the Liaison Committee of Communists see this as a reactionary attack on what the perpetrators say is blasphemy.  Far from being  a “left” publication, it is a liberal after birth of  the 1968 events;  Charlie Hebdo’s satirical viewpoint today is decidedly bourgeois and in as bad taste as the term bourgeois connotes in France.

Revolutionary workers and socialists oppose censorship.   Bourgeois laws that impose censorship are always directed against the publications of and speakers for the working class, sooner or later, and usually sooner.  We see tremendous hypocrisy both in calls for censorship from the Wahhabi inspired right, presumably the backers of the assailants in Paris, and from the parallel calls by French and western liberalism who routinely confuse freedom for the bourgeois press with freedom of speech. 

First and foremost these attacks must be put in the context of the “war on terror,” which is really an attempt by U.S./EU imperialism to contain the Arab National Revolution. To win the ideological and propaganda aspect of this war the ruling-class-owned “free press” reduces the class war to a “clash of civilizations” between the ‘barbarian’ hordes and the ‘enlightened and democratic’ west. The ‘free press’ wants to hide from you the fact that the war is a consequence and a cost of doing business in the region, because the subjective factor, the anti-imperialist aspirations of the masses, challenges the  economic interests of  declining U.S. imperialism and their comprador henchmen for control of  states and aspirant states sitting atop the oil and on the geo-strategic pathways for the delivery of that oil.

We denounce individual terrorism as it is not a legitimate tactic of the revolution (democratic or proletarian).  Individual terrorism, even for the most salutatory motives, permits propaganda victories for and repression by the enemy social class. We are for the effective action of the masses to wage decisive warfare against the ruling class oppressors and imperialist exploiters.  The Charlie Hebdo event was a terror attack and does not correspond politically to any small unit action by any power of the working class. It does not advance the revolution; it pushes the masses already trapped by Social Democracy and the Stalinists’ forms of social chauvinism further to the right.   

Some youth mistake the terror attacks of religious zealots for defense of Islam and are drawn, by the vacuum of leadership in the revolution, to jihad.  Every Islamic warlord who wants to disguise his bourgeois ambitions to become an oil magnate as a caliph who exploits the weakness of the revolutionary leadership by  calling upon oppressed and unemployed young Muslim workers around the world to join the jihad against the 'West'.  Their military operations and terror attacks are then characterized by the corporate bourgeois media as “asymmetric warfare” initiated by the Sunni Fellahin and not as a response to the armed-to-the-teeth imperialists’ centuries-long history of brutal subjugation.

Let there be no mistake, CLASS WAR takes the side of the Arab revolution.  But the forces of the religious right in the Arabic speaking world are not a part of it. They are the internal enemies of the revolution and are either past or future partners with the imperialist masters.  What future could an ISIS or any Boko Harram regime hope to have while embracing the market and private property, as matters of religion and culture, without the sponsorship of some imperialist master?  Each of these movements aspires to rule after the fashion of the Saudi monarchy, any of their professed republicanism not withstanding and even immaterial.

The revolution stands for the greatest religious freedom and this immediately puts revolutionaries in collision with all theocrats, each of whom seek a monolithic religious state and in this their enmity towards Iran and/or Israel is a fake.  Only the greatest religious freedom can permit the organization of inter-communal militias to guarantee the safety of each and every community.  The workers, as the revolutionary class, have the responsibility to organize these militias.

Right now Syria is the front line of revolutionary struggle; the working class position is for the defeat of the Assad dictatorship. Stalinism, in the form of the Syrian Communist Party and the neo-Stalinist sects (Marcyites, Castroists, etc.,) has played a reactionary role in Syria; consequent of their stagist theory of revolution, which finds progressive agency in the national bourgeoisie of semi-colonies.  When the spark of the Arab Spring ignited the Syrian masses the neo-Stalinists ignored the butchery of the Assad regime, which they cast as progressive, and placed it in a “progressive” bloc which they have conjured out of the Russia-China alliance.    

Alongside these fakers to leadership, the faux Trotskyists (ICL, IBT, Socialist Fight, Revolutionary Tendency, etc.) see the hand of the CIA behind every anti-Assad action and so ignore, denounce or oppose the legitimate uprisings of the masses that took form in the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC.). These LCCs  struggle to maintain independence from imperialism while battling the Assad regime, the jihadists and now ISIS.    

Now Washington is cozying up to Assad in its tack toward returning Iran to the pro-U.S. imperialist fold.   The U.S. no longer objects to Iran’s building of nuclear facilities in areas under Assad’s control.  And we hear none of the alarm we are accustomed to whenever the Geiger counter ticks in the region giving excuses for  Israel to launch first strikes. Instead, Zionism is given a green light to attack anti-Assad rebels in Syria, expand settlements in East Jerusalem and welcomed as a victim in the anti-Semitic attacks that followed the Charlie Hebdo bombing.

We denounce the French regime and its entire response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. The Hollande regime is social-imperialist in a way that is as brazen as any we have seen in the century since Social Democrats supported their bourgeoisie at the outbreak of WW I.  We condemn the CP for being errand boys for Hollande and for supporting every imperialist attack going back to the days of the Algerian independence struggle. 

France has played a nationalist propaganda card in support of the U.S.-led war no. 3 in Iraq, both by manipulating the mass revulsion against the political assassinations at Charlie Hebdo, the real attack on free speech of the Islamist right, and by redoubling its commitment to the U.S. war, sending the aircraft carrier and battle group Charles De Gaulle to join the U.S.-led air campaign.

Official France, of the bourgeoisie, has allowed itself to be viewed as an ally of Israel, which it is, a police force in Mali, Chad and the Central African Republic and the U.S.A.’s no. 1 client for threats, bombing and logistical support against the Libyan revolution.   

We call for a “Lets go home” movement amongst the French troops and political strikes against Obama and Hollande’s wars. Revolutionary workers in the imperialist centers of the U.S., France, and the U.K. must take a defeatist position against their own bourgeoisie and advocate for their labor organizations to form up international workers brigades to support the Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi revolutionaries that build the inter-communal fight against imperialism, Assad and ISIS.

France has deployed 120,000 troops to augment its police in defense of Jewish institutions.  France with 500,000 plus Jewish citizens has the largest concentration in Europe, but we have no confidence that this deployment will prevent real anti-Semitic attacks.   Similarly we don’t see the armed bodies of the bourgeois state protecting France’s Muslim population in any meaningful way. Quite the contrary, the police particularly suffer from the same racist reactionary mindset as their brothers in blue in the U.S.A. and are anti-Muslim,  anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and not incidentally anti-Semitic and belong to a variety of reactionary groups from Le Pen’s National Front to the Croix de Feu and latter day neo-fascist groupings. 

We distinguish between real anti-Semitism and self defense by Palestinians and their supporters who stand against attacks by Zionists on the streets, as has happened numerous times over the summer of 2014, when tens of thousands in France protested Israel’s “Mowing the lawn” war on Gaza. The police, in all capitalist countries, are the guarantors of the availability of the option for authoritarian rule.  The nominal champions of democracy, the Social Democrats, have as usual enabled the state forces of repression to expand their budgets and operations and this can only be bad for the working class and its manifestations.  

France is right at the center of the capitalist crisis in Europe.  The World Bank has just announced their 2015 forecast for the world capitalist economy and it is flat at 3% growth. The world population is expected to grow 3% and this renders the “growth” fictional.   But in France there is no forecast for 3% or even a larger fraction of 1% growth, while France almost as much as Germany is the holder of the bad debts of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece.  So the bourgeois regime can be expected to attempt to take more austerity out of the life and flesh of the French workers and anti-Muslim hysteria will serve that purpose and has even begun to do so now.

Minority religious communities need to be defended and we can only entrust this task to the working class.  The way to put an end to rightist violence against Muslims and Jews in France is for militant workers, their organizations and inter-communal defense guards to smash the fascists on the street, putting no faith in the troopers of the state.   Unlike the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), and not them alone, we declare the plain truth that cops are not workers but the gunslingers of capital. Their only relationship to the means of production is their role as strikebreakers.

In the U.S.A. we are calling for the expulsion of the Police Benevolent Associations from all labor movement bodies and for the formation of workers tribunals and militia exactly to begin suppression of racist violence, racist police murders, and for community prosecution of racist murderers.  In this way black, brown and immigrant communities will be defended by the working class as a whole.  Naturally this puts the LCC in collision with identity politics which we see as ultimate props under bourgeois property relations.  Since each identity politics denies or subordinates the class question to their utopian project, be it feminist, nationalist, or other separatist tendencies, each of which would leave the oppressor capitalist class fundamentally unmolested in the commanding heights of the reproduction of their social order.

Liaison Committee of Communists 

30 January 2015

Notes:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/18/french-hate-speech-laws-are-less-simplistic-than-you-think/

The specific wording of French law forbids “insult,” “defamation,” or “provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence”…“toward a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or a determined religion.”

 French citizens are perfectly free to challenge or blaspheme religious ideas, symbols, practices, and even leaders. Obnoxious, insulting, highly offensive speech is protected speech. Charlie Hebdo has been sued not only for its depictions of Muhammad, but also for caricatures of the pope. In fact, Catholic groups have sued it for anti-religious speech more often than Muslim ones. Charlie Hebdo prevailed in all of these cases, except for one (which was initiated by the Catholics).  

Europe Rising?

The revolution will not be twittered says a facebook friend. To which we answer: #tahrir #spanishrevolution #Libya #Yemen #Syria #italianrevolution #frenchrevolution #palestine etc. What is happening in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, France and elsewhere in Europe, is the opening of a social revolution promoted by social media, inspired in part by the Arab Spring, the pro-democracy revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, and also by the 'outrage' sparked by the treacherous role of social democracy. But all of these uprisings have their roots in the resistance of the labour movement to capitalist austerity coming up against dictatorships as in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the failure of institutionalised social democracy to stop austerity, as in Spain, Portugal and Greece.

This has led to the mobilising of unemployed and educated youth by means of facebook and twitter against these austerity regimes. In MENA the unions have been outlawed or repressed by the dictatorships. In Europe the unions have been tied to social democracy to act as barriers to mass mobilisations. Ostensibly, these uprisings take the form of democratic revolutions rejecting the political system and main political parties that are ‘owned’ by the banks, or by corrupt dictators. There is a common opposition to being mere ‘commodities – bought and sold by the banks’ with no political rights. A moment’s reflection shows that rejection of fraudulent politics ‘owned’ by banks and corrupt politicians is objectively targeted at the heart of capitalism at a time when to survive it has to force young workers to work for slave wages to pay for its structural crisis. We can therefore see that the content, if not the form, of these uprisings are in fact the opening shots of potentially anti-capitalist and socialist revolutions. This seems to be taken for granted on the streets and is reported in the mainstream media. What is not yet widely understood, is that these revolutions, to meet the demands of the youth and other working people, must become openly socialist to succeed, and failing that they will subside into defeat and worse, counter-revolution.

So what has to happen to make these revolutions succeed? There are many competing theories and programs on offer each putting forth a program for success but we can roughly put them into three categories, liberal, radical and Marxist.

Liberal Reform

If we start with the liberal reformists such as Democracia real Ya! their program asks for no more than making capitalists pay their fair share of austerity rather than imposing it upon the youth and other workers. Their understanding of capitalism is at the level of distribution. They don’t want to be bought and sold by the banks, but do not object to fair wages paid by fair employers. So these street reformers have rejected the institutionalised reformists such as the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, who they see as ‘owned’ by the banks, but they are not opposed to the masses creating new parties or backing more radical parties, to challenge the excess power of the finance sector. They are not anti-capitalists. This is the stage that the Egyptian revolutionaries have reached. They are negotiating with the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to prevent the old parties, notably the PSA of Mubarak, and the Muslim Brotherhood, from dominating politics and open the elections to the new forces for change. Its reformist objectives embrace both secular and liberal Islam currents. These street reformists will quickly find their liberal assumptions will be put to the test as they come up against the class nature of the state which is to manage exploitative class relations on behalf of the ruling class. So if the European uprisings that we are now seeing spreading from Spain and Portugal to Greece and France etc are in part inspired by the MENA revolutions, then the reformists will quickly learn the lessons of those revolutions as the struggle to make even the most minimal changes to the existing ‘system’. The reformists will be radicalised as anti-capitalists.

Radical Reform

The second grouping is of the anti-capitalist radicals who speak of the need to make a revolution to overcome capitalist exploitation and oppression but without taking state power. This includes a range of modernist political currents from anarchist, autonomist to indigenous and Islam. They view really existing capitalism as exploitative at the level of exchange. To get profits bosses pay workers less than the value of their labour. The state is totally complicit in its legal backing of this unequal exchange. Typically Radicals think they can defeat the power of the autocratic state by non-violent mass movements that refuse to play by the rules of existing institutions. Therefore to break with the state and the law mass resistance is necessary in refusing to work as wage slaves. The state will try to smash resistance to work by bringing out the police etc, but resistance on the street and workplace will destroy the state’s legitimacy so its moral authority will dissolve and with it the employers ability to enforce unequal exchange.

The pitfalls of this radicalism all flow from its exchange analysis. The masses cannot impose a radical reform that equalises exchange without a social revolution that means overthrowing the capitalist state. The capitalists and their state are not constrained by a morality that acknowledges unequal exchange. They think they have the total right to impose their property rights on workers and to force them to work, and will use the state to smash resistance unless it is organised as a revolutionary power capable of defeating capitalist state power in an armed struggle for socialism. The danger of radical anti-capitalism is that young workers won’t learn these lessons until they have been defeated. To avoid this danger it is necessary for Marxist revolutionaries to use the conditions for intense ideological struggle and  debate to convince reformists, radicals, and non-Marxist socialists that they need a Marxist program for revolutionary socialism.

Marxist Revolution

While the liberals think that capitalism can be reformed to produce a fair distribution of income, and radicals think that capitalism can be reformed to produce equal exchange of value, Marxists understand that capitalism is based on fundamentally unequal production relations that have to be overthrown before social equality is possible. But this is not a consciousness that can be arrived at spontaneously by camping in the city square or even by heated ideological debates. Capitalism is able to hide its exploitation at the point of production by turning production relations on their head as exchange relations which makes it seem that individuals can be made equal by getting paid the full value of commodities they produce. Marx called this commodity fetishism because instead of labour-time being seen as the measure of value, value now appeared to be inherent in the commodities themselves. Marx discovered that while workers got paid the full value when they sold their labour power for a wage, that unique 'queer' commodity is able to produce more value than its own value.

The result is the expropriation of surplus value from the working class in the production process. Surplus value is the source of profits, and when insufficient surplus value is produced profits fall. When profits fall capital is not invested in production but in speculation in existing values. This causes price bubbles in excess of values that must go bust. Capitalist crisis therefore begins at the point of production not in the banks which must go bust when the speculative bubbles burst. Thus the role of Marxist revolutionaries in the revolutions that have begun in MENA and Europe is to critique liberal and radical reformist politics as unable to confront the basic cause of capitalist crisis and austerity – capitalist social relations and the state which exists to reproduce and enforce those relations. Marxists explain what causes the ‘outrage’ and ‘indignity’ and also what must be done to eliminate that cause by means of socialist revolution.

Outrage>uprisings>class consciousness>revolution!