An Antitode to the Big Barnum of the US Elections! ( In the words of Friedrich Engels)

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08 November 2012 Last Updated on 08 November 2012

 

Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.

It is well known that the Americans have been striving for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and that in spite of all they can do they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.

 

Friedrich Engels, “Introduction” (1891), to Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

See "The New US President and Suckers International Ltd.", Internationalist Papers, n.14.

 

On Recent Events in the Arab World

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05 November 2012 Last Updated on 05 November 2012


Around mid-September, whilst a wave of Islamic-inspired demonstrations was arising more or less all over the Arab world (set off, so the “means of information” told us, by an obscure little satirical film on the Prophet), a notorious Italian opinion-leader was openly confessing to a well-known radio channel (and we quote from memory): “We got our analysis wrong.  What we called ‘revolutions’ were not revolutions but revolts stemming from social and demographic circumstances.”  A year and a half or so ago, the guilty ignorance of a gaggle of politicians, journalists, experts, commentators (to sum up, the dregs of the ruling ideology), were deafening us with hymns to the “Arab Springtimes”, the “Twitter revolutions”, “the final triumph of democracy”: today they mill around bewildered, wondering what on earth happened, what went wrong.  The mother of imbeciles is ever-pregnant.

Our evaluation of the events that have unfolded in the Maghreb-Mashrek (with wide-reaching ramifications elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East) have proved to be more than accurate.  Right from the start we identified the source of the contradictions in the proletarian battles sparked off by the economic crisis, in the wide movements of protest against dreadful living and working conditions affecting mainly Tunisia and Egypt, where it had been possible for years to note widespread social unrest (as we did repeatedly in our articles) – a mass of almost 100 million proletarians who, in the dramatic absence of any political revolutionary guide, were leaning hard on production relations, desperately seeking their own path.  Soon grafted onto these broad movements, at the head of them, and eventually leading them far away from the central issue (the conflict between classes and the power issue), came the interests of considerable sectors of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, who had long been interested, as the crisis advanced, in a transition from rigid, centralized régimes, often managed by the army, to more fluid and “freer” forms of economic management (something which, on a smaller scale, brings to mind the events of 1989-90 in the area of the ex-USSR) – thus a change of régime, aiming both to reorganize socio-economic life and to open up an opportunity for proletarian energy to let off steam, since it was starting to build up dangerously.

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No-debt: Rebels against the debt, prone at the feet of the Capital

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11 October 2012 Last Updated on 11 October 2012

“State loans, the creation of  the ever increasing, gigantic public debt, is one of the keystones of capitalist accumulation.  Marx, in Book One of Capital (chap. XXVI, 8, on the genesis of the industrial capitalist), states: ‘National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is—their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debts takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven’”. 

These few sentences of Marx’s (quoted in “America”, one of our own texts written in 1947) (1) give a very brief summary view of the general terms of the public debt issue and allow us to read current events free from the sea of prejudices that affect any interpretation not based on revolutionary Marxism.  The prejudices can be summed up precisely in what Marx defined as “the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”: in other words, that the debt be the fruit of guilt (terms which, moreover, are equivalent in German). State financing through the debt carries out praiseworthy work, as long as it guarantees safe returns to a capital otherwise unproductive, but suddenly becomes the object of public reprimand when it sways under the weight of its own gigantism.  In the latter case, it is pointed to as the fruit of guilt, of bad administration, of waste, if not, indeed, as the prime cause of all the ills that afflict the otherwise flourishing society of capital.  The public debt becomes a parasite that is called to account.  As an effect of the upturning of reality which is characteristic of our demented modern economy, the creditor – in other words financial capital – takes care not to demand that the parasite be uprooted, but demands greater returns from it as compensation for the loss in security.  In this way it reveals, to the eyes of those who know where to look, who is really the ultimate parasite in this relationship between parasite organisms: financial capital, even without taking into account the salvage operations by the Central Banks which in recent times have saved it from bankruptcy and have weighed so heavily on the debts of nation States.

Yet the responsibility is of the much-maligned State (Capital, in fact, is not guilty of being… itself!), which for its part confesses to have been a little too munificent, to have, in its turn, nurtured a vast population of parasites; but in the end the people who will have to pay will be those who are said to have benefited most from this munificence: the employees and the pensioners who have … wallowed in the midst of social buffers and the care offered by public services.

 

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Fighting for ourselves and not for the national economy

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31 October 2012 Last Updated on 05 November 2012


There are two attitudes that can be assumed to the devastating crisis of the capitalist mode of production.  One consists in look backwards, in having – as it has been put – “your eyes in the back of your neck”.  This means considering the present state of affairs eternal and untouchable, the institutions that sustain it as the only points of reference, the practices that have for decades been dominating (and castrating) the workers’ movement as the only ones possible.  And so we put ourselves in the hands of the official trade unions (active protagonists of the most disgusting betrayals to damage the proletarian class for the whole of the second post-war war period), delegating to them every strategy, all the action that concerns us; we entrust any decisions regarding our living and working conditions to the “negotiating tables”; we lean on one party or one parliamentary group or the other in the hope that (pausing for a moment in their sole activity: the decade-long sharing out of the cake) “they take up the cause” of our needs; we regard the government and the State (the direct expressions of the ruling class and its political, military and ideological tools) as so many impartial bodies that we can turn to, so that they do us the favour of stepping in to moderate the ruthlessness of one insensitive (or perhaps “foreign”) boss or the other; and more often than not we end up becoming the more or less unwitting pawns in far wider-reaching strategies played out at the expense of others (commercial wars, sectorial competition, the buying and selling of more or less seriously lossmaking companies, applications for European funding, etc. etc.). “Eyes in the back of your neck” are worse than complete blindness.  “Looking backwards” delivers proletarians, bound hand and foot, to the superior interests of domestic and international capital: it shuts them into the pen allotted to animals for slaughter.

The other attitude consists in looking forwards, well beyond the miserable horizon of our present conditions. It means understanding, even if only at a basic and instinctive level, the need to get out of the cul de sac, to make our presence felt by refusing to delegate practice and decisions to others and instead impose them through a process of organization, extension, centralization of the struggles: i.e. bringing onto the field a strength deriving from our numbers and our central position, as proletarians, in the work processes.  This means above all rejecting self-destructive desperation which, helped along by the unions, encourages us to slash wrists, climb up towers, plunge into the depths of the earth, under the illusion that the media impact (this added tool of collective imbecility) is sufficient to solve a dramatic situation; in fact it condemns those who fall into the trap to solitude, isolation, impotence and frustration.

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South Africa: Drowning in the blood of savage anti-proletarian repression, the myths and illusions of post-apartheid

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27 August 2012 Last Updated on 27 August 2012

 “… fifteen years more or less after the abolition of apartheid, the victory of Nelson Mandela’s African National Front and the much praised introduction of democracy, things have not changed so much compared to the past:  the situation of South Africa’s proletarian class remains tragic in all senses and from all points of view.  Amidst obsolete mines, non-existent maintenance, progressively worsening working conditions, could it be, then, that the problem is not skin colour, not one of “democracy against apartheid” but always and despite everything, in South Africa as elsewhere, one of class?  And one that will thus require class perspectives and solutions?”

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