Texts

“For a long time now, the lack of security measures in Turkish coal mines has been at the centre of polemics. Last year, 93 miners died in various mines across the Country. Last November, 300 miners shut themselves at the bottom of the Zonguldak mine, in the Black Sea region – where in 1992 an explosion had killed 263 men and in May 2010 30 more had died in the same way – in order to protest against the plant's insufficient security measures.Two weeks ago, the main opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu's Chp, asked in Parliament for an inquiry on security in the Soma mine itself. The proposal was turned down by the Akp, which has the absolute majority in Ankara's Great Assembly” (from the Italian daily “La Repubblica”, 5/14/2014).

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.

As the war massacres in Syria continue and millions of refugees flock to all corners of the Middle East, adding to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian, African and Asian proletarians fleeing by land and sea in an attempt to survive, the situation in Ukraine has blown up under pressure from the imperialist powers, with all the contradictions it has been dragging along with it since the explosion of Russia (1989-91), but which are mainly due to material factors linked to its history and geographical, economic and strategic position. Born old and decrepit, with the illusion of being able to gain stable independence at a political as well as an economic level, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie has “settled down” in a territory that reaches across the area of Eastern Europe bordering on Belarus, Poland, Hungary Slovakia, Romania, Moldavia and Russia.

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 thatconcerns 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.