Aufheben #1 Editorial

Aufheben #1 Editorial: "Theoretical criticism and practical overthrow are ... inseparable activities, not in any abstract sense but as a concrete and real alteration of the concrete and real world of bourgeois society." (Karl Korsch.)

We are living in troubled and confusing times. The Bourgeois triumphalism that followed the collapse of Eastern Bloc has given way to fear and incomprehension at the return of war, nationalism and fascism to Europe. The tumultuous events of the last four years have shattered the certainties of the Cold War period. Yet for all the momentous changes that have followed on from the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, it would seem that, after more than thirteen years of Thatcherism and designer socialism, that the prospect of revolutionary change is more remote than ever. Indeed in the Cold War period the very petrified state of geo-politics actually allowed the projection of total social revolution - a real leap beyond capitalism in its Eastern and Western varieties - as the only possibility beyond the status quo. Now, however, we see the real dangers of fundamental changes and ruptures within the parameters of continuing capitalist development. Within these dangers there does lie the real possibility of the further development of the social revolutionary project. But to recognise and seize the opportunities the changing situation offers we need to arm ourselves theoretically and practically. The theoretical side of this requires a preservation and superseding of the revolutionary theory that has preceded us.

Capitalism creates its own negation in the proletariat, but the success of the proletariat in abolishing itself and capital requires theory. At the time of the first world war the theory and praxis of the classical workers' movement came close to smashing the capital relation. But it was defeated by capital using both Stalinism and social democracy. The domination of the workers movement by Stalinism and social democracy that followed was an expression of this defeat of both the theory and practice of the proletariat.

The first stirrings from the long slumber began in the fifties following the death of Stalin and with the revolts against Stalinism by East German and Hungarian workers. This rediscovery of autonomous practice by the proletariat was accompanied by a rediscovery of the high points of the theory of the classical workers movement. In particular the German and Italian left communist critiques of the Soviet Marxism, the seminal work of Lukacs and Korsch in the critique of the objectivism of Second International Marxism which Leninism has failed to go beyond.

The New Left that emerged from this process was in a sense the reemergence of a whole series of theoretical currents - council communism, class struggle and liberal versions of anarchism, Trotskyism - that had largely been submerged by Stalinism. But while a number of groups that sprung up to a large extent just regurgitated as ideology the theories they were discovering, there were some real attempts to go beyond these positions, to actually develop theory adequate to the modern conditions. The period is marked by an explosion of new ideas and possibilities. The situationists and the autonomists represent high points in this process of reflecting and expressing the needs of the movement.

The rediscovery of the proletariat's theory happened in a symbiotic relation with the rediscovery of proletarian revolutionary practice. The wildcat strikes and general refusal of work, the near revolution in France in '68, the 'counter cultural' creation of new needs by the proletariat, in total a successful attack on the Keynesian settlement that had maintained social peace since the war. But with capital's successful use of crisis to undermine the gains of the proletarian offensive began a crisis in the ideas of the movement. The crisis was a result of the attacks on practice. We can see a number of directions in the collapse of the New Left.

One was a reformist turn: Under the mistaken notion that they were taking the struggles further - marching through the institutions - many comrades entered the Western social democratic parties. This move did not act to unify and organise the mass movements and grassroots struggles but rather encouraged and covered up the decline of these social movements. Those who avoided the mistake of being incorporated into the system fell into twin errors. On the one hand many embroiled themselves in frantic party-building. They were persuaded that the problem with the movement so far was the lack of an organisation to attack capital and the state. While they built their party the movementwas breaking up. They were blind to the history of Trotskyism as the 'loyal opposition' to Stalinism.

On the other hand many of those who recognised the bankruptcy of Leninism fell into a libertarian swamp of lifestylism and total absorption in 'identity politics' etc. Meanwhile from Academia came a sophisticated attack on radical theory in the guise of radical theory. The libertarian critique of Leninism - that it is an attempt to replace one set of rulers with another set - was transformed into an attack on the very project of social revolution. While appearing in their discourse to be exceptionally radical, the political implications of the postmodernists and poststructuralists amount to at best a wet liberalism, while at worst a justification for nationalism and wars.

The collapse of the new left parallelled the retreat of the proletariat as a whole before the onslaught of capitalist restructuring. In Britain we had the debilitating affect of the 'social contract' under Labour and the exceptionally important defeat of the miners strike. Elsewhere the crushing of the Italian movement and so on.

This brings us to the present situation. The connection between the movement and ideas has been undermined. Theory and practice are split. Those who think do not act, and those who act do not think. In the universities where student struggles forced the opening of space for radical thought that space is under attack. The few decent academic Marxists are besieged in their ivory tower by the poststructuralist shock troops of neo-liberalism. Although decent work has been done in areas such as the state derivation debate there has been no real attempt apply any insights in the real world. Meanwhile out in the woods of practical politics, though we have had some notable victories recently, ideas are lacking. Many comrades, especially in Britain, are afflicted with a virulent anti-intellectualism that creates the ludicrous impression that the Trots are the ones with a grasp of theory. Others pass off conspiracy theories as a substitute for serious analysis.

We publish this journal as a contribution to the reuniting of theory and practice. Aufheben is a space for critical investigation which has the practical purpose of overthrowing capitalist society.

LA '92: The context of a proletarian uprising

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April 29th, 1992, Los Angeles exploded in the most serious urban uprising in America this century. It took the federal army, the national guard and police from throughout the country five days to restore order, by which time residents of L.A. had appropriated millions of dollars worth of goods and destroyed a billion dollars of capitalist property. Most readers will be familiar with many of the details of the rebellion. This article will attempt to make sense of the uprising by putting the events into the context of the present state of class relations in Los Angeles and America in order to see where this new militancy in the class struggle may lead.

Before the rebellion, there were two basic attitudes on the state of class struggle in America. The pessimistic view is that the American working class has been decisively defeated. This view has held that the U.S. is - in terms of the topography of the global class struggle - little more than a desert. The more optimistic view held, that despite the weakness of the traditional working class against the massive cuts in wages, what we see in the domination of the American left by single issue campaigns and "Politically Correct" discourse is actually evidence of the vitality of the autonomous struggles of sections of the working class. The explosion of class struggle in L.A. shows the need to go beyond these one-sided views.

Contents:

1. Beyond the Image

2. Race and Class Composition

3. Class Composition And Capitalist Restructuring

4. A Note on Architecture and the Postmodernists

5. Gangs

6. The Political Ideas of the Gangs

7. Conclusion

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1. Beyond the Image

As most of our information about the rioting has come through the capitalist media, it is necessary to deal with the distorted perspective it has given. Just as in the Gulf War, the media presented an appearance of full immersion in what happened while actually constructing a falsified view of the events. While in the Gulf there was a concrete effort to disinform, in L.A. the distortion was a product not so much of censorship as much as of the total incomprehension of the bourgeois media when faced with proletarian insurrection. As Mike Davis points out, most reporters, "merely lip-synched suburban cliches as they tramped through the ruins of lives they had no desire to understand. A violent kaleidoscope of bewildering complexity was flattened into a single, categorical scenario: legitimate black anger over the King decision hijacked by hard-core street criminals and transformed into a maddened assault on their own community." Such a picture is far from the truth.

The beating of Rodney King in 1991 was no isolated incident and, but for the chance filming of the event, would have passed unnoticed into the pattern of racist police repression of the inner cities that characterizes the present form of capitalist domination in America. But, because of the insertion of this everyday event into general public awareness the incident became emblematic. While the mainstream television audience forgot the event through the interminable court proceedings, the eyes of the residents of South Central L.A. and other inner cities remained fixed on a case that had become a focus for their anger towards the system King's beating was typical of. Across the country, but especially in L.A., there was the feeling and preparation that, whatever the result of the trial, the authorities were going to experience people's anger. For the residents of South Central, the King incident was just a trigger. They ignored his televised appeals for an end to the uprising because it wasn't about him. The rebellion was against the constant racism on the streets and about the systematic oppression of the inner cities; it was against the everyday reality of racist American capitalism.

One of the media's set responses to similar situations has been to label them as "race riots". Such a compartmentalisation broke down very quickly in L.A. as indicated in Newsweek's reports of the rebellion: "Instead of enraged young black men shouting `Kill Whitey', Hispanics and even some whites - men, women and children - mingled with African-Americans. The mob's primary lust appeared to be for property, not blood. In a fiesta mood, looters grabbed for expensive consumer goods that had suddenly become `free'. Better-off black as well as white and Asian-American business people all got burned." Newsweek turned to an "expert" - an urban sociologist - who told them, "This wasn't a race riot. It was a class riot." (Newsweek, May 11th, 1992).

Perhaps uncomfortable with this analysis they turned to "Richard Cunningham, 19", "a clerk with a neat goatee": "They don't care for anything. Right now they're just on a spree. They want to live the lifestyle they see people on TV living. They see people with big old houses, nice cars, all the stereo equipment they want, and now that it's free, they're gonna get it." As the sociologist told them - a class riot.

In L.A., Hispanics, blacks and some whites united against the police; the composition of the riot reflected the composition of the area. Of the first 5,000 arrests, 52 per cent were poor Latinos, 10 per cent whites and only 38 per cent blacks.

Faced with such facts, the media found it impossible to make the label "race riot" stick. They were more successful, however, in presenting what happened as random violence and as a senseless attack by people on their own community. It is not that there was no pattern to the violence, it is that the media did not like the pattern it took. Common targets were journalists and photographers, including black and Hispanic ones. Why should the rioters target the media? - 1) these scavengers gathering around the story offer a real danger of identifying participants by their photos and reports. 2) The uncomprehending deluge of coverage of the rebellion follows years of total neglect of the people of South Central except their representation as criminals and drug addicts. In South Central, reporters are now being called "image looters".

But the three fundamental aspects to the rebellion were the refusal of representation, direct appropriation of wealth and attacks on property; the participants went about all three thoroughly.

Refusal of Representation

While the rebellion in '65 had been limited to the Watts district, in '92 the rioters circulated their struggle very effectively. Their first task was to bypass their "representatives". The black leadership - from local government politicians through church organizations and civil rights bureaucracy - failed in its task of controlling its community. Elsewhere in the States this strata did to a large extent succeed in channelling people's anger away from the direct action of L.A., managing to stop the spread of the rebellion. The struggle was circulated, but we can only imagine the crisis that would have ensued if the actions in other cities had reached L.A.'s intensity. Still, in L.A. both the self-appointed and elected representatives were by-passed. They cannot deliver. The rioters showed the same disrespect for their "leaders" as did their Watts counterparts. Years of advancement by a section of blacks, their intersection of themselves as mediators between "their" community and US capital and state, was shown as irrelevant. While community leaders tried to restrain the residents, "gang leaders brandishing pipes, sticks and baseball bats whipped up hotheads, urging them not to trash their own neighborhoods but to attack the richer turf to the west".

"It was too dangerous for the police to go on to the streets" (Observer, May 3rd 1992).

Attacks on Property

The insurgents used portable phones to monitor the police. The freeways that have done so much to divide the communities of L.A. were used by the insurgents to spread their struggle. Cars of blacks and Hispanics moved throughout a large part of the city burning their targets - commercial premises, the sites of capitalist exploitation - while at other points traffic jams formed outside malls as their contents were liberated. As well as being the first multiethnic riot in American history, it was its first car-borne riot. The police were totally overwhelmed by the creativity and ingenuity of the rioters.

Direct Appropriations

"Looting, which instantly destroys the commodity as such, also discloses what the commodity ultimately implies: The army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence."

Once the rioters had got the police off the streets looting was clearly an overwhelming aspect of the insurrection. The rebellion in Los Angeles was an explosion of anger against capitalism but also an eruption of what could take its place: creativity, initiative, joy.

A middle-aged woman said: "Stealing is a sin, but this is more like a television gameshow where everyone in the audience gets to win." Davis article in The Nation, June 1st.

"Looters of all races owned the streets, storefronts and malls. Blond kids loaded their Volkswagon with stereo gear... Filipinos in a banged up old clunker stocked up on baseball mitts and sneakers. Hispanic mothers with children browsed the gaping chain drug marts and clothing stores. A few Asians were spotted as well. Where the looting at Watts had been desperate, angry, mean, the mood this time was closer to a maniac fiesta".

The direct appropriation of wealth (pejoratively labelled "looting") breaks the circuit of capital (Work-Wage-Consumption) and such a struggle is just as unacceptable to capital as a strike. However it is also true that, for a large section of the L.A. working class, rebellion at the level of production is impossible. From the constant awareness of a "good life" out of reach - commodities they cannot have - to the contradiction of the simplest commodity, the use-values they need are all stamped with a price tag; they experience the contradictions of capital not at the level of alienated production but at the level of alienated consumption, not at the level of labor but at the level of the commodity.

"A lot of people feel that it's reparations. It's what already belongs to us." Will M., former gang member, on the "looting". (International Herald Tribune May 8th)

It is important to grasp the importance of direct appropriation, especially for subjects such as those in L.A. who are relatively marginalized from production. This "involves an ability to understand working-class behavior as tending to bring about, in opposition to the law of value, a direct relationship with the social wealth that is produced. Capitalist development itself, having reached this level of class struggle, destroys the `objective' parameters of social exchange. The proletariat can thus only recompose itself, within this level, through a material will to reappropriate to itself in real terms the relation to social wealth that capital has formally redimensioned".

[...]

2. Race and Class Composition

So even Newsweek, a voice of the American bourgeoisie, conceded that what happened was not a "race riot" but a "class riot". But in identifying the events as a class rebellion we do not have to deny they had "racial" elements. The overwhelming importance of the riots was the extent to which the racial divisions in the American working class were transcended in the act of rebellion; but it would be ludicrous to say that race was absent as an issue. There were "racial" incidents: what we need to do is see how these elements are an expression of the underlying class conflict. Some of the crowd who initiated the rebellion at the Normandie and Florence intersection went on to attack a white truck driver, Reginald Oliver Denny. The media latched on to the beating, transmitting it live to confirm suburban white fear of urban blacks. But how representative was this incident? An analysis of the deaths during the uprising shows it was not.

Still, we need to see how the class war is articulated in "racial" ways.

In America generally, the ruling class has always promoted and manipulated racism, from the genocide of native Americans, through slavery, to the continuing use of ethnicity to divide the labor force. The black working class experience is to a large extent that of being pushed out of occupations by succeeding waves of immigrants. While most groups in American society on arrival at the bottom of the labor market gradually move up, blacks have constantly been leapfrogged. Moreover, the racism this involves has been a damper on the development of class consciousness on the part of white workers.

In L.A. specifically, the inhabitants of South Central constitute some of the most excluded sectors of the working class. Capital's strategy with regards these sectors is one of repression carried out by the police - a class issue. However the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is predominantly white and its victims massively black and Hispanic (or as P.C. discourse would have it, people of color). Unlike in other cities, where the racist nature of the split between the included and excluded sectors is blurred by the state's success in co-opting large numbers of blacks on to the police force, in L.A. capital's racist strategy of division and containment is revealed in every encounter between the LAPD and the population - a race issue.

When the blacks and Hispanics of L.A. have been marginalized and oppressed according to their skin color, it is not surprising that in their explosion of class anger against their oppressors they will use skin color as a racial shorthand in identifying the enemy, just as it has been used against them. So even if the uprising had been a "race riot", it would still have been a class riot. It is also important to recognize the extent to which the participants went beyond racial stereotypes. While the attacks on the police, the acts of appropriation and attacks on property were seen as proper and necessary by nearly everyone involved, there is evidence that acts of violence against individuals on the basis of their skin color were neither typical of the rebellion nor widely supported. In the context of the racist nature of L.A. class oppression, it would have been surprising if there had not been a racial element to some of the rebellion. What is surprising and gratifying is the overwhelming extent to which this was not the case, the extent to which the insurgents by-passed capital's racist strategies of control.

"A lot of people feel that in order to come together we have to sacrifice the neighborhood." Will M., former gang member, on the destruction of businesses. (International Herald Tribune May 8th, 1992.)

One form the rebellion took was a systematic assault on Korean businesses. The Koreans are on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central L.A. - they are the face of capital for these communities. Relations between the black community and the Koreans had collapsed following the Harlins incident and its judicial result. In an argument over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, Latasha Harlins, a 15-year old black girl, was shot in the back of the head by a Korean grocer - Soon Ja Du - who was then let off with a $500 fine and some community service. While the American State packs its Gulags with poor blacks for just trying to survive, it allows a shopkeeper to kill their children. But though this event had a strong effect on the blacks of South Central, their attack on Korean property cannot be reduced to vengeance for one incident - it was directed against the whole system of exchange. The uprising attacked capital in its form of property, not any property but the property of businesses - the institutions of exploitation; and in the black and Hispanic areas, most of these properties and businesses were owned by Koreans. But though we should understand the resentment towards the Koreans as class-based, it is necessary to put this in the context of the overall situation. In L.A., the black working-class's position deteriorated in the late 1970s with the closure of heavy industry, whereas at the end of the 60s they had started to be employed in large numbers. This was part of the internationalization of L.A.'s economy, its insertion into the Pacific Rim center of accumulation which also involved an influx of mainly Japanese capital into downtown redevelopment, immigration of over a million Latin Americans to take the new low-wage manufacturing jobs that replaced the jobs blacks had been employed in, and the influx of South Koreans into L.A.'s mercantile economy. Thus while Latinos offered competition for jobs, the Koreans came to represent capital to blacks. However, these racial divisions are totally contingent. Within the overall restructuring, the jobs removed from L.A. blacks were relocated to other parts of the Pacific Rim such as South Korea. The combativity of these South Korean workers shows that the petty-bourgeois role Koreans take in L.A. is but part of a wider picture in which class conflict crosses all national and ethnic divides as global finance capital dances around trying to escape its nemesis but always recreating it.

3. Class Composition and Capitalist Restructuring

The American working class is divided between waged and unwaged, blue and white collar, immigrant and citizen labor, guaranteed and unguaranteed; but as well as this, and often synonymous with these distinctions, it is divided along ethnic lines. Moreover, these divisions are real divisions in terms of power and expectations. We cannot just cover them up with a call for class unity or fatalistically believe that, until the class is united behind a Leninist party or other such vanguard, it will not be able to take on capital. In terms of the American situation as well as with other areas of the global class conflict it is necessary to use the dynamic notion of class composition rather than a static notion of social classes.

"When Bush visited the area security was massive. TV networks were asked not to broadcast any of Mr Bush's visit live to keep from giving away his exact location in the area." (International Herald Tribune, May 8th, 1992.)

The rebellion in South Central Los Angeles and the associated actions across the United States showed the presence of an antagonistic proletarian subject within American capitalism. This presence had been occluded by a double process: on the one hand, a sizeable section of American workers have had their consciousness of being proletarian - of being in antagonism to capital - obscured in a widespread identification with the idea of being "middle-class"; and on the other, for a sizeable minority, perhaps a quarter of the population, there has being their recomposition as marginalized sub-workers excluded from consideration as a part of society by the label "underclass". The material basis for such sociological categorizations is that, on the one hand there is the increased access to "luxury" consumption for certain "higher" strata, while on the other there is the exclusion from anything but "subsistence" consumption by those "lower" strata consigned to unemployment or badly paid part-time or irregular work.

This strategy of capital's carries risks, for while the included sector is generally kept in line by the brute force of economic relations, redoubled by the fear of falling into the excluded sector, the excluded themselves, for whom the American dream has been revealed as a nightmare, must be kept down by sheer police repression. In this repression, the war on drugs has acted as a cover for measures that increasingly contradict the "civil rights" which bourgeois society, especially in America, has prided itself on bringing into the world.

Part of the U.S. capital's response to the Watts and other 60s rebellions was to give ground. To a large section of the working class revolting because its needs were not being met, capital responded with money - the form of mediation par excellence - trying to meet some of that pressure within the limits of capitalist control. This was not maintained into the 80s. For example, federal aid to cities fell from $47.2 billion in 1980 to $21.7 billion in 1992. The pattern is that of the global response to the proletarian offensives of the 60s and 70s: first give way - allowing wage increases, increasing welfare spending (i.e. meeting the social needs of the proletariat) - then, when capital has consolidated its forces, the second part - restructure accumulation on a different basis - destructure knots of working class militancy, create unemployment.

In America, this strategy was on the surface more successful than in Europe. The American bourgeoisie had managed to halt the general rise in wages by selectively allowing some sectors of the working class to maintain or increase their living standards while others had their's massively reduced. One sector in particular has felt the brunt of this strategy: the residents of the inner city who are largely black and Hispanic. The average yearly income of black high school graduates fell by 44% between 1973 and 1990, there have been severe cutbacks in social programs and massive disinvestment. With the uprising, the American working class has shown that capital's success in isolating and screwing this section has been temporary.

The re-emergence of an active proletarian subject shows the importance, when considering the strategies of capital, of not forgetting that its restructuring is a response to working class power. The working class is not just an object within capital's process. It is a subject (or plurality of subjects), and, at the level of political class composition reached by the proletariat in the 60s, it undermined the process. Capital's restructuring was an attack on this class composition, an attempt to transform the subject back into an object, into labor-power.

Capitalist restructuring tried to introduce fragmentation and hierarchy into a class subject which was tending towards unity (a unity that respected multilaterality). It moved production to other parts of the world (only, as in Korea, to export class struggle as well); it tried to break the strength of the "mass worker" by breaking up the labor force within factories into teams and by spreading the factory to lots of small enterprises; it has also turned many wage-laborers into self-employed to make people internalise capital's dictates. In America, the fragmentation also occurred along the lines of ethnicity. Black blue-collar workers have been a driving force in working class militancy as recorded by C.L.R. James and others. For a large number of blacks and others, the new plan involved their relegation to Third World poverty levels. But as Negri puts it, "marginalization is as far as capital can go in excluding people from the circuits of production - expulsion is impossible. Isolation within the circuit of production - this is the most that capital's action of restructuration can hope to achieve." When recognizing the power of capital's restructuring it is necessary to affirm the fundamental place of working class struggles as the motor force of capital's development. Capital attacks a certain level of political class composition and a new level is recomposed; but this is not the creation of the perfect, pliable working class - it is only ever a provisional recomposition of the class on the basis of its previously attained level.

Capitalist restructuring has taken the form in Los Angeles of its insertion into the Pacific Rim pole of accumulation. Metal banging and transport industry jobs, which blacks only started moving into in the tail end of the boom in late 60s and the early 70s, have left the city, while about one million Latino immigrants have arrived, taking jobs in low-wage manufacturing and labor-intensive services. The effect on the Los Angeles black community has not been homogeneous; while a sizeable section has attained guaranteed status through white-collar jobs in the public sector, the majority who were employed in the private sector in traditional working class jobs have become unemployed. It is working class youth who have fared worse, with unemployment rates of 45% in South Central.

But the recomposition of the L.A. working class has not been entirely a victory of capitalist restructuring. Capital would like this section of society to work. It would like its progressive undermining of the welfare system to make the "underclass" go and search for jobs, any jobs anywhere. Instead, many residents survive by "Aid to Families With Dependent Children", forcing the cost of reproducing labor power on to the state, which is particularly irksome when the labor power produced is so unruly. The present consensus among bourgeois commentators is that the problem is the "decline of the family and its values." Capital's imperative is to re-impose its model of the family as a model of work discipline and form of reproduction (make the proles take on the cost of reproduction themselves).

4. A Note on Architecture and the Postmodernist

Los Angeles, as we know, is the "city of the future". In the 30s the progressive vision of business interests prevailed and the L.A. streetcars - one of the best public transport systems in America - were ripped up; freeways followed. It was in Los Angeles that Adorno & Horkheimer first painted their melancholy picture of consciousness subsumed by capitalism and where Marcuse later pronounced man "One Dimensional". More recently, Los Angeles has been the inspiration for fashionable post-theory. Baudrillard, Derrida and other postmodernist, post-structuralist scum have all visited and performed in the city. Baudrillard even found here "utopia achieved".

The "postmodern" celebrators of capitalism love the architecture of Los Angeles, its endless freeways and the redeveloped downtown. They write eulogies to the sublime space within the $200 a night Bonaventura hotel, but miss the destruction of public space outside. The postmodernists, though happy to extend a term from architecture to the whole of society, and even the epoch, are reluctant to extend their analysis of the architecture just an inch beneath the surface. The "postmodern" buildings of Los Angeles have been built with an influx of mainly Japanese capital into the city. Downtown L.A. is now second only to Tokyo as a financial center for the Pacific Rim. But the redevelopment has been at the expense of the residents of the inner city. Tom Bradley, an ex-cop and Mayor since 1975, has been a perfect black figurehead for capital's restructuring of L.A.. He has supported the massive redevelopment of downtown L.A., which has been exclusively for the benefit of business. In 1987, at the request of the Central City East Association of Businesses, he ordered the destruction of the makeshift pavement camps of the homeless; there are an estimated 50,000 homeless in L.A., 10,000 of them children. Elsewhere, city planning has involved the destruction of people's homes and of working class work opportunities to make way for business development funded by Pacific Rim capital - a siege by international capital of working class Los Angeles.

But the postmodernists did not even have to look at this behind-the-scenes movement, for the violent nature of the development is apparent from a look at the constructions themselves. The architecture of Los Angeles is characterised by militarization. City planning in Los Angeles is essentially a matter for the police. An overwhelming feature of the L.A. environment is the presence of security barriers, surveillance technology - the policing of space. Buildings in public use like the inner city malls and a public library are built like fortresses, surrounded by giant security walls and dotted with surveillance cameras.

In Los Angeles, "on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus in a single comprehensive security effort." (Davis, City of Quartz p. 224) Just as Haussman redesigned Paris after the revolutions of 1848, building boulevards to give clear lines of fire, L.A. architects and city planners have remade L.A. since the Watts rebellion. Public space is closed, the attempt is made to kill the street as a means of killing the crowd. Such a strategy is not unique to Los Angeles, but here it has reached absurd levels: the police are so desperate to "kill the crowd" that they have taken the unprecedented step of killing the toilet. Around office developments "public" art buildings and landscaped garden "microparks" are designed into the parking structures to allow office workers to move from car to office or shop without being exposed to the dangers of the street. The public spaces that remain are militarized, from "bum-proof" bus shelter benches to automatic sprinklers in the parks to stop people sleeping there. White middle class areas are surrounded by walls and private security. During the riots, the residents of these enclaves either fled or armed themselves and nervously waited.

We see, then, that in the States, but especially in L.A., architecture is not merely a question of aesthetics, it is used along with the police to separate the included and the excluded sections of capitalist society. But this phenomenon is by no means unique to America. Across the advanced capitalist countries we see attempts to redevelop away urban areas that have been sites of contestation. In Paris, for example, we have seen, under the flag of "culture", the Pompidou centre built on a old working class area, as a celebration of the defeat of the '68 movement. Here in Britain the whole of Docklands was taken over by a private development corporation to redevelop the area - for a while yuppie flats sprang up at ridiculous prices and the long-standing residents felt besieged in their estates by armies of private security guards. Still, we saw how that ended... Now in Germany, the urban areas previously marginalized by the Wall, such as Kreuzberg and the Potzdamer Platz, have become battlegrounds over who's needs the new Berlin will satisfy.

Of course, such observations and criticisms of the "bad edge of postmodernity", if they fail to see the antagonism to the process and allow themselves to be captivated by capital's dialectic, by its creation of our dystopia, could fall into mirroring the postmodernists' celebration of it. There is no need for pessimism - what the rebellion showed was that capital has not killed the crowd. Space is still contested. Just as Haussman's plans did not stop the Paris Commune, L.A. redevelopment did not stop the 1992 rebellion.

5. Gangs

"In June 1988 the police easily won Police Commission approval for the issuing of flesh-ripping hollow-point ammunition: precisely the same `dum-dum' bullets banned in warfare by the Geneva Conventions." (Mike Davis, 1990, City of Quartz, p. 290.)

We cannot deny the role gangs played in the uprising. The systematic nature of the rioting is directly linked to their participation and most importantly to the truce on internal fighting they called before the uprising. Gang members often took the lead which the rest of the proletariat followed. The militancy of the gangs - their hatred of the police - flows from the unprecedented repression the youth of South Central have experienced: a level of state repression on a par with that dished out to rebellious natives by colonial forces such as that suffered by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Under the guise of gang-busting and dealing with the "crack menace", the LAPD have launched massive "swamp" operations; they have formed files on much of the youth of South Central and murdered lots of proletarians.

As Mike Davis put it in 1988, "the contemporary Gang scare has become an imaginary class relationship, a terrain of pseudo-knowledge and fantasy projection, a talisman." The "gang threat" has been used as an excuse to criminalise the youth of South Central L.A. We should not deny the existence of the problems of crack use and inter-gang violence, but we need to see that, what has actually been a massive case of working class on working class violence, a sorry example of internalised aggression resulting from a position of frustrated needs, has been interpreted as a "lawless threat" to justify more of the repression and oppression that created the situation in the first place. To understand recent gang warfare and the role of gangs in the rebellion we must look at the history of the gang phenomenon.

In Los Angeles, black street gangs emerged in the late 1940s primarily as a response to white racist attacks in schools and on the streets. When Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups formed in the late 50s, Chief Parker of the LAPD conflated the two phenomena as a combined black menace. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the repression launched against the gangs and black militants had the effect of radicalizing the gangs. This politicization reached a peak in the Watts rebellion, when, as in '92, gang members made a truce and were instrumental in the black working class success in holding off the police for four days. The truce formed in the heat of the rebellion lasted for most of the rest of the 60s. Many gang members joined the Black Panther Party or formed other radical political groupings. There was a general feeling that the gangs had "joined the Revolution".

The repression of the movement involved the FBI's COINTELPRO program and the LAPD's own red squad. The Panthers were shot on the streets and on the campuses both directly by the police and by their agents, their headquarters in L.A. were besieged by LAPD SWAT teams, and dissension was sown in their ranks. Although the Panthers' politics were flawed, they were an organic expression of the black proletariat's experience of American capitalism. The systematic nature of their repression shows just how dangerous they were perceived to be.

As even the L.A. Times admitted, the recrudescence of gangs in L.A. in the early 70s was a direct consequence of the decimation of the more political expressions of black frustration. A new aspect of this phenomena was the prodigious spread of Crip sets which caused the other gangs to federate as the Bloods. As Davis puts it, "this was not merely a gang revival, but a radical permutation of black gang culture. The Crips, however perversely, inherited the Panther aura of fearlessness and transmitted the ideology of armed vanguardism (shorn of its program). But too often Crippin' came to represent an escalation of intra-ghetto violence to Clockwork Orange levels (murder as a status symbol, and so on)...[the Crips] achieved a "managerial revolution" in gang organisation. If they began as a teenage substitute for the fallen Panthers, they evolved through the 1970s into a hybrid of teen cult and proto-mafia".

That gangs, even in their murderous mutation as "proto-mafia" Crips and Bloods, have been an expression of the need for political organisation is indicated in a few instances where they have made political interventions. In two major situations, the Monrovia riots in 1972 and the L.A. schools busing crisis of 1977-79, the Crips intervened in support of the black community. These gangs, as an expression of the proletariat, are not in the grips of a false consciousness that makes them think all there is to life is gold chains and violence. Whenever they have been given a chance to speak, for instance in December 1972 at the beginning of the transformation of the gangs into the ultra-violent Crips and Bloods, they have come out with clear political demands. Every time they have been given a chance to express themselves, similar demands have been voiced. The LAPD does everything in its power to stop the gangs being given a voice so as to maintain its war against them.

Still, if the gangs wanted to appeal to people's sympathies, they have done themselves no favors by dealing in crack. However, if we look closely at this we find that the mass move into this trade is pushed on them by capital. Young blacks moved into the alternative economy of drugs when traditional occupations were destroyed. We are dealing with material pressures.

For a member of South Central's youth proletariat, the only rational economic choice is to sell drugs. While the internationalization of the Los Angeles economy has meant a loss for working class blacks, what the Crips and Bloods have managed to do is insert themselves back into the circuit of international trade. While the international trade in legal commodities decided that the Los Angeles blacks were expendable another branch found them eminently useful. Southern California has taken over from Florida as the main route of entry of cocaine into the United States. When in the early 80s the cocaine business found the market for its product saturated, its price falling and profits threatened, it, like any other multinational, diversified and developed new products, the chief one being crack - "the poor man's cocaine". Young proletarians participate in this business because it is the work on offer. It is not them but capital that reduces life to survival/work. We can see, then, that selling crack is in a sense just another undesirable activity like making weapons or cigarettes that proletarians are forced to engage in. But there is a significant difference. Within most occupations proletarians can organize directly within and against capital; but the drug dealing gangs do not confront capital as labor. Gangs do not confront the capital of the enterprise, they confront the repressive arm of capital-in-general: the State. In fact, to the extent that the gangs engage in the cocaine trade and fit firmly into the circuit of international capital, they are the capitalist enterprise. This is a problem. The drive-by shootings and lethal turf wars of the black gangs is the proletariat killing itself for capital.

It is necessary to see, then, that the murderous gangbanging phenomenon which is presently halted has not been, as the bourgeois press would have it, the result of the breakdown of "family values" and the loss of the restraining influence of the middle class as they left for the suburbs; rather it resulted from: 1) the economics of capitalist restructuring (the replacing of traditional industries with drugs) and 2) the active destruction of political forms of self-organisation by state repression. The solution to the problem of the murderous crack wars is the rediscovery of political self-activity of the sort shown in the rebellion. The solution to inter-proletarian violence is proletarian violence.

The irrepressible nature of the gang-phenomenon shows the pressing need for organisation on the part of the youth proletariat of L.A. For a while in the 60s it took a self-consciously political form. When this manifestly political form of organisation was repressed, the gangs came back with a vengeance, showing that they express a real and pressing need. What we have seen in and since the uprising is a new politicization of gang culture: a return of the repressed.

6. Political Ideas of the Gangs

Since the rebellion, some attention has been given to the political ideas and proposals of the gangs (or, more precisely, the gang leadership). The proposals are mixed. Some are unobjectionable, like that for gang members with video cameras to follow the police to prevent brutality and for money for locally community controlled rebuilding of the neighbourhood; but others, like replacing welfare with workfare, and for close cooperation between the gangs and corporations, are more dubious. The political ideas from which these proposals spring seem largely limited to black nationalism. So how should we understand these proposals and this ideology?

The attempt by the gang leadership to interpose themselves as mediators of the ghetto has similarities to the role of unions and we should perhaps apply to them a similar critique to that which we apply to unions. It is necessary: 1) to recognise a difference between the leaders and the ordinary members 2) to recognise the role of the leadership as recuperating and channelling the demands of the rank and file.

Some of the gang leaders' conceptions are, quite apart from being reactionary, manifestly unrealistic. In the context of capitalist restructuring, the inner city ghetto and its "underclass" is surplus to requirements - it has been written off - it has no place in capitalist strategy, except perhaps as a terror to encourage the others. It is extremely unlikely that there will be a renegotiation of the social contract to bring these subjects back into the main rhythm of capitalist development. This was to an extent possible in the 60s and 70s, but no longer.

Understandably, in the light of the main options available, there is a desire in the inhabitants of L.A. for secure unionized employment. But capital has moved many industries away and they will not come back. Many of the people in these areas recognise the change and want jobs in computers and other areas of the new industries. But, although individual people from the ghetto may manage to get a job in these sectors (probably only by moving), for the vast majority this will remain a dream. Within capital's restructuring, these jobs are available to a certain section of the working class, and, while a few from the ghetto might insert themselves into that section, the attractive security of that section is founded on an overall recomposition of the proletariat that necessarily posits the existence of the marginalized "underclass".

But, leaving aside the change in the conditions which makes large scale investment in the inner cities very unlikely, what do the gang leaders proposals amount to? Faced with the re-allocation of South Central residents as unguaranteed excluded objects within capital's plan of development, the gang leaders present themselves as negotiators of a new deal: they seek to present the rebellion as a $1 billion warning to American capital/state that it must bring these subjects into the fold with the gang leaders as mediators. They are saying that they accept the reduction of life to Work-Wage-Consumption, but that there is not enough work (!) i.e. they want the proletariat's refusal of mediation - its direct meeting of its needs - to force capital to re-insert them into the normal capitalist mediation of needs through work and the wage. The gangs, with their labor-intensive drug industry, have been operating a crypto-Keynesian employment programme; now in their plans for urban renewal the gang leadership want fully-fledged Keynesianism, with them instead of the unions as the brokers of labor-power. But, even apart from the fact that capital will not be able to deliver what the gang leaders seek, the rebellion has shown the whole American proletariat a different way of realising its needs; by collective direct action they can take back what's theirs.

These demands show the similarity of gang and union leadership: how they both act to limit the aspirations of their members to what can be met within the capitalist order. But for all the negative aspects to the union/gang organization, we must recognise that they do originate from real needs of the proletariat: the needs for solidarity, collective defense and a sense of belongingness felt by the atomised proletarian subject. Moreover the gangs are closer to this point of origin than the sclerotic unions of advanced capitalist countries. The gang is not the form of organization for blacks or other groups, but it is a form of organization that exists, that has shown itself prepared to engage in class struggle and that has had in the past and now it seems again to have the potential for radicalizing itself into a real threat to capital.

Black Nationalism

The limitations of the practical proposals of the gang leaders are partly a result of their conflict of interest with the ordinary members but also a function of the limits of their ideology. The gangs' political ideas are trapped within the limits of black nationalism. But how should we view this when their practice is so obviously beyond their theory? After all, as someone once observed, one doesn't judge the proletariat by what this or that proletarian thinks but by what it is necessary impelled to do by its historical situation. The gangs took seriously Public Enemy's Farrakhan-influenced stance on non-black businesses and "shut 'em down". Although Farrakhan does not preach violence as a political means many in the black gangs agree with his goal of black economic self-determination and saw the violence as a means towards that goal. In reality this goal of a "black capitalism" is wrong but the means they chose were right. The tendency of separation and antagonism shown by the rebellion is absolutely correct but it needs to be an antagonism and separation from capital rather than from non-black society. It is necessary that as the marginalized sector rediscovers the organisation and political ideas that were repressed in the 60s and 70s that it goes beyond those positions.

But, just as blacks were not the only or even the majority of rioters, the Crips and Bloods are not the only gangs. Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Salvadorans and most other Latin American immigrants have all evolved the gang as an organizational form for youth. Now, just as these gangs are far less involved in the international side of the drug business - selling indigenous drugs such as marijuana, PCP and speed at much smaller profit - they also do not have the nationalist leanings of the black gangs. Before the rebellion, a level of communication was reached between black and Latino youth through the shared culture of rap music and the experience it expresses. The tentative alliance between blacks and Latinos that emerged during the uprising shows a way forward. Los Angeles and America generally does need a rainbow coalition, but not one putting faith in Jesse Jackson; rather, one from below focussing on people's needs and rejecting the mediation of the existing political system. For [working-class] blacks, a leap is required, but it will not happen through some "battle of ideas" with the black nationalists carried out in the abstract, but only in connection with practice; only by and through struggle will the [working-class] blacks of L.A. and the rest of the American proletariat develop a need for communism to which the direct appropriation of goods showed the way.

"In one crowded apartment building 75% of the tenants were found to possess looted goods and were swapping goods among themselves." LAPD Lieutenant Rick Morton (International Herald Tribune, May 8th 1992.)

We might say the proletariat only sets itself the problems it can solve. Only by and through a new round of struggles such as began in L.A. will there be the opening for the American working class to find the ideas and organizational forms that it needs.

7. Conclusion

"Let us please not go back to normal." Distressed caller on radio talk show during the riots. (Understanding the Riots, LA Times book, 1992.)

The rebellion in Los Angeles marked a leap forward in the global class struggle. In direct appropriation and as an offensive against the sites of capitalist exploitation, the whole of the population of South Central felt its power. There is a need to go on. The struggle has politicised the population. The truce is fundamental - the proletariat has to stop killing itself. The LAPD is worried and are surely now considering the sort of measures they used to break the gang unity that followed the Watts rebellion. The police are scared by the truce and by the wave of politicisation which may follow it. That politicization will have to go beyond black nationalism and the incorporative leanings of the gang leadership - another leap is required. In the multi-ethnic nature of the uprising and the solidarity actions across the country, we saw signs that the proletariat can take this leap.

For years, American rulers could let the ghetto kill itself. In May '92 its guns were turned on the oppressor. A new wave of struggle has begun.

EMUs in the class war

The developing New World Order, and the power of global finance capital, is accelerating the tendency of the European capitalist class to unite politically against the proletariat. The drawbacks of this strategy for the capitalist class, however, include the loss of their flexibility in fighting the proletariat at the national level.

Despite the riots, the town hall sieges and the above all the millions who defied the law through non-payment, it was not the poll tax revolt that finally put paid to Thatcher; it was the issue of Europe.

That the anti-poll tax movement was robbed of its ultimate coup de grace was perhaps indicative of the success of the Tories, even before the onset of the Gulf War, in making their tactical retreat from the poll tax, and perhaps demonstrates more than anything else the ultimate limitations of the anti-poll tax campaign.

Of course the spectacle of the 'palace coup' of November 1990, in which the pro-European wing of the Tory Party deposed Thatcher and swept aside her petty nationalism, was not a means to simply deny the class victory of the anti-poll tax movement - a victory that had come after so many defeats through out the 1980s and one which threatened to dispel myth of the futility of class struggle, although it did have this effect; but was the reflection of an important struggle within the British bourgeoisie. Indeed, it was only over Thatcher's dead body that British state could make its commitment to European union at Maastricht a year later.

Of course the whole issue of Europe for most people in Britain seems to be both irrelevant and incomprehensible; one big yawn, in fact. Who can make sense of the interminable list of E-words; ERM, ECU, EMU, EPU etc? Who can understand the 'historic implications' of this and that treaty couched as they are in Euro-speak? Even for revolutionaries the issue of Europe is often regarded as little more than a squabble amongst the ruling class. But the whole question of European unity raised by the Maastricht Treaty is part of the question of how the bourgeoisie is to organise itself against us in the New World Order which has arisen since the collapse of the state capitalism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Indeed, as we shall see, however indirectly, the potential class confrontation of the poll tax issue and the question Europe are linked as part of the same problem; the problem of class rule!

* * *

The Breaking of the Dam

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 signalled the end of the post-war era. All the old certainties of the previous forty years that had been cemented by the 'mutually assured destruction' of the confrontation between the old two super-powers have been swept away. Yet perhaps rather ironically, the very victory of the USA over its old rival has served to raise the very question of America's continued hegemony. In the old order, the threat of 'communism' had served as an overriding unifying force that consolidated the Western bloc under the leadership of the USA. Now that this threat has been vanquished, the centrifugal forces that have been building over the last 20 years as a consequence of the relative decline in the USA's economic hegemony are no longer held in check.

With the acceleration of the process of European unity and following the success of the North American Free Trade Agreement, even the most superficial of bourgeois commentators now recognises the rapidly accelerating process which is leading towards the break up of the world into three dominant and fiercely competitive economic blocs: the Pacific region led by Japan, the America's led by the USA, and Europe. It is this process towards a new tri-polarism, that has been unleashed by the collapse of the old bi-polar world, which is the basis for the development of the new world order of global capitalism. Yet the precise nature of this new tripolar world is far from certain. The relations of the various bourgeois factions both between and within these emerging blocs and their relative strengths with regard to each other and the proletariat are far from settled and indeed this is nowhere more so than in Europe.

Over the past forty years Europe, the very pivot of East-West confrontation, has been a bastion of stability in an uncertain and war ravaged world. Yet with the fall the Berlin Wall this has all changed. Both in Eastern and Western Europe we are seeing dramatic political and economic transformations as the European bourgeoisie realigns itself in the context of the emerging new world order.

We have all seen the dramatic collapse of the Eastern Bloc in Eastern Europe over the past four years, followed last year by the complete disintegration of the Soviet Union itself (and now even Russia is plagued by the threat of further disintegration into its constituent regions). We have seen the ruling classes of Eastern Europe, as they transform themselves from their old bureaucratic forms into fully fledged bourgeoisie, introduce drastic economic and political reforms in an attempt to sweep away the decrepit command structures of state capitalism. And we have seen them prostrate themselves before the envoys of international capitalism from the West and swallow whole the idiotic doctrines of the Western economic advisers as they seek to scramble aboard the New Europe. As the ruling classes of Eastern Europe no doubt know, either they open themselves up to the exploitation of Western capital and thereby hope to become a small centre of capital accumulation, or else they will be plunged into the nether regions of a newly emerging Third World of Europe.

Whereas the tectonic shifts of the New World Order are tearing Eastern Europe apart, in Western Europe they have hastened an obverse process of unification. Few but the most Euro-fanatics in 1988 would have believed that in less than four years time the Governments of the EEC would have committed themselves to abandoning their 'economic sovereignty' by accepting a single currency and a European Bank by the end of the century, with all the implications such a decision has for eventual political union in some form of United States of Europe. Yet it was such a momentous commitment that was made at Maastricht last December.

Whether such a commitment will be realised is still an open question - particularly in the wake of Denmark's rejection of the original Maastricht Treaty in its recent referendum. But to fully understand the importance of this commitment and the implications it has for the class struggle we must first look at the how it arose out of the decline and fall of the Old World Order of the post-war era and its effects on the political contours of Western Europe.

The Rise and Fall of the Old World Order

The Rise

It is perhaps no surprise that Europe should be at the centre of the geo-political changes brought about by the decline of the post-war era since it was through the stabilisation and division of Europe at the end of the Second World War that the world order of the past forty years was constructed. But to understand this pivotal position in the old world order and its position in the new we must recall Europe's special position in the history of capitalism.

It must be remembered that it was in Europe that capitalism first emerged and matured and it was in Europe that the industrial proletariat first emerged and became organised as an antagonistic force opposed to the domination of capital. It was the confrontation between the growing power of the organised working class and capital's ceaseless efforts to fully dominate and subsume the labour process that led to both the emergence of monopoly capitalism and the strife that tore Europe apart in the first half of this century. War, aborted revolutions, mass unemployment, fascism and yet more war plagued Europe for more than thirty long years. It was as a result of this tumultuous period that social democracy finally triumphed, establishing a truce in the class war that was to assure relative social peace in Europe for several decades and laid the basis for the post-war boom - in Western Europe at least.

The post-war settlements were made possible in Europe, as elsewhere in the industrial world of the Western Bloc, by a radical change in the mode of capital accumulation; from that of monopoly capitalism, that had been predominant since the late nineteenth century, to that of Fordism, which had first emerged in the USA during the 1920's and 30's and which became implanted in Europe following the Second World War. What then was the nature of this change in the mode of accumulation?

In the face of the growing power of organised labour in the late nineteenth century, the tendencies towards the centralisation of capital had become greatly accelerated. In order to accommodate concessions made to the more organised sections of the working class the huge monopolies sought to exploit their monopoly positions by restricting production thereby raising prices and shifting the burden of higher wages onto the non-monopoly sectors of the economy.

However, high monopoly prices could only be maintained by restricting foreign competition, and the necessary restrictions on the level of production served to restrict the outlets for the further domestic accumulation of capital in the monopolised industries. As a consequence the state had to be mobilised on behalf of monopoly capital, firstly to restrict foreign competition on the domestic markets, and secondly to defend by force if necessary the opportunities for the export of capital to foreign markets. Thus monopoly capitalism could only lead towards state capitalism and intense imperialist rivalry and ultimately war, a process ably described and analysed by Bukharin and Lenin at the time.

The fundamental problem of state monopoly capitalism was that it was unable to fully realise the real subsumption of the labour process under capital since it was unable to eliminate the power of various skilled craft workers from the process of production that had developed in the key heavy industries following the industrial revolution (eg coal, steel, engineering and the railways). With Fordism, pioneered by the new consumer industries (cars, washing machines etc) and made possible by the bitter struggles of the early twentieth century, a new deal was possible. The way was opened for the real subsumption of labour to capital allowing the rapid and 'scientific' transformation of the production process in the pursuit of the production of relative surplus-value.

Capital's real domination of the labour process enabled a continual rise in the productivity of labour. In return for conceding its power over the labour-process, the working class could be virtually guaranteed of rising real wages within the limits of the growth in the productivity of labour. These higher wages then served to provide the demand for the ever increasing production of commodities by Fordist industry. So, whereas the old mode of accumulation had been based on restricting the supply of commodities in order to obtain monopoly prices with which to accommodate the demands of skilled and organised sections of the working class, Fordism was based on expanding production and paying for higher wages out of increased productivity. It was a mode of accumulation of mass production and mass consumption.

As has been well documented elsewhere, Fordism gave rise to a major recomposition of the working class and to the emergence of the mass worker. The skilled craft workers of the old industries now gave way to the semi-skilled workers of the assembly line. For these mass workers, who had surrendered control over the production process as part of the 'Fordist deal', there was little or no attachment to a particular trade. Work was merely a means to a wage and no more, while the wage was the means of the imposition of an indifferent labour. As such the mass worker could be seen as the historical realisation of the tendency towards abstract labour.

The imposition of Fordism then served to underpin the social democratic class compromise at the political level. The increased production of relative surplus-value allowed the emergence of a relatively generous welfare state and the consequent rapid and unprecedented expansion of public expenditure into areas of health, housing, education and social security that provided a substantial and growing 'social wage' in the post-war era. At the same time, in most countries, various degrees of tripartite consultation (government, trade unions and employers) were instituted and developed at varying levels of society for the planning of the economy and for the co-ordination of social policy thereby giving labour-power representation within state-capital.

So while the new Fordist mode of accumulation underpinned the post-war settlement and provided the material and economic basis for limited class conciliation, the post-war settlement was consolidated at the level of the nation state. To this extent the post-war era of Fordism built upon the tendency towards state capitalism that had begun in the previous era of monopoly capitalism.

Yet the state not only policed, maintained and organised the new class compromise between the working class and the bourgeoisie, it also imposed and maintained and organised the new relations within the bourgeoisie itself.

Firstly, the old bastions of the age of monopoly capitalism were nationalised or else heavily regulated not only to diffuse the traditional class antagonisms that typified these industries, but also so that their inherent propensity towards restrictive monopoly pricing would not hold back the necessary expansionism of the newly emergent Fordist industries. This gave rise to the so called 'mixed economy' of the post-war era in which an extensive public sector of state capital operated side by side with a more or less equally extensive private sector of capital. Secondly, the state sought to integrate and subordinate the money-circuits of capital to the accumulation of national productive capital through extensive regulations on financial institutions and the active application of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy.

Capital accumulation in the post-war era therefore became consolidated around a number of distinct national economies each with its own semi-autonomous cycles of accumulation and each enjoying a limited autonomy with regard to its integration of its own working class. Fordism gave rise to the mass worker - the historical realisation of the tendency towards abstract labour - but the various post-war settlements fractured the mass worker as abstract labour on national lines. Concessions to the working class were made not to the working class as such but to the British, French, Italian or German working class - and thereby excluded those regarded as aliens such as immigrants. (This national fracturing of abstract labour of course reflected the national fracturing of capital that meant that, despite multi-nationals and global markets, we still can talk in terms of the interests of 'British', 'German' and 'American' capital etc.)

These distinct national economies were then inserted within the overall accumulation of capital in the Western Bloc through the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in which each national currency was committed to a maintain a fixed parity to the dollar. Through this system of fixed exchange rates and its attendant supra-national organisations such as the IMF and World Bank each national economy was strictly subordinated to the hegemony of the USA.

The empires of the old imperialist powers of Western Europe, which had been so central to the previous era of monopoly capitalism, were rapidly broken up through the post-war process of decolonialisation as the national economies of Western Europe became integrated as the secondary pole in the Atlantic axis of accumulation. It was this Atlantic axis of Pax Americana which then provided the central dynamic for capital accumulation in the Western Bloc throughout the first two decades of the post-war era. While the progressive development of free trade allowed an unprecedented growth in the trade of manufactures within the Atlantic axis the ex-colonies of the Third World were increasingly left to stagnate on the peripheries.

The Fall

The post-war settlement and Pax Americana laid the basis for the long post-war boom of the '50s and '60s and the economic stability and prosperity that Western Europe still to a large degree enjoys. However, already by the mid-'60s its very success had begun to sow the seeds of its own demise.

Firstly, the unprecedented period of sustained economic growth of the Atlantic axis had brought with it an even faster growth in world trade, particularly that of manufactured commodities. This growth in world trade brought with it a rapid expansion in the circuits of international money-capital and the development of global capital markets. With the development of offshore banking and the Euro-dollar markets, which had emerged as means to escape state regulation, these swelling international money-circuits increasingly began to breach the constraints that had bound the movement of such money-capital to the national accumulation of productive capital and which had underpinned the efficacy of Keynesian demand management.

At the same time, the successful export of Fordism and the generous aid provided by the USA to both Europe and the far East in order to 'preserve the free world from 'Communism'' had laid the foundations for the economic miracles of both West Germany, which pulled the rest of Western Europe in its train, and of Japan. As a consequence, both West Germany and Japan had by the late '60s become serious economic rivals to the USA. The growing autonomy of international money-capital combined with the relative decline of American economic hegemony increasingly put strains on the Bretton Woods systems of fixed exchange rates which finally collapsed in 1973.

However, more importantly, the post-war world order came under threat from the resurgence of class conflict. By the 1960s a new generation of the working class had grown up who had known nothing of the traumas of the early twentieth Century. A new generation fully formed within the Fordist mode of accumulation and the post-war settlement that brought with it new demands and aspirations - a new revolt of the mass worker. At their most radical these aspirations did not concern the question of who controlled the work process but constituted a revolt against work and the commodity form itself!

Against this, capital's immediate reaction was to recuperate such revolutionary demands and aspirations by making material and economic concessions that preserved the wage-relation and the commodity-form. Images of the revolution were sold back to the would-be revolutionary rebels in the form of rock music to t-shirts, the wildcat strikers were granted wage rises and more free time, while more was spent on public services and various restrictive social legislation was liberalised.

Yet while making concessions to the working class succeeded in diffusing the immediate threat to capital's very existence, it could not be a long term solution. Selling the revolution back to the would-be revolutionaries could only be a short term palliative which threatened to stimulate demands for the real thing once its inauthenticity had become apparent, while liberal reforms threatened to undermine the long term social discipline needed to ensure a productive working class. At the same time, conceding wage increases above the growth in the productivity of labour and allowing the 'social wage' to balloon out of control could only result in a serious profit squeeze.

Amongst all the diffuse complaints of the bourgeoisie concerning declining moral standards, disrespect to authority, the threat to the right to manage, it was the threat to profit, as always, that galvanised and organised their response to the resurgence of the proletariat. Indeed, the squeeze on profits caused by rising wages, combined with the rising organic composition of capital resulting from two decades of sustained capital accumulation, began to undermine the general rate of profit thus producing a serious crisis in the accumulation of capital in the Western Bloc. Capital had to take radical action.

In order to both circumvent and undermine the bastions of working class power that had become entrenched within the development of Fordism in the industrialised West, capital took up a threefold strategy of restructuring. In the old established industries it sought to completely re-organise and, wherever possible, to automate the existing labour process. A strategy exemplified by the automation of the Fiat production process in response to the militancy of the Italian car workers. Secondly, capital shifted into new industries, such as information technology, electronics and the so-called service sector, where fresh labour relations could be established. Thirdly, capital took flight to the more developed regions of the now long-neglected third world.

Whereas the first two forms of restructuring for the most part involved a long term commitment, capital flight offered a much more immediate response that became increasingly attractive as the crisis in Atlantic axis gathered pace. Indeed, throughout the 1970s, galvanising the emergent autonomy of international money capital, capital flooded into certain selected parts of the Third World giving rise to what became known as the newly industrialising countries (NICs). A process that was greatly accelerated following the dramatic oil price hike of 1974 which served to liquidate and then divert huge sums of capital away from industrial capital, which was committed to various national economies within the Atlantic axis, into the hands of the banks and the international circuits of money capital that owed little or no allegiance to any state.

However, this massive capital flight of the 1970s undermined the very conditions of its own realisation. Accumulation in NICs still depended on sustained accumulation in the main poles of global accumulation in the West. Yet the very flight of capital to the NICs undermined this very sustained accumulation in the West upon which its realisation depended. By the end of the decade the flight of capital, which had amounted to a virtual 'investment strike' in countries such as Britain, had precipitated a recession in all of the Western economies which necessarily brought with it a distinct downturn in world trade.

Those Third World economies that had borrowed heavily from the major banks and finance houses to finance rapid accumulation and development now found that the expected growth in exports necessary to pay for interest on such loans failed to materialise. This together with rising interest triggered the Third World debt crisis that came to dominate international finance throughout the 1980s.

Through strenuous efforts on the part of the IMF and the World Bank, backed by inter-government co-ordination amongst the industrial powers, the complete collapse of the international banking system was narrowly averted. Yet, at least for the time being, the attempt to out-flank the working class in the industrial countries through global capital flight had run up against its own inherent barriers.

But while the strategy of capital flight had run into its own insurmountable barriers it did serve to impose the new economic reality of the dominance of global finance capital and in doing so laid the ground for the further development of capital restructuring against the working class in industrialised economies. With the economic crisis of the early 1980s it became clear that economic policy had to be tailored to the demands of global money-capital.

The distinct national economies were now disintegrating as the circuits of international money-capital became increasingly autonomous from state regulation. As a consequence, government after government throughout the industrialised West began to abandon Keynesian economic policies in favour of monetarism as each tried to attract footloose international money-capital with escalating interest rates and disinflationary economic policies. As a result each government was obliged - whether socialist or conservative - to organise a concerted counter-offensive against the gains of the working class of the previous decade. Under the threat of mass unemployment, each sought to hold wages down and slash public spending on the social wage.

However, it must be said that this concerted counter-offensive against the working class in the industrialised economies has paled into insignificance compared with the onslaught on the working class in many Third World countries brought about by the solution imposed by international money-capital to the Third World debt crisis. Escalating interest payments have meant that throughout the 1980s huge amounts of surpus-value have been transferred to the industrial economies from the Third World. Even now, after much of the Third World debt has been written off it has been calculated that the net transfer is more than $50 billion per year.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. In order to service their debts Third World economies have been obliged to maximise their exports at all costs. As a consequence, the price of primary commodities, which make up a substantial proportion of the Third World's export earnings, have plummeted as the world market has becomes flooded by Third World economies competing with other to export. Thus even non-NICs that did not build up such massive debts during the 70s have been badly hit.

The collapse in prices for primary commodities, together with debt servicing, has involved a massive attack on working class living standards. While much of Africa is on the verge of mass starvation, the working class in countries such as Brazil and Mexico have seen their wages cut by between a third and half in real terms over the last decade.

The massive increase in the rate of exploitation in the Third World, together with the counter-offensive in the industrial economies that has resulted in a renegotiation of the post-war settlement, laid the basis for the renewed acceleration of capital accumulation in the 1980s. But as the present stagnation of the world economy shows the crisis of capital accumulation is far from being solved.

The New Economic Reality of Global Finance Capital

So, the decline of US hegemony and capital's attempt to outflank and force back the resurgent proletariat within the old Atlantic axis has led, in the past twenty years, to the emergence of the new economic reality of global finance capital and the disintegration of the distinct national economies that underpinned the Old World Order. With the disintegration of the national economies has come the decline in the efficacy of state action to regulate capital accumulation. As billions of dollars swish around the globe at the touch of button in search of ever greater profits and interest, all 'Chinese walls' are raised to the ground. All is reduced to the common standard of abstract profit. This movement of capital at its most abstract demands that all should be subordinated to the most productive of profit.

Yet the movement of abstract money-capital, for all its instantaneous freedom to roam the world, ultimately depends on the extraction of surplus-value in concrete labour-processes carried out in the context of social and political constraints. With the decline in state regulation the threat of serious dislocation, of devastating financial crashes becomes ever more probable.

In response to such dislocations we have seen the emergence of ad hoc interstate co-ordination on a global level - such as the G7 summits which bring together the major western industrial powers - so as to guide global markets back to positions coherent with economic 'fundamentals'. At the same time, we have also seen the development of the three regional blocs that have emerged in an effort to consolidate capital accumulation at a supra-national level.

However, the emergence of this new economic reality of global finance capital is still at an early stage. Its development has been held in check by two distinct factors. Firstly, the old confrontation between the USA and the USSR has meant that, despite the relative decline in USA's economic hegemony, the USA was still able and willing to play a leading role within the Western Bloc.

>From the very inception of the post-war era, the 'threat of Communism' has served to mobilise the diverse fractions of the American bourgeoisie to pursue a common policy of enlightened self-interest and take an active role in regulating the conditions for the world accumulation of capital. It was this very 'threat of Communism' which mobilised the enormous Marshall Aid programme of the immediate post-war years that served to rebuild Europe. And it was this self same 'threat' that up until recently meant that the USA was prepared to exclude agriculture from its insistence on free trade, and thereby tolerate the huge subsides given to the farmers of Western Europe and Japan at the expense of the export potential of its own farmers. Such subsidies being seen as necessary to support a substantial number of conservative small farmers as a bulwark against the electoral success of the various 'Communist' and Socialist Parties in Japan and Europe.

With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc there is little except the threat of Islamic Fundamentalism to mobilise the American bourgeoisie for anything more than their most immediately apparent common self-interest. As America's negative response to the recent World Environmental Conference in Brazil and its dismal response to the crisis in the erstwhile Soviet Union clearly demonstrates, the US government is increasingly unwilling to take a leadership role in the world. The American bourgeoisie is now increasingly restricted to its own immediate self-interests, subordinating all its efforts to its growing economic competition with Japan in accordance with the dictates of the new economic reality.

The second check on the emergence of the new economic reality has been the overhang of Third World debt. The huge debts of the Third World have meant that global finance capital has been largely restricted to the industrialised West. As a consequence, the huge profit potential of countries such as Brazil have so far been left untapped. But this huge overhang of debt is being progressively wound down. This check on the movement of international finance capital, that has gone a long way in mitigating the effects on the working class in Western Europe, is beginning to be removed. A prospect that points towards an intensification of global competition, particularly between the three poles of accumulation.

With the prospect of increased global competition within the New World Order it would seem that Japan and its Pacific hinterland has a clear head start. With real investment twice as high per worker as that of both Europe and the USA, and its dynamic links with the rapidly expanding NICs of the Pacific such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, the Japanese Pacific Bloc seems to be streets ahead.

But the USA and the North American Bloc is in hot pursuit. The important defeat of the American working class during the Reagan years has meant that wages over the last ten years have been cut in real terms to levels not seen since the 1950s.

Europe on the other hand has been lagging behind. Although the European bourgeoisie has been able claw back many of the gains of the working class of the previous decade and in many cases has been able to hold wages constant in real terms for most of the 1980s, it has so far failed to successfully impose Japanese style flexible labour relations nor has it been able to cut real wages to the extent that has been seen in the USA. It is in this context of the European bourgeoisie's response to the emerging new economic reality and the new world order that we must examine the question of European unity.

The Question of Europe

In the face of the growing competition from Japan and America the emerging European Bloc faces its own distinct and peculiar problems. First and foremost, Europe faces an entrenched working class that has grown accustomed to particularly generous post-war settlements. While most Western European governments have succeeded in holding down wages and introducing monetarist policies they have failed to impose large scale wage cuts like those imposed in the USA, nor have Western European managements succeeded in obtaining 'flexible labour practices' that would be on par with those obtained in Japan. Instead the Western European bourgeoisie has been obliged to tread very warily lest it awaken the wrath of its proletarian masses. A danger that has been repeatedly underlined in various instances through the 1980s: from the miners strike and the riots of 1981 and 85 in the UK, the often violent strikes by Spanish Dockers and French steel workers, the general strikes of public sector workers in Belgium and Denmark, the emergence of militant rank and file COBAS in Italy in the mid-80's, and so on.

Secondly, Europe is made up of a number of small nations, none of which has an overwhelming economic dominance. Of course the major economic power in Europe has been West Germany, but faced with the formidable economic power of France, Italy and even the UK, Germany has been unable to dominate the European pole of accumulation as the USA can that of North America or Japan that of the Pacific. In the absence of an overwhelmingly dominant state the emerging European Bloc has tended to coalesce around the supra-national organisation of the EEC. Yet this itself has caused important problems in the process of consolidating Europe as a distinct pole of accumulation. Without a single dominant state which can unify a programme and impose it on subordinated states as is the case elsewhere, the emergent European bourgeoisie has been riven by competing nationally defined interests that have repeatedly thwarted its development as a cohesive bloc in competition with those of the USA and Japan.

Thirdly, up until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Europe lacked an extensive economic periphery. While the USA had central America on its borders as a source of cheap and compliant labour and Japan had the enormous populations of South East Asia, Europe was confined to relatively underpopulated and politically unstable regions of North Africa and Asia Minor.

Germany

The fall of the Eastern Bloc has, however, opened up new possibilities for Western Europe as a distinct pole of global capital accumulation and particularly for Germany's leading role within it. Ever since its unification in the 1870s Germany has been a central European power, with German capital flowing equally eastwards as it did westwards. Yet the division of both Germany and Europe following the Second World War forced West German capital into the arms of its western neighbours as West Germany became integrated into the Atlantic axis.

However, even as early as the 1970s, exploiting the detente between the USA and USSR, West Germany had begun to make its rapprochement with East Germany and Eastern Europe through the policy of Ostpolitik which led to substantial credits being made by West German banks to the governments of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of Eastern Europe, West Germany did not hesitate at the opportunity of reunification. Indeed a united Germany offered the Western German bourgeoisie a golden opportunity to break out of its impasse.

The economic reunification of Germany hinged on the exchange rate that was to be established between the West German Deutschmark (DM) and the East German Ostmark (OM). The rate eventually set was 1 DM for 2 OM, with a limited 1-to-1 exchange for private individuals. This exchange rate substantially overvalued the Ostmark - a more realistic exchange rate being somewhere between DM 1 : 4 OM to as low as 1DM to 10 OM - as the Bundesbank and other financial commentators pointed out at the time. Butthis was no mistake.

By overvaluing the Ostmark the German government no doubt gained temporary popularity in the east as East Germans found their savings could buy ample quantities of long coveted western consumer goods, a popularity reflected in Chancellor Kohl's triumph in the first post-unification elections. But more importantly to the German bourgeoisie an overvalued Ostmark first of all created the basis for an East German petit-bourgoisie which was necessary for the extension of a 'market economy' to the east. Those East Germans that had large savings of Ostmarks could cash them in and find they had a substantial amount of Deutschmarks that could then serve as a starting capital for a small business or to buy shares in newly privatised industries.

What is more, East Germany, even more than the rest of Eastern Europe, had a plentiful supply of cheap but educated and skilled labour. However, the working class in East Germany, as in the rest of the old Eastern Bloc, tended to be adverse to hard work: the BR ethos of 'we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us' pervaded much of its industry. By imposing an overvalued Ostmark, East German industry was made hopelessly uncompetitive. Unable to compete, East German firms would have no option but to throw millions out of work and sell out to West German capital. This short sharp shock of mass unemployment would then serve to discipline the East German working class to accept Western style work discipline.

A disciplined and cheap East German labour force would then serve as a powerful competitor to the West German working class. The entrenched power of the West German working class, indeed that of the working class of Western Europe as whole, could thereby be undercut, opening the way for substantial cuts in both the private and the social wage to match the competitive edge of both Japan and the USA.

Indeed such a strategy would have established the newly unified Germany as the economic power in Europe and would have gone a long way in overcoming the problems of the consolidation of the European pole of global capital accumulation. However, the strategy has gone awry. The attempt to impose the short sharp shock on the East German working class was met by a wave of strikes and demonstrations. Faced with mass social unrest, the German government was forced to back down and concede commitments to raise East German wage levels to West German levels within less than three years and has repeatedly been obliged to extend employment support schemes. Although the German government has been able to sweep away various food and rent subsidies to the East German working class the 'cost of unification' imposed by working class resistance have been 'far higher than expected'.

The German government has sought to shift these costs onto the West German working class by restricting wage increases, but again, in the face of mass public and private sector strikes this spring, they have been obliged to back down. The promise of German unification is rapidly turning into a nightmare for the German bourgeoisie.

France, Italy and the rest of the EEC

The threat of the emergence of a Greater Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent process of German unification, greatly alarmed the other continental powers in Western Europe and the EEC. Fearing that the new Germany would break free of the EEC in order to establish itself as the central European power economically dominating the whole of Europe, both East and West, the other continental states of the EEC hastened to commit Germany to the process of economic and eventual political unification of Western Europe.

Although accelerating the process of unification meant that the rest of the EEC had to make important concessions to Germany as to the structure of the EEC and the exemplary role of the Bundesbank in monetary policy, it was clearly better to become subordinated to the dictates of Germany through the structure of the EEC where various governments would retain a say, rather than be subordinated de facto by Germany's growing economic might. This was particularly true for the more peripheral economies such as those of Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Greece.

The emergence of a unified market and eventually a single European currency could only unleash a process of concentration and centralisation of capital that would lead to an economic polarisation between the rich and poor regions of Europe; but if such a process was instituted politically through the EEC then it would necessarily involve compensatory financial transfers to the poorer nations. If, on the other hand, the Deutschmark eventually was allowed to became the de facto single currency then there would be no such compensation. The weaker EEC states would be left to their own fate on the verge of a newly emergent Third World of Europe.

So, faced with the prospect of being overwhelmed by the growing competition from Japan and America and faced with the new realities of both the dominance of international money-capital and the post-Cold War world the Western European governments had little choice but to accept the imperative for economic unification. What is more, the fear on the part of most of those governments within the EEC of the implications of a unified Germany impressed upon them the importance of EEC as the political vehicle for such economic unification. Hence the acceleration of the process of European unification through the EEC that we have seen in the last few years culminating with the Maastricht Treaty last year.

However, the breakneck speed with which the EEC is now heading towards economic unification has served to raise serious questions amongst many within the European bourgeoisie who are now having to face up to its implications. The 'convergence conditions' of the Maastricht Treaty has committed the bourgeoisie of the EEC to take a hard and resolute line in the face of European proletariat. If they are not to be left behind in the process of European unification, the signatories of the Maastricht Treaty are committed to meet strict and onerous monetary targets. These targets demand that public spending should not exceed 3% of each economies GDP, that the total National Debt should not exceed 60% of GDP and that inflation should be brought with a couple of percentage points of the lowest in the EEC. All of which imply for most economies of the EEC severe cuts in the social wage and strenuous efforts in holding down wage levels. Hence, in the absence of a world-wide economic boom, the resolute commitment to these 'convergence conditions' can only lead to an outright confrontation with the working class throughout most of the EEC.

Yet, at the same time, such a commitment to these convergence conditions, and indeed eventual monetary union, both removes the economic flexibility each individual government has in diffusing class confrontation, and serves to undermine nationalist sentiment that has proved such an important element in maintaining social cohesion in Europe for more than hundred years. Let us briefly consider these two important implications in turn.

Under the old Keynesian policy regime, governments could always defuse particular class confrontations by relaxing monetary and fiscal policies and maintain international competitiveness through a subsequent devaluation of the currency. In this way the bourgeoisie was always able to make a tactical retreat if the going got too tough in the hope that any concession could be clawed back at a later date. (Of course this always held the danger that a series of 'tactical retreats' would turn into a full scale rout, as it threatened to do frequently in the '70s.)

In establishing the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in the late seventies, most EEC governments committed themselves to taking a tough and unified stance by tying the exchange rate of their currencies to the Deutschmark and allowing only occasional realignments within the ERM. Following the Maastricht Treaty, not only is devaluation increasingly ruled out even in the most exceptional circumstances - eventually becoming impossible with the introduction of the single currency at the end of the century - but fiscal and monetary policy are to be increasingly circumscribed by the need to meet its various 'convergence conditions'. Hence, with the Maastricht Treaty, the governments of the EEC are now committed to progressively surrendering their flexibility and room for manoeuvre - their 'political sovereignty' - in their confrontations with the working class.

But many in the European bourgeoisie not only fear that the commitment to a hard and unified stance against the proletariat will restrict their room for manoeuvre and prove not only a hard but brittle unity, but that the Maastricht Treaty will ultimately rob them of the most effective weapon - nationalism. As Nicholas Ridley revealed most clearly in his outburst against the Germans, what many of the bourgeoisie fear is that while the working class may accept austerity measures imposed by their 'own' ruling class 'for the sake of the nation' that has been long and painfully constructed over more than a hundred years, they are less likely to go along with austerity measures that originate from Brussels or the Bundesbank.

This fear is shared by both the Left and Right of the bourgeois political spectrum and has led to increasing opposition to the Maastricht Treaty and the present course of European unification. In the face of accelerated European unification and its threat to 'national sovereignty and identity' the Right has mobilised nationalist sentiment. A mobilisation that has become most apparent with the rise of the far Right parties in Germany and France, and which has no doubt drawn strength from the fears of many working class people with the undermining of the nationally defined post-war settlements.

While the Right is opposed to the Maastricht Treaty because it sees European unity as undermining the working class identity with its 'own' bourgeoisie through the nation, the Left oppose the Maastricht Treaty on the grounds that it merely lays the basis for a bankers Europe run by bankers. For them, what is needed is the construction of a new European identity, perhaps buttressed by various sub-national identities (eg of the Scotland in Europe ilk), that can appeal to working class loyalties, built on filling the 'democratic deficit' (greater powers to the European parliament) and a European social settlement (eg through the strengthening of the social chapter). In other words, what they demand is a bankers Europe run by a new European intelligensia.

Britain

These divisions in the west European bourgeoisie are reflected in British ruling class circles, as is evident in the deep divisions within both the Tory and Labour Parties over the issue of Europe. But these divisions are further complicated by the peculiarity of Britain's position.

The British bourgeoisie have always maintained an aloof and detached attitude towards the rest of Europe. The legacy of being the first industrial capitalist power, which gave Britain hegemony over the world market throughout much of the last century, has left the British bourgeoisie with a distinctly global outlook and interests. Yet to understand the present divisions within the British bourgeoisie over Europe we must briefly reconsider the last 40 years with respect to Britain.

Unlike much of mainland Europe, Britain did not experience the devastating dislocations brought about by invasion and modern warfare on its soil. As a consequence it was far more difficult to sweep away many of the old pre-war social relations and institutional structures to make way for the post-war reconstruction around Fordism and social democracy. This had important implications for the development of Britain in the post-war era.

This not only meant the preservation of antiquated traditions and culture in social life, but that at the point of production many of the old restrictive practices that had built up over previous decades of monopoly capitalism remained intact and even incorporated intothe new Fordist industries. While there emerged distinct move towards a Fordist style national collective bargaining in most industries, which was conducted on behalf of the workers by professional trade union officials, shop-stewards at a plant level still retained an extensive role in negotiating piece rates, the maintenance of particular working practices, and lines of demarcation, which served to restrict the full development of Fordist control of production.

Unwilling to confront the entrenched power of the shop stewards, British capitalists tended to invest abroad wherever possible, leaving British industry with increasingly antiquated and uncompetitive plant and machinery. A response that led to the continuing decline of Britain as an industrial power through the post-war decades.

It was such peculiarities of post-war Britain which gave form to the particular expressions of the proletarian offensive of the 60's and 70's in this country. On the one hand there emerged the distinctly cultural 'youth revolt' against the 'quaint' yet stifling Victorianism that dominated British life and culture. A revolt that, unlike elsewhere in Europe, was largely separated from the questions of class and the economy. On the other hand there was the resurgence in the militancy of the shop stewards movement that was very much of the 'economic' and which found its expression in wave after wave of wildcat strikes and 'secondary "sympathy" actions'.

This overt separation of the largely cultural 'youth revolt' from the economic struggle at on the shop floor meant that the proletarian offensive was far less explosive in Britain than it was to prove to be in for example France and Italy, where the politicisation went much further resulting in the events of May '68 and the 'Hot Autumn' of '69 respectively. Yet while it was relatively easy for the British state and capital to contain the proletarian revolt within the limits of the commodity and the wage relation it could only do so by accelerating Britain's economic decline. This reached crisis point by the end of the 1970s.

The 'winter of discontent' of '78/'79 brought home to the British ruling classes more than anything else the precarious state of the British economy beset by the 'English disease' of 'bloody minded workers' that had made Britain the 'sick man of Europe'. The policy of the Labour government, which had successfully defused the class confrontations of the early '70s and, like other governments of Western Europe, had begun cautiously, and rather reluctantly, to adopt monetarist policies in an effort to claw back the gains made by the working class in the previous decade without at the same time destroying the social consensus, had now come to a dead end. It had become clear that if Britain was to remain a major area of capital accumulation far more radical action had to be taken than that being pursued elsewhere in Western Europe. The election of Thatcher in 1979 cleared the way for such radical action.

Rallying the bourgeoisie behind her, Thatcher began a sustained offensive against the working class. Armed with mass unemployment exacerbated by high interest rates and a grossly overvalued pound, Thatcher took on and defeated various sections of the working class one by one. The steel workers, the health workers, the railway workers, the miners, the printers; each victory served to galvanise the bourgeoisie to sweep away the restrictions on management and ruthlessly impose redundancies and new working practices. As a result the overmanning and restrictive practices that had constrained the profitablity of British industry for decades were swept away during the 1980s.

Thatcher's strategy of uncompromising confrontation was undoubtedly a highly risky one for the British bourgeoisie, and more than once it nearly came a cropper. Indeed, following the riots of July '81 and an impending miners strike it was only by playing the ultimate card of jingoistic nationalism with the Falklands war that Thatcher kept on course in her first term (an episode that was to underline the importance of nationalism in the minds of many of the British bourgeoisie); while despite five years preparation Thatcher's victory over the miners in '84 was far from certain.

Yet the success of Thatcher's counter-offensive fed on itself. The sweeping away of restrictive practices etc allowed a massive increase in the intensity of labour. This meant that capitalists could extract more surplus-value, and thus higher profits, while at the same time as conceding higher wages. As a consequence, for those that escaped the advance of mass unemployment and the low wage economy, wages have far outstripped prices throughout the 1980s. This, combined with income tax cuts and easy credit has allowed the Tories to divide the working class and thereby build a new conservative social consensus built around the infamous 'Essex Man'. A consensus that has ensured the continuing electoral success of the Tory Party.

Such was the success of the Thatcher's strategy that in the euphoria of her third election victory and in the midst of the first flush of the late '80s yuppie boom, the Tories became convinced that they could maintain, if not accelerate the momentum of the Thatcher counter-offensive almost indefinetly. They believed that they could continue to push back the working class and repeatedly re-negotiate the post-war settlement so as to eventually Americanise British society and Japanify production. As a consequence they were confident that Britain would become the land of ever rising profits and, given that the big bang had reaffirmed London as the third pillar in the world of international finance, Britain could compete with the best in the world as a centre for capital accumulation.

This confidence shaped the Tory Party's attitude to Europe at the crucial time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thatcher was happy to see freer markets, particularly if they could be broadened to Eastern Europe, but was opposed to any move towards economic or political unification that would inhibit the momentum of her counter-offensive. She was resolutely opposed, as she repeatedly made clear, to 'socialism through the back door' that would impose the timidity of the European bourgeoisie on her policies for Britain. The Tory government therefore sought to stall any moves towards EEC unification.

However, Thatcher's semi-detached attitude towards Europe was to become increasingly untenable for all but the most fanatical of Thatcherites. Facing the stampede towards European unity which followed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the British state soon found itself being forced to choose between being left behind on the margins of the new Europe or else making a commitment to its process of unity. Increasingly isolated and unable to stall or dilute European unification, Thatcher's preferred option was to go it alone and preserve 'Britain's sovereignty' so as to press ahead with her Americanisation and Japanification.

Yet such an option now looked increasingly unpalatable. Commentators on the Left of the British bourgeoisie had long pointed out that the cost of Thatcher's success had been the decimation of Britain's manufacturing base and a failure to reverse the chronic lack of real investment in plant and machinery. This weakness in the British economy soon became evident with the dramatic rise in the balance of payments deficit that accompanied the late '80s boom. For the first time in a hundred years Britain's balance of trade in manufactures went into the red. At the same time the great stock market crash of 1987 reminded all of the perilous nature of the high seas of international finance on which Thatcher had hoped to sail single-handedly.

With Thatcher's economic 'miracle' increasingly being revealed as a 'mirage', the government was forced to seek the protection of the Europe. To avoid escalating interest rates and to bolster international financiers confidence in Britain the Tory government was eventually obliged to seek to the protection of the EEC by joining the 'Exchange Rate Mechanism' - much to Maggie's chagrin.

But what more than anything else sunk Thatcher's counter-offensive was working class resistance. Within weeks of the triumphant celebrations of ten years of Tory rule which proclaimed the lowest level of strikes for fifty years came the wave of public sector strikes of the Summer of '89. London was repeatedly brought to a halt by wildcat strikes by underground workers and industrial action on the buses, oil production was disrupted by wildcat strikes by offshore oil workers, solid one-day strikes on British Rail were then followed by more than a million local government workers coming out on successive one-day strikes throughout the country.

While these strikes did not result in major victories over the government, they did not result in a major defeats either. If nothing else they began to undermine the apparent invincibility of the Thatcher regime. Indeed it was only through a long and perhaps pyrrhic victory over the ambulance drivers six months later that the government was able to regain its hardline reputation and restore some of the confidence of international capital. But no sooner had it done so than it had to face the emergence of the campaign against the poll tax.

The mass campaign against the poll tax, which exploded into the civil disorder of March 1990 and the biggest movement of civil disobedience ever seen in the UK, finally made it clear to the British ruling class that the momentum of the Thatcher counter-revolution could not be maintained. There was little option but to back off and slow down. As a consequence the policy of making Britain an offshore haven of profitablity outside mainstream Europe was no longer appeared as feasible. As the Europhiles in the both the Tory Party and the Labour Party made clear, the British bourgeoisie had no option but to sink or swim with its counterparts in European Community. For all her great service to the British bourgeoisie Thatcher had to be dumped.

Conclusion

The dilemma facing the British state is now the dilemma facing the bourgeoisie over Europe as a whole - it is the question of organising class rule in the New World Order and within the new economic reality of global finance capital. A dilemma made all the more acute by the current world economic recession that is threatening to turn into a full scale economic slump.

While Norman Lamont waits for Godot, in the form of an economic recovery that never comes, and while the more idiotic backbench Tories dream of Britain overhauling Germany as the economic anchor of Europe with the eventual realisation of zero inflation, more and more of the British bourgeoisie are becoming alarmed at the prospect of prolonged stagnation or even of a full scale economic slump. With the pound locked into the ERM and the Government committed to European economic convergence the British bourgeoisie face the continued world economic stagnation with little room for manoeuvre.

With the devaluation of the pound ruled out and interest rates dictated by the Bundesbank both the government and British capitalists are being driven towards a full scale confrontation with the British working class. Industrial capitalists face increased foreign competition handicapped by an overvalued pound and crippled by extortionate real interest rates, and as a result are being forced to hold wages down by throwing thousands onto the dole. Consequently the government faces an exploding budget deficit.

Indeed, at the time of the election last March, the government forecast an alarmingly sharp rise in the annual budget deficit to around £30 billion (5%-6% of GDP), and roundly denounced the Labour Party's modest, if not pathetic, proposals to add a few extra billion to public spending as wildly profligate. Yet such forecasts were based on the rosy assumptions of an imminent economic recovery. Four months later such assumptions have become laughable. With the prospect of a continuing decline in tax revenues and rising social security payments due to the prolonged economic recession, most economicforecasters are now predicting the budget deficit to rise to at least £40 billion (7%-8% of GDP) on current trends! If the Government is to contain its budget deficit to a level that it can confidently finance, let alone reduce it to the levels demanded by the Maastricht convergence conditions for EMU, then it has no option other than to make further substantial cuts to public spending, and may even have to raise taxes despite all its election promises.

Meanwhile, Major's attempt to salvage the new social consenus that Thatcher built around the dream of the 'property owning democracy' is beginning to flounder. The hope of reducing interest rates, and thus mortgage rates, has run aground against the Bundesbank's insistence on tight monetary policies. With falling house prices, restricted wage increases and rising unemployment there will be little respite in the mounting number of house repossessions in the coming year or so. The 'property owning democracy' has turned into a nightmare for increasing numbers of working class people and nice Mr Major's assurances of a new dawn are now being revealed as all too false.

The next few years will therefore be a testing time for both the government and the British bourgeoisie. With their room for manoeuvre restricted much will depend on the reaction of the working class to the coming wave of attacks. However, what has become clear following the anti-poll tax campaign is how weak the Labour Party has become as a means of both controlling and containing class conflict. Outside of Scotland and its few remaining strongholds in the cities of northern England and Wales, the Labour Party has lost all connection with the working class. Indeed, it is rapidly becoming a party of the middle class, a process that can only accelerate under the leadership of John Smith. In transforming itself into a 'modern social democratic party' on the European model, and as such fully committed to the bankers' Europe of Delors, the Labour Party has as little hope of controlling future social unrest as the French Socialist and Communist Parties had in controlling the recent lorry drivers blockades!

Lessons From The Struggle Against The Gulf War

The slaughter by the Americans and their allies of the deserting Iraqi troops represented a defeat for the international proletariat. This article shows how class struggle militants in Britain, by positing the class war ideally rather than practically, allowed the anti-war movement to be dominated by ineffective left-liberal sentiments and tactics.

A new cycle of working class struggle is tentatively emerging in continental Europe over austerity measures required by the Maastricht Treaty. But here in Britain any optimistic anticipation of the prospect of struggles is tempered by the shadow of a recent defeat. For since the historic and inspirational turning point of the poll tax rebellion, the resurrection of autonomous and uncompromised class hatred in Trafalgar Square and the mass refusal of austerity, has come the defeat of the anti-war movement.

The Gulf War may not have had an effect on the working class's ability to wage defensive struggles in response to coming offensives, but the revolutionary Left have still to come to terms with our failure to prevent the successful slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi proletarians. It is as if the blood of those thousands of Iraqi mutineers and deserters carpet-bombed on the road to Basra is somehow on our hands; the anti-war resistance in Iraq was so successful it rendered the Iraqi state incapable of defending its gains in Kuwait at all, while the impotence of the anti-war movement in the US and Britain virtually gave the murderous representatives of US/UK capital carte blanche to have Iraq bombed back into the Middle Ages.

In order to exorcise the ghost of this defeat we have to undertake a critical reappraisal of where the anti-war movement went wrong. Moreover, we have to reassess our own attempts to prevent the war and how we influenced the strategy pursued by the anti-war movement as a whole. It is not enough to say, as many who confined their opposition to grumbling over their pints must have done, that the outcome was inevitable, that the war couldn't be prevented, that we could never defeat the forces of war, backed by the UN, the police forces and the media. The Vietnam war is a recent enough reminder of how a seemingly omnipotent war-machine can be rendered impotent by concerted opposition amongst soldiers and the class from which they are drawn. And right up until the commencement of Operation Desert Storm, despite the propaganda which accompanied Operation Desert Shield and the lack of any effective redress to it by the anti-war movement, opinion polls suggested that around 50% of the population were opposed to military intervention. Not a bad foundation from which to build an active and effective opposition.

Our failure was not inevitable. Nor can it be solely blamed on the left-liberal leadership of the anti-war movement, for their success in controlling the movement reflected our inability to mount a successful challenge to the leadership, their positions, and most of all, their strategy. So, we have to look at our own role in resisting the war, what we did right and wrong, the strengths and weaknesses of our strategy.

Anti-war Strategy

The experience of our class has shown us how capitalist wars can be effectively opposed. For the sake of analytical clarity this opposition may be divided into three separate strategies which are in reality particular yet inter-related aspects of the overall struggle. These may be roughly defined as:

i) undermining support for the war by stressing the class antagonisms involved;

ii) actively sabotaging the state's ability to conduct a war and;

iii) precipitating a crisis 'at home'.

Let us consider these in turn.

i) Undermining the notion of a national interest.

The war in the Gulf has served to decimate a once combative oil producing proletariat, to reassert the role of the US as global policeman in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, and also to stimulate another round of capital accumulation based on military procurement. These results may well have been considered during the build up to the war, and could have been factors in deciding to pursue the aims of the Allies by military means rather than through sanctions. But the primary aim of the Allies was to resecure the flow of Kuwaiti oil revenue into the US and UK banking systems, essential for the financing of the US deficit. In other words, the war was fought for the interests of US and UK capital, for their need of injections of finance capital from Kuwait, which have amounted to $60 billion invested in the US alone.

On the other hand, it was to be the working class who would be made to pay the price for the war. The refusal of Iraqi troops to fight was not anticipated, so casualties amongst British as well as Iraqi troops were expected. On top of the despair of the families from whom they would have been taken, the working class as a whole was expected to suffer as NHS wards were to be denied to us in order to treat the troops. As it was, patients had operations cancelled in preparation for this eventuality.

Although the financial costs of the war have been largely recovered through reluctant contributions from Japan and Germany and other oil states such as Dubai, UAE etc, and the massive profits from subsequent arms sales to the region, the costs were always liable to be foisted onto the shoulders of the working class through higher taxes, cuts in public services, and price rises. The government also hoped for another 'Falklands' Factor', rallying a nation divided over the poll tax behind the flag of the bourgeoisie.

In order to successfully oppose the war it was crucial that the anti-war movement stress that the war was to be fought for the interests of the capitalist class alone, and to decisively situate itself in opposition to those interests. This could be done through the usual means of propaganda such as leaflets, banners, graffiti, fly-posting, public meetings, and through high profile actions.

Not only is this essential for building an opposition at home that knows why it opposes the war and can thus formulate tactics such as strikes and civil disorder which reflect the class basis of that opposition, but it is also essential to encourage 'disloyalty' amongst those troops expected to fight. Historical examples abound of desertions and mutinies making it impossible for rival capitalist interests to compete by means of war, not least in Vietnam where US troops were often more inclined to kill their officers than the supposed enemy. And there is evidence to indicate that a concerted refusal to fight in the Gulf War was not an impossibility. Even without the social unrest 'back home' that formed the backdrop to resistance in Vietnam, many troops refused to go to the Gulf, including at least 23 of the US's elite force, The Marines, who are currently in jail for desertion. There were also cases of warships en route to the Gulf being sabotaged . And Bush showed that he did not have absolute confidence in the loyalty of the US army when ammunition was taken away from all enlisted men and women on bases he visited during 'morale raising' trips to Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield.

Examples of this strategy were seen in Germany, both during the build-up to war and once it had started. In August of 1990 a live TV show debating the Gulf crisis was disrupted by anti-war protesters with a banner reading: "There's always German money in weapons when there's any slaughter in the world." And on January 21st 1991, anti-war protesters attempted to make clear in whose interest the war was being fought by blockading the entrance to the Frankfurt stock exchange and pelting the dealers with eggs and paint bombs.

ii) Sabotaging the war machine.

Fighting a war is huge logistical exercise requiring the coordinated movemen ts of troops, weapons, ammunition, and supplies from wherever they are stationed to wherever they are required. The ability of military commands to perform this operation is clearly dependent on a number of factors, including the reliability of those workers not required to fight but who are nonetheless essential for this logistical exercise, and if cooperative themselves, on their ability to function without interference. This presents many opportunities for sabotaging the war effort, and indeed there were a number of instances of such sabotage against the Gulf War. For example in August 1990, 4000 maintenance workers on US bases in Turkey went on strike for higher pay, thus deliberately hampering the war effort. And in France in September 1990, workers held up a ferry carrying troops to the Gulf, albeit for only 12 hours. In Italy there were attempts to blockade Malpanese airport near Milan in order to prevent it from being used to refuel USAF B-52's en route between bombing raids in Iraq and British bases.

In Germany frequent attempts were made to blockade military depots and barracks in order to disrupt the mobilisation for the war. Transport command supplies were also blocked, holding up the movement of the raw materials for the military bases of the British and American troops stationed in Munster, Bremerhaven, Frankfurt, Berlin and elsewhere. The tactic of disrupting the transportation of military supplies was also used in France on several occasions, and in Holland, where trains supplying troops in Germany were persistently sabotaged, derailed, and blockaded.

iii)Fermenting Crisis at Home.

The backdrop to the end of the Vietnam War, a result of the refusal of American conscripts to fight for their state, was a severe social crisis in the United States and Western Europe. One of the ways in which that crisis manifested itself was through civil disorder in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Footage of the riot in Grosvenor Square may look like a Keystone Cops movie compared with what Britain has seen in the last decade or so, but it was nevertheless an important moment in the international crisis which led the US State to pull out of Vietnam and confront the crisis it was suffering in its factories, streets, campuses and ghettoes.

Again, examples of this strategy were seen in opposition to the Gulf War. General strikes occurred in Pakistan, Italy, Turkey and Spain, although they seem to have been successfully restricted to one day only by union bureaucracies. A token 1/2 hour stoppage against the war occurred on January 18th 1991 at a firm in Bremen, Germany, and later that month, also in Germany, draft resisters forced to work as hospital orderlies went on a 3-day strike in opposition to the war.

Demonstrations against the war occurred virtually everywhere imaginable. And some of these, although not enough, spilled over into direct confrontations with the forces of the state. For example, in Bangladesh, police were forced to use batons to contain demonstrators on September 3rd 1990.

Waging Class War against the Bosses War...................

It can be seen from the above outline that there were a number of attempts, using various strategies, to wage the class war in continental Europe against the inter-capitalist war in the Gulf. One could no doubt find many other instances of anti-war resistance abroad if one was determined to search beyond these few examples which, despite a virtual media blackout on such activity, were available to the anti-war movement thanks to War Report, Counter Information , and a leaflet by B.M. Combustion .

One could criticize many of the actions which occurred as tokenistic, such as the one day strikes. But the point is that these actions, whether limited or exemplary, could never succeed in stopping the war unless they spread beyond those countries whose involvement in the war was relatively minor. Stopping the war meant that the class war against the Gulf war had to be taken up in those countries central to the UN backed coalition: the US and the UK.

...............Or not as the case may be

Early signs from the US were encouraging. On the 20th October 1990, 15,000 marched in New York and there were demonstrations in 15 other major cities. And US activists appeared willing and able to take direct action. A San Francisco TV station was disrupted, a cop car set alight on a demo, and the Golden Gate Bridge was blockaded on several occasions. These actions were not generalised however, and it appears that anti-war activity soon became dominated by left-liberal campaigners, of whom someone wrote in Echanges 66/67:

"They have brought their experiences with a vengeance into the new movement by demanding compromise with the status quo ideology and calling for protest within the context of peaceful obedience to the authorities so as to gain their respect. Many urge 'working through the system'. They tell us we must put pressure on elected representatives.....we must elect better representatives.....They urge that we 'support our troops', not hurt their feelings by criticising the job they do, and that we should express patriotism while criticising government policy. We must prove that we deserve to be listened to by obeying the rule of law and order, and by respecting the police".

This strategy of constitutional protest was an absolute failure. The attempt to base the opposition to the war on an alternative interpretation of the interests of US capital, and thus exploit the divisions which emerged within the US capitalist class, meant that Bush was given a free hand once Congress had voted in favour of military action and the bourgeoisie buried its differences and rallied to his support. The failure of the anti-war movement to root itself in a class opposition to the interests for which the war was to be fought can be measured by the overwhelming support for the war registered in opinion polls, even allowing for their notorious unreliability.

Here in Britain the anti-war movement registered its disapproval of the government's policy towards the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and, as in the US, sought to do so peacefully and constitutionally. Of course the anti-war movement was not a homogeneous mass, and contained within it many different perspectives united in their opposition to the war, many of which were fiercely critical of the CND/Tony Benn leadership. But the anti-war movement remained within the parameters set out by this leadership. These parameters derived from their political perspectives. They accepted the pre-supposition of a national interest. They accepted the legitimacy of the United Nations. They accepted the 'need' to re-establish the Kuwaiti regime's control over Kuwaiti oil. Their opposition to the war was thus based on a difference of opinion on how to achieve the goals of US/UK capital; they even advocated the pursuit of these goals by starving the Iraqi working class through sanctions.

As a result the anti-war leadership would never have countenanced the actions required for an effective opposition to the war. They wanted no repeats of the 1956 street battles in Whitehall against British intervention in Suez, a possibility they were only too aware of following the momentous re-emergence of class violence in Trafalgar Square only a few months before the Gulf crisis. The grip that the leadership maintained on the anti-war movement meant that it amounted to nothing more than a few peaceful marches to Hyde Park where any anger could be safely dissipated. No action was taken which challenged the authority of the state or undermined its ability to wage the war. The movement was confined to peaceful protest while the state was engaged in the mass slaughter of Iraqis.

We have not yet answered the question, however, as to how it was that the forces of pacifism and social democracy were able to contain the anti-war movement. It is not within the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive answer to this question, comprising as it would not only a critiqueof Trotskyism and anarchism, but also discussions of the psyche of the British working class and its experiences of wars. But we can start to answer the question by undertaking a critique of one group that should have mounted a challenge to the leadership of the anti-war movement: No War But the Class War.

No War But The Class War

NWBTCW was a loose collection of revolutionaries who came together in opposition to the Gulf War. As they clearly pointed out in their leaflets, their opposition to the war was firmly rooted in a class-analysis rather than some form of moralistic liberalism."We won't pay for the bosses war" was the headline on a leaflet distributed during the prelude to the war. "As in all bosses' wars, it's us who will be told to kill each other and die in the battlefields while those with most to gain from the war sit at home and count their profits " it continued. As well as providing the cannon fodder, "those of us not in the front line will have to pay in other ways..........it's us who will be told to tighten our belts and put up with cuts in jobs and wages."

NWBTCW also seemed to know what would be required for an effective opposition to the war: "Only escalating the class war can prevent the massacres of both war and peace. Strikes such as those by oil workers can not only make working conditions safer but can sabotage the national economy, making it harder to wage war. Struggles like that against the poll tax can also undermine national mobilisation towards war. Others can sabotage the war machine directly".

For various reasons however, NWBTCW limited itself to positing the class war ideally. Few, if any, steps were made towards actually realising it in practice. As Workers Scud pointed out, "a call for general class struggle opposition to the war became an emotional cushion". How and why this came to be will hopefully become clearer as we follow the evolution of NWBTCW through the unfolding of the Gulf War.

Resisting the build-up to War

Following the commencement of Operation Desert Shield in August 1990 NWBTCW was formed at a meeting in London to discuss ways of mounting an effective opposition to the war. Amongst those present were representatives from Hackney Solidarity Group, Anarchist Communist Federation, Class War, Anarchist Workers Group, Wildcat and assorted individuals including one of us from Brighton.

A proposal on the agenda was that we begin to organise a demonstration outside one of the major oil company offices in London. But rather than discussing this and other suitable actions the meeting soon became focussed on the fact that the AWG had adopted the Trotskyist line of supporting an Iraqi victory in the war. Their argument that they supported the Iraqi state militarily but not politically cut no ice with the rest of those present who pointed out that an Iraqi military success, in itself a virtual impossibility, could only be pursued by the imposition of military discipline on the Iraqi working class: suppressing the class struggle, shooting deserters and communists, torturing those who actively opposed the war etc.

The AWG were quite rightly expelled from the group. Had they not been there would have been endless problems over basic positions to be conveyed in the group's propaganda. With the rest of those present in agreement over the need to escalate the class struggle against the war in solidarity with the working class of Iraq, rather than implying that they should forsake their own struggle, the expulsion of the AWG should have allowed NWBTCW to press ahead with organising effective actions to sabotage the war effort. But as time went on it became clear that the meeting, and the argument with the AWG, had a different effect on those present. NWBTCW in many respects came to see its role as one of defending a class position on the war, rather than having a class position as a necessary but (in itself) insufficient prerequisite for taking practical steps to stop the war. Its concern with defining itself primarily against the position adopted by the various Trotskyist sects seemed to be at the expense of a practical challenge to the boundaries of peaceful constitutional protest imposed by the Benn/CND leadership.

Let us examine exactly how it was that this failure became manifested. Following the meeting the various groups and individuals involved threw themselves into the task of escalating the class struggle in order to undermine the mobilisation towards war. But rather than attempt this squarely on the terrain of anti-war resistance, as had been originally proposed, efforts were directed almost exclusively towards the on-going struggle against the poll tax.

Those of us in Brighton also directed our attention towards the struggle against the poll tax, and the important associated work of supporting poll tax prisoners. But the neglect of anti-war activity itself in the hope that confrontation with the state over the poll tax would be sufficient to counter the movement towards war must now be seen to have been a major mistake. It is obvious now, and indeed was clear at the time with the ditching of Thatcher, that the state was attempting to conduct a tactical retreat over the poll tax. Our attempt to turn their tactical retreat into a rout, and thus create a political climate in which the state would find it increasingly difficult to pursue the war was well intentioned, but there turned out to be no real practical way of pressing home our advantage and seeking out large-scale confrontations.

Only when the war actually began in January did the enormity of this tactical error become obvious. Not only had the rest ofNWBTCW also devoted their practical energies towards other struggles like the poll tax, but any sort of organisational work in preparation for the outbreak of the war had been entirely neglected. No plans had been laid for an immediate response to the start of the war such as a demo or an occupation. No efforts seem to have been made to make contacts with other groups, such as those who had been involved in Cruisewatch and the like, who would be prepared to take some form of direct action against the war. There was not even a decent network for communication between and throughout the various organisations and individuals who had been involved in the initial meeting. This haphazard approach to organisation continued through the duration of the war and served to compound the earlier mistakes.

The War Begins

As the pictures came through of the bombing of Baghdad, following the passing of the UN deadline for withdrawal, many people were filled with horror and suddenly became aware of the urgency of the situation. In Brighton there were spontaneous demonstrations, and in London anti-war protesters converged on Trafalgar Square. But it soon became blindingly obvious that the neglect of planning of any sort of autonomous direct action had proved costly. The CND network had already established itself as the focus for opposition to the war. The fact that we could not immediately provide any alternative focus for opposition to the war, a focus that would have been capable of developing increasingly effective tactics and drawing in ever-larger numbers, as the town hall riots had done with the poll tax struggle, meant that we had to start from scratch and begin by operating within the movement as it had become constituted under the guise of Tony Benn and CND. We had to find ways of starting from within the movement and carrying people beyond the boundaries set out by the leadership.

Not only had organisational matters been so neglected that we found ourselves in this position, but it soon transpired that NWBTCW was in a worse state than it had been in at the start. Meetings began but the venue was apparently switched a number of times without keeping people informed, and so it seems that many of the original participants were thereby excluded. Sectarianism or stupidity? Worse still, the person who had the contact list disappeared for most of the duration of the war, making coordinating and communication matters even more difficult. Indeed, we in Brighton did not receive any mailouts whatsoever from NWBTCW, despite providing a contact address at the inaugural meeting and making subsequent requests to be kept in touch.

This haphazard approach to organisation may now, however, be seen as symptomatic of the shift in the group's raison d'etre: The narrowed base was even less adequate for putting practical proposals into action, but was perfectly capable of putting together leaflets outlining the group's position and calling for escalated class struggle.

Here in Brighton we belatedly began to take action to sabotage the war effort. The local Committee to Stop the War in the Gulf, dominated by pacifists and supported by the SWP, had reduced anti-war resistance to "peace vigils", standing peacefully and if possible silently around a statue in the middle of town. Not surprisingly this inspired no one and went unnoticed by everyone. But a blockade/picket of the Territorial Army HQ was organised and attended by the NVDA elements in the peace movement, by hunt saboteurs, squatters and the members of Sussex Poll Tax Resisters. This was far more inspiring for those involved, spilling over into scuffles and forcing the TA to ring for the police, a van-load of whom arrived as we were leaving. A shame it had not been got together earlier as this type of action contained the seeds which could have grown into mass civil disorder.

There were various other low-key autonomous direct actions around the country, ranging from putting in the windows of Army Recruitment offices to occupying the toll booths of the Severn Bridge. But a national focus was needed, by neccessity in London, and all that was happening were the peaceful marches to Hyde Park, largely ignored by the media.

NWBTCW distributed a leaflet on the demonstration following the outbreak of the war entitled "Sabotage the War Effort!" Following a brief outline of mutinies in WW1, Vietnam and the Iran-Iraq war, it continued: "The war can and must be opposed on the home front as well as in the armed forces", and cited the attacks on munitions trains in Europe and the burning of a cop car and blocking of the bridge in San Francisco. Then it urged that "We can also refuse to pay for the war in any way by resisting attacks on our living standards- by carrying on refusing to pay the poll tax and other bills, by striking for more pay, by opposing cuts." NWBTCW wanted to keep the home fires burning, but evidently this was to take place away from the demos and over issues only indirectly related to the war. They had made no plans to try to make the demonstrations we were on anything other than peaceful and inconsequential.

On discovering a few days before the next national demonstration that NWBTCW had not worked out any practical initiatives for it, we desperately tried to figure out a way of stirring up some serious disorder on it. But attempts to find out the route of the march were fruitless, so we were unable to work out any potential targets for a lightning occupation, impromptu picket or well placed brick. So on the day before the demonstration we were forced to settle for producing a leaflet which we hoped might fire the imaginations of the demonstrators, particularly those grouped around NWBTCW. Under the heading "Class War Against The Oil War" and an introduction it declared:

"Already nearly 50% of the population opposes the war, but so far this massive opposition has remained largely passive. It will only succeed when it actively confronts the forces for war and once it goes beyond the boundaries, set out by CND and its friends, of peaceful constitutional 'protest'.......With much of the opposition to this war being censored by the mass media it is vital that we make our presence felt. It was a glimpse of our anger on the 31st of March last year that contributed to the downfall of Thatcher. Today we must show that anger again. We must refuse the state's right to define the nature of this demonstration. While they ask us to march peacefully between police lines they are murdering men, women and children."

Fighting talk is never enough, of course, so the reverse of the leaflet showed a suggestive map of central London locating the following buildings: the American Embassy, Shell Mex House, Esso House, Texaco HQ, Mobil Oil HQ, Vickers HQ, The Admiralty and the MOD. As it turned out the demonstration avoided all of these potential targets, only passing near to the American Embassy which was so heavily protected by police that it would have been the least desirable of them all. Still, we hoped that the leaflet might force NWBTCW to work something out for the next time. Just in case, however, we decided that we should formulate a concrete proposal of our own and attend the next NWBTCW meeting, to take place a week before the next national demonstration.

Just before the next meeting the Allied forces finally launched their ground offensive to retake Kuwait. The bombing campaign had continued for weeks, destroying residential areas, sewage plants, hospitals and other civilian as well as military targets, and now they were going to move in for the kill. We were all expecting to see the body bags donated by DuPont bringing the corpses back for burial. Once again we were filled with anger and a renewed sense of urgency. But at the NWBTCW meeting the discussion was primarily concerned with the necessary, but still insufficient, organisation of public meetings against the war and how to deal with Trotskyist hecklers. Then we put forward our proposal, and to the credit of those present, the urgency of the situation and the need to respond decisively was accepted.

We were to:

i) Mobilise our forces as best as possible. All NWBTCWcontacts and virtually every anarchist group in the country were to be informed of a meeting point near the main demo at which they were to converge at a specified time. It was to be made clear that we would move off immediately to take some unspecified form of direct action.

ii) Conduct a lightning occupation of Shell Mex House, only a few hundred yards from the main assembly point and with no visible means to prevent our access.

iii) Send others off to inform the gathering demonstrators of the occupation and pursuade many as possible to join us or help defend the occupation with a mass picket in The Strand.

iv) See how the situation evolved and respond accordingly.

We shall never know whether the plan would have worked in practice. It may have failed , or it may have been the moment at which the anti-war movement launched itself beyond its previous limits never to return. But we did not find out, for between the notification of contacts and the day of the demonstration the war was ended by the mass desertion of the Iraqi conscript army. The demonstration itself was small and dejected. But worse still, virtually no-one turned up at the secret assembly point aside from ourselves. It was a missed opportunity, for the first reports were already coming through of the heroic uprisings in southern Iraq; we could have at least discussed possible solidarity actions had there been enough of us. As it was those present were simply demoralised by the failure of others, and the rest of NWBTCW in particular, to turn up.

Conclusions

We made some serious tactical errors during our campaign against the Gulf War. We pinned our hopes on the anti-poll tax struggle, and left too much of the responsibility of organising autonomous resistance to the war to comrades in London. We have acknowledged our mistakes however, believing that self-criticism is an essential moment of revolutionary praxis. In print ing this article we hope to contribute to a similar process of self-criticism amongst others involved in NWBTCW, who will know much more about what actually happened within the group than us. This article should also help others who were not directly involved to learn from our mistakes.

To be fair to NWBTCW, no-one anticipated that the war would be over so quickly; we all underestimated the potential for revolt of the Iraqi army. Had the war continued and the corpses and wounded started arriving in Britain then NWBTCW may well have been in the front line of agitation against the closure of NHS wards for the war effort. And the anti-war movement may well have been galvanised by the deaths of British troops in a way it wasn't by the slaughter of Iraqi civilians. But NWBTCW must acknowledge that it failed consistently over a period of six months to do what was so desperately required. Various practical suggestions were made by various members, but were not put into practice. Not, it would seem, because other proposals were deemed to be more effective, but because the group was ultimately content to defend the right position, the historic class position in all its purity.

In other words, the NWBTCW group seems to have seen its role as a predominantly ideological one. The truly internationalist position had to be broadcast to the movement and the Trots had to be denounced or attacked, leaving the grip of social democracy and pacifism intact. Even when the CND/Benn leadership were threatening the RCP with the police because they refused to toe the patriotic line, NWBTCW were more concerned with getting into fisticuffs with the RCP than challenging CND's complicity with the state. For many years positions regarding the nature of the Soviet Union have served as the 'litmus test' for determining the 'authenticity' of groups within the British left that have claimed to be revolutionary. Was it the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declining relevance of these arguments that led to members of NWBTCW becoming preoccupied with distinguishing themselves from the rest of the ('always counter-revolutionary') Left?

We cannot do anything to change what happened during the Gulf War but we can learn from our mistakes. And with it looking increasingly likely that the British state will be involved in a joint attempt to intervene militarily in Yugoslavia, to ensure that the carve-up goes along the lines desired by German capital, we must be ready to make sure that they cannot get away with their bloody crusades so easily again.

Intakes: Some Critical Notes on Earth First!

Earth First! has begun to develop into a significant force within the British Green movement. We reprint an article by a dissident member who argues that its uncritical adoption of certain theoretical strands from the U.S.A. is at the expense of an understanding of capitalism and democracy.

Some Critical Notes on Earth First! ... from Within

[b]Editors' Introduction[/b]

Growing impatience and disillusionment with the reformist and elitist methods of organisations such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Green Party is leading many on the radical fringes of the Green movement to look towards a more direct action orientated politics.

This search for a new political orientation has resulted in the emergence Earth First!, which since it began in Britain little over two years ago has begun to grow into a significant radical force within the British Green Movement. Indeed, in the last six months Earth First! has begun to take off, with more than a dozen groups being established across the country. Earth First! groups have been at the forefront of organising demonstrations in Liverpool, Tilbury and Oxford against the import of tropical hardwoods, aswell as organising numerous local protests against the 'car economy' amongst other things and have already begun to gain a certain degree of noteriety within the national press.

However, while the direct action orientation of Earth First! is a welcome change from that of professional lobbying of mainstream ecology groups that see their grass roots supporters as simple fund raisers, the politics of Earth First! is, to say the least, confused. Earth First! originated in the USA and its import into the UK has brought with it a whole assortment of ideological baggage, much of which has little or no connection with political or social conditions in Britain.

We shall consider the crisis in the mainstream Green Movement and the politics of Earth First!, and their relevance to revolutionary politics in more detail in future issues of Aufheben. Here we publish an article written by a member of South Downs Earth First! that seeks to address the confusions in Earth First!'s politics as they have become manifest in the campaign against the M3 extention at Twyford Down. This article was originally written for the the Earth First! newsletter Action Updatebut was never published (whether this was because it was deemed 'too long', too theoretical,politically unacceptable or was simply lost (!) is unknown).

Lessons from Twyford Down so far

The extension of the M3 through Twyford Down has been Earth First!'s first opportunity in confronting the current motorway construction programme, which threatens to wreak further havoc in Britain's countryside and make room for even more of those noxious tin boxes that plague our cities and choke the air that we breath. However, apart from some unearned notoriety in the national press, Earth First!'s impact has, as yet, been far from impressive, a fact that demands that we take stock of our position - particularly with regards to other environmental groups.

Two other main groupings have been involved in opposing the M3 extension at Twyford Down. The first being the Twyford Down Association (TDA) which has organised the local opposition to this particular road scheme, the other being Friends of the Earth (FOE) which has opposed the M3 extension as part of its national anti-roads campaign. Let us consider the lessons from our relations to these two groupings in turn.

The Twyford Down Association

Winchester is one of the richest cities in the UK. It seems doubtful that in this Tory heartland any more than a small minority have anything more than a superficial and sentimental attachment to the surrounding countryside, an attachment, when it comes down to it, that is easily outweighed by the wealth and conveniences they owe to the 'car economy'. What is more, it seems unlikely that anymore than a handful of the people of Winchester have any experience of political protests, let alone of radical political action.

In such unfavourable circumstances for the development of a large scale local opposition to the M3 extension the TDA have exploited their contacts in high places and opted for a strategy of influencing those with power and influence in the Government and the Tory Party. To some extent this strategy has proved remarkably successful. Not only have they won over the high pulpit of the establishment - the Times leader columns - along with the rest of the bourgeois press to their side, making the Twyford Down a national issue, they have also penetrated the labyrinths of Brussels and won the backing of the European Commissioner. But all this has been to no avail. The government has pressed on regardless.

In their desperation at the failure of their strategy of influencing the government the TDA has come to welcome support from almost any quarter, even from the 'great unwashed'. In doing so they have come to present themselves as all things to all people. Thus while they continue to work with FOE in winning over Tory MPs to the cause, they have also given vague encouragement to the ideas for green camps and Non-Violent Direct Action, albeit with certain provisos to keep it respectable for their friends in the bourgeois press.

We have been all too easily taken in by such encouragements. Flattered at the prospects of being invited to offer our 'precious NVDA skills' to the 'hundred or so locals prepared to lay themselves on the line', we were then surprised when we found that such locals did not exist!

While it is very important to consider the 'locals' in opposing motorway construction in rural areas, it is important to remember that Britain does not have a rural population of any size, particularly not in southern England. Only 1% of the workforce works on the land - these being mainly wage-labourers. Unlike most countries on the continent which have considerable numbers of small-holders and small farmers, which in the past have provided the basis for mass local opposition to anti-environmental projects in rural areas (such as the construction of the nuclear power station at Wackersdorf), the vast majority of Britain's population have no direct attachment to or affinity with the land. Although many people live in country villages, most of such people now commute to nearby towns and cities for their work and shopping etc.

'Local' people cannot therefore be expected to have anymore affinity with the their local countryside than anyone else. Indeed, they may have less affinity than those, like most of ourselves, who need an escape from oppressive conditions of the towns and cities. Furthermore, in so far as they are rich or well off, as they mostly are in Winchester (although this will not always be the case in rural areas), they are likely to be conservative and ill inclined to taking or sanctioning radical action that may upset the status quo to which they owe their wealth. After all, if they build a few roads around Winchester they can always drive to Heathrow and take a few more holidays elsewhere if they want to 'enjoy some countryside'.

Thus while it is important to consider the feelings of the 'locals', we should not be to deferential to them. This then brings us to FOE.

Friends of the Earth: Friends or Foe?

While for the TDA Twyford Down is the 'be all and end all', (and hence in the face of defeat the TDA were prepared to welcome Earth First!'s interest in the issue), for FOE (and by FOE we mean the leadership of Friends of the Earth) Twyford Down is merely one battle in the long war against the motorway construction programme. A war in which they can point to victories as well as defeats. As they have made all too clear to us, unlike the TDA, they do not welcome Earth First!'s involvement in this issue. For them direct action beyond the most limited token civil disobedience can only serve to ruin the years of hard work they have put in lobbying the 'powers that be'. For them the only viable strategy is to win over public opinion as expressed by the mainstream bourgeois press so as to place political pressure on the government to change its plans. Ultimately for them, only by making the government believe that each and every road scheme is an electoral liability will the road programme be abandoned. Confrontation and direct action for FOE can only alienate the formers of public opinion and thus the electorate. For FOE such actions are therefore worse than useless.

Our responses to such arguments have been, to say the least, a little pathetic and betray a failure to work through our commitment to direct action. FOE are correct in seeing Twyford Down as one battle in a long war against the motorway construction programme, a battle that may well be lost. Furthermore, they struck very close to home when, in attacking Earth First!'s fetishism for 'Monkey Wrenching', they accused us of being a 'one tactic organisation'! Simply denying these criticisms leaves us as little more than romantic utopians prepared to make a heroic, if futile, defence of Twyford Down at whatever the cost and regardless of the consequences.

Nor is it adequate to plead that Earth First! helps FOE by making them appear more moderate and hence we are really FOE's best friends. As professional lobbyists FOE are better placed than anybody to know that their strategy of influence and reasoned arguments can only be ruined by direct action and political confrontation within the broader environmental movement however much they would seek to 'publicly disassociate' themselves from it. FOE would only be listened too as 'moderates' if they promised to be a means of defusing a militant environmental movement that was seriously challenging the state, a situation very far from the present reality in the UK, and one in which FOE would not be our friends but more of a Trojan Horse!

The underlying problem with FOE's arguments is not, as some in Earth First! may have it, that they are too 'human orientated' and fail to recognise the 'equal rights of all life to survival'. On the contrary, by making a stand on defending Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI's) for example, they set out from the moral imperative of defending the right of rare and endangered species of flora and fauna to survive, however much they then seek to dress this up as a question of 'science' to make it palatable to the decision makers. FOE's error is that they do not understand that the underlying problem is the problem of the existing organisation of human society: to be specific, they do not have a critique of capitalism and democracy! For them the road programme is simply due to the political influence of the road lobby on government decision making; an influence which they then simply have to counter through the force of public opinion. They fail to see the fundamental importance of the car economy to the very existence of the state.

To put it simply, the car industry has been the linchpin of capital accumulation since the Second World War; it has been the key industry in what has become known as the 'Fordist Mode of Accumulation'. If Britain is to be a place where profit can be made and capital accumulated, if Britain is to compete of the world capitalist market, then it 'needs an efficient infra-structure' and this means more roads and motorways. This is the overriding imperative that shapes government policy.

The role of the democratic process, of which FOE are an integral part, is not to determine whether the 'public' wants more roads, but rather how and when roads can be built with the minimum of popular opposition. In this light FOE's democratic methods may be able to win the odd battle but they can never win the war! The only way of halting the road construction programme is to develop mass opposition that through direct action and political confrontation with the forces of the state threaten the very basis of the 'car economy'.

Hence, while we must respect the work FOE do in gathering information etc, and while it will be necessary to work with them from time to time, we should have no illusions about them. Ultimately, when the crunch comes, they will be on the other side.

Conclusion

If nothing else our involvement in Twyford Down should teach us that it is not enough to be the specialists of Direct Action or 'Monkey Wrenching'. We have to place Direct Action within a coherent political project and for such a project we have to have a coherent critique of capitalist society. It is not enough to simply import uncritically half-baked notions from our sister organisation in the USA, we have to develop such a critique ourselves from our own experiences.

NB Since this article was written in March further actions at Twyford Down have occurred. Following a demonstration organised by the TDA in May more than a hundred people occupied the building site at the SSSI on the 'Water Meadows' and were able to flood the workings by opening a sluice gate causing a significant delay to the construction work. Since then a small green camp has been established that has maintained a continuous oppositional presence to building work.

Review: Fascism / Anti-Fascism by Jean Barrot

"Fascism/Antifascism" by Jean Barrot (a.k.a. Gilles Dauvé). Black Cat Press, Edmonton (1982). Reproduced by Unpopular Books, Box 15, 138 Kingsland High Road, London E8. [Gilles Dauvé responds to this review here]

This text first appeared in 1979 as part of an introduction to a collection of writings by Italian left communists (Bordigans) on the Spanish Civil War.

Although not recent, the pamphlet is being reviewed here as it concerns a contemporary issue: the relation of antifascism to the class struggle. Half the text is taken up with historical examples (Italy, Germany, Chile, Portugal, Spain, Russia, the Paris Commune, Mexico). Space does not allow discussion of these cases here. Instead, the focus will be on the general argument put forward by Barrot.

The translator's introduction sums up the argument's weaknesses (which, it is suggested, are the weaknesses of Left communism itself) as follows: dogmatic Marxism, positivist economics, obsolete class analyses and contempt for the working class. It is the last of these which is the most important limitation of Barrot's case. The strength of his case, however, is its clear-sighted and consistently uncompromising attack on the state, "an instrument of class domination", which most leftists still propose to treat as neutral and thus to "use". This theme saturates Barrot's argument.

Barrot's thesis is very simple; it is that struggling against fascism (in particular) necessarily entails supporting democracy, that capitalism will necessarily remain intact if antifascists support one of its forms against another. All manifestations of antifascism ultimately strengthen the democratic state at the expense of the class struggle; thus both fascism and its nemesis antifascism lead to totalitarianism (the strong state) not communism. Dictatorship, says Barrot, is not a weapon of capital but a tendency of capital.

But while criticizing antifascists for allegedly supporting democracy, Barrot also asks: "do we have a CHOICE? Democracy will transform itself into dictatorship as soon as is necessary ... The political forms which capital gives itself do not depend on the action of the working class any more than they depend on the intentions of the bourgeoisie." (p. 8).

Barrot is clearly emphasizing the logic of the capitalist state at the expense of the counter-logic of the proletariat. The picture he paints is of a highly successful capitalist state continually beating the working class to the first punch so that the latter are often duped ultimately into supporting rather than overthrowing the state. Given this, it is no wonder that many of the struggles the working class engage in (such as the fight against fascism) are at best futile and at worst counterproductive; the working class themselves may merely be contributing to the state's tendency to totalitarianism.

But if we abandon the assumptions, first, that it is the state (capital) that always moves first (with the proletariat as hapless respondants), and, second, that antifascism is a homogeneous phenomenon that, by its very nature, takes the side of the democratic state, we get quite a different picture of this particular arena of struggle. Before exploring alternative perspectives on antifascism, however, it is only fair to measure Barrot's account against current antifascist groups.

For example, the Bennite view (which partly informs the ethos of the Anti-Nazi League) is that "we" (on the left, broadly conceived) should forget our differences and concentrate on fighting the fascists (implicitly: we should unite around the lowest common denominator and vote Labour). This argument is based in part on the claim that the reason for the rise of Hitler was that the KPD and SPD (social democrats and communists) were fighting each other instead of the fascists. But Barrot points out that the left wing forces (fighting each other) were not defeated by the Nazis; rather, the proletarian defeat had already taken place when the fascist repression occurred; the revolutionaries were defeated not by fascism but by democracy. The Anti-Nazi League are also criticized (by the Revolutionary Communist Party, for example) for trying to build a mass movement around the issue of Nazis and fascists, when it is the (non-fascist and anti-Nazi) racists in power who are the main problem for (the non-white) working class of Britain. The word "Nazi" is emotive, so it is easy for people to agree to oppose "Nazism" while they may continue to condone racism and patriotism. Similarly, at a recent anti-fascist/anti-Nazi public meeting, I was dismayed to hear a speaker from Anti-Fascist Action criticize fascists on the grounds that they did not really support "our" country (implying that patriotism - supporting "our" bourgeoisie - is desirable).

In these examples we can see how Barrot has pointed accurately to problems of typical antifascist positions; there is a clear tendency to oppose fascism on the grounds that it is undemocratic and a threat to "our" country. In such cases we are in effect, as Barrot says, being asked to rally to the support of one manifestation of the state against another. A classic example is the case of the Spanish Civil War, in which the anarchist strategy for fighting fascism was to join forces with the republican government.

However, it is not enough to dismiss all the various contemporary antifascist manifestations on these grounds alone. The point is that many people become involved in antifascism not to support democracy but simply because they recognize the need to organize specifically against the BNP and similar groups who intimidate minorities, and against racist attacks in general. The issue of racism is not addressed by Barrot in this pamphlet. In his defence, it is worth stating that fascism and racism are by no means synonymous (conceptually or historically); racism is simply a contingent tool of fascism and other forms of capitalism. But racism is most people's experience of present day neo-fascism; fascism has almost become a theoretical justification for racism in many cases.

Barrot's argument is directed at those who are exclusively fighting fascism; but he also refers to struggles in Italy that were antifascist without being "specifically antifascist: to struggle against Capital meant to struggle against fascism as well as against parliamentary democracy." (p. 13). In other words, not all antifascist activity entails supporting democracy. The knub of the argument is this, however: the state transforms itself to suit capital, thus "[t]he proletariat will destroy totalitarianism [including fascism] only by destroying democracy and all political forms at the same time." (p. 17). Barrot presents us with a sharp dichotomy in which anything less than his pre-defined programme for revolution (the attack on wage labour) is worse than useless. While we would of course endorse an all-out attack on wage labour, and while we reserve the right to criticize the recent wave of antifascist groups, it is a necessary part of our support for one class against the other that we confront all forces which attempt to divide us along lines of "race", nationality etc. Barrot's pamphlet is important in that it warns us against the dangers of involvement in popular fronts; but it should not be taken as providing a theoretical justification for ignoring the concrete problems which affect particular sections of our class.

Class Decomposition In The New World Order: Yugoslavia Unravelled

(1) Introduction

Whilst there have been numerous wars around the globe over the last forty-eight years, Europe has seen only the mundane brutality of everyday capitalist social relations. But once again the spectre of war haunts the proletarians of the continent. The former republics of Yugoslavia have lurched into a bitter cycle of war, and the images of the suffering provide a terrifying reminder of the capacity of the working class to carve itself up along national lines.

Are we heading for a major European war? Will the events of the past couple of years in Yugoslavia be repeated throughout Eastern Europe? An analysis of the conflict is clearly imperative.

Such an analysis is made more difficult however both by our separation from the events, leading to a lack of information from 'below', and by the endless stream of depressing details on the conflict in the media making any attempt to keep abreast of events into a desensitising test of endurance. So this article will be limited to an attempt to simplify the conflict by grasping the material roots of the nationalist tensions.

The first problem lies with deciding where to start. A possible starting point would be the formation of the first (monarchist) Yugoslavia after WW1, as the internal migration of Serbs under the Serb-dominated regime (to be followed by a similar migratory flow after WW2) helped produce the ethnic mish-mash with which we are now familiar. Another possibility is WW2 and the genocide perpetrated by the Ustashe which helps explain the fear of persecution so characteristic of current Serbian nationalist ideology.

Neither of these starting points seem to provide the best means of unravelling the conflict however, as the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia did hold together for well over forty years despite its ethnic diversity and the experiences of WW2. Instead, the focus of the analysis has to be the 1974 Constitution, which appears to be a pivotal moment in the shaping of Socialist Yugoslavia; so, to begin with, we have to examine the factors which gave rise to it.

(2) Class Recomposition.

In 1948 the Yugoslav Communist Party (Y.C.P.) was expelled from the Cominform, in part due to the Y.C.P.'s desire for U.S. financial support. As if trying to disprove Stalin's accusation that the Y.C.P. was a 'Kulak' party incapable of making war on the peasantry the Y.C.P. set out on a programme of forced collectivisation beginning in 1949. Prior to the war 75% of the regions population were dependent on peasant agriculture and immediately after the war the Y.C.P. rewarded the peasants, from whom the partisan army under Tito had drawn most of its support, with land reform; land previously owned by foreigners, collaborators, the church and large estates was broken up and distributed amongst the poor peasants as small plots. Such an organisation of agricultural labour was, however, a brake on the development of the productive forces so desired by the Y.C.P., a brake which collectivisation (socialist primitive accumulation) was designed to remove. This programme came up against significant peasant resistance however, with extensive riots in 1950 and widespread sabotage of agricultural production the following year. Given their need for the political backing of the peasants the Y.C.P. was forced to abandon this policy of rural expropriation. First the compulsory delivery of agricultural produce to the state was scrapped and in 1953 collectivisation was abandoned. Peasants were allowed to leave the collectives, and most of them did.

Thereafter agricultural labour consisted of two sectors; a small collectivised 'socialist' sector comprising about 5% of the agricultural workforce and 15% of agricultural land, and a much larger private sector in which peasant families were able to sell their surplus produce on the open market with the states role reduced to setting the levels of taxes and some prices. Yugoslavia had clearly begun to move away from the Stalinist model of a centrally-planned economy. The Y.C.P. had decided that the accumulation of alienated labour would have to proceed using the discipline of market forces with the coercive power of the state decentralised. In 1950 the 'Basic Law on Workers Self Management' was introduced in the industrial sector to allow workers to participate on a democratic basis in their own exploitation. Workers Councils were henceforth able to elect Management Boards which by 1953 were able to engage in foreign trade, set prices in most cases, and decide for themselves questions concerning product range, investment, output, supplies and customers. Thus there evolved the partial separation of the 'political' and 'economic' aspects of the capital relation; the involvement of the Federal Government in the everyday running of the economy gradually declined as the social division of labour came to be increasingly regulated by the market.

Liberalising economic and political reforms occurred in 1960-61, 1963, and 1965 despite concerted opposition from the more centralising elements within the Y.C.P. The net results of these reforms were twofold although both represented a decline in the power of the Federal Government in Belgrade. On the one hand remaining price controls, including that setting a minimum price for labour-power, were abolished, and control over credit, and thus control over the real accumulation of capital, was devolved to the banking system. The rule of money over the conditions of life thereby increased. Alongside this shift was a political one devolving a certain amount of political clout to regional authorities although fiscal policy and control over the repressive functions of the state remained the prerogative of the Federal bureaucracy in Belgrade.

Within the Y.C.P. there had occurred a certain division between the conservative autocrats of the bureaucracy and the liberal technocrats of the productive enterprises and banks, with the relative empowerment of the latter. And such a reorganisation proved to be very successful. Investment rates during the 50s and 60s were exceptionally high by international standards. Rapid accumulation allowed for rising real wages paid for through rising productivity. A relatively generous social wage was affordable; healthcare and other services developed to rival those in many West European countries. Thus the Yugoslav model became the ideal for many left-liberals in Britain and elsewhere who had a particular fetishism for democracy but no critique of alienation. But this rapid accumulation had a number of consequences which would serve to undermine this particular form of market-based self-management.

i) Accumulation of Grave-Diggers:

In less than two decades much of Yugoslavia had been transformed from a predominantly agricultural country into an industrial one. And where industry had previously existed it had grown in size. Between 1953 and 1965 over 1 million peasants had been transformed into wage-labourers. The rulers had created their own nemesis, potentially at least. The increasingly real subsumption of labour under capital tended towards the homogenisation of the working class, and the increasing size of industrial units its unification. Democratic participation in the Workers Councils served to atomise the Yugoslav working class, but the increasing socialisation of labour led to those individuals becoming ever more parts of a collective worker collectively exploited by ever more hostile dead labour. This transformation of the productive power of labour was reflected in the minds of the workers themselves and class antagonism, expressed througha rapid turnover of labour, absenteeism, work stoppages and strikes, increased accordingly.

The incidence of wildcat strikes increased notably following the liberalising reforms of 1965, and whilst they tended to remain an amalgam of localised affairs, for reasons which will soon become apparent, they nonetheless constituted a significant threat to the status quo. A second front was opened up in the spring of 1968 by radical students who appeared on the streets of Belgrade with a coherent theoretical critique of alienated labour and of representative organisational forms. Of particular importance is the fact that the student movement was aware of the impossibility of abolishing the alienation of students without abolishing capitalist alienation in general, and thus sought through its slogans and in its programme to achieve that which had not yet happened; the unification of the whole of the Yugoslav working class in a movement for its own abolition.

ii) Accentuation of Regional Disparities;

The republics which together formed Socialist Yugoslavia after WW2 displayed massive social, cultural and economic differences. Slovenia and Croatia were the more developed regions (M.D.R.s) of the country due to their incorporation into the Austro-Hungarian empire, their close ties with German and Italian capital, and their relative lack of infrastructural damage during the war. Agriculture was still significant in the M.D.R.s, even if much less so than in the L.D.R.s. But land was much more fertile than in the southern regions and farms tended to belong to the collectivised 'socialist' sector which was much more capital intensive than the private sector of the independent peasants. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo (an Autonomous Province within the Serbian republic), being more rural areas in which private sector peasant agriculture was much more significant, made up the less developed regions (L.D.R.s). Serbia (with its other Autonomous Province of Vojvodina) had undergone an average degree of development and thus constituted the middle ground. The difference in levels of consumption between the workers of the M.D.R.s and those of the L.D.R.s was notable. Indicators such as share in the total social product, infant mortality rates, literacy rates, inhabitants per hospital bed and others are testimony to how much a higher rate of exploitation in the M.D.R.s enabled workers there a higher standard of living.

The Y.C.P. were fearful that these disparities would exacerbate nationalist tensions to a degree that would undermine the stability required for capital accumulation. An active regional development policy was therefore pursued immediately after the war in order that development in the L.D.R.s might be speeded up. Whilst this could be done relatively easily during the central planning period, when the main source of of investment funds was the Federal Budget, the shift towards a market economy undermined this policy. Up until 1963 investment was controlled by a General Investment Fund, and although a certain amount of money-capital was earmarked for investment in the L.D.R.s on preferential terms the bulk of the resources was allocated on the basis of the profitability of the enterprises wishing to receive funding. Then, when responsibility for credit and investment passed into the hands of the banking system, profitability became the sole criterion for decisions concerning the allocation of credit.

This relaxation of control over the workings of the law of value served to exacerbate the regional disparities. Enterprises in the L.D.R.s tended to be much less competitive and thus found it harder to obtain the capital required to raise the productivity of labour, thus they became even less competitive. Unable to obtain credit through the banking system the L.D.R.s resorted to obtaining the few resources available through the 'Federal Fund for Crediting Economic Development of Less Developed Regions'. With investments in the L.D.R.s then being made on the basis of political considerations these resources were often wasted on hopelessly uncompetitive 'prestige projects', thus further undermining profitability in the L.D.R.s. As for agriculture in the L.D.R.s, productivity was falling further behind that of the M.D.R.s socialised sector, and the Y.C.P. tried to narrow the gap by passing a law in 1967 enabling peasants to buy agricultural machinery such as tractors. But with the relatively small scale of plots such a move was futile. And on top of this, when the tourism industry began to expand rapidly Croatia was to prove the main benificiary.

Given such a regional division of labour, with manufacturing concentrated in the M.D.R.s, tourism concentrated in Croatia, and mining, energy production and peasant agriculture dominating the L.D.R.s, it is obvious that objective conditions did not favour a unified offensive by the Yugoslav working class as a whole. And it also becomes clear as to why the tensions within the party between the liberals and the conservatives took on a regional bias which was at times prone to expressing itself in nationalist terms.

(3) 1974 Constitution

The Y.C.P. was able to isolate, repress and recuperate the student movement and defuse the radical workers offensive thus neutralising the immediate threat to its rule. But it had become clear that capital accumulation would have to be re-stabilised on a new basis as the existing regime of domination was showing too many cracks. Striking workers in the M.D.R.s were questioning the inequalities between themselves and the new breed of entrepreneurs in an ostensibly socialist society. Workers in the L.D.R.s similarly protested about inequality, including the question of wage differentials between themselves and their northern counterparts. And within the bureaucracy itself there were tensions between the cadre of the different regions and between the regional leaderships and the Federal leadership in Belgrade.

A period of intense discussion resulted in the 1974 Constitution, heralding the period of 'associated labour' and 'social compacts'. The organs of workers democracy were divided into 35,000 smaller sub-units called the 'Basic Organisation of Associated Labour', thus fragmenting abstract labour in much the same way as TeamWork does under Just-In-Time/Total-Quality-Control production regimes. Relationships between B.O.A.L.s within an enterprise, and between enterprises, were to be governed by negotiated contracts, with wages regulated by 'social compacts' - agreements negotiated between enterprises, their B.O.A.L.s, trade unions, and the regional governments. In this way the autonomous power of money had been curtailed as a concession to quell dissent; market forces were henceforth partially subordinated to the political control of the party.

The party which had regained its leading role was itself restructured by the 1974 Constitution. The powers of the Federal government were reduced relative to the regional governments, and all major decisions concerning the federation had to be reached through social compacts and agreements requiring the consent of the leaderships of all eight republics and provinces. Such decisions included those concerning fiscal policy, monetary policy, public spending and contributions to the Federal Fund for Crediting Economic Development of L.D.R.s. The leaders of each of the republic's parties had effectively gained the right of veto over the policies of the Yugoslav government, and the leaderships of the L.D.R.s were thus able to secure preferential treatment for their regions, such as exemption from customs duties on the import of fixed capital, higher export subsidies, refunds for contributions to the Federal Budget etc. And the transfer of powers from Belgrade to the regions allowed the party leaders in the L.D.R.s exclusive control over the use of resources obtained from the development fund.

To summarise, the 1974 Constitution attempted to restore the rule of the party over the power of money, but the party itself was also restructured leading to the regionalisation of the Yugoslav economy. But what had emerged as an attempt to forge a new consensus around which accumulation could be organised in fact led to dissatisfaction in virtually every quarter.

i) M.D.R.s

The politicisation of resource allocation was inevitably unpopular with the technocrats/ entrepreneurs/ bankers concentrated in the M.D.R.s, and the party leaderships of Croatia and Slovenia soon resumed pressing for the prioritisation of profitability criteria for investment. Although in the late 1980s the M.D.R.s only made their contributions to the L.D.R. development fund under great duress, it was not the magnitude of the value that was transferred southwards that the M.D.R.s objected to. The level of contributions from the M.D.R.s was modest despite the fact that the Federal Fund provided virtually all the investment resources for the poorest of the L.D.R.s. What the party leaders in the M.D.R.s objected to was that the political restrictions upon the flow of money-capital towards the highest rate of profit was serving to slow capital accumulation in Yugoslavia as a whole and the M.D.R.s in particular. This section of the ruling class wanted further decentralisation and the extension of market-based reforms in order to reimpose competition as the means whereby Yugoslav capital would organise itself against labour on a national level.

ii) L.D.R.s

Such a move would have consigned the economies of the L.D.R.s to the role of Yugoslavia's 'third world'. The constitutional changes had however given the means to block the moves by the M.D.R.s for further liberalisation. But the status quo was not to the liking of the L.D.R. leaderships either, as the growing autonomy of the regional economies was already condemning them to a permanent position as the 'poorer partners' with a slower rate of accumulation. Thus they pressed for an active interventionist policy in opposition to the demands from the M.D.R.s.

iii) Serbia

As previously noted, Serbia occupied the middle ground where development was concerned, but was where political power had been concentrated. What caused consternation amongst Serbian cadre was that the Federal leadership in Belgrade was being held hostage by the narrow national interests of the republican and provincial governments. Contributing as much and sometimes more than each of the M.D.R.s to the fund for the L.D.R.s they were as resentful as the parties in those republics at seeing capital being wasted by the L.D.R. leaderships on 'prestige projects' which did nothing towards decreasing the profitability divide. The Serbian leadership thus wanted to revert to a strong central government to ensure the efficient utilisation of investment capital. Furthermore Serbs (and Montenegrins) had always been over-represented within the Y.C.P. as a whole because of the composition of the partisan movement, and within the Federal Army and the state apparatus there were a disproportionate number of Serbian (and Montenegrin) cadre. The 1974 Constitution was thus perceived by the Serbian party leadership as having reduced the power and prestige of the Serbian leadership in Yugoslavia as a whole. In the mid 1970s the Serbian party began campaigning against regional autonomy, setting up a working commission of the party to gather together the arguments against the regional autonomy granted by the constitutional changes in a 'Blue Book'. The 'Blue Book' advocated the return to Belgrade of control over economic policy for the whole of Yugoslavia, as well as control over the provinces judiciary, police and security services. Not surprisingly the arguments were rejected by the multi-national Federal leadership.

(4) The Onset of Crisis

Opposition to the 1974 Constitution was often expressed in nationalist terms. Such ideas were hardly new, having resurfaced periodically in Socialist Yugoslavia. But each time they had surfaced they had been criticised extensively as most of the Y.C.P. were committed to Yugoslav unity. So although opposition to the 1974 Constitution would incorporate certain aspects of nationalist ideology this did not lead to open hostilities. That is until the cement of capital accumulation which had held together the 'red bourgeoisie' of Yugoslavia began to crack as the economy plunged into a serious crisis.

The partial restriction of competition within the domestic market of Yugoslavia served to undermine the means whereby the valorisation conditions of social capital are forced upon particular capitals. Without the same competitive pressures, individual capitals operating within Yugoslavia were less compelled to raise the productivity of labour. The constant struggle to expend no more than the labour-time socially necessary for the production of given commodities was relaxed. But while the Y.C.P. could assert some control over the law of value as it operated within the boundaries of Yugoslavia, there was less it could do about the dictates of the world market. Global social capital demanded continuous reductions in necessary labour but Yugoslav capital had backed away from the struggle with its workers. Thus Yugoslav capital became increasingly uncompetitive in the world market. Selling commodities abroad increasingly required subsidies, but the money for this had itself to come out of surplus-value, which was becoming harder and harder to realise.

By 1980 a foreign debt of $14 billion had been accumulated, and Yugoslavia joined the I.M.F. The following year a loan was negotiated which was the biggest the I.M.F. had paid out at the time, but the provision of credit was conditional upon the imposition of an austerity programme. A strict incomes policy was to be introduced, prices were to be deregulated, interest rates increased sharply, the Dinar devalued, and exports increased at the expense of domestic consumption. The 1974 reforms had not succeeded in eliminating the Yugoslav working class as an overtly antagonistic subject however, as had been demonstrated by an upturn in the number of strikes in 1976. So in response to the attempted imposition of austerity the Yugoslav working class waged a fierce defensive struggle, in many cases successfully blocking the Federal government's measures. Strikes, largely in response to wage cuts, threatened to escape the control of the trade unions. And beyond the productive sphere other struggles were waged, including the organised boycott of rising electricity and gas bills.

This defensive struggle continued through the early eighties, but the state did have a certain amount of success in its battle against its working class. Many uncompetitive capitals were forced to collapse and unemployment rose rapidly, exerting further downwards pressure on wages. Wages were pushed down significantly in real terms during the 1980's, although there are various figures available as to exactly how much. An article in New Left Review 174 states that 'working class consumption' fell by nearly 8% between 1979 and 1985 whilst an article in the April/May '93 issue of Wildcat states that 'incomes' fell by 45% over the same period and that 'wages relative to prices' fell by 30% between 1978 and 1988. Mass unemployment is a contradictory weapon however, and despite this fall in wages the foreign debt had risen to $20 billion dollars by 1985, and inflation was becoming rampant (reaching 250% by the end of 1988).

In 1986 many individual firms had conceded wage increases which, although considerably below the rate of inflation, were in excess of the rate fixed by the government. In response the Federal government passed a law in February 1987 cutting wages and requiring that wages in excess of the limit be paid back. Mass strikes broke out, particularly around the areas of Zagreb and Belgrade, and street battles with the police occurred in many towns and cities throughout Yugoslavia. The Federal government in Belgrade threatened to bring tanks onto the streets to restore order, but this was eventually achieved by means of a temporary price freeze.

Another measure used by the Federal government to deal with this situation was an agreement that wages would be allowed to rise in excess of the norm provided they were 'paid for' through increased productivity. This was a divisive measure, obviously benefiting workers in the M.D.R.s, especially those in sectors linked to export and foreign currency earnings (the tourist industry). And divisive tactics probably had some success given the way that the gap between conditions for workers in the M.D.R.s and those in the L.D.R.s widened with the crisis. In 1987 the party leaders of three of the L.D.R.'s -Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro- declared their regions bankrupt, and 'Agrokomerc', the Bosnian agro-industrial conglomerate, collapsed. Whilst unemployment rose from 11% to 18% between 1975 and 1989 as an average for Yugoslavia as a whole, the rise was from 4% to 6% for the M.D.R.s, from 13% to 17% in Serbia and Vojvodina, and from 22% to 36% in the L.D.R.s. Using another indicator, the proportion of the Yugoslav population below the poverty line rose from 17.2% to 23% between 1978 and 1989, but the regional variation is striking; in 1989 the proportion was only 2.9% in Slovenia compared to a staggering 81.9% in Kosovo. The reason for this increase in regional disparities during this period was linked to the changing price of manufactured goods and primary products on the international market. The M.D.R.s had benefited from the rise in the price of manufactured goods following the oil price hike of 1979, whilst the prices of agricultural products and raw materials, the mainstays of the L.D.R.s' economies, collapsed due to the international debt crisis and the efforts of debtor countries to meet repayments by stepping up exports.

(5) Class Decomposition

1987 appears to have been something of a turning point in the unfolding of the situation. It was at this time that organised groups began successfully propagating nationalist ideas within the working class movement, placing themselves at the forefront of demonstrations. The development of nationalism within the working class had been encouraged by developments within the Y.C.P. On the one hand the party leaderships of the M.D.R.s had started backing up their demands for economic liberalisation with demands for national independence, probably at this stage just to increase the pressure on the Federal leadership. And on the other the Serbian party were now openly endorsing Serbian nationalism. That nationalism was able to become the potent material force we know it to have become in Yugoslavia is down to the fact that it had a material basis. Dismissing it as 'false consciousnesss' is inadequate as it can lead to little more than implying the need for a vanguard to teach the proles what their real interests are. Our opposition to all forms of nationalism should not mean that we are incapable of addressing the question as to why it is capable of mobilising working class support.

Nationalism reflects the superficial identity of interests thay exists between a particular national bourgeoisie and the proletariat of that country for so long as capitalist social relations persist. An identity of interests because the successful valorisation and realisation of capital provides both capitalists and workers with a source of revenue with which, as independent subjects in the market legally separated from means, commodities can be purchased to satisfy needs (albeit in an alienated form). Superficial because, whilst it does not immediately present itself as such, this process is one of class exploitation and hence antagonism. To the extent that the bourgeoisie organises itself on a national level, and it remains meaningful to talk of national economies, the proletariat will find itself a universal class divided upon national lines. For so long as we remain defeated, i.e. so long as the value-form exists, then nationalism may feed upon this division. Capital may be a unity, but it is a differentiated one whose unityis constituted through competition on an international level. With competition on the world market based on the cheapening of commodities, acceptance of a 'national interest' and making sacrifices to the national bourgeoisie may mean increased exploitation for the working class, resignation to a living death or a real one as cannon fodder, but it also increases the competitiveness of the national capital on the world market, making its realisation more probable, and thus helps to secure future revenue for both classes.

The regionalisation of the Yugoslav economy meant the existence of a material basis for nationalist divisions within the Yugoslav working class. Refusal to accept these divisions could maintain the prospect of social revolution, or at least maintaining a trajectory which kept this possibility alive. Acceptance of these divisions could mean abandonment of any hope for a free, unalienated existence, but also the prospect of a greater access to the social wealth alienated to capital by deflecting the assault of capital onto the 'other', whether that be other republics, other nationalities within the republic, or both. As the prospects for the class began to disappear over the horizon so resignation to nationalism increased.

i) Serbia

Around 1980 a new generation of bureaucrats came to power in Serbia, grouped around Ivan Stambolic (head of Serbia's government 1980-82, head of Belgrade Party 1982-84, president of Serbian Party 1984-86). This new leadership, which included Slobodan Milosevic, sought to achieve the aims of the 'Blue Book', the recentralisation of political power in Belgrade, through the strategic manipulation of nationalist sentiment in order to exert pressure on the Federal leadership. Such a proposal would have to be agreed by the assemblies of the Autonomous Provinces of Vojvidina and Kosovo, as well as the other republics, and the assemblies of Serbia's Provinces were not willing to give up power.

Indeed, in 1981 there was a huge wave of rioting right across Kosovo. Whilst the underlying cause of the rioting may be rooted in the falling living standards of Kosovo's working class these riots have usually been interpreted as nationalist riots. There certainly were demands put forward that Kosovo be given full republican status. But even if this interpretation is wrong there can be little doubt that the predominantly Albanian working class were forced into falling in behind 'their' leaders in defence of 'national rights' by subsequent events.

The rioting was suppressed by the predominantly Serbian Federal forces and a state of emergency declared. Nationalist elements within Serbia began decrying the way in which the 1974 Constitution had led to what they saw as the Albanianisation of Kosovo, which they considered to be a part of 'Greater Serbia'. Indeed Kosovo is of central importance to Serbian nationalists as it was the centre of medieval Serbia until it was lost to Turkey in the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389. Such nationalist ideas did not however have much popular appeal at the time.

By 1986, however, the Serbian leadership's use of nationalism in the context of a worsening economic crisis was starting to have some effect. The Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences produced a document called the Memorandum which was full of xenophobic nationalism, revising the history of Yugoslavia in order to rehabilitate the Chetniks (Serbian ultra-nationalist movement of WW2). Milosevic ensured that the Serbian Party leadership did not openly criticise the Memorandum, thereby encouraging the development of nationalism by the intelligentsia. And at this time the 'Kosovo Committee of Serbs and Montenegrins' began organising nationalist rallies in Kosovo and sending delegations to Belgrade demanding military rule in Kosovo. To back up their demands the Committee and their nationalist allies in Serbia launched an anti-Albanian campaign. Their allies included retired policemen, right wing intellectuals, a wing of the Orthodox Church and of course a significant section of the state and Party bureaucracy. The official media aided the campaign by printing racial slurs and the fabricated stories of the systematic rape of Serbian women by Albanian men in Kosovo. Many Serbs were emigrating from Kosovo, not least due to the comparatively high rate of unemployment in the Province, and this was presented in the media as evidence of Albanian oppression of the Serb minority.

By 1987, anti-Albanian discrimination was rife. Factories started to be built in Kosovo for Serbs only, Albanian families were evicted from Serb villages, sale of Serb-owned land to Albanians was prohibited, and Albanians heavily sentenced for minor crimes. The more liberal elements in the Serbian Party, grouped around Stambolic, became worried that the monster they had given sustenance to, if not created, was threatening to divide not just the Yugoslav working class but Yugoslavia itself, and so they sought to criticise the nationalist 'excesses'. But those grouped around Milosevic openly endorsed the rising nationalist sentiment recognising that it could serve to deflect the anger of Serbian workers away from their real enemies, justify repressive measures in Kosovo, and pressurise the Federal bureaucracy into making the desired constitutional changes. A struggle for control of the Serbian Party ensued and by September of that year the liberals had been defeated and Milosevic was in power.

The battle to impose a solution to the crisis continued throughout 1988 along regional lines. Slovene and Croat leaders continued to demand the unleashing of market forces, which the L.D.R. leaderships resisted, recognising that such a move would imply a chronic devalorisation of their existing capital and little opportunity to accumulate further. Slovenia's rulers in particular, presiding over the most developed and Westernised of the M.D.R.s, were the most vocal in their desire to see increased local autonomy, political pluralism, and the introduction of private enterprises alongside self-managed ones. Whilst their economic demands were supported by Croatia alone, the demands for increased regional autonomy had the support of many in Bosnia, Vojvodina, and Kosovo as well.

The solution proposed by Serbia's leaders however was the restoration of a strong central government in Belgrade such that the motor of accumulation, the M.D.R.s, could be harnessed to the rest of the country, and the L.D.R.s developed more efficiently. And in this they enjoyed the support of the leaders of Macedonia and Montenegro who were grateful for Serbia's anti-Albanian campaign for allowing them to discriminate against their own Albanian populations.

The first hurdle, however, remained the Party leaders of Vojvodina and Kosovo. In the autumn of 1988 numerous nationalist rallies were organised. Throughout Serbia, and especially in Belgrade, huge rallies called for Serb unity, i.e. the unification of 'Greater Serbia', and solidarity with the armed Serbian vigilantes operating in Kosovo. Serbian nationalist rallies also took place in Vojvidina, Montenegro and Kosovo, leading to the replacement of Vojvodina's leaders with Milosevic-supporters in October, and those of Montenegro the following January. With big Serbian nationalist rallies planned to take place in Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia the Federal Party decided that it would have to appease Milosevic and agreed to allow for Vojvodina and Kosovo to be put under Serbian control.

Amidst much speculation of a break in the Federation, October 1988 saw the introduction of a number of Constitutional changes. As a concession to the leaders of the M.D.R.s there were a number of moves in the direction of freeing competition, scrapping the system of B.O.A.L.s and Compacts. And to appease the Serbian leadership the resignation of the Kosovo Party leaders was secured. This provoked massive demonstrations in Kosovo, and in February the following year, when the Serbian Party imposed their own officials on Kosovo's assembly in an attempt to speed up ratification of the Constitutional changes, Albanian workers responded with a general strike. Their demands for the retention of regional autonomy were rejected by the Federal leadership following big counter-demonstrations in Belgrade, and in March 1989 the Kosovo assembly finally agreed to accept direct rule from Belgrade. The news was greeted with celebrations by nationalists in Belgrade, but Albanian workers in Kosovo rioted until they were violently suppressed by the Federal Army. Since then tension has been high in Kosovo.

Nationalism was able to flourish amongst Serbian workers due to the fact that Milosevic sought to transfer increased value southwards from the M.D.R.s and that non-Serbian peasants and workers in the L.D.R.s would bear the brunt of the crisis. But its development did not go unopposed. Independent trade unions and other organisations formed to defend class interests and Serbian workers continued to strike against 'their' bosses. Indeed, strike activity increased in 1988, the most spectacular incident being the occupation of the Serbian parliament by 5,000 united Serb and Croat strikers from the cities of Vukovar and Borovo Selo in South-East Croatia. 1989 saw a further increase in strike activity and in 1990 moves to carry out the dismantling of the self-management apparatus and the privatisation of enterprises were abandoned in the face of violent strikes, not just in Serbia but throughout all the republics. Despite the growing influence of the nationalists those opposed to nationalism were able to mobilise mass support right up until the outbreak of the war. In March 1991, only months before the break away of Slovenia, 70,000 demonstrated in Belgrade against control of the media by Milosevic's nationalist lackeys. The demonstration was met with water cannons, tear gas, mounted police, rubber bullets and finally live ammunition leaving two dead (according to official figures). The next day saw big demonstrations throughout Serbia's towns and cities demanding the release of the 300 arrested and for the next four days there were mass demonstrations in Belgrade, including an ongoing occupation of the main square. But despite the fact that Serbian workers were often able to win concessions from 'their' bosses struggles such as these ultimately proved incapable of overcoming the divisions between the workers both within and between the different republics to the extent required to prevent the war.

This account of the development of Serbian nationalism shows the lie of those on the left who, in their desperation to back one faction of our class enemy against the other, seek to apologise for Serbian nationalism by arguing that it is merely a response to the threat posed by Croatian fascism. But this account does not explain the disintegration of Yugoslavia. It did not occur, as much of the bourgeois press initially argued, due to fear of Serbian domination on the parts of those nice liberals in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. Let us shift our attention north-westwards.

ii) Slovenia and Croatia

Party leaders in Slovenia and Croatia observed what was happening in Belgrade with trepidation. But, despite talk of secession, what they really wanted was economic liberalisation and increased autonomy within a looser Yugoslav Federation. They certainly did not want the recentralisation of power in Belgrade, nor were they content with the 1988 Constitutional changes. But things would begin to change rapidly the following year; 1989 was the year that the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe crumbled, the year that the Berlin Wall fell.

During 1989 opposition parties formed in Slovenia and Croatia, committed to market forces and closer ties with W. European capital. Talk of solving the economic crisis by cutting themselves free from the millstone of the incompetitive L.D.R.s became louder, and nationalist tensions increased with a boycott of Slovene commodities in Serbia. In September the Slovenian assembly adopted Constitutional Amendments, including the right to secede and the right to decidewhether any declaration of martial law in Belgrade should be extended to Slovenia. The leaders of Croatia and Bosnia were also increasingly lining up against Serbia.

In January 1990 the Federal Party congress broke up in disarray, and two months later the Slovenian and Croatian delegates failed to attend a Central Committee meeting in Belgrade, choosing instead to meet with Italians, Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Slovenia, whilst the Bosnian delegation turned up in Belgrade only to leave again immediately. But it was to be the election of parliamentary parties in the M.D.R.s which had no affiliation with the leaders in the rest of the country that made secession look increasingly likely.

Slovenia and Croatia both staged elections in April 1990. In Slovenia the election largely revolved around the issue of secession, with the secessionists winning, although the election of Kukan, leader of the Slovenian Communist Party, to the position of President reflected a certain amount of caution. In Croatia the election brought Franjo Tujman, leader of the right-wing nationalist Croatian Democratic Union, to power. In the 1960s Tujman had engaged in historical revisionism, rewriting the history of WW2 and the Ustashe regime, and on coming to power set about their rehabilitation. The new Croatian Constitution declared Croatia to be the land of the Croats, giving no constitutional guarantees for the rights of minorities. The use of the Cyrillic alphabet for official communication was banned, even in areas where Serbs are the majority. The insignia and flags of the Ustashe began reappearing, 'Victims of Fascism' Square in Zagreb was renamed 'Croatian Heroes' Square. Serbian workers began to be sacked en masse from public sector jobs in order to reduce unemployment amongst Croatian workers and establish a new pattern of domination. And in a manner reminiscent of the bad old days arbitrary arrests, disappearances and the murder of Serbs started happening all over again.

Not surprisingly Croatia's Serbs started agitating for autonomous Serbian enclaves. In October 1990 they seized arms from police arsenals throughout Eastern Croatia and set up roadblocks, declaring the region autonomous and calling for the Federal Army to back them against the 'fascist government' in Zagreb. But within the enclaves Chetnik insignia were reappearing; many of the insurrectionists were pro Serbian nationalism as much as anti Croatian fascism.( The Serbian minority in Bosnia had also been agitating for autonomy and October 1990 also saw violent clashes between Bosnia's Serbs and Muslims. The reason for the trouble was the refusal of Serbs to commemorate the slaughter of Muslims by Chetniks in WW2.)

As previously noted the 1988 strikes in precisely this region of Eastern Croatia had demonstrated a significant degree of unity between Serbs and Croats. Two years on, however, and caught between rival nationalist militias, such unity appears to have been impossible to sustain. And whilst Croatian and Slovenian workers struck in 1990 along with workers in the other republics, opposition to nationalism seems to have been less fervent than in Serbia, largely because of the potential benefits that workers in the M.D.R.s could accrue from independence (and that Croatian workers could gain at the expense of the Serbian minority in Croatia).

It could be said that the civil war had already started, but it would not start in earnest until the following summer. In December 1990 elections in Serbia and Montenegro had returned the renamed Y.C.P. to power, signalling to the leaders in the M.D.R.s that their demands were unlikely to be met. Slovenia's new rulers organised a referendum on whether they should secede should reforms not be forthcoming in the near future, and a huge majority voted in favour. Croatia also made Constitutional changes reserving the right to secession.

In Spring 1991 both announced their intention to ditch the Federation. The Federal Army leadership sought the declaration of a state of emergency in order to block the move, but the Federal leadership refused them. On June 25th 1991 Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves independent.

(6) The Conflict Begins

Outmanoeuvred politically the leadership of the Federal Army, now the de facto Federal power, responded militarily. On June 27th the Federal Army attempted to hold the Federation together through the seizure of Slovenia's border posts and main airport. Within only 10 days however, the Serb-dominated Federal Army leadership had to concede that Slovenia's secession could not be prevented. On the one hand the Federal Army met with fierce Slovene resistance. The previous year had seen both Slovenia and Croatia make moves towards turning those Federal forces under their control into independent national armies, which were blocked by the Federal leadership declaring such moves illegal and impounding weapons. But whilst almost all of Croatia's weaponry was impounded only 40% of that in Slovenian hands was recovered. Thus when the fighting started Slovenian forces were sufficiently well armed to encircle and cut off the Federal Army's Slovenian bases.

Another factor behind the Slovenian victory was resistance within the Federal Army itself. Military leaders had registered their concern about the loyalty of Federal troops in May 1991 when they began calling up Serbian reservists to form ethnically 'pure' tank regiments. But resistance to the war was not limited to non-Serbian troops, who in 1991 made up only 40% of Federal Army manpower. Indeed it has been reported that since the war began a staggering 80% of Federal Army conscripts have deserted!

Resistance within the Federal Army was backed up by anti-war protests in Serbia itself. The independent trade unions and other organisations which had been set up to oppose the development of nationalism in Serbia in the late 1980's quickly established themselves as the foundations upon which an anti-war movement could be built. Two days after the outbreak of the war anti-war protesters, including many mothers of conscripts, stormed the Serbian parliament in Belgrade demanding the withdrawal of the Yugoslav Army from Slovenia.

Whilst the weakness of the Federal Army meant that Slovenia's secession had to be accepted as a fait accompli, the situation regarding Croatia differed for a number of reasons. Not only were the Croat forces not as well armed as the Slovenians, more importantly Croatia's leaders already had a major problem on their hands in the form of Chetnik revivalism amongst Croatia's Serbian population. Following the declaration of independence, tensions between Croatia's rival ethnic groups increased further, and there were numerous reports of armed clashes. Thus when the Serbian leaders of the Federal Army switched their attention towards Croatia they were able to allow Chetnik forces to do most of the fighting. In this way the Serb leaders were able to relegate the potentially unreliable Federal Army to a supporting role, claiming in order to appease both 'the West' and the rest of the Federation that its role was one of neutral arbitration, whilst their aims were pursued by Chetnik guerrillas for whom reliability was not an issue. In this way the Chetnik /Federal Army alliance was able to score a partial military victory over the forces of the Croatian Army (backed up in turn by guerrillas including H.O.S., the fascist movement reminiscent of the Ustashe). Whilst they were unable to achieve the total victory which might have preserved the Federation, albeit minus Slovenia, they were able to gain control over the mainly Serbian regions, and have the gains consolidated by the U.N. cease-fire agreement. As previously noted the goal of a Greater Serbia had many supporters within the Serbian leadership. Whilst this was probably not the aim of the Serb leaders when they launched the Serb/Croat war in July 1991, the chances of being able to hold the Federation together decreased significantly following the German-led E.E.C. recognition of Croatian sovereignty on January 15th 1992. This, combined with the inability to ensure an absolute victory over the Croatian Army, must have been a major factor behind the shift in the aim of the Serbian leaders from that of preserving the Federation to that of a Greater Serbia.

This shift was itself probably a major factor leading to the Bosnian declaration of independence in April 1992. The Bosnian leadership had long been moving closer to the leaders of the M.D.R.s (due to their support for regional autonomy), despite themselves presiding over a L.D.R. (although the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984 indicates a significant potential for foreign currency earnings through the development of skiing as a tourist industry). Now, not only were their fears of Serbian domination heightened, but they had also seen (admittedly confusing) signs of international support for secession in the cases of Slovenia and Croatia, and may have assumed that they would receive backing against Serbian retaliation. A spring referendum boycotted by the Serbian minority registered 99% support for independence. Bosnian Serbs and Croats had already been calling for the cantonisation of Bosnia to produce Serbian and Croatian enclaves which could subsequently join Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia respectively. The announcement of the referendum result stirred them up, particularly the Serbian nationalists in Bosnia. Serb gunmen mounted barricades around Sarajevo on the night of March 2nd and the following night (to which Muslim militants responded by blocking off the Muslim quarter). Protesters immediately gathered at the barricades to demand their removal and were fired upon only to regroup and return with thousands more demonstrators. The multi-ethnic and well-integrated population of Bosnia's capital city had signalled their opposition to the nationalists in their midst, as did the population of the city of Tuzla by signing a statement against 'ethnicisation', but elsewhere in the country ethnic clashes escalated. When independence was declared the following month, and immediately recognised by the U.S., the war in Bosnia began.

Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tujman had met the previous month to discuss the partition of Bosnia between a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia. What had by this stage become a Serbian Army invaded Bosnia from one side to back up the Chetnik militia whilst Croatian forces invaded from the other. Anyone with eyes and ears must have a fair idea as to what has happened since. Serbian forces have seized about two-thirds of the country and Croatia much of the remainder, as the countryside, though not the cities, has seen neighbours take up arms against each other and, divided along ethnic lines, pursue a bloody civil war. All three of the warring parties have attempted to tighten their grip on the regions they control by driving out 'aliens' through the use of terror, including rape.

(7) Resistance To The War

At the forefront of the struggle against the war has been desertion and draft resistance; some media reports have indicated that the cities have been awash with those refusing to fight. In mid 1992 it was reported that over 100,000 Serbs had refused the call-up and that over 10,000 had been prosecuted for desertion. And Sarajevo is reputed to contain many Serbs, Croats and Muslims refusing to join or having fled from their respective armies.

Without wishing to appear too pessimistic, it does however seem that the anti-war movement has gradually lost its way. Exactly one year on from the demonstrations of March 1991 and there was another wave of demonstrations in Belgrade, this time against the war itself. But they were far smaller than the previous years and seemed to be far more dominated by students and school kids, with a truancy epidemic said to be sweeping through the capital. June 1992 saw 10,000 demonstrate in Belgrade and July 1992 saw a strike by 10,000 Belgrade students, but important though this resistance was it seems to have lost the ability to mobilise other sections of the working class. Then, following the announcement of Panic's participation in the Serbian elections on an anti-war platform, the demonstrations appear to have disappeared from Belgrade altogether as hopes were pinned on the democratic process. Whilst Belgrade voted solidly against the war voters elsewhere backed Milosevic, and the ultra-nationalists to his right gained about a third of the votes, largely from rural areas. Milosevic was returned to power and the hopes of the anti-war movement shattered.

Vague stories have surfaced of striking workers occupying railway lines in Vojvodina and Serbian tanks being diverted en route to the front to intimidate unruly workers. And June 1st 1992 saw the return of violent confrontations in Belgrade between the Serbian state and proletarians following the sacking of the President of the 'rump-Yugoslav Federation' by Milosevic. Such a development can only be for the good, despite the fact that opposition to Milosevic is an extremely confused amalgum of anti-nationalists and ultra-nationalists, for it signals that the war has not meant the irreversable defeat of the working class of Serbia. But with Milosevic now in favour of a settlement to end the conflict due to pressures brought to bear by domestic opposition and the effects of sanctions, but unable to exert sufficient pressure on Bosnia's Serbs, the impact that an anti-war movement in Belgrade could have appears to be limited. What is really needed is opposition within Bosnia itself, and whilst opposition in Belgrade could serve as a filip to the small anti-war movements in other republics, the chances of its development in Bosnia are slim given that the cities are in ruins and their populations terrorized by bombardments and sniper fire. It is hard to be optimistic about the near future for the working class of former Yugoslavia. Given the severity and extent of the atrocities witnessed, the divisions between the various nationalities are likely to fester for many years to come.

(8) The International Context

No account of Yugoslavia's descent into civil war would be adequate without reference to the massive changes in the surrounding geo-political order. As with many of the most significant events of recent years, from the Gulf War to the end of the Ethiopian war, the collapse of Somalia to the Italian corruption scandal, it was the crisis in the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that precipitated the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation. Such a scenario would have been inconceivable whilst Yugoslavia straddled the border between East and West. Neither side would have allowed events to take their own course whilst the possibility remained of Yugoslavia going over to one side or the other.

The end of the Cold War meant the loss of any advantage Yugoslavia's rulers may have derived from their position as an unaligned nation placed strategically between rival Blocs. But more important has been the reorganisation of the European bourgeoisie following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The process of European unification offers a stark choice to the rulers of the poorer countries on the fringes of the newly emerging power bloc. Either try to climb on board, in which case the position of poorer partner supplying cheap primary products and labour-power will, to a certain extent, be compensated for by financial aid. Or be left trying to keep afloat in the emerging 'Third World' of Europe, competing with other East European plus African, Asian, and Latin American economies to sell basic commodities inside 'Fortress Europe' or the other trade blocs. This fear of marginalisation from the main circuits of capital is perhaps the most important consequence of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc so far as Yugoslavia is concerned, forcing the tension between the M.D.R.s and the L.D.R.s to breaking point. The election of nationalist/secessionist politicians in the M.D.R.s was a consequence of this struggle against margin alisation. An undivided Yugoslavia could just as easily have gone the way of Albania as that of Hungary. Now, Slovenia and Croatia seem to have laid some of the necessary foundations for future economic recovery, with Slovenia in particular attracting significant amounts of foreign investment capital which provides a source of revenue for the new state, whilst the poorer Southern nations seem destined for further economic deterioration on the periphery.

The end of the Cold War has also meant that 'The West' has lost much of the coherence that the opposition to 'communism' imposed, and major divisions within the bourgeoisie of Europe have emerged which have had a significant effect on the international response to the war in Yugoslavia, and which must therefore be examined. The major division is that between Germany, and to a lesser extent Austria and Italy, on the one hand and France, Britain and the rest of the E.E.C. on the other. Germany has strong economic interests in Croatia and Slovenia. Since its formation the German state has been as inclined to look Eastwards as Westwards, and whilst this process was blocked by the Cold War, since the detente of the 1970s German capital has been forging closer links with Eastern Europe. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall this process has accelerated as the German bourgeoisie have sought to develop a hinterland in which they can exploit cheap yet skilled labour and so undermine wages in Germany itself. To this end, having already encouraged Croatian and Slovenian separatism, the Bundestag pressed for early recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. They eventually forced E.E.C. recognition in January 1992 having unilaterally recognised them the preceding month. And whilst Croatia has been somewhat destabilised by the war, Germany has been able to begin the annexation of Slovenia to the Deutschmark zone. Around 40% of the foreign capital invested in Slovenia since independence has come from Germany (25% has been Austrian and 15% Italian, with many firms simply shifting factories from one side of the border to the other). And in relation to the war the German bourgeoisie have been pressing for an anti-Serbian position within the E.E.C., openly siding with Croatia to such an extent that many otherwise supportive liberals have been embarrassed by the blind eye turned towards Croatian fascism.

For the rest of the E.E.C., however, there is far less at stake in the conflict. Lacking the strong economic interests in the region of the German bourgeoisie, and given that there is little money to be made out of this particular war, the primary consideration of the rest of Europe's rulers has been to minimise the destabilising effects of the war. Refugees are not required at a time of mass unemployment, and there was the possible danger of the conflict spreading to involve N.A.T.O. countries such as Greece (which supports Serbia) and Turkey (which supports Bosnia). Hence the main aim at the start of the conflict of the rest of the E.E.C. states was to preserve the status quo, obstinately refusing to recognise that the Federation was dead until forced to do so by Germany's actions.

This division between Germany and the rest of Europe paralysed the E.E.C.'s attempts to respond to the situation in Yugoslavia. So the main outside intervention has been mounted by the U.N., in which Germany is still denied the permanent seat on the Security Council that its economic might would warrant. The main power in the U.N. is of course the U.S.A., with Britain and France still enjoying a major role as well. And once more a division has emerged. American interests in the region are hard to identify, but in opposition to German support for Croatia, and at odds with the position of the rest of the E.E.C., the United States appears to have supported Bosnia. When Croatia and Slovenia declared themselves independent the U.S. reiterated its position of supporting Yugoslav unity, recognising the Federal leadership as the legitimate power in the region. Then, when Bosnia declared its independence, U.S. recognition was immediately forthcoming. When the war in Bosnia began the U.S. repeatedly expressed a desire to arm the Bosnians, pressing for them to be exempted from the embargo imposed on the whole of former Yugoslavia, and has only recently come to realise that Bosnia has ceased to exist as such and would not therefore make much of an ally.

Given the lack of obvious interest in the region it is difficult to say why the U.S. took a position in opposition not just to Germany but also the rest of the E.E.C. One consideration may have been the fear that the Bosnian Muslims, at present renowned for their secular leanings, would be driven into the arms of fundamentalist regimes should they hold out the only possibility for real support. Another factor may have been the fear of the economic power of a 'Greater Germany', of the threat it would pose to U.S. hegemony, and thus the desire to have Bosnia as its bulwark against German expansionism. Yet another may have been the desire of a beleaguered presidential regime for a foreign policy success to deflect criticism in the same way its predecessor used the Gulf War. But whilst the State Dept. and foreign policy advisers urged Clinton to get involved the Pentagon was resolutely opposed, recognising the potential hazards. This left the U.S. President urging intervention but refusing to join Britain and France in sending ground troops.

So where does the British Government stand in relation to all this? The media has consistently taken an anti-Serbian position, first backing Croatia and then, when that became untenable, backing the 'poor Muslims'. And Margaret Thatcher has appeared on Croatian television calling for the British Government to arm the Croatians in their fight 'for democracy', and has, more recently, called for the arming of Bosnian Muslims. But whilst ideology plays its part, the war is being fought for real material interests, and it is clear that the British Government has no intention of joining Germany in taking sides with Croatia. In fact the U.K. seems to be more sympathetic to Serbia, though not to the extent that Russia is, and usually takes the stance that all the sides are as bad as each other even if the Serbians are more powerful. Britain, like most of the other E.E.C. states has little economic interest in the region, and would be as concerned as any about German predominance within Europe, but is more reluctant than most to become involved in military intervention, refusing to do anything more than police an agreement once it has been established between all the warring parties, because British troops would undoubtedly be expected to bear the brunt of any fighting, which would involve major casualties.

With no country willing to commit ground troops for military purposes the international actors seem set to limit their ambitions to containing the conflict and letting it burn itself out. The Vance-Owen plan which sought to carve-up of Bosnia into semi-autonomous provinces, was scuppered by the fact that each of the parties attempted to further their gains, or in the Bosnian case reduce their losses by provoking military intervention on their behalf, before a 'final' settlement was reached. A three-way partition of Bosnia is now firmly on the agenda since all talk of U.N. military intervention to impose a settlement has long since been shown to be empty. Neither Kohl nor Clinton would have had their way, but Croatia will have made significant territorial gains and a Bosnia of sorts will remain. Neither Germany or the U.S. had enough to gain by acting unilaterally and destroying the fragile international consensus.

To return to the questions posed in the introduction, we now have to consider whether or not we are witnessing the opening salvos in a major European War. There are those for whom the very asking of this question proves our inability to learn the lessons of history. For them 'decadent capitalism' is inexorably driving towards a final apocalypse unless the cavalry arrive on cue. But the essence of capital is not war, nor even a drive towards it. It is the self-expansion of value, a process repeatedly requiring the re-establishment of certain preconditions. At certain historical junctures the imposition of these preconditions has proved impossible to obtain except through war, but not always. Whilst those who drone on about the lessons of history continue to live in the past we must recognise that history is only closed and certain when it is in the past. History is open and full of possibilities in its making because it is a living process made through the struggle of labour against capital, of life against death. Answers to questions such as these cannot, therefore, be merely presupposed, but require real analysis. There is no conclusive evidence that the events in former-Yugoslavia herald a much wider military confrontation. Indeed it seems likely that whilst hostilities in the Balkans will continue for a while the conflict is unlikely to spread. Greece's sabre-rattling over Macedonia seems to have been little more than an exercise in trying to encourage a national identity in a country plagued by working class opposition to austerity. And whilst tensions in Kosovo remain high the odds are stacked too firmly in Serbia's favour for it to become a battleground in the struggle between a 'Greater Albania' and 'Greater Serbia'.

The other question was whether the pattern of events in Yugoslavia are likely to be repeated throughout Eastern Europe. The division of Czechslovakia demonstrates that disintegration need not necessarily lead to war, whilst the many conflicts simmering in the former republics of the U.S.S.R. indicates that there remains a real possibility of further conflicts. Should such conflicts concern 'The West' more than the present one, due to a threat to strategic or economic interests, then military intervention would be a real possibilty. If only for this reason we therefore have to look at how the Left in Britain has related to the present conflict.

(9) The Left and the Conflict

As war has moved westwards from the Middle East to the Balkans, so doves have turned into hawks. The left-wing of the Labour party, which with C.N.D. established itself as the pacifist opposition to the Gulf War, has been baying for military intervention in this war. Seemingly unable to penetrate the distortions of the media, the hand-wringing desperation to 'do something' has lead them to call for something, anything, to be done and ignore all the evidence showing that such actions would only make things worse. Their position shows that they have not grasped the hypocrisy of the U.N.'s supposedly humanitarian mission. The U.N. forces are not there to prevent suffering in the name of humanity; the U.N. mission reflects the only interests on which western capital can agree, namely the containment of the conflict. Given this premise it is impossible to support military intervention by the U.N. Not because of some abstract 'right to self-determination', which in this case amounts to the right to slaughter fellow proletarians, but because such a move could only strengthen the hand of international capital and make things worse for the working class of Yugoslavia. Aerial strikes were the most likely form of intervention, as the only option military leaders were prepared to countenance, and it was widely admitted that these would inevitably result in significant civilian casualties. And the exemption of the Bosnian Army from the arms embargo, a policy still advocated by Germany and the U.S. (not to mention Ken Livingstone in the U.K. and Edward Said and Noam Chomsky in the U.S.) but resisted by France and Britain, would clearly lead to an escalation in the fighting. Working class unity in the Balkans already seems a remote possibility and military intervention or the re-equipment of the Bosnian Army would postpone it even further.

The left of the Labour Party are not the only ones who have seen fit to alter their position on inter-capitalist wars. During the Gulf War the S.W.P. moved from an initial position (logically derived from their 'theory') of supporting 'anti-imperialist' Iraq, to one of simply opposing the allied war mission (in order to be able to recruit from the fringes of the pacifist movement to which they attatched themselves). This time they have adopted a class position on the war:

'The privations of war may lead workers to discover that their real enemies are the regimes which set them at war with one another.......That means turning towards class struggle as the only real basis for ending the war.'

Whilst we must commend the S.W.P.'s recent conversion to a class position it does strike us as somewhat strange that it has occured in the present situation. They have seen fit to take sides in numerous wars where there has been serious working class opposition to the war, whilst they are now adopting a 'No War But The Class War' position in a situation where the opposition has been all but smashed. After ignoring class struggle in Iraq they are now inventing it in Bosnia.

Meanwhile the R.C.P. attempted to stake its claim to be the most solidly pro-Serbian faction of the British Left early on in the conflict. Living Marxism thoroughly prepared the ground for making inroads into the market as soon as U.N. intervention occured as 'the magazine that supports the Serbian boys'. Every month it avidly 'exposed' the latest reports of the atrocities perpetrated by the 'anti-imperialist' Serbian militias as 'lies', only to be left high and dry by the West's lack of intervention. The West's failure to perform its proper imperialist duties has left the R.C.P.'s position of tacit support for the Serbian bourgeoisie without the usual 'justification' that such a position undermines the needs of 'the highest stage of capitalism'.

With these changes in position within the Left it is clear that opposition to any future military engagement would not simply be able to learn the lessons from opposition to the Gulf War end expect to be able to replay the game on the same pitch; the goalposts would be found to have been moved.

(10) Conclusion

The roots of the present conflict are located in the severity of the economic crisis which hit Yugoslavia at the end of the 1970's, and the different solutions which, due to the disparities between the republics, the different republican leaderships were striving to impose. The rapid changes in the surrounding political and economic order resulting from the collapse of the Eastern Bloc precipitated the disintegration of the Federation by upping the stakes. And disintegration has lead to war as each of the newly independent factions of the bourgeoisie pursues its own goals regardless of the consequences for others. We would have to say, however, that the slide into civil war is a consequence of the particularities of the history of Yugoslavia, notably the genocidal programme of the Ustashe during World War Two, memories of which provide nationalism in the Balkans with a particularly fertile basis. Furthermore, whilst the effects of regional disparities may be witnessed elsewhere, such as in Italy, in no other European country is there the degree of regional economic autonomy which the Yugoslav Republics enjoyed. The civil war in Yugoslavia is extremely unlikely to be repeated in the countries of Western Europe whose economies are so interpenetrated, whilst further conflicts could well emerge in the developing 'Third World' of Eastern Europe.

In contrast to other accounts of the civil war we hope to have demonstrated that the working class of Yugoslavia have not been mere passive victims of circumstance. The wave of struggles waged in the late 1960's forced Tito to curtail the rule of money over the lives of the working class by means of the 1974 Constitution. This in turn lead to their entrenchment and an inability of Yugoslav capital to raise the rate of surplus value sufficiently. As such the Yugoslav economy was particularly hard hit by Western standards when the world recession began to bite.

A period of open struggle ensued for most of the 1980's. Despite the fact that the Y.C.P. were unable to resolve the crisis of accumulation, by the late 1980's they were having increasing success in undermining the working class's ability to defend its previous gains. As the prospect of defeat began to stare the working class in the face so nationalist ideas began to gain increasing acceptance. This in turn undermined the ability of the working class to generalise its particular struggles. Struggles defeated in isolation encouraged nationalism which isolated struggles even further. From the graveyard of proletarian aspirations rose the ghost of nationalism, and the potential grave-diggers of Yugoslav capital began burying the corpses of their own class.

Footnotes

The need to take a closer look at what has occurred in Yugoslavia was adequately demonstrated to us by the now obvious fallacy of our assertion in issue 1 that the British State was preparing for a military intervention in pursuit of interests held in common with the Bundestag. This may have reflected an overestimation of political unity within the EEC, and a tendency to conflate the demonisation of the Serbs in the British media with the real interests of the British State. But it certainly reflected an inadequate theorisation of the driving forces behind the conflict.

See Table 1 in 'The Disintegration of Yugoslavia: Regional Disparities and the Nationalities Question' in Capital and Class Vol. 48. This article places too little emphasis on the limits to capital accumulation imposed by the struggles of the Yugoslav proletariat but is nonetheless useful for the wealth of empirical information regarding Yugoslav development that it presents. Also recommended is 'Yugoslavery' (£1 from BM Blob, London WC1N 3XX) which contains 'Yugoslavia: Capitalism and Class Struggle 1918-1967' and 'Some Basic Ingredients of Yugoslav Ideology', again because it provides a much richer account of capitalist development in Yugoslavia, but as this was published before the conflict had broken out its use is now limited to providing context.

The Ustashe regime ruled the Independent State of Croatia, which existed under German and Italian protection from 1941 to 1944. The fascist Ustashe are estimated to have murdered between a half and one million people, mainly Serbs but including Jews and gypsies, with a zeal reputed to have shocked their Nazi allies.

See 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' in Capital Vol. 1.

The best account of the student revolt and how the Y.C.P. managed to deal with it is 'Revolt in Socialist Yugoslavia' by Fredy Perlman. This article has been included in a recent compilation of some of his works called 'Anything Can Happen' (Phoenix Press £4.50).

See Sayer, A. 'New Developments in Manufacturing: The Just-In-Time System', Capital and Class Vol. 30.

Yugoslavia's economic crisis was of course bound up with the worldwide recession which began in the early 1980s, as Left-Communist articles on Yugoslavia have pointed out. But unlike them we reject the thesis that a purely 'objective' crisis lead to certain 'subjective' responses, recognising the need for a unified theory of crisis. In the case of this article it is important to recognise the role of working class entrenchment in the development of Yugoslavia's crisis. After all the Yugoslav economy was much harder hit by the same worldwide crisis than, say, Japan.

The little information included on the class struggle in Yugoslavia during the 1980s has largely been taken from an article in the October 1992 and April/May 1993 issues of the German autonomist magazine Wildcat (Sisina, Postfach 360527, 1000 Berlin 36-030/6121848).

See 'The war in Yugoslavia and the Debt Burden: A Comment' in Capital And Class Vol. 50 for an analysis of the effects of the international debt crisis on regional disparities in Yugoslavia.

Recognition of this allows one to understand how capitalism has proved to be so remarkably resilient. How does one account for the absence of revolution or the attractions of reformist politics if this is not recognised?

Much of the information for this section has come from 'Yugoslavia: The Spectre of Balkanization' in New Left Review 174, 1989.

There has been no conclusive confirmation to back up this claim of systematic rape, but that does not necessarily mean that it did not occur. Rape is often a weapon in war and the atmosphere in Kosovo could certainly be described as warlike at the time, with the dehumanisation of rivals that encourages rape well developed. But whilst there may well be some truth in the stories of rape of Serb women by Albanian separatists it is also clear that the Serbian media exploited such actions to their own ends and in doing so refused to be constrained by the facts.

We use the term 'Muslim' with some reservations given the way the war in Bosnia has been portrayed at times as a tribal feud and the way in which Croatian and Serbian propagandists have used the 'fundamentalist bogey'. Whilst some of Bosnia's leaders have professed support for Islam most of those referred to as Muslims are in fact secular. The term seems to apply to all those in Bosnia who do not identify themselves as either Serbian or Croatian. We are simply using it for the sake of brevity.

Fear of the consequences of a Muslim state based on the Sharia (Islamic law), which the Bosnian President had previously declared himself in favour of , may also have been a factor behind the opposition of (Catholic) Croats and (Orthodox) Serbs to independence.

See 'Crimes against Women in Former Yugoslavia' in Bad Attitude no. 2.

Does this election result, the seige of Sarajevo and the destruction of cities such as Vukovar signal a divide between the urban and rural classes on the question of nationalism? We do not have sufficient information to say conclusively one way or another. Opinions on this matter would be welcome.

Capital's victories can in any case only ever be provisional because it cannot eliminate antagonism, having to posit living labour as its opposite. Regarding the question of war one only has to remember how the first world war ended.

See 'E.M.U.'s In The Class War' in Issue 1 of Aufheben.

As with the U.S. there are major divisions within the Government and even within the two main parties.

Divisions are even deeper within the Russian state, with Yeltsin and his supporters keen to please 'the West', particularly the U.S., and his opponents, notably the old guard in the Red Army, more inclined towards backing their old Slavic allies.

And containment of any possible uprisings in the immediate aftermath of the war.

For an analysis of the opposition to the Gulf War see 'Lessons from the struggle against the Gulf War' in issue 1 of Aufheben.

Socialist Review Issue 165, June 1993.

June 1993

Somalia and the Islamic threat to capital

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THE SOMALIA MYSTERY

The landing of US troops on the beaches of Somalia in December 1992 might be significant for a number of reasons. The ludicrous spectacle of television camera crews virtually jostling the troops for space on the beach to get the best pictures seems to point to the need on the part of the American state to draw attention to itself not only as a military power, but also as an efficient humanitarian force: not just the world's cop but also the world's social worker.

The apparent suddenness of the decision by then President Bush to send in the marines might suggest that we need look no further for an explanation for such ostentatious benevolence than the prevalent journalistic glosses that the operation was perhaps a last dramatic personal gesture by a lame-duck president, more lauded for his foreign policy than his domestic achievements, an attempt to salvage his vision of a new world order and the international policing role of the US for posterity. Bush's expressed justification for sending troops to deliver relief supplies was in terms of the need to prevent armed Somalis "ripping off their own people". And, in fact, when the US troops ended the operation in early May this year, the consensus among journalists was that, though the US troops had done little to tackle the causes of the civil war in Somalia, they had indeed helped with food distribution, which was said by many to be the main reason for the high levels of starvation in that country.

Yet the extent of the Somalian famine and its problems of food distribution had long ceased to be news by the time Bush's decision came. For the previous two years, the UN had attempted to negotiate with various clan leaders to bring in relief supplies to famine hit areas. As class conscious cynics, we might see Bush's somewhat belated outbursts on "bandits" and his unprecedented attack of charity as, at some level, a pretext. Even within the aid agencies, questions have been asked about the reasons given for the invasion. Thus one UN official described the American claim that 80% of food aid was being looted as "bullshit". He saw the American invasion as an excuse for the testing of certain operational methods by the US army. It is not clear, however, why the American state should want simply to test certain operational methods in Somalia at this particular time. Similarly, Medicins sans Frontiers claimed that the figures of 95% malnutrition cited by the Americans were out of date and, again, just a pretext for sending troops in. Troops, said the French spokesperson, would shatter the balance between the aid agencies and the clans. Finally, we are told that some of the claims about starvation, and particularly displacement, are "absurd" given that Somalia's population is largely nomadic anyway.

Thus problems have been raised, but the bourgeois critics of American intervention bring us little closer to a full explanation. We need to take a proletarian viewpoint in our search for answers. We might therefore understand Bush's sudden change of heart on the question on intervention in Somalia in terms of the strategic interests of Western capital against the particular forms of proletarian militancy in the region. We might ask, for example, whether the invasion had anything to do with the apparent spread of Islamic fundamentalist influence in the Horn of Africa, minor reports of which have been appearing in the bourgeois press over the last year.

Islamic fundamentalism is the common declared enemy of the Americans, the UN and the major clan leaders in Somalia. Somalia is 100% Moslem, and although under Siad Barre it might have been regarded as a politically Islam ic country, fundamentalists have never been happy with its laws. While the major clan leaders in Somalia welcomed the US intervention (albeit inconsistently), one of the country's Islamic parties, the Ittihad al Islami al Somalia, greeted the Americans with threats. Now, the leaders of the main military factions have had to give assurances to an increasingly disillusioned population that they will introduce Islamic shariah law. Groups of Islamic militants who have taken part in the civil war in Somalia are apparently backed by Sudan, which is backed in turn by Iran. Sudan itself has been engaged in a civil war; the (Arabic) north is trying to impose Islamic law on the ("African") south. The southern forces are backed by Western interests, including people like Tiny Rowlands. Sudan condemned the American intervention for destabilizing the region. Other politicians in the region see the US operation as a warning to the Khartoum government which has supported Islamic fundamentalist groups in both Africa and the Arab world. It is interesting in this respect that the US envoy who headed the US mobilization, Robert Oakley, is better known in the Moslem world as a man more familiar with warfare than relief efforts. He ran the Afghan mojahedin fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul. The presence of the US forces may encourage Sudan to keep a low profile in case the troops are sent into the south of that country. The arrival of US troops also coincided with a growing secessionist tone from the southern troops fighting Khartoum.

Bush was at pains to emphasize that the intervention in Somalia was to be a very limited one. The aim was simply to get food into the region; that was all. As soon as this was achieved, the US troops could be gone. All this would fit with a scenario whereby the effects of the famine are ameliorated, yet the various dominant armed factions within the country are still ultimately able to struggle for political control. If they had been disarmed or defeated by the Americans, this would leave the way open for forces even less desirable, in the eyes of the American bourgeoisie, to make a bid for power. The US force therefore hoped to create a degree of stability in Somalia in order to prevent a feared rise in Islamic fundamentalism.

However, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism may not be the only reason for the operation; and indeed other explanations have been proposed by revolutionaries. Thus both World Revolution and Organise! have pointed to the conflict between the national capitals of Europe and the US over influence in the region. But if this is the explanation, why did the US hand over to the UN in May this year instead of retaining a permanent presence in the country?

Even if competition between Western states was a factor in the invasion, such an explanation is, in an important sense, back to front. The very need for influence in the region is itself a symptom of the requirement of capital to respond to particular proletarian struggles. The form of the proletarian struggle determines the form of capital's development, both nationally and internationally. "Operation Restore Hope" might therefore be best grasped in terms of its global context of class struggle and capitalist response. To do this we must briefly outline some of the history of Somalia and the Horn of Africa more generally.

ORIGIN OF THE PRESENT SITUATION: THE OLD WORLD ORDER & THE COLD WAR

As with most of sub-Saharan Africa, and indeed the Third World in general, capital had little economic interest in the Horn of Africa beyond whatever primary products and raw materials that could be found there. In the case of the Horn of Africa these were few. Among the peasant and proles, the survival of communal ties and the lack of a tradition of wage dependence fostered a sense of entitlements with regard to the distribution of wealth in the community. Communal ties are also responsible for the fact that most African proleterians fail to experience capital's laws as naturalo r inevitable. Monetarization and commodification of social relations have gradually undermined these traditional relations, but capital accumulation has been confined to narrow sectors, restricting the development of modern capitalist social relations.

The general shift towards cash crops and plantation economies made sub-Saharan Africa increasingly unable to guarantee its own needs and thus prone to famine. In the Horn of Africa, the local business class makes most of its money in the import-export trade, which creates little employment and channels much wealth abroad. Capital-intensive export agriculture helped plunge the region into debt and soaked up the resources - land and capital - needed for food production.

However, while the Horn of Africa shared the problems of underdevelopment that have affected sub-Saharan Africa generally, it was also in a distinctive position. While of relatively little intrinsic economic interest, its geo-political location gave the region a strategic importance to the world powers. Firstly, it was of close proximity to the all-important oil production centres of the Middle East. Secondly, because it controlled the important trade route through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. The history of Somalia is a story of imperialism and cold war rivalry.

History of imperialist rivalries in Somalia

Somalia was colonized by the British and Italian states in the nineteenth century. To Britain, the Somali ports were useful as source of meat supplies to nearby Aden. The Italian state, the last colonial power in the country, developed lucrative banana plantations, often having to force recalcitrant peasants to work on them as slaves. Eventually bananas superseded hides as the country's main export; both these and meat remain important in Somlia's foreign trade.

The Italian collapse throughout East Africa was primarily the result of desertion by their African conscript forces. Independence and unification were finally achieved in Somalia in 1960. In 1969, the army under Siad Barre seized power. Siad Barre courted the USSR in an attempt to create a greater Somalia. With military assistance, he hoped to take land occupied by ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia and Kenya, countering local proletarian militancy with an appeal to nationalism. The partnership was an attractive one to the USSR because of the proximity of the Horn of Africa to the oil-producing Gulf states and the Middle East in general. Soviet rewards for having bases on Somali territory comprised saturating Somalia with weaponry. In turn, Somalia, passed the weapons on to pro-Somali guerrillas fighting inside Ethiopia.

But the 1974 socialist revolution in Ethiopia created complications for the Soviet-Somali relationship. The USSR violated an agreement with Somalia by supplying arms to Ethiopia. Barre was already trying to get the West on his side when the USSR dropped Somalia and openly befriended Ethiopia in the war. The break with the Soviet Union led to a wave of popularity for Barre's government in Somalia. Barre offered the abandoned Soviet military bases to the USA who rewarded him by flooding the country with even more weapons.

In the 1980s, Barre remained in power largely through his ability to play his enemies off against each other. But in 1991, the rival clan-based opposition fronts, whose ideologies were based largely on their desire for foreign backing, collaborated against him and his government collapsed. Having defeated him and driven him out of the country, however, the various anti-Barre fronts fell out. There was also schism within some of the clans. This has led to the current situation where there is no national police force and no central government and the southern portion of the country is split between rival "warlords". Of the most powerful warlords, Aideed is a general, a former government minister and ambassador to India, Mahdi is one of his former clan members and Morgan is another general and a son-in-law of Barre.

Consequences of superpower rivalry for the Horn, particularly for Somalia

The underdevelopment of the Horn of Africa was only exacerbated by the flooding of arms into the area and by the high dependence of large sections of the population on military employment. Instead of being spent on developing the forces of production, money was poured into military expenditure. Clearly, such a priority makes even economic reproduction on the same scale difficult if not impossible. In the early 1970s, Somalia was self-sufficient in its food production; but by the mid-1980s, it was one of the most food-dependent in Africa, and many of its policies were dictated by the IMF.

The economic decline of Somalia was partly a result of the cost of the Ogaden War with Ethiopia. Also, Barre's economic policies for the banana and sugar export trade were disastrous for these industries. However, these factors in the decline of Somalia's economy might be regarded as symptoms of the inability of capital in Africa to screw quite as much out of the proletariat as capitals in other continents were able to do; capital and operating costs in Africa are more than 50% higher than in Southern Asia, where the return is also greater.

In a context of spiralling food and fuel prices and shortages, there were riots in August 1987 in Mogadishu. These were enough to force the government to grant a number of concessions. The ruling class were no doubt mindful that similar disturbances in similar circumstances had heralded the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, terminating the long reign of Haile Selassie.

WAR, MASS STARVATION AND THE COLLAPSE OF STALINISM

1. The crisis of Third World debt

Africa for the most part did not benefit from the flight of capital out of the West following the proletarian offensive of the 1960s and 70s. Instead, the continent suffered the consequences of this flight. Faced with huge debts and spiralling interest rates and a stagnant world market in manufactured goods, newly industrializing countries such as Mexico and Brazil had little option but to increase the production and export of traditional primary products such as bananas, coffee, ores etc. This dramatic increase in the export of traditional Third World products forced prices down in the world market. This was catastrophic for much of Africa, pushing much of it to the brink of starvation. In the case of Somalia, by the end of the 1960s, the competitiveness of the country's leading crop and export - bananas - was already declining relative to Latin American producers such as Ecuador

2. Collapse of the Eastern Bloc

This plight of Africa in the 1980s was made worse by the collapse of the USSR which meant that there was no longer superpower competition for influence through aid. This was particularly true of Somalia, which had been so dependent on superpower rivalry. With this lack of superpower competition over the region, Bush's decision to invade might seem rather anachronistic. Indeed, it was the US, in March 1992, which vetoed a proposed monitoring operation by the UN (apparently because of the cost), restricting the UN instead to delivering humanitarian aid. So why did Bush suddenly change his mind? To get closer to a possible answer we must turn to the general problems that face American capital now and in the recent past.

D/ THE RISE OF ISLAM

1. The importance of oil in the post 1945 world

Since the Second World War, the car industry has been the linchpin of capital accumulation. It has been the key industry in the Fordist Mode of Accumulation. The Fordist Mode of Accumulation represented a compromise between the demands of capital and the needs of the Western proletariat. As an approach to industry, it allowed increased surplus value to be produced alongside increasing real wages. With Fordism, the rate of profit did not have to be sustained by raising the rate of exploitation through the "super-exploitation" of colonial labour, nor by the appropriation of monopoly profits through the restriction of the domestic market. Instead, the rate of profit was sustained through the production of relative surplus-value and the expansion of the domestic market for consumer goods. Thus, particularly after 1945, capitalism became based on mass production and mass consumption; capitalist corporations no longer sought to restrict production so as to maximize prices but rather sought to cut prices and maximize sales ("pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap").

The rapid expansion of the car industry, the Fordist industry par excellence, required the expansion of the coal, power and steel industries. But coal production, vulnerable to the militancy of miners, was becoming too risky for capital as a general source of energy. The dependency on oil for the smooth running of the car economy developed into a mad dash for the stuff in capital's desperate search for a general alternative energy source to coal.

2. Growth of oil production in the Middle East

With the growth of oil production in the Middle East came the rapid modernization of social relations in previously traditional societies. The emergence of a national bourgeoisie with means to establish a national strategy of capital accumulation was accompanied by the appearance of an oil-producing proletariate. In the late 1970s, proles from Mexico to Nigeria to Iran used the higher price of oil to demand a better standard of living, higher wages, schools, hospitals etc. The price of oil went up to keep up with these demands. Thus much of the wealth generated by the higher oil prices imposed by OPEC went to proletarians instead of being invested in the industries which require high levels of technology and energy.

In the Third World, various socialisms and nationalisms emerged as powerful ideologies to mobilize the emergent oil-producting classes behind the projects of national accumulation (over and against that of global accumulation of Western capital). Nasser in Egypt, the Ba'athist and Communist Parties in Iraq, Gaddafy in Libya and the PLO are all cases in point. While movements such as these divided the proles and inhibited the development of autonomous expressions of proletarian militancy, thus helping capital-in-general, they also threatened to some extent the particular interests of Western capital. There was always the threat of Middle Eastern countries which had adopted these ideologies going over to the state capitalist Eastern bloc or cutting themselves off from Western capital in some other way, thus operating against the interests of capital-in-general.

3. Islam fostered as \"moderate\" alternative to Stalinism

As a modernizing project, the ideologies of National Accumulation had to be secular. But to people in nations only recently unified and who defined themselves largely in terms of tribal or other allegiances, nationalism alone was clearly insufficient. Hence, in order to mobilise traditional sectors (peasants etc.), there was the need to reconcile secular national modernization with Islam. Indeed, there is no necessary conflict between Islam and the interests of capital. Although the Koran prohibits interest, there are ways of evading this, and capitalist developments have been uninhibited in many Moslem countries. The religion was therefore promoted by pro-Western conservative regimes as a safe alternative to stalinism, to prevent popular support for radical nationalist ideologies and to divert the class struggle. For example, Israel promoted Hizbullah in the Gaza strip, General Zia promoted Islam in Pakistan, the US supported moslem fighters against the Soviet-backed regime in Afganistan, and the religion is still used effectively in Saudi Arabia.

4. The policy backfires

In many cases, however, Islamic fundamentalism is getting out of control as far as Western capital is concerned. Islamic practices threaten to cut off large areas from the world market, just as stalinism threatened to do. Paraphrasing (and reversing) Tronti, while it is true that capital may sometimes objectively force the proletariat into certain choices, it is also true that the proletariat makes these choices work against capital.

The first sign that the policy of using Islam to guarantee national capital accumulation and a place in the world market had backfired was the Iranian revolution. The revolution was sparked by oil strikes and the proletarian seizure of the oil wells; it was the proletariat who destroyed the Shah's regime. The mullahs managed to recuperate and suppress this, however, and channel it into a form of Islamic fundamentalism that went far beyond the intentions of Western puppets such as the Shah.

With the collapse of stalinism as an embodied ideal and a potential patron, and with the discrediting of Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism has emerged as the potential replacement ideology. Islam has historically been a religion of resistance and independence for much of the world's population. Fundamentalism has been posited by followers as the true opposition to (Western) Christianity - and, by extension, as an alternative to democracy and capitalism. Islam is a more worldly, materialistic religion than Christianity, and easily accepts a role as a political force. Communalistic and egalitarian precepts to accept responsibilities to relatives and to fellow moslems (regarded as forming a single "nation") can hamper capital accumulation. All these factors make Islamic fundamentalism both a likely substitute for stalinism for both the oppressed Third World proletariat, who have little hope of overthrowing world capitalism by themselves, and the US bourgeoisie, which might require an external enemy in order to unify itself. Like stalinism, the ideology of the "export of the revolution" - so feared by Western capital - simply serves to consolidate counter-revolution at home.

E/ THE THREAT OF ISLAM

1. The new threat

But the perceived threat to the interests of Western capital is both real and illusory. The threat is real in that Islam is indeed a powerful means of mobilizing the poor against the interests of Western capital. Evidence for this real threat comes from the increasing damage caused to the functioning of the Algerian and Egynptian economies by fundamentalist movements and terrorist groups. But the danger is exaggerated to provide a necessary external threat through which to mobilize the American bourgeoisie.

In the past, the American bougeoisie was mobilized by the stalinist threat. Faced by the threat of stalinism, military expenditure became a surrogate industruial policy. This surrogate industrial policy became particularly important with the relative decline of the US as an economic power and the need for restructring to meet competition from Japan and the Pacific Rim. In contrast with previous administrations, Reagan abandoned all hope of defending the general competitiveness of American industry. The policy of competitive devaluation of the dollar was dropped; interest rates were pushed up to finance the growing budget, and trade deficits and the dollar were allowed to soar. Large swathes of the rust-belt industries in the North Eastern states were devastated. Under the guise of national security, state investment was able to circumvent the vested interests of the old industries and find its way to the more dynamic leading edge of productive Ameican capital. SDI ("Star wars") is the most well -known example of this. Although militarily preposterous, it allowed capital to be shifted from rocket technology and the aerospace induistry to the computer software and electronics industries. Indeed, SDI represented a massive state subsidy for these leading edge industries at a critical stage in their battle with Far East competitors. More than this, however, Reagan also managed to re-orientate the world accumulation of capital around American military production. With more and more American mainstream industries falling behind to foreign-based competition, the American consumer could no longer be relied upon to buy American. However, military demand came fromthe goverment which could bias its specifications in favour of American-based capital. Through large military expenditures, the centre of gravity of the world accumulation of capital would shift towards military production where American-based capital would have a competitive advantage. In this way, the US could reassert its economic hegemony.

But this use of military expenditure as a surrogate industrial policy, overriding particular interests in favour of general US interests in the name of National Security, has been in crisis since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the mounting budget deficits. It is no longer sustainable. Hence, American capital might be argued to be facing two choices. "Strategy A" entails renewing the policy of military accumulation as a surrogate economic policy by raising the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism. "Strategy B" would be to intervene directly in the economy with money financed through defence cuts.

2. Bush's belated invasion

This brings us directly back to the mystery of Bush's belated invasion of Somalia. We can conclude by asking two questions regarding the manoeuvre. Prompted by the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism in the Horn of Africa and North Africa generally, was the invasion an attempt to bounce Clinton into "strategy A" on behalf of the military/industrial faction of US capital? And, even if this is not the case, how far did the invasion address the real problems for Western capital of Islamic expansion in the area? The answer to the latter question may become clearer in the coming months.

Footnotes

World Revolution (161; February 1993) suggested as one of the two main objectives of the military deployment the USA's wish "to signal to its two main imperialist rivals - Germany and France in the first place - that the US will not hold back any longer from anywhere in the world." (p. 4).

Organise! (30; April-June 1993) commented: "This forward camp for the USA on the East African coast can allow it to intervene against the interests of the French (or European) ruling class. It could intervene in Chad, in Zaire, throughout North Africa where French interests are under threat, in particular in Algeria." (p. 6). However, the article also points to the function of the operation of countering the menace of Islamic fundamentalism.

See for example Sylvia Pankhurst (1951) Ex-Italian Somaliland. London: Watts & Co.

It is important to note in regard to this that the debt crisis suited many African dictators as much as Western capitalists; maintaining the constraints imposed by debt can be a way of maintaining internal order in African countries.

IMF Surveys of African Economies. Volume 2 (1969). Washington.

See Aufheben 1, page 19, footnote 38.

See the Midnight Notes pamphlet When Crusaders and Assassins Unite, Let the People Beware (1990)

Clearly, capital is not a unitary force, and particular "modernizing" capitals have on occasion been able to use Third World nationalism against rival capitals. Thus, in 1956, the US effectively sided with the nationalist government of Egypt by refusing to support French and British intervention to protect the latters' "ownership" of the Suez canal.

We can infer from the call by Gadaffi in May this year that all fundamnetalists should be kiled without trial that this idelogyt is getting beyond the control of the islamic-socialists and is threatening them too.

Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part I

Part 1/ Part 2 / Part 3

A] Introduction
We are subjects faced with the objective reality of capitalism. Capitalism appears as a world out of control - the denial of control over our lives. But it is also a world in crisis. How do we relate to this crisis?

One understanding that has been dominant among critics of capitalism is that capitalist crisis, especially a prolonged and severe crisis such as we are presently in, is evidence that capitalism as an objective system is declining. The meaning of decline is either that it has created the basis of 'socialism' and/or that it is moving by its own contradictions towards a breakdown. Capitalism, it is said, is a world system that was mature in the Nineteenth Century, but has now entered its declining stage. In our view this theory of capitalist decline or of the decadence of capitalism hinders the project of abolishing that system.

It might seem a bad time to critique the theory of decadence. In the face of a widespread disillusion with the revolutionary project and with a lack of a working-class offensive there is an understandable temptation to seek refuge in the idea that capitalism as an objective system is after all past its prime, moribund, heading inexorably towards collapse. If the subjective movement for revolutionary change seems lacking, the severity of the present world crisis offers itself as evidence that the objective conditions will bring about a change in the prospects for revolution.

In the theory of decline a number of issues are intertwined - crisis, automatic breakdown, the periodising of capitalism into ascendant and decadent phases, the notion of transition and the ontological question of the relation of subject and object. At a general level we might say the theory of decline represents a way of looking at the crises of capitalism that sees them expressing an overall downward movement. A complication in looking at the theory is that it has numerous versions. Among those presenting themselves as revolutionaries the two principal variants of the theory are those of Trotskyism and left-communism which although similar in origin are substantially different in the way they effect their politics.1 For some left-communists politics is virtually reduced to propagandising the masses with the message of capital's decadence, while for many Trotskyists the theory is often more in the background informing their theory of crisis and organisation if not their agitational work.

Essentially the theory suggests that capitalism as a system emerged, grew to maturity and has now entered its decline. The crises of capitalism are seen as evidence of a more severe underlying condition - the sickness of the capitalist system. Capitalist development brings about steadily increasing socialisation of the productive forces and at a certain point the capitalist forces of production are said to have moved into conflict with the relations of production. The concept of the decline of capitalism is bound up with a theory of the primacy of the productive forces. The driving force of history is seen as the contradiction with the relations of production. It is 'quintessentially' a marxist theory taking its understanding of the basic marxist position from the Preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy2.

For most versions of the theory the change from mature to declining capitalism is said to have occurred at a time around the First World War. The present form of capitalism is then characterised by declining or decaying features. Features identified with this change are the shift from laissez faire to monopoly capitalism, the dominance of finance capital, the increase in state planning, war production and imperialism. Monopoly capitalism indicates the growth of monopolies, cartels and the concentration of capital which has now reached the point of giant multinationals disposing of more wealth than small countries. At the same time in the phenomenon of finance capital, large amounts of capital are seen to escape linkage to particular labour processes and to move about in search of short term profits. In the increase in state planning the state becomes interpenetrated with the monopolies in various ways such as nationalisation and defence spending - this is capital getting organised. This planning is the state trying to regulate the workings of capitalism in the interests of the big firms/monopolies. Statification is seen as evidence of decay because it shows the objective socialisation of the economy snarling at the bit of capitalist appropriation; it is seen as capitalism in the age of its decline desperately trying to maintain itself by socialistic methods. The state spending and intervention is seen as a doomed attempt to avert crises which constantly threaten the system. War production is a particularly destructive form of state spending, where large amounts of the economy are seen to be taken up by essentially unproductive expenditure. This is closely related to imperialism which is seen as the characteristic of capitalism in the age of its decline. The 'epoch' is in fact said to be initiated by the division of the world between the great powers who have since fought two world wars to redistribute the world market. Wars and the threat of war are seen as evidence that capitalism's only way of continuing to exist is by destruction, it is suggested that if it can not save itself by other methods capitalism will plunge us into a war.

At the present unrewarding time for revolutionary politics it might then seem desirable to seek support for a revolutionary position in a theory offering an analysis of the objective development of history that shows capitalism on the way out. On the other hand some of the developments that have put pressure on a revolutionary position so making a theory of decline attractive undermine some of the presuppositions of at least some versions of the theory. The crisis of social democracy and literal collapse of the Soviet Union has been presented as a triumph of capitalism and as the end of history. In the West and East it used to be possible to point to an inexorable advance of socialistic forms as apparently concrete evidence of the movement of history being a progress towards socialism or communism. The notion that socialism represented progress was underpinned by the idea that capitalism had entered a declining or decadent phase. It was said that the socialisation of the productive forces was in sharp contradiction with private appropriation. Now with a move towards privatisation of nationalised concerns in the west, and the privatisation of the ruling class itself in the East, the idea that there is an inevitable movement towards socialism - an idea which has been so dominant on the left for the last 100 years - now stands undermined and the notion that history is on our side no longer seems plausible. With the failure of what was seen as 'actually existing socialism' and the rollback of social democratic forms, the identification of socialism with progress and the evolution of human society is thrown into doubt. It would seem that what has suffered a breakdown is not capitalism but history.

Abandonment of the idea that the historical development of the productive forces is a progress towards socialism and communism has resulted in three main drifts in thought: 1) The abandonment of the project of abolishing capitalism and a turn to reformism of the existing system by the 'new realists', 'market socialists' etc. 2) The post-modern rejection of the notion of a developing totality, and denial of any meaning to history resulting in a celebration of what is, 3) The maintenance of an anti-capitalist perspective but identification of the problem as 'progress' or 'civilisation', this romanticism involves the decision that the idea of historical movement was all wrong and what we really want to do is go back. These directions are not exclusive of course; post-modernist practice, to the extent it exists, is reformist while the anti-progress faction has roots in the post-modern attack on history. In the face of the poverty of these apparent alternatives it is understandable that many revolutionaries would wish to reaffirm a theory of decadence or decline - it is asserted that communism or socialism is still the necessary next stage of human evolution, that evolutionary course might have suffered a setback but we can still see in the crisis that capitalism is breaking down. However in the face of unsatisfactory drifts in theory it is not the case that the only alternative is to reassert the fundamentals, rather we can and must critically re-examine them.

We can see the theory of decline represented by two main factions (of the left?) - Trotskyism and left-communism. With the hard left-communists the decadence theory is at the forefront of their analysis. Everything that happens is interpreted as evidence that decadence is increasing. This is exemplified in the approach of a group like the International Communist Current (ICC) for whom capitalist crisis has become chronic, 'all the great moments of proletarian struggle have been provoked by capitalist crises'. [pI] The crisis causes the proletariat to act and to become accessible to the 'intervention of revolutionaries'. The task of the revolutionaries is to spread the idea of capitalist decadence and the tasks it puts on the historic agenda. 'The intervention of revolutionaries within their class must first and foremost show how this collapse of the capitalist economy demonstrates more than ever the HISTORIC NECESSITY for the world communist revolution, while at the same time creating the possibility for realizing it.' [p III]3 The model is one of the objective reality of capitalist decadence, arising from its own dynamic, which makes world communist revolution necessary and possible, with the job of revolutionaries being to take this analysis to the class who will be objectively predisposed to receiving the message due to their experience of the crisis. So far no luck! Still, for the theory's proponents the decadence can only get worse; our time will come.

For the Trots the theory is less up front but it still informs their analysis and practice. In comparison with the purist repetition of the eternal decadence line by the left-communist upholders of the theory, the Trots seem positively current in their following of political fashion, but behind this lies a similar position. Despite their willingness to recruit members by connecting to any struggle, Trotskyist parties have the same objectivist model of what capitalism is, and why it will break down. They gather members now and await the deluge when, due to capitalism's collapse, they will have the opportunity to grow and seize state power. The position of orthodox Trotskyism is expressed in the founding statement of the Fourth International in which Trotsky writes:

The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind's productive forces stagnate... [p8] The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership. [p9]4

A significant difference in the theories is that the Trotskyist version historically identified the former Soviet Union as a (politically degenerated) part of the economically progressive movement of history while for the left communists it has exemplified the decadence of the period. Thus the Trotskyist theory of decline, which tended to see the Soviet Union as progressive and proof of the transitional nature of the epoch, has been more bothered by the collapse than the left-communists for whom it was just state capitalism and for whom its fate was just grist to the mill of the notion of capitalism's permanent crisis. Despite their antipathy to other parts of the 'left wing of capital's' program, it is the general statements by Trotskyists about the decadence of capital that the left commies find themselves in agreement with. In fact the ICC even think that the inadequacies of the Trotskyist theory stem from it not having a proper conception of decadence. The underlying similarity in the theories can be identified in an account of their history. Both the Trots and the left-communists claim the mantle of the heritage of the worker's movements. Both trace their heritage through the Second International, and their argument is whether it is in Lenin and Trotsky or figures such as Pannekoek and Bordiga that the classic marxist tradition is continued after 1917 or some such date. If then we wish to understand and assess the theory of the decline of capitalism, we need to trace its history back to Second International Marxism.

B] The history of the concept and its political importance
The theory of capitalist decadence first comes to prominence in the Second International. The Erfurt Programme supported by Engels established the theory of the decline and breakdown of capitalism as central to the party's programme:

private property in the means of production has changed... From a motive power of progress it has become a cause of social degradation and bankruptcy. Its downfall is certain. The only question to be answered is: shall the system of private ownership in the means of production be allowed to pull society with itself down into the abyss; or shall society shake off that burden and then, free and strong, resume the path of progress which the evolutionary path prescribes to it ?[p 87] The productive forces that have been generated in capitalist society have become irreconcilable with the very system of property on which it is built. The endeavour to uphold this system of property renders impossible all further social development, condemns society to stagnation and decay. [p 88] The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The erection of a new social order for the existing one is no longer something merely desirable; it has become something inevitable. [p 117] As things stand today capitalist civilisation cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or into barbarism. [p 118] the history of mankind is determined not by ideas, but by an economic development which progresses irresistibly, obedient to certain underlying laws and not to anyone's wishes or whims. [p119] 5

As well as this insistence on the inevitable collapse of capitalism by its inner contradictions, the Erfurt Programme also contained eminently reformist goals and tactics and it was these that dominated the Second International whose practice became to build a set of socialist institutions and work through parliament. In this program we see the recurrent themes of the theory of capitalism's decadence: the identification of the revolutionary project with the evolutionary progress of society; the ascribement of primacy to the economic laws of development of capital; and the reduction of revolutionary political activity to a reaction to that inevitable movement. Though it is insisted there is a need for political activity, it is seen to be at the service of an objective development. Socialism is seen not as the free creation of the proletariat but as the natural result of economic developments which the proletariat becomes heir to. It is this conception shared by those who present themselves as heirs of the 'classical marxist tradition' and thus the Second International that we must shake off. The Erfurt Program was not just a compromise between the 'revolutionary' position that capitalism was coming to an end and the reformist remainder: this 'revolutionary' part had already converted the revolutionary conception of capitalism's downfall into a mechanistic, economistic and fatalistic one.

The Legacy of Marx
By adopting a theory of capitalist breakdown the Second International identified itself as the 'marxist' section of the workers movement. Indeed for most members of the Second International as for most members of Leninist parties today, Marx's Capital was the big unread work that proved the collapse of capitalism and the inevitability of socialism. The substance of the split in the First International is clouded by the personal acrimony between Marx and Bakunin. Following Debord, we can recognise that both Marx and Bakunin then, and the anarchist and the marxist positions since then, represent different strengths and weaknesses of the thought of the historical workers' movement. Organisationally while Marx failed to recognise the dangers of using the state, Bakunin's elitist conception of a hundred revolutionaries pulling the strings of a European revolution was also authoritarian. While 'marxists' have developed theory to understand the changes in capitalism but have often failed to ground that theory in revolutionary practice, the anarchists have maintained the truth of the need for revolutionary practice, but have not responded to the historical changes in capitalism to be able to find ways for this need to be realised. While the element of truth in the thought of anarchism must always be present in our critique, if we wish to develop theory we must address the marxist strand of that movement. 6

The question that arises then, is whether the Second International adopted the valuable point from Marx's side. As well as personal differences the split in the First International between Marx and Bakunin reflected a serious division on how to relate to capitalism. Marx's critique of political economy was a move away from a moral or utopian critique of capitalism. It marked a rejection of the simple view that capitalism is bad and we must overthrow it in favour of the need to understand the movement of capitalism to inform the practice of its overthrow. Marx and Bakunin's reactions to the Paris Commune show this. Bakunin applauded the action and tried to organise his hundred revolutionaries in the immanent revolution; Marx, while identifying the communards as having found the forms through which capitalism can be negated, thought the defeat showed the weakness of the proletariat at that time. What Marx's critique of political economy did was give a theory of capitalist development in which it is recognised that capitalism is a transitory system of class rule that has arisen from a previous class society but which is dynamic in a way beyond any previous system.

The Erfurt Program and the practice of the Second International represented a particular interpretation of the insights of Marx's critique. The theory of the decline of capitalism is an interpretation of the meaning of Marx's insight that capitalism is a transitory system, an interpretation that turns the notion of a particular dynamic of development into a mechanistic and determinist theory of inevitable collapse. If we think that there is a value in Marx's work, a value that most marxists have lost, then what is it? Marx analysed how the system of class rule and class struggle operates through the commodity, wage labour etc. Capitalism is essentially the movement of alienated labour, of the value-form. But that means that the 'objectivity' of capitalism as the movement of alienated labour is always open to rupture or alteration from the subjective side. An irony in the split in the First International is that Bakunin considered that Marx's 'economics' were fine. He did not recognise that Marx's contribution was not an economics but a critique of economics and thus a critique of the separation of politics and economics as well.7 As we shall see, the Second International in their adoption of Marx's 'economics' made the same mistake of taking the critique of political economy offered to revolutionaries as an economics rather than as a critique of the social form of capitalist society.

Behind the breakdown theory is a notion of what socialism is: the solution to 'the capitalist anarchy of the market', the freeing of the forces of production from the fettering relations of private capitalist appropriation. Capitalism is seen as an irrational economy and socialism is seen as equivalent to a fully planned economy. The theorists of the movement were convinced that the movement was on their side, focusing on Marx's ideas that the joint stock system "is an abolition of capitalist private system on the basis of the capitalist system itself."8 They thought the further socialisation of production evidenced in the extension of credit and joint-stock companies into trusts and monopolies was the basis for socialism. At some unspecified date a revolution would occur and the capitalists would lose their tenuous hold on the socialised productive forces which would fall into the hands of the workers who could continue their historic development.

This is an optimistic reading of the lines of capitalist development which gives the agency for social transformation to capital's drives towards centralisation and co-ordination. To base one's theory on how capitalism transforms into socialism on passages such as that above is founded on the belief that Capital volumes I-III gives a complete systematic and scientific account of capitalism and its destiny. It is to see Capital as essentially complete when it is not.9 Engels prepared volumes II and III for publication, in which as in volume I, although there are intimations of capitalism's mortality, there is no finished theory of how capitalism declines and breaks down. Engels himself was tempted towards such a theory by the sustained depression of the 1870's and 80's, though he never finally settled on one. It was this crisis and Engel's speculative position on it that encouraged Kautsky to make capitalist collapse central to the Erfurt programme and it was the replacement of depression by a prolonged boom from the 1890's that then prompted the revisionist debate.

Revisionism and its False Opposition
The major proponent of revisionism was Bernstein, his opponent at first Kautsky but later and more interestingly Luxemburg. On one level Bernstein was arguing for the party to bring its theory into line with its tactics and to embrace reformism wholeheartedly. However the focus of his argument and the revisionist controversy was his insistence that the conception of economic decline and breakdown included in the Erfurt program had been proved wrong by the end of the long depression and that the changes in capitalism - e.g. the growth of cartels, of world trade and of the credit system - showed it was able to resolve its tendency towards crisis. Bernstein argued that the legacy of Marx was dualistic, on the one hand a 'pure science of Marxist socialism', on the other an 'applied aspect' which included its commitment to revolution. The notion of decline and breakdown and the revolutionary position it implied was, Bernstein argued, scientifically wrong and it, and the dialectical element in Marx that prompted it, should be eliminated. In the heated arguments Bernstein and Kautsky engaged in a battle of statistics on whether the breakdown theory was correct. 10

The important point about the revisionist debate was that both Kautsky and Bernstein were agreed on tactics - the furious dispute about theory hid a complicity about practice. What Kautsky defended and what Bernstein attacked was a caricature of revolutionary theory - theory become ideology due to its separation from practice. Moreover it was closer to Engel's Marxism than the ideas of Marx. Kautsky gained his credibility from his association with the two old men but his contact was almost exclusively with Engels. Kautsky continued the process started by Engels - in works such as the Dialectics of Nature - of losing the subject in a determinist evolutionary view of history.

When revolutionaries like Luxemburg intervened they were supporting a position that already contained the negation of a consistent revolutionary position. Luxemburg's criticism of Bernstein was at a deeper level than Kautsky's in that she recognised the extent to which his reading of Marx had lost its dialectical revolutionary aspect and had reduced it to the level of bourgeois economics. While Kautsky tried to argue that there was no problem of dualism in Marx's Capital, that the notion of the collapse of capitalism and the need for revolution was absolutely scientific, Luxemburg saw there was a dualism: 'the dualism of the socialist future and the capitalist present... the dualism of capital and labour, the dualism of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. ... the dualism of the class antagonism writhing inside the social order of capitalism.' 11 In this we can see an attempt to reclaim the revolutionary perspective from the scientism of the Second International. However as she came to develop her own position on the collapse of capitalism a different form of dualism came to the fore. Her position was irreconcilably split between on the one hand revolutionary commitment and on the other an objectivist theory of capitalist collapse. Her theory of collapse was founded on a rereading of Marx's schemas12 to show the eventual impossibility of the reproduction of capital when their purpose, although they indicate the precariousness of capitalist reproduction, is to show in what conditions it is possible. Surprisingly for someone who was committed to mass revolutionary action from below, her theory of capitalist crisis, decline and collapse was based entirely at the level of circulation and the market, and thus does not involve the proletariat at all. At the level of the schemas everyone is simply a buyer or a seller of commodities, and the workers can thus not be agents of struggle.

Luxemburg's theory of decline is premised on the postulation that capitalism needs external non-capitalist markets to absorb surplus profit and when these are exhausted its collapse is inevitable. This did not mean she was not committed to political combat; she did not suggest we should wait for the collapse, arguing that the proletariat would and had to make the revolution before that. But her position was nonetheless economistic, in that it postulated the collapse of capitalism from purely economic disequilibrium even though it was not economistic, in the sense of say the orthodox Second International theory which relied on those economic forces to bring about socialism. Luxemburg was a revolutionary and she participated in the revolution in Germany, but her conception of the capitalist process was wrong, based as it was on a misunderstanding of the role of Marx's schemas. However she thought that the scientific case had to be proven that capitalism could not expand indefinitely and it is in this imperative we find the key to the vehemence of the 'breakdown controversy'.

The left of the Second International saw those who denied the bankruptcy of capitalism moving towards reformism and they conceded that such a move was natural for "If the capitalist mode of production can ensure boundless expansion of the productive forces of economic progress it is invincible indeed. The most important objective argument in support of a social theory breaks down! Socialist political action and the ideological import of the proletarian class struggle cease to reflect economic events, and socialism no longer appears an historic necessity."13 For those who follow Luxemburg the reason to be revolutionary is because capitalism has an irresolvable crisis due to a purely economic tendency towards breakdown which becomes actualised when its foreign markets are exhausted. Capitalism's collapse and proletarian revolution are seen as essentially separate, and their connection lying only in the idea that the former makes the latter necessary.

While Luxemburg was absolutely committed to revolutionary action, and unlike Lenin was sure that such action had to be the self-action of the proletariat, she dualistically held that what made that action necessary was the fact that capitalism would otherwise collapse into barbarism. In that she was wrong; capitalism will only collapse through proletarian action. What needed to be argued with Bernstein was not that capitalism cannot resolve its problems by its own forms of planning (although it cannot ever permanently resolve its problems because they are rooted in the class struggle), for that only demands a socialist planned economy. What actually needed arguing was that the debate over whether the problems of capitalism could be resolved within capitalism or only by a socialist planned economy was missing the point. These problems are not our problems. Our problem is that of the alienation of not controlling our lives and activity. Even if capitalism could resolve its tendency towards crisis, which it cannot do because such a tendency is an expression of class antagonism, it would not answer our problem with it.

But here's the rub. The socialist economy as envisaged by Second International marxists was a solution to capitalism's problems, and as such was state capitalism. The better left social-democrats14 identified socialism with proletarian self-emancipation, but their underlying conflict with the state capitalist position of both the right and centre of the party became displaced on to a conflict with the revisionists over the question of economic collapse. This is not to say that the SDP and the Second International were simply a state capitalist party. They represented millions of workers real aspirations and it was often workers who had been members of Second International parties that took a lead in communist actions. But ideologically the Second International had state capitalist goals and those who went beyond these such as Luxemburg did so contradictorily. A part of that contradiction is represented in the maintenance of an objectivist theory of decline.

Bernstein attacked Kautsky and the Second International orthodoxy on the inevitability of breakdown and socialist revolution for fatalism and determinism, in favour of social reformism and the abandonment of revolutionary pretensions. But in point of fact the notion of deterministic economic evolution was the perfect counterpart of reformism. The breakdown theory of the Second International implied a fatalistic conception of the end of capitalism, and thus allowed reformism as an alternative to class struggle. The theory of decline/decadence put forward by the revolutionaries was different to that implicitly contained in the Erfurt Program, for in people such as Luxemburg and Lenin the notion of economic collapse gets identified with the end result of a final stage of capitalism - imperialism/monopoly capitalism. In recognising the changes in capitalism they were in a curious way closer to Bernstein than Kautsky; they marked their opposition to his reformist conclusions by emphasising their commitment to the inevitability of breakdown. It was precisely those changes which Bernstein thought showed capital's resolution of any tendency to collapse, which they saw as expressive of it entering the final stage before its collapse.

The political question of reform or revolution gets bound up with a falsely empirical question of decline. For the left Social-democrats it is seen as essential to insist capitalism is in decay - is approaching its collapse. The meaning of 'marxism' is being inscribed as accepting that capitalism is bankrupt and thus that revolutionary action is necessary. Thus they do engage in revolutionary action, but as we have seen, because the focus is on the objective contradictions of the system with revolutionary subjective action a reaction to it, they do not relate to the true necessary prerequisite of the end of capitalism – the concrete development of the revolutionary subject. It seemed to the more revolutionary members of the movement such as Lenin and Luxemburg that a revolutionary position was a position of belief in breakdown while the theory of breakdown had in fact worked to allow a reformist position at the start of the Second International. The point was that the theory of capitalist decline as a theory of capitalism's collapse from its own objective contradictions involves an essentially contemplative stance before the objectivity of capitalism, while the real requirement for revolution is the breaking of that contemplative attitude. The fundamental problem with the revisionist debate in the Second International is that both sides shared an impoverished conception of the economy as simply the production of things when it is also the production and reproduction of relations which naturally involves people's consciousness of those relations.15This sort of economism (seeing an economy of things not social relations) tends towards the notion of the autonomous development of the productive forces of society and the neutrality of technology. With the economy seen in the former way, its development and collapse is a technical and quantitative matter. Because the Second International had this naturalistic idea of the meaning of the economic development of capitalism, they could maintain a belief in capitalism's collapse without any commitment to revolutionary practice. Because the left identify breakdown theory as revolutionary, Lenin could be surprised at how Kautsky, who wrote the Erfurt Program version of that theory, could betray the revolutionary cause. When the left fought against the mainstream's complicity with capital they brought the theory of breakdown with them. Thus the radical social democrats such as Lenin and Luxemburg combine revolutionary practice with a fatalistic theoretical position that has its origins in reformism.

To say that the Second International was guilty of economism, has become a common place. We have to think what it means in order to see whether the Trots and left-communists who might criticise the politics of the Second International have gone beyond its theory. It is our case that they have not, that they retain an impoverished Second Internationalist theory of the capitalist economy and its tendency towards crisis and collapse with political and social struggle promoted by this crisis at the economic level. This fails to grasp that the object we are faced with is the capital-wage labour relation i.e. the social relation of class exploitation that occurs right across capitalist society: the areas of reproduction, production, political, ideological are all intertwined moments of that relation and it is reproduced within the individual him or herself.

Radical Social Democracy
It was with the radical social democrats such as Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin that the full conception of a decadent epoch of capitalism is arrived at - the notion that at a certain stage - usually around 1914 - capitalism switched into its final declining stage. Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital is one source of the theory of decline but most revolutionaries then and now disagreed with her account.16 Other left social democrats such as Bukharin and Lenin founded their theory of imperialism and capitalism's decadent stage on Hilferding's Finance Capital. In this work Hilferding linked new features of the capitalist economy - the interpenetration of banks and joint-stock companies, the expansion of credit, restriction of competition through cartels and trusts - with expansionist foreign policy by the nation state. Hilferding, while seeing this stage as the decline of capitalism and transition to socialism, did not think capitalism would necessarily collapse or that its tendency towards war would necessarily be realised, and his politics tended towards reformism. The theories of Bukharin and Lenin produced after 1914 saw imperialism and war as the unavoidable policy of finance capital, they identified this form of capitalism as decisively the decline of the system because of the natural progression of finance capital and monopoly capital to imperialist expansion and war whose only further development had to be proletarian revolution.17

Lenin's Imperialism, which has become for his followers the crucial text for the modern epoch, defines the imperialist phase of capitalism 'as capitalism in transition, or, more precisely, as moribund capitalism.'18 For Lenin, in the capitalist planning of the large companies it is 'evident that we have socialisation of production, and not mere "interlocking"; that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed; a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period, but which will inevitably be removed.'19 Lenin's text, like Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy, which was a great influence on it, adopts Hilferding's analysis of the 'final stage of capitalism' - monopolies, finance capital, export of capital, formation of international cartels and trusts, territorial division of the world. But whereas Hilferding thought that these developments, particularly the state planning in this stage of 'organised capitalism', were progressive and would allow a peaceful advance to socialism, Lenin thought they showed that capitalism could not develop progressively any further. The continuity between the reformist theory of the Second International and the 'revolutionary' theory of the Bolsheviks in terms of the conception of socialism as capitalist socialisation of production under workers' control is one of the keys to the failings of the left in the Twentieth Century. Hilferding writes:

The tendency of finance capital is to establish social control of production, but it is an antagonistic form of socialization, since the control of social production remains vested in an oligarchy. The struggle to dispossess this oligarchy constitutes the ultimate phase of the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most important branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ - the state conquered by the working class - to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production... taking possession of six large Berlin banks would mean taking posession of the most important spheres of large-scale industry, and would greatly facilitate the initial phases of socialist policy during the transition period, when capitalist accounting might still prove useful 20

Henryk Grossman, who as we shall see is one of the key theorists of decline, refers to this conception as 'the dream of a banker aspiring for power over industry through credit... the putchism of Auguste Blanqui translated into economics.' 21 Yet compare this with Lenin to whom Grossman feels nearer:

Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employees' unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible.

The big banks are the "state apparatus" which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop-off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed into quality. A single State Bank, the biggest of the big.. will be... the skeleton of socialist society.'22

Whilst Hilferding thinks this take over of finance capital can be done gradually, Lenin thinks it requires revolution but both identify socialism with the taking over of the forms of capitalist planning, organisation and work.

Imperialism as the stage of monopoly and finance capital was, for Lenin, capitalism's decadent stage. Luxemburg, though with a different analysis, had the similar conclusion that collapse was inevitable. In the internecine debates Leninists accused Luxemburg of a fatalism or spontaneism and of not believing in the class struggle. But although Luxemburg and Lenin differed in their analysis of imperialism their conception of capital's end was essentially the same - the development of capitalism heads towards the collapse of the system and it is up to revolutionaries to make it socialism and not barbarism. Neither of these thinkers were against class struggle; for both the idea is that the development of capitalism has reached a crisis point, thus now we need to act.

However, behind the similarity between Lenin and Luxemburg on the notion of capital entering its final stage there lay a considerable difference, in that while Luxemburg had to an extent criticised the statist model of socialist transformation held by Social Democracy, Lenin had not. In the arguments within social democracy following the Bolshevik revolution, Leninism was accused of voluntarism and defended as reasserting class struggle. What it was actually about was Lenin's maintaining of an objectivist position on what socialism is: the development of an objective dialectic within the economy combined with a voluntaristic view that it could be built. He rode the class struggle to get there - or more favourably responded to it and was carried forward by it - but when in power he started from above to develop the economy because that was what he identified socialism with. Lenin and the Bolsheviks made a political break from Second International marxism, specifically from the orthodox stages theory which implied for Russia that there had to be a bourgeois revolution before there could be a proletarian revolution. But this was not a fundamental break from the Second International's economistic theory of the productive forces. Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution, which the Bolsheviks effectively adopted in 1917, was not premised on a critique of the reifed notion of the development of productive forces held by the Second International, but on an insistence on seeing such development at the level of the world market. The prerequisite for socialism was still seen as the development of the productive forces narrowly considered, it was simply seen that in its decadent highest stage capitalism would not provide that development for Russia.23

The Bolsheviks accepted that Russia needed its productive forces developed and that such development was identical with capitalist modernisation; they voluntaristically chose to develop them socialistically. The nature of combined and uneven development under imperialism meant that because capitalism was failing to develop itself, the Bolsheviks would have to do so. Of course they expected support from a revolution in Western Europe but in the introduction of Taylorism, capitalist specialists etc. we see that the task which the Bolsheviks identified as socialist was in fact the development of the capitalist economy. These measures were not pushed on them by the pressure of events, they were part of their outlook from the beginning. In the same text from before the October revolution quoted earlier Lenin admits that "we need good organisers of banking and the amalgamation of enterprises" and that it will be necessary to "pay these specialists higher salaries during the transition period." but don't worry he states:

We shall place them, however under comprehensive workers' control and we shall achieve the complete and absolute operation of the rule 'he who does not work, neither shall he eat.' We shall not invent the organisational form of the work, but take it ready-made from capitalism - we shall take over the banks, syndicates, the best factories, experimental stations, academies, and so forth; all that we shall have to do is to borrow the best models furnished by the advanced countries.24

While Hilferding had seen the role of state planning in the stage of 'organised capitalism' as the basis for a peaceful transition to socialism, Lenin was convinced of the need to take power. But he was in agreement that capitalist planning was the prototype for socialist planning. For us revolution is the return of the subject to herself, for Lenin it was development of an object . The defence of Lenin is that socialism was not possible in Russia so he waited for revolution in Germany. But his conception of socialism, like that of the Second International from which he never effectively broke, was state capitalism.

Within the Bolshevik and Second International conception the socialisation of the economy under capitalism was seen as neutral and unproblematically positive, with the anarchy of circulation being seen as the problem to be got rid of. But capitalist socialisation is not neutral; it is capitalist and thus in need of transformation. The Bolshevik measures are a direct product of their adherence to the Second International identification of socialism with planning. The notion of decline and decay is seen as evolving from the contradiction between the increasing socialisation of the productive forces - the increasing planning and rationality of production versus the anarchy and irrationality involved in capitalist appropriation through the market - the former is good, the latter bad. The solution implied by this way of conceiving the problem with capitalism is to extend planning to the circulation sphere as well, but both these sides are capitalist - the proletariat does not just take over capitalist control of the labour process and add control over consumption, it transforms all areas of life - the social regulation of the labour process is not the same as the capitalist regulation.

The economistic position of Second International marxism shared by the Bolsheviks dominated the worker's movement because it reflected a particular class composition - skilled technical and craft workers who identified with the productive process.25 The view that socialism is about the development of the productive forces where they are considered as economic is a product of the lack of development of the productive forces considered as social26. One could say that at a certain level of development of the productive forces the tendency for a state capitalist/socialist program was dominant and a truly revolutionary communist position harder to develop. The communist project was adopted by many workers but they did not manage to realise it. There is a problem in looking at history with the question whether it was possible for any particular revolution to win. It did not win then. Communism is never possible in the past only from the present to the future. What we can do is look for reasons why the project of communism was not realised then to inform our efforts to realise it now. What happened was a battle of forces in which the forces of capital increasingly took the form of a state capitalist worker's party. In considering the productive forces as neutral when they are capitalist the Bolsheviks become a capitalist force. In Stalinism the ideology of the productive forces reached new heights of crassness but while it had differences it also had continuity with the ideas of Trotsky and Lenin. The crushing of workers by the German Social Democrats and by the Russian Bolsheviks both expressed the victory of capital through the ideology of state capitalism. This is not to deny that there would be communist development but such a development would be the conscious acts of the freely associated producers and not the 'development of the productive forces', which presumes their separation from the subject.27 It would not, as the Bolshevik modernisation program did, have the same technical-economic content as capitalist development. Communism is not built from above, it can only be the movement of proletarian self-emancipation.

The Heritage of October
The two main proponents of the theory of decadence/decline trace their lineage to this period of war and revolution. And of course there were objective factors supporting the theory - the war was catastrophic28 and it did appear that capitalism was clapped out. Yet the revolution failed.

The Trotskyist form of Leninism has never made a successful break from the Second International conceptions of what constitutes the crisis of capitalism and thus what socialism should be. While Lenin adopted the theory that capitalism had entered its period of decay, he also insisted that no crisis was necessarily final. Trotsky on the other hand does write of inevitable collapse. His politics after 1917 was dominated by the idea that capitalism was in or approaching a final crisis from which revolution was inevitable. Trotsky's marxism was founded on the theory of the primacy of the productive forces and his understanding of the productive forces was crude and technical, not so very different from Stalin's: "Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress, and constructs the communist program on the dynamic of the productive forces."29 When still part of the Soviet bureaucracy, Trotsky's mechanistic notion of the productive forces led him to justify militarisation of labour and to accuse workers resisting Taylorism of 'Tolstoyian romanticism'. When in exile it led his criticism of the Soviet Union to focus not on the position of the workers, whom he'd always being willing to shoot, but on its lack of technical development. He states "The strength and stability of regimes are determined in the long run by the relative productivity of their labour. A socialist economy possessing a technique superior to that of capitalism would really be guaranteed in its socialist development for sure - so to speak automatically - a thing which unfortunately it is still impossible to say about the Soviet economy."30 On the other hand there was something that made Russia an advance on decadent capitalism: "The fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, but the fact that in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production, thus condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay." 31

The Soviet Union for Trotsky was progressive because although it had a ruling strata living extravagantly, with planning it had gone beyond capitalist irrationality and decay. It was backward because it lacked technical development. The orthodox Trotskyist defence of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state was premised on the model of economic development which sees state control and planning as progress. Because of the change in the relations of production, or what for Trotsky amounted to the same thing the property relations, the regime was somehow positive.32 This position was the logical expression of the theory that capitalist socialisation is positive, private appropriation negative, thus that if one gets rid of private appropriation - private property - you have socialism, or at least the transition to socialism. One can call it socialism but it is state capitalism.

The Falling Rate Of Profit
Trotskyism as a tradition thus betrays its claim to represent what was positive in the revolutionary wave of 1917-21. The importance of the left and council communists is that in their genuine emphasis on proletarian self-emancipation we can identify an important truth of that period against the Leninist representation. However in the wake of the defeat of the proletariat and in their isolation from its struggle, the small groups of left communists began to increasingly base their position on the objective analysis that capitalism was decadent. However there was development. In particular Henryk Grossman offered a meticulously worked out theory of collapse as an alternative to Luxemburg's. Instead of basing the theory of collapse on the exhaustion of non-capitalist markets he founded the theory on the falling rate of profit. Since then, nearly all orthodox marxist theories of crisis have been based on the falling rate of profit. In his theory, which he argues is Marx's, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall33 leads to a fall in the relative mass of profit which is finally too small to continue accumulation. In Grossman's account capitalist collapse is a purely economic process, inevitable even if the working class remains a mere cog in capital's development. Grossman tries to preempt criticism:

Because I deliberately confine myself to describing only the economic presuppositions of the breakdown of capitalism in this study, let me dispel any suspicion of 'pure economism' from the start. It is unnecessary to waste paper over the connection between economics and politics; that there is a connection is obvious. However, while Marxists have written extensively on the political revolution, they have neglected to deal theoretically with the economic aspect of the question and have failed to appreciate the true content of Marx's theory of breakdown. My sole concern here is to fill in this gap in the marxist tradition.[p 33]34

For the objectivist marxist the connection is obvious, the economic and the political are separate, previous writings on the political are adequate and just need backing up with an economic case. The position of the follower of Grossman is thus: 1/ We have an understanding of economics that shows capitalism is declining, heading inexorably towards breakdown. 2/This shows the necessity of a political revolution to introduce a new economic order. The theory of politics has an external relation to the economic understanding of capitalism. Orthodox theories of capitalist crisis accept the reduction of working class activity to an activity of capital. The only action against capital is a political attack on the system which is seen to happen only when the system breaks down. Grossman's theory represents one of the most comprehensive attempts to declare Marx's Capital a complete economics providing the blueprint of capitalist collapse. He insists that "economic Marxism, as it has been bequeathed to us, is neither a fragment nor a torso, but represents in the main a fully elaborated system, that is, one without flaws."35 This insistence on seeing Marx's Capital as being a complete work providing the proof of capitalism's decay and collapse is an essential feature of the worldview of the objectivist marxists. It means that the connection between politics and economics is obviously an external one. This is wrong; the connection is internal but to grasp this requires the recognition that Capital is incomplete and that the completion of its project requires an understanding of the political economy of the working class not just that of capital. But Grossman has categorically denied the possibility of this by his insistence that Capital is essentially a complete work.

Pannekoek
While left-communists maintained the classical general identification of decadence with the imperialist stage of capitalism, Grossman's more abstract theory rooted in the falling rate of profit tendency in Capital was enthusiastically adopted by many council communists, most prominently Mattick. Against this trend Pannekoek made an important critique. In The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism36 Reprinted in Capital and Class, 1, 1977 and can be found online here. Pannekoek, apart from showing how Grossman distorts Marx by selective quotation, develops some arguments that point beyond objectivist marxism. Although in his own way still a believer in the decline of capitalism, Pannekoek starts to make an essential attack on the separation of economics from politics and struggle: "Economics, as the totality of men working and striving to satisfy their subsistence needs, and politics (in its widest sense), as the action and struggle of these men as classes to satisfy their needs, form a single unified domain of law-governed development." Pannekoek thereby insists that the collapse of capitalism is inseparable from the action of the proletariat in a social and political revolution. The dualism involved in seeing the breakdown of capitalism as quite separate from the development of revolutionary subjectivity in the proletariat means that while the working class is seen as necessary to provide the force of the revolution, there is no guarantee that they will be able to create a new order afterwards. Thus "a revolutionary group a party with socialist aims, would have to appear as a new governing power in place of the old in order to introduce some kind of planned economy. The theory of economic catastrophe is thus ready made for intellectuals who recognise the untenable character of capitalism and who want a planned economy to be built by capable economists and leaders." Pannekoek also notes something that we see repeated today37; the attraction of Grossman's theory or other such theories of breakdown at times in which there is a lack of revolutionary activity. There is a temptation for those who identify themselves as revolutionaries to:

wish on the stupefied masses a good economic catastrophe so that they finally come out of the slumber and enter into action. The theory according to which capitalism has today entered its final crisis also provides a decisive, and simple, refutation of reformism and all Party programs which give priority to parliamentary work and trade union action - a demonstration of the necessity of revolutionary tactics which is so convenient that it must be greeted sympathetically by revolutionary groups. But the struggle is never so simple or convenient, not even the theoretical struggle for reasons and proofs.[p 80]

But, as Pannekoek continues, opposition to reformist tactics should not be based on a theory of the nature of the epoch but on the practical effects of those tactics. It is not necessary to believe in a final crisis to justify a revolutionary position; capitalism goes from crisis to crisis and the proletariat learns through its struggles. "In this process the destruction of capitalism is achieved. The self-emancipation of the proletariat is the collapse of capitalism."[p 81, our emphasis] In this attempt to internally link the theory of capitalism's limits with the movement of the proletariat Pannekoek made an essential move. How to grasp this linkage requires further work.

Fourth International and Left-Communism: Flipsides of the Objectivist Coin
While the small bands of left and council communists mostly adopted a theory of decadence the other claimant to the mantle of continuer of the marxist tradition -Trotskyism - was also making it central to their position. At the foundation of the Fourth International they adopted Trotsky's transitional program The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the 4th International. In this text the mechanistic conception of the capitalist economy and its decline which had previously justified the position of the bureaucracy, now meant that attempts by Stalinists "to hold back the wheel of history will demonstrate more clearly to the masses that the crisis in mankind's culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International. [...] The problem of the sections of the Fourth International is to help the proletarian vanguard understand the general character and tempo of our epoch and to fructify in time the struggle of the masses with ever more resolute and militant organisational measures."38 It might seem churlish to accuse the Trots over something written 50 years ago at a time of depression and impending war when it seemed more reasonable. Moreover, while it is the case that the orthodox trots will hold to every word, in Britain at least, revisionism is the order of the Trotskyist day. However the revisionist SWP and more revisionist RCP still hold to the essential thesis of decline induced crisis and the need for leadership. Trotsky's writings are marked by a rigid dichotomy between the objective conditions that is the state of the economy and the subjective, namely the existence or non-existence of the party. Capitalist crisis is an objective process of the economy and the decadence of capitalism will make that crisis severe enough to create an audience for the party which supplies the working class with the needed subjective element of consciousness and leadership. This conception of the relation between objectivity and subjectivity has to be contested.

What we are saying is not that proponents of decadence or decline do not believe in revolution - they quite manifestly do. (The theory of decline is not a theory of automatic breakdown. Most of its proponents recognise that capital can generally gain temporary escape if the working class let it, but it is a theory which sees an inevitable tendency to breakdown coming from capital's own development and which sees the subjective problem as bringing consciousness into line with the facts). Our criticism is that their theory contemplates the development of capitalism, the practical consequences of which being the fact that the trots move after anything that moves in order to recruit for the final showdown while the left communists stand aloof waiting for the pure example of revolutionary action by the workers. Behind this apparent opposition in ways of relating to struggle, they share a conception of capitalism's collapse which means that they do not learn from the real movement. Although there is a tendency to slip into pronouncements that socialism is inevitable, in general for the decadence theorists it is that socialism will not come inevitably - we should not all go off to the pub - but capitalism will breakdown. This theory can then accompany the Leninist building of an organisation in the present or else, as with Mattick, it may await that moment of collapse when it becomes possible to create a proper revolutionary organisation. The theory of decay and the Crisis is upheld and understood by the party, the proletariat must put itself behind its banner. That is to say 'we understand History, follow our banner'. The theory of decline fits comfortably with the Leninist theory of consciousness, which of course took much from Kautsky who ended his commentary on the Erfurt Program with the prediction that the middle classes would stream "into the Socialist Party and hand in hand with the irresistibly advancing proletariat, follow its banner to victory and triumph."39

After the Second World War both the Trotskyists and Left-communists emerged committed to the view that capitalism was decadent and on the edge of collapse. Looking at the period that had just passed the theory was did not appear too unrealistic - the 1929 crash had been followed by depression through most of the thirties and then by another catastrophic war. Capitalism if not dying had looked pretty ill. Apart from their similar theories of decline both currents claimed to represent the true revolutionary tradition against the Stalinist falsification. Now, while we might say the left and council communists upheld some important truths of the experience of 1917-21 against the Leninist version upheld by the Trots, the objectivist economics and mechanical theory of crisis and collapse which they shared with the Leninists made them incapable of responding to the new situation characterised as it was by the long boom. The revolutionaries of the next period would have to go beyond the positions of the last.

After the Second World war capitalism entered one of its most sustained periods of expansion with growth rates not only greater than the interwar period but even greater than those of the great boom of classical capitalism which had caused the breakdown controversy in the Second International. A crisis ensued within Trotskyism because their guru had categorically taken the onset of the war as confirmation that capitalism was in its death throws and had confidently predicted that the war would herald both the collapse of capitalism and proletarian revolution to set up workers states in the West and to sort out the bureaucratic deformations in the East.40 Trotsky had closely identified his version of marxism with the perception of capitalist bankruptcy and had written that if capitalism did recover sustained growth and if the Soviet union did not return to its true path then it would have to be said that "the socialist program , based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a Utopia."41 The tendency of orthodox Trotskyist groups from then on was to deny the facts and constantly preach that crisis was imminent.42

The fragments of left-communism were not so limited by identification with one leader's analysis (moreover many of their theorists were still alive). However, they like the Trots tended to see the post war expansion of capital as a short lived reconstructive boom. Essentially all these representatives of the theory of the post-WW1 proletarian offensive could offer was the basic position that capitalism had not resolved its contradictions - it just appeared to have done so. The basic thesis was right of course - capitalism had not resolved its contradictions - but these contradictions were expressing themselves in ways not grasped by the mechanistic theory of decline and collapse because it did not fully grasp the contradictions. The problem of how to relate to these contradictions in the post-war boom with its pattern in the advanced countries of social democratic politics, Keynesian economics, 'Fordist' mass production and mass consumerism, was the problem facing revolutionaries of this period.

When struggles started breaking out the new generation of radicals were antagonistic to the rigid schematic account of capital's crisis held by the old left. While the left-communist sects accepted this stoically many of the Trot groupings opportunistically followed the concerns of the New Left but only to grab recruits into their organisations who could then be persuaded of the doctrine of economic collapse. There were a number of groups - Socialism or Barbarism, the Situationist International, the autonomists - who attempted to escape the rigidities of the old workers movement and to re-develop revolutionary theory. In the second part of the article we will now look at some of the most important of them as well as at attempts to reassert a revised version of the theory. Some of the questions asked and the answers to which are important for us were: What form was the struggle taking in these new conditions? What was the meaning of communism? How was revolution to be reinvented?

• 1. A reformist conception that development towards socialism is an inevitable process witnessed in the steady increase in the socialisation of the productive forces and the growth of the welfare state has also been widespread. The emphasis of this article will be on those who see capitalist decline as part of the revolutionary project.
• 2. Here Marx writes, "the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage of development of their material forces of production…At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution…No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society…In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society." Preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, p. 20-21
• 3. ICC pamphlet, The Decadence of Capitalism.
• 4. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Forth International (1938), reprinted 1988 by the Workers Revolutionary Party who state that "its message is more relevant than ever".
• 5. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle [Erfurt Program], (Norton Company, 1971). The Erfurt program was the official statement of the politics of the Social-Democratic Party from 1891 until after the First World War.
• 6. Our task is to contribute to the revolutionary theory of the proletariat which neither orthodox Marxism nor anarchism represents. But the Marxist strand of the historical worker's movement has developed the most important ideas we need to address.
• 7. Of course if Bakunin hadn't given Freilgrath his copy of Hegel's Logic who then lent it to Marx then Marx might not have arrived at such a total understanding of capitalism!
• 8. Capital Vol. III, p. 570.
• 9. The view that Capital was a complete work providing a full prescription for the end of capitalism was a position adopted by disciples but not by Marx himself. Kautsky once asked Marx when he would produce his completed works. Marx replied "they would first have to be written".
• 10. Kautsky denied Marxism contained a theory of breakdown but he defended one nonetheless.
• 11. Reform or Revolution, p. 40.
• 12. Marx's schemas of reproduction in Vol.II of Capital identify certain proportions that must exist between the production of means of production and means of subsistence if capitalist reproduction is to take place.
• 13. Accumulation of Capital, p. 325.
• 14. Lenin was not particularly on the left. He was a good Second International Marxist working in Russian conditions who saw Kautsky as a betrayer of the proper social democratic (hence state-capitalist) position.
• 15. See Colletti, 'Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International' in From Rousseau to Lenin.
• 16. Except the ICC.
• 17. Lenin suggests it is not enough for the proletariat to react subjectively to the war, the war itself must prepare the objective grounds for socialism: "The dialectics of history is such that the war, by extraordinarily expediting the transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism, has thereby extraordinarily advanced mankind towards socialism. Imperialist war is the eve of social revolution. And this is not only because the horrors of war give rise to proletarian revolt - no revolt can bring about socialism unless the economic conditions for socialism are ripe - but because state-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs." 'Impending Catastrophe and How to Avoid It', Lenin, Collected Works, 25, p. 359.
• 18. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Progress Publishers, 1982), p. 119.
• 19. Ibid., p. 119-20.
• 20. Hilferding, Finance Capital, pp. 367-368.
• 21. Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being also a Theory of Crises, p. 52.
• 22. Lenin, 'Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?', CW, 26, p. 110.
• 23. Is there mileage in the Situationist criticism that Trotsky's was a theory of 'limited permanent revolution' while what is needed is a 'generalised theory of permanent revolution'. Situationist International Anthology p. 65.
• 24. Lenin, op. cit.
• 25. See Bologna, 'Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers' Councils Movement' in Telos, 13, (Fall) 1972.
• 26. This is why Marx's statement that the greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself, is so important.
• 27. As Marx remarks in the Grundrisse productive forces and relations are but two sides of the social individual.
• 28. The word decadent does seem apt for a system that flings millions to their deaths but this would be to slip into a moral use of the term that the proponents of the theory would be the first to reject.
• 29. Revolution Betrayed, p. 45.
• 30. Revolution Betrayed, pp. 47-48.
• 31. Revolution Betrayed, p. 19.
• 32. The only Trotskyist grouping to adhere to a state-capitalist theory of the Soviet Union has done the theory much discredit by continuing to uphold a state-capitalist program i.e. a Second International idea of socialism. In part II we will consider whether the revisionism of the neo-Trotskyist SWP (International Socialists) amounts to a sufficient break.
• 33. Capitalists gain profit by making workers work longer than necessary to replace the value of their wage. The rate of exploitation is then the ratio between the surplus labour workers are forced to perform and the necessary labour, i.e. that which represents their wages. In value terms this can be expressed as surplus value/variable capital (wages) or s/v. However the workers also maintain the value of the machinery and materials going into production at the same time as they are creating new value. The value of their product can then be divided into a portion representing constant capital such as machinery and materials - c, an equivalent of their necessary labour - v, and surplus value - s. Capital's tendency is to increase the organic composition of capital - increase c relative to v. As the capitalists rate of profit is s/(c+v), if c increases the rate of profit falls. This is of course only at the level of a tendency and the interplay with counteracting tendencies (such as an increase in exploitation and devaluation of fixed capital) needs to be considered. At an abstract level this tendency can be said to exist but whether an inexorable process of capitalist decline can be said to develop from it is precisely the point of argument.
• 34. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being also a Theory of Crises.
• 35. H. Grossman, 'Die Anderung des Ursprunglischen Aufbauplans des Marxschen 'Kapitals' und ihre Ursachen' quoted in Rubel on Karl Marx, p. 151.
• 36.
• 37. Grossman's book has just been translated into English with an introduction by an RCP member.
• 38. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Forth International, pp. 11 and 23.
• 39. The Class Struggle, p. 217.
• 40. "The war will last until it exhausts all the resources of civilization or until it breaks its head on the revolution". Writings 1939-40, p. 151. He was also certain that the Stalinist oligarchy would be overthrown as a result of the war. Trying to deal with this particular contradiction of their master's thought with reality led the American SWP to claim in November 1945 that he was right, only the second World War had not ended!
• 41. In Defence of Marxism, p. 9.
• 42. The SWP likes to claim that with its theory of the permanent arms economy it escaped the imminent crisis problematic of orthodox Trotskyism. In actual fact the Permanent Arms Economy theory was originally introduced as a stopgap to explain the temporary delay to the arrival of the big slump. As the slump continually failed to arrive the SWP then called the Socialist Review Group gradually elaborated the notion into a full scale theory.

Intakes: 'Rostock or: How the new Germany is being governed'

The 'Intake' article this issue is taken from #60 of the German magazine Wildcat (Shiraz e.V. - Postfach 301206 - 50782 Köln), a copy of which was sent to us with the request that it be circulated.

The text seeks to give an overview of the relationship between capitalist restructuring and immigration in Germany. Whilst we are well aware that the Fascists pose a real threat to German immigrants, the idea that they threaten to take state power in Germany (the '4th Reich') is a product of the media and some anti-fascists. Despise this the 'fascism/anti-fascism trap' appears to be working; with the state focusing on right-wing violence in an attempt to make the public forget about the social and political crisis. Thus the stale tries to exploit the majority's rejection of the extreme-right by imposing new laws (e.g. high sentences for 'violent crimes', 'against right and left extremism', increased surveillance etc....) which it then portrays as 'democratic'.

But the state has been unable to completely co-opt the anti-fascist movement. This was shown by the clashes between the left and the police at the government sponsored 'anti-racist' demonstration in Berlin on November 8th 1992, where Kohl was heckled by large sections of the crowd. And the recent murders of five Turkish women in Sollingen were followed by two nights of rioting and looting as the community vented its anger on the police and capitalist property. Indeed Turkish youths have begun to organise themselves into gangs to protect their communities from the far-right, resulting in running battles between themselves and the fascists.

Yet despite these actions the German state, with the help of the media, has managed to secure the general consensus that legal foreign workers are OK, whilst asylum seekers should be deported as rapidly as possible under the new 'fast-track' procedure.

Rostock or: How the New Germany is being Governed

Although the burning of ZASt (the central office for asylum claimants] in Rostock was made a symbol by the media and the Left, it is necessary to locate violence against asylum seekers in the general context of class struggle and capitalist restructuring currently occurring in Germany (and throughout Europe in general). This requires a detailed analysis which relates the riots in front of the asylum camps to housing shortages, rising unemployment, restructuring of the factories, state labour market policy, juvenile rebellion and so on. So far we have only partial answers to these questions, and there has been a tendency for anti-fascists to become fixated with re-runs of '33. But it is clear that the state is seeking to manipulate the conflicts around the 'asylum problem' in order to try out a new form of politics within Germany, i.e. a strategy of tension. The riots in front of the asylum camps nearly all had a common pattern: a heating up of the situation by the state, letting go of fascist groupings, protection of the riots against interventions by anti-fascists. Thus the riots serve as a smoke screen in an effort to distract the German working class from the welfare cuts decided last summer, and act to legitimise the further militarisation of the repressive apparatus. The attacks on foreigners are to enable a stronger hierarchisation of the labour movement and a fragmentation of the class. To a degree the state's policy is succeeding with a rise of racism within the class.

Migration into metropolis

The destruction of possibilities for self-reproduction by capitalist development or non-development, wars, starvation in the case of Africa, the changes in the East, etc., are sparking off migration movements on a worldwide scale. Millions of people are trying to reach regions where they are able to secure their survival (in a better way). Only a small percentage of these people have a chance of reaching Europe (due to large distances, and the high costs of travelling) and many of those who do arrive here are caught and turned back at the borders. However those who succeed in breaching 'fortress Europe' are subject to racist attacks both by the state apparatus and right-wing groups. At the moment, in all Western European countries intensified conflicts are taking place between natives from the lower layers of society (workers, welfare recipients, petit-bourgeois) and immigrants searching for self-reproduction possibilities; brawls between Greek and Albanian workers, attacks on Africans in Italy and France, arson against refugees' homes and street riots in Germany. The fact that the 'multicultural middle-classes' show up less doesn't mean they're less racist: for them, refugees initially provide no competition in the housing and labour markets, their kids don't have the problems of overcrowded school classes with a high percentage of foreigners, and asylum camps or ZASt are rarely if ever located in their neighbourhoods. In Germany, the demand for cheap labour has traditionally been met by immigrants. Until recently assimilated immigrants were able to secure wages approaching the levels of the worst paid Germans. Now German capitalists are trying to counteract this by a hierarchisation of immigration and a slowing down of the assimilation process. This is being accompanied by the implementation of seasonal contracts, and the use of casual workers from Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, CSFR, Bulgaria, Russia for much lower wages.

An illegal workforce is much cheaper for the single entrepreneur, but these 'illegal' immigrants pay no taxes or social contributions. However the German social system can only be financed by the immigration of a young workforce, whose education didn't cost the German state anything, and who are working here and filling up the coffers of the health insurers and pension funds, whilst receiving few, or no payments if they go back to their native countries. Thus the state has a financial interest in a legal regulation of migrant work. For this purpose, the Grundgesetz [provisional constitution of the BRD] article 16 which guarantees the individual the right to claim asylum and to stay in Germany until a court has decided upon the individual case is dysfunctional: after recruitment stoppage and the obligatory visa. it becomes the only way to legally come to Germany. It excludes the conditions of the free market and actually prevents the taking up of a job. But the concentration of immigrants in 'asylum houses' has served to make the refugees visible as a 'problem' whilst preventing contacts with other proletarians. Until now, this has worked quite well, preventing common struggles (e.g. for decent housing). But the bureaucratic process hinders people from starting a 'normal' job. At the moment less than 10% of those caught crossing the border illegally say they are claiming 'asylum'; most of them want to 'work' here and would rather get deported and try again soon than be subject to displacement in the camps under bureaucratic control. The most rational solution for capital (to let the workforce in) would be an immigration law. But such a law would be a de facto recognition of the rights of immigrants, hence other measures are being debated in order to provide a stronger hierarchisation of the 'foreign population' in Germany. But the pogroms are needed, too, to create the necessary 'pressure for action' for a change of the Grundgesetz and other measures - and to show the immigrants that they are second class people who are merely tolerated whilst they are willing to do the jobs Germans won't.

Crisis of the political class - crisis against the workers

The scenario of hostility against foreigners, supported by both the state and media, takes place in the context of the deepest political crisis in German history. Central to this crisis is the breakdown of the political machinery; the parties are failing in their role of recuperating the desires of the working class in order to sustain capital. Now the parties only represent themselves, and no one pretends otherwise. The system of the party-state doesn't function anymore. Although the parties are co-operating in a great coalition of crisis-management, neither the SPD nor the ruling coalition have a political programme. Compared to this, the slogans of the right-wing parties seem simple and understandable: against the 'Islamisation' of Germany, against the ECU, the few available flats for Germans etc... Thus the traditional parties are losing votes, as a significant section of the electorate refuses to vote or casts its vote for right-wing and populist parties. This is particularly so in the former GDR, where the collapse of the civil rights movement has been followed by the emergence of a new scandal-ridden political class. With its nationalisation, the church, in GDR times an 'oppositional force', finds itself in a deep crisis. Accepting separate wage levels for East and West Germany, the unions have also gambled away previous successes. The financial crisis of the state is also sharpened by the high costs of re-unification (i.e. payments for unemployment in the East, the building-up of the infrastructure, subsidies to capitalists willing to invest). The high interest rates serve to keep the state budget financeable and to slow down the boom. But this crisis is not a specific 'German problem'. In France and Italy, already the Gulf War had been used for a slow-down. The re-unification of Germany first resulted in a separate development. But after the summer of '91, unrest also grew among the West German workforce, despite both the metal union IGM and the public sector unions calling off strikes. Since then, the ruling class has turned to a policy of high interest rates, a social pact, i.e. a great coalition (and in our context: the deliberate escalation of the 'asylum problem', resulting in the introduction of new asylum laws on July 1st 1992). Now, simultaneously there is a slow-down of the boom, with factories being restructured for lean production, resulting in record levels of unemployment, the social cuts are deepening, and higher taxes and interest rates are eroding the value of wages.

As a result of a policy of high interest rates conducted through the European Monetary System, Germany is exporting its debts and unemployment into the other European countries - that is, into national economies already much deeper in crisis. The unrest in Greece and Italy shows that the bourgeoisie can't escape class struggle through the export of capital, They merely alter the location of this struggle. On this level, too, the Maastricht treaties have shown where Europe is heading: towards economic unification whilst delaying it at a political level, thus the illusion of 'social democratic' control of the EC has been postponed indefinitely. The reunification of Germany was conducted in a similar fashion as there was no 'political ' decision in a parliamentary sense, neatly illustrating the abdication of the political class. But, if an economic imperialism, ruled by anonymous bureaucrats and emergency governments, is capital's vision of future government, it would necessitate a substantial sharpening of repression in advance. In this case a strategy of tension would seek to drive the multi-party apparatus into coalition whilst repressing the social opposition. Whether it gets this far depends on working class resistance. We must remember that the ruling class are not heading towards Europe voluntarily, but because they are unable to survive in a national form - our aim must be to help them to an all-European funeral instead!

Review: The State Debate and Post Fordism and Social Form

fight-state.png

School, the police, social workers, the DSS, prisons....the proletarian rebel knows full well that the state is her enemy!

This immediate experience of the repressive nature of the state is a vital touchstone against those that would urge us to elicit state power to our advantage. Yet a simple gut reaction to the state is not enough; it is necessary that we understand both what the state is and how its role and function in the class war is changing. This has become vitally important in recent years. With the rise of the New Right under the libertarian banner of minimising the state, we are confronted with the wholesale privatisation of state provisions. In the face of the war of all against all of the market, state provision of welfare and the NHS etc. all too often seems the preferable false choice. Without a clear understanding of what the state is, and how its role and function is changing, it is all too easy to be led into either defending in isolation a simplistic anti-state position - a position that all too frequently ends up as seeing the state as simply an instrument of some grand conspiracy of capital - or else abandoning an anti-state perspective in practice and relapsing into liberal campaigns that seek simply to lobby the state for various reforms.

It is therefore vitally important that we develop our theory and understanding of the state. But where should we begin?

Together The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form provide perhaps the most sophisticated Marxist theory concerning the state that has been developed in the last two decades, and both are worth consulting in order to come to an understanding of what the state is and how its role and functions are changing in the present period of capitalism.

The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Formare the first two books in a series that seeks to bring to a wider audience various debates and discussions that have emerged within the Conference of Socialist Economists, and its journal Capital & Class, over the past decade. As collections of papers by leading Marxist academics that make few concessions to the lay reader both these books appear at first sight rather formidable, if not dry and inaccessible to the non-initiated. However, the editorial introductions to both of these volumes go a long way towards placing these debates in context and seek to show how the collection of articles are not simply an irrelevant academic debate but a debate that has profound political and practical implications. Indeed the editors of both volumes see themselves as partisans in fierce polemic, and they make no pretence of presenting an unbiased selection of papers. As Simon Clarke, the editor of The State Debate, readily admits:

"The papers by Colin Barker, Joachim Hirsch and Bob Jessop provide a flavour of other sides of this debate. However, I make no apologies for the balance of the collection, or for the partisanship of this introduction".

Clarke, and Holloway and Bonefeld, the editors of Post-Fordism and Social Form, can be seen as on the same side in the underlying polemic that runs through both volumes. In this polemic Clarke, Holloway and Bonefeld side with those who seek to attack the prevailing structuralism and technological determinism of much modern Marxist theories of the state and the development of modern capitalism, which has led to the increasingly popular notions of Post-Fordism and the Post-Fordist state, by an insistence on seeing both the state and capital not as structures but as class struggle. The implications of which Holloway and Bonefeld make quite clear in the conclusion to their introduction to Post-Fordism and Social Form:

"There are two crucial issues in the discussion of Fordism and the Fordist state. The first is the nature of the present crisis. Is capitalism already on the way to overcoming the international crisis and to establishing a relatively stable basis for a new period of prosperity, as the post-Fordism thesis suggests, or are we still in the middle of a prolonged and quite unresolved crisis of overaccumulation, as Clarke suggests? The answer to this question affects dramatically how one sees the propects of world development and the urgency of the socialist destruction of capitalism. It is important to remember that the last major crisis of capitalism was resolved only through the destruction of millions of workers... . The second issue is how one understands the driving force of capitalist development. Given that there are major changes taking place in the pattern of capitalist social relations at the moment, how is one to unerstand these changes? As the replacement of one model by another, driven forward by the objective tendencies of capitalist development, or as a process taking place through constant, hard-fought struggle? If the former, we are confronted by a new reality, a closed structural-functionalist world which we are powerless to change, and all we can do is adapt or cry out in despair. But if the latter, we are faced with no 'reality' other than the reality of a constant struggle, a struggle of which we are inevitably part."

The State Debate And Post-Fordism and Social Form

For Clarke, the selection of papers he presents in The State Debate represent a re-emergence of a debate that originally began in the early 1970s and culminated in State and Capital : A Marxist Debate in 1978. Indeed, The State Debatecould be seen as sequel to this earlier work. As a consequence, Clarke in his introduction sets out by tracing the development of this debate of the 1970s and placing it within its wider political and historical context.

For Clarke, the debate in the 1970s arose from the inadequacies of the traditional Marxist theories of the state that been inherited from the two wings of classical Marxism. On the one hand the Leninist theories of state monopoly capitalism saw the state as simply an instrument of monopoly capitalism which had to be smashed before a socialist state could be constructed through which the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' could then be imposed. On the hand reformist and revisionists theories took the state as being simply a neutral instrument that could be wielded to the advantage of which ever class was able to assume the reins of government.

For Clarke, both the Leninist and reformist approaches to the state ran into problems with the electoral advance of social democratic parties in the 1960s. The theory of state monopoly capitalism was unable to account for how it was possible for social democratic parties to take charge of the state apparatus and hence it was unable to provide an adequate theoretical basis to inform the politics of those socialists within such parties. At the same time the reformist approach was unable to define the limits of state power. It was therefore unable to explain the difficulties facing socialist in exercising state power to the advantage of the working class.

So, for socialists attempting to advance socialist policies within the state apparatus both the theory of state monopoly capitalism, which denied the possibility of democratic socialism, and reformist theories, which denied the obstacles and limits to democratic socialism, traditional Marxist theories had ceased to be adequate. But there was a further inadequacy which, as we shall see, for Clarke was to prove even more important. Both these strands of traditional Marxist theory centred on the question of seizing state power. For the largely libertarian orientation of much of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s such an orientation towards state power was irrelevant. It was in response to this situation that the first attempts were made to develop a Marxist theory of the state, which gave rise to the great debate between Milliband and Poulantzas.

Miliband began by raising the all important question of why it was that the state, even if it had a democratic constitution and the majority of the population were working class, acted in the interest of the capitalist class? Why was it that even democratic states were capitalist states? Drawing from the empirical and commonsensical traditions of British academia Miliband's answer to this was simple enough. The state acted in the interest of the capitalist class: firstly because the leading positions within the state apparatus were held by members of the bourgeoisie; and secondly because the economic power behind capitalist lobbyists was far greater than other interest groups. Thus although the state may be democratic, and while it may be open and pluralistic, the economic power of capitalists interests and the bourgeois sympathies and perceptions of those running the state apparatus meant that the policies of the state were dominated by the minority interests of the bourgeoisie.

Miliband's theory of the state implied that it was not sufficent for socialist to capture office. It was necessary for any socialist Government to be backed up by a mass extra-parlimentary movement that could counter the political and economic pressures that would be brought to bear against socialist policies both within and outside the state apparatus. Yet as Clarke observes, Miliband's theory of the state:

"...was unable to conceptualise the limits to the exercise of state power on behalf of capital, except to the extent that such exercise met with popular resistance. This laid Miliband's account open to the charge of offering an 'instrumentalist' theory of the state, which ultimately reduced the state to an intrument of the capitalist class, and a 'voluntarist' theory, which saw the limits to state power in the organisation, will and determination of the contending classes."

In Britain, where even the leadership of the Labour Party was dominated by public school and Oxbridge graduates, and the state was infused by notions of class privilege, the ideas of Miliband may have appeared not only sufficient but even self-evident. However, they soon became contested by the far more sophisticated theories emanating from France which were being put forward most forcefully by Poulantzas.

For Poulantzas it was simply not enough to say that the state apparatus was dominated by members of the bourgeoisie. In fact there were many instances where the state was run by classes other than the bourgeoisie, or was run by a distinct faction of the bourgeoisie, yet they still were capitalist states that ultimately ensured the dominance of the general interests of capital. Indeed, the problem for Poulantzas was to explain how the state could be capitalist without the bourgeoisie necessarily having to act as the ruling political class.

Simply put, the answer Poulantzas offered to this problem was that the state could only act within certain limits that were determined by the capitalist mode of production. The state could only function if it had the power to raise taxes and command material resources; but, so long as the material reproduction of society was based on the capitalist mode of production, this power ultimately depended on the success of capitalist accumulation. If the state persistently acted against the interests of capital then sooner or later the conditions for capital accumulation would be undermined, the economy would be thrown into crisis and the state would find it increasingly difficult to command the material resourses it needs to function.

So, for Poulantzas, insofar as society was structured by the capitalist mode of production, the state was always 'determined in the last instance' by the need to sustain capitalist accumulation. Yet within such structural limits Poulantzas suggested there was a large degree of relative autonomy for state policy and political action. Political conflict would necessarily arise between various classes and factions over the determination of state policy and this would give rise to the formation of various class alliances and 'hegemonic blocs' between the dominant classes and factions through which the state was run.

As Clarke points out, although both Miliband and Poulantzas went beyond the traditional Marxist theories of the state, they were still bound by the old socialist project of contesting state power. Such a political imperative was increasingly divorced from the practical political struggles that were being fought in the 1970s in which the struggle was primarily against the state rather than for it. As Clarke himself puts it: "This perspective was increasingly remote from the popular struggles which were developing through the 1970s, which confronted the state more and more directly not as the prospective instrument of their liberation, but as the principal barrier to the realisation of their aspirations."

This point became increasingly apparent to many within the CSE from their analysis of contemporary struggles around housing and labour processes. It was this that led Holloway, Picciotto, Clarke along with others, to attempt to develop the theory of the state further, so as to consider not only the capitalist content of the state but also its form: that is to not only understand what the capitalist state must do but how it must do it. For a theoretical starting point for such a theoretical project, that would allow them to break from the Poulantzas and Miliband framework, they looked to the state derivation debate that had been developing independently in Germany.

For the German theorists any Marxist theory of the state had to begin with the categories of Marx's Capital. For them Capital was not simply a Marxist political economy that was counterposed as a radical alternative to bourgeois political economy, and to which a Marxist sociology, a Marxist political science and so forth could be simply added in accordance with the given disciplines of bourgeois social science. Rather Capital was a critique of political economy as such. It sought to go beyond the analysis of the bourgeois economy to grasp capitalist society as a totality. In doing so Marx's critique had to expose the readily apparent objective categories of bourgeois political economy - money, commodities, capital etc., as reified social relations that assumed the social form of things, and which in turn gave rise to idea of political economy or economics as a distinct 'objective social science'.

As a consequence, these German state theorists did not simply set out to develop a Marxist theory of the state within the confines of 'political science', as both Miliband and Poulantzas had sought to do, but rather sought to derive the state form from the very categories of Marx's Capital, and then, in doing so, show how the sphere of politics manifests itself as being both distinct and separate from that of the economy.

The implications of this approach was that the state was not presupposed as something separate from capital, which then had in some way to be articulated to it, as either an instrument or as a relative autonomous structure and apparatus, but was rather a manifestation of the essential social relations of capital that necessarily has to present itself as something separate and distinct from capital and the 'economy'. In short, within capitalism, we have to begin by recognising that the state is capital!

Of all the German state theorists it was J. Hirsch who was most influential in Britain, and it was his version of state derivation that served as the inspirational source for the attack on the Miliband-Poulantzas orthodoxy, that was collected together by Holloway and Picciotto in the seminal : The State and Capital: A Marxist Debate. However, even then, as Clarke admits, there were vital differences between Hirsch and his British adherents, the full significance of which only began to emerge with Hirsch's attempts to reformulate his theory of the state in the light of the new French regulation school in the early 1980s. It is these differences that underpin the arguments and polemics fought out in the articles collected together in both The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form.

As Holloway and Bonefeld make clear in their introduction to Post-Fordism and Social Form, Hirsch had been preferred over other German state theorists of the 70s because he went furthermost in escaping from the 'capital logic' approach, that was prevalent within much of the German debate, which tended to see the state form as simply a function arising from the needs of capital for an apparently independent social form above competitive battle of contending capitals. Indeed Hirsch had insisted that the form of the state had to be logically derived before any functions could be ascribed to it. As a consequence the state form could be seen as subject to class struggle.

In so far as there were differences between Hirsch and his British followers it was over the importance of historical analysis. Indeed, in their introduction to The State and Capital, Holloway and Piccitto had criticised Hirsch for taking the emergence of the state form, and with it the manifest separation of the economic from the political, as a 'once and for all' historical act, rather than one that had to be repeatedly reimposed through class struggle. However, at the time this difference was seen mainly as a matter of emphasis which only implied the need to supplement Hirsch's state theory with more historical orientated analysis.

With Hirsch's reformulation of his theory of the state in the 1980s it became clear that this difference of emphasis between logic and history was symptomatic of more fundamental differences that arose from Hirsch's failure to fully break with the functionalism of the 'capital logic' approach. In his articles reprinted in both The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form , Hirsch attempts to give his theory an historical dimension by adopting the French regulation approach that saw the crisis in capitalism of 1970s as a shift from a Fordist 'mode of accumulation', involving mass production and mass consumption, to a post-Fordist mode of accumulation of flexible specialisation etc. For the French regulation school, this shift in 'mode of accumulation' which centred on the process of production, demanded a wider shift in the regulative institutions of society that ensured the overall reproduction of capital and labour. This, for Hirsch, implied a change in state form from a Fordist to a post-Fordist state, which he then sought to analyse.

In embracing the French regulation school so as to historicise his theory of the state, Hirsch relapsed into structuralism. Indeed, as Holloway and Bonefeld point out, Hirsch takes up many of the structuralist concepts of Poulantzas. As a result, Hirsch falls into the ultimately determinist and fashionable view of the 1980s which saw the emergence of a post-Fordist/post-modernist era as the inevitable outcome of the development of the objective laws of capitalism, with all the political implications of accepting the 'new realities' of the end of the working class and the rise of designer socialism that this implied.

In The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form these political implications are drawn out and ruthlessly criticised at a theoretical level. As such we find several lines of attack. Firstly there are those at the level of method through which the regulation school and Hirsch's reformulation of state theory is attacked on the basis of its disarticulation of class struggle and structure, its underlying technological determinism, and its misreadings of Marx. While secondly there are those on a historical level which raise questions over the precise periodisation of capitalism into pre-Fordist, Fordist and post-Fordist modes of accumulation. Through all these lines of attack, as we have already noted, the underlying argument against the structuralist orthodoxy is that capital is class struggle.

So what are we to make of Post-Fordism and Social Formand The State Debate? Quite clearly we must side with the editors in their polemic against the post-Fordist etc. With Hirsch retreating into the comfort of his professorship, insisting that we understand everything before we act:

"...we must come to a clear understanding of the trends in social development and of changes within capitalist formations. Only then can we realise the relevance of movements and conflicts and the conditions for social-revolutionary politics in today's society, and only then will we be ready for political action."

Or Jessop who, in failing to fully recognise the political implications of the regulationist theory and the reformulation of the state approach, blithely suggest they provide a 'good framework for a research programme'; our sympathies are clearly with Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al.

Yet if we consider the polemic more closely we can only take sides with certain reservations. Firstly, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al in making their polemic against the post-Fordists, fail to critically situate themselves and their relation to the left. Indeed, the sheer vehemence of Holloway and Bonefeld's attack on the post-Fordism is perhaps in some sense due to their belief that post-Fordism, and with it designer socialism, is nothing other than a betrayal. Yet the degree to which these theoretical comrades were originally on the side of 'real socialism' in the first place is never adequately considered. Secondly, the insistence that capital is class struggle, while vital in the polemic against structuralism is not without its own problems and ambiguities.

Let us first consider our reservations concerning Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al with regard to their situation and relation to the left. For this we should perhaps look a little closer at Clarke's introduction to The State Debate. While this introduction seems a reasonably comprehensive contextualisation of the debate and its origins there are two points that are not adequately addressed and which gives us clues to the politcal position of Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al's. Firstly Clarke does not really explain why the debate over the state became silenced in the late 1970s. He states that the debate was primarily for 'political clarification' and alludes to the changing political climate but does not tell us anything further. Secondly, he does not discuss in any detail the political context that led to the re-emergence of the debate in the 1980s nor its political significance.

In order to draw out the implications of these omissions we must seek to place Clarke's history of debate into the wider and more explicit context of the crisis of the New Left of the late 1970s and the failure of the left strategies of the 1980s.

The crisis of the New Left

In the wake of the proletarian offensive of the late 1960s and early 70s the New Left broke into two parts. On the one side there were, what have since become known as, the new social movements; feminism, ecology, squatting, gay liberation, black liberation etc. All these movements, whether 'oppositional' or 'alternative', combined a utopian vision for the transformation of society, preserving the communist hopes of the heights of the proletarian offensive, with practical everyday activity on the personal level. As a consequence these movements adopted a distinctly anti-state ideology and as such came to constitute what became known at the time as the libertarian left.

On the other side, in the face of the 'political and social realities of the post '68 era' many in the New Left turned towards reviving the organisations of the traditional left. Thus not only was there a resurgence of Trotskyism (at least in Britain) either in revised or in traditional forms, but also a concerted attempt to renovate the old Stalinist Communist Parties! So rather ironically, while the New Left had originally emerged as a reaction against the excesses of Stalin that had resulted in the invasion of Hungary in 1950s, less than twenty years later many New Leftists re-entered the Communist Parties so as to reform and rehabilitate them. This resulted in the emergence of Eurocommunism which sought to distance the Communist Parties of Western Europe from the ideological commitment to 'proletarian revolution', a commitment that had in effect served to reduce the Western Communist Parties to being little more than a tool of USSR foreign policy during the Cold War, in favour of a electoral strategy of capturing state power.

For the erstwhile students of the class of '68, who had now begun their 'long march through the institutions', Leninism, whether of the Stalinist or Trotskyist variety, offered a privileged role as leading intellectuals planning the political strategy on behalf of the working class. As these students of '68 became the lecturers of the 70s, Marxism became academically respectable. But this academic Marxism was dominated by the structural Marxism of Althusser: the arch renovator of the French Communist Party, who saw the party intellectuals as the sole producers of scientific truth. As Althusserain Marxism swept all before it, being championed by the vanguard of intellectual Marxists of the New Left Review , so Poulantzas, structural Marxism's representative in the field of political science, rose to pre-eminence.

This then is the broader context within which the Poulantzas-Miliband debate emerged. But by the late 1970s both the two separate wings of the New Left were in crisis. In Britain the proletarian offensive had been successfully contained into established political and economic channels and had as a consequence become diffused. Capital's counter-offensive had now begun. This had become clear when the Labour Party formally abandoned Keynesianism and embraced monetarism with James Callaan's speech to the Labour Party conference in 1976, and his subsequent letter of intent to the IMF. This was followed by a programme of drastic cuts in public expenditure and the complete abandonment of the Labour manifesto's commitments to make an 'irreversible shift of wealth in favour of working people'.

With the rise of the New Right and the first cold breezes of monetarism, the New Left was thrown into crisis. For the libertarian left the new political and economic climate threatened to reduce the space for building and experimenting with alternative structures and lifestyles, while the increasing power of the right exposed the weakness and lack of unity of the new social movements that were all busy 'doing their own thing'. At the same time, both the weakening of working class militancy and the open failure of the Labour Government, and its traditional social democratic project, had opened the way for the growing popularity of a more virulent right. The looming prospect of a Thatcher Government, along with the rise of the National Front, cast doubt amongst those on the 'far left' that only a few years earlier had been 'preparing for power' after the fall of the Heath Government.

The impact of this crisis was to stimulate an intense bout of self-criticism that was finally resolved in an all-embracing call for left unity. Perhaps one of the most important examples of this reaction, and one which Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al politically connect to, was Beyond the Fragments. Beyond the Fragments was originally a discussion paper that brought together the various experiences of three women who had been active in both the feminist movement and various Trotskyist and 'far left' groups. As such it ably expressed the crisis confronting both the feminist movement and the more 'soft' Trotskyist groups such as the IMG that had sought to mobilise the new social movements within a Leninist framework.

By the late 1970s the feminist movement was in deep crisis. With the original impetus of 'consciousness raising' running out of steam, and in the changing political and economic climate, the womens' movement became racked with tensions and divisions that had been emerging between socialist and radical feminist. In the face of the general retreat of radical feminists into either mysticism or separatism, socialist feminists had become increasingly concerned that the feminist movement was becoming little more than a middle class ghetto that was failing to address the everyday concerns of working class women. A failing that was becoming ever more important with the threat to womens' rights posed by the rise of the right.

Yet, at the same time, socialist feminism had found the often authoritarian and depersonalised forms of organisation and politics of the 'traditional male left' in stark and uncomfortable contrast to forms of organisation and politics that had been developed within the feminist movement. What is more, their repeated efforts to reform such organisations and to reorientate their politics in a feminist direction had proved more than disappointing.

It was in this context that Beyond the Fragments emerged as an attempt to go beyond the failure of both the feminist movement and the Leninist left. Drawing on their experiences, the contributors to this work provided perceptive criticisms of both these movements, and implicitly the New Left in general. Yet for all its perceptiveness in detail, Beyond the Fragments failed to go far enough. It failed to see how the left could act as a means to recuperate struggles, and for all its criticisms of Democratic Centralism it failed to get beyond the idea of Party and social democratic politics. In refusing to impose a solution to the crisis of the New Left, in recoiling from the 'ultra leftism' of the autonomist movements that at the time were raging in Italy, Beyond the Fragments ended up as a vague appeal for an uncritical left unity. An appeal for unity that eventually ended up as a rallying cry to join the Labour Party!

Another response to the crisis of the late 1970s was the work of London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group which became published as In and Against the State. This group of radical academics and professionals, of which Holloway was a leading member, sought to address the important question facing many of the class of '68 whose professional careers were coming into contradiction with their socialist beliefs. Indeed, the organisation of 'radical' professions were proliferating in the late 1970s whose pretensions were ably criticised at the time:

"These 'radical' specialists (radical lawyers, radical architects, radical philosophers, radical psychologists, radical social workers - everything but radical people) attempt to use their expertise to de-mystify expertise. The contradiction was best spelled out by a Case Con [an organisation of 'radical' social workers] 'revolutionary' social worker, who cynically declared at a public meeting, 'the difference between us and a straight social worker is that we know we're oppressing our clients'. Case Con is the spirit of a spiritless situation, the sigh of the oppressed oppressor; its the 'socialist' conscience of the guilt ridden social worker, ensuring that vaguely conscious social workers remain in their job, whilst feeling they are rejecting their role...The academic counter-specialists attempt to attack (purely bourgeois) ideology at the point of production: the university. Unwilling to attack the instituition, the academic milieu, the very concept of education as a separate activity from which ideas of separate power arise, they remain trapped in the fragmented categories they attempt to criticise. Non-sectarianism is the excuse for their incoherence..."

Using the concept of state form as their theoretical basis, Holloway and others sought to show how it was possible for 'radical' professionals, by identifying themselves as state workers, to contest the forms of state provisions so that the class struggle could be waged in as well as against the state. Whatever we may say against it, this work did raise important questions with regard to the need to go beyond simply defending state provision of welfare that was the common response of the left to the rise of monetarist policies, so as to challenge the form of state provision that had long served to demobilise the working class. Indeed, In and Against the State proved far more perceptive than Beyond the Fragments in its warnings over the dangers of using the Labour Party to seize local Government and was well aware of 'state workers' substituting themselves for their clients in the struggle in and against the state:

"When the crunch comes, when Whitehall's commissioners move in to deal with over-spending, will people in these areas unite to protect the councils that defend 'their' services? We hope so, but we fear not".

Yet for all this, In and Against the State, with its resolute 'non-sectarianism', ended up simply appealing for the left to take these concerns on board. It failed to see how the social democratic project of 'building socialism' was a necessary part of the state-form and its demobilising of the working class. As a result it too ended up in the movement for an critical left unity which subsequently underlay the mass stampede into the Labour Party.

The left's strategy in the 1980s

It was this left unity, that preceded the influx of much of the New Left into the Labour Party at the end of the 1970s, which brought an end to the original debate over the state. Within the broad church of the Labour Party all the former divisions were dissolved in the common project of 'democratising' and capturing the Labour Party for the left and seizing control of local government as a stepping stone towards winning the next election. This not only culminated in the near victory of Tony Benn in the deputy leader elections in 1982, and the changes in the Labour Party constitution, but also, and more importantly, with the fall of the GLC into hands of the left.

The capture of the GLC allowed the co-existence of various tendencies within a broad 'right on' left populism. Erstwhile eurocommunists could practice implementing an alternative economic strategies for an economy which was, after all, 'bigger than that of many Third World countries'. The neo-Gramscian proponents of establishing a cultural hegemony of the left could revel in the numerous festivals put on by the GLC, while the various new social movements found official recognition in the appointment of various committees and officials.

Yet you did not have to be a reader of Class War to know that the GLC was one big gravy train for trendy middle class professionals. The appointment of numerous highly paid professionals to look after special interest groups such as blacks, gays women etc. did little to 'empower' the class. Indeed, they often worked against the class by dividing people into special interest groups. In Lambeth the lefty council did not hesitate to evict squatters so that it could build a housing advice centre so that social workers could have a place to advise the homeless!

The politics of the GLC was often more to do with image than anything else. A point borne out not only by the insistence of renaming everything in 'right on terms', so that for instance professionals became known 'workers' (thus lawyers became 'legal workers' while accountants became 'finance workers' and so forth) but also in its gesture politics. Ken Livingstone's incessant need to maintain his reputation culminated in the London Transport fiasco when, after the law courts over-ruled the GLC's cheap fares policy, Red Ken threatened to defy the law only to back down at the last minute, in the end managing to pose for the cameras buying his ticket showing he wasn't such a 'red' after all!.

Clarke significantly avoids dealing with the left in the 1980s. While he declares his aversion to the dangers of a left populism, he is far from being unsympathetic to the politics of 'harnessing the resources of the local state' and concludes that while such strategies failed they should not be considered misguided. For as he says 'history judges the losers harshly'. This failure to criticise the politics of the GLC means that Clarke's introduction fails to draw out the full significance of the State Debate as part of a response to the immediate aftermath the defeat of this left strategy of the early 1980s.

For the rats fleeing the sinking ship of the left, the leap from the image politics of the GLC to the designer socialism of Marxism Today and its associated fads of post-modernism, post-Fordism post everything, was after all not that great. Indeed, it was the 'socialist planners' of the GLC that hailed post-Fordism as the way forward to regenerate London's economy, drawing as their model the Communist Party controlled municipalities of the 'Third Italy'. It is only by understanding the debate over the state and post-Fordism etc. as part of a wider polemic against what is perhaps seen as a betrayal, or at least a pessimistic turn, of erstwhile 'comrades' that we can appreciate much of the underlying verhmence that we find in many of the articles in both these volumes. And it is perhaps only through such an understanding that we appreciate the full political significance of this 'debate'.

This brings us to the second part of our reservations towards Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et at. The political ambiguities that we have outlined above are reflected in at the abstract theoretical level. While a comprehensive analysis of this beyond the scope of this review we should perhaps note a few salient points.

In Post-Fordism and Social Form we find Holloway and Bonefelds' repeated insistence against Jessop that capital is class struggle! Indeed this insistence is perhaps vital for them if they are to press home their polemic against what they see as the structuralist orthodoxy of much of Marxist theory. Yet while we must be sympathetic to this stress on class struggle we should perhaps retain certain reservations. Thus when they claim the backing of Marx by returning to Capital to derive the centrality of class struggle to Marx's own analysis then we must concur with Jessop when he indicates that the categories of Capital are very far from being explicitly embued with class struggle. Indeed, we would argue that in Capital Marx necessarily takes as his starting point the critical perspective of the bourgeoisie. A perspective through which class struggle is only implicit, or at the most marginal to the development of the exposition. As a result what strikes the reader who is aquainted with the importance of the question of class struggle for Marx is its apparent absence in the pages of Capital.

To understand what capitalism is, Marx was obliged to begin his critique from this critical perspective of the bourgeoisie. But from this perspective capitalism does appear as simply the autonomous movement of structures; capital developing in accordance with its own objective an inexorable laws. To make class struggle explicit we have to go beyond these categories. We have to invert them. The failure to do so can only generate problems particularly when we seek to return to Marx to derive our theory as form-analysis seeks to do.

Thus for example when Marx shows how labour takes the social form of value he presupposes the defeat and subsumption of the worker. Indeed, as self-expanding value, capital is the presupposition of the repeated subsumption of living labour; it is the triumph of dead alienated labour over the living. Capital is class struggle only in that it is not class struggle; that is in so far as it is the provisional defeat of the working class. A similar argument could be advanced for the state formas a defeat of the autonomous organisation of the working class.

It would be unfair to say that Holloway and Bonefeld etc. are completely unaware of this. Yet we may suggest that their failure to fully recognise this point leads them into certain ambiguities in order to preserve the value of their role within the state. Thus, for example, Holloway makes a distinction between state-form and the state apparatus which, as Clarke has pointed out, seems to imply that: "...the bourgeois state apparatus can somehow be given a socialist form."

So what then are to make of The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form? Both Post-Fordism and Social Formand The State Debate provide a important analysis of the nature of the state and the current period of capitalism. An analysis that is for the most part directed against the prevalent structuralist and objectivist Marxist orthodoxy. As such we are sympathetic to them but with certain reservations. For us the struggle is not to 'build socialism' or to democratise capitalism, it is for communism. A project that demands no complicity with the recuperative strategies of the left and social democracy.

Auto Struggles: The Developing War Against the Road Monster

Introduction

Britain's first motorway opened in 1958 on a wave of auto-triumphalism. Motorways were presented as both an answer to 'the public's' transport requirements and an essential component of the modern infrastructure British capital needed to compete with its European counterparts.

The growth of bypasses (and bypasses round bypasses) has been promoted in the same way. These new roads appear to reflect a compromise between transport needs (of both freight and private motorists) and the needs for freedom from transport: the next road is always the solution to the congestion of the last one. And it's perfectly true; the growth of the car and its environment the road do represent a compromise. Increasingly, however, our relationship with motor vehicles and roads reveals the contradiction at the heart of this compromise: the products that promise to liberate us actually destroy our spaces and enslave us in work and in leisure.

What is of interest to revolutionaries is the way this revelation is not simply unfolding mechanically as an objective and quantitative relationship between natural resources and technical capacity. Such factors play a part insofar as we become more conscious of them; but the most important elements determining how many of us are coming to define our relationship with cars and roads are the growing struggles around road developments. These struggles have brought many people into direct and effective confrontation with capital, this despite the fact that such actions are understood by many of those involved in purely 'moral' or purely 'ecological' terms.

To suggest that many of those involved in these struggles do not have theory adequate to their own practice is not to say that they won't develop their ideas through their engagement in these struggles. Neither is it to say that we at Aufheben have a completed theoretical understanding of the struggle over roads. If we knew where the roads struggle was going we'd be there already. Instead, we are in a similar situation to many of those involved in this struggle - involved and trying to understand what's happening in order to involve ourselves more effectively. The present article is a contribution to this ongoing attempt to understand and act in these struggles.

Part 1: The importance of the car to the modern economy

Roads serve cars. In order to explain current struggles over roads we need to trace out the development of the forces that have led to the modern proliferation of motor vehicles. First, however, we will briefly rehearse some of the more well known arguments against roads.

Know the enemy

Much of the following is fast becoming common knowledge and hardly needs elaborating.

Pollution and health: Car fumes are linked to respiratory diseases such as asthma, particularly for children. The car is responsible for 90% of U.K. emissions of carbon monoxide; it also produces lead and benzene; all are poisonous gases. Among the other nitrous oxides the car produces is carbon dioxide, which is the main greenhouse gas. And if they can't gas you or destroy your climate they'll run you over: 4500 people die on Britain's roads each year. These deaths are depoliticized by referring to them as mere 'traffic accidents' or 'problems on the roads'; they are not in fact incidental and inevitable - they are a consequence of a particular mode of accumulation and social existence, and therefore contestable. They are part of a vicious circle, however; concerned for their kids' safety on the busy roads, an increasing number of parents now drive their offspring to school - so contributing to the problem they're attempting to avoid.

Land: In London, 25% of land is devoted to the car. Every mile of motorway takes up 25 acres of land. DoT figures forecast an increase in car numbers of up to 140% by 2025 to a total of 39,000,000; this would require a motorway 257 lanes wide between London and Edinburgh to accommodate them and an area twice the size of Berkshire to park them. Furthermore, the aggregate industry blights quarrying areas such as the Mendips, Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands as it extracts 250,000 tonnes of sand and gravel for each mile of motorway. This destruction of trees and green areas amounts to a loss of a communal resource; the continued need for further road building is therefore incompatible with our need for countryside.

Energy: It might also be argued that, since more 'eco-friendly' alternatives to petrol are viable, oil is best reserved for use in plastics etc. However, this argument does not necessarily mean accepting the 'energy-crisis' thesis.

Who needs roads?

Do roads harm everyone's interests? Liberal critics of the road and motor industry add to the list of woes above the following points:

Roads are becoming increasingly less cost effective; the cost of 'improving' them is going up.

And as soon as new roads are built and old ones expanded, they fill up because increased road transport is encouraged. Congestion is therefore not improved and businesses pay the cost of traffic jams.

Finally the liberal critics argue that particular car/road capitals are cutting 'everyone's' throat in the long run because 'we' can't carry on indefinitely using resources in this way.

But, although particular capitals tend not to operate in terms of the future interests of capital in general, there is no reason in principle why a 'greener' capitalism can't be developed. (In fact, it is being developed right now to recuperate the developing 'green rage' into consumer channels.) So why has the car been preferred to more eco-friendly alternatives, such as rail transport? Tracing the development of the motor car industry - and thus road expansion - historically, we can observe a number of forces at work.

Capital needs transport

To put this history of car industry expansion in perspective, however, we need to point to capital's general requirements. Capital is a relationship which necessarily seeks to expand itself. Capital is, essentially, the boundless expansion of value (i.e. of alienated labour) - it is the need and striving to achieve such indefinite expansion. In other words, the economy must expand or die! Thus one important indicator used by economists to gage the health of an economy is percentage growth in gross national product.

>From the capitalist's perspective, one way of creating profit (i.e. surplus-value) more quickly, and hence speeding expansion, is to reduce turnover times; the capitalist always seeks a way of producing goods more quickly and getting them to market more quickly.

Expansion and faster turnovers require efficient transport. Raw materials need to be moved from their source (e.g. mines, farms etc.) to factories to make new commodities. These commodities in turn may need to be transported to further factories to modify their use-value and value before they reach shops. Finally they are transported to shops in order to realize their values in the realm of consumption.

The dynamic of the motor industry: from labour process to way of life

The need for the road-building programme is the need of an alien power. Roads are not simply for moving commodities about per se. Capital needs more roads simply because the motor industry still represents a key locus for its expansion.

As it has grown to serve the needs of particular capitals, the motor industry has developed new needs and desires of its own - desires which draw their energy, vampire-like, from the energy of its host, the proletariat, and which have pushed the motor industry into a pivotal position in its own right in developed economies. But how has it been able to do this?

Railways and the rise of industrial capitalism

A hundred years ago it was not roads, but the railways which were the dominant capitalist mode of land transport. Railways were the iron sinews that had drawn industrial capitalism to its feet. Indeed, the spread of railways across the globe was then synomous with the spread of industrial capitalism.

Providing the rapid and efficient transport of people and commodities over vast distances, railways had made possible the concentration of production in factories centred in large industrial cities. Whereas before production had been dispersed in traditionally based cottage industries and sold for the most part in local markets, the railways had made it possible to concentrate and totally reorganise production in huge factories that could supply both national and world markets. In this way the railways had facilitated the destruction of the old craft skills, which had given workers a large degree of control over their labour, and had thereby served to impose the real subsumption of labour under capital.

With workers concentrated in factories under the direct organisation and supervision of the capitalist and his functionaries, the railways provided the means for the further subordination of the worker to capital that came with the mechanisation of factory production. Mechanisation of production required huge quantities of steel to build and maintain machines and even greater quantities of coal to power them. It was the railways, that are so perfect for hauling bulk materials rapidly over large distances, which provided the vital means of transport without which mechanisation of production would have been impossible.

Yet the railways did not merely make industrial capitalism possible, the railways epitomised early industrial capitalism. The mechanical regularity of the machine that reduced the movements of the worker to its own rhythms in the factory were replicated in the punctual regularity of the railway timetables that confined movement of people to the discipline of precise departure times. The railways after all were the mechanisation of transport.

Having facilitated the development and concentration of industrial capitalism, by the end of the nineteenth century the railways had come to stand alongside iron and steel and coal as one of the central pillars of monopoly capitalism. But with the turn of century this era of capitalism entered into a period of grave crisis whose resolution saw the decline of railways and the rise of the motor industry as a central locus of capital accumulation.

The crisis of monopoly capitalism and the decline of the railways

The development of the factory system and the growth of huge industrial cities brought with it the emergence of the urban industrialised proletariat that stood opposed to capitalism. But capital was not simply confronted by the sheer numbers of the working class that were now concentrated together in the factory and the city but also by their growing power within production. Although the old craft skills that had given the traditional artisan control over his work had been swept away by industrialisation, many industrial workers had become able to define, develop and defend new industrial skills that were vital to the industrial production process. Such skills were evident on the railways as any other industry. The management could not hope to understand the complexities and idiosyncrasies of driving and stoking a steam engine any more than they could hope to develop the finely tuned ear of the wheeltapper.

In response to the growing power of the working class, the bourgeoisie pursued a policy of divide and rule. While attempting to repress the demands of the mass of unskilled workers, skilled workers were conceded higher wages while their limited control over production came to be tolerated. To pay for such concessions capital either had to cut the costs of raw materials by increasing the exploitation of the colonies or else by exploiting their monopoly positions to push prices up at the expense of non-monopoly and pre-capitalist sectors of the economy.

In most industries monopoly prices could only be obtained by restricting domestic production and thus severely limiting the scope for domestic capital accumulation. Consequently, this excess of both commodities and capital drove nationally based capitals to find foreign outlets. With the drive to export capital and commodities, and the need to secure cheap raw materials to cut production costs, international competition and imperialist rivalries intensified.

By the first decade of this century this intensification of international competition, together with the growing power and militancy of the unskilled working class, had reached the point where the capitalists were forced to begin to reconsider their compromise with the skilled workers. However, attempts to cut skilled wages and to wrestle back control over the production process through the introduction of Taylorism (i.e. scientific management through time and motion studies etc) only served to increase the militancy of skilled workers who now in increasing numbers began to flock to the banners of revolutionary syndicalism under the slogan of 'workers control of production!'.

With the mutual intensification of international competition and class conflict capitalism faced a severe crisis which threatened it very existence. The question of the day had become that of, war or revolution!

In 1914 war broke out and engulfed the capitalist heartlands of Europe. Three years later, after millions had been slaughtered in the trenches, revolution broke out in Russia which then sparked a wave of revolutionary movements across mainland Europe. After several years of bitter and intense struggles the revolutionary workers movements in Europe were both defeated and defused one by one by social democracy, fascism and stalinism. Yet despite such defeats, it was not until 1945, after another bloody world war, that capitalism was able to resolve the crisis of monopoly capitalism and establish the basis of a new era of accumulation centred around what has become known as the post-war settlement.

The post-war settlement and the rise of the car

With the class compromise of the post-war settlement, which was established in varying forms throughout the advanced capitalist nations, the working class, in effect, abandoned all hopes for the end of capitalism and relinquished much of its existing control within production. In return the working class was offered the welfare state, the promise of stable full employment and rising living standards.

Yet the post-war settlement, and with it the post-war boom, was only made possible on the basis of a new strategy and mode of accumulation - Fordism. Fordism was based on the mass assembly line production of standardised consumer goods which was made possible by the replacement of the skilled worker by semi-skilled assembly line workers, that then allowed management detailed control over the labour-process. With such detailed control, assembly line production opened up a huge potential for the application and refinement of 'scientific management' and automation which together opened the way for an enormous growth in the productivity of labour.

This scope for raising labour productivity meant that, within the bounds of increased productivity, both wages and profits could rise at one and the same time. With rising wages, and the relative secure employment offered by Fordist production methods, Fordism was then able to provide the basis for mass consumption which was a necessary condition for its own reproduction. The mass production of consumer durables created the effective demand for such consumer goods by creating a relatively prosperous working class.

The analysis of Fordism, and the institutions such as collective bargaining and Keynesian demand management that arose to ensure that the mass consumer demand was able to match the expansion of mass production, has been dealt with in great detail elsewhere. Our main concern here is to stress the centrality of the motor industry for Fordism.

Fordism, as it name indicates, was first pioneered by the Ford motor company in the 1920s, and further experiments were made in Nazi Germany with the development of the Volkswagen (the peoples car) and the building of the Autobahns across Germany in the 1930s. As such the motor industry became the model for whole number of consumer durables that followed its lead, such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, hi fis etc

But the car was not merely the first in a line of consumer durables to be produced by Fordist production methods it was also the foremost. After housing the car has become the biggest purchase an ordinary consumer is likely to make, being the equivalent to several months wages. Furthermore, the production of a car involves a wide range of industries ranging from rubber, steel, plastic, electrical, oil together with support industries such as road construction, advertising and finance. The broad range of such economic linkages has meant that large and diverse sections of the modern economy have become dependent on car production to such a degree that car production has become an important economic indicator in its own right. As has been said 'when General Motors sneezes America catches cold!'.

But it not simply at an economic level that the car, as the exemplar of Fordist production, has served to sustain the post-war settlement and the partial truce in the class war. The car has played a prominent role in altering the life and conceptions of the working class which has served to consolidate the social and ideological conditions of the class compromise established within the post-war settlement.

With the post-war reconstruction of bombed cities throughout Europe the opportunity was taken by capitalist state planners to break up the old working class communities and relocate the working class in new tower blocs, new towns and 'Garden cities' and in the middle class suburban areas that had grown up in the inter-war era. This dislocation of the working class from the location of production was at first made possible by the development of public transport, but its further development was consolidated by growing car ownership.

This relocation of the working class, which was increasingly made possible by the spread of the car, was in many ways a major advance for many who were able to escape their old slums and claustrophobic communities for modern housing with inside toilets etc. But it was a gain that had its cost. With the break up of the old communities came the break up of the old working class solidarity to be replaced by the isolated individualism of the new sterilised housing estates. Neighbours are now never seen as they rush past in the motor cars and as neighbourhoods become more dangerous and unpleasant due to increasing traffic more and more people retreat into the comfort of their houses.

Thus the car has become a bubble, a sealed environment, a shield from the picket line; it renders relations more distant in the way that public transport cannot. For businesses, motor transport has become an ideal way to employ scab labour. Potential militancy by railway workers, who could gather together and organise co-ordinated shut-downs at stations and depots, preventing vast amounts of commodities and raw materials moving, could be bypassed with a fleet of individual contract lorry drivers. The lorry has almost become identified with the scab, particularly since the role of TNT in the News International dispute.

Thus although the working class is still concentrated in urban areas this threat to capitalism is mitigated by containing the working class as consumer citizens esconed in their little metal boxes, forever moving past one another in the incessant movement of traffic.

The car and bourgeois freedom

Crossland, the great labour politician of the 1950s who saw in the post-war settlement the advent of socialism, once said 'after one man one vote: one man one car!'. Clearly for the post-war ideologues, from Crossland to Thatcher the car epitomises freedom and democracy, and we would say indeed it does!

For the individual car ownership does offer a leap in freedom and opportunity. The freedom to go where and when you want. A freedom undreamt of for working class people of earlier generations. Indeed, for many learning to drive is the major break from the stifling restrictions of the family and the first step to adulthood.

Yet this increase in individual freedom serves to reduce the freedom of everyone else. Other car drivers now face that much more car congestion and delays; pedestrians, particularly mothers and children, become more restricted by the fear of death or serious injury by one more car; while people suffer more traffic noise and that much more pollution.

The freedom of movement offered by the car becomes increasingly a formal freedom, a representation of freedom, as everywhere becomes the same as it is tarmaced and polluted to make way for the car. As the car becomes the norm, the freedom of the car becomes a necessity, as the mundane acts such as shopping becomes impossible without access to a car. This has already become the case in Los Angeles and is rapidly approaching with the development of out of town super stores.

In casting us as consumer citizens the freedom of the car, like all bourgeois freedoms throws us into a war of all against all where other car drivers serve as merely obstacles and restrictions to our own inalienable right of movement. This inalienable right of movement consequently demands the duty to obey the highway code and traffic laws which is in turn enforced and guaranteed by the state. Through policing the roads and by giving an open ended commitment to provide new road space, the state ensures the bourgeois freedom of movement.

Yet as the volume of traffic grows at a rate faster than road construction the car has nowhere to go (except to take its owner to work) but yet has everything to say. The car has long since become less of a mere means of transport and more a means of identity. In curtailing the possibility of direct communication the car has to say what we are for us. Whether it is that we are upwardly mobile or a conscientious environmentalist the car says it all.

Although the working class offensive of the 1960s and 1970s which threw the Fordist mode of accumulation into crisis and forced a major restructuring of capital, this has not affected the continuing centrality of the car. Indeed the associated struggle of women and youth against the old patriarchal family structure which found its modern material expression in the family farther driven car designed with a wife and 2.4 kids, has long since been recuperated in the drive to sell cars to women and the young (and would be young).

So the car has not only become central to the accumulation of capital over the past fifty years, but has also become a vital means in consolidating the class compromise that has made such accumulation possible. The promise of physical freedom and mobility offered by the car has led to the political demobilisation of the working class.

Developing European markets

Infrastructures must be improved and updated in line with sources of raw materials and new markets. The European Union, for example, is an internal market, an attempt to integrate European national capitals and particular capitals within European Union nations to maximize the realization of surplus-value by stabilizing market relationships. The European Union has drawn up plans for the massive upgrading of a number of strategic road systems across Europe as part of a 'Trans European Route Network', an infrastructure to serve the needs of European capital as a whole by allowing greater efficiency in the movement of freight. The plans for British roads are centred around those trunk-roads serving the Channel Tunnel (e.g. the Folkestone to Honiton road, the M25 and all those roads coming off it) and the links between the Eastern ports of Harwich and the Western side of the country. Roads ministers talk of the individual elements of these roads (e.g. the A27, A35 etc. on the Folkestone-Honiton route) each being 'improved' independently but in fact they are being massively upgraded and augmented in conjunction to accommodate (and encourage) freight lorries. Aside from these public plans there are schemes that have been evolving 'organically' with the growth of bypasses. Now many new bypasses are to be linked up to form 'superhighways'. The widening of the M42, M6 and M1 is part of this process.

The increasing integration within the world market of the eastern European markets of Russia, Poland etc. represents further expanding needs by capital for road development. Raw materials and finished commodities now need to travel regularly across the whole of Europe, hence the EU's plan to integrate a road system all the way from Cork to Moscow.

Just-in-Time

Even without the efforts of the planner-union, particular capitals in the form of factories, retailers and road haulage firms are increasingly demanding and filling more road space. One trend which has been becoming more influential in this escalating need for road space and lorries is use by businesses of the 'just-in-time' system. The just-in-time system began as a production strategy aimed at economizing on time and space on the shopfloor by having efficient communications in the production process to ensure that only what was immediately required was built, thereby saving on warehouse/storage space. A firm using this system therefore attempts to save money by cutting down on warehouse workers, managers and bookkeepers etc. The just-in-time system reduces turnover time by reducing production time to the time actually spent in valorization itself - eliminating latent (i.e. potential) productive capital and unproductive labour.

Their 'economizing', their reduction of 'costs' is our intensification and rationalization of work. Just-in-time is essentially a method for imposing discipline on workers through surveillance and through their internalizing the regime's rules and needs.

Factories using the system have many small deliveries a day (instead of a single larger delivery) from their suppliers, many of who in turn would be adopting the system. This amounts to using the road itself instead of a warehouse! What they save on warehousing costs, we pay in terms of loss of environment and air quality!

Worse still, since the advent of the bar code, communications technology has allowed the just-in-time system to be extended to retailers. Major stores are increasingly moving to huge out-of-town sites and using less site space for warehousing; they use bar code scans at checkouts to determine which items are selling and have them delivered constantly from manufacturers and their own warehouses on other sites. These out of town stores choose greenfield sites not far from major roads to which they add service roads. Or if they cannot find a big enough out of town site near a major road, they will offer money to a local council for a 'bypass' which will then be used by their lorries. This is what has been happening, for example, in Yeovil with a proposed Sainsbury superstore.

The motor industry remains a key indicator in the world economy. The nexus of related industries which depend for their continued expansion on the car point to its crucial position. The massive growth of cars has required a massive growth of roads. In Britain and the USA the underdevelopment of the railways means that the roads are in many cases the essential artery for the creation of virtually all commodities and the realization of their value in the market place. Given all this how can cars and roads be neutral? They are forms of technology, and no technology is developed outside the class war. They represent a particular definition of progress; and all definitions of progress depend on who has the power to decide what is good and what is needed.

Having outlined how the vital roles played by the motor industry and road construction in the modern capitalist world, we will now move on to the new forms of opposition to the car/road vampire that have been developing in Britain in the last few years.

Part 2: Against the road/car empire! The nature of current struggles

The factory and beyond

The provisional truce of the post-war settlement was abruptly renegotiated in the late 1960s, a process which is still continuing. But the cracks were appearing long before then. Just as working class power forced capital to develop new modes of accumulation, these new modes created new social subjects with new forms of resistance. The intensification of the labour process and the institutionalization of struggle in collective bargaining gave rise to a trend towards the refusal of work itself in the 1960s, particularly in Italy, where the Turin motor factories were a central site of struggle in the 'hot Autumn' of 1969. The ongoing elimination of powerful sectors of skilled labour and this new refusal of work in the proletariat signalled the demise of the privileged position of the workplace itself in class warfare.

New social subjects

In the factory, capital responded with Neo-Fordism. This was an attempt to make work less mechanical and monotonous. It added flexibility, variety and a human face to alienation with the aim of getting workers to internalize the capital relation in the form of self-management and self-discipline (e.g. semi-autonomous work groups at Volvo); thus it was intended to preserve profitability by cutting down on absenteeism. Neo-Fordism came to British workplaces in 1980s and is still being contested today. Other, parallel, trends were already developing. Since the 1970s, capital has been attempting to restructure social relations by 'diffusing' the factory; this is an attempt to defuse the mass worker, the antagonistic work-refusing subject produced by Fordism. Capital has therefore been attempting to subsume social labour as a whole. At the same time, class antagonism was already being recomposed at a higher level, and struggles beyond the direct workplace were becoming more important.

The battleground of the diffused factory has developed and changed with the mounting attack on and defence of the social wage. Original methods have been found to use aspects of capital's 'victories' against the capital relation. The car features in many of these struggles, now not only as parts on a conveyor belt (exchange-value, bargaining chip) but also as use-value turned against capital itself. The car has become identified as the ubiquitous emblem of modern democratic identity. The very ubiquity of the car, particularly the expensive car, as both representation and embodiment of value, makes it a popular point of attack - as in the poll tax uprising of 1990, for example. However, the car itself can also be the very vehicle (pun intended) for the negation of the modern democratic practices of property ownership, representation, money and work. Cars were used effectively in the Los Angeles uprising of 1992 to loot and attack property, for example. Similarly, the riots of summer 1991 revolved around police attempts to clamp down on joy-riding and ram-raiding, activities which were in many cases popular in their local communities as both forms of entertainment (to watch as well as do) and alternative methods of providing means of subsistence.

Similarly, the burgeoning anti-roads movement is another expression of class antagonism and therefore an attack on capital. Anti-roads actions (occupations of land, 'monkey-wrenching', wasting construction companies' time and money etc.) are direct attacks on the intended expansion of a crucial capitalist industry.

It may be objected to this claim that many if not most of those involved in the many anti-road actions that have been taking place over the last two or three years do not necessarily understand their actions in anti-capitalist terms, that they do not have socialist or communist theories, and that this is the case because they have a coherent identity of struggle only in the sphere of culture (i.e. consumption and politics) - they are not directly connected with the means of production (the true 'levers of power'), and in their composition they are thoroughly heterogeneous (anti-roads campaigns are often made up of a odd alliances of respectable middle class types and unemployable eco-warriors); they are not therefore a true class force, a potential agent of fundamental transformation, in themselves.

Before examining in detail the practices and ideas of the anti-roads movement(s), let us digress for a moment to examine these claims, using our analysis of the class struggle since the Second World War developed above.

Against workerism and social science

Workerism

The claim that the anti-roads movement, although a fight against some of the more obnoxious effects of capitalism, cannot in itself be an assault on capital is an argument associated with Leninism. Leninists would ask us to believe that anti-roads actions are only of value insofar as those engaged in them can understand (through their defeat or through party propaganda) that building the party is the only solution to their problems. They ask us to believe, in other words, that our own struggles, needs and oppression are not in themselves part of the class struggle and that we can only connect with the class struggle by building an abstract party in preparation for the 'real' struggle. The party's needs are thus privileged over our needs.

The Leninist argument is based on an outdated understanding of the proletariat. As we argued above, the demise of powerful sectors of the skilled working class and the extension of the factory to all aspects of society means that the ontological privileging of the industrial working class is no longer tenable. Certainly, during the time of the Second International, revolutionary strategy revolved around the power of certain sectors of skilled industrial workers, who, because of their skills and perspective, were in a position to bring about change simply by taking over existing means of production. But now, increasingly, everywhere is the factory, everywhere is the battleground: from the university to the dole, from the street to the office. In each of these areas capital has to impose control to ensure the (re)production of labour-power. Each of these areas is therefore capable of being an arena of struggle with the potential and the need to be an intrinsically valid moment of total transformation. By the same token, in analysing the significance of current anti-road struggles, it is not enough to look at people's class backgrounds (the 'odd alliances' mentioned above); it is also necessary to look at what people are actually doing, and the effects of their actions.

And why should we want to take over the existing means of production, anyway? They are not neutral; they were developed to oppress us - that is the function of Taylorist/Fordist/just-in-time practices. Taking over these 'levers of power' is simply to introduce further planning to capitalism. It is no coincidence that Luddite-type ideas are now common among militant sections of the young proletariat. Capitalism is now a world system, forever trying to subsume our activity in ever greater detail, and actions by any sectors to break the capital relation are all equally valuable. The proletariat isn't the 'workers' - it's the obverse of capital; and communism isn't an ideal or programme - it's the movement that carries out this negation of the capital relation.

Social science

A comparable argument against the significance of struggles like that of the anti-roads movement is made from an area of the social sciences that has become a growth industry since the late 1960s - the study of social movements. Weberian and postmodernist perspectives come to remarkably similar conclusions on this. But this is hardly surprising given their common origins in the attempt by liberal academia to recuperate revolutionary theory. These accounts of the 'new social movements' - anti-nuclear, gay, green, black and women's liberation etc. - argue against the validity of class analysis by accepting the Leninist definition of the class war then 'finding' that it longer exists. Instead, particular 'ideologies' (i.e. sets of ideas) give coherence and structural significance to collective actors, and define their difference from and supersession of the 'traditional ideologies' (practices and roles) of class politics Where it is allowed in the analysis, class conflict is understood as just one of many possible sites of collective conflict, one that is not of key ontological significance, and one that is fast going out of fashion.

These theorists avoid relating particular forms of oppression to the requirements of capital, and thus they exclude issues of how resistance might therefore entail resistance to capital, not just to particular loci of power based on 'moral positions' or 'counter-ideologies'. It is a function of their purely analytic perspective that they attempt to grasp the significance of 'new social movements' merely in their subjective aspects (their various ideas) and ignore their objective effects on capital - and thus how they might recreate themselves as a class subject. The sociologists limit the significance of the 'new social movements' to the particular, apparently disassociated aims of 'identity politics'; they exclude what such movements might share and therefore where their logic might lead them in relation to the totality. These academic perspectives, like their workerist political counterparts, deny the dynamic relation of the 'new social movements' to 'class politics'. These 'new social movements' theorists attempt to undermine a class understanding of these movements with their dull empiricist emphasis on differences of appearance; they attack with their theory the theory and practice of the proletariat by denying that capitalism is the issue and that it might be overthrown.

None of this means that we don't recognize the moments of dogma, liberalism and lifestylism in the 'new social movements'. Quite obviously, many of the new movements are consistently limited in their aims and actions or function only to disempower and channel away the energies of potential activists through bureaucracy and representational methods. Although the 'new social movements' are expressions of class antagonism, they have to discover this - and this is something that is by no means guaranteed. Thus we can accept that there may be an element of truth in the suggestion by the 'new social movements' theorists that such movements embody ideologies. But there never have been 'pure' movements. And a movement, like the current anti-roads movement, which stresses action without a conscious coherent political critique of capitalism is no worse (and is often better) than a Marxist theory - like so much Leninism - without a grounding in effective practice.

The current anti-roads movement

In describing the present state of the anti-roads movement, it may be useful to begin with its precursors. This is so because many of those involved in present anti-roads actions draw on the theoretical and practical heritage of certain other movements, whether they participated in them directly or whether they only know the ideas through literature, slogans and arguments.

Precursors

What is now called the green movement in Britain has taken a number of different forms. For example, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) was born as long ago as 1926 to meet needs not met by the National Trust. The CPRE's target was, and remains, 'urban sprawl'. Until the 1970s, 'green' campaigns like this remained the preserve largely of middle class types who would campaign in a traditional middle class way (i.e. public enquiries etc.).

Popular environmentalism

In the 1970s, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth emerged as a more populist force in green politics; these groups were able to attract a large number of young people who actually wanted to do something, so there were publicity stunts and direct attempts to 'save the planet' organized in the name of these groups. In the 1980s, however, FoE and Greenpeace became more professional in their approach. Now, much of their 'activity' involves commissioned reports and types of lobbying, with the bulk of the membership being reduced merely to raising money to pay for these experts to do their thing. At the same time that this was happening, the Green Party began to expand rapidly and extend its profile. However, a process paralleling in some ways the demise of FoE and Greenpeace took place here too; this led eventually to some of the more professionally minded 'leaders' leaving the Party to the liberal anarchist types.

In each case what has happened is that a need for 'action' of some sort - the very aspiration that made these green groups attractive to many people, particularly young people - has been met with the argument that change can only be effected through official channels. The failure of these groups in the eyes of would-be green activists has fuelled the popularity in the 1990s of Earth First!, a group which has put the emphasis unambiguously on action. At the same time, there is a trend (particularly since Twyford Down - see below) away from a purely 'NIMBYist' basis to groups opposing roads; the issue has become increasingly seen as affecting 'the planet' not just particular 'back yards'.

The British version of Earth First! will be discussed below. It takes its name and much of its ideas from the American Earth First! movement. Earth First! began in America as a number of individuals who were prepared to do whatever was physically necessary to defend the natural environment. Though their literature still carries the monkey-wrenching message, the character of the movement has become more liberal and their anti-human deep ecologism has softened.

'Direct action'

Other important precursors of the present movement(s) are the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). (particularly in its Greenham Common type manifestation rather than its manifestation as an organizer of national marches ), and the animal rights movement.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the peace movement (in Britain, at least) tended to overshadow the green movement, and the liberals and radical liberals who might otherwise be campaigning against nuclear power (and other environmental issues) were campaigning against nuclear weapons. Since the peace movement went into decline, the environmental movement has grown correspondingly.

>From these movements the anti-roads movement has inherited its radical liberalism and militant moralism and its range of methods (collective direct action, individual specialisms as well as lobbying and publicity stunts.) The CND technique of civil disobedience, on the mould of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, sits alongside the 'by any means necessary' doctrine of Earth First! and animal rights strategies. The coexistence of these currents is not simply due to theoretical incoherence on the part of those involved, or even mutual tolerance of different points of view. Their shared emphasis on morality (good and evil) has allowed them to coalesce in the new superordinate theme of saving all life on the planet (life and the planet being essentially good) from the evil road monster.

The present wave of anti-roads movements typically stress 'direct action', but this can mean a number of things. Borrowing from the CND tradition, the term often means civil disobedience or symbolic protest; but, borrowing from the ALF (Animal Liberation Front) tradition, it may also mean attacks on property, defined in law as criminal damage.

Many of the ideas and practices from these older movements (monkey-wrenching, setting up camps, non-violence, moral arguments) were used in the first major site of struggle, that at Twyford Down. The Twyford struggle not only consolidated some of these older themes as dogmas; it also produced new ideas and new practices as many people learned how to struggle directly for the first time.

Twyford

Locals opposing the M3 extension at Twyford had already begun to realize that constitutional methods (lobbying, petitions, letters, public enquiries etc.) were a waste of time when a small number of people turned up and camped on the site where the construction work was due to begin. So began a long war of attrition, with a growing number of Donga dwellers, travelling eco-warriors and their local supporters occupying land, bridges and machines and sabotaging property in their efforts to save the land. For a while protesters were highly successful. At first, security men were bewildered and unable to respond effectively when people sat in front of bulldozers. Finally, however Group 4 security launched a mass assault on the protesters occupying the site.

In terms of the quality (methods) and the mass (numbers involved) of the anti-roads movement, the protest movement against the M3 development through Twyford was pivotal. Vast amounts of investment money were wasted through the protesters' delaying tactics, sabotage and the subsequent security costs. The events at Twyford led to recent changes in the law to shorten the appeal period for proposed trunk roads, the aim being to prevent opposition groups from organizing. In effect, the more traditional methods of green campaigns have been rendered even less effectual. But this is actually not a problem for the new movement which in many cases does not rely on these methods and indeed doesn't spend time on formal organizational issues. Despite the stress by many anti-roads groups that 'direct methods' will be a 'last resort', there is an increasing recognition that the constitutional methods are a waste of time and that public enquiries cannot be of use.

The decision last year to cancel (or at least postpone) the scheme to demolish Oxleas Wood, South-east London to make way for a road was due to the Twyford precedent. Another Twyford was feared when hundreds of people let it be known that they had pledged to hold hands round the bulldozers. A recent government document lists over 100 controversial road schemes, and includes some details of the nature of the opposition in particular cases, testifying to the growth in anti-roads campaigns since Twyford. For example, it states that 'Residents of Maisemore are leading ostensibly environmentalist campaign' and that 'Residents of the area north of the existing A38 are mounting a strong NIMBY campaign'.

The campaign against the M11 link road

The level of campaigning has varied across the country. But perhaps one particular struggle has stood out in the last year both in terms of the quality and quantity of the forces of opposition: the fight against the proposed M11 link road in east London.

History of the struggle

There have been plans to build a road linking the M11 with Hackney since as long ago as 1911. For a number of years, a relatively small number of locals have produced newsletters, held meetings, attempted to lobby MPs and engaged in all the other ultimately futile, methods to stop the road. However, as far as most people in the area (comprising Wanstead, Leyton and Leytonstone) are concerned, the collective campaign began in earnest in September 1993 when the developers' bulldozers first appeared. Most of the people who were sitting in front of bulldozers, occupying sites and trees and locking themselves on to JCBs with bicycle D-locks in September and October comprised experienced eco-activists who had moved to the area a few weeks previously. They included Twyford and Jesmond Dene veterans, such as Earth First!ers, the Dongas, Dragon, Rainbow and Flowerpot tribes, and individuals forming themselves into new anti-road groups, such as Reclaim the Streets and Road Alert who aimed to link up with the radical elements in Alarm UK and the traditional green campaign groups.

The fact that it was the nature-loving eco-warriors and not the urban locals who were involved at this stage was slightly paradoxical given that in these early skirmishes the issue was less 'trees' and 'green areas' but housing. The proposed link road would go through about 350 houses. The Department of Transport bought all these houses a long time ago and has been throwing people out of them for years. Once people are evicted, firms like those scumbags Squibb & Davies are brought in to make the houses uninhabitable: toilets are blocked and smashed, floorboards removed, stair cases demolished, doors and windows breezeblocked etc. to deter squatters. >From the beginning of the campaign, then, the defence and restoration of these houses as dwelling places was important. The empty houses in the area were treated not only as a general living resource to be defended, however, but also as weapons. The houses could be used not only as 'permanent' homes but also as places to crash for people coming up occasionally to join in the struggle and as bases for information and communication, meetings and coordination.

Although most local residents didn't want the road, they were not yet prepared to get directly involved in action against it. There seemed to be a feeling that, since the decision to build the road had gone ahead, and since the bulldozers had already arrived, there was nothing they could do about it. Things began to change when the developers fenced off George Green, Wanstead, to begin work in that area.

Continuing the peasants' revolt!

A short historical digression at this point. George Green used to be part of Epping Forest (could we make it part of Epping Forest again?). Now only a few trees remain, including (until December last year) a chestnut tree which was hundreds of years old. At the time of the enclosures (eighteenth century), the area was the scene of bloody battles as peasants fought to save the common land from the schemes of the money-system. George Green was said to be one of the few areas in the country where the enclosures were repelled and the land remained common.

The details of this story may be apocryphal, but it resonates with some of the events of November-December 1993. On Saturday 6th November, the peasant's revolt to reclaim the land from the designs of the money-system broke out again. And again our needs, as users of the planet, were successfully asserted over the insatiable and destructive needs of the handmaiden of the money-system - the road/car empire.

While the houses were perceived as private, and not a community natural resource, the Green was recognized by locals as a common facility; its 300 year old chestnut tree was perceived as of historical, practical and symbolic value to the local children. A children's tree-dressing ceremony organized by eco-warriors and local campaigners attracted a large number of local families who were dismayed to find that the developers had fenced off the land with nine-feet high hoardings in order to dig up the earth and cut down the tree. The first few that climbed over the fence were restrained by the security men. But then the kids started climbing in. The security men and cops didn't known what to do. And pretty soon there was nothing they could do because they were outnumbered inside the site. People then took over the site. The kids often led the way in this; for example, they demanded that the security men release those eco-warriors they were holding.

Immediately after a mechanical digger was occupied and made to leave the site, people spontaneously made practical use of this opportunity and began undoing the digger's work by carrying the earth back to the roots of the trees! The digger had made an enormous pile of earth, perhaps hundreds of tons; but people made a line and used bags to carry it all back to where it belonged.

De facto common land!

Still police and security men were doing nothing to hinder this action. Having seized the initiative, those involved quickly saw the need to act on their power and go further in reclaiming the land. So they pushed the fence down. Once the first bit went down, more people joined in. People acted fast and in unison, and eventually very little of the fence was left standing. The police intervened very late and by then most of the necessary work had been done. The 'site' had been transformed into de facto common land! Earth removal and flower planting by locals went of all over the weekend. By Monday, most of the earth had been returned. On Monday, security men were told by their bosses to get everyone off the 'site'. But this simply wasn't practicable. By dismantling the fence the boundaries of the site had been destroyed. It couldn't operate as a site any more.

To date, this event has been perhaps the high point of the campaign. Not only symbolically but also practically, it changed the shape and size of the struggle overnight. A tree-house was constantly occupied in the old chestnut tree which became a site for daily gatherings. The new people that were drawn in potentially provided the necessary numbers for further occupations of the land as well as other activities.

'Blue Tuesday'

A month after the Green was reclaimed from the developers, hundreds of people stood vigil all night after hearing rumours that an attack on the old chestnut tree was imminent. Two hundred pigs turned up at half past five in the morning and fought till the mid afternoon to remove people from in and around the tree and to prevent them from hindering the actions of the sheriff's officers, cherry-pickers and the mechanical digger which eventually felled all the trees in the area.

A lot of the locals who had gathered under the tree didn't know what to expect and were disillusioned by the action of the police. Although far bloodier crowd scenes than this have been witnessed in London in recent years, many of the locals perceived the police as 'excessively brutal'. However, this revelation about police priorities and the logic of democratic power has not necessarily translated into a greater commitment to direct and non-constitutional methods of action. Despite its lack of formal organization, the campaign is already characterized by a relatively consistent ideology (an ideology which is consistent over time rather than internally coherent, that is) which provides support for the persistence of certain practices and attitudes. Below we discuss how such ideas are perpetuated by the social situations of the struggle.

Fall of Wanstonia

The houses occupied by campaign members in Wanstead were declared 'The Autonomous Free Area of Wanstonia' in January this year. This was basically a publicity stunt. The well publicized 'fall of Wanstonia' (16 February 1994) also functioned as a publicity exercise for the campaign although it was at the same time a serious, committed and often courageous attempt to protect perfectly sound housing from the sheriff's bailiffs and 700 police who turned up to evict people. The DoT were so desperate to get on with the work that they began demolishing the houses when there were still people in and on the roofs of some of them. Since then, although activity has continued in Wanstead, the campaign's centre of operations has moved down the route of the proposed road to Leytonstone.

Composition of and relationships in the struggle

The battles in Wanstead have been just a small number of episode in a long term and continuing struggle. But the story of the initial victory and eventual (although provisional) defeat allows us to draw out a number of themes on the nature of this struggle as whole, themes which illuminate some of the dilemmas of the anti-roads movement generally.

'Locals' and 'activists'

Many of the new people who join the campaign have remained largely passive or auxiliary in their functions. Squat opening, eviction of security from houses and house restoration has attracted some local involvement (particularly in Leytonstone), but machine sabotage and demolition hindrance has been left largely to experienced eco-activists. Locals have often preferred to leave it to the 'experts'. Many of them also perceive internal difference in the campaign in terms of 'full-timers' and others. On this continuum there are at one end people who do nothing else but take part in the struggle and at the other end people who only turn up when they are not at work. Locals often admit that they have to much to lose in terms of jobs etc. and therefore won't engage in some activities that could mean injury or arrest.

But it would be easy to exaggerate the extent of this division of labour. Initiative and influence sometimes shifts in the struggle itself and the 'local' - 'eco-activist' distinction doesn't always hold up in practice. Thus, although many older residents have largely limited themselves to providing resources for the 'committed eco-warriors' (e.g. food, blankets and wood for the tree house), site occupation has been popular among local youth, who, since the first George Green struggle have been keen to act directly. The eco-warriors brought with them to this struggle a heritage of useful experience of methods, but locals of all ages were leading the fence pushing in November.

'Outsiders'

For those locals critical of the struggle the issue is one of 'outsiders' imposing themselves (and their 'hippy' lifestyles) on a respectable local community. This argument has been the main ideological weapon of the locals who want the road, including James Arbuthnot, the absentee MP (an irony he appears not to notice). Involved locals recognize that the issue isn't where people come from but what they are prepared to do; they simply want as many people as possible to help them fight the road. Eco-warriors add that one more road encourages still more cars and ruins the quality of air for everyone and adds to the global environmental crises. But perhaps the central issue is that the outcome of the events in Wanstead/Leyton/Leytonstone have consequences far beyond east London. Any kind of victory for those acting against this road here will both discourage the roads industry and encourage those involved in similar struggles in other parts of the country (just as Twyford and Oxleas Wood have inspired this struggle).

The housing issue

Twyford was about 'nature', 'science', 'history' and 'mysticism'; it was a relatively untouched green area historically associated with the Arthurian myths. A road through east London, however, presents more of a threat to human lungs and housing needs than to natural eco-systems and historic sites. A common source of outrage for many of those involved in the Wanstead struggle is the waste of what would otherwise be perfectly good houses just to build yet another road. The proposed road leads directly to Hackney, which has the highest concentration of squatters of any London borough; and all this at a time when squatting is under threat from new legislation to criminalize it. The sad irony is that, despite the current levels of homelessness, the squatting movement has been unable to contribute sufficiently to the anti-M11 struggle. The reclamation of houses has been too slow relative to the rate of their eviction and demolition, and even when houses have been restored there have sometimes not been enough people to inhabit them!

Some locals saw the tree occupation etc. important purely as a way of giving the campaign media publicity. But it was actually a very important delaying tactic, in itself a direct way of hindering the road scheme. The housing issue has therefore not been overshadowed by the struggle over the Green simply because 'green' issues were being fetishized. The focus on the tree and the Green, although symbolic of the struggle (green issue, community resource, living area etc.), remained at the level of a tactic in terms of its importance.

Non-violence

The unifying theme of non-violent direct action (NVDA) has also been an important inclusive strategy in the campaign against the M11 link road. Its prevalence in the campaign reflects both factors operating directly in the immediate situation, and the existence of pacifist ideology which has been imported from previous struggles but which is readily appropriated by people in the current situation.

Factors in the situation

We can identify two reasons, reflecting the nature of the situation in east London, that have favoured non-violence: firstly, a concern with getting others to join in, and hence with public (media) image; and secondly, the relative effectiveness of operating within the unwritten rules of civil disobedience.

Public support and media image

Campaign propaganda and activity often reflects the dilemma over whether the emphasis should be on appealing to or on shaping 'public opinion'. Those involved in the campaign in the Leytonstone and Wanstead area do not want to cater to every prejudice in an effort not to annoy and drive away the locals from the campaign - hence intra-campaign arguments for 'looking smart' in order not to alienate the middle classes have been rejected. Yet the usual 'practical' argument against violence has been that the campaign will lose 'public support' if we start punching cops etc - even in self-defence! It is argued that 'others' will be more sympathetic, and perhaps even get involved themselves, if the campaign is 'peaceful'.

It is true that the general 'peacefulness' of the eco-warriors has made them attractive to the locals, in spite of the former's 'hippy' appearance. In Wanstead, it has been one of the factors drawing in local people, many of whom are happy to commit inspiring acts of criminal damage but like to justify their action in moral terms. The principle of 'non-violence' allows these people to see their actions, and the more committed actions of the eco-warriors, as based on a 'better' principle than the law of the land and the rule of money. They recognize, in other words, that the road is about 'materialism' (big business, profits, 'government corruption') and see themselves as a force of opposition to this in a fundamental way.

However, it is not simply because the 'activists' are 'peaceful' that greater numbers of locals have been attracted and radicalized. Numbers have swelled because campaign actions have been seen to be effective in slowing down and resisting the progress of the road.

A second point in relation to non-violence as a way of encouraging 'public support' is that there are limits to this numbers game. As discussed above, not everyone is involved in the campaign to the same degree. This in itself can sometimes be a distinct advantage.

For example, actions such as site occupations benefit from people distracting security simply by hanging around; moreover, even the 'passive' supporters' actions, such as bringing food, have been vital in terms of both sustenance and morale. The numbers have maintained the campaign at a high level of daily activity; a small number would be picked off or tired out too soon by the constant action.

Nevertheless, though people involved in the campaign sometimes talk as if they want to get 'everyone' involved, it is obvious that the quality of potential supporters is at least as important as their sheer numbers. Thus, those who are likely to initiate and take part regularly in campaign activities - in the vanguard of the struggle, so to speak - are more valuable to the campaign than those 'supporters' who actually do very little beyond express opinions and listen to speeches. The more radical and committed need less to persuade them to take part, and will not be put off if campaigners sometimes get a bit 'rough' with police or security.

The point is, then, that 'public opinion', conceived as a homogeneous and largely passive perspective that needs to be appeased by careful presentation of a putatively acceptable image, may not be as important as campaigners sometimes think in determining the success of the campaign. Examples from labour disputes in recent history serve to illustrate this point. Despite its poor public (i.e. mass media) image, and the weight of 'public opinion' against them, the miners' strike of 1984-5 could have won. Conversely, despite the fact that 90% of public opinion was behind them, ambulance workers had little chance of succeeding in their dispute. Positive 'public opinion' is useless unless it translates into effective activity.

Concern with 'public opinion' inevitably leads to attempts to attract the mass media. It is of course necessary that people hear about forces of resistance; they cannot take part if they don't know about them, and sometimes publicity stunts are a part of this process. But if the media are encouraged to present positive images of the campaign because campaign activists stress their pacifist identity and their 'democratic rights' to protest etc., then where does that leave other aspects of the campaign? The price of courting the mass media in this way is the (pubic) disowning of effective but illegal tactics such as monkey-wrenching and even the popular assault on the George Green fences as an 'aberration'. To rely on appealing to the democratic prejudices of the media in order to get publicity means to risk allowing the mass media to set the agenda - to determine the shape and nature of the resistance.

In fact, campaigners may again be worrying too much about creating a positive media image. The bad local press the campaign received throughout 1993 did it little harm. Similarly, the larger-scale bad publicity endured by the anti-poll tax movement (both for the riots and the non-payment campaign) had few detrimental effects.

Effectiveness of NVDA

As was mentioned earlier, NVDA is a term than covers a variety of activities, including occupations, site invasions and attacks on property. The basic rationale behind most of these methods is to waste the developers' money and hence ultimately create a climate where it becomes politically unacceptable for the Government to bankroll them any more. It might be argued that broadly similar methods, when adopted by CND, didn't actually contribute much to government decisions not to step back from the arms race; the slowing down of the arms race was actually prompted by international political and economic developments. We will not deal with the economistic aspect of this argument here except to say that changing 'economic factors' need to understood in the light of class struggles. More to the point is the fact governments are not so free as the argument implies to pump money indefinitely into unpopular projects in order to defeat resistance. In the case of the M11 link road, the Department of Transport are apparently bankrolling the construction firm Norwest Holst up to the tune of £2 million. Actions by campaigners have already cost hundreds of thousands. The DoT may well be happy to put more money in, but such a decision would have repercussions beyond the closed doors of a Whitehall office; the money would have to come from somewhere, and the potential victims of any shift in spending priorities would obviously be resistant. Thus if people campaigning against the road continue to waste vast amounts of money through their actions, new areas of struggle could develop at the same time. The campaign of NVDA could therefore be effective beyond its own immediate focus of concern.

But if NVDA is an effective weapon against property and capital, then the forces protecting property and capital must oppose it. How effective is NVDA in dealing with these forces?

In the past, non-violent occupation of land etc. in green campaigns (anti-nuclear actions, for example) has had a certain level of effectiveness because the individuals involved were clearly middle-class types (i.e. valuable skilled mental labour-power) and therefore the cops were reluctant to lay in.

In the final battle for George Green and the chestnut tree, however, many of the people defending the tree were clearly visibly distinguishable as 'non-workers', eco-warriors or alternative types - the people that police tend to hate. Although there were also a large number of locals present, many of whom were recognizably middle-class, these people were also kicked, punched and thrown in the mud etc. Police violence seemed to be determined less by their appearance (and thus their class position) than by where people were standing or sitting.

Despite this, it is generally recognized that the police are usually less willing to get stuck in in this way to 'locals' than to those perceived as 'eco-warriors'; this has been the experience at other actions on the campaign. But because so many people involved are obviously not middle class, overall there is little material back up (i.e., valuable labour-power) to the non-violence argument. There is therefore correspondingly greater stress on the moral, psychological argument of 'shaming' the oppressors in their treatment of 'fellow human beings'.

Those involved recognize that the moral high ground is not enough. So they supplement it with other psychological weapons, such as humour - which they also use as a publicity stunt. Many humorous tactics are made up on the spot and can therefore take the police by surprise. Thus the sudden decision by many of those present on 'Blue Tuesday' to express their love for the police by hugging them was deeply disconcerting to the cops and left them confused as to their response.

It is difficult to say whether the Gandhian techniques alone actually prevented police being more violent than they could have been; quite possibly they did encourage a level of restraint. Similarly, it may well be true that the injuries sustained on 'Blue Tuesday' would have been worse had the cops not seen campaigners' cameras trained on them. Either or both of these factors may have enabled people to fight all day without numbers being depleted by serious injuries. The fighting - and thus the use of non-violence and cameras - did not, in the end, prevent the Green from being taken by the developers, but it certainly wasted a lot of their time and money.

Regarding the use of cameras, those involved reason that, since mass actions are non-violent, they can use cameras without risking arrest among their own numbers. They hope cameras will deter police and security from violence and that, when police etc. do use violence, pictures will facilitate complaints and prosecutions. This assumes not only that protesters will be non-violent but also that they won't break the law in any other way. The latter has been a mistaken assumption on a number of occasions, such as the first great fence removal.

A second potential problem relates to the point discussed above about appeasing the media with a presentation of the campaign as consonant with legality. The police argue that the campaign's regular actions against machinery and property (and in particular the mass attack on the fences in November 1993 and the attack on site property on a big day of action in January this year) give them grounds to suspect that the campaign will do similar things in the future. Therefore they have been obliged to police the campaign more proactively. Unless the campaign disowns and suppresses its vital and inspiring attacks on property, it will have difficulty arguing that the police's actions are 'unreasonable' in law. Democratic rights are part of an exchange process or equation. If you accept that you have rights within the law (in this case, the rights to protest, the rights to be moved by the police using only minimum necessary force, the rights for your trespass of a building site to be treated by police as a purely civil matter), then you must also accept your duties within that same law - i.e. the duty to respect property. The police's suspicions of the campaign are reasonable; the campaign's arguments against them are often inconsistent, though campaigners themselves don't often recognize this. Given what the campaign has done and may do again, legal arguments and video evidence of police 'crimes' may therefore count for little.

Ideological aspects of non-violence

If a strategy is shown to be effective in a particular time and place then it risks developing into a dogma that will be applied indiscriminately. The importance of non-violence was inherited from Twyford (and before that from CND among others) and is already seen by some people as a principle rather than just a tactic.

Strategy as dogma?

As a principle, the pacifist qualification of the campaign's direct action is based on notions of an ideal, good human nature or essence which transcends historical manifestations of human activity, including class differences. On this account, there is no qualitative difference between the violence the personifiers and protectors of capital use against us (in order to alienate and exploit us) and our violence against them (in order to liberate ourselves from this alienation and exploitation). On this account, our oppressors are also human beings 'just like us' and to harm them would be to 'descend to their level'. Thus, during one of the minor fence-wrecking incidents, when someone new to the campaign was heard to call the security protecting the site 'Scum' he was told not to do so because 'They are human beings like us'.

The logic of this dogma is that we might simply have to accept being assaulted, alienated and exploited if we can't stop it through non-violent methods. This grotesque Gandhian inversion of what counts as 'evil', which prefers the moral high ground of risking personal injury rather than injury to 'others', also leads to the type of situation where some of the bravest eco-warriors go to the absurd lengths of almost sacrificing themselves instead of their enemies' machines! Sometimes machines are regarded as targets 'only in the last resort'. This idealist ideology sees only individuals acting out personal consciences and not class members acting on the basis of their collective power. It confuses similarity of appearance (punching, kicking etc.) with the content and object of the action itself.

In practice, whether it is ideological or merely tactical, the NVDA/civil disobedience techniques involve an appeal to the 'humanity' of police, bailiffs and security guards. Methods such as locking yourself on to machinery and barrels of concrete, lying in front of diggers and climbing on to them involve making ourselves vulnerable and thus forcing our oppressors to acknowledge their 'humanity' and their shared commitment to democratic rights and duties (e.g. 'the right to protest as a civil liberty', the value of 'life'). Verbal arguments with these foes take the same form; instead of being treated as cops etc., there is often an attempt to ignore the real objecthood of these social categories and relate to them on a 'human' level ('what you're doing is wrong. Your children will never forgive you').

Limits to NVDA

If cops and security can be emotionally blackmailed or shamed into some kind of restraint or defeat by these tactics then we are all for them. Indeed, the methods have proved relatively effective in the campaign up till now: they have wasted a vast amount of money and engaged a lot of people.

But if non-violence is a tactical necessity at present, this does not mean that it will be so in the future. To the extent that it becomes petrified as a principle, it could become a serious problem to the resistance to the road if that movement of resistance grows and conflict becomes more likely. It has often been argued that use of violence by the campaign would 'give the cops the excuse' to trash everyone. Of course, cops don't always need 'excuses'; so long as they're physically capable, they trash you if they think you're effective, not just when you are 'violent'. They don't use violence against us simply because they are ignorant and immoral; they do it because it works. They are not dogmatic about it; they have evolved their violent methods through years of trial and error. We need to evolve our methods likewise in order to continue our effectiveness in the face of threats from the cops.

Practical protest

Before leaving this question of pacifism it is necessary to stress that in this struggle it is not usually an abstract dogma but a predicate of direct action. People didn't simply hope that if they stood around long enough shouting 'Let us in' the security and police would do so; they did it themselves by tearing the fences down. Despite a concern with legal efforts, the crucial importance of action directly to hinder the road construction process is clearly recognized. Moreover, although many of those involved criticize aggression and violence, much of the 'non-violence' is far from passive and stoical. Damaging machinery and other property doesn't usually count as 'violence', for example. And during the fierce struggle of 'Blue Tuesday', people didn't simply sit waiting to be dragged off; they pushed police lines back, and snarled, shouted and swore at police. Despite the pacifist rhetoric, they were often an impressively intimidating and aggressive force.

Input from Earth First!

Earth First! (UK) has had two main focuses of influence. The first was the American Earth First! (discussed above). The second source of influence came from various related European currents: the European anti-nuclear movement and the ALF, for example. As EF! began to form itself in Britain, different factions began to develop, reflecting the disparate influences of the new movement, over such issues of public image, use of violence, form of organization and so on. The more radical elements became disillusioned with EF!'s lack of thrust, and set up the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as an underground movement. These radical elements also saw more need to link up with other forms of class struggle and hence get away from the usual middle class type of lobbyist ghetto organization that usually characterizes environmental groups.

Earth First! is associated with the slogan 'No compromise In the defence of Mother Earth!'. There are two elements implicit in this: the deep ecologism (also reflected in the very name Earth First!) and the principle of putting action before public opinion. This would appear to endorse monkey-wrenching and violence at the expense of courting the mass media, using the law and the support of locals. Yet in conference, where these issues have been debated, Earth First! has deliberately come out with a 'policy' of having no policy on either monkey-wrenching or violence. Again this appears to reflect two things. Firstly it seems to stem from the influence of liberal-anarchist tolerance of the particular decisions made by different Earth First! groups and individuals; many of those attracted to Earth First! are, again, ex-CND, liberal anarchists, 'hippies' etc. Secondly, it stems from a shrewd recognition of the importance of not turning a strategy into a dogma that defines the movement in stone.

Relatedly, Earth First!, unlike the typical leftist group, is not concerned with claiming credit for actions or with building its public profile as an organized group. It is more concerned that the action itself should take place. It is preferred that when actions take place - such as monkey-wrenching and other acts of sabotage - those responsible are understood to be non-aligned rather than members of named groups. Breaking a sharp 'ordinary person' versus 'revolutionary' distinction in this way again makes anti-road sabotage more inclusive and gives the authorities nothing to attack but 'ordinary people'.

Despite the radical potential of many of these ideas, the Earth First!/ELF dichotomy has meant that the former is often more radical in its rhetoric than it is in practice. Hence although Earth First! is an important current at the campaign against the M11, much of its distinctive contribution (monkey-wrenching, for example) has been outweighed by pacifism and media-oriented methods. This is not simply because Earth First! members have lost arguments against other elements; rather what usually happens is that Earth First! members themselves practice and preach an ideology that is far milder and less coherent that the literature produced in the name of that group.

Forms of organization

As with other anti-road campaigns, those involved in this struggle make a fuss about the fact that 'all the legal channels have failed'; they point out that the Government and the roads lobby 'did not consult the local community' and make the other democratic arguments. Despite this apparent concern with democracy, the campaign has certainly benefited from the fact that there is little democratic organization. This seems to have little to do with explicit arguments by Earth First! and other radicals against hierarchy, bureaucracy and formality. There is simply so much to do that there is no time to waste on electing committees, tedious voting procedures and any of the other long-winded nonsense we associate with democracy. There is a skeleton of organized duties (some people commit themselves to answering phones, providing food, handing out leaflets on particular days), but basically whoever is present simply does what is necessary.

The campaign has certainly benefited from the fact that there is little democratic organization.

There are several good things about this highly informal form of organization. Firstly, it means that the nature of particular actions at particular times determines the form of the collective, rather than the reverse which would be the case with a formal cumbersome committee framework. Secondly, and relatedly, there is space for the spontaneity necessary in many actions; people are not accepting a democratically imposed and predefined discipline beyond their shared commitment to the NVDA and eco ideology. Similarly, it means that there is still room for the specialist or 'expert'. Not everyone need know that ten people plan to trash some machinery for example. Why should they? Although anyone could do this kind of thing with a hammer and something to chuck in a fuel tank, it is not necessary for them all to be there. Although there is always a danger of an ALF-type division of labour developing between active specialists and passive masses, such a split is not likely to develop here because of the stress on numbers as the bread and butter of the campaign; what makes specialist monkey-wrenching possible is the existence of a large movement of people all getting involved in different ways; with so many people involved, culprits are not easily identified. A rigid and visible hierarchy would also allow the most active to easily recognized and picked off by the authorities. Lastly, although there has been little leftist interest in the campaign up to now, even if a particular party or faction wanted to take over, the lack of formal structure would make it impossible; there is no 'committee' to be voted on to in order to determine decisions and no decision making meetings to pack. This is not to say that people do not coordinate and that they do not have mass meetings. They certainly do, but decisions are not necessarily binding, and informality prevails.

And this is not to say that the 'organization' is perfect by any means. Plans are not enacted, things don't get done and a small number of people frequently do most of the work and become tired out or resentful - or resented as a clique. There are also frequent internal complaints about lack of communication (and lack of responsibility being taken). The lack of formal coordination may have functioned effectively in Wanstead because of the closeness of the community and the fact the Green was an excellent rallying point. But in Leytonstone the lack of formal organization and communication has just allowed houses to be picked off one by one by the scumbag demolition firms.

Some of these point about intra-campaign issues organization need to extended to the current anti-roads movement(s) as a whole. The struggle in east London has been the focus of the discussion here because it is already serving to some extent as a national focus for anti-roads struggles. But this process needs to be taken further. What is needed, we suggest, is a way of bringing together anti-roads struggles across the country into some form of nationwide movement that encompasses all of them. In short, we need the kind of concrete organization or coordination that will allow the struggle over roads to be recognized not merely as a series of only coincidentally related local issues and campaigns but as an issue of national significance, an issue that involves the country (and indeed Europe and the world) as a whole. A greater degree of commonality needs to be added to the existing diversity.

Conclusions

Progress and need

In both Britain and the USA, radical greens such as Earth First! have developed from a deep green anti-humanist position to embrace a recognition that human need is involved in most of the struggles they are engaged in. But this development has been uneven. The most advanced elements in the radical green movement recognize human need as an historical essence and thus make the connection explicitly between environmental issues and the requirement to smash capitalism. Most eco-warriors recognize that technology isn't neutral; science presents itself to them as what it is - an attack on natural resources (not to mention human need) to expand surplus-value. But for many of those involved in these struggles, this well-founded anti-progressivism and anti-scientism degenerates into both mysticism and a fetishized anti-workerism that sees workers as 'dull materialists' whose interests coincide with those of industry and techno-expansion simply because they say they need their jobs.

Despite this confusion, the common rejection of modern technological progress among eco-warriors find the right targets in terms of collective action more frequently than one would expect if it was entirely ideological or arbitrary. In the nineteenth century, railways were being built all over the place; this involved cutting holes in hills, knocking down houses, scarring green areas and natural habitats etc. - all the things that road development is doing now (although of course it is worse now because so little of these natural resources remain.) And at that time the railways were crucially linked with capitalist expansion; they were cause, product and symbol of the industrial revolution, the growing real subsumption of labour under capital. Yet people involved in the struggle against the M11 typically want to see more and better railways. This is a recognition, not only of the importance of human need in such struggles, but of the fact that human needs are always historical. We are against capitalist progress since it is always at our expense. We endorse the slogan of 'Not one more road', but we do not want to see the railways eliminated in an attempt to return to some ideal past. The point is that since there are virtually no needs (beyond those for community, understanding etc.) that are not historically specific, all needs are equally real. We have now evolved a need for a certain amount of mobility - due to the fact that one effect of the developing antagonism between capital and labour has been the creation of various modes of transport - and we will use some of these technologies to meet our need.

Future needs and forms of struggle

Just as the road building programme steps up one more gear so its antithesis has grown and flourished. Those involved in the anti-roads movement claim to perceive the 'tide turning' in their favour. There has certainly been a shift in the nature of struggles over capitalism's need for transport and control - and 'public opinion' is moving with it. Now, refusal to take the presence of bulldozers as the end of a campaign has become widespread; the closing of a public enquiry is no longer seen as the end of the matter.

But we don't see anything inevitable about this. The shape of future struggles depends on the outcomes of present ones. New sites of conflict are opening up but there is still a need for a lot more people to get involved because people are often spread too thinly over existing sites. One of the reasons for this article is the fact that critique is always necessary, because present forms of struggle eventually need to be superseded in order to overcome their limitations, limitations which reflect oppositional adaptations to these present forms. We only bother to make a critique of the anti-road movement because we think the movement is valuable and effective, and we find the courage and commitment of many of those involved an inspiration. One of the strengths of the movement has been its originality in finding new points of attack.

The issue of methods and strategies is crucially important right now as the Government introduces new legislation on public order in an attempt to undermine hunt sabs, travellers, ravers, squatting and mass trespasses. The last two are particularly relevant for the battle in east London and for other road struggles. Changes in the law could see a regression back to basic reliance on constitutional methods, persuasion of authorities etc. Or such changes could see a shift to a greater militancy born out of clearer recognition of the link between roads, the state and capital. Reliance on legal arguments may fall away as the law fails to provide even the pretence of an impartial mechanism of redress; people may come to recognize the law for what it is - an instrument of class oppression which will be changed by the state whenever the forces of opposition are effective within it.

Anti-roads campaigners in actions are often confronted by arguments from their opponents in terms of people's freedom to use cars. They respond often by pointing to the way this freedom encroaches on their freedom from pollution etc. But they need to make more connections. As we have argued above, freedom to drive is the freedom of an individual consumer. This personal partial freedom in the market place is premised on enslavement as a class member in the sphere of production and in the social factory: this is the essence of the Fordist deal. What links this personal freedom with class enslavement is the freedom of money as a social and physical force at work shaping our relationships. The dominance of the car/road empire is our real subsumption by money in the social car factory as a whole.

We suggested earlier that the anti-roads campaign could have effects beyond its conscious area of concern; that it could help activate other struggles. To make and recognize these links will allow the roads campaign to coordinate with other sectors of the proletariat and hit capital more effectively. For example, the privatization and running down of the rail network is working in tandem with the Government's current roads programme. We need to find some way of bringing these sites of conflict together in order to assert our needs over those of capital.

March 1994

Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part 2

Part 1/ Part 2 / Part 3

In the second instalment of this, our radical soap-opera of theoretical controversy, we critically examine three important revolutionary currents that went beyond the objectivism of orthodox Marxism - Socialism or Barbarism, the Situationist International, and the Italian autonomist current, as well as attempts to reassert the orthodox line.

Part Two

The subject of this article is the theory that capitalism is in decline or decay. This characterisation of 'the epoch' is associated with the schema that capitalism's youth was the period of mercantile capitalism that lasted from the end of feudalism until the middle of the nineteenth century, its mature healthy period was the laissez faire liberal period in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that its entry into the period of imperialism and monopoly capitalism with its forms of socialisation and planning of production marks the start of the transitional epoch towards post capitalist society.

In Part I we looked at how this idea of the decline or decadence of capitalism has its roots in Second International Marxism and was maintained by the two claimants to the mantle of true continuers of the 'classical Marxist tradition' - Trotskyist Leninism and Left or Council communism. Both these traditions claimed to uphold proper Marxism against the reformist Marxists who had ended up defending capitalism. We suggested that a root of the practical failure of the Second International was that theoretically 'classical Marxism' had lost the revolutionary aspect of Marx's critique of political economy and had become an objectivist ideology of the productive forces. The idea of the decline of capitalism upheld by these traditions is the sharpest expression of their failure to break from objectivist Marxism. After the Second World War, while Trotskyism and Left-communism maintained their position despite the counter evidence of the greatest boom in capitalist history, a number of revolutionaries attempted to develop revolutionary theory for the new conditions, and it is to these currents that we now turn.

We will look at three groups which broke from orthodoxy - Socialism or Barbarism, the Situationist International and the Italian workerist/autonomist current. We will also consider the re-assertion of the theory of decline and the rejection of decline within objectivism.

1 The break with orthodoxy

i) Socialism or Barbarism
Socialism or Barbarism(S or B), whose principle theorist was Castoriadis (aka Cardan or Chalieu), was a small French group that broke from orthodox Trotskyism. It had a considerable influence on later revolutionaries. In Britain the Solidarity group popularised its ideas through pamphlets that still circulate as the most accessible sophisticated critique of Leninism.

Undoubtedly one of the best aspects of S or B was its focus on new forms of workers' autonomous struggle outside their official organisations and against their leaders.1 S or B, though small, both had a presence in factories and recognised proletarian struggles beyond the point of production.

Part of what allowed S or B to get down to this theorisation and participation in the real forms of workers struggles was a rejection of the reified categories of orthodox Marxism. In ]Modern Capitalism and Revolution Cardan summed up this objectivism as the view that "a society could never disappear until it had exhausted all its possibilities of economic expansion; moreover the 'development of the productive forces' would increase the 'objective contradictions' of capitalist economy. It would produce crises - and these would bring about temporary or permanent collapses of the whole system."2 Cardan rejects the idea that the laws of capital simply act upon the capitalists and workers. As he says "In this 'traditional' conception the recurrent and deepening crises of the system are determined by the 'immanent laws' of the system. Events and crises are really independent of the actions of men and classes. Men cannot modify the operation of these laws. They can only intervene to abolish the system as a whole."3 S or B took the view that capitalism had, by state spending and Keynesian demand management, resolved its tendency to crisis leaving only a softened business cycle. Cardan's attack on orthodox Marxism's adherence to a Nineteenth century crisis theory in mid-Twentieth century conditions had bite. Conditions had changed - in the post war boom capitalism was managing its crises.

But rather than take this position as undermining the objective basis for revolutionary change S or B affirmed a different way of conceiving the relation of capitalist development and class struggle. As Cardan puts it, the "real dynamic of capitalist society [is] the dynamic of the class struggle." Class struggle is taken by this to mean not just the constantly awaited date of revolution, but the day to day struggle. In this turn by S or B within their theory of capitalism to the everyday reality of class struggle and their attempt to theorise the new movements outside of official channels we see the turn from the perspective of capital to the perspective of the working class. In the mechanical theory of decline and collapse the orthodox Marxists were dominated by capital's perspective, and such a perspective affects ones politics as well. The rejection of the crisis theory was for S or B the rejection of a concomitant politics for as Cardan points out, the objectivist theory of crisis holds that workers' own experience of their position in society makes them merely suffer the contradictions of capital without an understanding them. Such an understanding can only come from a 'theoretical' knowledge of capital's economic 'laws'. Thus for the Marxist theoreticians workers:

Driven forward by their revolt against poverty, but incapable of leading themselves (since their limited experience cannot give them a privileged viewpoint of social reality as a whole) ... can only constitute an infantry at the disposal of a general staff of revolutionary generals. These specialists know (from knowledge to which the workers as such have no access) what it is precisely that does not work in modern society...4

In other words the economics involved in the theory of capitalist decadence goes hand in hand with the vanguardist 'consciousness from outside' politics of What Is To Be Done.

In the attempt to recreate a revolutionary politics S or B rightly rejected the orthodox conception that the link between objective conditions and subjective revolution was that the crisis would get worse and worse forcing the proletariat to act, with the Party (through its understanding of 'the Crisis') providing leadership. Indeed, in the absence of crisis but with the presence of struggle, the rejection of the traditional model was a help rather than a hindrance. At their best S or B turned to the real process of class struggle, a struggle that was more and more against the very form of capitalist work. As they put it:

The humanity of the wage worker is less and less threatened by an economic misery challenging his very physical existence. It is more and more attacked by the nature and conditions of modern work, by the oppression and alienation the worker undergoes in production. In this field there can be no lasting reform. Employers may raise wages by 3% per annum but they cannot reduce alienation by 3% per annum.5

Cardan attacked the view that capitalism, its crises and its decline, was driven by the contradiction of the productive forces and private appropriation. In place of this he argued that in the new phase of 'bureaucratic capitalism' the fundamental division was that between order-givers and order- takers, and the fundamental contradiction was that between the order-givers' need to deny decision-making power to the order-takers and simultaneously to rely on their participation and initiative for the system to function. In place of the notion of crises of capitalism on the economic level Cardan argued that bureaucratic capitalism was subject only to passing crises of the organisation of social life. While the notion of a universal tendency towards bureaucratic capitalism with the crucial distinction being between order-givers and takers seemed useful in identifying the continuity between Eastern and Western systems - in both situations proletarians don't control their lives and are ordered about - such a distinction fails to grasp that what makes capitalism distinct from other class societies is that the order givers have that position only because of their relation to capital, which in its various forms - money, means of production, commodity - is the self expansion of alienated labour. The tendency towards bureaucracy does not replace the laws of capitalism, particularly the fetishism of social relations, rather it expresses them at a higher level. The return of crises in the early seventies showed that what Cardan termed bureaucratic capitalism was not a once and for all transformation of capitalism that abolished economic crises but one particular form of capitalism in which crises tendencies were temporarily being controlled.

Cardan and S or B thought they had superseded Marx in identifying as the 'fundamental contradiction' of capitalism that between capital's need to "pursue its objectives by methods which constantly defeat these same objectives", namely that capitalism must take the participative power away from workers which it actually needs. In actual fact this contradiction, far from being an improvement on Marx, is but one expression of the fundamental ontological inversion Marx recognised at the root of capitalism - the process where people become objectts and their objects - commodities, money, capital - become subject. Of course capital has to rely on our participation and initiative because it has none of its own. Capital's objectivity and subjectivity is our alienated subjectivity. While the ideology that flows from capital's social relations is that we need it - we need money, we need work - the other side is that it is totally dependent on us. S or B's 'fundamental contradiction' does not grasp the full radicality of Marx's critique of alienation. In other words they presented as an innovation what was actually an impoverishment of Marx's critique. We can however understand that their theory was a reaction to a Marxism, whether Stalinist or Trotskyist, that had lost the fundamental importance of Marx's critique of alienation and become an ideology of the productive forces, a capitalist ideology.

Moreover, in not really grasping the root of what was wrong with orthodox Marxism S or B allowed some of its problems to reassert themselves within their own ideology. One could say that, in their identification of the order giver's reliance on workers control of the production process and their councilist wage labour based program,6 S or B showed the extent to which it remained stuck in the councilist perspective that some of its concrete studies of workers' resistance should have moved it away from - i.e. the perspective of the skilled technical worker. The perspective and struggles that were to bring the post-war boom to a crashing end were those of the mass worker. Whereas the radical perspective of the skilled worker, because s/he understood the whole productive process, tended towards the notion of workers control whereby the capitalist parasite could be dispensed with, the struggles of the Taylorised mass worker tended towards a rejection of the whole alienated labour process - the refusal of work.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Cardan's critique of Marx and Marxism is what it identified in Capital as the root of orthodox Marxism's sterility. What's wrong with Marx's Capital for Cardan:

is its methodology. Marx's theory of wages and its corollary the theory of the increasing rate of exploitation, begin from a postulate: that the worker is completely 'reified' (reduced to an object) by capitalism.7 Marx's theory of crises starts from a basically analogous postulate: that men and classes (in this case the capitalist class) can do nothing about the functioning of their economy. Both these postulates are false... Both are necessary for political economy to become a 'science' governed by 'laws' similar to those of genetics or astronomy...It is as objects that both workers and capitalists appear on the pages of Capital. ...Marx who discovered and ceaselessly propagated the idea of the crucial role of the class struggle in history, wrote a monumental work ('Capital') from which the class struggle is virtually absent!8

Cardan has recognised something crucial - the relative marginalisation of class struggle by the very method adopted by Marx in Capital. It is this closure of the issue of class struggle and proletarian subjectivity in Capital that is the theoretical basis of the objectivist theory of decline. Cardan's reaction is to abandon Capital. Similarly Cardan makes a central point of his attack on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall an assertion that Marx believed that the real standard of living and wages of the working class is constant over time.9 However this is not the case. Capital holds this as a provisional hypothesis - part of the provisional closure of subjectivity in Capital. Marx was always aware that what counts as the necessary means of subsistence is a point of struggle between the combatants but in Capital he holds it constant expecting to deal with it in the 'Book on Wage Labour',10 a book that was never written. Thus the value of labour power is dealt with in Capital only from the point of view of capital because here Marx was essentially concerned with showing how capitalism was possible. For capitalism to exist it must reify the worker, yet for the worker to exist and to raise the level of her needs she must struggle against this reification. In Capital Marx presented the proletariat with an account of how capitalism operated. Such an account is one part of the project of overthrowing capitalism but only a part. The problem with objectivist Marxism is that it has taken Capital as complete. Thus it takes the provisional closure as final. Cardan's criticisms grasp an important one-sidedness to Capital, and it is the failure to recognise that one-sidedness that leads to the one-sidedness of orthodox Marxism.11

However understandable in the context of the post war boom, Cardan and S or B's rejection of the theory of crisis and later of Marx was an overreaction that itself became dogmatic. Cardan and many other S or B theorists like Lyotard and Lefort became academic recuperators. While adopting Cardan's ideas gave revolutionaries an edge on the Leninists in the fifties and sixties, when crisis returned in the seventies those who continued to follow him ironically showed the same dogmatism in denying crisis in the face of its obvious reappearance as the old lefties had in insisting on it during its absence. What one might say is that although the substance of the theory of S or B was wrong, the importance of the group was not their alternative theory of capitalism nor the later ravings of Cardan but rather the way their critique of orthodox Marxism pointed the way for later revolutionaries. S or B pointed towards a rediscovery of the revolutionary spirit in Marx, which is nothing more than an openness to the real movement happening before our eyes.

ii) Situationist International
One of the most important parts of S or B's analysis was their recognition that workers were struggling against alienation in the factory and outside. The situationists developed the critique of the modern forms of alienation to a new peak, subjecting the capitalist order of things to a total critique. Rather than saying revolution depended on the capitalist crisis reducing the proletariat to absolute poverty the situationists argued that the proletariat would revolt against its materially-enriched poverty. Against the capitalist reality of alienated production and alienated consumption the situationists put forward a notion of what is beyond capitalism12 as the possibility of every individual participating fully in the continuous, conscious and deliberate transformation of every aspect and moment of our lives. The refusal of the separation of the political and the personal - rejection of the sacrificial politics of the militant and thus the critique of objectivist Marxism in a lived unity of theory and practice, objectivity and subjectivity, was one major contribution of the Situationist International(S.I.). In fact one could say that in recognising that revolution had to involve every aspect of our activity and not just the changing of the relations of production the situationists reinvented revolution, which Leninism had wrongly identified with the seizure of the state and continuation of an economically determined society.

While S or B fetishised their rejection of Marx the situationists recovered his revolutionary spirit.13 The chapter of Debord's Society of The Spectacle - 'The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation', is an acute study of the history of the workers' movement. In terms of the question of crisis and decline14 one of the most important of Debord's points is his criticism of the attempt to ground the proletarian revolution on past changes in modes of production. The discontinuity between the tasks and nature of the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions is crucial. The proletarian aim in revolution is not the wielding of the productive forces more efficiently; the proletariat abolishes their separation and thus abolishes itself as well. The end of capitalism and proletarian revolution is different to all previous changes so we cannot base our revolution on past ones. For a start there is only really one model - the bourgeois revolution - and our revolution must be different in two fundamental ways: the bourgeoisie could build up their power in the economy first, the proletariat cannot; they could use the state, the proletariat cannot.15

These points are crucial to an understanding of our task. The bourgeoisie only had to affirm itself in its revolution, the proletariat has to negate itself in its. Of course orthodox Marxists will admit there is something different about the proletarian revolution but they do not think through its implications seriously. In the notion of the decline of capitalism the analogy is made to previous systems in which the old order runs out of steam and the new one has grown ready to take over with a simple capture of political power to accompany economic power. But the only change between modes of production that corresponds to this was the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the transition from capitalism to socialism/communism must be different because it involves a complete rupture with the whole political/economic order. The state cannot be used in this process because by its nature the state is an organ to impose unity on a society riven economically while the proletarian revolution destroys those divisions.16

Part of what led orthodox Marxists to the notion of socialism as something constructed through the use of the state is their bewitchment by Marx's 'Critique of Political Economy', through which they become political economists. Now while Marx's work was not political economy but its critique it had elements that allowed this attenuation of the project. As Debord writes:

The deterministic-scientific facet in Marx's thought was precisely the gap through which the process of 'ideologization' penetrated, during his own lifetime, into the theoretical heritage left to the workers movement. The arrival of the historical subject continues to be postponed, and it is economics, the historical science par excellence, which tends increasingly to guarantee the necessity of its future negation. But what is pushed out of the field of theoretical vision in this manner is revolutionary practice, the only truth of this negation.17

What this describes is the loss of the centrality of 'critique' in the assimilation of Capital by the 'classical Marxist' tradition. In losing the importance of this fundamental aspect to Marx's project their work descends into 'Marxist political economy'. As we mentioned in relation to Cardan a theoretical root of objectivist Marxism is the taking of the methodological limitations of Capital as final limitations in how to conceive of the move beyond capitalism.

However if the problem of the objectivists was how they took Capital as the basis for a linear model of crisis and decline, a problem with the situationists was the extent to which they reacted to this misuse of the Critique of Political Economy by hardly using it at all. For the situationists the critique of political economy becomes summed up as the 'rule of the commodity'. The commodity is understood as a complex social form affecting all areas of life but its complexities are not really addressed. The complexities and mediations of the commodity form - that is the rest of Capital - are worth coming to terms with. The commodity is the unity and contradiction of use value and value. The rest of Capital is the unfolding of this contradiction at ever higher levels of concreteness. This methodological presentation is possible because the beginning is also a result. The commodity as the beginning of Capital is already the result of the capitalist mode of production as a totality, is thus impregnated with surplus value and an expression of class antagonism. In other words the commodity in a sense contains the whole of capitalism within it. More than that the commodity expresses the fact that class domination takes the form of domination by quasi-natural things. That the situationist critique could have the power it does is based on the fact that 'the commodity' does sum up the capitalist mode of production in its most immediate social form of appearance. However, particularly with regards to questions like that of crisis, the mediations of that form need to be addressed.

Instead of rejecting Capital (or ignoring it) what should be emphasised is its incompletion, that it is only one part of an overall project of 'capitalism and its overthrow', in which the self-activity of the working class has the crucial role. What the work of the situationists did, in their re-emphasis on the active role of the subject, was to pose 'the only truth of this negation'. To emphasise this, against all the scientific Marxists, the Althussarians, the Leninists etc., was right. In a fundamental sense it is always right. Orthodox Marxism, lost in political economy, had lost the real meaning of revolutionary practice. The situationists regained this crucial element in Marx by preferring the earlier writings and first chapter of Capital. The ideas of the situationists, which were a theoretical expression of the re-discovery of revolutionary subjectivity by the proletariat, inspired many in '68 and since then. They are an essential reference point for us today. But this re-assertion of the subject in theory and in practice did not defeat the enemy at that time - instead it plunged capital into crisis.

In the new period opened up by the proletarian offensive in the late sixties and seventies an understanding of the crisis - including its 'economic' dimension - would once again need to be a crucial element of proletarian theory. But the situationists had essentially adopted Socialism or Barbarism's position that capitalism had resolved its tendency towards economic crisis.18 Debord's critique of the bourgeois outlook lying behind the scientific pretensions of the upholders of crisis theory had its truth, but he was wrong to dismiss the notion of crisis completely. In The Veritable Split, Debord and Sanguinetti at least admit the return of crisis saying that "Even the old form of the simple economic crisis, which the system had succeeded in overcoming... reappears as a possibility of the near future."19

This is better than Cardan's attempt even in his '74 intro to another edition of Modern Capitalism and Revolution to deny the substantial reality of the economic crisis.20 Cardan even accepts the bourgeois belief that it is all an accident caused by the oil shock. But whilst Debord and Sanguinetti's position in admitting the return of crisis is better, we see no attempt by situationists to really come to terms with that return. As The Veritable Split opens "The Situationist International imposed itself in a moment of universal history as the thought of the collapse of a world; a collapse which has now begun before our eyes."21 In fact The Veritable Split is generally characterised by the notion that capitalism's final crisis has arrived - though that crisis is seen as a revolutionary one.

In The Veritable Split the description of the period opened up by May '68 as one of a general crisis is basically correct, however it was also inadequate. Although in the wake of May '68, the Italian Hot Autumn etc. to judge the epoch thus is perhaps forgivable what was needed was a real attempt to come to terms with the crisis. That would have required some grasp of the interaction of the rebelling subject and the 'objective' economy, and that would have required a look at the rest of Capital.

2 Return of the Objectivists

When economic crisis did return with a vengeance in the early seventies the defenders of the traditional Marxist notion that capitalism was in terminal decline seemed vindicated.22 As well as thinkers of the old left like Mandel for Trotskyism and Mattick for the council communists new figures like Cugoy, Yaffe and Kidron23 emerged to champion their version of the proper Marxist theory of crisis. The political movements connected with such analyses also experienced a growth. There was major disagreement between the theories produced, but what most shared was the perspective that the return of crisis was to be explained solely within the laws of motion of capitalism as explained by Marx in Capital.The question was which laws and which crisis tendency was to be emphasised from Marx's scattered references.

i) Mandel and Mattick
Mandel and Mattick, as the father figures, offered influential alternatives. Mattick essentially had kept Grossman's theory of collapse alive through the period of the post-war boom. That is, he offered a theory of capital mechanistically heading towards breakdown based on the rising organic composition of capital and falling rate of profit. His innovation was primarily to analyse how the Keynesian mixed economy deferred crisis through unproductive state expenditure. He argued that though such expenditure could temporarily stop the onset of a crisis this was only because of the general upswing in the economy following the war. The successful manipulation of the business cycle was seen to be dependent on an underlying general healthiness of profits in the private sector. When the underlying decline in the rate of profit had reached a critical point then the increase in demand by the state would no longer promote a return to conditions of accumulation and in fact the state's drain on the private sector would be seen as a part of the problem. His argument then, was that Keynesianism could delay but not prevent the tendency to crisis and collapse inherent to the laws of motion ofcapital. One of the main advantages of his analysis was to make the theory of crisis basic to the internal contradictions of capitalist production. Mattick thus avoided the fashionable focus on capitalism being undermined by the defeats of imperialism represented by third world revolutions. He thus does not deny the revolutionary potential of the Western working class. However their class struggle for him would be a spontaneous response to the eventual failure of Keynesianism to prevent the crisis of accumulation. The laws of capital from which crisis was seen to originate and the class struggle were totally separate. What his analysis fundamentally lacked was an analysis of how the class struggle occurred within the period of accumulation. Capitalism's crisis cannot be understood at the abstract level with which Mattick deals with it.

Mandel, the Belgian economist, offered in Late Capitalism a multicausal approach. He defines six variables, the interaction of which is supposed to explain capitalist development. Only one of these variables - the rate of exploitation - has any relation to class struggle but even here class struggle is only one among other things that determine this variable.24 The history of capital is the history of class struggle among other things! The main other thing being the nature of uneven development and thus the revolutionary role of the anti-imperialist countries. He thus describes the history of the capitalist mode of production as driven not by the central antagonism of labour and capital but that between capital and pre-capitalist economic relations. On the one hand he asserts his orthodoxy in claiming that late capitalism is just a continuation of the monopoly/imperialist epoch discerned by Lenin, but he also rehabilitates the theory of long waves of technological development which overlays the epoch of decline giving it periods of upturn and downward movement. The long waves are driven by the agency of technical innovation.

But neither in Mandel's technology driven long waves, nor the rising organic composition driven falling rate of profit thesis, is there is recognition of the extent to which technological innovation is a response to class struggle. Technological determinism of one form or other lies behind objectivist Marxism, which is why the autonomist critique of the objectivist view of technology is so important.25 It is necessary to relate capitalist accumulation and its crises to the class struggle. The Keynesian/Fordist period had been one in which working class struggle had been expressed largely in steadily rising wages, where the unions as representations of the working class had directed struggle against the tyranny of the labour process into wage claims. By winning steady increases in wages the workers forced capital to increase productivity by intensifying the conditions of work and making ever more labour saving investments, which in turn allowed it to continue to grant the workers rising real wages. In this sense, as we shall see the autonomists argued, working class struggle for a period had become a functional moment in the circuit of capital: a motor of accumulation. But before looking at such analysis it is worth noting that some thinkers in the objectivist camp did break from the decline problematic and attempt a more sophisticated analysis of the post-war period. The Regulation Approach(RA) was open to new ideas like the autonomist analysis of Fordism. However another major influence was structuralism and this kept the RA within the boundaries of objectivism.

ii) The Regulation approach
The RA is significant because it attempted to develop theory in relation to the concrete reality of modern capitalism. RA figures such as Aglietta and Lipietz broke from the orthodox positions on the periods of capitalism and on what capitalist crisis represented. The orthodox periodisation of capitalism was that it grew with mercantile capital, becomes mature with competitive laissez faire, and then declines and prepares the conditionsfor socialism in the period of monopoly and imperialism. The orthodox position on crisis was that in healthy capitalism it was part of a healthy business cycle while in 'the epoch of wars and revolution' it is the evidence of its underlying decline and always quite possibly the terminal breakdown crisis of the system as a whole. In terms of periodisation the RA introduced the notion of 'regimes of accumulation'. That is that the stages of capitalist development are characterised by interdependent institutional structures and patterns of social norms. In terms of crisis the RA suggested that prolonged crisis could represent the structural crises of the institutions of regulation and social norms connected with the regime.

So for example they reinterpreted the division between laissez faire and monopoly capitalism as the move from the 'regime of extensive accumulation and competitive regulation' that had existed before the First World War to a regime of intensive accumulation and monopolistic regulation after the Second World War, with the period in between a period of the crisis of one regime and transition to the next. The problem for the orthodox Marxists had been to fit the post-war period into their notion of the 'transitional epoch'. They might do so by calling it a new stage of 'state monopoly capitalism', but their problem was that monopoly should represent the end of capitalism rather than its growth. The RA said that far from being a period of decline the post war period saw the consolidation of a regime of intensive accumulation. This period they saw as characterised by Fordist production methods and mass consumption, the incorporation of consumer goods as a major part of capitalist accumulation, and at the international level American hegemony. At its core the regime is seen as founded on the linkage of rising living standards and rising productivity. In the light of the RA the '70s are then a new period of structural crisis, but this time of the regime of intensive accumulation. Like Negri and the autonomists the RA sees one part of the crisis as the delinkage of wage increases and productivity and the undermining of the social consensus. The breakdown of productivity increases brings out the fiscal crisis of the state as it remains committed to accumulative increases in public spending while the economic base - real sustained growth - for such a commitment is undermined. At the international level there is also the breakdown of favourable conditions of world trade as American hegemony is undermined. The point in relation to the decline thesis is that the crisis is not a death agony but a severe structural crisis out of which capital could come if it re-establishes a regime of accumulation.

The RA's break with the rigid schema of orthodoxy appears a much more sophisticated and less dogmatic Marxist analysis. However there is no reversal of perspective to see the process from the point of the working class. The RA stays firmly within capital-logic simply layering a mass of complications on to the analysis. So although it might rightly see the crisis as an overall crisis of the social order, the fact that it sees capital not as a battle of subjects but as a process without a subject means that it falls into functionalism. It is assumed that the current restructuring of capitalism will successfully lead to the establishment of a new regime of flexible accumulation - post or neo-Fordism is deemed to be inevitable. Such ideas amount to a new form of technological determinism26 which, because it asserts the inevitable continuity of capitalism rather than its collapse, is attractive to reformist leftists rather than revolutionaries. So although we might be able to use some of their ideas, the RA is like its structuralist father essentially based on capital logic. Taking the point of view of capital is always going to be a tendency of the academic thinker paid by the state.27

Objectivist Marxism does partly grasp the reality of capitalism but only from one pole - that of capital. The categories of Capital which are based on the reifying of social relations in capitalism are accepted by this Marxism as a given rather than a contested reality. The subsumption of working class labour is taken as final where it is something that must be repeatedly made. The working class is accepted as a cog in the development of capital which develops by its own laws. Tendencies such as rising organic composition is taken as a technical law intrinsic to capital's essence while it and its counter tendencies are actually areas of contestation. It is necessary to come at the process from the other pole - that of the struggle against reification, which is what groups like Socialism or Barbarism and the situationists did. Their move away from crisis theory was understandable and a necessary part of rediscovering revolutionary practice in the post war boom. However when crisis resurfaced it was the objectivists who seemed to have the tools to grasp it. Yet they failed to come out with an adequate political direction from their theory. The idea was simply that they understood the crisis so people should flock to their banner. However in Italy there emerged a current whose rejection of objectivism included a a new way of relating to crisis.

3 The workerist/autonomist current

A strong tendency in the Italian New Left is represented by the 'workerist'28 theoreticians of the '60s such as Panzieri and Tronti and the autonomists of the late '60s and '70s in which Negri and Bologna come to prominence. They attacked the reified categories of objectivist Marxism. Attacking the objectivism of orthodox Marxism also brought into question the crisis-decline problematic that was so dominant. Part of the strength of this current was that rather than simply assert Marx against a straightforwardly reformist labour movement it had to deal with theoretically sophisticated and prestigious Marxism of the hegemonic Italian Communist Party. The PCI in its transition from Stalinism to Eurostalinism had shifted from contemplation of capitalism's general crisis to support for its continuing development. The workerists recognised that both positions shared a contemplative position on the capitalist economy and that what was needed was a reversal of perspective to look at capitalism from the point of view of the working class.

Raniero Panzieri, one of the initiators of the current contributing two fundamental critiques of orthodox Marxism. He attacked the false opposition of planning and capitalism; and the idea of the neutrality of technology contained in the ideology of the productive forces.

i) The false opposition of planning and capitalism
Panzieri argued that planning is not the opposite of capitalism. Capitalism, as Marx noted, is based on despotic planning at the point of production. Capitalism transcended previous modes of production by appropriating co-operation in the productive process. This is experienced by the worker as control of her activity by another. In nineteenth century capitalism this despotic planning contrasts with anarchic competition at the social level. Panzieri argued that the problem with orthodox Marxism and its theory of decline is that it takes this period of laissez faire capitalism as the true model, change from which must represent the decline of capitalism or transition to socialism. The conception Panzieri and later Tronti developed was that mid-twentieth century capitalism had to a certain extent transcended the opposition of planning versus market, becoming a more advanced capitalism characterised by the attainment of the domination of society by Social Capital; the progressive formation of a Social Factory. At the social level capitalist society is not just anarchy but is social capital - the orientation of all areas of life to the imposition of the capitalist relation of work.

With this the central contradiction on which orthodox Marxism based its theory of decline is undermined. There is no fundamental contradiction between capitalist socialisation of production and capitalistappropriation of the product. The 'anarchy of the market' is one part of the way capital organises society but capitalist planning is another. These two forms of capitalist control are not in deadly contradiction but in a dialectical interaction:

with generalised planning capital extends the fundamental mystified form of the law of surplus value from the factory to the entire society, all traces of the capitalist process' origins and roots now seem to really disappear. Industry re-integrates in itself financial capital, and then projects to the social level the form specifically assumed by the extortion of surplus value. Bourgeois science calls this projection the neutral development of the productive forces, rationality, planning.29

The planning we see in capitalism is not transitional. With the identification of socialism and planning, socialism from being the negation of capitalism becomes one of its tendencies. What emerged from the development of monopoly/finance capital was not the basis for a non-capitalist mode of production but for a more socially integrated form of capitalism.30 Capital overcame some of the difficulties of its earlier phase but its process of doing so was interpreted as its final stage.

ii) The critique of technology
Related to Panzieri's deconstruction of the planning/anarchy of market dichotomy was his perhaps even more path-breaking critique of technology. Capitalism's despotic planning operates through technology. Essentially Panzieri argued that in capitalism technology and power are interwoven in such a way that one must abandon the orthodox Marxist notion of the neutrality of technology. Once again what is being critiqued here is the reified nature of the terms in the orthodox conception of the productive forces rattling against the chains of their capitalist fetters.

There exists no 'objective', occult factor inherent in the characteristics of technological development or planning in the capitalist society of today, which can guarantee the 'automatic' transformation or 'necessary' overthrow of existing relations. The new 'technical bases' progressively attained in production provide capitalism with new possibilities for the consolidation of its power. This does not mean, of course, that the possibilities for overthrowing the system do not increase at the same time. But these possibilities coincide with the wholly subversive character which working-class 'insubordination' tends to assume in face of the increasingly independent 'objective framework' of the capitalist mechanism.31

This exemplifies the change the 'workerist' perspective represented - the turn from some 'occult' movement of the productive forces considered technically to the greatest productive force - the revolutionary class. Panzieri was responding to a new combativity of the working class, its coming together to pose a threat to capital but "This class level" as he puts it "expresses itself not as progress, but as rupture; not as 'revelation' of the occult rationality in the modern productive process, but as the construction of a radically new rationality counterposed to the rationality practised by capitalism."32

While the mainstream Marxists, whether ostensibly revolutionary or reformist, were and are stuck in a reformist attitude towards capitalist technology, i.e. the expressed wish of organising it by means of the plan more efficiently and more rationally, Panzieri had seen the extent to which the working class were the much better dialecticians who recognised "the unity of the 'technical' and 'despotic' moments of the present organisation of production."33 Machine production and other forms of capitalist technology are a historically specific product of class struggle. To see them as 'technically' neutral is to side with capitalism. That this view has dominated orthodox Marxism makes it no wonder that some now wish to reject the historical critique of capitalism in favour of an anti-technology perspective. The problem with substituting the simple negati on of 'civilisation' for the determinate negation [Aufhebung] of capitalism is not just that some of us want to have washing machines, but that it prevents one connecting with the real movement.

The critique of technology combined with the reversal of perspective allowed the workerists to reclaim the critique of political economy as a revolutionary tool by the proletariat. As we have seen, a crucial part of most theories of crisis and decline is the tendency for the rate of profit to fall due to the rising organic composition of capital brought about by capital's replacement of labour (the source of value) by machines. The Italians took an overlooked statement by Marx "It would be possible to write a history of all the inventions introduced by capital since 1830 just to give them weapons against the revolts of the working class"34 and developed it into a theory that made capital's technological development a response to and interaction with working class struggle, the capitalist labour process becoming a terrain of constantly repeated class struggle. By founding capitalist development on working-class struggle the workerists made sense of Marx's note that the greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself.

When we see the constant increase in organic composition as a product of working class struggle and human creativity, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall starts to lose its objectivist bias. Capital's turn from an absolute surplus value strategy to a relative surplus value strategy35 was forced on it by the working class and has resulted in capital and the working class being locked in a battle over productivity. The categories of the organic and technical composition of capital become de-reified in this workerist theory and linked with the notion of class composition, that is with the forms of class subjectivity and struggle accompanying the 'objective' composition of capital. Using this notion the theorists of workers' autonomy developed the critique of earlier forms of organisation, such as the vanguard party, as reflecting a previous class composition and theorised the new forms of struggle and organisation of the mass worker. This puts a whole new light on the decline of capitalism / transition to communism question:

The so-called inevitability of the transition to socialism is not on the plane of the material conflict; rather precisely upon the basis of the economic development of capitalism - it is related to the 'intolerability' of the social rift and can manifest itself only as the acquisition of political consciousness. But for this very reason, working-class overthrow of the system is a negation of the entire organisation in which capitalist development is expressed - and first and foremost of technology as it is linked to productivity.36

We see then that the first wave of Italian workerism in the '60s rejected of the view that the period of laissez faire marked the proper existence of capitalism and that what has happened since is its decline or decay in favour of an analysis of the concrete features of contemporary capitalism. This allowed them to see the tendency towards state planning as expressing the tendencies of capitalism to the full: Social Capital. They also broke from orthodox Marxism in their reversal of perspective to see the working-class as the motive force of capital, backed up by militant research on the struggles of the mass worker.

iii) The class struggle theory of crisis
There are similarities with Socialism or Barbarism's analysis but the autonomists' positions, based as they were on a reinterpretation of the tools offered by Marx's critique of political economy rather than a rejection of them, were better able to respond to the crisis that opened up in the '70s. In fact the crisis of the seventies could be said to show the accuracy of Tronti's 1964 suggestion that it was possible that "The first demands made by proletarians in their own right, the moment that they cannot be absorbed by the capitalist, function objectively as forms of refusal that put the system in jeopardy.. simple political blockage in the mechanism of objective laws."37 Capitalism's peaceful progress was shattered in the late '60s and the Italian workerists theory went furthest in understanding this, just as the Italian workers' practice during the '70s went furthest in attacking the capital relation.

As we saw with Mattick the orthodox Marxist response to Keynesianism was to argue that it could not really alter the laws of motion of capital and that it could only delay the crisis. At one level this is correct but the problem is that the economy is seen as a machine rather than the reifed appearance of antagonistic social relations. The autonomist advance expressed in such works as two essays by Negri in '6838 was to grasp Keynesianism as a response to the 1917 working class offensive, an attempt to turn working class antagonism to the benefit of capital. Keynes was a strategic thinker for capital and Keynesianism by channelling working class struggle into wage increases paid for by rising productivity was essentially not just demand management of the economy but the state management of the working class, a management that becomes increasingly violent as the working class refuses it. The precarious balance that it represented was flung into crisis by the working class offensive of the late '60s and '70s which ruptured the productivity deals upon which the accumulation was premised. The whole post-war Keynesian/Fordist period was seen in the autonomist analysis as the period of the planner state that had now been flung into crisis and was being replaced by the active use of crisis by the state to maintain control.

The class struggle theory of crisis is a necessary corrective to the objectivists' views. The fundamental point in autonomist Marxism was to turn capitalist crisis from the fatalistic outcome of objective laws standing above the working class into the objective expression of class struggle. The notion of an epoch of decline or decadence is effectively bypassed by this theory of the concrete struggles of the class. The history of capitalism is not the objective unfolding of capital's laws but a dialectic of political composition and recomposition. The serious world crisis that opened in the '70s is thus seen as the result of the struggles of the Fordist mass worker. That subject, which had itself been created by capital's attack on the post first world war class composition that had almost destroyed it, had politically recomposed itself into a threat to capital. The crisis of capital is the crisis of the social relation.

During the '70s the autonomists produced the most developed theorisation of the refusal of work and a critique of the catastrophist theory of the crisis in favour of a dynamic theory of capitalist crisis and proletarian subjectivity. The autonomists developed a class struggle theory of the crisis exemplified in the slogan 'The Crisis of the Bosses is a Victory of the Workers'. This puts them in sharp variance with the orthodox Marxist explanation of crisis39 in terms of internal contradictions of capital with the general crisis caused by its decline brought on by its fettering of the productive forces by the relations of production. The notion that capital fetters the productive forces, though in a sense true, forgets that at times of strength the working class fetters the productive forces understood in capitalist terms - the working class fetters the development of the productive forces because their development is against its interests, its needs. The significance of the resistance of the proletariat to capitalist work must not be missed in a socialist dream of work for all. As Negri puts it, "Liberation of the productive forces: certainly, but as the dynamic of a process which leads to abolition, to negation in the most total form. Turning from the liberation-from-work toward the going-beyond-work forms the centre, the heart of the definition of communism."40

Autonomist theory was in some ways an optimistic projection forward of tendencies in the existing struggle. This worked fine when the class struggle was going forward and thus when revolutionary tendencies became realised in further actions. So for example Tronti developed the notion of a new kind of crisis set off by workers' refusal because he saw it prefigured in the battle of Piazza Fontana (events in 1962 when striking FIAT workers attacked the unions with great violence). The Italian Hot Autumn in 1969 when workers would often go on strike immediately after they came back to work from a previous strike showed the validity of this projection. However such theoretical projection, which the situationists also made in seeing the emergence of wildcat strikes in England in particular as a sign of things to come,41 became inadequate when in capital's counter offensive against this refusal the tendencies that were to be later realised were that of a re-imposition of work. Autonomist theorists tried to grasp this with notions like that of the shift from the planner to the crisis state.

The class struggle theory of crisis lost its way somewhat in the '80s, for while in the seventies the breaking of capital's objective laws was plain, with capital's partial success the emergent subject was knocked back. It appears that during the '80s we have seen the objective laws of capital given free reign to run amok through our lives. A theory which connected the manifestations of crisis to the concrete behaviours of the class found little offensive struggle to connect to and yet crisis remained. The theory had become less appropriate to the conditions. Negri's tendency to extreme optimism and overstatement of tendencies as realities, while not too bad in a time of proletarian subversion, increasing became a real problem in his theorising, allowing him to slip in his own decline thesis. Out of the relation to the revolutionary movement Negri's writings suffer massively. In writings like Communists Like Us and his contribution to Open Marxism we even see in a new subjectivist guise the theory of a decline of capital/emergence of communism behind our back.42

All in all the autonomists are a necessary move but not a complete one, they expressed the movement of their time but, in Negri's case anyway become weak in isolation from it. We might say that just as '68 showed the limitations as well as validity of situationists ideas the period of crisis and revolutionary activity in Italy in the decade '69-'79 showed the validity and limitation of the workerist and autonomists theory. This does not mean we need to go back to the objectivists but forward. Autonomist theory in general and the class struggle theory of crisis in particular did essential work on the critique of the reified categories of objectivist Marxism. It allows us to see them "as modes of existence of class struggle".43 If at times they overstate this, failing to see the real extent to which the categories do have an objective life as aspects of capital, it remains necessary to maintain the importance of the inversion. We need a way of conceiving the relation of objectivity and subjectivity that is neither the mechanics of the objectivists nor the reactive assertion that its 'all class struggle'.

S or B, the situationists, and the autonomists all, in different ways, made important contributions to recovering the revolutionary core of Marx's critique of political economy. They did this by breaking from the catastrophist theory of decline and breakdown. But the revolutionary wave they were part of has receded. The post-war boom is now a fading memory. Compared to the era in which these revolutionary currents developed their theories the capitalist reality we face today is far more uncertain. Capitalism's tendency to crisis is even more evident, yet class struggle is at a low ebb. In the third and final part of this article we shall look at more recent attempts to solve the problem of understanding the world we live in, such as that of the Radical Chains group, and put forward our own contribution to its solution.

• 1. The Johnson-Forest tendency in America were developing a similar bottom up and non-workerist approach.
• 2. Modern Capitalism and Revolution, p. 85.
• 3. Ibid., p. 48.
• 4. Ibid., p. 44.
• 5. Redefining Revolution, p. 17.
• 6. See Workers' Councils and the Economics of Self-Management.
• 7. Paradoxically, though this reification is a central part of Cardan's critique of Marx, he himself suggests another problem with Marx is his use of the category of reification when instead modem capitalism should be understood by its 'drive to bureaucratic-hierarchical organisation.' Revolution Redefined, p. 6.
• 8. Modern Capitalism and Revolution, p. 43.
• 9. See the Appendix to Modern Capitalism and Revolution. Part of the rest of this appendix is an argument for a return to Adam Smith's definition of capital.
• 10. As he writes to Engels 2/4/1858, "Throughout this section [capital in general] wages are invariably assumed to be at their minimum. Movements in wages themselves and the rise or fall of that minimum will he considered under wage labour."
• 11. For more on this crucial point about how to read Marx, see F.C. ShortalI, The Incomplete Marx (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994).
• 12. They declined to use the word communism because of its associations. To which one would have to say their alternative of universal self-management has not escaped its own negative connotations.
• 13. "Are you Marxists? - Just as much as Marx was when he said 'I am not a Marxist."' Situationist International Anthology.
• 14. The situationists at times expressed the idea of a general crisis of capitalism, of its reaching of an impasse. At times they expressed the view that modem capitalism was in decline or decomposition. However they did not see this proceeding through an objective logic of the economy, seeing it rather as arising from the subjective refusal of the proletariat to go on as before. To an extent they did ground this on the contradiction of productive forces and relations, but only to the extent that the gap between how capitalism developed them, and what their possible use by the proletariat as it abolished itself could be, had reached an extreme level visible to the subject. This perspective is crucial but it should not be confused with the theory of decline as classically understood where there is a linear evolutionary logic in which it is the productive forces which push to be liberated. The gap between what is possible and what actually exists can only be crossed by a leap.
• 15. "...the bourgeois revolution is over; the proletarian revolution is a project born on the foundation of the preceding revolution but differing fiom it qualitatively. By neglecting the originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie' one masks the concrete originality of the proletarian project, which can attain nothing unless it caries its own banners and It knows the "immensity of its tasks." The bourgeoisie came to power because it is the class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot itself come to power except by becoming the class of consciousness. The growth of productive forces cannot guarantee such power, even by way of the increasing dispossession which it brings about. A Jacobin seizure of power cannot be its instrument. No ideology can help the proletariat disguise its partial goals - general goals, because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial reality which is really its own." The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 88.
• 16. This is not to say the proletariat does not use force to realiae its goals and prevent a return to capitalism, just that its force is qualitatively different to state force, which can only be the power of the separate.
• 17. The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 84.
• 18. See The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 82.
• 19. Debord and Sanguinetti (1972) The Veritable Split, Thesis 14, (London: Chronos Publications, 1990).
• 20. Modern Capitalism and Revolution, pp. 10-11.
• 21. The Veritable Split, Thesis 1.
• 22. The ICC even try to explain '68 in terms of the objective crisis beforehand. Despite the overwhelming market lead of the falling rate of profit theory of crisis they continue to push a Luxemburgist thesis. Such brand loyalty really should be applauded.
• 23. Yaffe and Kidron were both in the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP) which attempted to distinguish itself with its theory of the Permanent Arms Economy. This essentially tried to account for the whole post-war boom in terms of one factor - arms spending. Behind the innovation of giving arms spending a stabilising role, the theory was essentially orthodox Marxist economics. In the version put forward by Cliff the orthodoxy was underconsumptionism. Military expenditure was given an ability (initially very temporary then as the catastrophe failed to arrive more long lasting) to ofliet an inevitable crisis of overproduction of capital versus the limited consumption power of the masses. When within Marxist economics there was a shift - the falling rate of profit increasingly took the foreground and underconsumptionism was seen as too crude - Kidron put forward a new version which changed what it was that military spending was meant to mitigate. Rather than unproductive arms spending delaying the point when production of capital outstrips the possibilities for its consumption, that spending was to be seen as a counter-tendency to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

  The essential point is the theory kept within the assumptions of objectivist Marxist economics. To the extent that it broke from Lenin's analysis of imperialism it was not because of the fact that Lenin gave no place to working class struggle in his analysis. No, for the International Socialists imperialism was just to be the 'last stage but one - another objectivist capital-logic stage. The permanent arms economy was to be the final stage and it, like Lenin's Imperialism, is explained purely in terms of capital. Even in its more developed form the theory was a bit of a hotch potch that had younger guns in the I.S. like Yaffe, who was better versed in the Marxist classics, demanding a return to a fundarnentalist falling rate of profit-based theory and leaving to form the RCG in order to develop one. Since then Chris Harman has fleshed out the theory, rounded off a few of its rough edges, and even used Grossman and other decline theorists to back it up. By the seventies anyway the SWP had returned to the fold by agreeing that arms spending could no longer mitigate the tendency towards crisis.

• 24. Late Capitalism, p. 40. Interestingly Mattick, who one would have to side with politically against Mandel, argues that Late Capitalism gives too much weight to the class struggle. Mattick introduced Grossman's falling rate of profit based breakdown theory to a new audience. That we find the non-Leninist arguing against the significance of class struggle shows that the problem of objectivism cuts across the Leninist/anti-Leninist divide. In actual fact in Britain the Mattick/Grossman thesis on the nature of the crisis was taken up by a firm Leninist David Yaffe. For Yaffe the class struggle had been absent during the post war boom but the economic detetminants had apparently been progressing in its absence.
• 25. See following section.
• 26. The attack on the functionalism and determinism of the RA is ably made in Post Fordism and Social Form (edited by Bonefeld and Holloway) and reviewed in Aufheben 2 (Summer 1993).
• 27. On the other hand the analysis of the autonomists never lost the point of view of the working class. The point is that though some of the Italian theorists were academics they were also part of a revolutionary current. They might be 'thinkers sponsored by the state' but when half of them get arrested and banged up for years it becomes reasonable to believe that their ideas were contradictory to their position.
• 28. Italian 'workerism' refers not as with the Anglo-Saxon use of the term to the idea that only shop-floor struggle is meaningful, but to the attempt to theorize capitalism from the working class's perspective.
• 29. 'Surplus Value and Planning' in The Labour Process and Class Strategies, CSE Pamphlet No.1, p. 21.
• 30. While some of those influenced by Bordiga became the archetypal dogmatic proponents of the theory of decadence others developed some of his ideas in an interesting direction with parallels to the workerists. Invariance (Jacques Camatte et al.) theorised that the increasing socialization of production expressed not the decline of capital but the shift from capital's formal subsumption of the labour process to its real subsumption i.e. the shift from capitalist supervision of a labour process dependent on workers' skills and understanding, to complete capitalist domination of the whole process. Furthermore they saw a shift from capital's formal domination of society to its real domination. However we might say that their attention to the autonomy of capital insufficiently recognised that this process is constantly contested; this led them to see revolution as a catastrophist explosion of repressed subjectivity.
• 31. R. Panzieri, 'The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the 'Objectivists'' in P Slater ed., Outlines of a Critique of Technology (Ink Links, 1980), p. 49.
• 32. lbid., p. 54.
• 33. Ibid., p. 57.
• 34. Capital, vol. 1, p. 563.
• 35. I.e. From a strategy of increasing exploitation through lengthening the working day to one of increasing productivity, thereby lengthening the section of the existing working day during which the worker produces surplus-value.
• 36. 'The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the 'Objectivists'' in Outlines of a Critique of Technology, op. cit., p. 60.
• 37. Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (Red Notes and CSE Books), p. 17.
• 38. 'Keynes and Capitalist Theories of the State Post 1929' and 'Marx on Cycle and Crisis', both in Revolution Retrieved (London: Red Notes, 1988)
• 39. In fact your orthodox Marxist militant will think it wrong to suggest that crisis could possibly be the work of the working-class. "No, no, no" s/he'll say "that's a right wing argument; crisis is the fault of capital; the working class - bless his cloth cap - is free of any involvement in it - the crisis shows the irrationality of capitalism and the need for socialism". But this was precisely what the autonomists attacked - socialism seen as the resolution of capital's crisis tendency.
• 40. Marx Beyond Marx, (London: Autonomedia/Pluto, 1991), p. 160.
• 41. Not to mention Marx and the Silesian miners.
• 42. For example on p. 88 of Open Marxism II: "new technical conditions of proletarian independence are determined within the material passages of development and therefore, for the first time, there is the possibility of a rupture in the restructuration which is not recuperable and which is independent of the maturation of class consciousness." He seems to think that this possibility is linked in with the immaterial labour of computer programrners! It seems that many radical thinkers show a tendency to lose clarity in their old age or, more accurately, when the movement to which they are connecting falls back. Perhaps it is a question of using Negri against Negri as we (must sometimes?) use Marx against Marx, and perhaps also we should see decadence theory as a slippage made by revolutionaries when the movement they are part of recedes (post 1848, post 1917 post 1977). When the movement of class struggle that one could connect to seems to lose its power there is a temptation to give power to capital's side - a temptation that should be resisted.
• 43. See R. Gunn (1989) 'Marxism and Philosophy', Capital & Class, 37.

Review: Midnight Oil

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Introduction

Midnight Oil is a collection of articles produced by the Zerowork (1974-79) and Midnight Notes (1979-) collectives, having as its focus a thorough analysis of the recent Gulf war. There are a number of reasons why the publication of this book should be welcomed. For a start the making available of texts from the autonomist tradition, which have previously been available to few people, can only have a positive impact on revolutionaries in this country who, with notable exceptions, have tended either to regurgitate orthodoxy or dismiss theory as academic contemplation. It is also reassuring to find that despite the setbacks experienced by the US working class over the last couple of decades some US theorists are still capable of attempting to analyse contemporary events - not everyone has responded to these defeats by seeking to conjure the future out of some mythical past like Zerzan or Perlman.

Coming after the Gulf-War Midnight Oil provides a pertinent counter-point to the orthodox Marxist theories which reduced the war to merely an inter-imperialist conflict. However, whilst we are sympathetic to aspects of Midnight Notes'/autonomist analysis, and appreciate it as a weapon against orthodox Leninist conceptions, we can not remain entirely uncritical. Indeed, while at first sight the broad sweep of analysis in Midnight Oil is impressive, on closer inspection we find that it has fundamental weaknesses. A hint of such problems become apparent if we remember Midnight Notes's predictions before the Gulf War in the pamphlet When Crusaders and Assassins Unite. This pamphlet, published in November 1990, in an attempt to provide a class analysis for the US anti-war movement, argued that there would be no war as there were no fundamental disagreements between US and Iraqi capital as both wanted higher oil prices :

These differences over oil pricing control and debt policy can be mediated, though this mediation process might very well include the use of marginal military force. However, U.S. Crusaders are not in the Arabian Peninsula to fight a large-scale, conventional shooting war with the Iraqi Assassins, as frequently envisioned. For U.S. troops are not in the Arabian Peninsula to fight the soldiers of a government that plays the game of collective capital. A game that the Saddam Hussein regime has shown itself perfectly willing and able to play. The U.S. invasion of the Persian Gulf, therefore, is not like the war in Vietnam where the U.S. military was sent to crush a directly anti-capitalist, revolutionary armed movement. It is more like the post-W.W.II U.S. occupation of Western Europe, whose main function was not to fight a Soviet invasion, but rather to repress the rise of any revolutionary forces within Western Europe itself.

Midnight Notes, and No War But The Class War (NWBTCW) in Britain, attempted to move beyond Leninist analyses of the war to emphasise the class war, but we have to recognise their limitations if we are to move beyond them. Perhaps unsurprisingly 'When Crusaders and Assassins Unite' and its predictions go unmentioned in Midnight Oil. However what is important for us is not so much that Midnight Notes got it wrong but why they got it wrong. When we test their analysis against the litmus of the Gulf War the loose ends of their theory rapidly unravel. It is not merely that Midnight Oil is inconsistent, as is only to be expected from a collective project developing over 20 years, rather it is that we find its underlying theory incoherent.

Leninism and the theory of imperialism

To understand the significance of Midnight Oil we have to put it into the context of its opposition to the dominant Marxist explanations for the Gulf War. In Britain the anti-war movement was dominated by the left-liberal pacifism of CND which advocated sanctions to starve the Iraqi's into submission instead of bombing them into the middle ages. The immediate response of the 'revolutionary left' was simply to 'trot out' the old anti-imperialism position of 'supporting the weaker country against imperialist aggression' which refuses any real class analysis of the war. However, in the case of Iraq the sheer absurdity of this position became apparent. How could so called revolutionaries back a fascist dictatorship with a proven record of butchering its own working class? In the case of the SWP their knee jerk reaction of backing Iraq was soon dropped as opportunism led them to change their line and tail-end the peace movement in the hope of picking up new recruits whilst the RCP maintained an unrelenting support for the Iraqi state. In both cases a rigid adherence to the discredited Leninist theory of imperialism led these groups to fail to grasp the initiative from left-liberalism/pacifism in the anti-war movement.

Lenin's Theory of imperialism

The Leninist theory of imperialism owes its origins to Lenin's Imperialism. Lenin's Imperialism was based on Bukharin's work which in turn had developed out of the orthodox theory of the Second International, as exemplified by Hilferding's Finance Capital. It argued that since the 1870's the world had seen the concentration and centralization of production into huge monopolies and cartels that dominated national markets. This had brought about a new era of monopoly capitalism which, for Lenin at least, was the last stage of capitalism. In monopoly capitalism the huge monopolies tended to merge with banking capital and because of the national importance of these huge capitals they became increasingly regulated and protected by the state. Since these huge capitals, organised in cartels, dominated the market they could plan production and set prices. No longer was there an anarchy of the market. The preconditions for a centralized and planned socialist economy were all but there. All that was needed was for the working class to take power and nationalize the big monopolies and banks!!

But to make monopoly profits the big monopolies restricted domestic production to push domestic prices up. Restricted production limited investment which meant that there was both a tendency for surplus-production and surplus-capital to be invested abroad. This meant a drive for foreign markets and imperialism under the protection of the state, but this brought each imperialist power into conflict with others as its rivals. The orthodox/centrist Kautsky thought that this imperialist conflict would ultimately be resolved peacefully through ultra-imperialism. Lenin said it could only be resolved through war and revolution. A point he thought vindicated by World War One.

Problems of Lenin's theory

Firstly his analysis is out of date when applied to the current situation. Hilferding's work, which Lenin's analysis is largely based on and relates to the era of monopoly capitalism at the turn of the century, particularly to the situation in Germany. But with the development and establishment of Fordism the division of the world is no longer based on super-exploited colonies, rather the Third World appears as marginalized economies within the world market that capital is unable to fully exploit.

Perhaps more importantly Lenin's theory of imperialism is crippled by its assumption of working class passivity. The working class is the least developed aspect of Lenin's Imperialism as the dynamic to war and the possibility of planning are derived entirely from the relations between capitals. Thus the working class is seen as passive, needing the objective conditions to mature before being forced to take decisive action. This is particularly clear in Lenin's conception of the labour aristocracy in terms of workers being 'bought off' rather than in terms of them winning concessions that force the monopolies to push prices higher. Therefore the result of Lenin's Imperialism, with its assumption of working class passivity, is to locate the movement towards communism in the contradictions of capital as an objective economic system rather than in the revolutionary self-activity of the working class.

Autonomism against Leninist theories of Imperialism

If the inadequacy of Lenin's Imperialism, as applied to the Gulf-War, is its focus on the 'objective', i.e. capital, can we combat this by using Midnight Notes' autonomist analysis to bring in the 'subjective', i.e. class struggle? The great strength of Midnight Notes and other autonomist-Marxists is their focus on the centrality of class struggle. Through their focus on working class composition, especially the notion of the mass worker, Midnight Notes' and other autonomists grasp the need to go beyond the era of monopoly capitalism described by Hilferding. By focusing on the working class as an autonomous power within and against capital the autonomists were able to account for Fordism and the resistance to it. Therefore both technology and working class organization reflect a particular division of power produced as an outcome of past struggles. This makes trade unions, social democratic, and Leninist parties historically specific organizational forms.

Midnight Oil's great strength is its focus on class struggle whether it be of migrant oil workers, Iraqi deserters, striking autoworkers, wildcat coal miners, or Italian rent strikers. But whilst this focus on working class self-activity is Midnight Oil's greatest strength it is also its greatest weakness. The problem with Midnight Notes however, is not simply that they overemphasize class struggle, rather it is their inadequate understanding of modern capitalism. By concentrating so much on struggles they tend to reduce the workings of the world market to merely a question of power, one where capital collectively manipulates prices in order to attack the working class.

Value and the Apocalypse

For Marx capitalism is not the latest incarnation of the omniscient megamachine that comes to dominate humanity, nor is it a simple means through which the capitalist class consciously conspires to exploit us. Rather capital is a social relation through which human activity returns as an alien and objective force which subsumes human will and purposes to its own ceaseless drive towards its own quantitative expansion. As such, for Marx, capitalism is very far from being a consciously regulated system. As a totality capital is a process that must continually reconstitute itself out of the conflicting actions and purposes both between disassociated individuals and antagonistic classes. Of course this is not to say that there are not conscious attempts to plan nor of some forms of social co-operation, e.g. the state, but that these are only moments subsumed within capital as an unconscious subject and only arise from given conditions of conflict and competition between individuals and classes.

Despite different political perspectives, both Midnight Notes and the orthodox Marxism of Lenin and Kautsky see a fundamental change in capitalism from that described by Marx in Capital - modern capitalism is seen as moving towards a consciously regulated system. This is linked with the notion of us entering the transitional stage to socialism/communism. For orthodox Marxism this is seen primarily in terms of inter-capitalist relations in the form of growing state intervention and the growth of monopolies, both of which lead to the planning of production and exchange rather than regulation through the anarchy of the market, i.e. the supersession of the law of value. For Midnight Notes/autonomism the supersession of the law of value is seen more in terms of the separation of labour from capital with the automation of production.

The fragments on machines

The theoretical basis for Midnight Notes' argument that the law of value has been superseded is the now famous passage from the Grundrisse that has become known as the fragments on machines. In these passages Marx vividly describes how capital in its drive to increase the social productivity of labour through the mechanisation and eventual automation of production makes production increasingly disproportionate to the labour employed. But since capital is nothing but the expansion of alienated labour, this tendency drives capital beyond its own foundation. Hence crisis and apocalypse. As Marx notes:

As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be a measure] of use value. ...Capital itself is the moving contradiction , [in] that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth...On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labor time employed in it. On the other side, it wants to use labor time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value.

The notion that there is a tendency for the law of value to be superseded is central to Midnight Notes' analysis of oil pricing. It allows them to argue that, since value is no longer a necessary measure/regulator of capital work has become merely a form of social discipline. Hence the refusal of work is no longer a utopian demand. Also, to the extent that labour is separated from capital and no longer mediated by value we have only two antagonistic classes each with its own distinct strategy. Therefore the collective capitalist seeks to preserve its power through the imposition of work and the collective worker seeks to resist and refuse this work.

In Midnight Oil, Midnight Notes seek to unilaterally apply this tendency as if it was a long term historical tendency that is now at the point of realisation. But in doing so they run into severe problems. If this tendency has been realised then capital steps beyond its own substance. If capital is not the self expansion of value what is it? Capital disappears! Unedited by objective categories of value and capital we are left with two antagonistic subjects, the 'capitalist' class and the 'working' class locked in an apocalyptic life and death struggle. Have we reached such an era? Is the continuing existence of capitalist competition and markets merely an illusion left over from the past? Midnight Notes staring into the abyss see the consequences of such a conclusion and recoil from them:

If capital can, at will, change and manipulate energy and industrial prices on the basis of multinational corporate power , i.e., independent of the amount of work that goes into the production of commodities, then we must abandon work and surplus value (exploitation) as our basic analytical categories. Marx would be an honored but dead dog. We would have to accept the position of Sweezy and Marcuse that monopoly organization and technological development have made capital independent of the 'law of value,' (viz., that prices, profits, costs and the other numerology of accounting are rooted in (and explained by) the work-time gone into the production of the commodities and reproduction of the relevant worker). Capital it would seem can break its own rules, the class struggle is now to be played on a pure level of power, 'will to domination,' force against force and prices become part of the equation of violence, arbitrarily decided like the pulling of a trigger.

Instead they try and get around the problems that flow from abandoning the law of value by arguing that only certain sectors have escaped labour, but these sectors - oil and food - are basic commodities whose price determines all other prices and thus can be used as a weapon through which capitalism as a global system can be organised against the working class. In several articles, most notably the Notes on the International Crisis, they take political control of oil as self evident, but in The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse they try and explain it in terms of differing organic compositions of capital.

Using Marx, The Work/Energy crisis and the Apocalypse argues that the equalisation of the rate of profit means that prices must diverge from labour-values due to differences in the ratio of living to dead labour across various branches of industry. Since surplus-value can only be expropriated from living labour, those industries employing a large amount of labour relative to their employment of means of production (i.e. those with a low organic composition of capital (OCC)) will be able to produce relatively more surplus-value than those capitals invested in industries that are highly mechanised (i.e. those that have a high OCC). An equalisation of the rate of profit arises through the transfer surplus-value from those capitals invested in industries with a low OCC to those with high OCC. For this to occur prices must be higher than values in industries with a high organic composition of capital (OCC) and lower than values in those with a low OCC.

>From this Midnight Notes then attempt to invert Marx by asserting that this proves that prices can be disconnected from values in high OCC industries like food or energy. Yet Marx was attempting to show the very opposite, i.e. how despite variations in prices and values, values still regulate production and exchange. It is through this very analysis of the formation of a general rate of profit, and the formation of production prices that systematically diverge from values, that Marx shows how, through the competition between individual capitals, the 'law of value' ensures that each individual capital is obliged to act as if it simply a particular part of capital-in-general, despite any conscious intentions on the part of the capitalist themselves.

So even if we accepted that energy and food were necessarily high OCC industries, which we do not, The Work/Energy crisis and the Apocalypse fails to provide an adequate theoretical grounding. Indeed Midnight Notes even admit this themselves when they concede that capitalists only have 'apparent freedom' when it comes to setting oil prices independent of the labour that goes into the production of oil. However it is only through considering Midnight Notes' view of history that the importance of these theoretical inadequacies becomes apparent.

Oil as history

Is it true, as Midnight Notes contend, that the history of post-war capitalism is the history of oil price changes?

As is well known, by the late 1960s working class struggles broke the wage-productivity deal of Keynesianism. Workers demanded 'more money - less work' resulting in a steep decline in profits. Midnight Notes argue that in response to this offensive 'capital' (in the guise of the USA) engineered the 'energy crisis' by forcing up oil prices, which resulted in a restructuring of capital and cuts in real wages. Thus the quadrupling of the oil price in 1973-74 resulted in huge profits for the energy companies and oil producing countries which were then recycled as petrodollars, allowing massive investment in the automation of factories and a shift of production to the 'Newly Industrialising Countries' where labour was cheaper.

After capital has jacked the price of oil right up, Midnight Notes then argue that it has to bring it back down again; because by the mid 1970s oil producing states in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caribbean had succumbed to popular demands and 'squandered' the increased oil revenues on higher wages and social spending. Not only did this rise in oil prices lead to the oil proletariat demanding higher wages but, in countries like Iran, it also encouraged them to overthrow their rulers in an attempt to gain control of the wealth they produced.

Therefore Midnight Notes argue that, in the 1980s capital abandons its high energy price strategy and imposes austerity. This necessarily involves cutting the price of oil in order to attack the oil proletariat. Thus the US Federal Reserve Bank engineers a global slowdown by constricting the money supply, which results in a steep climb in interest rates, and when combined with a loss of export revenues triggers off the debt crisis. As chief enforcer for capital the IMF prescribes austerity for debtor nations, i.e. a more favourable investment climate and production for export. However Midnight Notes argue that working class resistance to austerity leads to a threatened default on Third World debts which forces the US to devalue the dollar by half, thus halving the debt (which it is calculated in US dollars) in order to save the global banking system.

As expected this extension of austerity was met with fierce working class resistance, which leads Midnight Notes to argue that by the late 1980s capital had decided that its austerity program had failed, and that it was planning a massive expansion with huge new areas like Russia and China to be opened up. The idea being that the cheap labour and raw materials of the socialist bloc could be used to undermine the wages of western workers. But, given the world wide recession, investment was in short supply, thus oil prices were to be used as the motor to create surplus funds for a general restructuring of global accumulation. This restructuring was to centre on the reorganization of the oil industry, particularly in those areas where it had been nationalised. International capital was hoping to force open these areas as a result of falling oil prices, but when the IMF tried to force oil states like Nigeria, Venezuela, Algeria and Morocco to cut welfare and wages there were mass uprisings. Therefore Midnight Notes argue that if oil prices were to be raised there would have to be a massive increase in repression to prevent the proles appropriating a slice of the planned oil revenue as had happened throughout the 70s and 80s.

Thus Midnight Notes argue that the Gulf War emerged out of the process of recolonization in the late 1980s following the collapse of the socialist bloc. If the oil fields in the Eastern bloc, Mexico, and Nigeria were to be opened up there would need to be a whole new wave of investment to make them profitable. But the regimes might be forced to give some of the increased revenues to the proles. For Midnight Notes the Gulf war was needed as an example to terrorize the proles into accepting a life of extreme poverty amid vast accumulations of wealth. Therefore;

the re-organization of workers in the planet's most important oil-producing region was not an accidental by-product of the war, but rather a central objective, and one shared, despite some disputes, by the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi, European and US ruling classes. As the oil industry in the Mideast (and internationally) was preparing for its largest expansion in fifteen years, it needed both to recompose and terrorize an increasingly rebellious oil-producing proletariat. In the environment of an 'international intifada' against IMF austerity plans, any new attempt to vastly debase workers' lives amidst new accumulations of wealth based on oil price increase was going to require a leap in the level of militarization.

Down the slippery slope to conspiracy

The central problem of Midnight Oil is that their attempt to reduce the history of capitalism to the history of oil price fluctuations tends to lead to a conspiratorial analysis where a unified capital manipulates energy prices in order to attack the working class. No one denies the impact of oil prices, nor their role in the restructuring of capital after the working class offensive of the 1960/70s, but Midnight Notes' analysis completely ignores the importance of the development of global finance capital. Because it is beyond the control of any government, global finance capital completely undermines Midnight Notes' notion of a unified capital exercising conscious control.

Also Midnight Notes' fail to show anywhere in Midnight Oil how and by whom oil prices are manipulated. Who decides 'capital's strategy'? Furthermore the 'documentation' they cite showing the USA conspired with OPEC to triple oil prices does not support their case. It merely shows that, with the tripling of oil production and exploration costs in the USA, the American oil industry was able to influence the US government not to intervene when first Libya and then the other states took the opportunity of the crisis in the oil industry to push prices up to levels determined by the marginal producers in the USA. The oil crises of 1973,1979 and 1986 could be better explained as critical conjunctures in the development of the oil industry away from the conscious and planned regulation of production and exchange by the big seven oil companies, backed by the US and British governments, to a unified global oil market which to a large extent escapes conscious control of governments and monopolies.

The limitations of Midnight Notes' method and analysis are starkly exposed in the articles Oil, Guns and Money and Rambo on the Barbary Shore. Although Rambo on the Barbary Shore appears ostensibly to concern Saudi Arabia's doubling of oil production in 1985-86 and its relation to the US bombing of Libya, it in fact encapsulates Midnight Notes' conception of how capital manipulates the market. The argument is summarised in Oil, Guns and Money where, referring to the devaluation of the US dollar by one half in 1985, they argue that:

This manoeuvre, in one stroke, lowered the value of debt held by countries from Mexico to Poland by one half. But this was no charity. If the lowering of interest rates in 1983 had been prompted by Mexico's moratorium, the dollar devaluation was prompted by South Africa's moratorium on payments to foreign banks in August 1985. The potential of South African capital to succumb to black workers struggles within the country and to provoke other governments around the world to similarly halt loan payments was enough to force western capital to change the terms of global debt. In this manipulation of monetary values we see capitalist planning at its most abstract and reified levels, where decisions seemingly removed from the labors on the shop floor or in the kitchen ultimately entail the most profound effects. One of the most important consequences of the dollar's devaluation, for example, was the simultaneous devaluation of oil. As the dollar was taking a free fall in the market, Saudi Arabia doubled its production within nine months and thereby halved the price of oil. The US government arranged this oil devaluation to keep the US import bill from skyrocketing. With a dollar half of what it was worth before, imports, particularly oil, would have doubled in cost. The US was already becoming the largest debtor nation in the world and there was the fear that the dollar devaluation, if taken alone, would have thrown the US over the edge of solvency. These twin manoeuvres of 1985-86 - the dollar and oil devaluations - exhibit how the international market is consciously structured by capital.

This whole analysis is riddled with errors which are symptomatic of Midnight Notes' theoretical inadequacies. Firstly the US dollar was not devalued unilaterally at a stroke. The devaluation of the dollar that followed the Plaza Accord took nearly two years and required concerted intervention of the central banksof the major industrial powers armed with reserve funds that were only a fraction of the huge flows of capital surging around the international money markets. Secondly the devaluation does not necessarily halve the debt, particularly if the debt is denominated in US dollars and the exporter, e.g. Mexico, is trading mainly with the US. It is true that resistance to debt forced rescheduling under the Baker plan and simultaneously limited the US government's strategy of using interest rates to indefinitely defend an overvalued dollar, forcing them towards international co-operation to devalue the dollar in 1985. But we can not simply explain fluctuations in the US dollar in terms of oil pricing as Midnight Notes are prone to do. Halving the dollar does not mean that oil prices have to be halved to prevent the US' import bill doubling since oil is denominated in dollars. Consequently the twin manoeuvres of 1985-86 do not show how the international market is structured by capital, on the contrary they show how attempts to consciously regulate international markets are highly circumscribed!

Conspiracy at Midnight?

Overall Midnight Oil is an important work because its unrelenting focus on working class struggles provides an important corrective to the objectivism of Lenin's Imperialism and its defenders. However Midnight Oil is fatally undermined by Midnight Notes' tendency to ascribe outcomes to the conscious strategy of a unified capital. Throughout Midnight Oil Midnight Notes fail to show how capital constitutes itself. They imply that the US state formulates capital's strategy, but then fail to explain how US policy is formulated. The problem is that Midnight Notes conception of a unified capital results in them conflating capitalism with the actions of individual capitalists. Capitalism does not have a strategy, although capitalists pursue different strategies. Capitalism as a totality is mediated by the world market and emerges from the conflict between and within different capitals and the working class.

Even if capital has a strategy, which it does not, Midnight Notes fail to show how it is organized and by whom. Given that Midnight Notes see capital as an undifferentiated unity imposing an agreed strategy on the working class, we would expect to find them focusing on organizations like the UN, the IMF, G7 etc. However there is little analysis of those organizations which could be seen as arenas for hammering out 'capital's strategy'. Such an omission can not simply be a mistake by Midnight Notes, rather it is a consequence of their method which does not look at capitalist divisions because their theory has assumed these divisions away.

When their conception of a unified capital is applied to concrete events its inadequacies are glaring. For example Midnight Notes saw the Gulf War as a collective capital imposing an agreed strategy of increasing oil prices. Initially this caused them to take the position, in 'When Crusaders and Assassins Unite', that there would be no war, or at most token skirmishing. After all, why should there be a war if there are no fundamental disagreements between Iraq and the US? However, when they are forced by events to admit there was a war then they merely reduce it to collective capital militarizing oil production. This results in them tending to argue that Iraq and the US colluded in the invasion of Kuwait, via April Glaspie, as part of a co-ordinated strategy of increasing oil prices. Whilst the invasion of Kuwait was a consequence of the Ba'athists inability to impose austerity on their own working class, it is not the case that it was part of a co-ordinated global plan for militarizing the world's oil industry, as the disarray of the US government's response clearly illustrates.

By imposing a pre-defined conception of a unified capital onto events Midnight Notes are able to change their position on the Gulf War from seeing it as a 'phoney war' to seeing it as a method for the Iraqi regime to impose austerity. This culminatesin them arguing that the Iraqi state did not believe the US would intervene and even if it did that it would be in the Ba'athists interests. It is true that the main targets of the UN bombing were civilians, infrastructure, and retreating troops who were the main force of revolt within Iraq, but from this Midnight Notes argue that the war was in the Ba'athist's interests because it finally enabled them to impose austerity on the Iraqi working class.

However, the triumph of the Ba'athist state over the working class uprisings was by no means guaranteed. Also it is not the case that the Iraqi state sought saturation bombing, resulting in massive destruction of productive capital, and the risk of overthrow, because it thought it might possibly improve its ability to impose austerity. Excepting the decimated oil industries of Iraq and Kuwait, Midnight Notes fail to show that oil production is more militarized after the Gulf War than it was before. Even with civil war raging in Yemen oil prices are only $16 a barrel, the level they were prior to the Gulf War. This is hardly the mass increase in oil prices that Midnight Notes expected as the result of collective capital militarizing oil production through the Gulf War. With oil prices predicted to settle down to $13-14 a barrel for the forseeable future we can conclude that either capital does not have a high oil price strategy atall, or that it has been incapable of imposing one. It is clear that oil prices are not operating as the motor for a new phase of accumulation to pull the world out of recession.

Finally when we apply Midnight Notes' theory to other conflicts like Somalia and Yugoslavia we find that their method breaks down. The war in the former Yugoslavia provides a perfect example of the disunity and divisions among the various capitals. Whilst the Leninists see the conflict as an imperialist war fought out by proxies, autonomist analyses tend to see it as a conspiracy by a unified capital using nationalism and war to divide and subjugate a combative working class. These two positions represent the opposing flipsides of the same undialectical coin. Theorising conflicts such as these is only possible if we can understand how the class struggle is mediated by competition, and vice versa. The autonomists' antipathy to dialectical thinking means that whilst they can provide a corrective to the diatribes of the anti-imperialists they cannot supersede them.

Review: Carry on Recruiting

'The politics and practice of the SWP negate its claim to be revolutionary'. Have Trotwatch nailed the Leninists?

Why the SWP dumped the 'downturn' in a 'dash for growth'

Trotwatch. £2.95 AK Press. ISBN 1 873176 02 3.

"Many people find a critique of Bolshevism boring. Unfortunately even one's uninteresting enemies can be powerful."- Call It Sleep.

Carry on Recruiting! is certainly not boring. The irreverent manner in which it catalogues the SWP's regular changes in line and the tortuous arguments used to justify them is undoubtedly its strength. Trotskyism still has far more credibility amongst would-be rebels in the UK than anywhere else, and needs therefore to be subjected to repeated criticism. But we need not take the Trots too seriously, as if another Krondstadt were threatening. After all, ideas which have hardly developed since the demise of the classical workers movement are unlikely to have much resonance in a modern revolutionary upheaval, for all the students that get taken in in the meantime.

Trotwatch wickedly take the piss out of the SWP's abandonment of their 'downturn' theory in October '92. As they point out, the SWP clung vehemently to the theory in the face of the '81 inner-city riots and the '84/'85 miners strike only to argue that the 'upturn' had arrived when faced with the back bench rebellion over the pit closures programme and a fifty year record low in the level of strike activity. Similar treatment is meted out to the SWP's about turn on Poll Tax non-payment and the meaning and significance of the Trafalgar Square riot.

Throughout this, plus a section looking at the SWP's contradictory positions on the '74-'79 Labour government, the underlying aim of the pamphlet is "to examine the reality of the SWP's 'critique' of the labour movement and the bureaucrats that run it. It goes on to question the SWP's understanding of what constitutes a 'genuinely independent' working class movement. In doing so, it uncovers an organisation whose politics and practice negate its claim to be revolutionary."

Trotwatch's commitment to working class autonomy and emphasis on self activity underpins the piss-taking. But merely allowing this perspective to inform its jokes about the SWP's opportunistic inconsistencies is obviously insufficient - a point Trotwatch acknowledge in the final section 'What's wrong with the SWP'.

Following on as it does from a long catalogue of details this section is crucial; tying the ends together with a stinging critique of Leninism as the knock-out blow. Unfortunately Trotwatch don't quite manage it. Because of the SWP's eagerness to recruit anyone with vague anti-Tory sentiments, it is argued, the party must be structured to ensure that the Central Committee maintain a tight grip over the organisation. Generalising their critique, they state:

"In reality, a Leninist party simply reproduces and institutionalises existing capitalist power relations inside a supposedly 'revolutionary' organisation: between leaders and led; order givers and order takers; between specialists and acquiescent and largely powerless party workers. And that elitist power relationship is extended to include the relationship between the party and the class."

The attack on hierarchical organisational forms is obviously a necessary component of the critique of Leninism, but is insufficient in itself. This line of argument is reminiscent of that of libertarian socialists who accuse the Leninists of employing the wrong means (the party) for the right end (socialism). And whilst it would be wrong to accuse Trotwatch of being wishy washy liberals their critique relies heavily on a paper produced by dissidents within Southampton SWP which simply complains that the party isn't democratic enough.

A thorough critique of Leninism requires a critique of representation and democracy. The advocacy of democratic-centralist 'Revolutionary Party' must be shown to arise from the fact that their programme is the capture of state power in order to abolish the 'anarchy of the market'. Not the abolition of work but a planned reorganisation of work. Not the destruction of alien 'productive forces' but their liberation from fetters. Leninists have an objectivist critique of capitalism, which is why they can't grasp its real negation. In other words a critique of Leninism must address the fact that Leninists are not communists; they have not broken sufficiently with Second International orthodoxy, which is why their relationship with Labourism appears contradictory. One cannot abolish alienation with alienated means, but we cannot just attack their 'means' without distinguishing our 'ends' from theirs.

Trotwatch's 'negative, critical and destructive' publications provide handy ammunition for arguments with Trots, sparing the rest of us the trouble of reading their banal papers and turgid magazines. And they make no claim to provide a complete or definitive critique of Leninism or even the SWP in particular. But partial critiques provide fertile ground for the forces of recuperation. We don't need better organisations to deliver socialism- we need to organise our emancipation from all forms of alienation.

"Bolshevism will remain formidable as long as it can maintain its monopoly on the interpretation of revolution."- Call It Sleep

Kill or Chill - An analysis of the Opposition to the Criminal Justice Bill

Last year, the threat of the Criminal Justice Bill galvanised thousands of people to take various forms of action against the state. It also brought very different oppositional elements together in a common practical relationship, many for the first time. In this issue, we examine the possibilities of these struggles.

Part One: Sign of the Times

Monetarism, the Crisis of Representation, and the CJB

Any analysis of the opposition to what is now on the statute books as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act has of course to consider what the legislation is all about, to examine its meaning as a weapon in the struggle between the contending classes.

Such a consideration is far from easy given the wide ranging nature of the inordinate number of clauses contained in the act, varying from removing the Prison Officers' Association's right to strike to allowing the incarceration of children in prisons. A common criticism of the opposition to the act is that it has concentrated its concerns on Part 5, containing the provisions against ravers, travellers, squatters, hunt saboteurs and the like, and thereby giving the impression that the CJ&POA is concerned only with 'marginal elements'. Some anarchists (such as the Anarchist Black Cross) have argued that the supposedly 'anti-terrorist' measures, such as the reintroduction of stop and search powers, and the removal of the 'right of silence' under police questioning demonstrate that the act is not primarily concerned with marginals but conversely represents an attack on the working class as a whole. And many Leninists have argued that the new offence of aggravated trespass demonstrates that the act is likewise an attack on the working class as a whole by outlawing trade union picket lines, given that to their minds (and despite evidence to the contrary) the working class (or at least the section that really counts) all actually go to full-time work.

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Though the first of these arguments may contain a significant element of truth, both fail to grasp the nature of this nebulous beast. The CJ&POA has been described as a bundle of prejudices, and is perhaps best understood as that - a piece of legislation which a divided Conservative Government can unite around as an attack on their favourite scapegoats. But the CJ&POA functions in this way because, whether they are conscious of it or not, there is a method in their madness. Despite the ditching of the 'petty nationalist' Thatcher, the Conservative Party is still divided over the question of Europe: the problem of class rule in the new economic reality of global finance capital. And the recent crisis over VAT on fuel, with backbench Conservative rebels defying a three line whip to sabotage the government majority, clearly showed up the disunity and lack of direction afflicting the government. The problem they face which seems to be defying any easy resolution is simply the need to impose austerity, the need to attack the gains of an entrenched working class, without destroying the fragile Conservative social consensus represented by the 'Essex Man' phenomenon. With the dream of a property-owning democracy sinking into the nightmare of debt, the consensus is rapidly becoming unravelled, but UK plc cannot retreat. What better tonic than a good old attack on those firmly outside of the deal, the marginalized, whose exclusion the Conservative deal was predicated upon, to stiffen up resolve in the ranks for those attacks which threaten to recompose the class. But even such an apparently uncomplicated weapon has been threatening to blow up in the faces of those trying to use it. We are running ahead of ourselves, however. Before we proceed further we have to consider the context in which the battle is being fought.

The character of the movement against the CJ&POA can only be adequately grasped through an examination of the political context in which it has arisen. The most notable feature of the campaign has been the complete absence of the Labour Party's involvement (save for Tony Benn's speeches) and the effective marginalization of the groups which traditionally scavenge in its detritus. The movement may be considered in some ways paradigmatic of class struggle in the era following the retreat of social democracy: unhindered by any powerful mediating force and, as such, both relatively incoherent in its attempts to express its demands and potentially explosive. We seem to be moving towards a situation where the traditional means of recuperation of struggles and integration of its subjects - the 'left' - is finding itself increasingly incapable of representing struggles occurring outside of the productive sphere. This retreat of social democracy is itself a consequence of new global realities.

(i) The crisis of representation

a) The retreat of social democracy:

As the traditional form of mediating the relationship between capital and labour, social democracy, including its radical variants, may be said to be the representation of the trade union consciousness of the working class. Unlike Lenin, who argued that the working class could not develop revolutionary consciousness without external intervention, we would argue that it is the struggles of the working class itself which defetishizes the social relation of capital. But this does not necessarily mean that the working class is just inherently revolutionary. Reformism (or democracy for that matter) is not adequately understood as a con trick perpetrated by the (middle class) left on an otherwise revolutionary class, as many 'ultra-leftists' would have us believe. The tendency to leftism, like the tendency to communism, must be grounded in the social relation of wage labour itself: exploitation mediated by the sale and purchase of labour-power.

Proletarian subjectivity moves along a continuum between the poles of integration and transcendence, poles which represent the acceptance or refusal of the commodity form of labour. Labour-power is a commodity which is not a commodity. A commodity is a thing that is separable and thus alienable from its owner which is produced to be sold; and for capital labour-power is this thing whose exchange-value is the wage and whose use-value is the capacity to create and preserve value. However, not only is labour-power not immediately produced for sale, being produced only as part of the reproduction of human life itself, but it is also not a thing separate from its possessor. The alienation of labour is thus experienced as loss of subjectivity, as estrangement.

Thus the imposition of the commodity form is resisted, leading to the refusal of work, defetishization and the communist tendency. However, in so far as this imposition is accepted, the worker may accept the position of commodity owner in the sphere of exchange and consumption alongside bourgeois and other proletarians alike, and possibly buy a car, house, and other trappings of a 'middle class' identity.

Social democracy represents the acceptance of the commodity-form of labour, the interests of the working class as objects, with trades unions carrying out its collective sale to capital. It represents the interests of a national working class as a whole within capitalism through the use of state intervention against some of the excesses of the market.

Thus struggles against the alienation of wage labour must be recuperated by the left, represented by it, and rendered compatible with the continued objectification of the workers by capital accumulation. And during the period when the refusal of work was manifest, the primary role for revolutionaries was to attack such recuperation, to distinguish the working class as subject from its representation. But it is also necessary to recognize and explore the limits of the recuperative powers of leftism, and this is not possible if the left is reduced to a simple identity with capital (its left wing) rather than grasping it as a form of mediation, a two-way process. Social democracy does not only deliver the working class to capital and preserve national divisions within it, but does so on the basis of being an organizational form through which concessions can be demanded and won from capital, advancing the interests of the working class as a social stock of objective labour-power.

The inherent tendency towards refusal and resistance, a tendency which came to the fore in the post-war revolt against Taylorized labour processes, was recuperated on the basis of the monetarization of frustration: financial compensation for the experience of alienated labour. Such monetarization of demand was the class meaning of Keynesian demand management. Keynesianism represented the recognition that working class demands could no longer be ignored due to the threat of revolution, but would have to be accommodated and harnessed as the motor of capital accumulation. Thus deficit financing allowed for rising real wages and public spending on welfare, to be repaid by returns from future exploitation.

The basis of social democracy's success was therefore premised on the state's ability to accommodate working class struggles through flexibility in monetary policy, to deliver reforms and concessions which could be recovered from the future production of surplus-value by taxation. As we have seen, this premise has been eroded with the increasing autonomy of global finance capital. With it has come the retreat of social democracy on a global scale.

b) From Labourism to Blairism:

The Labour Party fell from power when the 'winter of discontent' exposed the limits of attempting to impose monetarist economic measures within a Keynesian institutional framework. Wildcat strikes left the social democratic consensus in tatters; a more radical strategy was required, one of dividing the working class to establish a new Conservative consensus based on the exclusion of those whose exploitation would not produce a sufficient rate of profit. It has taken 15 years in opposition for the Labour Party to respond to the dictatorship of finance capital by planning to scrap the traditional commitment to nationalization. During those 15 years the party has swung to the right, recognising that if it is to win an election it will have to satisfy City analysts that it is capable of imposing as harsh a monetary regime as its opponents. This process has reached its logical conclusion with the election of Tony Blair as leader and his plans to reassure the bankers that his party does not even have a semblance of a commitment to the type of fiscal regime which would allow the diversion of surplus value into loss making nationalized industries and public services.

With the development of this 'new realism' has come the decline in the recuperative capability of the left. But this process has not been smooth. Indeed, as the New Left decided en masseto enter the party during the start of the 80s, and enjoying the flexibility that comes with being in opposition, the party swung to the left initially. The left wing of the party has been put under severe pressure since then, however, particularly with Kinnock's 'witch-hunt' of Militant. The left of the party, from being a major force in the 1970s has declined to such an extent that it is rarely encountered, and no longer capable of even the occasional pyrrhic victory at 'Conference'.

A stream of employment laws has imposed this 'new realism' on the trade unions over the years. From being in a position of negotiating over beer and sandwiches at No. 10, and occasionally threatening that their members wouldn't agree to what the government wanted without a concession, union leaders now find themselves in the position of simply having to police their members regardless, clamping down on any initiative which could end in the dreaded sequestration. The inability to win anything through acceptan ce of the union form has been an invitation to wildcat autonomy that has alas been all too rarely accepted. Whether this has been due to a certain loyalty to the form which, for all its 'sell outs', delivered so much in the past, or to an understandable lack of confidence is unclear; but the invitation is unlikely to be retracted.

But whilst social democracy retains a firm if fragile grip on workplace struggles, the decline in its relevance to non-workplace struggles was brought home by the Poll Tax. Who remembers the 'Stop It' campaign (dubbed 'Pay It' by its detractors), launched by the Labour Party, except the union leaders who supported it? Indeed most people's recollection of the relationship between the Labour Party and the 'Tory Tax' will be the vigour with which Labour councils demonstrated their fiscal responsibility by pursuing non-payers.

With this retreat of mainstream social democracy from the concerns of 'the workers', radical social democracy's task of orienting the struggle towards the labour movement was made intolerably difficult. The SWP's position of orienting opposition towards pressing the unions to veto collection was a non-starter. Militant appeared to do somewhat better, with people going along with their non-workerist 'lobby the Labour council' position to the extent that they took it as an invitation to picket, disrupt or riot. Yet they also failed dismally in their efforts, despite stitching up the 'Federation'. Trying to fit the struggle into a social democratic strait-jacket required an attack on the Trafalgar Square rioters whose actions did not conform with a social democratic definition of working class subjectivity, an attack that even disgusted many loyal members. Not only did they fail to deliver the working class to the labour movement, but also got expelled from their beloved party and lost half their members.

Traditional forms of mediation are in crisis. This can best be illustrated by comparing the movement against the 1994 CJ&POA to that which campaigned against the 1977 Criminal Trespass Law.

c) From CACTL to fractal:

Squatting, as a violation of the inalienable laws of private property, is clearly a challenge to the ground rules of the social democratic compromise. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, social democracy proved itself to be quite capable of recuperating a significant squatters' struggle. In 1974 the Law Commission published its initial report proposing to replace the 1381 Forcible Entry Acts with a Criminal Trespass Law which would make all forms of trespass, and consequently squatting, illegal. London's relatively well organized squatters responded immediately; at an All London Squatters meeting they decided to set up a campaign to fight the proposals, and the Campaign Against a Criminal Trespass Law (CACTL) was born. Comrades who were involved in the campaign, however, report that CACTL quickly became dominated by Trots, eventually being represented by a couple from the SWP. And this is borne out by CACTL's own propaganda which inevitably played down the effect of the proposals on squatters in order to present the proposed legislation as an attack on workers. In much the same way as the SWP has tried to steer the anti-CJ&POA movement, CACTL sat about orienting opposition towards the labour movement.

By arguing that the legislation was aimed at factory occupations, however, CACTL had remarkable success. Between 1971 and 1975 over 150,000 workers were involved in over 200 occupations, ranging from those at Fisher-Bendix in Kirkby in 1972 and 1974 against redundancies to the occupation of Hopkinson's in Huddersfield in 1975 for a wage increase. Student occupations were also recurrent events during the 1970s, especially during 1976. And that same year, while the Labour left were decrying Callaghan's 'betrayal' at their conference and wondering what to do, Ford workers at Dagenham demonstrated their contempt for leftist mediation by rioting, holding the police at bay while they smashed up and set fire to various parts of the plant. With workplace struggles raging, the workerist card played by CACTL turned out to be a trump, and they began to receive invitations to send speakers to trades councils, trade union branches and student unions.

Radical social democracy was able to recuperate and represent the struggle because it was able to deliver results. By 1976 CACTL had received support from 36 trades councils, 85 trade union branches and 51 student unions, and by the following year not only had the national unions ACTT, AUEW-TASS, and NUPE passed resolutions in opposition to the proposals, but the TUC General Council had also voted to oppose the CTL. Orienting towards the labour movement in this context meant that CACTL was able to mobilize massive support for its demonstrations. In the face of this opposition the Law Commission watered down its initial plan massively.

The 1977 Criminal Law Act represented a compromise which meant that squatting, whilst more difficult, was still legal. The act, which has been the basic squatting law until the 1994 CJ&POA changes, only legislated against violent or threatening entry, refusal to leave when requested by a displaced residential occupier or a protected intending occupier, trespassing with an offensive weapon, squatting an embassy or consul, or resisting a bailiff executing a possession order. A long way short of making squatting itself a criminal offence. The price paid for CACTL's successful recuperation, however, was that many people were under the misapprehension that squatting had been made illegal, and CACTL's own propaganda reinforced this belief, inevitably undermining the squatting movement. Indeed in the summer of 1978 the Advisory Service for Squatters felt it necessary to mount a campaign against this leftist counter-information with the slogan 'squatting is still legal'.

What is most notable, however, is the fact that three years before the proposals were to become law there was already a significant campaign of opposition. Less than three months before the Criminal Justice Bill was due to become law there was still no specific campaign against it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, bang! May 1st last year, 25,000 ravers on the streets of London and the left nowhere to be seen, a massive party in Trafalgar Square and everyone dancing to the deliciously ambiguous chant of 'Kill the Bill'!

(ii) Alternative lifestyles and the CJ&POA Part 5

a) Monetarism and mass unemployment:

In 1976 the then British Prime Minister told his Labour Party Conference that deficit financing of public demand could no longer be sustained: 'We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists and that so far as it ever did exist, it only worked by injecting inflation into the economy.' With that statement, the Labour Party launched its policy of monetarist economic measures within a Keynesian political framework. A policy of 'sound money' demanded the reduction of the state deficit through the abandonment of full employment guarantees, cuts in welfare expenditure and the scrapping of unproductive producers, or a boom in productive accumulation which would presuppose either a rigorous intensification of work or a major reduction in wages.

The struggles of the late 1970s and the 1980s have been well documented elsewhere. We are all only too aware of the extent to which heavy defeats have cowed the working class. Since the defeat of the miners, the level of strike activity has subsided massively. But it is all too easy to allow oneself to become demoralized by the apparent success of our enemy. Whilst the quality of our lives may have been diminished by the violent and repressive accompaniments of monetary terrorism we must also consider the quantitative aspects of this shitty system - after all, our alienation rests upon the numerical ratio that is capitalist exploitation. A balance sheet is required.

Wave after wave of redundancies have swelled the ranks of the unemployed to the extent that the leftist's hand-wringing when the numbers on the dole reached 1,000,000 now seems ridiculous. The abandonment of full employment and the creation of this huge reserve army of industrial labour has given capital a powerful weapon with which to try to undermine the previous gains of the working class. And the fear of joining those ranks has played a major role in undermining workers' confidence in their ability to resist the restructuring of labour processes. The intensification of work and the imposition of overtime underpinned the apparent miracle of Thatcherism.

But whilst the reserve army may have played a major role in containing wages and intensifying work, the extent to which the British working class's gains have been clawed back has been limited. Throughout Europe, capital faces the same problem of working class entrenchment, a proletariat which refuses the cuts in wages and welfare that have been suffered in the US. Whilst in the economic textbooks the price of labour-power rises and falls in accordance with its supply and demand, in reality wages have tended to be contained only during periods when the level of unemployment is actually rising. They have not been slashed to the extent that will attract money capital towards productive investment here rather than to the other emerging economic blocs. Likewise it has proved impossible to cut that part of state spending which constitutes the social wage to a degree comparable with the US, despite the constant attacks on the NHS and those on benefit.

Many attempts have been made over the years to restructure the benefit system in order to encourage claimants to compete for low paid jobs, most recently the 'actively seeking work' stipulations and the plans in the pipeline for the Job Seeker's Allowance. With a continuing lack of productive investment the British state seems to be opting for the strategy of a 'low wage economy', competing directly with the likes of Portugal, Greece and Ireland, as evidenced by the Social Chapter opt-out. But there seems to be a bug in that circuit necessary but extraneous to the circuit of capital's reproduction process: that of the reproduction of the peculiar commodity labour-power; a social process which is subject to particular forms of contestation given that the commodity is the capacity and, crucially, willingness to work. Thus at times when unemployment has been rising in the UK the formation of reserves of idle labour-power desperate for work has been subject to a counter-tendency of the development of alternative lifestyles which take as their point of departure not the wage but the dole as their means of social reproduction. Such lifestyles have undermined, albeit insufficiently compared to their visibility, the state's attempts to impose a tighter relationship between consumption and work, the life-blood of capital.

b) No Future:

Given the close relationship between alternative lifestyles and music, and the importance of music in providing something concrete within which value can invest itself in its repeated search for a new generation of consumers, the word 'alternative' needs to be treated with a degree of caution. Nevertheless, not all youth cultures are the same. Some contain more or less positive tendencies than others, a greater or lesser potential for recognizing the contradictions inherent in the phenomenon and developing a practical critique of their grounding. And all 'alternative' lifestyles are by definition outside of the remit of the usual forms of political representation.

Music was in a moribund state in the mid 1970s. The musicians of the '68 generation had become tired and boring, the naive optimism of hippydom out of tune with the harsh realities of ongoing class conflict. No amount of lustre or glitter on the stage sets of glam rock could disguise the fact that all was not well in the (music) factory, and it was obvious that the new subjects of struggle required new overtures. And as Callaghandeclared his intention to launch the war of austerity in 1976, a different declaration of war was beginning to reverberate through distorted amplifiers in the back rooms and basements of London: the declaration of war on 'society' by punk. Punk was able to articulate the frustrations of the new generation. But in comparison to the wave of youth revolt in Italy, both inside and outside of the factories, punk was only a caricature of revolt, superficial nihilism.

Punk was inherently contradictory. Central to it was the 'DIY' ethos, but it lacked an explicit critique of the commodity-form. This lack of critique allowed self-valorization to give way to recuperation, giving a long overdue kick up the backside to the entrepreneurs involved in the 'youth culture' industry. The shops of King's Road and Carnaby Street testified to the process of turning rebellion into money, shelves laden with designer bondage trousers, studded leather, mass-produced 'Destroy' and 'Vive La Revolution' t-shirts, and badges. But the recuperative powers of these new commodities were not without limit. For the punks that had taken the mocking lyrics of their anti-heroes seriously, the sight of all this commodity capital awaiting realization, and the selling out to major labels of the biggest bands, was an insult they could not leave unanswered. They realized that 'the great rock and roll swindle' had in fact been perpetrated on them.

Perhaps the most important point, however, is the fact that selling an image of revolution to keep would-be revolutionaries from the real thing requires that they have the necessary purchasing power. And many of the working class youth attracted to punk were on the dole and therefore skint. The time was right for a sub-genre to emerge from all this shit to explicitly politicize the DIY ethos that punk stood for.

c) Anarcho-Punk:

'Do you believe in the system? Well OK. I believe in anarchy in the UK'. These words from the release of the first Crass record on their own non-profit making label were accompanied by the words 'Pay no more than £2'. If you still had to pay for your anarchy at least it was affordable! Crass had the means to release their own cheap records, play cheap gigs, and promote other bands who shared their ethos. The anarcho-punk scene soon became a vibrant alternative to the punk scene it declared dead. The anarchism of the typical anarcho-punk was however little more than militant liberalism. Crass had their roots in the old peace movement, and largely ignoring the harsh realities of class warfare in the world outside their commune, set about promoting the ideas of pacifism and lifestyle politics. Offensive though many of their dogmas were, the anarcho-punks must be judged not just by the lyrics they sang along to, but, crucially, by what they actually did.

During the early 1980s, the main political focus for the new breed was the CND demonstrations which drew hundreds of thousands of concerned liberals to Hyde Park on a yearly basis. Grouping under a collection of black flags the anarchos would hand out leaflets and fanzines encouraging personal revolution and then heckle the speakers and try to storm the stage. As numbers swelled, the anti-militarist struggle was taken into the heart of enemy territory with the Stop The City actions when banks and rollers would get smashed under the cover of a pacifist carnival. The obsession with lifestyle politics, however, was a major factor hindering the development of the 'movement', making links with those who didn't fit problematic, as would become apparent during the miners' strike. Far too many anarchos simply changed their clothes, diet, drugs and musical tastes, deluding themselves that by doing so they were creating a new world within the belly of the old which would wither away once it recognized its comparative existential poverty. But most of the criticisms of lifestyle politics, then and now, were and are mere defences by militants prepared to accept the continual deferral of pleasure in favour of the 'hard work' of politics. The desire to create the future in the present has always been a strength of anarchists. How one lives is political. Thus the anarchos may be considered to have constituted a political movement seeking social reproduction unmediated by wage labour.

In 1980 Crass played the Stonehenge festival and a close link with the free festival scene subsequently evolved. Likewise the anarchos gave a massive impetus to the squatting scene left over from the 70s. By the mid 1980s, virtually every town in England and Wales had its squats. Bands were formed, venues either squatted or hired dirt cheap (church halls and the like which meant no bar - take your own home-brew) and gigs organized, often benefits which would succeed in raising money despite cheap entry because the bands would play for next to nothing. During the summer months much of this activity would shift on to the free festival circuit, meeting up with those who had chosen to spent the whole year travelling between peace camps and festivals, and who in turn would benefit from the links with the urban scene (news, contacts, places to rest and repair, opportunities for fraud etc.).

This scene was particularly well organized, and more politicized, in the cities. On Bristol's Cheltenham Road, the Demolition Ballroom, Demolition Diner, and Full Marx book shop provided a valuable organizational focus, with the activities of the squatted venue and cafe supplemented by the information and contact address of the lefty book shop. Brixton squatters not only had their own squatted cafes, crèches and book shop, but also Crowbar their own Class War style squatting oriented paper. Strong links were forged with the squatting movement on the continent, particularly Germany, and draft dodgers from Italy were regularly encountered. And with direct communication supplemented by the then fortnightly Black Flag, a couple of phone calls and a short article could mobilize numbers in solidarity with other struggles.

Whilst the anarcho-punk scene created a not insignificant area of autonomy from capital, such autonomy was always disfigured by the continued existence of exchange relations. Going to gigs and eating in squat cafes, even brewing your own beer to share with mates, all required money. And free festivals, whilst standing in stark contrast to the commercialism of Glastonbury, were anything but - there was no entry fee and no-one would let you starve if you were skint, but drugs in particular cost money. Unless you wanted to cloud your relationships, obscuring lines of solidarity and friendship by becoming a dealer, if only to cover your own dope requirements, money remained a problem. There was always a correspondence between the satisfaction of needs and the need for money, a correspondence that contradicted the professed desire to abolish the filthy stuff.

d) Fragmentation of anarcho-punk:

This contradiction partially explains the subsequent fragmentation and decline of the anarcho-punk squatting/travelling movement. On the one hand, the state relaxed credit restrictions, abandoning tight monetary policy, producing the credit-fuelled boom which preceded the 1987 stock market crash. This led to a rapid fall in the number of jobless. Many previously involved with organizing in and around the squatting scene got jobs during the boom, and whilst many remained living in squats (to stay with friends and save on rent), momentum was being lost. Individualism tended to replace a collective approach to social problems, as wage earners and dealers could afford to accept the position money held within the scene. The carrot of the boom, however would not have had the same impact without the repeated blows with the stick of state repression.

With unemployment falling, it became easier for the state to make the benefit system more punitive. The changes in 1987 and 1988 certainly increased the disciplining role of the welfare state, thereby throwing down a gauntlet to the lifestyle of work-rejection. Benefits for 16 and 17 year olds were scrapped in favour of an extension of YTS slave labour, thereby removing the possibility of work avoidance (except by begging) for the young school leavers who had always been central to the movement. The introduction of the Job Training Scheme and the availability for work requirements also had an effect. Restart interviews were easy enough for most people sufficiently clued up to blag their way through, but tended to encourage people to rely on their own wits. Because these changes were ultimately divisive, they encouraged people to look after number one. Attempts to organize against them were met with responses that expressed a distinct lack of solidarity, and this reflected not only the nature of the attack but also the divisions that had emerged within the scene.

The biggest causes of such fragmentation were the smashing of the miners and printworkers on the one hand and the repression of the festival scene on the other. The anarchism of the anarcho-punk scene was always pretty incoherent, a militant liberalism that sought to destroy the state yet which was committed to pacifism. Within the movement there would be differences, some placing greater emphasis on non-violence or animal rights, some more committed to a revolutionary class position. For a while these underlying differences could be glossed over, and whilst people could argue about the 1981 riots, for example, it was just talk. But the miners' strike presented a major challenge by its longevity and opportunity for involvement, one that caused underlying differences to surface with a resultant divergence between those who dismissed the miners as violent macho men performing an ecologically unsound activity, and those who, despite a certain amount of confusion, recognized that there was a war going on and, whatever it was about, they had to choose the violence of the pickets over that of the state's thugs.

Most anarchos supported the miners, even if such support was not of a particularly practical nature, though bands like Crass and Poison Girls and numerous others played benefits for the miners to give some material assistance. The resultant defeat therefore had a demoralizing effect on the anarcho-punk scene.

The same conflict between liberalism and class struggle anarchism came to the fore with the Wapping dispute the following year. The movement was divided between those who saw the need to support the printworkers and those who dismissed them as sexist, racist, homophobic macho men. However even amongst those more sympathetic to the former view were some who argued that it was better that pickets got trampled by police horses than horses get broken legs by pickets rolling marbles under their hooves. The defeat of the printworkers was another demoralizing factor, but also one which accelerated the process of fragmentation. The inherent contradiction in the movement led to a substantial parting of ways, one pole devoting itself almost exclusively to the moral crusade of animal lib and many of those they fell out with getting so fed up with lifestylism that they joined one of the national anarchist organizations.

Meanwhile those who had been more attracted to travelling than squatting or political activity were being put under severe pressure. The Stonehenge festival was banned in 1985, and the determined attempt to defy the ban was met with a response not unlike that experienced by the miners, culminating in the famous 'battle of the beanfield'. The following year the state brought in the Public Order Act, section 13 of which established a 4 mile radius exclusion zone around the stones. Other sections gave new powers to proscribe demonstrations and extended the law against trespass. The former were successfully challenged on the streets of London by the Campaign Against The Public Order Act/Campaign Against Police Repression; but whilst many travellers have battled bravely in adverse conditions, the police have been able to use section 39 to intimidate and harass them, continually moving them on. Travelling and free festivals continued, but, with the loss of the weeks-long Stonehenge focus, went into something of a decline. The police-benefit festival at Glastonbury, extortionately priced but affordable to those now working, mopped up. And before they were successfully excluded in recent years, convoys of travellers used to gatecrash it (literally), with many others bunking in, and so the new reality was gradually accepted, particularly as the 'unfree' festivals were full of punters waiting to be parted from their cash.

The nomadic dream of rural idyll gradually gave way to the reality of being moved from noisy lay-by to squalid car park, with decent sites often blocked off by farmers and local councils. As the links with squatters and politicos became more distanced, so the mysticism of the 60s hippies, aided by reminiscence of the magical stones now out of reach, took further hold, alongside cynicism. Alienation from capitalist society increasingly expressed itself through alcoholism and heroin addiction, bringing new problems to deal with or run away from. Ghettoization increased, with the 'you've had a bath so you must be a cunt' mentality increasing.

Whilst the late 80s witnessed a decline in the anarcho-punk phenomenon, it did not disappear. The Poll Tax riot demonstrated that the anger of the punks only needed an invitation to riot to stop it being internalized and bitterly misdirected. And despite all the repression since 1985, the loss of direction, supportive links, and ghettoization, a significant travelling scene survived to see the psychedelic cavalry arrive in 1992.

e) Acid House / Rave:

When acid house parties became popularized beyond exclusive clubs with an explosion of huge warehouse parties in 1988, media trend-setters dubbed it the 'summer of love'. It soon became clear, however, that despite the squatting of venues the whole phenomena was becoming subordinate to the interests of a new breed of entrepreneur, and gradually the rave scene has tended to move from squatted warehouses and country fields to licensed venues. It is now well known that the much vaunted love did not extend to letting overheated ravers drink from taps in night club toilets when the dehydrating effects of ecstasy could be exploited to flog overpriced bottled water. The acid house / rave scene provided a perfect opportunity for a rapid accumulation of capital with little outlay, offset only by the risks involved in the illegality. As recognition of the commercial potential of the phenomena grew so free parties went into decline.

Whilst the rave scene may have permitted the opening up of a new area for commercial activity, it has not been one that established capital has been able to fully penetrate, and this is not just due to the illegality of the drugs industry which has an unprecedented cultural importance to raves. Surplus-value has instead been largely distributed amongst a new generation of petty entrepreneurs, from dealers to DJs and home-growers to laser operators, and whilst night-club owners have benefited from police repression of illegal parties, established interests in the brewing and music industries have been worried by the impenetrability of the rave scene for their products. As much of the money circulating in the rave scene becomes siphoned off by DJs and owners of sound systems and light shows etc., often to supplement their dole, at the expense of it being spent on records and CDs, the MTV-promoted grunge phenomenon has been needed to help maintain the level of the music industry's commodity capital consumed by the youth market.

As for ravers themselves, one has to consider the extent to which their lifestyle is 'alternative', if only because of the state's attempts to repress the unlicensed rave scene and possible reactions to that repression. Quite clearly ravers are not self-consciously political in the way that anarcho-punks were, because anarcho-punk's premise was a critique of the commercialism of the 'punk industry' whilst the rave scene was built on an acceptance of the commodification of squat parties.

There has, however, been something of a reaction to the crass commercialism of rave culture, although this has been predominantly mystic, seeing crude material interest as being at odds with the 'spiritual significance' of the rave high in which the 'collective consciousness of the tribe' is rediscovered, apparently. And the development of a more sober critique (apart from the practical one of bunking in to raves) has been hindered by the fact that the sound systems which provide free parties do so with equipment they have accumulated by putting on licensed raves in clubs for money. Many of these entrepreneurs reinvest their share of surplus-value but do so predominantly for the enhanced use-value of their equipment rather than because it can make them even more money. Simply enjoying the parties they put on and the status that comes with it they impose the rule of money on ravers, but not for the sake of money itself.

The recession of the early 1990s has seen youth unemployment shoot up rapidly, however, and with it the need for a lifestyle compatible with being skint. It has enabled the development of the 'eco-warriors' that have so infuriated the government through taking anti-roads protests beyond 'NIMBYism'. But alongside clauses seeking to effectively criminalize anti-roads actions, squatting, travelling and hunt-sabotage, the CJ&POA also contains clauses specifically aimed at raves. In order to understand why, it is necessary to consider the events of 1992, events that left landowners, police and MPs demanding action.

In 1992 the Exodus collective in Luton began putting on free raves that grew to attract 10,000-strong crowds. But the most significant events in the 1992 rave calendar were the free festival at Castlemorton in the Malverns and the Torpedo Town festival at Otterbourne near Twyford Down. These saw a new and exciting fusion of the rave scene with the leftovers of the travelling scene. Such a fusion posed the possibility, on the one hand, of an auto-critique of the commercialism of raves, learning from the old nomadic anarcho-punks, and a critique of soap-avoiding ghettoization on the other. Such a prospect admittedly seemed fanciful at the time given the level of mutual dislike - ravers dismissed as 'part-timers' with no respect for 'their' sites, and 'scrounging' travellers apparently confirming popular prejudices.

But what was far more significant in the short term was the fact that by coming together, sheer weight of numbers meant that each group enabled each other to defy police bans, raising the prospect that the steady process of the state's crushing of the free aspects of each genre could be put into reverse. In Otterbourne, Hampshire police repeatedly asserted that there would in no circumstances be a festival, only to have to allow one to prevent the county's arteries of commerce being clogged up by would-be revellers refusing to go home. Since then police have committed resources to a nationwide surveillance operation, hounded travellers persistently and demanded increased powers to ensure such scenarios are not repeated. With the passing of the CJ&POA such powers have been granted.

e) CJ&POA Part 5:

Following the release of the Birmingham 6, the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice was set up to find a way of solving the crisis of confidence in the British legal system. One of its central recommendations was that the right to silence be maintained; but by the time the Commission published its report the original concerns of the government had been succeeded by the need to unite the party with the 'back to basics' programme. In October 1993, after both the opposition parties had banged the 'law and order' drum at their conferences, Michael Howard gave a 'hang 'em and flog 'em' speech to the Tory party conference, presenting a 27 point law and order package which became the basis for both the Criminal Justice Bill and the Police and Magistrates Courts Bill.

As well as a relatively straightforward, if draconian, increase in the repressive powers of the state (abolishing the right to silence etc.), the proposals attacked every conceivable scapegoat that the party could agree to hate, from the young killers of Jamie Bulger (provisions for children's prisons) to paedophiles (extending the powers of police to raid premises on suspicion they may contain child pornography).

Had the CJB stuck to attacking these relatively easy targets the response would probably have amounted to little more than condemnation from the liberal establishment and social workers. But the CJB also contained Part 5 devoted almost entirely to an attack on squatters, travellers, hunt-sabs, road protesters and, importantly, ravers, and these groups have refused to be scapegoated quite so easily.

What unites these groups in such a way that they have become such hate targets of the government is that, although they may be a long way from consciously declaring war on capital, they share a common refusal of the work-ethic, of a life subordinated to wage labour. As such, they pose an alternative to the life of desperately looking for work, which must be made unattractive. But the state is not alone in not having a clear understanding of the class meaning of Part 5 of the CJ&POA; for this is something which the representatives of the opposition to the act also seem to be painfully incapable of grasping.

Part Two: From Campaign to Movement

Latent and Manifest Contradictions

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Class war or a liberal lobby? A movement to defend autonomy and subversion or an appeal for rights? Anyone who has had any involvement in the campaign against the Criminal Justice Bill, if only to the extent of going on one of the three national marches, must be aware that the opposition to the act is riven by this contradiction. 'Keep it Fluffy' or 'Keep it Spikey'? 'Kill the Bill' or 'Chill the Bill'? Communists undoubtedly know which side they are on. But this contradiction exists not just in the antagonism between the different components which make up the campaign, most famously between the media bete noire Class War and the media darlings in Freedom Network. It also runs through the hearts of many of the individuals for whom this is their first political engagement. The division exists in the contradictory things the same people have said - and, more importantly, done - in different circumstances. It is therefore worthwhile examining the basis of this contradiction, as well as taking sides, for the emergence of a new generation of rebels is dependent upon them understanding and seeking to resolve their contradictory interpretations of the world around them.

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(A) Contradictions in the Campaign

(i) Subjects and Representatives

a)Left Behind:

The retreat of parliamentary social democracy may have caused problems for Trotskyism's engagement with the opposition to the Poll Tax, but at least the Labour Party opposed the Poll Tax in parliament, enabling an argument to be made that they offered a hope of salvation worth pursuing, lobbying, pressuring etc. Orienting opposition to the CJB towards the labour movement however would quickly come up against the problem that not only did the Labour Party not oppose the CJB in parliament, but also that its leader was happy to boast that he had even suggested sections of it (the reintroduction of stop and search powers). It is clearly no surprise that the left was incapable of launching a movement against the CJB.

b) Carry on regardless:

If we understand leftism as a form of mediation, it becomes clear that the crisis of representation does not just open up new possibilities for autonomous class struggle, but also poses new problems. Social democracy provided a political form through which working class antagonism could be expressed. In order to recuperate through representation, the left had to arrange meetings as well as stitch them up, and organize demonstrations as well as police them. For revolutionaries who used to intervene in or heckle at those meetings, leaflet disrupt or attempt to riot on those demonstrations, the crisis of leftist mediation poses a dilemma. Meetings and demonstrations need to be organized in order to bring together atomized individuals so that they can become a collective force.

When the CJB was drawn up, it immediately became clear that contesting its implementation would require drawing strength from the breadth of its attack. Practical links would have to be made between the different marginalized groups affected in order that they could reinforce each others resistance. A movement would have to be forged, beginning by launching a campaign of opposition to the bill, drawing in groups, mediating between them, co-ordinating activities, organizing demonstrations etc. But with the left incapable of performing this role, who would launch a campaign against the CJB?

As we have seen, squatters and travellers have become relatively disorganized and depoliticized since the mid 1980s. Some squatters are still involved in organizing politically around squatting, and the 121 Centre in Brixton is still functioning, even if political activities are being increasingly marginalized. But in 1994, squatters were in no position to repeat their initial success of 1974, and travellers were in an even worse position. A nomadic lifestyle does not lend itself to co-ordinated resistance, and the CJ&POA's provisions allowing police to seize and destroy vehicles means that travellers would be risking their homes by leading a confrontation with the law. Leaving the struggle to those with the luxury of being able to confront the law on less perilous terrain, many travellers have been consistent with the tendency to try to escape the clutches of the state and have therefore emigrated.

The nature of hunt sabotage and anti-roads protests meanwhile lent itself to a quite different response to the challenge contained in the bill. Most of those involved in these activities justify their actions in moral terms, and it is exactly this commitment to a militant liberal ideology which has made them determined to contest the new laws. For the sake of some external morally pure referent, 'the planet' or 'innocent animals', just about any sacrifice is worth making. Thus the dominant tendency in response to the criminalization of these activities was that of a renewed determination to carry on regardless. But, laudable though this determination may be, this tendency neglected the importance of making solidaristic links, of the need to build a national campaign of opposition.

c) Advance to Go:

On the one hand the crisis of representation, and on the other the opposing tendencies amongst targeted subjects towards running away or carrying on regardless. It is these factors which have combined to allow the 'fluffies' to represent the movement against the CJ&POA; and had it not been for them there would not have been any significant campaign against the CJB, and, ironically given their opposition to (anti-hierarchical) violence, no Hyde Park riot. The main organizers behind the May 1st demo were the Advance Party, made up of the petty entrepreneurs of the rave scene who had woken up to the implications of the bill for unlicensed parties. They used the channels of communication established for organizing raves; to those not involved in the scene the demo seemed to come out of nowhere. As news reached DIY enthusiasts around the country local anti-CJB groups began to spring up, co-ordinated through the Freedom Network, and the 'fluffy' character of the campaign became established.

The connection between 'fluffy' ideology and people with a penchant for shelves from 'Do It All' might seem far fetched, but DIY refers not to this but to a relatively new cultural phenomenon. Communicated through a host of fanzines, DIY culture celebrates self-organization. It is anarcho-punk stripped of its subversive potential, with neither punk's anger nor anarchism's politics. Thus it appeals both to the (predominantly mystic) alternative ravers who reject the crass commercialism of the dominant rave scene in favour of self-organized parties (free and otherwise), and to the 'eco-reformists' in and around the Green Party who are disillusioned by its attempts at electoral respectability but who would rather celebrate recycling their rubbish, getting an allotment, and the worship of Gaia than get involved with Earth First!.

(ii) The world-view of the 'fluffy'

a) Basis of liberal ideology and its antithesis:

Fluffy ideology is merely the latest development in liberal ideology, and can be summed up as the view that society is nothing more than the aggregation of individuals. We have consistently countered this by arguing that we live in a class society, and that the struggle we are engaged in is not a question of civil liberties but a moment in the class war. The problem is that we are, each of us, an individual with our own subjectivity, and a member of a class. The contradiction between class war and liberal lobby is rooted in the contradiction of bourgeois society as a contradictory unity of the spheres of production and circulation, a society characterized by class exploitation mediated by the 'free' sale and purchase of individual labour-powers. Getting to grips with this contradiction in the movement requires grappling with the problematic of proletarian subjectivity.

As we saw when discussing the problem of reformism, proletarian subjectivity moves along a continuum between the poles of integration and transcendence. It is living activity which constitutes both the dialectic of capital - alienated subjectivity - and the counter-dialectic of class struggle - the subjectivity of the working class. Acceptance of the commodity form of labour allows the proletarian to enter the sphere of the circulation of commodities as a sovereign individual relating to other individuals through the reified world of market relations. This is the world of freedom and equality guaranteed by the rights of the individual. This is the immediate appearance of bourgeois society so beloved by its apologists. This is the basis of liberal ideology, the world of atomized citizens all equal before the law.

The only thing which is really free in this world however is money, and the only equality that of the equivalence of different activities as abstract labour. The essence of bourgeois society is class exploitation in the sphere of production, unfreedom and inequality. The appearance of bourgeois society as an aggregation of individuals is not an illusion, but an abstraction from this exploitation. Thus, despite this apparent freedom and equality we find the tendency of proletarian subjectivity towards resistance, refusal, struggle and class consciousness.

But therein lies the problematic. Whilst an individual proletarian may adopt the viewpoint of an atomized individual and act as such by him- or herself, the development of working class subjectivity, thinking and acting as a class, can only be a part of a collective process of realization. Thus working class subjectivity, the transcendence of liberalism, is not immediately given as certain autonomists and 'ultra-leftists' would have it, but must be composed out of struggle.

As workerists will tell you, the realm of production brings proletarians together, in contrast to the atomization in the realm of circulation. But it brings us together only as components of collective exploitation. To the extent that the working class is composed by capital itself, it remains fractured, as capital-in-general itself is fractured into the particular capitals which constitute it. And even within each collective labour process, the co-operative nature of the labour confronts each individual as a hostile power to the extent that it has been really subsumed by capital. Thus the development of an antagonistic working class subjectivity occurs only to the extent that divisions are overcome, whether it be through struggle within and against production (strikes etc., breaking the fragmentation of individuals joined only by assembly lines or telecommunication cables), or struggles outside of production (riots, occupations etc., breaking the atomization of individuals connected to 'communities' only by the market and ballot box). Either way, the working class develops its own unalienated collective subjectivity only through the initiation, development, inter-connection and generalization of the multiplicity of proletarian struggles towards the struggle of the proletariat.

b) Why liberalism now - an historical perspective:

The above may best be illustrated by looking at the problem historically. Given its basis in the real abstraction that is the atomized individual within bourgeois society, it should be clear that liberalism becomes transcended by the process of working class self-formation.

Conversely, an eclipse of a class offensive will inevitably see its return, particularly amongst those most atomized through this decomposition; and so it has proved. Capital's counter-offensive since the 1970s has fragmented the class. Many sites of concentration of the working class have been restructured, dispersed or closed down altogether - industrial, residential and recreational alike. Divisions have increased, between north and south, employed and unemployed, skilled and unskilled etc. Repeats from the golden age of situation comedy clearly demonstrate the extent to which working class subjectivity imposed itself on the 1970s; no Prime Minister in those days would have dreamt of calling society 'classless'. In the 1990s, far fewer people hold a class perspective, whilst a communist perspective seems to most people who encounter it to be more a matter of semi-religious faith than an expression of a real tendency within society.

The lack of a class perspective and dominance of liberal ideas within the anti-CJB campaign was amongst other things a result of the relative lack of (obvious) class struggle within the UK in recent years. The 1984/85 miners' strike was probably the last battle whose stakes were such that it demanded to be understood in terms of a war between classes rather than between a particular set of workers and their bosses. As for class struggle in the 1990s, the movement against the Gulf War presented itself in predominantly moral terms, the 1993 campaign against pit closures presented itself as a defence of the 'national interest', whilst the anti-roads movement tends to present itself as a defence of 'the planet'.

In viewing the problem of liberalism historically, however, it is also necessary to consider the weight of dominant historiography. For us, history is the history of class struggle, whilst bourgeois historians recognize only the result, not the process. The development of working class power during periods of class recomposition has often been recognized by the state in the granting of rights. Such rights, however, are not just a neutral barometer of working class pressure to be defended uncritically, since they play a role in decomposing the class as citizens. As the class eventually retreats, what remains are the rights it has won. And the bourgeois mind then interprets history in terms of the granting of rights and their most prominent individual advocates, leaving the underlying class movement unrecognized. The liberal is then left with a distorted understanding of the historical precedents to their struggle. Thus many liberals, including those in Freedom Network, look to the examples set by Gandhi and Emily Pankhurst, ignoring the class offensives which underpinned the end of colonialism in India and the granting of universal suffrage in the UK.

c) Liberalism and social positions:

The connection between liberalism and the social positions of its adherents is usually grasped in terms of them being 'middle class wankers'. Though this is undoubtedly true of supporters of Charter 88 and Liberty, and may describe the family background of many fluffies, the influence of fluffy ideology within the campaign can be better understood by a closer examination of their current positions within capitalist society. The CJ&POA Part 5 is an attack on marginal elements rejecting the conformity of the 'traditional working class'. Within its scope therefore, including as it does a clamp down on unlicensed raves, are hippy entrepreneurs who have a material interest in adopting a liberal position of defending freedom (to make money in their case, to dance in fields etc. in the case of their punters); adopting a class position would expose the tensions between those who sell and those who always buy, the personifications of the opposing extremes of commodity metamorphosis.

By far the majority in the movement, however, are young unemployed who have no material interest in obscuring class divisions. But this very position of unemployment reinforces the apparent truth of liberal ideology as the claimant exclusively inhabits the realm of circulation and exchange, experiencing only one facet of capitalism. Many in the movement relate to money only as the universal equivalent, as purchasing power, not as the face of the boss. Their income is not payment for exploitation as a component of a collective workforce, but apparently a function of their individual human needs.

Whilst the claimant's pound coin is worth every bit as much as that of the company director, the quantitative difference in the amount they have to spend becomes a qualitativeone that becomes recognized as class inequality, especially if the claimant has not chosen the dole as a preference, has family commitments, or lives in a working class community. But 'young free and single' claimants who have chosen to be on the dole, particularly if they have never worked, more so if they come from a middle class background, and if the housing benefit pays for a flat in an area shared by students, yuppies and other claimants alike, and especially if the higher echelons of a hierarchical education system have increased their sense of personal self-worth, will tend towards the one sided view of the world they inhabit that is liberalism.

Such a tendency is, of course, transformed by experience. For the individuals who engage in the collective struggles of, say, anti-roads protests, there is the possibility of moving beyond liberalism towards a critique of capitalism. To the extent that such activities remain the domain of dedicated 'cross-class' minorities however, it is more likely that a liberal viewpoint will be retained in the modified form of militant liberalism.

On the other hand, no such modification can be expected through the world of DIY culture. The collective experience of the rave, simultaneous movement to a pre-determined rhythm with spontaneous outbreaks of cheering or mass hugging, offers the illusion of unity but, once the 'E' has worn off, leaves the individual little closer to becoming a social individual with meaningful bonds than before. The experience of defending a rave against the police, on the other hand, does lend itself to the development of working class subjectivity; but our 'fluffy friends' do not seem to have involved themselves with this most positive aspect of the rave scene, preferring the 'positive vibes' of paganism, Sufism, Taoism or some other theological bullshit.

As for the other aspects of the DIY world, fanzine production often preserves atomization. Either the production of a single person, or a collection of articles with no editorial policy, it serves as a vessel for individual viewpoints to be aired unanswered; there is none of the discussion or debate leading to the development of inter-subjectivity that is required in a collective project. And to the extent that DIY culture concerns itself with grand social problems it does so by fetishizing either the power of the individual 'ethical consumer' or that of the example-setting pioneer in self-sufficiency.

The failure to recognize the need to overcome the atomization of individuals through collective struggles in which they can become social individuals, becomes, not a failure, but a virtue in the world of DIY. As a result, the liberalism of the fluffy is far worse than that of any of its predecessors.

d) Fluffy liberalism versus militant liberalism:

Many who have been on the national demonstrations may be under the illusion that the fluffies are simply the pacifists of the 1980s re-emerging from the woodwork. There are however important differences between fluffyism and the pacifism of the old peace movement. Pacifists at least recognized the state as a social force of violent coercion that needed to be confronted for 'freedom' to have any meaning. Fluffyism on the other hand takes liberalism to its logical extreme (and is even more incoherent as a result). The fluffy view of society as an aggregation of individuals denies the possibility of recognizing the state as a social force; below their suits and uniforms the bailiffs, police, property speculators, industrialists and even Michael Howard and his cohorts are just individual human beings. Fluffies assume therefore that all individuals have a common human interest. Any conflicts which arise in society can, by implication, only be the results of misplaced fears or misunderstandings.

This view underpinned the fluffies' conception of how the campaign against the CJB needed to proceed. As the CJB could only be the result of prejudice, the best way to counter it would be to demonstrate to those nice men in suits that they really had nothing to fear: that beneath the dreadlocks and funny clothes, strange ideas and new-fangled music, the marginalized community was really made up of respectable and honest human beings making a valuable if unorthodox contribution to humanity. The way forward was to overcome prejudice by demonstrating to the rest of society their reasonableness and 'positivity'. Thus in comparison to the liberalism of the pacifists, fluffyism is characterized by being not only fundamentally unconfrontational, but also supposedly apolitical. (Its obvious incoherence could be sustained only because of the political inexperience of its young adherents, the extent to which its contradictions had not been exposed through the impact of external reality.)

Two things followed directly from this conception. Firstly, as the purpose of the campaign was to provide itself with a positive self-image, the representation became more important than that which was to be represented. Attracting media attention and getting 'positive coverage' became the be all and end all of the campaign as far as the fluffies were concerned. Indeed, were it possible to get positive TV coverage of a demonstration without the hassles and risks involved in actually having one, the fluffies would no doubt have done so. The fluffy is the situationist's nightmare come true, the rarefied thought of the post modernist personified - virtual politics.

Secondly, the fluffies were initially incapable of considering the possibility that they would not persuade the men in suits not to pass the bill. Unable to think in terms of building a social movement capable of defying the law, the failure of the campaign would represent the end rather than the beginning, and, as such, was a prospect that it was best not to think about less it sap the campaign's positivity. Many of the fluffies are too young to have not paid the Poll Tax. For them there are legally enshrined rights, or nothing.

(iii) Latent contradictions in the campaign

There were a number of contradictions, some of which were immediately apparent from the start, and some which remained latent for a while. These can be considered as operating on three main levels:

a) Class struggle militants / liberals: This opposition needs little explanation. Within the groups linked under the umbrella of the Freedom Network there were coherent and organized political elements like the Oxford Solidarity Action and Brighton Autonomists. And the national demonstrations were bound to attract elements seeking an opportunity to confront the state, veterans of Trafalgar Square and Welling. Anarchists and communists, aware of the contradiction inherent in proletarian subjects waging class war being represented by fluffies, were bound to try to help the campaign escape from its liberal strait-jacket. More interesting are the contradictions which became apparent within liberalism itself.

b) Fluffy liberals / militant liberals: The campaign was represented predominantly by fluffies seeking to demonstrate to the establishment their respectability. But those groups who would become a large part of the campaign's constituents were not involved in order to demonstrate their loyalty to the status quo, but precisely because they were involved in and wished to continue social struggles attempting to subvert it on some level. The fluffies were initially primarily concerned with the 'right to party', an activity which they reasoned they would be able to show posed no threat to the interests of the establishment once the latter understood it a little better. Hunt-sabs, anti-road protesters, squatters and to a lesser extent travellers, however, all shared a common opposition to those interests.

Thus the contradiction between the militant liberals and the fluffies was that of a political versus an apolitical outlook, a collective oppositional approach versus an 'individual with contacts' media-oriented approach, and operated on the familiar level of the contradiction between subject and representation.

c) Fluffy subjects / fluffy representation: The media obsession of the fluffies meant that this contradiction between subject and representation was even felt within the ranks of the fluffies themselves. For the young raver types amongst them especially, the requirements of the campaign to present them as decent, reasonable members of society conflicted with their desire to drop out, smoke dope, take ecstacy, grow dreadlocks, dye their hair, pierce their faces and all the other things which do not fit with the media's idea of respectability. The need to appear respectable was a matter of self-denial, something which their ('new age') beliefs did not approve of; it contradicted their desire to be 'alternative', however depoliticized that lifestyle may be in comparison with that of the anarcho-punks or eco-warriors.

These three contradictions would come to the surface as the campaign became a movement. And as it became increasingly clear that, in contrast to old-fashioned leftist mediation, the fluffies would prove to be incapable of delivering anything in return for loyalty, this contradiction between subject and representation would become sharper. As it became clear that the only way forward would be to build a movement of mass defiance, this contradiction would become an openly visible rupture.

(B) The Movement: Contradictions Manifested

A complete account of all the actions which took place as the campaign against the CJB gathered momentum is well beyond the scope of this article; far too much has happened over the last year to cover everything in detail. Local demonstrations have been organized all around the country, many of which have been the biggest seen in those towns for years, and some of them have been illegal, explicitly challenging the 1986 Public Order Act. The movement has thrown up squatted social spaces in Oxford, Blackburn, Hastings, Swansea, Brighton, Huddersfield, Cardiff, London, the Isle of Wight, Nottingham, Sheffield, Lewes and Rugby. There was the invasion and disruption of Hackney Council's meeting on the use of the CJB against squatters; this, like the Hackney Homeless Festival, ended in clashes with the TSG. There was also the clash in Oxford when squatters occupied the lobby of the local nick to protest against their eviction. And there was a whole host of publicity stunts, lobbies, and media opportunities. All these events contributed to pushing the CJB to the top of the political agenda last year. The focus of this article, however, is on the contradiction within the movement between the political activities of class subversion and liberal lobbying, and this contradiction became most clearly manifest at two pivotal moments for the campaign: the national demonstrations in London on July 24th and October 9th last year.

(i) The march to Downing Street:

a) The 'Coalition': SWP jumps on the bandwagon, but can it steer it?

The May 1st demonstration last year took the left by surprise. It demanded some kind of response, if not because it demonstrated the left's redundancy then because it provided a new wave of potential recruitment fodder. The SWP, with the keenest nose for an opportunity, and a more youthful rank and file than their main rivals, were first off the mark, setting up the 'Coalition Against the Criminal Justice Bill'. This comprised various groups such as the Advance Party, Freedom Network, the Hunt Saboteurs Association and an assortment of local anti-roads campaigns (notably the No M11 Link Campaign). But it was effectively dominated by the SWP given that these other groups were relatively inexperienced in the sordid business of political manipulation and were easily outmanoeuvred. The Coalition then called a national demonstration in London for July 24th, the weekend before the CJB was expected to become law.

This attempt at leftist recuperation demanded that the campaign be oriented towards the labour movement, and given the Labour Party's position on the CJB, this would have to be orientation towards the unions. SWP cadre became involved at grass roots level, intervening in meetings of local groups, criticizing fluffyism by emphasizing the class nature of the attack, and arguing for the need to connect to other working class struggles. But any positive impact the SWP may have had on the movement was more than compensated for by the effects of its workerism, which only served to reinforce the appeal of liberalism within the movement.

During the build up to the demonstration, the RMT called a series of 24 and 48 hour signal workers' strikes which paralysed the rail network. The SWP's repeatedly stated position was that it was necessary to forge links between the two struggles. Such links would theoretically have been desirable. Besides both being instances of class struggle, the signal workers' dispute and the anti-CJB movement were clearly linked by way of the anti-roads movement.

The prospect of connecting the struggles over transport (in a more meaningful way than the hoots of tube drivers in Leytonstone being reciprocated by cheers from squatters in Claremont Road holding up the M11 link), the prospects of practical links between struggles forged through recognition of a common enemy in state and capital, was obviously one that would have been mutually beneficial.

Unfortunately, the signal workers' dispute offered no such opportunities as it was tightly controlled by the RMT as a signal workers' dispute and nothing more. Aside from a couple of arson attacks on signal boxes, there were no autonomous initiatives by the signal workers for others to support, and not even picket lines in many places. Under pressure from its left wing, the RMT executive agreed to call a national demonstration to support the 4,000 strikers, but did nothing to build it; only 1,500 turned up and about 90% of these were members of Trot groups. And the rally at the end of the march was exclusively for RMT signal workers. The dispute was sewn up by the RMT to such an extent that the making of links could only be rhetorical.

This did not dissuade the SWP, however. In part this was due to their willingness to carry the dead-weight of unionism, doing the donkey-work for the RMT executive whilst pleading for it to call an all-out strike or call out other railway workers. But mainly it was due to their conception of the how the struggles were related.

Firstly, the SWP argued that the CJB was aimed primarily at striking workers (which is why it was a class issue), and the movement should therefore be defending its most important flank. Secondly, the link had to be made with the signal workers because, as a workplace struggle, it could succeed where the anti-CJB movement couldn't. Telling the main targets of the legislation that they were a mere smoke screen for the target that really mattered was bad enough, but telling them that they were effectively incapable of fighting it was an abject lesson in theoretical disempowerment:

We need to turn our efforts towards the trade unions and workplaces - for two reasons. First because it is at work that most of the people threatened by the bill come together. Second, because it is at work that we have most power.

('What We Think', Socialist Worker, July 23rd)

This was the SWP's underlying message to proletarians refusing to allow their lives to be subordinated to wage labour: 'you are powerless', ('get a job!'). Given the choice between a 'class line', subsuming the struggle to that of the signal workers, on the one hand and the 'Defend Diversity - Defend Dissent' slogan of Liberty on the other, it is not hard to see why the appeal of liberalism was reinforced by the SWP's workerism. Besides which, there is nothing like seeing a long line of leftist hacks holding their character armour up to their chests, all shouting 'this week's Socialist Worker...', to make you feel like reaffirming your individual autonomy. And for those who couldn't quite envisage the signal workers toppling the government before it had managed to pass the CJB, the naive optimism of the fluffies seemed more attractive than the obvious conclusions to be drawn about a movement which could have no workplace presence.

Nevertheless, until the signal workers dispute was finally settled, the SWP tried hard to win the heart and mind of the movement. Their main opponents in this battle for ideological hegemony were the fluffies, particularly their vanguard - the Freedom Network.

b) Keep it Fluffy - Go to Jail:

The Freedom Network started out as a non-hierarchical network between groups co-ordinated through the 'Cool Tan' office in Brixton. Within a short period of time, however, the pressures arising from being the point of contact between the network on the one hand, and the media and liberal establishment (Liberty, Charter 88) on the other, led to the London co-ordinators becoming the voice of the network. As they came to accept the position of representing the movement, so their commitment to fluffyism - and to ensuring its hegemony over the movement - became an increasing problem.

Following the initial success of May 1st, the Freedom Network sought to maintain the momentum of the campaign, but virtually had to be tricked by the SWP into endorsing plans for the national demonstration on July 24th. In the meantime, they pressed ahead with their own plans for escalating the movement, resulting in Operation Emily and Operation Democracy RIP. Operation Emily was considered a great success. Twenty or so people dressed up in Edwardian costumes and chained themselves to railings outside parliament outnumbered by the watching journalists; and hey presto - as much media coverage as May 1st with 24,980 less potential trouble makers! Operation Democracy RIP was an even more sickening attempt to gain 'positive media coverage': a funeral procession as far from positing the death of democracy as the coffin-bearers were from comprehending that the content of democracy is the atomizing dictatorship of money.

The fluffies immersed themselves in the hard work of representation - the production of pathetic media spectacles, liaising with representatives of the liberal establishment, the press and other campaign groups, co-ordinating the flow of information etc. But an early sign that their ability to impose the politics of fluffyism could be threatened by those they sought to represent occurred at Twyford Down on July 2nd. Local fluffies organized a mass trespass of the M3 extension prior to its opening, and a couple of thousand people turned up, including other fluffies, eco-warriors, travellers and some lefties. But whilst its billing gave the impression that the organizers intended a confrontational exercise in direct action, they had in fact arranged for the trespass to be a largely symbolic affair culminating in a media stunt; an effigy burning for the benefit of invited journalists.

Many of the trespassers on the other hand had different ideas. The numbers there gave the crowd a subversive potential whose actualization had an irresistible appeal, and some small groups set about trying to trash the finished motorway (no easy task) by stuffing rocks down the drains, whilst others jumped up onto security vehicles. Most people were content at this stage to be simply trespassing, however, and continued to march up the hill, at the top of which the crowd would come to a standstill and be confronted with a choice of fundamental importance.

The organizers had halted the march, holding hands and dancing round to their irritating anthem ,'we are the new people, we are the old people, we are the same people, stronger than before', attempting to offer a celebration of the crowd's potential as a sop for preventing its realization. They wanted the crowd to return the way it had come in order to conduct the spectacle of the effigy burning, and they certainly did not want the crowd to carry on down the other side of the hill where potential 'negative press' lay waiting to sabotage the occasion. In that direction stood a thin blue line of police and beyond it the A33, the congested artery the Down had been bisected to alleviate.

Decision time; a spectacular memorial to a defeated struggle by continuing to trespass on an unopened road that the police clearly did not give a shit about because little harm could be done, or an easy confrontation with a clearly inadequate police presence in order to blockade the functioning road beyond it. Hampshire police had obviously been relying on the fluffy cops and the cops in people's heads, and once their arguments had been defeated it was relatively easy to breach their line. Again a long pause, as the assertion of collective power by blocking the road required someone confident enough that others would follow to step out in front of the traffic. But the realization that the road was the easiest way back to liquid refreshment meant that the plunge was taken and the best part of two thousand people piled onto the road. The feeling of collective empowerment, in stark contrast to the feeling of vulnerability felt by the individual pedestrian, was immense. The police were powerless to intervene as the crowd danced its way to Winchester to the rhythm of bongos, chants of 'kill the bill', 'no more roads' and the syncopated 'smash the Criminal Justice Bill'. Would the fluffies be able to contain such energy when 50,000 came together on the streets of London?

As the July 24th demonstration approached, the Freedom Network began to worry about 'their' mass spectacle being 'hijacked' in a similar way. Confused by its rhetoric, not understanding that they are sheep in wolf's clothing, they thought the SWP was gearing up for a confrontation with the police, a scenario which had to be avoided at all costs for their 'respectability strategy' to have any chance of success. So the Freedom Network decided to make sure the march would pass off uneventfully by providing fluffy stewards, 'Chill the Bill' placards, 'Non-Violence' stickers, and distribution on the day of the infamous 'Keep it Fluffy' leaflet.

c) The 'Mob' Storms Downing Street?

The tension between the SWP and Freedom Network became increasingly clear as the date of the demonstration approached. But this opposition between 'class politics' and 'fluffyism' is not the contradiction between class struggle and liberalism that we are concerned with. The opposition between Freedom Network and the SWP was primarily ideological, a struggle for representative hegemony. Both wanted the demonstration to be a media spectacle, but disagreed as to the particular nature of the image. Neither wanted to see the development of autonomous working class subjectivity that is a proletarian crowd realizing itself in confronting its enemy. Both these groups share a vision of social change which depends on 'the mob' being kept in check. And contrary to the sensationalist reports which appeared in the tabloid press, this development of collective subjectivity was successfully limited; there was no concerted attempt to storm Downing Street.

The coming together of 50,000 diverse proletarians in opposition to government legislation does encourage a sense of solidarity, and to that extent is a necessary step beyond the usual atomization of bourgeois society. But unless the crowd acts as a collective force, the development of collective subjectivity is limited. When the potential goes unrealized, when the crowd simply marches from A to B along an approved route in order to hear boring speeches before dispersing, the collectivity is little more than a collection of atoms, like an inert gas. It is when the crowd actsto impose its power on an external barrier that such atomization is overcome, releasing the energy of molecular bonding like the act of combustion. It must act against that which tries to keep it divided - capital and its state form - for its potential to be realized. And on July 24th that did not happen to a sufficient degree.

The SWP headed the march, proudly revelling in the thought of all those photographers capturing the image of copies of 'the paper' and Socialist Worker placards being brandished beneath the RMT banner. Some way behind this leftist contingent, a group of about a hundred or so stopped outside the gates of Downing Street, and perhaps a dozen of these attempted to either pull the gates down or climb over them. But this small section of the crowd remained relatively isolated from the main body of the march, which continued to file past. Indeed, had the ornamental gates actually given way this relatively small 'mob' would have been hammered by the riot police, a point later underlined when it was revealed in The Observer that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner had been prepared to authorize the use of plastic bullets, for the first time on mainland Britain, if the crowd had penetrated Downing Street.

That this section of the crowd was isolated was partly due to the 'fluffy stewards'. They, along with the police, encouraged the main body of the march to keep moving; some stewards took their ideological presuppositions to their logical conclusion by becoming 'pacifist police', not only remonstrating with those outside the gates but in some cases actually removing masks to expose faces to the security cameras! But the isolation of combatants was not primarily due to the hold of these fluffies on the march. Indeed no-one took the ridiculous advice of the 'Keep it Fluffy' leaflet to heart by holding hands around the 'trouble makers', let alone sitting down or adopt the 'doormat' tactic. In fact, most of the demonstration took neither the side of 'the mob' or of the 'pacifist police'; they simply remained spectators. They were not compelled to recognize themselves in either collective identity, neither the force of negation nor reaction. And whilst many in the crowd were sympathetic to some of the ideas of thefluffies, this decision not to join in was not so much a result of a firm commitment to all the practical implications of fluffy politics so much as the police tactics on the day.

There was little visible police presence on the march. The favourite targets of animal rights activists, McDonald's and Boots, had small numbers of police outside, but there were no riot police on view. Those in Whitehall were in withdrawn positions initially; there were none stationed outside the gates of Downing Street. There had obviously been a decision made to adopt a low profile in order not to provoke any trouble. When the gates began to give way the police sought to distract the crowd by making several limited forays from behind the gates on the opposite side of Whitehall, but having learnt the lessons of the Poll Tax riot took considerable care not to provoke the rest of the march. Aftereach foray, they retreated, allowing the march to continue, and leaving the would-be rioters with little alternative but to rejoin it.

The events of July 24th indicated that whilst many in the movement preferred the ideological appeal of liberalism to the dogma of Leninism, they had no commitment to the practical necessities of fluffyism. Nothing happened on the march to force it to realize its collective identity as a force of negation - no confrontation occurred that forced it to realize its class subjectivity. But there are two sides in this battle. The state was legislating against class autonomy, and, whether the movement recognized itself in class terms or not, if the movement continued in the direction of mass defiance of the law, and if that legislation was going to be imposed, the state would have to put on a show of force sooner or later. If it chose to attack the movement rather than back down, it could intimidate, divide and disperse it. But it could just as easily help to compose it as a force of working class subjectivity - it could provoke a riot!

(ii) Hyde Park '94 - Stuff the Law!

a) Build up to the demonstration:

The Coalition called another demonstration for October 9th. Over the two months before the demonstration there were, however, significant changes affecting those competing for representative hegemony. The other groups in the Coalition effectively withdrew, pissed off at being continually outmanoeuvred, leaving the SWP in sole charge of the organization. But at the same time as the SWP found itself being handed the reins of the movement it was effectively withdrawing itself from it. The party had never felt comfortable operating on such relatively alien territory, a playing field better suited to anarchism than Leninism; and as they belatedly realized that the signal workers' dispute was going nowhere, the SWP found that it had nothing left to say, and has been struggling for direction ever since.

The fluffies on the other hand were having a field day, and not just because their main competitors were withdrawing their bid. The events at Downing Street had done their credibility no harm whatsoever. Only a small minority, who had been critical of them in the first place, knew how disgracefully the fluffy stewards had behaved, siding with the police against the movement. The fluffies were in charge of the flow of information within the movement, and many non-fluffy liberals would side with the fluffies to the extent that they knew what had occurred.

But most of the movement did not know any of the details of the confrontation, having mostly found out about it through the extensive media coverage. And it was this fact, that the Downing Street clash had sparked off intense media interest in the movement, that put the fluffies in such a strong position. Throughout August and September the fluffies were in their element, giving interviews to the more liberal newspapers or lefty magazines like the New Statesman, appearing on radio chat shows, being invited to address meetings etc. The trouble outside Downing Street paradoxically gave a massive boost to the representative opportunities for the fluffies. They became media darlings.

Time was ticking away, however. The House of Lords mauled the bill somewhat, slowing down its passage, but the day it would be passed to the Queen for Royal Assent (unless her humanity - beneath the crown etc. - led her to opt for a constitutional crisis instead) was drawing nearer. The hunt sabs were gearing up for confrontation once the fox-hunting season began again, and the No M11 protesters were getting ready for the big showdown at Claremont Road. Whilst the fluffies hared around getting 'good press' but going nowhere fast, the realization that confrontation with the forces of the state was going to be inevitable was gradually infusing the rest of the movement.

b) Ravers' revenge:

The atmosphere of the October 9th march was in many ways similar to that of the previous one; lots of percussion instruments and whistles, most people simply intent on enjoying themselves. The police on the other hand were more visible than before, with concentrations of riot cops tooled up along the route. And they would be needed.

Despite the fact that most of the crowd were not seeking a confrontation, their desire to have fun conflicted with the state's need to regulate that fun, and their determination to dance led to a confrontation prefiguring those posited by the legislation against unlicensed raves. The Coalition organizers had agreed with the police beforehand that music in the park would be limited. But would the crowd be content with speeches from boring and irrelevant liberals from the labour and civil liberties movement, welcoming the anti-CJB movement (in so far as they could recuperate it)?

Many didn't bother listening to them, grouping instead around small pockets of music. But these poxy rigs were clearly inadequate for a celebration of unity, for 100,000 or so demonstrators to dance together. The means of production for such a mass rave were arriving, however. Two lorries with sound systems on the back were bringing up the rear of the march, moving down Park Lane to Marble Arch, surrounded by a throng of bodies dancing in the sun. And they clearly intended to carry on into the park, in defiance of what the organizers had agreed (possibly for the all-night rave we had heard rumours about).

Having publicly stated that they were banned from the park the police had little alternative but to try to stop the sound systems at Marble Arch, blocking their progress with police vans. Perhaps a riot could have been averted had they simply allowed the ban to be violated, but this approach carries with it inherent dangers as well, encouraging a lack of respect for the rule of law. If they weren't going to stop the sound systems at Marble Arch what would happen to the legislation against raves - would it be taken as a serious deterrent or mocked disdainfully? Where and when would a line be drawn saying 'thus far and no further'? As it turned out the police did have to let the sounds into the park. The dancing crowd did not bow to their authority and disperse, but grew as people in the park realized what was happening. A few missiles were thrown and riot police were deployed, along with horses. But the situation remained a stand-off; the dancing continued in the street, on the lorries, on bus shelters, and even on top of a police van. Faced with such determination, and not wanting to provoke a major public order 'problem' given the size of the crowd, the police decided to back down. The lorries edged their way into the park and although people pulled crowd barriers into the road to guard its rear the police made no effort to provoke further trouble.

c) Riot! Riot! I Wanna Riot!

That despite this retreat the riot still happened was due to the moment of truth in the police's 'anarchist conspiracy' theory. While most of the crowd celebrated the sound system victory by partying, content to have got their music, a determined minority sought to push the situation further. Class War were no doubt off competing with the SWP and the other leftists in the paper-selling stakes, but some 'class warriors' were pelting police vans with missiles from inside the park. They could have been squatters or travellers angry that the outlawing of their lifestyles was imminent, or just veterans of past battles in Trafalgar Square with an intense hatred of the police. Or they could indeed have been anarchists or communists who reckoned the situation was ripe because the movement had discovered the important moment of truth in fluffy ideology - that beneath its air of invincibility the police force is just made up of individual human beings, strong as an organized collective force, weak in disorganized isolation, and far from invincible when faced with vastly superior numbers on a terrain not of its choosing.

Whatever, the police, seeing that it was only a tiny minority, chose to confront the missile throwers rather than pullback their vans. Their initial foray into the park was brief. The small deployment of police horses was insufficient to take on those who were attracted by the disturbance, and they were quickly driven from the park by a jubilant mob. But they came back into the park - public order had to be reasserted. Dancing was one thing, but trashing police vans and attacking mounted cops was not something which could be tolerated. And this time they came back in greater force. Units of police horses backed up by baton-wielding cops on foot charged into the park in an effort to disperse the crowd. But the crowd would simply scatter, and then regroup, and then charge back at the police.

Having defied the police over the sound systems a large body of the crowd had already developed a sense of unity. The park was their space, autonomous space. The dancing was a celebration of that collective autonomy, and the police intrusion was a violation of it. By charging the crowd the police only served to further undermine the atomization within it, and each time it refused to disperse it became less an aggregation of independent citizens and more a collective subject.

Proletarians who had been relatively uncritical of the fluffies, who had lobbied for rights, became composed as antagonistic working class subjectivity - defiant and determined to drive the police back out of the park. And this it did, by sheer weight of numbers. Weapons were scarce, although a few resourceful individuals showed great initiative in inventing ways to satisfy this newly produced need (empty tins filled with sand, smashed up park benches and litter bins for example). And a few individuals showed remarkable bravery in leading some of the attacks. But the overwhelming characteristic of the riot was the number of anti-CJB campaigners who showed class solidarity and, one for all and all for one, forced the police to retreat.

When the police were successfully driven out of the park, another stand-off ensued. The police were on one side of the railings and the rioters the other. The police were unable to come over the railings without getting hammered, and the crowd showed no desire to try either, content to use the railings as a traditional 'barricade', a boundary marking the autonomous zone it had reclaimed.

Dancing, smoking, drinking, watching the fire breathers; the atmosphere was unlike recent riot situations in that the territory the police wanted to retake was being held relatively easily and it was possible to gradually relax and enjoy the occasion. The 'rinky dink' bicycle-powered sound system arrived to try to diffuse the crowd's joyous anger, but merely managed to provide audible accompaniment to the rebellious revelry under the trees.

And, with time to look around and reflect, identifying friends and familiar faces beneath hoods and masks, it became clear that this crowd was demonstrating that the contradiction between class war and liberalism was not simply one of different people, 'militants' and 'liberals', with different ideas. It was also one of proletarians who had reflected their relative atomization in their liberal arguments now reflecting the extent to which it had been overcome in the collective activity of rioting. Bourgeois ideology and the active negation of bourgeois society as dialectical opposites within the same individual subjectivity.

d) Reflection:

During the hangover which follows an intoxicating experience such as this it becomes easier to assess the limitations of what has been achieved. The riot has not swelled communist ranks by 100,000, nor did it transform the nature of the movement overnight.

For starters perhaps only 5 or 10% of the crowd actually took part in the riot. Not having experienced the riot themselves, those who had not taken part were far more vulnerable to the dominant competing interpretations of the events. And the rioters themselves dispersed to return to 'normal life', albeit with a heightened awareness of the shallowness of its roles. After experiencing its active negation, returning to the reified world of bourgeois society is like finding oneself on the set of a soap opera where the other actors will not admit that they are playing cameo roles and are seemingly unaware that they could invent their own characters instead. As the memory fades the sense of separation from the cameo diminishes, and resignation to the boundaries of this stage set, where social connections are mediated by money but where the semblance of life contains certain guarantees, appears an easier option than continually trying to shake the other actors.

To the extent that a 'community riot' actually succeeds in creating a community, collective subjectivity may be preserved by the sharing of experiences and the desires they gave rise to. The problem of decomposition is far greater following a riot like that in Hyde Park. Many combatants will have returned to 'communities' in which there is a greater awareness of the frustrations and aspirations of the inhabitants of Albert Square or Ramsey Street than of real neighbours.

The TV and newspapers will have screamed 'scum!' at them, repeating the police assertion that the riot was the result of deliberate manipulation by 'violent hate-mongers'. If they returned to a local anti-CJB group they were likely to have been outnumbered by non-combatants bemoaning the 'tragedy' of the riot, exchanging stories of how this or that 'innocent bystander' got truncheoned by the police. To the extent that our rioter finds him- or herself isolated in the face of this barrage, it becomes easier to cling to the explanation of the organizers than to defend the class position that the riot was a good thing. Such logic is class logic, a collective logic, and its voice sounds strange when entering into arguments whose terms of reference are limited to the continued existence of bourgeois society.

Just as an individual subject may contradict his or her liberal ideology by developing working class subjectivity in collective struggle, so this process of class recomposition is subject to the counter-tendency of decomposition and fragmentation. The Hyde Park riot allowed a few more proletarians to glimpse the possibilities of the life of the truly social individual. But as these social individuals returned to the privations of bourgeois individuality, so the dominant ideas in the movement could reassert themselves.

(iii) 'CIA Week': Meeting the Act Head On

Only ten days after the events at Hyde Park, a lobby of parliament organized by the Coalition was taken as another opportunity to confront the Met. A mini-riot ensued, with bottles and sticks thrown at the police, railings destroyed and fire-crackers used against police horses, before it was defused by a police withdrawal and Coalition stewards taking over from the absent fluffies. During the same period, there were also many opportunities for the fluffies to argue on the radio or TV shows like Kilroy that no, the legislation was not necessary (for some undefined but universally accepted 'common good').

Thus the development of working class subjectivity neither reached 'critical mass' nor was completely fragmented; the movement continued, and contained within it the same contradictions.

On the day the bill became an act, the No M11 Link Campaign organized a mass trespass of motorway construction sites, and the following day a publicity stunt on the roof of the houses of parliament: two actions which oscillated around the pivot rather than expressed the poles of the basic contradiction.

The No M11 Campaign were also involved with a number of other groups (hunt sabs, youth CND, Freedom Network and others) in organizing a week of actions, in and around London, designed to publicly defy the new act. The week was intended both to warn the authorities and to encourage potential targets of the legislation of our intention to intensify our activities rather than curtail them; it was hoped that, in the face of large numbers of people participating in each others campaign actions, the police would be reluctant to make arrests under the new act. Dubbed 'CIA (Criminal Injustice Act) week', most of the actions failed to achieve quite the participation or the co-operation between different groups that was hoped for. The highlight of the week was perhaps the trespass / rooftop demonstration of Michael Howard's new house in Kent, which combined clever direct action, taking the police completely by surprise, with publicity stunt. However, most of the actions that week can be considered successful in that the police were largely unwilling to arrest people using the new laws when faced with mass defiance; clearly they did not want 'trouble' after their recent disastrous intervention at that other CJB/CJA demo at Hyde Park.

But whatever happened in 'CIA week', what really mattered was whether, after the initial fuss had died down, the movement would prove to have had any lasting effect in reinforcing the areas of autonomy and subversive struggles that needed to be defended against renewed assault, armed with more repressive legislation, by the state. Would the movement go forward with the same spirit of determination and resistance that characterized the intentions of those who wanted to meet the new act head on? Could the movement meet the challenge of continued resistance, or would the mundane reality of the act signal the decomposition of the movement?

Part Three: Into The Void

From Single Issue Campaign to Anti-Capitalist Movement?

(i) The Movement

Although the CJ&POA has only been law for 5 months now, and some sections of it have yet to be implemented, it seems fair to say that to a limited extent the movement has risen to the challenge; it has not crumbled in the face of the law. But there have been significant developments.

a) The 'Coalition':

The Coalition has organized two mass trespasses, at Chequers (the Prime Minister's residence in Buckinghamshire) and Windsor Castle, ostensibly to challenge clause 70 of the act against trespassory assembly. But unlike the trespass at Michael Howard's place, these have been pre-arranged with the full knowledge of the police; and with the SWP having done little to build them, even failing to mobilize significant numbers of its own cadre, there have been insufficient numbers to pose any real threat to the large contingents of police on standby.

SWP stewards have had some difficulty getting 'trespassers' to stick to public footpaths; at Chequers the SWP agreed with the police to proceed along the Ridgeway footpath, i.e. a public right of way, but were ignored by elements who mistakenly thought the whole point of the exercise was to trespass, thereby challenging the police to use the new law. But these stage-managed events have been at best publicity exercises, at worst little more than cynical recruitment exercises.

The Coalition is now little more than a classic front organization. With each event, more of the movement becomes disillusioned with it, with the result that each trespass or demonstration produces diminishing returns for the party. Another national demonstration cannot be ruled out, but it is equally likely that the SWP will disentangle itself from the movement completely in favour of involvement in one of the various public sector disputes which are looming, where they would be on a more comfortable terrain. The 'pressure the union leadership' position would find a more receptive audience amongst nurses, teachers or civil servants than road protesters and ravers, and the movement as a whole would lose one of its national foci.

b) The Fluffies:

Meanwhile the fluffies have entered 'the void', the period after the passing of the law, the future which they had considered only in their dystopian nightmares where even family picnics would be broken up by marauding riot police. As they have done so, the latent contradiction within the fluffy tribe - identified earlier in terms of subject and representation - has come to the fore and is leading to something of a parting of ways.

There is rumoured to be a division within the Freedom Network, between those who see the struggle against the CJ&POA as essentially over, and who are arguing that attention should now be turned to the next civil rights lobby, and those more attracted towards maintaining opposition by engaging in defiance of the law. And this division is confirmed to some extent at local level. The most anti-proletarian fluffies, those for whom there was less of a contradiction in presenting themselves as upright citizens, are now orienting themselves towards working with Liberty and Charter 88 or green reformism, and are becoming less relevant to the remainder of the movement.

Those fluffies who have rejected this approach have not done so because they have suddenly developed a critique of the right-on ideology of the liberal bourgeois establishment. Not surprisingly most remain uncritical of the strategy of challenging certain sections of the CJ&POA in the European Court of Human Rights or lobbying for a written constitution (remaining critical only of criticism itself).

But instinctively most fluffies are not prepared to dissolve the movement and wait for deliveries from on high. Despite arguing that we are all just individuals they have found themselves as part of a social movement and do not want to return to their previous atomization. As a result, many are taking their slogans of DIY more seriously at last.

For some, who are still obsessed with the media image, this has meant concentrating on self-media production like Undercurrents , an alternative video news service produced by 'Small World' (a non-profit making organization committed to supporting liberal campaign groups). The democratization of the image enabled by the camcorder revolution has created its own problems, and not just the security risks posed by cameras in situations of confrontation with the police. Even in situations where video evidence is more likely to be of use to the defence than the prosecution, such as on NVDA actions, the presence of cameras creates the feeling that even in the act of negation one is still playing a role on the stage set of reification, only producing an image of negation and not its substance. Others still are more interested in looking after the flow of information in order to create the impression of a dynamic movement at the expense of organizing direct action, a strange interpretation of the 'Deeds not Words' slogan that defines the group.

But the majority of Brighton's fluffies, who previously declared themselves apolitical and non-confrontational but were also more committed than some to an alternative lifestyle defined by opposition to dominant values, are now moving towards a commitment to direct action. They have remained with the movement by moving from a position of just lobbying for legal rights to one of defying the law as well: from playing the 'upright democratic citizens' card to engaging with the anti-roads movement's refusal of the democratic process.

And it is worthwhile reviewing further how far many of these people have come in moving towards the positions of militant liberalism. When the campaign started up, it was the first engagement in any form of political activity for many, and early meetings would often be plagued by the mysticism that some of the 'alternative ravers' brought along with them from the scene. There would be proposals to chant 'Om' together on the beach to increase the psychic energy of the group, reports that mediums had been consulted to ensure 'the spirits' would be on side, and reassurances that the 'little people' were behind us. But involvement in even a limited campaign rapidly demonstrated the inadequacy of these ideas, as just organizing a picnic or benefit gig necessitated a level of collaboration between humans that exposed the limits of the spiritual world.

The fluffy ideology may not be considered that much of an advance, but despite it many people helped to organize political demonstrations or open squats for the first time. In doing so they have slowly begun to move from a definition of 'alternative' in terms of ideas, to one defined through activity; negatively by the refusal of work, and positively by involvement in an oppositional movement. They have been exposed to the arguments of more experienced squatters, environmental activists, leftists and even communists. And now that the CJB has become law, fluffy ideology is itself being transformed somewhat as the fluffies embrace overtly political actions. The commitment to non-violence is maintained, but even this becomes less absolute in the face of state brutality.

c) Dispersal?

The extent to which it is possible to speak of 'a movement' as opposed to 'the movements' is a function of the extent to which those struggles are linked, not just by virtue of having been legislated against, but by interconnections through which both information and people flow. The Coalition is both uninterested in and incapable of performing the role of national co-ordination, and it would seem that he Freedom Network are disengaging themselves from the movement.

Filling the vacuum is the SchNews team in Brighton's 'Justice?' (sic) group which receives information from other local groups as well as the Advance Party, Road Alert, Hunt Saboteurs Association and others, producing a weekly news-sheet for national distribution which details the latest from the various struggles. From this information, it is clear that whilst the movement has gone into decline in some places, local anti-CJB groups are still going strong where they are - or have been - more closely connected to the various struggles attacked by the CJ&POA.

Those groups such as Brighton which set up squatted social centres seem to have benefited both from the number of people such centres brought into the orbit of the movement and the unifying effect that resisting evictions ultimately had. In certain places, proximity to anti-roads protests has allowed momentum to be maintained; similarly, in Cardiff, the opposition to the Cardiff Bay barrage development has provided a focus for consolidation.

Thus given that the movement as a whole is now little more than the sum of its interconnected parts we must now interrogate them in turn.

(ii) The Movements

a) Squatting Movement:

At the time of writing, not all of the anti-squatting provisions of the act have been implemented. But the 'protest squats' the movement has thrown up give some hope that squatting in this country could develop in the direction of the continental squatting scene.

Squats in much of continental Europe have not had the legal protection enjoyed by squats in this country under the 1977 Criminal Law Act. As a result, their survival has depended on their ability to defy the law by force, either being heavily fortified with squatters well armed to contest the eviction, or by having sufficient local support which can be mobilized onto the streets to pose a public order headache for the authorities. European squatters have therefore had to be more organized and politicized than British squatters, who have tended to rely on their legal rights. But, as these rights are removed, squatters in Britain will have to overcome their fragmentation and recompose themselves as a social force if they are to continue to squat. If this is to happen, squatted social centres will play a crucial role. If squatters choose not to coalesce in mass residential squats, for understandable reasons, then social spaces where they can connect and organize anti-bailiff solidarity will become essential.

The squatted social centres thrown up by the movement have had both similarities and differences to the social centres which provide the basis for autonomous organization in places like Italy. They have been characterized by expressing the contradictions inherent in the movement. The Courthouse squat in Brighton fell between the stools of a centre for a 'community of struggle' and a 'community arts centre', as it was forced both to meet the needs of the movement'sparticipants and satisfy the obsession with gaining positive representation.

Overtly political activities - like workshops held on the continental squatting movement, prisoner support and contradictions in the anti-roads movement, and meetings to discuss the groups activities and direction - competed for space with poetry readings, Tai Chi, massage, cinema, drumming workshops and art displays etc. But this division was at least an expression of the differing needs of the movement. The publicity stunt with Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes appearing as a prosecution witness in a mock trial of the government, the 'no drink or drugs policy' (which no-one observed), and the argument against resisting the eviction, are just three out of many instances which demonstrated the extent to which, for the sake of representation, the fluffies tried to present an image which contradicted their own needs.

The eviction of the Courthouse was resisted, however, if only to the extent of using barricades and sealing off the roof area in order to slow the bailiffs down. But given the previous fragmentation of the squatting scene this is at least a start, and there has been other bailiff resistance since then. This recomposition could continue if it is not undermined by the idea, held by some fluffies and reinforced by both police statements and press coverage, of a difference between 'good squatters' (who are 'creative', middle class, and do up the buildings they squat) and 'bad squatters' (who aren't and don't). But, importantly, many of the participants, through their involvement in the squat, have developed both a need for space free from the clutches of capital - where they can socialize without it being subordinated to organized leisure entailing mass consumption of some commodity or another - and the beginnings of a recognition of what it is that stands between them and the fulfilment of that need: the organized power of the state.

Far from having crushed squatting, the CJ&POA may have breathed new life into the movement which, by refusing to allow basic human needs to be subordinated to the power of money, prefigures the day when everyone will be able to live in their own cathedral.

b) Anti-Roads Movement:

By leafleting the national demonstrations and encouraging people to come to parties afterwards, the No M11 Link Campaign was able to draw significant numbers to the showdown at Claremont Road. By the time the law was passed in late October, the campaign was centred on defending this squatted street from the Department of Transport. In preparation for the eviction, rooftop towers and walkways were constructed, along with tree houses and street barricades cleverly disguised as works of art and thus blending in with the explosion of colour and creativity which made this car-free street such an island in the grey sea of east London.

The urban setting of this campaign, dealing with the impact of road building on daily life (housing, health and the human environment) meant that it became relatively unplagued by the Donga-style mysticism which so afflicted the Twyford Down campaign. The resistance to the eviction of Claremont Road was easily the high point of the anti-roads movement to date. It took the state 4 days to retake the street in an operation which cost £2 million and involved over 700 police with dozens of bailiffs and security guards. The tactics of withdrawing to rooftops or 'locking on' in vulnerable positions are not without limits, however. Whilst the whole eviction may have taken 4 days, the police managed to retake the actual tarmac and pavement in little over an hour. This left people cut off inside squats, in tree houses and on the main tower in siege conditions, many with insufficient food and water or warm clothing and, after a while, no electricity. Such conditions breed the martyrdom syndrome, with divisions and recriminations as a result.

While the eviction of Claremont Road was not actually prevented, the effects of the resistance - on top of more than a year of direct action against the building of the link road - need to be judged in the wider context of the government's roads programme as a whole. The costs of this eviction, and of the security as a whole over the past year (reported to be £6 million), will have a bearing on future road building schemes. Projections to be fed into the Department of Transport's cost-benefit analyses and contractors' bids will be affected, and schemes where the economic advantages are at present marginal could therefore be shelved.

But the most important point, for this article anyway, is the fact that the state was unwilling to use those provisions of the CJ&POA which were explicitly drafted with road protesters in mind. None of the 'aggravated trespassers' were even arrested let alone charged under the act; neither was the new offence of trespassory assembly evoked. The scale of the resistance, in combination with its timing, occurring so soon after the Hyde Park riot, seems to have produced a recognition that using the CJ&POA could have created more problems than it was designed to solve.

But this raises the question as to who actually made this decision; simply referring to a retreat by the state glosses over the fact that, despite cross-party support in parliament, the state is far from united over the act. The police, and screws for that matter, hate 'their boss' Michael Howard. Indeed, there are a number of reasons for this division opening up within the state between the police and parliament. Firstly, by making previously civil offences into criminal ones, the workload of the police could be significantly increased; this, at a time when many forces are facing Treasury driven cutbacks, means an unwelcome intensification of work. Secondly, and particularly following the Hyde Park riot, the police recognize that the legislation could force them into more situations of conflict, both exposing them to more risks and increasing resentment of them. In short, the police see much of this legislation as serving the self-interests of the government whilst leaving them to pay the price. Given this, it may be more accurate to say that it was police discretion which meant that the law was not used at Claremont Road.

In the last issue of Aufheben, we devoted considerable attention to the contradiction between the class struggle against roads and the liberal ideology held by many of its participants. Although some of the most active elements in the No M11 Link Campaign did have a critique of capitalism and democracy, for many in the campaign a recognition of the objective basis of the campaign was still sorely lacking. It is vital to recognize how ideas and practice are related, however, in order to grasp how the development of an anti-capitalist perspective may emerge. There was a degree of local support for the No M11 Campaign, especially at certain times when the struggle was in Wanstead, less so as it shifted into Leytonstone. But more often than not, protesters would invade construction sites to find themselves outnumbered by potentially violent security guards. In this situation of numerical disadvantage, notions of class solidarity count for little. Playing the game of non-violence and hoping the rules are respected by the opposition seemed the best way of escaping a good kicking. The appeal for police to 'do their job even handedly' by protecting your 'right to protest', is at least in part a result of the weakness of the movement in relation to the violence of the road builders' protectors. Unfortunately the tactic of non-violence tends to encourage the adoption of a principled pacifism, to the detriment of an analysis in terms of class warfare.

This relation with security guards is becoming inverted in the campaign against the proposed M77 through Pollok Park in Glasgow. An unprecedented degree of local opposition to the scheme, and support for the 'outside' protesters, whose ranks are regularly swelled by local kids bunking off school, has meant that conditions no longer lend themselves so easily to appealing for the unwritten rules of non-violence to be observed on each side. Pictures of security guards have menacingly been posted up around the local estate, and they have been warned in no uncertain terms that there will be severe repercussions if they beat up any protesters. In the face of this intimidation, finding the boot on the other foot for a change, and being charged with siding with the yuppies against their own class, many security guards have quit, including 24 on one day alone. In these circumstances, the limitations of non-violence as a principle should be more clearly exposed, and the development of an anti-capitalist perspective may be encouraged. The recent spate of arson attacks in other parts of Glasgow on the show homes of the main contractors, Wimpey, is a sign that things could be moving in the right direction.

The CJ&POA, far from crushing the anti-roads movement, has swelled its ranks. Not only has involvement in the anti-CJB movement led to a degree of further politicization, as anti-roads protesters have faced new questions and arguments arising from events like the Hyde Park riot, but the conditions for this movement becoming conscious of itself as class struggle are becoming more fertile as well. As it begins to do so, it prefigures the day when transport will no longer serve the requirements of the circulation of commodities, and people as commodities, but will be a function of enriched human needs and desires.

c) Hunt Saboteurs Movement:

Hunt sabs have, in the main, been reluctant to become involved with the movement. Those that have engaged with it have, because of their emphasis on direct action and lack of hang ups about violence, been useful allies against the fluffies at various junctures, and have themselves become politicized. This politicization has been a result of their engagement with other struggles, and this engagement has only been possible to the extent that these hunt sabs have left the ideological baggage of 'animal rights' behind them. It is necessary to examine this particular brand of militant liberalism in order to understand both why many hunt sabs have not become involved with the movement, and why those that have can appear better but in some ways be worse than the fluffies.

Militant liberalism looks at the world in terms of individuals and their morality. Militant liberals experience the horrors of capitalism more sharply than other (middle class) liberals, but unlike revolutionaries project these horrors onto particular manifestations of 'evil', which it is a moral imperative for individuals to confront. Thus militant liberalism has a certain appeal to activists seeking to save 'the planet' (good) from the (evil) 'road monster', for example. Many road protesters confront those protecting and carrying out road construction work with the argument that they should be ashamed of themselves for having made the wrong moral choice; they confront non-participants, seen as abdicating their moral responsibility, with the guilt trip of the morally pure and innocent unborn child: 'what did you do in the eco-war, daddy?'.

But there is an important difference between the militant liberalism of the roads protester and the hunt saboteur, in that the very activity of road sabotage can lead to the transcendence of liberalism because it is essentially a struggle against capital. As it is objectively a form of class struggle, it carries within the possibility of being recognized as such. Hunt sabotage, on the other hand, does not, as it is purely a moral question. Fox hunting is not an imperative of capital but a mere tradition, and sabbing in itself therefore leads nowhere. The most logical development in the ideology of the hunt saboteur is from fox = good / hunters = bad, to animals = good / animal 'exploiters' = bad; the ideology of animal liberationism.

Animal liberation ideology is best understood in terms of its relation to the humanistic liberalism of the peace movement, in many ways its precursor. Again we find that, in contrast to the activities of the hunt saboteur, the activities of the NVDA wing of the peace movement were an expression of opposition to capital's imperatives (for the militarization of the state form) and thus open to development in an anti-capitalist direction. But the most important contrast between the militant liberalism of the pacifists and that of the hunt saboteurs is that the world view of animal liberationism is an inversion of this humanistic liberalism.

For the peace movement, the individual was seen as basically good, and thus humanity was basically good, and this was counterposed to the evil of nuclear weapons which threatened humanity's destruction. For the animal liberationist on the other hand, it is not humanity which is good or innocent, but animals. Humanity (excepting the vegans) is therefore seen as the evil in this case. Humanity 'exploits' animals for its own ends, and each individual is implicated in this crime of humanity by eating meat or drinking milk and allowing it to happen. Thus whilst the humanistic liberalism of the peace movement would have made it contradictory to use violence against other human individuals, those hunt saboteurs who cling to an anti-humanistic liberalism find that violence is perfectly compatible with their ideology. And it is not surprising that most hunt sabs have not wanted to become involved in a movement in which many individuals have not purged themselves of this crime of humanity.

Thus whilst other liberals in the movement may be able to move beyond their liberal perspectives because they are fighting for themselves, even if in a distorted/projected form, and are involved in the development of class solidarity, hunt saboteurs, to the extent that they confine themselves to the orbit of animal liberationism, projecting the horrors of capitalism away from themselves absolutely , can never move beyond the discourse of 'rights'. Animals can never play a part in class recomposition, no matter how much animal liberationists anthropomorphize them to justify giving them 'rights'. Unlike other groups demanding rights, animals cannot develop proletarian solidarity; they can only be granted 'rights'.

But the possibility does still exist of hunt saboteurs seeking solidarity from others in the movement (rather than animals), thereby opening up the possibility of the development of a class perspective.

Apart from the recent live export protests, hunt sabotage is the most open and collective of animal rights activities. Sabs who are less committed to the ideological baggage of the puritanical self-sacrificing vegan may be slagged off, but are not completely excluded. Many sabs hold contradictory ideas, just as they did when hunt sabbing was popular amongst anarcho-punks in the 1980s until the miners' and printers' disputes resolved such contradictions one way or the other. And it is likely that developments will occur in the hunt saboteurs' movement, in the face of increased repression, that will expose some of these contradictions.

The discretion the CJ&POA gives to the police has meant that, in contrast to the anti-roads movement, the law has been extensively deployed by the police against hunt sabs; there is little chance of repercussions in the countryside. Hunt sabs have undoubtedly borne the brunt of the legislation to date. But those sabs more committed than others to a militant liberal ideology are unlikely to seek solidarity from the movement. Two opposing tendencies offer themselves as ways out of this repression for those who choose to continue to prioritize the end of fox hunting.

On the one hand there is the inherent tendency towards guerrilla activity. For many of the most committed animal rights activists, hunt sabbing is seen as a relatively ineffective activity suitable mainly for education and recruitment purposes, spotting those who might best graduate to Animal Liberation Front activity. Thus one possible response to the pressures on hunt sabbing may be the development of more covert attacks on hunt vehicles and kennels etc., at present the fringe activities of groups like the Hunt Retribution Squad and the Justice Department which emerged as repression and violence increased in the late 1980s.

On the other hand there is the tendency towards the lobbying tactics of the League Against Cruel Sports and the RSPCA. The banning of hunting by parliament can no longer be seen as an impossibility given the recent commons majority in favour of a ban. This may not lead to a new law during the lifetime of this parliament, but should Labour win the next election a ban is certainly likely. Despite the Hunt Saboteurs Association's commitment to direct action, the movement does contain its less militant and more democratic wing, usually in charge of the movement's representation. A leaflet the HSA put out on the July 24th national demonstration must have made many hunt sabs cringe, stating: 'We believe that police officers should be allowed to do what they joined the force to do - catch criminals and try and make this country a better, safer place to live...'.

Either of these tendencies would remove hunt saboteurs even further from the class struggle. In contradistinction to our hopes for the anti-roads movement or squatting, there is little hope for a favourable resolution of contradictions in this particular movement at present.

d) Rave New World:

Our previous statement that the rave offers only an illusion of unity requires qualification in the light of experience. Quite clearly, the crowd at a rave shares something which is missing in a cinema audience or a crowd in a shopping centre. It is necessary to examine the nature of the illusion. The illusion of unity derives from the shared transformation in consciousness that occurs during a rave. This is brought about largely by the empathic intoxication induced by ecstasy, and moving as one to the same beat. It is this consciousness-shift that becomes mystified as 'recovering the lost consciousness of the tribe'. And it is celebrated in lyrics which promote the idea that freedom results from a mere change in attitude, a 'revolution of consciousness' as it has been called.

Supposedly a better world can be created if we think about each other in a more loving way. And for the DIY idealist, the rave is the beginning of the transformation of this alienated world, a process to be continued by 'being in touch with ones feelings' even when not intoxicated (substituting the drug of eastern religion for orthodox narcotics) and being generously disposed to others, hugging them even after the empathic effects of ecstasy have worn off.

But alienation is not just a question of consciousness. It describes the social relations which give rise to specific forms of consciousness: the process of reification. Thus freedom cannot result from a mere change in ways of thinking, but can only be the result of the revolutionary transformation of social relations.

The unity of a rave is illusory to the extent that ravers remain alienated from each other. We remain alienated from each other because we are alienated from ourselves; our subjectivity is stolen from us by capital and returns to confront us as a hostile power, the dull compulsion of the economy. The unity of a rave is an illusion because ravers still carry their social bonds with each other in their pockets in the form of money. Social relations remain mediated by exchange, reified as the economy, external to us and out of our control.

But if this unity is illusory only to the extent that capitalist social relations keep ravers essentially alienated from each other, then to the extent that those relations are subverted through forming relations of collective struggle, the unity is no longer illusory but becomes real. If ravers create relations which are direct, immediate and visible, then the celebration of unity is qualitatively different. The raves which have occurred after demonstrations against the CJB were celebrations of a real if limited overcoming of bourgeois atomization, attempts to preserve a real collective unity experienced for the first time by many. And in Hyde Park, the unity celebrated by the dancers confronting the riot police was similarly no longer illusory. Could these ravers come to recognize that the 'revolution of consciousness' is inseparable from the transformation of material reality? Could they become dialecticians?

A summer of class conflict between ravers and the police would dwarf the significance of events like Claremont Road. Unlicensed raves may have declined in recent years but, sufficiently well organized, would still attract huge numbers of proletarians in defiance of the law. There are literally millions more ravers than road protesters, and dealing with only a fraction of these would cause the police major problems. But it is not just the quantitative dimensions of such potential conflicts that makes them such qualitatively important prospects.

Raves are on the whole the least politicized of the activities targeted by the CJ&POA, but ravers are potentially in the best position to see the capital relation behind the actions of the state. The legislation against raves is an attempt to further subordinate them to the commodity form and reintegrate them into the mainstream circuits of capital where they can be regulated and subject to taxation. Many ravers who have become involved in the movement have little understanding as to why they are being picked on so unfairly. The Advance Party cannot help them as it cannot criticize the commodity form. But as the more money-oriented rave organizers tend towards further acceptance of the constraints of commercialism, rather than risk having their 'constant capital' seized and confiscated by the police, the divisions within the rave scene may become more sharply focused.

Clearly much depends on how those with the means to put raves on respond to the act this summer. There has been a degree of organization emerging amongst those sound systems who have put free raves on in the past, so it is possible that the commercial pressures may be resisted. But there are also signs that such resistance may not lead to the open antagonism that offers such potential for a hot summer of class struggle. There are signs that such antagonism may be mediated, as has been the case in Luton with the Exodus collective.

Exodus have been putting on free raves around Hertfordshire since 1992 and have faced extensive police harassment. But in doing so they have also built up a lot of support in the area. Thus when the police arrested 52 party go-ers and organizers, seizing their equipment, an angry crowd of 4,000 ravers descended on Luton police station to demand their release. Bottles were thrown; and the 150 police inside the station, fearing an outbreak of proletarian-style justice, turned to Exodus for help in policing the crowd. Exodus defused the crowd's legitimate anger and negotiated with the police for the release of the prisoners and the return of the confiscated equipment. When an agreement had been reached Exodus in turn told the crowd to disperse and go home.

By demonstrating their ability to mediate, policing the power of ravers in return for concessions from the police, Exodus now find themselves in a position where the police are no longer trying to crush them but want to work with them instead. The CJ&POA clauses concerning raves give discretionary powers to the police, who may therefore allow 'responsible' groups like Exodus to put on free raves while cracking down on easier or more dangerous targets. The development of open antagonism could therefore be undermined by such mediation.

The continuation of free raves would represent a victory of sorts, but as with those delivered by old fashioned social democratic mediation, it will have been at a price. Consider the plans announced by Exodus after the Hyde Park riot for a demonstration in London some time this spring involving sound systems from up and down the country pledged to non-violence, with microphones on all the floats to help control the crowd. We can speculate that, having experienced the wrath of the Hyde Park rioters, the police would give in to the demands for music, and in return Exodus would no doubt strive to ensure no-one rocks the stitched up boat. Ravers could get what many fought for last year without having to fight again. But the legitimacy of the state would have been reinforced by such a negotiated 'freedom to party'.

The deliverance of such freedoms by these new recuperators may serve to undermine a challenge to the guarantors of the condition of unfreedom, unless ravers too, through their involvement in the movement, have developed a need for the kind of freedom that can not be given, but must be taken.

Conclusions

The CJ&POA is an article of legislation which addresses us as individuals equal before the impartiality of the law. The 'right to silence' can no longer be used by either a shoplifter or Michael Howard. The Queen can no more party in my back yard without my permission than I can in hers. And the directors of Tarmac or Wimpey can no more stop me going about my lawful business on my own property than I can them on theirs. Are these ironies lost on those who continue to represent the movement in terms of 'civil rights', or do they believe such class inequalities can be cured by their progressive furtherance?

As individuals, we are protected by rights. The fundamental right from which all others are derived is the right of private property. Bourgeois society has in most countries abolished the slavery whereby I may be taken against my will as the property of another. I am an equal to others, free to dispose of my private property as I please; if someone else wants what is mine, the law says they cannot take it forcibly but must buy it. But what have I to sell? Only my capacity to labour. Thus the social relation of private property becomes on the one hand those with the means to satisfy labour and on the other those who must sell their labour to them. The essence of private property is laid bare, not as ownership, but exclusion:

Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both forms of the world of private property... The proletariat ... is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, the condition of its existence, what makes it the proletariat, i.e. private property. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.

(Karl Marx, 'The Holy Family')

No amount of rights can compensate for the absolute poverty of the proletarian condition. The world of rights is founded upon our alienation. Rights define, not freedom, but its limits. Real freedom can only come about through the dissolution of this world of rights, the restoration of our creative capacities unto ourselves in a world where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all. Communism abolishes rights in favour of free determination, the production first and foremost of ourselves as social individuals with richly developed needs and desires. The lobby for rights on the other hand serves to maintain this stinking rotten world of work and duty, unfreedom and poverty.

The negation of bourgeois society exists in the process of becoming, however. It must be discovered in the tendencies of the here and now. And despite the language of the movement which has emerged in opposition to the CJB, if we care to scratch its surface we can find that it contains within it tendencies which posit the dissolution of this alienated world of rights. It exists in the road protesters' refusal of democracy, the squatters' refusal of property rights, and the ravers' pursuit of autonomy. It is expressed by the self-organization of the movement, and found its highest point in the Hyde Park riot.

We have to look at the possibility of these tendencies articulating themselves as a self-conscious anti-capitalist movement. Such a possibility is not just an abstract or utopian one, but one posited by the movement itself. The CJ&POA has brought previously separate phenomena into a relation with one another and has resulted in a degree of cross-fertilization between struggles. As it has done so, it has raised the question amongst some participants of how these struggles are related. Thus it has opened up the possibility of the recognition of the general (capital-in-general) that exists in and through the particular (the road industry, music industry, farming industry, property developers, police force).

The possibility exists of the recognition of the enemy as the differential unity of capital, and thus its negation no longer in terms of separate groups but in terms of their connection as the differential unity comprising the universal class that is the proletariat.

Such a development of working class subjectivity is inseparable from the political recomposition of the class. Further decomposition could see these tendencies smothered even deeper under the blanket of liberalism. In the present context, the development of a struggle against the Job Seekers Allowance, which poses a threat to social reproduction on the dole which is the basis for most of these struggles and lifestyles, could be an important step towards a better understanding of the class nature of bourgeois society. In the long term, it will depend on making links with the struggles of the rest of the class, a possibility which is posed by the state's need to move beyond attacking the marginalized sections of the working class to attack the entrenchment of the remainder. The development of class consciousness is inseparable from the experience of class struggle.

An undialectical approach to this question is insufficient, however. The relationship between consciousness and being is not one way, and an approach which conceives of it as such can only be a repetition of, or an inversion of, the misconceptions of Lenin. Human activity is conscious activity. People do not function automatically only to think about what they have done afterwards. They also think about what to do beforehand. What the anti-CJ&POA movement does reflects the different ideas of its protagonists on how to proceed. Ideas are important.

The liberal establishment has an influence on the ideas of the movement. It offers ideas which guide the movement in the opposite direction to emancipation. Groups like Liberty and Charter 88 are not seen as having a political agenda, because agendas are proposals for change and these groups are fundamentally in favour of the status quo. They aim for the perfection of the bourgeois state, its correspondence with the democratic ideal. Comfortable in their alienation these professionals who advocate legal reform do not recognize the fundamental antagonism within this society, an antagonism that means that their dreams will never be fulfilled because the exploited class will always have a tendency to disobey the rules of the democratic game. But many in the movement, whilst unaware of the real meaning of the liberal establishment's agenda, are not insulated from the harsh realities of capitalism by the wealth and status that come with a professional role. Many in the movement have nothing to lose but their illusions that they have something to gain by conforming. Their positions as marginals in class society means that, whether the prospect is appealing or not, for many the future holds nothing but confrontation. In these circumstances revolutionary ideas can play a role.

Have revolutionaries responded adequately to the questions posed by the struggle? Have they helped the self-formation of the working class through their praxis? Let the reader be the judge. What is certain is that the theory and practice of many revolutionaries were forged in relation to the left during a bygone era, defending proletarian autonomy against its recuperative tentacles. But as the world about us changes, so theory and practice must develop. Revolutionaries need to theorize the new conditions of struggle which are emerging, conditions which have given this movement its unique character. If we don't we will be consigned to the museum of revolutionary ideology. This article is a contribution to that process of Aufhebung.

March 1995

Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part 3

Part 1/ Part 2 / Part 3

Part Three

Introduction: The story so far

As our more patient and devoted readers will know, the subject of this article is the theory that capitalism is in decline. In the previous two issues, we traced out in detail the development of the theory of the decline of capitalism which has emerged amongst Marxists and revolutionaries over the last hundred years.

In this, the final part the article, we shall bring our critical review up to date by examining the most recent version of the theory of decline, which has been put forward by Radical Chains. But before considering Radical Chains and their new version of the theory of the decline of capitalism, we should perhaps, for the benefit of our less patient and devoted readers, summarize the previous two parts of this article.

In Part 1, we saw how the theory of decline, and the conceptions of capitalist crisis and the transition to socialism or communism related to it, played a dominant role in revolutionary analysis of twentieth century capitalism. As we saw, the notion that capitalism is in some sense in decline originated in the classical Marxism developed by Engels and the Second International.

At the time of the revolutionary wave that ended World War I, the more radical Marxists identified the theory that capitalism was in decline as the objective basis for revolutionary politics. They took as their guiding principle the notion from Marx 'That at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production... From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution'. They argued that capitalism had entered this stage and this was expressed in its permanent crisis and clear objective movement towards breakdown and collapse.

In the wake of the defeat of the revolutionary wave following World War I, for those traditions which claimed to represent 'proper Marxism', against its betrayal - first by the reformist Social Democrats and then by Stalinism - the acceptance of the notion that capitalism was in decline became a tenet of faith.

For the left-communists, the notion that capitalism had entered its decadent phase with the outbreak of war in 1914 was vital since it allowed them to maintain an uncompromising revolutionary position while at the same time claiming to represent the continuation of the true orthodox Marxist tradition. For the left-communists, the reformist aspects of the politics of Marx, Engels and the Second International, which had led to support for trade unionism and for participation in parliamentary elections, could be justified on the grounds that capitalism was at that time in its ascendant phase. Now, following the outbreak of the World War I, capitalism had gone into decline and was no longer in a position to concede lasting reforms to the working class. Thus, for the left-communists, the only options in the era of capitalist decline were those of 'war or revolution!'

For the Trotskyists and other associated socialists, the increase of state intervention and planning, the growth of monopolies, the nationalization of major industries and the emergence of the welfare state all pointed to the decline of capitalism and the emergence of the necessity of socialism. As a consequence, for the Trots the task was to put forward 'transitional demands' - that is, apparently reformist demands that appear reasonable given the development of the productive forces but which contradict the prevailing capitalist relations of production.

So, despite the otherwise fundamental differences that divide left-communists from the Trots, and which often placed them in bitter opposition to each other, for both of these tendencies the concrete reality of capitalist development was explained in terms of an objective logic heading towards capitalist collapse and socialist revolution. The underlying objective reality of the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production reduced the problem of that revolution to organizing the vanguard or party to take advantage of the crisis that would surely come.

However, instead of ending in a revolutionary upsurge as most decline theorists predicted, World War II was followed by one of the most sustained booms in capitalist history. While the productive forces seemed to be growing faster than ever before, the working class in advanced capitalist countries seemed content with the rising living standards and welfare benefits of the post-war social democratic settlements. The picture of an inescapable capitalist crisis prompting a working class reaction now seemed irrelevant.

Then, when class struggle did eventually return on a major scale, it took on forms - wildcat strikes (often for issues other than wages), refusal of work, struggles within and outside the factory - which did not fit comfortably into the schema of the old workers' movement. Many of these struggles seemed marked not by a knee-jerk reaction to economic hardship caused by 'capitalism's decline', but by a struggle against alienation in all its forms caused by capital's continued growth, and by a more radical conception of what lay beyond capitalism than was offered by socialists.

It was in this context that the new currents we looked at in Part 2 of this article emerged. What currents like Socialism or Barbarism, the situationists and the autonomists shared was a rejection of the 'objectivism' of the old workers' movement. Rather than put their faith in an objective decline of the economy, they emphasized the other pole: the subject. It was these theoretical currents and not the old left theorists of decline that best expressed what was happening - the May '68 events in France, the Italian Hot Autumn of '69 and a general contestation that spread right across capitalist society. Though more diffuse than the 1917-23 period, these events were a revolutionary wave questioning capitalism across the world.

However, in the 1970s, the post-war boom collapsed. Capitalist crisis returned with a vengeance. The turn by the new currents away from the mechanics of capitalist crisis which had been an advantage now became a weakness. The idea that capitalism was objectively in decline was back in favour and there was a renewal of the old crisis theory. At the same time, in the face of the crisis and rising unemployment, there was a retreat of the hopes and tendencies which the new currents had expressed. As the crisis progressed, the refusal of work, which the new currents had connected to, and which the old leftists could not comprehend, seemed to falter before the onslaught of monetarism and the mass re-imposition of work.

However, the various rehashings of the old theory of capitalist crisis and decline were all inadequate. The sects of the old left, which had missed the significance of much of the struggle that had been occurring, were now sure that the mechanics of capitalist decline had been doing its work. Capital would be forced now to attack working class living standards and the proper class struggle would begin. These groups could now say 'we understand the crisis: flock to our banner'. They believed that, faced with the collapse of the basis of reformism, the working class would turn to them. There was much debate about the nature of the crisis; conflicting versions were offered; but the expected shift of the working class towards socialism and revolution did not occur.

This, then, is the situation we find ourselves in. While the advances of the new currents - their focus on the self-activity of the proletariat, on the radicality of communism etc. - are essential references for us, we nevertheless need to grasp how the objective situation has changed. The restructuring that has accompanied crisis, and the subsequent retreat of working class, has made some of the heady dreams of the '68 wave seem less possible. To some extent there has been an immiseration of the imagination from which that wave took its inspiration. There is a need to rethink, to grasp the objective context in which class struggle is situated. The bourgeoisie and state do not seem able to make the same concessions to recuperate movements, so the class struggle often takes a more desperate form. In the face of a certain retreat of the subject - lack of offensive class struggle - there is a temptation to adopt some sort of decline theory. It is in this context that the ideas of the journal Radical Chains are important.

The Radical Chains synthesis

Despite all their faults and ambiguities, Radical Chains have perhaps more than any other existing group made a concerted attempt to rethink Marxism in the wake of the final collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the fall of Stalinism. In doing so, they have sought to draw together the objectivism of the Trotskyist tradition with the more 'subjectivist' and class struggle oriented theories of autonomist Marxism. From the autonomists, Radical Chains have taken the idea that the working class is not a passive victim of capital but instead forces changes on capital. From the Trotskyist Hillel Ticktin, Radical Chains have taken the idea that one must relate such changes to the law of value, and its conflict with the emergent 'law of planning'.

In adopting the notion that the present epoch of capitalism is a transitional one, characterized by a conflict between an emergent 'law of planning' - which is identified with the emergence of communism - and a declining law of value, Radical Chains are inevitably led towards a theory of capitalist decline, albeit one which emphasizes class struggle. Indeed, as we shall see, the central argument of Radical Chains is that the growing power of the working class has forced capitalism to develop administrative forms which, while preventing and delaying the emergence of the 'law of planning' - and with this the move to communism - has undermined what Radical Chains see as capitalism's own essential regulating principle - the law of value. As such, Stalinism and social democracy are seen by Radical Chains as the principal political forms of the 'partial suspension of the law of value' which have served to delay the transition from capitalism to communism.

However, before we examine Radical Chains' theory of the 'partial suspension of the law of value' in more detail, it is necessary to look briefly at its origins in the work of Hillel Ticktin which has been a primary influence in the formation of this theory.

Ticktin and the fatal attraction of fundamentalism

Hillel Ticktin is the editor and principal theorist of the non-aligned Trotskyist journal Critique. What seems to make Ticktin and Critique attractive to Radical Chains is that his analysis is not tied to the needs of a particular Trotskyist sect but takes the high ground of an attempt to recover classical Marxism. As such, for Radical Chains, Ticktin provides a perceptive and sophisticated restatement of classical Marxism.

With Ticktin, the Second International's central notion, which opposed socialism as the conscious planning of society to the anarchy of the market of capitalism, is given a 'scientific' formulation in terms of the opposition between the 'law of planning' and the 'law of value'. Ticktin then seeks to 'scientifically' explain the laws of motion of the current transitional epoch of capitalism's decline in terms of the decline of capitalism's defining regulatory principle - the 'law of value' - and the incipient rise of the 'law of planning' which he sees as heralding the necessary emergence of socialism.

Like the leading theorists of classical Marxism, Ticktin sees the decline of capitalism in terms of the development of monopolies, increased state intervention in the economy and the consequent decline of the free market and laissez faire capitalism. As production becomes increasingly socialized on an ever greater scale, the allocation of social labour can no longer operate simply through the blind forces of the market. Increasingly, capital and the state have to plan and consciously regulate production. Yet the full development of conscious planning contradicts the private appropriation inherent in capitalist social relations. Planning is confined to individual states and capitals and thus serves to intensify the competition between these capitals and states so that the gains of rational planning end up exploding into the social irrationality of wars and conflict. Only with the triumph of socialism on a world scale, when production and the allocation of labour will be consciously planned in the interests of society as whole, will the contradiction between the material forces of production be reconciled with the social relations of production and the 'law of planning' emerge as the principal form of social regulation.

However, unlike the leading theorists of classical Marxism, Ticktin places particular emphasis on the increasing autonomy of finance capital as a symptom of capitalism's decline. Classical Marxism, following the seminal work of Hilferding's Finance Capital , had seen the integration of banking capital with monopolized industrial capital as the hallmark of the final stage of capitalism which heralded the rise of rational planning and the decline of the anarchy of the market. In contrast, for Ticktin late capitalism is typified by the growing autonomy of financial capital. Ticktin sees twentieth century capitalism as a contradiction between the forms of socialization that cannot be held back and the parasitic decadent form of finance capital. Finance capital is seen as having a parasitic relation to the socialized productive forces. It manages to stop the socialization getting out of hand and thus imposes the rule of abstract labour. However, finance capital is ultimately dependent on its host - production - which has an inevitable movement towards socialization.

By defining the increasing autonomy of finance capital as symptom of capitalism's decadence, Ticktin is able to accommodate the rise of global finance capital of the past twenty-five years within the classical Marxist theory of decline. To this extent, Ticktin provides a vital contribution to the development of the classical theory of decline.

But it could be objected that the increasing autonomy of finance capital is simply the means through which capital comes to restructure itself. In this view, the rise of global finance capital in the last twenty-five years has been the principal means through which capital has sought to outflank the entrenched working classes in the old industrialized economies by relocating production in new geographical areas and in new industries.

So while the increasing autonomy of finance capital may indeed herald the decline of capital accumulation in some areas, it only does so to the extent that it heralds the acceleration of capital accumulation in others. >From this perspective, the notion that the autonomy of finance capital is a symptom of capitalism's decline appears as particularly Anglo-centric. Indeed, in this light, Ticktin's notion of the parasitic and decadent character of finance capital seems remarkably similar to the perspective of those advocates of British industry who have long lamented the 'short termism' of the City as the cause of Britain's relative industrial decline. While such arguments may be true, by adopting them Ticktin could be accused of projecting specific causes of Britain's relative decline on to capitalism as a whole. While footloose finance capital may cause old industrialized economies to decline, it may at one and the same time be the means through which new areas of capital accumulation may arise.

This Anglo-centrism that we find in Ticktin's work can be seen to be carried over into the theory put forward by Radical Chains. But for many this would be the least of the criticisms advanced against Radical Chains' attempt to use the work of Ticktin. Ticktin is an unreconstructed Trotskyist. As such, he defends Trotsky's insistence on advancing the productive forces against the working class, which led to the militarization of labour, the crushing of the worker and sailors' uprising at Kronstadt and his loyal opposition to Stalin. But Radical Chains resolutely oppose Ticktin's Trotskyist politics. They insist they can separate Ticktin's good Marxism from his politics.

We shall argue that they can't make this separation: that in adopting Ticktin's theory of decline as their starting point they implicitly adopt his politics. But before we advance this argument we must consider Radical Chains' theory of decline in a little more detail.

Radical Chains

The world in which we live is riven by a contradiction between the latent law of planning and the law of value. Within the transitional epoch as a whole these correspond to the needs of the proletariat and those of capital, which remain the polarities of class relationships across the earth.

This quote from Radical Chains' Statement of Intent succinctly summarizes both their acceptance and their transformation of Ticktin's problematic of capitalist decline. Radical Chains' theory, like Ticktin's, is based on the idea of the conflict between two different organizational principles. It is not enough for the proletariat to be an 'agent of struggle'; it must be 'the bearer of a new organizational principle that, in its inescapable antagonism to value, must make capital a socially explosive and eventually doomed system.'

But Radical Chains are not Ticktin. Radical Chains accept the idea that the proper working of the law of value has given way to distorted forms of its functioning. However, there is a very significant shift in Radical Chains from conceiving of the law of value purely in terms of the relations between capitals to seeing it in terms of the capital/labour relation. The crucial object of the law of value is not products, but the working class. Thus while for Ticktin it is phenomena like monopoly pricing and governmental interference in the economy that undermine the law of value, for Radical Chains it is the recognition and administration of needs outside the wage - welfare, public health and housing, etc. This is an important shift because it allows Radical Chains to bring in the class struggle.

Central to Radical Chains' theory is the interplay between the state and the law of value. Their combination creates regimes of need, which is to say ways in which the working class is controlled. If the orthodox decline theory has a schema based on laissez faire free markets as capitalism's maturity and monopoly capitalism its decline, Radical Chains offer a similar schema based on the application of the law of value to labour-power. Capital's maturity was when the working class was brought fully under the law of value; capital's decline is the period when that full subordination was partially suspended by administrative forms.

Full Law of Value

For Radical Chains, the 1834 Poor Law Reform Act was the 'programmatic high point' of capitalism because it marked the establishment of labour-power as a commodity. In the previous Poor Law, the subsistence needs of the working class were met through a combination of wages from employers and a range of forms of parish relief. The New Poor Law unified the wage, by terminating these forms of local welfare. In their place it offered a sharp choice between subsistence through wage labour or the workhouse. The workhouse was made as unpleasant as possible to make it an effective non-choice. Thus the workingclass was in a position of absolute poverty. Its needs were totally subordinate to money, to the imperative to exchange labour-power for the wage. Thus its existence was totally dependent on accumulation. This, Radical Chains argue, was the proper existence of the working class within capitalism.

For Radical Chains, only when the subjective existence of the working proletariat corresponds to this state of absolute poverty is capitalism in proper correspondence with the pristine objectivity of the law of value. Once there is a change in this relation, capital goes into decline.

The 'Partial Suspension of the Law of Value'

This full subordination of working class existence to money prompted the working class to see its interests as completely opposed to those of capital and, as a result, to develop forms of collectivity which threatened to destroy capital. The threat is based on the fact that the working class, though atomized by the law of value in exchange, is collectivized by its situation in production. The law of value tries to impose abstract labour, but the working class can draw on its power as particular concrete labour. Radical Chains' idea of proletarian self-formation expressing the law of planning is bound to its existence as a socialized productive force. In response to the full workings of the law of value, the working class developed its own alternative, pushing towards a society organized by planning for needs.

The bourgeoisie recognized the inevitable and intervened with 'administrative substitutes for planning'. One aspect to the Partial Suspension of the Law of Value is that the bourgeoisie accepted forms of representation of the working class. Responsible unions and working class parties were encouraged. At the same time, there was the abandonment of the rigours of the Poor Law. Radical Chains trace the eventual post World War II social democratic settlement to processes begun by far-sighted members of the bourgeoisie long before. From the late nineteenth century, haphazard forms of poor relief began to supplement the Poor Law. The 1906-12 Liberal government systematized this move to administered welfare.

Such reforms amounted to a fundamental modification of the law of value: the relaxation of the conditions of absolute poverty. The wage was divided with one part remaining tied to work while the other became administered by the state. There was a move to what Radical Chains call the 'formal recognition of need': that is, the working class can get needs met through forms of administration. Bureaucratic procedures, forms, tests and so on enter the life of the working class.

There are now two sides to capital - the law of value and administration. This Partial Suspension of the Law of Value represents national deals with the working class. The global proletariat is divided into national sections which have varying degrees of defence from the law of value. This acts to stop the proletariat's global unification as a revolutionary class, but it also acts as a limit on the effectiveness of the law of value which must act globally.

Crisis of the Partial Suspension of the Law of Value

Within the forms of the Partial Suspension of the Law of Value, the working class struggles. It uses the existence of full employment and welfare to increase both sides of the divided wage. Administration proves a much less effective way of keeping the working class in check than the pure workings of the market. Radical Chains see the forms of struggle that the new currents connected to as evidence of the working class breaking out of its containment. The last twenty years or so are seen by Radical Chains as a crisis of the forms of prevention of communism to which capital has responded by trying to reunify the wage and reassert the law of value. Radical Chains do not see much point in looking at the different struggles; the point is to locate them within a grand theoretical perspective!

The attraction of Radical Chains' theory is that the concrete developments of the twentieth century are explained by a combination of subjective and objective factors. Revolutionary theory has a tendency to see the subjective aspect - working class struggle - appearing in revolutionary periods and disappearing without trace at other times. Radical Chains conceptualize the subjective as contained within the forms of the prevention of communism - Stalinism and social democracy - but continuing to struggle and finally exploding them. This analysis seems to have a revolutionary edge, for Radical Chains use the theory to criticize the left's tendency to become complicit with these forms of the prevention of communism. However, there is an ambiguity here because Radical Chains hinge their account on the idea of an underlying process - the breakdown of the essence of capitalism before the essence of communism - planning. This, as we shall argue, is exactly the framework that leads to the left's complicity with capital.

However, before moving to the fundamental conceptual problems that Radical Chains inherit from Ticktin we should point out some problems with their historical account of the rise and fall of capitalism.

In the Blink of an Eye

Radical Chains are right to see the New Poor Law as expressing bourgeois dreams of a working class totally subordinated to capital. They imagine that this period of proper domination beginning in 1834 and lasting till the beginnings of the Partial Suspension of the Law of Value with the movement towards haphazard forms of poor relief in the 1880s, the mature period of capitalism, lasts around fifty years.

But there is a difference between intent and reality. The New Poor Law while enacted in 1834 was resisted by the working class and the parishes so that it was not until the 1870s that it became properly enforced. So virtually as soon as it was enforced the New Poor Law began to be undermined. From this it would seem that the high point of capitalism becomes reduced to little more than a decade or two. From an historical perspective in which feudalism lasted for more than a several centuries, capitalism's maturity is over in the blink of an eye.

Against this notion that capitalism matured for a mere twenty years in the later part of the nineteenth century and has ever since been in decline, it can of course be countered that the world has become far more capitalist during the course of the twentieth century than it has ever been. This view would seem to become substantiated once we grasp the development of capitalism not in terms of the decline of the law of value, but in terms of the shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour to capital and the concomitant shift in emphasis from the production of absolute surplus-value to the production of relative surplus-value.

Formal and Real Domination

In the period dominated by the production of absolute surplus-value, the imperative of the control of labour is simply to create sufficient hardship to force the proletarians through the factory gates. However, once relative surplus-value becomes predominant, a more sophisticated role is required. The capital/labour relation had to be reconstructed. The reduction in necessary labour required the mass production of consumption goods. A constant demand for those goods then became essential to capital. As a result, the working class became an important source not only of labour but also of demand. At the same time, the continual revolutionizing of the means of production required a more educated workforce and a more regulated reserve army of the unemployed.

Of course Radical Chains are right that these changes are also being forced on capital by the threat of proletarian self-organization. But the idea that they thereby represent capital's decline is not justified. It is only with these new ways of administering the class that relative surplus-value can be effectively pursued. The phenomena of Taylorism and Fordism indicate that capitalism in the twentieth century - the pursuit of relative surplus-value - still had a lot of life in it. Indeed, the post-war boom in which capitalism grew massively based on full employment and the linking of rising working class living standards and higher productivity is perhaps the period when working class needs and accumulation were at their most integrated.

Indeed, from this perspective, the New Poor Law was more of a transitional form in the development of capitalism. On the one hand it was in keeping with the draconian legislation that capital required in its long period of emergence. On the other hand it created a national system to control labour. The multitude of boards that it set up are the direct forerunners of the administrative bodies that came to replace it.

So, rather than a massive break, there is a great deal of continuity between the sorts of institutions created by the 1834 Act and those bureaucratic structures that were set up later. The forms of systematic national management of labour that were created by the New Poor Law simply to discipline the working class were the material basis for new relations of representation, administration and intervention.

We can see, then, that the New Poor Law was introduced to fulfil the needs of a period of the production of absolute surplus-value. What is more, though it was enacted in 1834, it was only in the 1870s that its provisions totally replaced earlier systems of relief. By this time, capital was shifting to its period in which the production of relative surplus-value came to predominate, and this required a new way of relating to labour.

The underlying problem of Radical Chains' historical analysis is that they take the laissez faire stage of capitalism at its own word. Its word is an individualist ideology which was immediately undermined by the growth of collective forms. The idea of a perfect regime of needs under the law of value is a myth. The law of value and capital have always been constrained, first by forms of landed property and of community which preceded it, and then by the class struggle growing up within it. Capital is forced to relate to the working class by other means than the wage, and the state is its necessary way of doing this. The Poor Law expressed one strategy for controlling the working class: administration expresses a different one. Once we see the law of value as always constrained, then the idea of its partial suspension loses its resonance.

The fetishism of planning

Given that Radical Chains seek to emphasize the relation of struggle between the working class and capital, it may seem strange that they do not consider the shift from the formal to real subsumption of labour to capital. Yet such a consideration would not only undermine their commitment to a theory of decline but also run counter to the conceptual framework that they have drawn from classical Marxism through Ticktin. To examine this more closely we must return briefly once more to the origins of classical Marxism's theory of decline.

As we have already noted, the notion of an objectively determined decline of capitalism is rooted in the orthodox interpretation of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy where Marx states that 'At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production... From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution'. For the classical Marxist at the turn of the century, it seemed clear that the social relations of private appropriation and the market were becoming fetters on the increasingly socialized forces of production. The driving force towards revolution was therefore conceptualized as the contradiction between the productive forces' need for socialist planning and the anarchy of the market and private appropriation.

Of course, implicit in all this is the idea that socialism only becomes justified once it becomes historically necessary to further develop the forces of production on a more rational and planned basis. Once capitalism has exhausted its potential of developing the forces of production on the basis of the law of value, socialism must step in to take over the baton of economic development. From this perspective, socialism appears as little more than the planned development of the forces of production.

However, viewing history in terms of the contradiction between the development of the forces of production and existing social relations, where each form of society is seen to be replaced by a succeeding one which can allow a further development of the forces of production, is to take the view point of capital. By articulating this view, Marx sought to turn the perspective of capital against itself. Marx sought to show that, like preceding societies, capitalism will repeatedly impose limits on the development of the forces of production and therefore open up the possibility for capitalism's own supersession on its own terms.

>From the point of view of capital, history is nothing more than the development of the productive forces; it is only with capitalism that production fully realizes itself as an alien force that can appear abstracted from human needs and desires. Communism must not only involve the abolition of classes but also the abolition of the forces of production as a separate power.

By seeing socialism principally as the rationally planned development of the forces of production - and opposing this to the anarchy of the market of capitalism - classical Marxists ended up adopting the perspective of capital. It was this perspective that allowed the Bolsheviks to take up the tasks of a surrogate bourgeoisie once they had seized power in Russia, since it committed them to the development of the forces of production at all costs. The logic of this perspective was perhaps developed most of all by Trotsky who, through his support for the introduction of Taylorism, one-man management, the militarization of labour and the crushing of the rebellion at Kronstadt, consistently demonstrated his commitment to develop the forces of production over and against the needs of the working class.

As a long committed Trotskyist, there are no problems for Ticktin in identifying socialism with planning. Indeed, in restating classical Marxism and developing the contradictions between planning and the anarchy of the market, Ticktin draws heavily on the work of Preobrazhensky who, alongside Trotsky, was the leading theoretician of the Left-Opposition in the 1920s. It was Preobrazhensky who first developed the distinction between the law of planning and the law of value as the two competing principles of economic regulation in the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism. It was on the basis of this distinction that Preobrazhensky developed the arguments of the Left-Opposition for the rapid development of heavy industry at the expense of the living standards of the working class and the peasantry. Arguments that were later to be put into practice, after the liquidation of the Left-Opposition, under Stalin.

For Radical Chains, adopting the notion that we are in the period of capitalist decline and the consequent transition to socialism, in which the principal contradiction is that between the law of value and the law of planning, is far more problematic. An important part of Radical Chains' project is their attempt to reject the traditional politics of the left, particularly that of Leninism. This is made clear in such articles as 'The hidden political economy of the left', where they resolutely stress importance of the self-activity of the working class and attack the Leninist notion of the passivity of the working class and its need for an externally imposed discipline. Yet this is undermined by their adherence to the 'good Marxism' of Ticktin.

As a result, we find that when pressed on the question of planning Radical Chains' position becomes both slippery and highly ambiguous. Their way of vindicating planning is virtually to identify it with self-emancipation. They ask us to make a revolution in the name of planning and insist that really that is fine because 'Planning is the social presence of the freely associating proletariat and, beyond that, the human form of existence.' But planning is planning. The free association of the proletariat is the free association of the proletariat. For all their efforts, by refusing to break with the framework set out by Ticktin, Radical Chains end up simply criticizing the left's idea of planning from the point of view of planning. For us, this classical leftist Marxism must not be revitalized but undermined. This means questioning its very framework.

For us, the market or law of value is not the essence of capital; its essence is rather the self-expansion of value: that is, of alienated labour. Capital is above all an organizing of alienated labour involving a combination of market aspects and planning aspects. Capitalism has always needed planning and it has always needed markets. The twentieth century has displayed a constant tension between capitalism's market and planning tendencies. What the left has done is identify with one pole of this process, that of planning. But our project is not simply equal to planning. Communism is the abolition of all capitalist social relations, both of the market and of the alien plan. Of course, some form of social planning is a necessary prerequisite for communism: but the point is not planning as such, as a separate and specialized activity, but planning at the service of the project of free creation of our lives. The focus would be on the production of ourselves, not things. Not the planning of work and development of the productive forces, but the planning of free activity at the service of the free creation of our own lives.

Radical Chains concluded

With Radical Chains we have the most recent and perhaps most sophisticated restatement of the classical Marxist theory of decline. Yet, for us, their attempt to unite such an objectivist Marxist theory with the more class struggle oriented theories which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s has failed, leaving them in a politically compromised position. With Radical Chains our odyssey is complete and we can draw to some kind of conclusion.

In Place of a Conclusion

Is capitalism in decline? Coming to terms with theories of capitalist decline has involved a coming to terms with Marxism. One of the essential aspects of Marx's critique of political economy was to show how the relations of capitalist society are not natural and eternal. Rather, he showed how capitalism was a transitory mode of production. Capital displays itself as transitory. Its negation is within it, and there is a movement to abolish it. However, the theory of decline is not for us. It focuses on decline as a period within capitalism and it identifies the process of going beyond capital with changes in the forms of capital rather than the struggle against them.

Decline cannot be seen as an objective period of capitalism, nor can the progressive aspect to capital be seen as an earlier period now passed. The progressive and decadent aspects of capital have always been united. Capitalism has always involved a decadent negative process of the commodification of life by value. It has also involved the creation of the universal class in opposition, rich in needs and with the ultimate need for a new way of life beyond capital.

The problem with Marxist orthodoxy is that it seeks capital's doom not in the collective forms of organization and struggle of the proletariat but in the forms of capitalist socialization. It imposes a linear evolutionary model on the shift from capitalism to communism. The revolutionary movement towards communism involves rupture; the theorization of the decline of capitalism misses this by identifying with aspects of capital. As Pannekoek pointed out, the real decline of capital is the self-emancipation of the working class.

Review: Against His-story, Against Leviathan

Fredy Perlman's influential book Against His-tory, Against Leviathan! expresses the position of the new 'primitivist' current in which the enemy is not capital but progress. Going beyond leftist notions of the basic neutrality of technology is a step in the right direction; but seeing all technology as essentially alienating is a mystification. Since it is itself an expression in theory of a radical setback, primitivism contributes little to the practical problem we all face of overthrowing capitalism.

Civilization and its latest discontents
Review Article: Fredy Perlman (1983). Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Detroit: Black & Red.

I'm born in a certain age which has certain instruments of production and certain kinds of knowledge; I have the possibility to combine my ability with my knowledge, and can use the socially available means of production as instruments with which to realize an individual or collective project.

(R. Gregoire & F. Perlman, 1969)

Civilization is under attack. A new critical current has emerged in recent years, united by an antagonism towards all tendencies that seem to include 'progress' as part of their programme. Perlman's book, described in the AK Distribution 1993 Catalogue as 'One of the most significant and influential anarchic texts of the last few decades' (p. 30), is one of the key texts in this 'primitivist' current. In the U.S.A. and this country, it is in anarchist circles - particularly amongst those engaged in eco-struggles - that primitivism has become particularly popular. But Perlman used to be a Marxist (see the quote above), and he contributed usefully to the development of a libertarian version of Marx's theory for a number of years. The wholesale abandonment of Marx in favour of primitivism has touched the non-Leninist revolutionary milieu in this country too, with the recent conversion of Wildcat to the anti-civilization position.

One direction that the primitivist current points in is the need to develop a critique of technology. This is something the old left cannot grasp, and is one of the reasons why it is unable to connect properly with tendencies toward communism. According to most varieties of leftism, technological progress and therefore economic growth will be of universal benefit so long as they are planned rationally; what prevents the full and rational development of the forces of production is the irrationality of the capitalist market. All this is reflected in the way leftists relate to the new struggles over technological 'progress', such as the anti-roads movement. Thus, while opportunists like the SWP treat these new struggles as valid only because they might be fertile grounds for recruitment to the 'real' struggle, leftists who are more openly traditional on this issue - such as the RCP - repeat the old claim that what the proles really want is more and better roads (so we can all get to work on time, perhaps!): a modern infrastructure is necessary for growth, and an expanding economy necessarily makes for a better quality of life.

The old project of simply taking over existing means of production was the creation of an era before capital had so thoroughly invested its own subjectivity in technology, design and the labour process. The technology that promises to liberate us in fact enslaves us by regulating our activities in and through work and leisure; machines and factories pollute our environments and destroy our bodies; their products offer us the image of real life instead of its substance. Now, more than ever, it is often more appropriate to smash existing means of production than merely manage them differently. We must therefore go beyond leftist notions of the neutrality of technology and problematize their definitions of progress.

The current anti-roads movement offers an example of a practical critique of progress - that is, one which contests dominant definitions of progress through physically disrupting their implementation. As we argued in our lastissue, struggles such as that over the M11 link road in north-east London should be understood as part of the class struggle. This is often despite the ideas of those taking part, some of which echo Perlman's ideological critique of progress. In contrast to the practical critique, the ideological critique actively hinders an adequate critique of capitalism. Thus Perlman rejects unwanted leftist notions only through a retreat into a form of romantic quasi-anarchism which is unable to grasp the movement necessary to abolish capital. Given that Perlman is only one voice, however, the present article will use a review of his book as a springboard for a critique of other expressions of the new primitivist current.

The case against 'progress'

Perlman's book begins by distinguishing between a state of nature (harmony between humanity and the rest of nature) and civilization. Civilization began, not because everyone wanted to improve their conditions of existence, not because of 'material conditions', but because a small group of people imposed it on everyone else. Perlman traces the origin of civilization to the Sumerians, who, he says, felt obliged to build waterworks to ensure a regular supply of water. The Sumerians invested power to direct the building of the waterworks in one individual, who eventually became a powerful expert elite and then a warrior elite - the first ruling class, in effect. Under the direction of their ruling class, the Sumerians then waged war on their neighbours, eventually enslaving them. The rest of Perlman's book is taken up with the rest of world history, comprising the evolution of - and resistance to - various types of Leviathan (the name, taken from Hobbes, which Perlman uses for civilization, class society or the state), each of which takes in human beings as its living energy, is animated by them, and excretes them out as it decays, only to be replaced by yet another Leviathan. Leviathans fight with each other, but the winner is always Leviathan. Given that the opposition is between Leviathan and the oppressed majority, the differences between types of class society can therefore be largely glossed over.

Perlman appears to agree with Marx that what distinguishes civilization from primitive communism is the development of the means of production, which enabled surplus labour and thus the existence of a parasitic non-productive class. But the book challenges the traditional Marxist view by suggesting that in primitive communism there were already 'surpluses'. If there was no problem with means of subsistence, then there could be no need to develop the means of production. The emergence of civilization is therefore comparable with the 'fall' from the Garden of Eden.

However, Perlman's claim that the ancient Sumerians felt obliged to introduce technological innovation suggests that primitive communism wasn't always so idyllic after all: the place where they were living was 'hellish'; they were intent on 'farming a jungle'; in the rainy season the floods carried off both their crops and their houses, while in the dry season their plants dried up and died. This might suggest that population growth forced people to live in marginal lands, away from any surpluses. It also seems to conflict with Perlman's repeated claim that material conditions were not responsible for the development of technology and thus civilization; if lack of a regular water supply isn't a material condition, then what is? Similarly, the material condition of a growing population isn't discussed. The social relations Perlman describes which accompany the new technology seem to be rather arbitrary. Much (the whole of history, in fact) seems to hinge on the decision made by the 'wise' (sic) Sumerian elders to appoint 'a strong young man' to be the 'supervisor' of the waterworks project. (So is chance to blame rather than the small minority?)

The writings of John Zerzan, such as his collection of essays Elements of Refusal, seems to take Perlman's general argument further (back). Zerzan's writings are not orthodoxy within the new primitivist current, but they have been important in the American primitivist and eco-anarchist scenes in setting agendas for debate on issues such as agriculture. The whole problem in Zerzan's view may be summarized as follows: symbolization set in motion the series of horrors that is civilization's trajectory. Symbolization led to ideas of time, number, art and language which in turn led to agriculture. Religion gets the blame as well, being carried by language, and being one of the prime culprits for agriculture: food production is 'at base ... a religious activity' (p. 70). But why is agriculture so bad? According to Zerzan, 'captivity itself and every form of enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor or model' (p. 75). Therefore while Perlman might have wanted to defend existing primitive communities against encroaching capitalist development, Zerzan sees anyone using agriculture as already alienated and therefore not worth saving: even most tribal types wouldn't be pure enough for him. Similarly, permaculture is an aspiration of many primitivists, but, within Zerzan's vision, this too would be part of the problem since it is a method of production. His later work has even dismissed hunter-gathering - since hunting leads to symbolism (and all the rest).

It might be easy to dismiss many of Perlman's and Zerzan's arguments as just half-baked idealism. They are not particularly original, and indeed might be said to be no more than vulgarizations of the ideas of Camatte (see below); if we are interested in theory, it might therefore be more appropriate to develop a critique of his work rather than theirs. However, Camatte is far less well known and far less influential than either Perlman or Zerzan. The fact that their ideas are becoming something of a material force - in the form of an increasing number of people engaged in struggle espousing primitivism - means that we have to take them seriously in their own right.

The modern context of primitivism

Ideas of a golden age and a rejection of civilization are nothing new. The Romantic Movement in bourgeois philosophy began with Rousseau, who eulogized unmediated relations with 'nature' and characterized 'industry' as evil. (Perlman quotes Rousseau approvingly.) But why has this old idea become so popular now?

It would seem no coincidence that anti-civilization ideas have blossomed in particular in the U.S.A. It is easy to see how such ideas can take hold in a place where there is still a recognizable wilderness which is currently being destroyed by production. The U.S.A. differs from Europe also in the fact that it lacks the long history of struggle that characterizes the transition from feudalism to capitalism (and the making of the proletariat). Instead, it has had the wholesale imposition of capitalism on indigenous cultures - a real genocide. Moreover, in recent years, the U.S.A. has also differed from Europe in the extent of the defeat of proletarian struggle over there.

Defeat brings pessimism, and when the current radical movement is on the decline, it may be easier to be radical about the past than to be radical in a practical way in the present. In the biography of Perlman, we can trace a movement from hope in the proletariat as the liberatory force to a turn to nature and the past in the context of defeat. As a Marxist, Perlman was caught up in the events of 1968, where he discovered the texts and ideas of the Situationist International, anarchism and the Spanish Revolution, and council communism. Afterwards, however, on moving to the U.S.A., '[t]he shrinking arena for meaningful political activity in the early 70s led Fredy to see himself as less of an "activist" and more as a rememberer.' Perlman's development is closely linked with that of Jacques Camatte, sometime comrade of the Italian left-communist Bordiga. Camatte broke with left-communist organizations partly due to his recognition of the need to go beyond their (objectivist) perspective and rethink Marx on the basis of the radical promise offered by such texts as the 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' (The 'missing sixth chapter' of Capital Volume I), the Grundrisse, and the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. However, Camatte eventually concluded that capital was in fact all powerful; given this, the proletariat offered no hope and the only option for humanity was to run away and escape somehow.

In the case of Zerzan, his early work romanticizes proletarian spontaneity; on the basis of his observations of apparently new expressions of resistance in the form of worker sabotage and absenteeism, he pronounced this to be the future of class struggle. In the early 1980s, the recession threw millions out of work. We might take this as the vindication of his critics' predictions about the transience of these forms of the revolt against work as viable expressions of the class struggle; for in the face of widespread unemployment how could workers commit sabotage or go absent? But instead of recognizing the setbacks to the struggle as a whole, Zerzan saw in the new unemployment figures the 'collapse' of capitalism and the 'vitality' of the revolt against work. For those who were still in jobs, work intensity increased during this period. To Zerzan, however, the most important thing, was a decline of the work-ethic. Zerzan also dismissed strikes (successful or otherwise) as being cathartic charades. His focus on attitudes allowed the perilous state of the proletariat as a movement to be overlooked.

Zerzan's unrealistic optimism is merely the flipside of the pessimism that comes with defeat. But holding on to such ideas - substituting the simple negation of civilization for the determinate negation of capitalism - is not only a reflection of pessimism with current movements; it also functions to prevent adherents from connecting with these movements. The ultimate test of the primitivists' case might be its usefulness in struggles. Primitivists say they don't want to 'simply' go back (maybe they want to go back in a more 'complex' way - in a tardis, perhaps), but neither do they say much about what we should be doing now; and Perlman and Zerzan give few examples of collective struggles that seem to them to point in the right direction. In the past, Perlman and Zerzan made contributions to revolutionary struggle; but whatever useful contributions Zerzan may make now do not particularly seem to flow from his theory.

For the modern primitivist, the despair of failing to locate the future in the present, and of failing to counteract the pervasiveness of production, may leave no alternative but principled suicide (possibly in the service of a bombing mission against one or other manifestation of the 'mega-machine'), or resignation before Leviathan's irresistible progress, and a search for an individual solution. Although primitivists see capital as a social relation, they seem to have lost the sense that it is a process of class struggle, not just an imposition by a powerful oppressor. Since, in their account, all praxis is alienated, how can proletarian praxis possibly offer the way out? So, for example, George Bradford, writing in Fifth Estate, argues that all we can hope to do is maintain human decency, affirm moral coherence and defend 'human personhood', and hope that others do the same.

History produces its own questioners

The argument that the turn to primitivism reflects the limits of the class struggle at the present time has certain consequences for the coherence of the primitivist position. To say that primitives necessarily resisted civilization may be to project on to them the primitivist's own desires - specifically, her own antipathy to technology and 'civilized' (i.e. class) society. Primitives very likely were not conscious of their way of life as a possibility or choice in the way the modern primitivist is, and therefore would not have valued it in the same way that we might, and may not necessarily have resisted the development ofthe productive forces. The desire to transcend civilization seems itself to be a product of class society; the rosy view of pre-history is itself a creation of history.

The issue touches upon the definition of 'human nature'. In confronting this, we find two sorts of position in the writings of primitivists. Firstly, consistent with Marx's approach, some acknowledge that human needs and desires are indeed historical products. But, for the logically pure primitivist, this is problematic because such needs and desires would therefore be an effect of the very thing they are trying to overcome; these needs would be part of history and civilization, and therefore alienated. (Recall the traditional leftist view that capitalism holds back our needs for technological progress; to the primitivist, needs like these would be part of the problem.)

Given this, primitivists often imply instead that the human needs and desires to which civilization is antithetical are ahistorical or suprahistorical. Perlman says nothing explicit in his book about the precise features of this ahistorical human nature he seems to be positing, except that he 'take[s] it for granted that resistance is the natural human response to dehumanization' (p. 184). The rest, we can assume, is simply the negative of his account of civilization: non-hierarchical, non-working and so on.

Again, an ahistorical 'human nature' argument against capital ('civilization', 'government' etc.) is not a new one, and we don't have to re-invent the dialectical wheel to argue against it. In fact, we can turn to some of Perlman's own work for a pretty good counter-argument. In his Introduction to Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Perlman discusses Feuerbach's conception of human nature. As Perlman says, for Feuerbach the human essence is something isolated, unhistorical and therefore abstract. The great leap in theory beyond the bourgeois idealists made by Marx was to argue against this that 'the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.' (p. 122).

By contrast, then, the later Perlman makes a huge leap backwards in theory to rediscover old, bourgeois notions which define human nature in terms of certain negative desires located within each individual. Similarly, Zerzan counterposes 'alienation' (be it through hierarchy, agriculture or wage labour) to an asocial humanity. His more promising early writing on absenteeism and sabotage was flawed by his inability to recognize the limits of struggle that does not become collective. His more recent work centres on a critique of language, that aspect of human life which, probably more than any other, allows us to share and therefore makes us social beings.

Primitivists' conception of the essential ontological opposition as being between history (civilization) and an abstract human nature, instead of between two historically-contingent sets of interests (capital versus the proletariat), means that their critique tends to be merely a moral one. For example, as his widow and biographer states, Perlman argues that the trail-blazers of civilization did have other choices. In Worker-Student Action Committees, a similarly voluntaristic theme works as a useful critique of the limits of the practice of those taking part in the events in Paris in May 1968: 'Subjectively they thought they were revolutionaries because they thought a revolution was taking place ... They were not going to initiate this process; they were going to follow the wave wherever it pushed them.' (p. 82). But, in the absence of a proper recognition of the logical-historical drives and constraints of particular modes of production, Perlman's primitivism represents the degeneration of a non-objectivist version of Marxism into a version of the anarchist critique of power, with all its obvious weaknesses: 'These leaders were just bad or stupid people!' Similarly, in the case of Zerzan, language is said to have arisen not so that people could co-operate with each other, but 'for the purpose of lying' (Elements of Refusal , p. 27). So we must blame, not class interests, but people's moral failings!

Whose progress is it anyway?

Primitivists say little about variations and changes in climate in pre-historic times. In certain times and places, there may well have been societies like the idyll described by Perlman; but it is equally likely that other situations were nightmarish. All primitive societies relied completely on the benevolence of nature, something which could easily change; and changes in climatic conditions could wipe out thousands.

Bound up with the primitivist view of pre-history as an ideal state is the rigid distinction they draw between nature and human productive activity. What makes us human are the set of 'first order mediations' between humanity and nature: our needs, the natural world around us, our power to create, and so on. To be human is to be creative. Through 'second order mediations', these basic qualities of existence are themselves mediated by relationships - of power, alienation, exploitation and so on - between classes. Zerzan idealizes a golden age before humanity became distinct from nature only because he conflates human creative activity per se with alienated creative activity; to him, any human creative activity - any activity which affects the rest of nature - is already saturated with exploitation and alienation.

What the anti-civilization position overlooks, therefore, is the mutual constitution of humanity and (the rest of) nature: humans are part of nature, and it is their nature to humanize nature. Nature and humanity are co-defining parts of a single moving totality; both are therefore subject to change and change each other. Changes in the world may lead to new social relations among human beings - relations which may involve a different relation to that world, a different praxis and technology (such as when the Iron Age developed out of climatic changes). We are products of nature, but we also create ourselves through our own activity in shaping the world that we inhabit. While it is certainly true that to privilege 'humanity' in any of these changes may be to damage the very environment we need to live, to privilege 'the natural world' by viewing all our activity as an assault on it may be to damage humanity.

If the change from pre-history to agriculture and other innovations wasn't necessarily alienating - if the latter weren't by their nature imposed within and through social relations of domination - then the whole historical opposition Perlman and Zerzan set up between progress and its popular resistance is thrown into doubt. Evidence from history suggests that progress is by no means necessarily the expression of the powerful; rather the powerful were sometimes indifferent to progress, and the powerless were sometimes the ones who contributed to it.

In Antiquity, particularly in Greek society, there was technological stagnation rather than progress. The surplus product of slave labour was used for innovations only in the sphere of civic society and the intellectual realm. Manual labour, and therefore innovations in production, were associated in the minds of the Greek ruling class with loss of liberty. Although the Romans introduced more technical developments, these were largely confined to the material improvement of cities (e.g., central heating) and the armed forces (e.g., roads) rather than the forces of production. In both cases, military conquest was preferred to economic advance through the forces of production.

In the feudal period, both lords and peasants had reasons to bring innovations to agriculture to increase production. The growing desires for amenities and luxuries in the aristocratic class as a whole, particularly from about the year 1000 onwards, motivated an expansion of supply from the countryside. Hence the introduction of the water-mill and the spread of viticulture. The peasants were motivated to create and satisfy new needs by the particular parameters of the feudal mode of production, which tied the peasant to only a certain weekly toll and fixed number of days to work: the rest of the time was their own, and could be used to improve their quality of life. Hence more and more villages came to possess forges for local production of iron tools; cereal cultivation spread; and the quality and quantity of production on the peasants' own plots increased.

The key to understanding the massive growth in productivity in the feudal period, however, was the recurrent rent struggles between peasants and landowners. Disputes over land, initiated by either pole of the feudal relationship, motivated occupation and colonization of new lands in the form of reclamation of heaths, swampland and forests for agricultural purposes. It was a continual class struggle that drove the economy forward.

Primitivism, by suggesting that the initiators of progress are always the ruling class, projects features of capitalism back into the past - as do most bourgeois theories. Previous class societies were based largely on a settled level of technology; in such societies technological change may have been resisted by the ruling classes since it might have upset settled relations of dominance. Capitalism is the only mode of production based on constantly revolutionizing technology and the means of production.

Moreover, characterizing capitalism as simply the rule of technology or the 'mega-machine' fetishizes fixed capital as a prime mover, thereby losing sight of the struggle behind the shape of the means of production. Progress within capitalism is characteristically the result of capital responding to forms of resistance. For example, in the shift to Taylorist production methods, the variables that the management scientists were having to deal with were not merely technical factors but the awkwardness and power of the workforce; this could best be controlled and harnessed as variable capital (so the scientists thought) by physically separating the job of work into its component parts and the workers along the production line so they were unable to fraternize. One of the next steps in improving output was the introduction of the 'human relations' approach, putting a human face on the factory, which was forced upon capital by worker resistance (in the form of absenteeism and sabotage) to the starkness of pure Taylorism.

Thus, we might understand progress in the forces of production not as the absolute imposition of the will of one class over another, but as the result of the class contradiction itself. If progress is in an important sense a compromise, a result of conflict - both between classes and between competing capitals - then some of its effects might be positive. We might hate capitalism, but most of us can think of capitalist technologies we'd like to keep to meet our present and future needs (though not as commodities, of course) - be it mountain bikes, light bulbs or word processors. This is consistent with our immediate experience of modern capitalism, which isn't simply imposed upon us monolithically, but has to reflect our own wishes in some way. After all, isn't the essence of the spectacle the recuperation of the multiplicity of our own desires? Therefore it is not some abstract progress which we want to abolish, but the contradictory progress we get in class society. The process of communism entails the reappropriation and radical, critical transformation of that created within the alienated social relations of capitalism. To hold that the problem is essentially technology itself is a mystification; human instruments are not out of our control within capitalism because they are instruments (any more than our own hands are necessarily out of our control), but because they are the instruments of capital - and therefore of reified, second-order mediations.

Given all this, the argument by Wildcat - that IF the productive forces need to be developed to a sufficient degree to make communism possible, and IF these forces are not developed sufficiently now, THEN revolutionaries might have to support their further development - applies only to Marxist objectivism rather than to the version of Marx's project we are trying to develop. At any time, the revolutionary supports the opposition to capital (and, by extension, takes the side of any communist tendency in any class society). Actions by the opposition to capital can force concessions from capital, making further successful resistance possible both subjectively (confidence, ideas of possibility etc.) and objectively (pushing capital beyond itself, weakening its mechanisms of control etc.). 'Progress' often describes the deferment of this revolutionary process, as the mode of production is forced to change its form: look at the way the class compromise of the post-war settlement entailed the development of new production and accumulation methods in the form of Fordism. In their attack on progress, Wildcat mistake the shadows for the substance of the fight.

Good and bad Marx

Perlman and Camatte certainly knew their Marx, and developed their early, more promising, revolutionary theory through a confrontation with him. But Against His-story and much of Zerzan's work recommend no such constructive confrontation; rather they encourage a simplistic and dismissive attitude by characterizing Marx as merely a nineteenth century advocate of progress. From that perspective, any apparently radical critique of Marx is welcomed, including that of postmodernist scumbags like Baudrillard. (The Mirror of Production, a book by the media darling and recuperator of situationist ideas, which groups Marx with the rest of the 'modernist' has-beens, is promoted in the primitivist-influenced Fifth Estate periodical.)

A critique of Marx and Marxism is certainly necessary, but primitivism (like postmodernism) is merely the ideologization of such a critique. The anti-civilization position is not just a necessary attack on leftism, but a counter-productive attack on everything in Marx. In defending some version of Marx against primitivism, we certainly need to acknowledge the problems in attempting to separate from some of its own consequences a theory which sought not merely to interpret the world but to change it. However, some of the primitivist critics seem to simply fit Marx up rather than attempt to understand some of the limitations of his theory. For example, Zerzan's critique of Marx claims to link Marx's practice with the supposed problems of this theory. But the critique consists almost entirely of a list of Marx's personal shortcomings and says virtually nothing about his theory.

At least Wildcat bother to dig out some quotes from Marx, which they then use as evidence in a critique of (their reading of) Marx's theory. From the Grundrisse, they find a quote to show that Marx thought that capitalist progress and thus alienation was a necessary step to the full development of the individual; and from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy they quote Marx's well-known statement declaring that the development of the productive forces is the precondition for communism. These kinds of theoretical statements they link to Marx's failings in practice, in particular his support for the American Civil War. In response, we might pick out a dozen more quotes from different texts by Marx - or even from the same texts Wildcat draw upon - to show the importance he placed on proletarian subjectivity and self-activity; and we might link these with his important and innovatory contributions to revolutionary practice, such as his support for the Silesian uprising and the Paris Commune.

But a mere selection (or even an aggregation) of quotes from Marx is not an analysis. If we think there is anything useful in Marx's work, we could try to locate his limits and contradictions in their historical context rather than in the person of Marx in abstraction. As Debord argued, Marx's limits and contradictionsreflect those of the workers' movement of the time. The economistic element in Marx's theory - exemplified in writings such as Capital - was merely one facet of his project as a whole. When the struggle appeared to be at its most promising, the totality and hence the subjective came to the fore in Marx's theory (as in the case of the overall content and direction of the Grundrisse ); but in the face of setbacks Marx was reduced to scientistic justifications. It was also important rhetorically, of course, to foresee the inevitability of the communist revolution in the maturation of capitalism (as in The Communist Manifesto, for example). Understanding Marx this way allows us to critically develop his revolutionary theory in the direction of communism rather than leading us simply to dump it as a whole uncritically.

In an important sense, Marx was simply describing his observation that the development of the forces of production in the end brought communism closer through the proletarianization of the population. It is also true that at times he was an advocate of such development. But the main point is that such advocacy of capitalist progress does not flow from his theoretical premises in the clear cut way the primitivists would have us believe. Productivism is one trajectory from his work; this is the one taken up by the Soviet Marxists and other objectivists in their narrow, scientistic reading. But, taking his project as a whole, Marx's theory also points to the active negation of capital through thoroughgoing class struggle on all fronts.

Theory, history and future

In approaches to history, there is an important difference between looking to it for a communist ideal and attempting to understand why previous communist tendencies have failed - and thus why we have more chance than the Luddites, millenarian peasants, classical workers' movement etc. But in order to go beyond these previous tendencies, we also need to interrogate the present and the future. What new developments in technology call forth new unities within the working class? Do changes to the means of communication enable those engaged in struggles to understand and act more effectively upon their global significance?

To grasp present trends, we need more than the radical anthropology offered by primitivists. We need theory that allows us to understand the historical specificity of struggles. Capitalism is the most dynamic of class societies; the proletariat is the only revolutionary class that seeks to abolish itself and all classes. There are therefore many features of the present epoch of class struggle that are lost in the simple gloss 'civilization'. In order to struggle effectively, to understand the possible directions of struggles and the limits of particular ideologies within struggles, we need to develop - not reject - the categories Marx derived to grasp the capital relation and the process of its negation.

'Primitivism' is itself a product of a particular period of capitalist history. The same setbacks that have encouraged postmodernism among radicals in the academic realm have helped produce primitivism in circles of activists. One merely describes 'the end of History', the other actively calls for such an end; both are an inverted form of liberal idealism which reject the traditional liberal faith in capitalist progress.

However, if primitivism was, like postmodernism, simply a complacent expression by well-paid academics of the defeat of industrial class struggles then we wouldn't bother giving it space in these pages. All of us are forced to make a response to increased pollution and environmental destruction brought about by the growth of the alien power that is capital; primitivism is, at best, an attempt to engage in struggles around these kind of issues. The alarming and compelling new appearance of the fundamental problematic of alienation, in the form of world-wide environmental destruction for profit, has encouraged new forms of resistance (particularly in the U.S.A.), and these new forms seek ideas. Marxism, identified with the old forms (of both capital and its resistance), is seen to fail in the eyes of this new wave of resisters - hence the appeal of a radical alternative, such as primitivism. But the problem of primitivism lies in a flawed diagnosis of the problem of Marxism: the essential problem in Marx and Marxism is not the belief in progress, but objectivism. A revolutionary theory adequate to the struggle needed at the present time must therefore start with a critique of the objectivism of previous revolutionary theories.

The class struggles in France

Editorial Introduction to articles on the 1995 winter crisis in France

Two million on the streets burning Roman candles, waving red and black banners, and singing the Internationale... A strike, spreading like wildfire from one sector to another through rank and file delegations... Daily assemblies open to all... Occupations... The switching of electricity onto cheap-rate by striking workers... Rioting coal miners... Shock waves reverberating throughout Europe, echoes in Germany and Belgium... And a feeling that anything is possible............

And yet. A movement initiated by the unions. Peaceful demonstrations policed by the unions. Limited extension of the strike beyond the public sector. Silence in the banlieue. An agreement negotiated by the unions. A return to work called by the unions. Central demands not met. And the postponement once more of hopes for real social change............

These contradictory appearances of last years social upheaval in France make an analysis imperative. There is little doubt that the movement was one of the most significant moments in European class struggle for decades. The working class of France once again assumed a central role in the international amphitheatre of class conflict. In 1968 it launched perhaps the most advanced - if not the most enduring - assault on the post-war settlement. In 1995 the working class of France mounted the biggest challenge to date against European capitals attempts to destroy that same settlement and liberate capital from its institutionalized commitments to working class needs.

Around five million workers were on strike for the mass demonstration on December 12th, while a quarter of a million were on indefinite strike throughout the duration of the movement. This easily dwarfs the numbers involved in any struggles in France since 68. And whilst ten million were involved in the general strike of that year, the movement of 95 saw more people demonstrating, and more often, than did that of 68. More than two million took to the streets for the biggest demonstrations.

Was the movement autonomous? Or was it merely a trade union affair? It would be impossible to answer these questions in absolute terms. The realities of class struggle are riven with complicating contradictions even if revolutionaries often see things in black and white:

The struggles have raised echoes of the great movements of 1936 and 1968 and have placed the power of the working class firmly back on the agenda. (Socialist Review, Monthly review of Socialist Workers Party, January 1996)

In reality the French proletariat is the target of a massive manoeuvre aimed at weakening its consciousness and combativity; a manoeuvre, moreover, which is also aimed at the working class in other countries, designed at making it draw the wrong lessons from the events in France. (International Review, 85, Quarterly journal of the International Communist Current, 1996[1])

The trade unions played a major role in the movement. Union militants, with the approval of their leaders, pushed for the extension of the strike from its initial base and encouraged the setting up of assemblies. On the other hand these assemblies, consisting of union members and non-union members alike, controlled the day to day affairs of the movement and initiatedmost of what was exciting about the movement. Localized autonomy was one of its key features.

In this issue of Aufheben we include as Intakes a number of leaflets and articles translated from French in order to provide documentation of this important movement. The documents we reproduce here help us to appreciate the current state of class struggle in France. However, on their own these documents are not enough. They do not explain to readers outside France how the French working class has arrived at this juncture. In this Editorial Introduction we will therefore try to illuminate these events in the light of their international and historical contexts. We need to be able to appreciate last years movement in relation to the struggles which have preceded it and those which may follow. Our attempt to place the French events in context has inevitably been limited by the problem of the restricted availability of translated material, which may have led to a certain imbalance in the importance we have placed on, and detail we have given on, some struggles while others have been neglected. This imbalance will hopefully be corrected in the future by the increased availability of further translated texts on the recent class struggles in France.

The class struggle in France, whilst occurring within specific geo-political boundaries, does not however take place separately to those in the rest of the world. Its parameters are determined by forces which exert themselves globally and to which nation states are tending towards responding supra-nationally. It is necessary to place the events of last year in relation to the context of European integration.

(A) The European Context

(i) Maastricht and all that

The leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) denounced the government's call for a clamp down on the budget deficit as lining up with Chancellor Kohl of Germany, a move which raised questions for France and its sovereignty. In response to this and other explanations which blame Maastricht and all that for everything, it has been pointed out that the austerity measures implemented by the French government last November were required to assuage the needs of French capital regardless of foreign policy considerations. Indeed much of the pressure for action came from factions in the French capitalist class who are opposed to Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).

The international dimensions of the situation cannot be ignored, however. The French economy is locked into the global circuits of capital and therefore obliged to play by the rules. Soon after their ascendancy in May 95, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé sacked a minister who had pushed for action on the budget deficit. The result was pressure on the franc in the international money markets and panic in the French government. After the announcement of the Juppé plan, stock prices stabilized and the franc recovered. All the talk at the moment about the ideology of neo-liberalism obscures the fact that it refers to the political expression of the real imperatives of capital. The global autonomy of finance capital subordinates all would-be masters of capital to its dictates - never before has the alienation of the capitalist been so apparent.

Faced with this tidal wave which threatens to wash away all the messy compromises of the past, the French bourgeoisie clearly intends to cling to the life raft of European integration. Twenty-odd years of rationalization has still left European capital with a competitive disadvantage compared to the US or Japan. Whilst European capital faces an entrenched working class, doggedly clinging on to the concessions wrought from capital during the post-war boom, capital in the US has been able to outflank the battalions of organized labour by shifting investment away from the rust belt industries of the North and East towards the flexible labour of sunrise industries in the South and West. Likewise, Japanese capital has been able to reduce the value of the labour-power, which becomes objectified in its labour-intensive industries, through shifting investment away from its own highly paid workers towards those in Korea and other Pacific NICs. Since the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, capital in Western Europe has increasingly come to recognize that confronting its working class in order to be able to compete with the emerging blocs of the Japanese Pacific and the US-dominated Americas will similarly require a continental territorial perspective.

The process of European integration has proceeded at a pace unimaginable during the years when global geo-politics were dominated by cold war rivalry. By 1999, proletarians in Europe will not only sell their labour-power in a unified market, but could well find it confronted with and bought by money with a single face, the imaginatively named Euro. The working class of Europe is becoming increasingly unified, but only behind our backs, through our alienated labour becoming increasingly integrated into the social abstract labour which is European capital. This contains an inherent possibility, which can be realized only through re-appropriating our activity as struggle: that of the political recomposition of the proletariat across the continent. But whilst this possibility remains as yet unrealized, the cycles of struggle which have occurred over the last few years have proved that the entrenchment of the working class throughout Europe poses a significant problem for the project of EMU. It cannot proceed if any of the central players, particularly France or Germany, fail to meet the convergence criteria. Moreover, the signal such a failure would send to the international money markets would lead to serious repercussions.

The formation of a single currency is conditional upon nation states being able to impose upon their subjects the strict criteria for EMU agreed upon at Maastricht. Meeting the targets for public spending (below 60 per cent of GDP) and national debt (below three per cent of GDP) require significant attacks upon the social wage and strenuous efforts to hold down wage levels. It is against this backdrop that the Juppé plan must be viewed. Class struggle throughout the continent is now mediated by political decisions made at the European level - the Maastricht Treaty has given the general requirement for austerity: quantitative targets to be achieved within a specific timetable. The gauntlet has been thrown down.[2]

The Maastricht Treaty also aims to introduce liberalization and competitiveness to areas of state monopoly such as post and telecommunications, transport and energy. A 1990 European directive liberalized telecommunications, with state monopolies due to end in 1998; a 1991 rail transport decree (which became law in France in 1995) separates management of rail infrastructure and access to the system, allowing private rail companies access to the rail network maintained by public funds; a 1993 agreement frees up internal rail travel; while the next area for liberalization will be energy, where major consumers will be able to buy power from the supplier of their choice while using existing infrastructure to deliver it.[3] Whilst such measures simply reflect the existing situation on the ground in the UK, they clearly have strong implications for France, the most state-dominated economy in the EU.

(ii) Working class opposition

The winter crisis in France was not the first to result directly from measures aimed at achieving the targets for EMU (or, perhaps more accurately in this case, reassuring the money markets that these targets will be achieved). Strikes and mass demonstrations have been seen in virtually every European country over the last few years. These movements have created significant problems for the national bourgeoisies of continental Europe. But, excepting recent events in France for the time being, those that stand out occurred in Germany and then Italy in 1992. The strike wave in both Eastern and Western Germany in the spring of 1992 wrecked hopes that unification would instrumentally undermine the power of the German working class, and further strikes in 1993, 1995 and 1996 have left German qualification for EMU on a knife-edge. Indeed much depends on whether the sweeping welfare cuts announced in April this year, aimed at slashing £22 billion from public spending by reducing sick pay and pensions and eroding employee protection laws, can be carried out in the face of concerted union opposition.[4]

Whilst national union federations throughout Europe have been mobilizing opposition to austerity, there can however be little doubt that they remain generally committed to the well being of their capitals and sympathetic towards European integration, if a little dismayed that the price to be paid for the Social Chapter is subordination to Europes bankers. And the problem remains that, on the whole, these struggles have occurred within a strict union framework. The apparent exception was the movement in Italy against the Amato plan in autumn 1992. This autumn budget comprised a freeze on public sector recruitment and wage negotiations, the abolition of health care for 66 per cent of families, and the imposition of new taxes on houses.[5] Spontaneous strikes broke out in many factories in response. The reaction to these measures combined with anger towards the trade unions because of an agreement they had signed with the government at the end of July abolishing the scala mobile, a mechanism for partial wage protection against inflation. This agreement had been signed whilst most workers were on holiday, in order to avoid an immediate backlash. The trade unions called for regional general strikes, and three million public sector workers took strike action. But when trade union leaders addressed rallies they were met with exemplary expressions of anger. In Florence, Milan and Turin, union speakers at rallies were pelted with rotten vegetables, bolts and ball-bearings, whilst huge demonstrations in Naples, Bologna, Bari, Genova, Parma, Padova, Venezia, Taranto, Brescia and Bergamo saw similar outbursts of anger directed at the unions. Alternative rallies and demonstrations were held, the COBAS providing the necessary autonomous organization.[6] The limits of this movement were exposed by the simple fact that, in terms of scrapping the proposed measures or exacting concessions from the government, it achieved practically nothing. The militants of the COBAS remained marginal with respect to the mass of workers still loyal to the unions. Italian unions have ridden this storm and retained control over the working class. The demonstration in Rome in 1994, the biggest in Italy since the Second World War, was essentially under trade union control. Nevertheless, the struggles in Italy in 1992, 1993 and 1994 will almost certainly mean that the Italian bourgeoisie will be unable to satisfy the convergence criteria for EMU in the foreseeable future.

But what of France? French qualification for EMU is also in the balance, but the whole project would need to be completely reappraised if the French bourgeoisie fails to meet the requirements. Last year's movement certainly came close to wrecking France's chances and following the end of last year's movement there was a strong feeling in France that the working class was not defeated and would mobilize again if provoked. But it is also necessary to look at this whole situation from another angle - that of the proletariat and its potential transnational, antagonistic recomposition. We must turn our attention to the major battles in the class war in France over the last few years and the light they throw ontolast year's events.

(B) French Historical Context - Capital and Class Struggle 1945-1995

Part I: 1945-1986

A short note on French trade unions

A short preamble to this section is required to explain the difference between trade unionism in France and in the UK. Less than ten per cent of French workers belong to a trade union at present, an extremely low figure representing a decline in membership throughout the 1980s. For example, the membership of the CGT in 1994 was only a third of that in 1977. But this low level of membership can be misleading. The influence of French trade unions is far greater than the figures suggest, as it derives from their legal and institutional positions in the state organized system of works councils, comités d'entreprise. All workplaces over a minimal size have a works council in which the workers are represented. As well as being responsible for running facilities such as canteens, sporting activities, clubs etc., these works councils have rights to information regarding the profitability and future plans of the enterprise. This institutionalized social partnership extends all the way to the top, with, for example, meetings in which representatives from all of the councils in each Renault plant will sit around the table with the top management.

Union members and non-members alike vote in works council elections, so non-membership in France involves none of the consequences that it can in the UK. Indeed, to become a member of a trade union in France is quite a different thing to signing up in the UK where it is a relatively apolitical act of combination. In France it is an explicitly political act, nailing one's colours to the flag of the particular union federations political affiliations. The CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), the largest, is explicitly the PCFs union federation, whilst FO (Force Ouvriere) resulted from an anti-Soviet cold war split from the CGT, and the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique Du Travail) is closely linked to the Socialist Party (PS). Of course, the CGT has changed a great deal of late, as at least one of the Intakes articles reproduced here points out, due to the historic waning of Stalinist influence throughout Western Europe, although it seemed impervious to the wave of euro-communist revisionism for years. Other unions have emerged to complicate the picture, including the SUD, which resulted from the expulsion from the CFDT of postal service members deemed too militant.

(i) Liberation

As was the case elsewhere, many of the welfare commitments which capital has subsequently tried to rescind were granted in the aftermath of World War Two. The Conseil National de Résistance (CNR) drew up a programme, even before the Normandy invasions, for nationalization and social security[7], and for the direct involvement of the unions in processes of planning and the joint administration of social security. Following its patriotic role in the resistance, the PCF subsequently gained the largest proportion of votes in the 1945 Constituent Assembly elections and formed a tripartite government with the Socialists and the Christian Democrats. As a matter of the survival of French capitalism, all parties were committed to nationalization (in order to prevent social revolution), consensus (rather than class war), and the modernization of France along Keynesian lines in order to prevent a return to the crises of the 1930s.

Building on the measures introduced by the Vichy government, the Popular Front and before, a national planning mechanism was established, state education was extended to the age of eighteen, and women were given the vote. A number of key nationalizations were enacted, including the coal, electricity and gas industries, Renault, Air France, Paris transport, the four main deposit banks, 34 insurance companies, press agencies, press printing shops and distribution companies, radio stations and navigation companies. A law subsequently established the comités dentreprise, giving the unions special privileges in elections to them. In October 1946, the right to strike was recognized in principle; moreover, a special status was established for national and local government employees, laying down recruitment and promotion procedures, pension rights and elected joint administrative committees.

The widespread destruction resulting from the war, whilst providing the long term basis for the profitable reconstruction of industry along fordist lines, had left the economy in tatters. Food shortages, low wages and overcrowded insanitary accommodation led to widespread discontent in 1947. Investment in the form of OECD funds provided by the Marshall Plan served to stave off the immediate threat of communism, or at least the real threat of French alignment with the Soviet Union, forcing the PCF into opposition and locking the French economy into the circuits of industrial capital policed by the US. The CGT launched a wage offensive, triggering national general strikes of railway workers, miners and bank employees in the summer of 47 and the Marseilles general strike and factory occupations that November and December. In 1948 an eight week long national miners' strike ended in defeat when a number of miners were killed, thousands were imprisoned and the army occupied the coalfields. But concessions played a role alongside repression. A national minimum wage was introduced along with generalized insurance against unemployment, and urban renewal saw the tearing down of the festering shanty towns which were breeding working class antagonism, gradually replacing them with new suburban estates or banlieue.

These new banlieue provided the dormitories for the new working class concentrations, predominantly immigrants (many from North Africa but with significant numbers from Europe and the rest of Africa) rather than internal migrants, required to rebuild the French economy. The modernization of French agriculture was initially delayed in the post-war era, restricting the number of internal migrants available for the rapid modernization of French industry. The rural population did however decline from 35 per cent of the total to six per cent in 1990, whilst the number of students increased tenfold between 1950 and 1980. Rising labour productivity provided the basis for a modern fordist economy.[8] The production of relative surplus-value, dependent on the application of the mental labour of science to the transformation of labour processes, allowed for relatively stable capital accumulation[9] along with expanded consumption for the working class.

(ii) May 68

May 68 didn't come out of nowhere, unless one was looking for the prior existence of a revolutionary party, or for a major economic crisis. The successful accumulation of alienated labour posited as its opposite the accumulation of frustration and hostility. The resultant proletarian offensive which rocked Paris and the world remains one of the essential reference points for revolutionaries searching beyond the horizons of the old workers' movement in search of the richness of the project for the fully developed social individual.

As such the revolt deserves to be re-examined carefully. This introduction is not however the place to undertake such an examination - space does not permit it.[10] We will have to confine ourselves instead to the briefest of summaries, delineating the two phases of the movement and the separation between them that enabled the counter-revolution to emerge victorious.

The student movement was from the start a movement against the role of the student, developing from a reaction against the use to which power put knowledge in Vietnam to become a conscious desire to abolish the separation of ideas from practice and ideas of separation.[11] In conquering the territory of the university, it had become a movement in which students were a minority and in which the very category of student was being left behind with the division of labour. Through occupying and socializing the university, destroying the separate roles of thinker and worker, it had temporarily abolished it.

This occupations movement was revolutionary in both form and content - the discovery of new ways of living dependent on the full participation of all involved. The situation became a genuinely revolutionary one, however, only when ten million workers went on wildcat strike and occupied the factories, thereby posing the decisive question of control of the means of material as well as ideological production. Those who had seized control over the means of production of specialized knowledge[12], however, posited the same separation in the factory that they were abolishing in the university. Calls for the formation of workers' councils were issued to the workers. Unlike in the university, the task of seizing control of, transforming, socializing and thereby abolishing the factory was to be the prerogative of those who had been condemned to that particular prison by capitals social division of labour. The workers were expected to carry out the revolution in their factories. But in the era of the real subsumption of labour to capital it is only leftists who self-identify with the alienated role of the worker. The vast majority of workers remained uninspired by the ideology of self-management. Nor had they discovered a need for communism through struggle. Unwilling to make a history which was not their own yet not ready to make their own history, the workers of France delegated.

The CGT controlled the factory occupations, stitched up what passed for councils or assemblies, and locked the gates against the revolutionary tide. There was no organized challenge to the CGT stranglehold - that would have to wait until 86. In sharp contrast to the active nature of the strike in 95, the strikers largely remained the passive observers of the passing of an opportunity. The CGT negotiated the return of the factories in exchange for wage increases, and many never recovered from having to return to the old world when the new had seemed so possible.

(iii) Recession, Austerity and Resistance

(a) Stage 1

The costs of containing such an overt challenge to the rule of capital and preventing such developments elsewhere only served to compound the squeeze on profit rates which were falling globally. Along with those of the rest of Western Europe and the US, the French economy plunged into recession, particularly following the oil price hike in 1973 which saw increased inflation, balance of trade problems, the halving of growth rates and rising unemployment. Despite the fact that the Gaullists remained in power, the response was that of social reform, including an increase in tax on capital and increased social security. In 1976 however unemployment topped one million and inflation was becoming rampant. An austerity package was imposed by the incoming prime minister Raymond Barre in an attempt to reduce wage inflation and curb public spending. Despite a one day stoppage in protest, social security contributions were increased and a wage freeze was imposed. The second oil shock of 1979-80 pushed unemployment over 1.6 million.

The reimposition of material poverty for the surplus population, amongst whom immigrants were disproportionately represented, led to insecurity for those still in work, resulting in a gradual decline in the confidence and combativity of the French working class. There was rioting after a striking steel workers' demo in Paris in 1979, but this was to be the last such riot in central Paris until 1986. And the one day strikes in 1976 marked the beginning of a long decline in the number of days lost (reclaimed) through strikes, a decline that continued all the way through the 1980s (with a slight blips in 1982 and 1988) and 1990s until it was arrested in the strike wave of last year.

(b) Stage 2

At the same time as right-wing leaders such as Thatcher and Reagan were coming to power in the Anglo-Saxon world with explicit mandates to tear up the post-war social democratic consensus and confront the organized power of the working class, the Socialist Party (PS) came to power in France with a Keynesian reflationary programme. A commitment to increase public spending was to be guaranteed by nationalizing the remaining private banks. President Mitterand, backed by a PS majority in the National Assembly and support from the PCF, aimed to create 55,000 public sector jobs, nationalizing aeronautics, electronics, chemicals and information technology companies, taking the state share of turnover from sixteen per cent to 30 per cent and public sector employment from eleven per cent to 24.7 per cent. Further measures designed to reduce unemployment included a reduction in the working week to 39 hours, an extra week of paid holidays, early retirement, and retraining for the unemployed. The national minimum wage was to be increased by ten per cent and family allowances boosted. All of this was topped off by a proposed tax on wealth and rhetoric about attacking the wealthy.[13]

The result was somewhat inevitable. The competitiveness of French companies declined whilst imports were sucked in, leading to inflationary and balance of payments problems. Capital took flight for pastures greener, and the franc had to be devalued three times in eighteen months as the global balance of class forces reasserted itself through the international money markets. The reform policy was put into reverse gear in 1982, with an initial wage and price freeze followed by wage restrictions in the public sector. Interest rates were cranked up to reimpose global disciplinary conditions upon French capital, taxation increased, welfare spending reduced, and wage indexation scrapped. The response to this dose of socialist austerity was a strike wave[14], but it was relatively weak and certainly unable to counterbalance the pressure upon the French state from capital. Thus in 1984 the coal, steel and shipbuilding industries were all subjected to rationalization, resulting in a wave of redundancies. Other companies were encouraged to shed labour in pursuit of the increased exploitation of the remainder.

The French car industry was already engaged in the process of restructuring: introducing automation, shedding labour, running down certain plants and reorganizing the assembly line along neo-fordist lines in order to re-impose managerial control over the labour process.[15] The inability of previous concentrations of working class power to resist this restructuring, the extent to which the car worker had been fractured (particularly along racial lines), and the confusion of labour at once antagonistic to capital and desperate not be consigned to the scrap heap, were demonstrated by the pitched battles between workers at Talbot-Poissy in 1983.[16] Indeed a major element in the decline in strike activity from 1982 onwards has been the reluctance of private sector workers to strike, public sector workers being on average between half (1980s) and a third (1990s) more likely to strike than private sector workers.[17] But, notwithstanding this historic decline in the level of strike activity, there have been important developments in the class struggle, beginning with the bitter dispute of railway workers in the winter of 1986-7.

Part II: 1986-1996

(i) 1986: Riots Return to Central Paris

In electoral terms, the right-wing gained from the disillusionment of the working class with socialist austerity, although the experience may have played a part in the determination of railway workers in 86 to control their own dispute as the unions were tainted by their attachment to the PS-PCF government.[18] The 1983 municipal elections and 1984 European elections witnessed the rise of the National Front, which was supported by many PCF and Socialist Party officials in an attempt to split the right-wing vote. Indeed Mitterand changed the voting system for the 1986 National Assembly elections in order to boost the NF vote, but it was the conservative UDF (Union for French Democracy) and RPR (Rally for the Republic) which gained a majority, electing Chirac as Prime Minister to work alongside President Mitterand. Privatizations and deregulation (excluding those industries which had traditionally been in the public sector such as gas, electricity, aerospace and telecom), a reform of labour legislation to favour employers, and the refinancing of social security all formed important parts of his programme. But perhaps the most important element was the plan for outright repression of the unemployed second generation immigrant youth who constituted the beur movement.[19]

The first generation of immigrants played an important role in the revolts of the mass worker, from the struggles over the assembly line to the rent strikes of the Sonacotra foyers (hostels and living quarters where large numbers of migrants were housed) in the late 1970s. Marginalized by the processes of restructuring, the torch was handed on to the second generation and their revolts in the early '80s, beginning in 1981 with the summer of rioting in Minguettes, the banlieue east of Lyons. Besides launching a cycle of urban revolt which has continued right up to the present day, the riot led to a number of initiatives to recuperate the beurs' struggle, beginning with the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, which many young blacks and Arabs used as an opportunity to protest against racist attacks and violent police repression (despite their rejection of miserable institutional anti-racism), and ending with SOS-Racisme. This organization was launched by leftists with media blessing in 1985 with the express intention of regaining control over the beur movement and reducing it to a moralistic and non-violent media-oriented vehicle to integrate and destroy the real social movement and promote the re-election of Mitterand. Despite a certain degree of success initially, no doubt succeeding in preventing more riots than the cops, the organization rapidly began to lose its legitimacy in the banlieue, particularly after the movement had reasserted itself as a predominantly anti-police movement in the winter of 86.[20]

The 86 election had been won with a strong law and order platform, aimed particularly at dealing with the beurs. Home Secretary Pasqua introduced a new policy against immigration and expelled 101 Malians on a charter flight, and legislation was passed by the new assembly to change the nationality laws so as to deny automatic French citizenship to kids born in France or to French parents. At the same time, the Devaquet Bill was passed, restricting what had previously been automatic and universal access to university for anyone with the baccalauréat (French equivalent of A levels), a move which would have disproportionately affected those already discriminated against in other spheres. The spectre of terrorism, intifada and Islamic fanaticism was the cloak used by state terrorism, justifying routine harassment, searches and the like - and shootings. Cops were pulling out their guns and pointing them at black and Arab kids on a daily basis, on two occasions accidentally killing drivers for going the wrong waydown a one-way street. Years of repression and now this - no wonder that when the opportunity arose the situation exploded.[21]

From November 26th onwards, students began mobilizing against the Devaquet Bill, organizing meetings and demonstrating peacefully. On the 4th of December, however, a concert to end a march at Invalides erupted into a riot with some 4,000 or so youths, mainly high school students, disrupting the show and fighting the cops, injuring 121. The following day, students gathered in the Latin Quarter to protest against police repression and proceeded to occupy the Sorbonne. Unlike in 68, however, non-students were excluded, and the whole affair served only to illustrate the extent to which students reflected the defensive nature of the times, having moved from a position of subverting their role to defending it. Later on, however, in the streets of the Latin Quarter the smashing up of a couple of shop windows and torching of a Porsche provoked the cops into attacking the crowd, killing Malik Oussekine.

Despite the fact that the crowd naturally enough comprised many non-students just hanging out in the area, Malik Oussekine was an Arab student. SOS-Racisme along with student bodies sought to exploit this incidental fact by excluding non-students from the funeral, outrageously proclaiming him one of their dead. But since the riot on the 4th, the mobilizations had ceased to be simply student affairs in defence of the university but were seen by many as a vehicle for the expression of anger towards the police and the whole stinking system.[22] Many non-students turned up as well, and as the march passed near the 13th arrondisment police station, the CRS (French riot cops) were pelted with missiles. Later that night, rioting erupted in the Latin Quarter, injuring 58 cops. Burning cars, barricades, and looting served to demonstrate the extent to which the initial premises of the movement had been left behind, despite the opposition of many students to such a process of generalization. The repeal of the Devaquet Bill was announced on December 8th, followed almost immediately by repeal of the new nationality law.

Two things need to be noted. First, that the reluctance of many students to embrace the struggle of the marginalized and their wrecking and looting would be overcome when they mobilized again in 1994. Second, as in 68, and as would happen again in 95, the initial impetus created by a student movement was followed by a workers' movement. Although plans for a rail strike were already well under way, the governments climb down boosted the railway workers as they prepared for what would be an historic battle.

(ii) The 86-87 Rail Strike

Through its exemplary quality the movement has created an incomparable precedent (Emergency stop, in France goes off the Rails, BM Blob & BM Combustion).

It was the first time in France that such a large movement broke out completely autonomously while simultaneously setting up organizations of direct democracy to ensure the strikes continuation. (Henri Simon, France Winter 86-87, The railways strike, An attempt at autonomous organisation, Echanges et Mouvement).

During 1986 there had been fourteen one-day strikes organized by the unions in response to rank and file pressure. Although strike committees began to emerge during these strikes, the symbolic nature of the strikes rendered them ineffectual.[23] Then, in November, a non-union train driver from Paris Nord circulated a petition demanding better conditions and the scrapping of a project for salaries based on promotion by merit (read subservience), proposing to have it out once and for all if the demands werent met. Other drivers brought out a leaflet reiterating the demands and calling for an unlimited strike from December 18th. From midnight the strike spread like wildfire, without a single call from the unions, engulfing virtually the entire SNCF (state railway) network by the end of the second day. On December 20th non-drivers joined in as well.

The CGT, with a strong base in the railways, initially opposed the strike openly, tearing down strike posters and in some depots organizing work pickets to encourage drivers not to strike. Finding their position untenable, they made a swift U-turn. But the strike was characterized right from the start by its autonomous organization. Mass assemblies of strikers made all the decisions concerning the running of the dispute and elected strike committees subject to recall (except in the Paris Nord depot where the assembly refused to delegate to a committee at all, seeing it as being a form of separate power potentially above that of the assembly itself, and contrawise in Caen and Gare de Lyons where control lay in the hands of the CGT). Co-ordinations between the different committees were established, beginning with local and regional liaison committees, and then national liaisons, to ensure the circulation of information and maximize the impact of the strike.

At the same time, there were strikes by seamen, dockers and metro workers, as well as patchy strikes by postal and munitions workers. And trouble was brewing amongst gas and electricity workers, and miners in Northern France. Although all of these strikes were initiated and controlled by the CGT the potential was there for a generalization of the struggle on the basis of the methods of the railway workers. But the government was determined to crush this experiment in autonomy before it got out of hand. The CRS were sent in to violently evict the strikers from the railway stations and signal boxes they had been occupying. The government refused to negotiate with the co-ordinations. Then on December 31st it conceded on the demand of the merit wages and announced negotiations with the unions over working conditions - the central concern of the strikers.

Following the evictions there was widespread sabotage of tracks and rolling stock, even extending to the ambushing of trains in the countryside in order to fuck up the brakes. But faced with the government-management-CGT negotiations axis on the one hand and the full force of the state's violence on the other, together with the collapse of the strikes on the metro and in the electricity industry, the strikers felt unable to continue. Although the strike became increasingly violent and bitter, the sense of isolation contributed to a growing recognition of defeat and there was a full return to work by January 14th.

In one sense the railway workers were defeated; they had been battered by the cops and they had been forced back to work without having had all of their demands met. But in having taken control over their struggle, the railway workers had made a huge advance. In 68 the workplace assemblies had been mere audiences for the unions to tell the workers what was happening. In 86 the assemblies themselves were sovereign, accepting no power outside of themselves. They were not without important limitations however. Ultimately it was these limits that allowed the unions to represent the strike.

The co-ordinations were never sufficiently well organized to truly represent the movement as a whole, whereas the unions were able to claim that they represented it because they existed everywhere. And despite outright hostility to the unions at a local level in some places - forcing union members to remove their badges in some assemblies, expelling the CGT in others, and in most insisting that the day to day running of the strike was their responsibility alone - many workers believed that they needed the unions to negotiate with the government. But perhaps the most important weakness of this movement was the extent to which divisionsimposed by the SNCF were reproduced in the autonomous movement. There were joint pickets involving all the different categories of railway worker at Montparnasse, Gare de Lyons and St. Lazare, but sectional differences remained an abiding problem. Separate mass meetings were held by train drivers who insisted on differentiating themselves from the rest of the workforce. Naturally enough this division on the ground reproduced itself at the level of the co-ordinations. Nevertheless, regardless of however else it fell short of it, the development of co-ordinated organizational autonomy in this movement represented a significant advance upon the delegation to the CGT during the general strike of 68.

(iii) Further Co-ordinations/Recuperations

Other struggles of the proletariat over the next couple of years demonstrated that the conditions which had given rise to co-ordinating committees in the railway workers strike also existed elsewhere. Workers in the private sector remained in a situation of precariousness, subjected to team-work and increasingly employed on temporary contracts. Between 87 and 90 the average length of the working week increased by 30 minutes whilst wages fell in real terms. But in the public sector the response to the increasing subjection of public services to capitalist imperatives and attempts to restructure the workforce along similar lines was leading to a number of strikes. Whilst lacking the impact of the railway workers' strike, many of those which occurred in 1988-89 led to the re-emergence of assemblies and co-ordinating committees, and in some cases open antagonism with the unions.[24] Particularly important was the nurses' strike between March 1988 and January '89; this occurred in practically non-unionized sector, tempting the government to deal with the co-ordination and thereby posing a threat to the mediating role of the unions. Also, workers at Banque Nationale de Paris (a state-owned bank) held assemblies, formed strike committees and established co-ordinating committees during a two month strike in 1989, attacking and ransacking the local offices of the unions who negotiated a return to work behind their backs.[25]

The lycée (secondary schools) movement of autumn 1990 however demonstrated that the form of the co-ordinating committee is no more a guarantee of autonomous content than workers' councils. In that movement (for more money, better buildings and more teaching staff) two co-ordinating committees were established - one close to the JCL (PCF youth federation), the other close to SOS-Racisme - which aptly illustrated that the open and democratic nature of the co-ordinations was no assurance against their political recuperation. The TV seized upon media-friendly leaders, but the lycée students tended to reject them and their co-ordinating committees, preferring spontaneous violence to dialogue with leftist recuperators.[26]

The demonstrations were characterized by clashes with the police, in which kids from the banlieue were particularly involved, and the emergence of looting as an aspect of mass demonstrations. The media tried to split the movement by criminalizing the casseurs (hooligans, wreckers) in the hope that, as they had in 86, students would disown them. But this was a movement of high school students rather than university students and thus closer to the harsh realities facing lower order labour-power. Many casseurs were ex-students, but more significantly many students recognized that they too might be in the same situation as the casseurs. This awareness enabled the movement to embrace the involvement of outsiders and take up the themes of the revolt in the banlieue.

On the terrain of the banlieue themselves there was to be a heat wave the following spring. In Vaulx-en-Velin (a suburb of Lyons), cop cars were being smashed up regularly from February onwards to avenge the killing of Thomas Claudio, and more than 600 cops had to be mobilized following the ram-raiding of a cop shop with a BMW. In Sartrouville (suburb to the North West of central Paris), on the 26th, 27th and 28th of March, three days of rioting followed another death, with further incidents on April 10th. Cops were attacked with stones and petanque balls, plainclothes cops beaten up, cars burned and a furniture shop set on fire. TV journalists were systematically attacked and a TF1 camera stolen.

But if the left had proved incapable of recuperating those who knew French society had rejected them, an alternative was offering itself in the aftermath of the Sartrouville riots. Whilst cops guarded the supermarkets, the streets were being watched by 30-40 year-old North Africans wearing the green armbands of Islam. A spate of murders to which the rest of French society seemed indifferent, the rise of Le Pen, institutionalized racism, and the rage against anti-Arab media manipulation during the Gulf War - all of these factors combined to produce a climate favourable to the development of Islamic rackets; and following the riots Islamists attempted to reinforce the ghettoization of the beurs. The anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was circulated; and, journalists, shopkeepers and the Mayor of Sartrouville were criticized as Jews in meetings held to discuss what to do next.

The left wants the beurs to identify themselves with the nation whose subject they are. The Mullahs encourage the beurs to identify themselves ethnically. Neither want them to identify themselves in terms of what they do. But other ideologies compete for their minds. Excluded from work, they are nevertheless seduced by the images of consumption and the French way of life they depict. Whilst the Mullahs are content with the Koran, the beurs want these things, and want them immediately. And they can gain access to the commodities of French society by involvement in the black economy or through joy-riding, ram-raiding and looting. Through these collective criminal activities, the beurs share not only the wealth of modern society but also in the construction of an identity. This identity is neither ethnic nor French but subverts both categories. It is constructed socially, as they are, but through opposition rather than acceptance. It is antagonistic to both backward and modernist variations of hierarchical society. Moreover, it is one which is constructed alongside the marginalized French kids and Jewish kids of the banlieue, through the formation of multi-ethnic territorially delineated gangs. The beurs have more in common with these other excluded subjects than they do with the Mullahs. Furthermore, women in particular will not want to renounce the freedoms of bourgeois society for the subjugations of a theocratic one.[27]

The experience of blacks in the US has demonstrated, however, that this separatist ideology can be extremely influential amongst the most marginalized. As in the US, the youth of the French ghettos waste much of their anger on gang fights and the like. We should resist the fetishization of violence that forgets to question the ends to which it is used. But, in LA in 92, gang rivalries and separatist ideologies were superseded practically through ferocious anti-hierarchical violence. As we shall soon see, such a supersession also occurred in France in March 94.

(iv) Truck Drivers 92

The relative failure of the first co-ordinations and their subsequent political recuperation, compounded by fragmentation and restructuring in the public sector, led to a gradual decline in the tendency in working disputes towards forming co-ordinating committees. The result has been a tendency towards localization - fragmented struggles concentrating on localized autonomy of action.[28]

The truck drivers' strike in the summer of 92 was characterized by a refusal of mediation through virtual non-organization and an emphasis on spontaneous activity. Public sector strikes in the spring of that year had seen off Edith Cresson, who had prioritized the fight against inflation on replacing Rocard as Prime Minister. But, despite the problems they posed for the project of restructuring the public sector, these public sector strikes remained the usual uninteresting affairs. The truck drivers actions on the other hand captured the imagination on a wide enough scale for the Carling Black Label ad men to base a TV commercial on them.

In response to the announcement of a new points system for driving licences which they saw as a potential threat to their jobs, the truck drivers blockaded the motorways. Riot police and soldiers used tanks to break up some blockades but new ones sprang up in their place. Refusing mediation, communicating locally by CB radio rather than establishing committees, they just waited for the government to accede to their demands - which they did when major industries began to complain about the damaging effects of the strike. By paralysing the arteries of commerce, the truck drivers caused one billion francs of damage to the tourist industry and cost Spanish fruit firms 150 million francs. More significantly, the strike revealed the vulnerability of the just-in-time factory regimes which had built on the neo-fordist experiments of the 70s.[29] Renault and Peugeot had to close car assembly plants due to shortages of parts whilst the production of Michelin tyres was disrupted.

Whilst the truck drivers' victory was important, it did not serve to bury the culture of defeat and subjection amongst workers which had been produced during the long period of PS rule. But such a transformation occurred the following year when the honeymoon plans of the new conservative government were rudely interrupted by trouble on the runways.

(v) Air France 93

The PS lost out in the National Assembly elections in March 93, although Mitterand remained President. A significant minority of the electorate (33 per cent voted for the RPR and UDF, sufficient to give them 80 per cent of the seats in the new parliament) was unhappy with the sacrifices which had supposedly made the French economy one of the strongest in the industrialized world.[30] Notably, unemployment had risen from 1.7 million when Mitterand took power to 2.9 million, no longer only affecting blacks and Arabs but making the rest of the population feel insecure and concerned about its social costs. Not the least of which was the continued destruction in the suburbs - particularly worrying for the petit-bourgeoisie who voted for the right.

In 1991 France had signed the Maastricht Treaty and joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), committing the French government, of whatever shade, to pursuing the Franc Fort policy of tailing the relatively strong Deutschmark. This circumscribed the government's ability to deal with the onset of recession in late 1992 through monetary policies (interest rates etc.), leaving only budgetary (tax and spending) and structural policies - exactly the kind of head on measures liable to provoke a working class response.

The incoming government under Edouard Balladur faced a dramatically deteriorating economic and financial situation.[31] A sharp downturn in the economy at the end of 1992 had led to both an unexpected shortfall in tax revenues and an increase in social spending as unemployment rose. As a result, the government's budget deficit, which only six months before had been comfortably within the Maastricht convergence limits, was now projected to double to 5.8 per cent of GDP and was threatening to spin out of control. In response to this financial and econom ic situation, Balladur's government announced a package of tough economic measures. The package comprised making workers in the public sector work for 40 instead of 37.5 years to qualify for a pension, freezing public sector wages, and increasing hospital charges. Shopkeepers and other petit-bourgeois elements on the other hand were rewarded with grants and other forms of assistance. They were further appeased by the race card the government had used to steal votes from the National Front. Nationality laws and immigration procedures were to be tightened up once more.

The proposals met with only muted opposition from the PS and PCF. The CGT, alone amongst the unions, held a day of protest, but this was a damp squib of an affair. Although the size of the government's majority in relation to its proportion of the votes had produced an air of unreality and a gulf between government and electorate, this lack of opposition to a pretty drastic assault on living standards did not bode well for the prospects for class struggle against the overhaul of the state. Which is why, when frustrations did surface, the struggles were so significant.

The government embarked on a series of privatizations: June 93 Crédit Local de France, October 93 Banque National de Paris, November 93 Rhone-Poulenc, January 94 Elf Aquitaine, May 94 Union des Assurances de Paris, November 94 Renault, etc... Shares in nearly all of these privatized companies have fallen since they were floated and, now that they are no longer shielded from the blackmail of competition by state protection, squeezing more surplus-value from their workers in order to arrest their decline is the logical response. And the threat of privatization, along with European directives demanding liberalization, has loomed large over industries that remain part of the state sector. The fear of being fragmented from the state sector and subjected to the discipline of the market has played on the mind of workers in the post office, telecom, EDF-GDF (Electricity de France and Gaz de France), RATP (the Paris public transport authority), SNCF and Air France ever since.

The privatization programme was however only one aspect of the government's plans to drastically accelerate the process of industrial reorganization and the restructuring of the wage relation. Fundamental to these plans were legislative changes to reflect in labour laws the de facto situation in the post-fordist social factory. The Five Year Employment Law, supposedly aimed at reducing unemployment, comprised removing job protections guaranteed by the Popular Front and Liberation governments. But first the government tried to push through a programme of rationalization in one of those industries still directly under state control - Air France. Four thousand workers were to be sacked, with reduced wages, increased productivity and new functional hierarchies for the remainder.

The response by Air France employees was both massive and determined.[32] A national one-day strike called by the unions for October 12th was rapidly spread and extended to all sectors, bringing together all categories of ground staff for the first time since 68. Almost immediately, strikers began to take action to increase the effectiveness of the strike by occupying runways to prevent planes from taking off. The government stated that the plan was irrevocable and sent in the CRS. On October 20th at Roissy, strikers blocking the runways responded to police intervention by launching a vehicle at their lines (missing them and hitting a plane). On October 21st at Orly there were violent confrontations on the runways between the CRS and strikers, masked and tooled-up in anticipation, using vehicles against the cops water cannons, and further confrontations the next day with strikers smashing windows in the terminal. On the same day in Toulouse strikers blockaded the runways and the central railway station. Unable to break the strike by force, unable to get the strikers to accept a compromise, and unable to withstand the huge losses the strike was causing, the government withdrew its plan on October 24th and the manager of Air France resigned.

The strike was characterized not only by its violence, but also by its organization and its openness. A significant minority of strikers were consciously hostile to the unions, but the unions were generally given reign to control the formal organization of the movement - organizing the general assemblies, co-ordinating the different sites within and between airports, and handling negotiations with the government. The CGT in particular had learnt the lessons from the 86 rail strike and adapted their approach to the assemblies in order not to provoke the re-emergence of non-union co-ordinations. Nevertheless, when it came to actions the unions were practically outflanked. During the hot week at Orly the morning general assemblies called by the unions were quickly terminated by cries of to the runways!, where tactical discussions around immediate practical objectives took place outside of union channels. And when the FO (and in some places the CGT) called for a return to work following the government's revocation of the irrevocable plan in order that workplace elections could go ahead, assemblies voted for a continuation of the strike - at Orly 3,000 marched on the police to demand the dropping of charges, and at both Orly and Roissy victory demos were held on the runways on October 26th. Furthermore, despite a degree of corporatist pride and identification with the well-being of the company, not unusual in the state sector, the movement was open. Divisions within Air France (freight vs passenger, white collar vs blue collar etc.) were broken down, and outsiders were welcomed - the strikers received huge popular support.

The most significant aspect of the strike however was the blow it had struck against the bullish new government so early in its term, and the boost it had given to the rest of the working class in the face of the timidity of the unions.[33] Wary of sustaining another defeat, the government turned its attention to an area where it reasoned that the forces of opposition would be weaker - training. Youth unemployment was high, the unemployed relatively disorganized, and the student movement not directly concerned with the issue of wages. The government argued that youth unemployment was a result of high labour costs and attempted to impose a reduction in the youth wage, the CIP (Contrat dInsértion Professionnel or beginning work contract), only for it to explode in its face.

(vi) Youth Revolt March 94

The government's defeat at the hand of the Air France strikers only served to increase the popular perception that the right-wing government lacked legitimacy. There was a pervasive air of alienation from the political sphere, and this extended to the PS and PCF as well. The rejection of the usual channels of discontent was expressed in January 94 when a demonstration in Paris against a law authorizing regional and city authorities to fund private (predominantly Catholic) schools was taken as an opportunity to vote with the feet. Between 600,000 and one million people took to the streets, many of whom had no real concerns about the educational issue but wanted to express their general opposition to the government and frustrations with society in general.[34]

The demonstration was peaceful, which is partly why it has almost been forgotten, overshadowed as it has been by the confrontations which rocked France on either side of it. Incidentally, the law was scrapped as unconstitutional. But the demonstration was significant for establishing a practice of responding to unpopular decrees from above by taking to the streets en masse, taking the opportunity to develop a popular but diverse unity of opposition therein, and using the demonstrations to protest against a general malaise without having to go through bureaucratic channels. This demonstration can be seen as a prelude to those against the Juppé plan when exactly the same phenomenon occurred, but repeatedly, on a wider scale, and connected with a strike wave.

If the peacefulness of this demonstration marked a break with the violent tendencies of the lycée movement and Air France strike then such a tendency was to be quickly re-established. In February 94 French fishermen rioted, and, in an attempt to hit the cops with distress flares, burned down the Breton parliament (a local court building) in Rennes. Although some other elements used the opportunity to have some fun, it remained a strictly sectional affair, defined by opposition to measures affecting the fishing industry. But the following month saw the emergence of a movement which combined the tendency towards violent confrontation with that of using demonstrations to express an opposition held in common by different social groups.

On February 24th the government presented the CIP, allowing employers to take on first time wage-slaves at only 80 per cent of the legal minimum wage, establishing a SMIC-jeune or minimum wage for youth. [35]The response to this 20 per cent wage cut for young proletarians was a month of almost daily marches which increasingly tended to become full blown riots. Prime Minister Balladur became haunted by the fear of an explosion of the May 1968 sort whilst President Mitterand began to talk of the danger of imminent social revolt,[36] and on March 30th the government conceded defeat.

The movement was unprecedented. Although in some respects it marked a continuation of tendencies which had been emerging in the student movements of 86 and 90, the Air France strike and the recent schools mobilization, it nevertheless had a unique character.[37] The CIP created an immediate basis for unity between different types of students, workers, and the unemployed. Each sector was concerned to fight an attack on the terrain, defined socially, as that of the wage relation - the fundamental social relation of capitalist society - but on the terrain defined physically of the streets.

The movement was diffuse - both spatially and organizationally - and stronger for it. Spatially, it was the first movement which was not dominated by the gravitational pull of Paris;[38] marches happened in Lyons, Nantes, Rennes - literally everywhere. Organizationally, the movement was characterized by an almost complete absence of legitimate representation. The movement made use of the traditional structures - the unions, including the student unions UNEF, UNEF-ID and FIDL, and the co-ordinations of technical university institutes - which were used for the initial mobilizations and to develop the movement nationwide. Assemblies were held in university buildings which had been occupied by striking students. But as the interaction of the subjects in the streets developed its own dynamic, formal structures, and the unions in particular, became marginalized. The level of organization characterizing the movement was fluid and unstructured, arising spontaneously out of the marches themselves. This outflanked attempts by the unions to establish march monitors/stewards. Thus the movement developed in a direction that was both haphazard and powerful. [39]

The movement was also heterogeneous. No single social subject asserted hegemony over it. It was not a student movement. When the state came to analyse the composition of the 5,000 or so arrested during the course of the movement, 30 per cent were found to be university and technical students, 30 per cent secondary school students, and 30 per cent unemployed or precarious workers. The gangs from the banlieue, including beurs who were also angry about the ID checks and nationality laws recently introduced by the government, were incorporated without being neutralized. This heterogeneity gave the movement a truly proletarian character, breaking completely, in the direction other movements had only pointed, with the politics of the labour movement.

What characterized the movement more than anything, however, was its systematic and targeted violence. Initially defensive and determined to resist the state's attempts to physically repress the movement, it brought the intifada from the peripheries to explode in the centre of the metropolis. The lack of any centralized organizing structure allowed for differences, however. In Nantes, for example, there was night after night of violent clashes with riot cops guarding the prefecture, but in the main shops were spared, some having their windows smashed but not looted. In Lyons on the other hand, not only were there daily clashes with the cops, but over 200 shops were looted. And in both Paris and Lyons cars left along the route of the marches were routinely wrecked or torched. Indeed the police had to ban parking along the proposed routes of demonstrations in Paris and insist that shops within a mile radius put up their shutters.

This endemic violence was extended from the movement's most apparent enemy - the cops - to a more insidious one. Television crews and anyone else with a video camera were confronted, their equipment smashed up, and chased from the demonstrations. These attacks were not just a response to the immediate threat posed by this equipment[40] but was also a response to the media role in the government's attempt to divide the movement.

The government sent the CRS in hard and made thousands of arrests. But, as it had been with the Air France dispute, it was concerned not to get into a continually escalating spiral of confrontations for fear of where it might lead.[41] The state needed to be able to target its violence, and thus needed to get the movement to disown the casseurs which it had identified as the most dangerous subjects. In Paris and Lyons efforts were made to intercept the multi-ethnic gangs from the banlieue as they arrived at Metro and railway stations linking the centre to the peripheries, and efforts were made, helped by union stewards in some cases, to single them out on demonstrations. But the main tactics were ideological. That old scumbag Pasqua, who had overseen the murderous period of 86 and had come back to preside over the latest bout of state terrorism, defended the right to demonstrate but said he would not permit thousands of hooligans to come in from the banlieue and attach themselves to demonstrations in order to engage in street fighting and looting. He then expelled two Algerian kids from Lyons in order to give the impression that the violence was ethnic in origin. After having tried to paint the movement as a whole as nothing more than one of mindless hooliganism, the media quickly picked up on this theme of a division within the movement between the respectable students and the casseurs.

But the movement refused to be divided. Nous sommes tous des casseurs! (we are all wreckers!) was one of the slogans used to counter this propaganda offensive. Another was simply to argue that it was the government and capitalists who were the real wreckers. The movement, except for the union stewards who also wanted to rid the movement of this element, refused to accept that the phenomenon of wrecking was down to a separate contingent who could be disowned. On March 25th in Paris all of the sections of the march demanded the freeing of comrades arrested, casseurs or not, during the confrontations. The movement as a whole had come to accept the legitimacy of the methods which the youth from the banlieue had brought to the movement. Hence when the government tried to split the movement by conceding to university students, restoring the legalminimum wage for those with a two-year university diploma or its equivalent, those students insisted on remaining with the movement as a whole until the government backed down completely. University students had recognized that, rather than being the bosses of the future, most of them looked forward to a future in which they would remain (skilled) proletarians, possibly even unemployed ones at that.

(vii) The stage is set

We arrive almost on the eve of battle and it is time to assess the troops. This short survey of class struggle in France since the Second World War has revealed something quite important. The working class has for sure been on the defensive since the heady days of 68. Inevitably such a rearguard campaign has meant that there have been many defeats. But there has been no defeat on the scale of the miners' strike in the UK. There has been nothing to send a signal throughout society as a whole that the boot is firmly on the other foot. In the UK it has been a pretty sure bet that kicking up a fuss will lead to defeat. But quite the opposite is true in France. What lessons would the working class of France have drawn from the major battles with the state of the 90s? Surely the main one would be that taking to the streets can defeat the government - that active opposition bears fruit.

This is not to say that capital has not succeeded at all in restructuring the factory. As we have seen, workers in the private sector feel less inclined to take strike action. Nevertheless private enterprises are far from having eliminated strikes altogether. For instance, in March 95 a spontaneous strike wave paralysed Renault plants throughout France by blockading or occupying the plants.[42] Nor is it to say that no progress has been made in rationalizing the welfare burden. But, as we have seen, attempts by the state to restructure the reproduction of labour-power (Devaquet Bill or CIP for instance) have been repulsed.

What of the union question? Following the initial experiments with the co-ordinating committees, we have seen a tendency towards seizing control over the actual daily activity of struggles but, rather than making a direct organizational challenge to the mediation of the unions, allowing the unions to play the role of representing the movement and negotiating for it. And why not? Alternatives to unions tend to become alternative unions as a result of having to perform the negotiating role. In these recent struggles in France the negotiating position has been made clear to the unions at the grassroots level - repeal of the law, or the bill, or the plan. It has been absolute. A single measure on the one hand and outright opposition to it on the other. What room does that leave for a sell out? But what happens to the opposition when that single measure becomes split up into a number of measures and the unions have been left to resolve the situation - does the opposition fragment as well?

(C) The Social Movement of November - December 1995

(i) Paris in Spring

If the French state's economic strategy had been in any way blunted by a right-wing government having to compromise with a socialist President then that problem would be resolved in May 95 with the election of Jacques Chirac, bringing to an end fourteen years of Mitterands rule. In March 95, France had been brought to a virtual standstill by simultaneous air, rail and urban transport strikes, to which the Presidential candidates had responded by exuding sympathy. This understanding approach was used in Chiracs successful electoral platform, which promised to put employment first (unemployment had now reached 3.3 million), increase wages, cut taxes, heal the countrys social fracture and protect social welfare benefits.

Alain Juppé was installed as Chiracs new Prime Minister. The rent-fixing scandal, involving his acquisition, when Mayor of Paris, of city-owned luxury flats at bargain rents for his friends and family, coming hot on the heels of other corruption scandals and exacerbated by the resumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific, sent the government into an unprecedented slump in the opinion polls. But priorities lay elsewhere. U-turns and broken promises on economic priorities had led to speculation that the government would fail to cut the public sector deficit enough to keep to the timetable for EMU, and consequently there was a run on the franc. On October 6th Chirac was overheard muttering The priority is to avoid a monetary disaster. The government has not convinced the financial markets. We must send signals.[43]

(ii) Autumn Rumblings

The statement above reflected the situation which existed after the September budget for 1996 which included a freeze on public sector wages, a measure over which Juppé publicly refused to negotiate with the unions. The job security, retirement rights and conditions of workers in state owned companies like France Telecom and the SNCF were also effectively denounced as special privileges. Trouble had already been brewing in the public sector, with a series of local strikes and occupations in the post office against the piecemeal introduction of a restructuring plan, and over 700 strike notices issued in the SNCF on top of regular wildcat strikes. The response from the public sector unions to the pay freeze was to organize a day of united public sector strikes and demonstrations for October 10th.[44] Over three million went on strike for the day, the biggest such stoppage for over a decade, with the demonstrations mobilizing 382,000 (according to police figures). The scale of this protest gave a clear signal to the unions that further calls would be heeded.

Meanwhile science and technology students returning to studies in Rouen from their summer holidays had started an indefinite strike against a spending cut resulting from the Bayrou plan which was endangering their adequate reproduction as technical labour-power, demanding twelve million francs for more teachers and equipment, and demonstrating the extent to which the grim realities of survival had come to replace the hope for real life as the central concern of students over the years since 68. A strike committee was formed and the strike quickly became an active one, seeing 1,000 students blockade Rouens rail traffic on October 16th, followed by motorway blockades and toll-booth occupations. On October the 25th the university administration offices were occupied and barricaded, whilst the police were kept busy by a student demonstration elsewhere, only to be violently evicted by the cops that night. This only resulted in an escalation of the strike, however. Over a thousand students demonstrated in protest at the eviction and humanities students joined the strike.

By the first week of November, having had an offer of six million francs rejected by the Rouen students assembly, and remembering 86 and 94, the government was sufficiently concerned about the possibility of the movements extension to concede nine million francs to end the strike. But far from containing the movement within this one university, this concession encouraged it to spread throughout the provinces. Within the next fortnight, students in Metz, Toulouse, Tours, Orleans, Caen, Nice, Montpellier, Perpignan and elsewhere staged strikes and demonstrations, each raising demands for greater funding, and on November 16th students in Paris finally joined in the movement.[45] More than 100,000 students demonstrated across the country on November 21st, three days before the first big demonstrations against the Juppé Plan, and on the November 30th student demonstration the numbers swelled to 160,000 as railway and other workersjoined in with their banners as students had the demonstrations against the Juppé Plan on November 24th.

This mobilization gave an added impetus to the spreading of the public sector strike following the November 24th day of action. The fact that it was about money, plus the fact that many students defined it as a social movement rather than a student movement, made it easy for the two movements to grasp their connection. But the student movement as such began to subside just as the struggle elsewhere was picking up, with those students who wished to participate dissolving themselves into it as individuals - proletarians - rather than constituting themselves as a separate body within a coalition of specific groups. Part of the reason for this was the disastrous outcome of the student co-ordinations meeting in Paris. Delegates from the provinces, where the movement was strongest, tended to be representative of assemblies whilst those from Paris, where the movement was relatively weaker, tended to be hacks from the student unions or leftist groupings. Centring the co-ordinations in Paris therefore resulted in a high degree of politicking and ideologically-motivated sectarian rivalry which alienated those who wanted to take the movement forward. At the University of Jussieu on November 23rd, the nationally co-ordinating body unsuccessfully tried to exclude students who, having two days earlier looted the university book shop, had just overturned a number of cars, thrown molotovs at the cops and raided the canteen. The result of separating the political representation from the social movement ended in chaos when the excluded finally gained admittance. The student co-ordination appears to have disintegrated soon thereafter, unable to contribute anything useful to the unfolding of events apart from a lot of hot air.

However, the main reason for the subsidence of the student movement was the government's policy of selective appeasement. On December 2nd the government opened negotiations with student representatives and conceded to their demands in order to split them off from the rest of the movement, a tactic which would be repeated with great success with the railway workers a week or so later.

(iii) The Juppé Plan

On November 15th Alain Juppé revealed his package of measures to cut the deficit of a welfare budget argued to be heading towards bankruptcy.[46] This set of measures was seen as crucial for reassuring the foreign exchange markets that France would be able to stick to the Maastricht timetable.

The austerity package was such that many of the measures only had a direct impact on workers in the state sector. Above all, workers in the SNCF and RATP were to be subjected to specific measures on top of those aimed at the rest of the public sector, and at the working class in general.

The Juppé Plan

... A new tax (the RDS, Réimbursement of the Dette Sociale) of 0.5 per cent on all wages, breaking with the practice of exempting the low paid from direct taxes, to be introduced to clear an accumulated welfare deficit of 250 billion francs over the next thirteen years. The current welfare deficit was to be reduced from 64 billion francs in 1995 to seventeen billion francs in 1996 through a series of increased contributions and reduced benefits.

... Reduced spending on health, estimated to account for up to half of welfare losses, and increased charges on patients for public hospitals. Introduction of log book medical records to restrict prescriptions and prevent patients from consulting specialists without the approval of a GP.

... Family benefit (paid to low income families with children) to be frozen in 96 and taxed from 97. Suspension of plan to introduce a home-care allowance for the elderly.

... Pension system for public sector workers to be brought into line with that of private sector workers, extending from 37.5 years to 40 years the length of service required for a full pension. Also abolition of the régimes particuleurs for those in the public sector with difficult working conditions, under which SNCF or RATP train drivers can retire at 50 or other RATP, EDF-GDF, post office and coal workers at 55.

... Radical restructuring of social security administration, transferring health, pension and family allowance financing from joint control by the unions and employers into a form involving an enlarged role for the state, along with a planned constitutional amendment to allow the government to set a ceiling on welfare spending.

... At around the same time, the details of the contrat de plan, a restructuring package for the SNCF, were revealed to include the regionalization of management, closure of 6,000 km of track and the sacking of 30,000-50,000 workers. Considered by many to be a prelude to privatization, a threat also hanging over the heads of workers in telecom, EDF-GDF etc.

... Also at the same time, the Treasury mooted the removal of a 20 per cent tax allowance given to all employees.

The nature of the Juppé package may explain why, as we shall see, the strike started in the SNCF and spread to the RATP first; above all, it explains why the movement was concentrated in the public sector. It also gives us some clues, but not the whole reason, as to why the unions adopted such a degree of militancy in opposition to the plan.

The package was presented to the National Assembly without any official consultation with the unions. In the eyes of the unions, this threatened to undermine the acceptance by the French bourgeoisie, one that had endured since 1936, of the role of the unions as social partners. Indeed the main employers' federation, the CNPF (Conseil National du Patronat Français), also resented the government's unilateral declaration of the Juppé plan and the way it interfered with its partnership with the unions. Bipartite negotiations over major social issues such as unemployment had been established between the union confederations and the CNPF, which had been particularly concerned over recent years to maintain institutional channels for the expression and mobilisation of discontent....[47]

On top of this the social security reforms explicitly sought to limit the power of the trade unions to manage the welfare system. The trade unions derived a great deal of benefit, in terms of entrenchment, perks and cushy jobs for functionaries, from this administrative function. In particular the usually moderate FO particularly resented measures which would have meant removing its nose from the trough of health insurance administration. Indeed, whilst the leader of the CFDT, Nicole Notat, greeted the proposals with the statement the reforms proceed in a sensible manner, the leader of the FO, Marc Blondel called them a declaration of war to the FO and called for a day of action on November 28th.

The unions needed to flex their muscles in order to demonstrate to the government that they could not be either disregarded or ousted from their spheres of influence. At this point it is worth remembering that for all the French bourgeoisies attempts to impose austerity upon the working class there had never been a challenge to the unions' position as social partners. The Popular Front and Liberation governments had promoted the unions to a central position in the social organization of French capitalism, and such a position had remained unchallenged. Whilst such a relationship was being terminated in the UK by the new broom of Thatcher and in the US by Reagan, Mitterand was coming to power in France determined to work with the unions. His fourteen year rule had ensured that the relationship had been maintained despite the eventual rightwards shift in policy. It was only now, following the election of Chirac, that the partnership role of the unions was being explicitly questioned for the first time.

However, if the unions' position was being threatened by new developments in the French state, they also had to beware that their mediating role was not to be endangered by the rising discontent which had sometimes sought to bypass them in the past. Whilst not wanting to precipitate a general strike, the CGT and the FO certainly wanted to unleash a strong public sector strike. But in order to make clear the basis of their status in the social partnership, the unions had to ensure that they did not do anything to provoke or encourage the development of autonomous organizations which would have threatened their role as sole legitimate representatives of the workers in negotiations with the state. Thus they were not in the least antithetical to the development of localized autonomy in the form of strike assemblies. Indeed the contradictory experiences of the 86 rail strike and the 93 Air France strike had shown them how to maximize their influence with the state by minimizing interference at the grass roots level. However, the tendency to portray the struggle as one in which the unions simply ran fast to stay abreast of autonomy in order to get in a saving tackle on the strikers says more about the limits of an analysis which sees unions only as firemen for the bourgeoisie than it does about a contradictory movement, like the one we are dealing with here, in which the union structures themselves as well as the workers were under threat.

(iv) The Response

(a) The strike

The CGT called for a day of action in support of civil servants for Friday November 24th. Perhaps sensing a determined groundswell of discontent, the unions one by one issued strike notices to coincide with the demonstration - the CGT for 8pm on the 23rd until 8am on the 25th, the FO for a five-day strike to connect to their day of action the following week, and the CFDT, demagogically, for an indefinite strike. Whatever, it was to be another three and a half weeks before most of the workers who struck that day returned to work.

Throughout the whole of France, half a million took part in huge demonstrations which were relatively larger in the provinces than in Paris, with tens of thousands marching in cities as far apart as Marseilles, Lyons and Toulouse in the South to Lilles in the North. In Paris, workers from throughout the public sector, from train drivers to teachers, were joined by workers from a wide variety of private sector companies. Nicole Notat, leader of the CFDT, was subjected to violent abuse by workers belonging to her union, forcing her to leave the demonstration. And it was clear that this was not a tokenistic affair like the usual one-day strikes. The public transport system in the Paris region, including the railway network, was completely paralysed.

Railway workers held general assemblies in the big rail depots, deciding to continue the strike and to hold further assemblies on a daily basis. Delegations of strikers, including union activists acting with the approval of their leaders, then played a crucial role in the extension of the strike, first to the RATP, and then to the major postal sorting offices (usually located near rail depots) and other urban public tr ansport systems. Some of the most active minorities engaged, without the democratic blessing of the assemblies, in exemplary acts of sabotage. Whereas in the 1986 strike movement the sabotage was more of the traditional variety (train couplings etc. with a hammer and spanner), that which occurred last December comprised hi-tech sabotage of the control boxes on the railway and of other computer systems and communication equipment including the bringing to a standstill of nuclear power stations (without danger of release of radioactive substances)[48] This level of rank-and-file activity was in marked contrast to the passive nature of much of the 68 general strike. The way the assemblies operated also marked an advance on those which the rail strike of 86 had produced. Not only were the divisions between different categories of railway worker transcended - drivers, ticket collectors and all the other grades discussing how to proceed together - but complete outsiders - other workers, the unemployed etc. - were also welcomed, transcending the divisions which cripple the class. However, we must not overstate the self-activity of the assemblies. In the first place, the assemblies varied in openness across different workplaces; and, second, the assemblies were ultimately unable to escape the control of the unions.

By the end of November, substantial numbers of electricity and gas workers, kindergarten and primary school teachers, and some secondary and tertiary lecturers had joined the strike. In those sectors where only a minority were on strike (post, telecom, electricity and gas), occupations of premises were used to increase the impact. In exemplary fashion electricity workers occupying distribution centres switched domestic consumers onto the cheaper night tariff during the day.

Despite some autonomous efforts to encourage the spread of the strike to the private sector, as a rule such an extension did not occur. There were exceptions though. In some parts of France, lorry drivers blocked roads in support of their unions' demand for retirement at the age of 55. At Caen, Renault workers from Blainville along with workers from Moulinex, Citroen, Credit Lyonnais, Credit Agricole and Kodak struck in order to join the regular demonstrations. In Clermont-Ferrand thousands of Michelin workers did the same, and in Lorraine miners went on strike for higher wages and fought running battles with the police. But the only place where substantial numbers of private sector workers broke down the political barrier separating the two sectors was in Rouen where a delegation of 800 strikers went to the Renault Cleon plant to encourage them to strike and join them in blockading roads and the like.

(b) The demonstrations

Whilst there was no general strike, the winter crisis amounted to more than simply a public sector strike. Local government buildings were occupied, the channel tunnel was blocked, runways were invaded, and motorway toll booths were requisitioned to raise strike funds. But perhaps the most notable feature of the movement was the series of demonstrations which brought hundreds of thousands of people out onto the streets: the Juppéthons of November 24th and 28th, December 5th and 7th, culminating in the huge rallies on the 12th and 16th of December. Juppé had promised to resign if two million people took to the streets, thereby setting a target for the movement. Other public sector workers including civil servants, dockers, airport workers and hospital workers, as well as delegations from the private sector, struck on the days of the demonstrations, and they continued to grow in size. By the first week of December, more than a million were taking part in the demonstrations. And by the second week the magic number of two million had been reached.

The demonstrations were both massive and carnivalesque. Proletarians mixed and had fun regardless of professional or sectional differences, unlike on the funeral marches so typical of normal political demonstrations, producing a tangible feeling that social relations were being transformed through transforming the psychogeography of the street. But although there were clashes with the cops after demonstrations in Paris, Montpellier and Nantes on December 5th, the marches themselves did not erupt into the kind of confrontations which occurred regularly in the movement of the previous year. In large part this may have been due to the fact that the demonstrations were too big for the cops to attack so the CRS had to be kept on a tight leash.[49] Rather than risk raising the stakes it was left up to union stewards (including revolutionary ones from the CNT) to keep the peace. Moreover, without an initial spark provided by friction with the cops, the step to riot and direct appropriation is, psychologically, a huge one for most people.

It has to be recognized, however, that the movement did not attract the casseurs who might have transcended the limited dialogue of the workers' movement in favour of the universal language (spoken by worker and non-worker alike the world over) of the proletarian riot. The demonstrations remained peaceful, within certain boundaries and limited in impact. Only in Montpellier and Nantes, the cities where the clashes occurred, did the kids from the banlieue join in with the social upheaval. In the main, the banlieue remained quiet.

Some 6,800 acts of urban violence had occurred in 1995 according to the French intelligence services, causing the junior minister for urban affairs to denounce what he called an intifada à la Française.[50] Riots had occurred throughout the year in the suburbs of Paris and elsewhere. But it seems as if the gangs were not attracted to the movement. Perhaps it was because they were not being directly attacked as they had been in 94. Or perhaps because from their perspective, that of the marginalized, the government's labelling of the main protagonists as privileged rang true. Or could it be that the attraction towards a separatist ideology had increased? In May beurs and Jewish kids in a Parisian suburb had fought the cops together after the latter had issued racist statements attacking both groups. But since then there had been a wave of terrorist bombings related to the civil war in Algeria and Islamic fundamentalism had become a national obsession, labelling anyone without a white face as a potential terrorist suspect. The French media had celebrated the public execution on September 29th of terrorist suspect Khaled Kelkal, an unemployed 24 year-old of Algerian origin from Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyons. TV pictures showed a cop kicking the corpse, and reactions to the footage revealed deep divisions. Whilst many felt relief that an enemy within had been eliminated, Vaulx-en-Velin exploded at yet another state atrocity.

(v) Prospect of European Escalation

The movement in France was also beginning to hear echoes of itself beyond its national boundaries. Solidarity rallies were held in Rome and Athens. In Berlin on December 14th a demonstration in solidarity with foreigners inside Germany turned into a demonstration of solidarity with the struggle of those in France. But the most significant developments occurred in Belgium where, after a month long strike by Alcatel employees against redundancies, and following a demonstration of students and teachers in Liege which ended in a violent confrontation with the cops, a demonstration was called by the unions for December 13th. Sixty thousand or so marched in Brussels against spending cuts. The railway workers of the SNCB, who had been on strike for three days, along with Sabena employees, whose strike had disrupted air traffic, were at the forefront.

Any possibilities of transcending national divisions in a unified struggle against the formation of a bankers' Europe were stillborn, however. Negotiations between the government and the unions in France had begun to seek a settlement. Within two days of the demonstration in Belgium, strike assemblies in France were discussing a faxed circular from the CGT calling for an end to the strike.

(vi) The Settlement

Through paralysing circulation, the strike was beginning to have a major impact upon the French economy.[51] Shortages of raw materials began to hit the production of surplus-value whilst a lack of customers in the cities hit at its realization. All in all, the strike was estimated to have cost French capital up to eight billion francs in lost production. But the government was unable to break the movement by force. Efforts to run a fleet of scab buses for Parisian commuters had to be abandoned due to the paralysis of the traffic system. The RPRs attempt to organize a demonstration against the strike, using De Gaulles half million strong demonstration in May 68 as its model, ended in farce, mobilizing only a couple of hundred people. And attempts to form transport users' committees barely got off the ground. Clearly the strikers enjoyed overwhelming, if still overwhelmingly passive, support. So threats to call a referendum or general election to resolve the crisis also had to be forgotten quickly.

Unable to face down such a strong and unified movement on December 5th, the government offered to open negotiations with the unions, offering a few paltry concessions with no mention of the planned changes to pensions. This offer in itself was taken by the CFDT as reason enough to call off the strikes, indicating the extent to which the priority of all the unions was to regain their invite to the bargaining table. But the CGT and FO dismissed the offer as a non-response and vowed to continue the strike until the welfare reform plan was withdrawn. However, the opening of negotiations signalled that the movement's unwillingness to challenge the unions' overall control would fatally undermine its ability to achieve its demands. On November 28th, the government had declared that the welfare reforms are a single package, and the movement had united around the twin demands of scrapping the package as a whole and sacking the man responsible. But in the negotiations the government's strategy became one of selective appeasement in order to split the movement. Concessions had already been made to the student movement in order to split it from the main body of struggle, and the government now proceeded to separate and isolate the different aspects of the package in order to deal with each one separately over a longer period.

On December 10th the climb down was announced. The contrat de plan for the SNCF would be put on ice and the proposal to increase the number of years public sector employees would have to work for their pensions dropped. The régimes particuleur would remain. Promises were made to protect the public services from the deregulation demanded by the EU. Wage negotiations with the miners were to be reopened. Assurances had been given to the FO concerning their position regarding social security reform. A social summit between the government and union leaders was announced for 22nd December.

The dissatisfaction of the rank-and-file with these concessions was evident when two million demonstrated on December 12th. But the fax from the CGT on December 15th marked the beginning of the end. It was greeted with anger by many strikers including CGT

branch officials who were initially convinced it was a forgery. General assemblies at the Gare du Nord in Paris, the South West Paris rail depot, in Lyons, Rouen and elsewhere initially voted to continue the strike, unhappy that the demands of the movement as a whole had not been met. But no alternative to union control had been established. There was no national co-ordination to organize the continuation of the strike and negotiate a better deal. Anyway, the seeds of division had been sown with the withdrawal of those aspects of the Juppé plan which had particularly riled the most combative sectors in the struggle, those who had been on all-out strike. The assemblies of striking railway workers began to exclude the outsiders who had previously been made welcome. Votes for a return to work were carried. Within three days, and despite the fact that the demonstrations on December 16th were still huge, the rail strike was practically over. The return to work followed, gradually, elsewhere. Bar a few notable exceptions, the movement had ended.[52]

The union leaderships had won major concessions from the government. Railway workers and other workers in the public sector had ensured that the aspects of the package which had made them most angry had been scrapped. But those measures which had figured in the immediate deficit-reduction timetable remained. The RDS, the increase in hospital fees, health spending caps, the freeze on family allowances - all of these measures which would together reduce the social security deficit by 43 billion francs - remained intact. These were the measures which had united the demonstrators, measures which affected public and private sector worker alike. But by ending the strikes the government had managed to preserve these measures, described by The Economist as the essentials.[53]

(vii) Reflections

Only idiots complain about sell outs. We can criticize unions and parties, recognize their role of recuperation and mediation, but our criticisms must begin with and develop from within the movement of the working class itself. The question is why the movement was unable to go further. If it could not go all the way, and had to settle for crumbs, then could it still not have achieved more? What was missing was some kind of co-ordinated autonomous control over the movement. Perhaps if the local examples of autonomy had co-ordinated nationally... But this would have been a big step. The unions were wary of provoking co-ordinations, and thus avoided confronting the strike assemblies, even going so far as to praise their autonomous activities. And those railway workers who wanted to trigger an all-out strike did not see the need for autonomous organization; quite the opposite, they knew that if they tried to revive something like the co-ordinations they risked confrontation with the unions and the end to the spirit of unity that seemed to be of paramount importance in persuading hesitating workmates. Besides which, their strike of 86, for all its advances in self-organization, and perhaps in part because of them, had ended in harsh defeat.

Perhaps this is the wrong way to look at the question. There was no autonomous organization because there was no clash between the strikers and the unions to give rise to it until it was too late - the forms of autonomy arise out of circumstances which make them necessary. The CGT and the FO roundly condemned the Juppé plan and encouraged an all-out strike in the public sector. The problem then is that the movement was unable to extend itself beyond a public sector strike on the one hand and limited demonstrations on the other. Or to put it another way, the fundamental problem was that the class remained divided between those prepared to throw themselves into the struggle and those who supported it passively.

In strictly formal terms the movement was simply a trade union affair. It cannot be denied that the unions remained in charge, permitting and even encouraging a certain level of autonomous activity. But it would be an easy mistake to look at these events from the sort of perspective which looks only for particular organizational forms, seeing in the unions only monolithic structures of domination. The new unionism which tolerated autonomy should be seen as mediating a real expression of antagonistic subjectivity. Like that of the state, the mediating and recuperating role of the union is made and remade through struggle - crystallizations of previous waves of struggle liquefied by new antagonisms. The movement can be criticized for not developing the requisite organizational forms in order for it to go further. But it is also necessary to identify the more positive aspects of the struggle in the hope that - next time - they may develop the forms adequate for the realization of their full potential. The Intakes articles we reproduce in this issue of Aufheben draw out some of those aspects.

Epilogue: France Risks New Unrest

The most important thing about the movement of November and December 1995 must be how the working class of France follows it up. The only thing that is certain is that it will come under attack again. The pressures which led to the Juppé plan remain. The convergence criteria for Maastricht still need to be met.

In May 96 a special cabinet meeting was held where ministers were ordered to make savings of £7-8 billion over eighteen months. Chirac had demanded draconian cuts, insisting that a change of mentality on public spending had to be made either voluntarily or by force. A government official announced that No figure has been fixed yet on eventual savings, but the effort needed to meet targets will mean cuts on a scale never seen before.[54]

It is because more battles will be fought that it is necessary for the limits of the winter movement to be superseded. There is a need for critique. The articles we reproduce here are attempts at such a critique by people who were participants. Without necessarily agreeing with every point in them we recognize their importance. The movement towards communism depends upon critical reflection and practical supersession. It is to be hoped that the inclusion of these articles may hasten the day in which the struggles of the French working class become as one with our own.

Notes

1 The SWP is the largest (far-)leftist organization in the UK; the ICC is (probably) the largest left-communist organization in the world (not saying much!). That theoretically the ICC puristly upholds communist positions while the SWP opportunistically flits between different counter-revolutionary positions is of course a difference between the organizations. What is interesting with regards the French events is their similarity. The SWP thinks all the movement lacked was the right leadership which was not given by the PCF, the unions or French Trot groups. The ICC on the other hand sees the working class as completely hoodwinked by these cunning factions of the bourgeoisie. But, as Leninists, they both agree that they somehow possess what the working class lacks - the correct leadership or consciousness.

2 See EMUs in the class war in Aufheben 1.

3 From France after the strikes, in Frontline (Australian activist newspaper), posted on the internet by Harry Cleaver for Accion Zapatista de Austin.

4 See Dr Kohls prescription for trouble, in The Guardian, 1st August 1996.

5 See A New Hot Autumn: The struggle against the Italian government and the official trade unions is the struggle against the Europe of the bosses, London Notes, 1993.

6 One account of the COBAS is Gregor Gall, The emergence of a rank and file movement: the Comitati di Base in the Italian workers' movement, in Capital & Class 55 (spring 1995). A more satisfactory account, but earlier and therefore more about their origin, is David Brown (1988) The COBAS: Italy 1986-88: A new rank and file movement (Echanges et Mouvement).

7 In considering the extent to which bourgeois anti-fascism played a central role in shaping post-war France, the period of the Popular Front government should not be forgotten. Many enduring labour protection laws, such as the 40 hour week and significant nationalizations (Banque de France, war industries, railways etc.) were enacted in June 1936 in response to a wave of strikes and factory occupations involving two million workers. An account of internationalist resistance to fascism is contained in the pamphlet Internationalists in France during the Second World War by Pierre Lanneret.

8 The reference to a fordist economy requires an explanation because of a later reference to the neo-fordist labour process further on in the article. By fordist economy we mean Fordism, a mode of capital accumulation based on the mass production and mass consumption of consumer durables. The establishment of the fordist labour process was its necessary prerequisite. As a valorization process extracting relative surplus-value it allowed for rising profits to occur alongside expanded consumption for the working class. By using the assembly line to dictate the pace of work to a workforce which had already been broken down into deskilled component parts by Taylorism, the fordist labour process was, up to certain limits, able to impose progressive increases in productivity. See previous issues of Aufheben (in particular EMUs In The Class War in no. 1 but also the review article in no. 2 and Auto-Struggles in no. 3) for our use of the concept of Fordism and for our criticisms of the regulation school which developed them.

9 Interrupted only by strike waves in 1953 and 1963.

10 Readers unfamiliar with the events are encouraged to seek out original sources. Fortunately there are a number of decent pamphlets available in English: R. Gregoire & F. Perlman (1969) Worker-Student Action Committees: France May 68 (Detroit: Black & Red), R. Vienét (1968) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May 68 (New York: Autonomedia / London: Rebel Press), and the eye-witness account produced by Solidarity (1968) Paris: May 1968 (London: Dark Star/Rebel Press).

11 This analysis obviously owes a debt to that of the Situationist International.

12 It would be inaccurate to say that the movement seized control over the means of production of ideas per se because the mass media was able to continue its function of counter-revolutionary propaganda unthreatened by the movement. This criticism, amongst others, is made in the text by Gregoire & Perlman, referred to above (note 10), an account notable for its willingness to engage in self-criticism.

13 As with all Keynesian programmes which involve concessions, these measures are ambiguous in that they necessarily involve the rationalization of capitalist production and the struggles that result from this. For example, most of these nationalizations were undertaken in order to perform badly-needed restructuring in these sectors; and the implementation of the 39 hour week involved the suppression of certain benefits in working time.

14 Whilst the government was forced to back-track on certain measures, it did not retreat on all of them. Moreover it did not opt for the Thatcherite model but rather pursued policies which were more consistent with Gaullism. No attempt was made to tear up the social consensus - the unions were kept on board. This point is extremely important because it is only now that the French bourgeoisie are considering emulating their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

15 The technological elimination of aspects of the labour process, making redundant whole sections of semi-skilled workers, was combined with an organizational restructuring of the remainder. The fordist labour process had individualized its component workers at distinct work stations connected by the assembly line. The neo-fordist labour process retained the assembly line in order to dictate the pace of work but brought workers back together in groups. By breaking with some of the accumulated rigidities of Taylorism, allowing the groups themselves to organize how to meet the demands imposed by the line, a greater intensity of labour was made possible than under the previous organization as more of the time imbalances between distinct tasks could be eliminated. But the neo-fordist assembly line was not just a technical innovation aimed at quantitative goals. Whilst not completely successful, neo-fordist experiments were deliberately designed to reduce the antagonism between capital and labour which had made the car factories one of the central battlegrounds of the revolt of the mass worker. By taking on board some of the lessons which industrial sociology had distilled from its analysis of the class struggle, the experience of a real increase in the rate of exploitation could henceforth be made less inhuman. The introduction of group co-operation not only made the experience of assembly line work less atomizing, in itself reducing the tendency for conflict, but also, by getting the group to internalize and co-operate around the dictates of management, it served to create a new aspect of capitalist control, that of the work group over the potentially unruly individual. See Benjamin Coriat The restructuring of the assembly line: A new economy of time and control, in Capital and Class 11 (summer 1980).

26 In response to the announcement of several thousand redundancies, workers struck and occupied the factory. Immigrant workers, who comprised 90 per cent of the workforce in some factories, were attacked by scabs and foremen as the struggle against restructuring took place along racial lines. See Sol Picciotto, The battles at Talbot-Poissy: Workers' divisions and capital restructuring, in Capital and Class 23 (summer 1984). These incidents occurred after a series of conflicts in Citroen factories during which immigrant workers clashed with CGT and CFDT trades unionists.

17 Although the downward trend in the incidence of strike activity cannot be disputed, exact figures should be viewed with caution. On the one hand they demonstrate the unions' inability to stage symbolic actions as well as a reluctance of workers to take meaningful ones, and on the other the statistics rarely take account of the number of rank and file conflicts at factory level which neither management nor unions have any interest in publicizing.

18 The PS and PCF agreed a Common Programme of the left in 1972 in a bid to break the control of the right-wing over parliament. The PCF was still the biggest political party in 1956 but had been in continual decline in opposition since 1947, being gradually overtaken by the PS. Although the PCF renounced the agreement in 1977, a deal was struck between the leaders of the parties for the 1981 elections. Mitterand won the second round, dissolved the National Assembly and called for elections, and then formed a coalition government in which the PS were the majority. Four ministerial positions were reserved for the PCF including that of Employment Minister, which meant that the CGT came to adopt a less than militant approach in industrial disputes, continually emphasizing the need for negotiations (see the article on the dispute at Talbot-Poissy referred to earlier, note 16) and sabotaging a wildcat strike on the railways in 1984. The PCF withdrew from the government in 1984 following the replacement of left-wing Prime Minister Mauroy with one from the right of the Socialist Party, Laurent Fabius.

19 When the word beur was made fashionable by the media, it was in order to grasp a reality that was escaping them: some individuals were presenting the interesting characteristic of not really having an identity. They didnt really feel French, nor really Algerian or Moroccan etc. Without a homeland, full of energy, capable of criticizing each civilization with the values of the other, of rejecting Islamic obscurantism as much as the inhumanity of the modern West: here were people who risked being absolutely un-integratable. (Suburbs on fire - The centre in the middle, in Mordicus 4, April-May 1991).

20 A clear opposition between white liberals and black/Arab militants would be a gross oversimplification - from the start the beurs were not a homogeneous grouping. Following the success of the march against racism, there was a boom in beur culture which principally benefited a new cultural elite, the beurgeoisie, who gained access to the corridors of ministerial power and the circles of the caviar left. Conferences were organized, building on many localized working class initiatives, with a view to gaining representative legitimacy in the eyes of the state, and the movement was split between those seeking to climb the social ladder and those that recognized that, even if this became a real possibility for everyone, it was one which could only ever be realized by an elite few. Since then many blacks and Arabs have joined the political classes, but many have been left as before with nothing to lose by adopting a lifestyle of criminality (Immaterial Labour, Mass Intellectuality, New Constitution, Post-Fordism and all that, Red Notes, July 1994).

21 For a full account of the movement see France goes off the Rails (BM Blob and BM Combustion, London, 1987).

22 See the leaflets reprinted in France goes off the Rails.

23 Strike committees had also emerged in strikes on the railways in 1978, 1979, 1981 and 1984.

24 For example Chausson (February-March 88), SNEMCA (spring 88), nurses (March 88 - January 89), and a (relatively) rare strike in the private sector, Peugeot (autumn 89). See Echanges et Mouvement 66/67 (January-June 91).

25 Echanges et Mouvement 65 (July-December 90).

26 Echanges et Mouvement 66/67 (January-June 91). Regarding the question of recuperation, a critique of the distinctive style of rap music which emerged in France in the 1980s as part of the rejection of the left's patronizing assimilation strategy would be valuable. The fact that the lyrics are not in English imposes restrictions on the size of the market and precludes the emergence of mega-rich gangsta-stars as happened in the US, but nevertheless must lead to the development of hierarchy within the beurs movement as muchas it unites it around an antagonistic social identity. As for the film La Haine, based around the desire of three young banlieue residents (one black, one Jewish, and one Arab) to avenge the murder of a mate by a cop, and containing real footage from a riot in a Parisian suburb, to what extent does the spectacularization of the struggle hinder its real development? It is worth noting that there were riots in Noisy le Grand, Le Havre and Rouen during the first fortnight of the film's release, but it is arguable whether these were in any way related to the film or whether they would have happened anyway. The film does not seem to have a particularly pacifying effect, however. In the UK when crowds emerging from a screening in Brixton last year found a riot in full swing following a Brian Douglass memorial march (killed by cops wielding the new US-style batons) many were not merely content to have consumed the representation of revolt but had been fuelled to seek out the real thing.

27 See Indians of the suburbs in Mordicus 4 for an analysis of Muslim recuperation of the '91 riots.

28 See The co-ordinating committees in France: A new form of organisation in the class struggle in Echanges et Mouvement 72/73 (January-February 93).

29 The elimination of stock inventories in favour of parts being delivered just-in-time, and extending this principle throughout the factory, served to increase the discipline imposed by the requirements of the production process upon each work group and thus of this alienated collectivity on individual workers (see note 15). The just-in-time disciplinary regime is itself highly dependent upon a well disciplined workforce - a system which works through the establishment of its own preconditions - and thus highly vulnerable when disruptions do occur. Having served to reduce the incidence of strikes these developments in the capitalist labour process have also served to increase their potential impact. An interesting analysis of this vulnerability, prompted by a dispute with similarities to the one being considered here, the Spanish lorry drivers dispute of 1990, was included in the June 91 edition of the Barcelona based magazine Etcetera, and translated as Dispersed Fordism and a New Organisation of Labour in Here & Now 13.

30 Unlike sterling, the franc had been able to withstand the kind of intense speculatory pressure which led in Britain's case to Black Wednesday and the exit of the pound from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). According to the socialist government's figures, growth was at 1.8 - 2 per cent p.a. (greater than that of all its competitors except for Japan), inflation down to 2.4 per cent, and the public spending deficit down to 2.7 per cent of GDP. The franc had been stable against the Deutschmark since 1987, income tax was at its lowest for 25 years, and the number of strikes down to a post-war record low. See The Economist, 21st November 1992.

31 The apparent strength of the French economy (see previous note) had been bolstered by the economic boom that had followed German unification. The failure to stem the rise in eastern German wages towards levels paid to western German workers, together with the generous rates of conversion of Ostmarks into Deutschmarks, had created an inflationary surge in consumer demand in Germany that French industry had been well placed to meet. However, the failure to both stem the levelling up of eastern German wages and make the western German working class pay directly the full costs of unification had meant that the Bundesbank, as the last line of defence against inflation and the erosion of profitability, had little option but to pursue a tight monetary policy. The Bundesbank steadfastly maintained high German interest rates even at the cost of triggering the exchange rate crisis that wrecked the ERM on what became known as Black Wednesday. By late 1992, this counter-inflationary policy had begun to take its full effect with a sharp slow down in the German economy. Having weathered the storm on the exchange rate markets, with the franc remaining firmly tied to the Deutschmark in the ERM, France found itself not only at a significant competitive disadvantage with regard to those countries such as the UK, Spain and Italy who had devalued following Black Wednesday, but also tied to a stagnating German economy. As a result, the French economy went into reverse: having grown by nearly two per cent in 1992 it shrank by over one per cent in the first quarter of 1993 alone.

32 A chronology of events and analysis is contained in the winter 1993 edition of Mordicus. A translation into English has been produced by 56a Infoshop, London.

33 The plethora of struggles which followed the Air France strike, including many wildcat strikes, is catalogued in Collective Action Notes 3/4.

34 The significance of this demonstration is explored in Circuit breakers broken by Echanges et Mouvement, in Nous Sommes Tous Des Casseurs (see note 37 below).

35 The CIP was, like many divisive social security reforms in the UK, aimed specifically at those under 25 years old. It applied to school leavers still unemployed after six months, who would receive vocational training in return for this reduced wage, and to those holding a baccalauréat and two years further education starting their first job.

36 The Economist, 12th March 1994.

37 It is impossible to do justice to this movement in the few lines which an introduction to a subsequent movement allows. It is therefore strongly recommended that readers try to get hold of Nous Sommes Tous Des Casseurs. This pamphlet includes various translations which provide a detailed account and analysis of the movement and deserves a wider circulation than it has so far received. It should be available from AK Press. The movement is also dealt with in Immaterial Labour, Mass Intellectuality, New Constitution, Post-Fordism and all that, Red Notes, July 1994. This pamphlet is nigh impossible to get hold of as well. Readers could try writing to Red Notes.

38 Since 68 the state has made significant efforts to evacuate proletarian social life from the centre of Paris, filling it with Culture. For example, the Pompidou Centre was built on one of the few areas of central Paris in which the working class could afford to live. To be sure, the state has had a degree of success in this strategy - social movements have of late failed to focus themselves in the heart of the capital, with the resultant feeling that the movements have somehow been less significant for it. But when unruly proletarians do manage to reconquer the territory from which they have been excluded, as in the case of this movement, the treasures to be recovered by looting are all the richer for it.

39 Despite a network of student organisations supposedly putting a coherent case ... the past few days have shown that the movement, dominated by high schools and polytechnics, is headless, spontaneous, decentralized and ready to explode. The Guardian, 31st March 1994.

40 Press photographs of looters found their way onto notice boards in police stations throughout Paris. See The Independent, 6th April 1994, for more on this subject.

41 It is worth remembering that the general strike in May 68 came out of a day of protest at the brutality of the cops' assault on the barricades of the student movement.

42 See Collective Action Notes for a chronology of struggles in France. This makes quite clear the contrast in the level of strike activity between France and the UK.

43 Quoted in The Economist, 14th October 1995.

44 There had been a gradual rapprochement between the unions which culminated in 1995 with an end to the internecine conflicts which had broken out following the end of the Union of the Left in 1977. The collapse of Stalinism reduced the significance of the CGTs attachment to the PCF and raised questions about the FOs raison dêtre, whilst the CFDT had increasingly distanced itself from the PS since Mitterands 1988 re-election. The CGTs general secretary received a warm welcome at the CFDTs conference in March, whilst his symbolic handshake with Marc Blondel of the FO was a first since the split in 1947. But the main factor was a greater desire for unity at rank-and-file level in response to the evident weakness of each union. A notable feature of the days of action in November and December 1995 was that workers from all the unions (as well as those from none at all, of course) participated regardless of which union had organized it.

45 The universities in Paris are funded more generously than those in the provinces, where the student movement, like the subsequent workers' movement, was more impressive in relative scale.

46 Although the Liberation government introduced a comprehensive system of social protection, it emerged as a far from universal system but one which is a strongly particularistic tangle of administrative units. Each of the general, specific, basic and supplementary schemes that make up the social security system is separately administered by a council representing both unions and employers. Each has responsibility for collecting contributions and paying out benefits. Perhaps the most important aspect from the present point of view is that this financing is done on a current-funding or pay-as-you-go basis - each year's receipts from workers' contributions go out immediately in payments to the retired, ill, or injured. This means that, unlike in the UK where social security is funded out of general taxation, imbalances are immediately visible. Thus the talk of bankruptcy in France compared with the message of an unsustainable burden in the UK. However the crisis in the welfare budget manifests itself, the state needs a degree of control in order to impose restructuring.

47 In Steve Jefferys, France 1995: The backward march of labour halted?, in Capital & Class 59 (summer 1996).

48 This seems to represent an important breakthrough, not only in its effectiveness, but also in bringing beautifully on to the social terrain what has previously been a very individualized form of resistance (i.e. the hacker).

49 The miners in the Lorraine basin were attacked by the cops, however. After the cops tear-gassed a peaceful rally and beat up 30 strikers at Houilleres, the miners kidnapped the local mayor and held him down a mine shaft for thirteen hours. The next day 2,000 miners were met by 1,000 cops and further running battles ensued. In Merlebach on December 8th, 4,000 miners with helmets, protective eye-glasses, gas masks, armed with pick-axes, steel cable, explosive pétards and molotovs fought for a day and a half continuously with the CRS, successfully burning down a building. State violence was also targeted at those strikes which persisted after the majority had returned to work, as we shall see below.

50 The Economist, 27th January 1996.

It has been pointed out, however, that much of the circulation process of capital occurs electronically. Telecom strikers apparently identified the possibility of paralysing this aspect of the process as well, but it did not happen in this strike, partly due to kind of respectful taboo amongst telecom employees, partly due to a whole range of repressive disciplinary measures aimed precisely at interference with the means of electronic communication.

51 Strikes continued over local demands in the Marseilles transport authority and Caen post office. Despite the use of the CRS to evict strikers from occupied premises and escort scabs, resulting in violent clashes, these strikes were successful.

52 Tactical retreat: Costing Juppés concessions, The Economist, 16th December 1995.

53 France risks new unrest, The Guardian, 3rd May 1996.

September 1996

Intakes: Together we can create a future

Our Intakes section in this issue comprises articles and leaflets written by participants in the 1995 winter crisis and translated from French. The first six documents were mostly produced as leaflets at the time, and describe and analyse the developing criticisms and desires among sections of the movement. The remaining three pieces are articles written at the end of the wave of strikes and demonstrations, in January 1996. They reflect upon some of the radical tendencies and limits of the movement, and provide a vivid account of the solidarity, creativity and conflict experienced by rail workers and others.

The first six pieces below were mainly produced as leaflets, in December last year. We have chosen these from the dozens of leaflets we came across on the basis of the insights they offer into how those involved understood the movement at the time. Some, such as Now or Never convey the overall feel of the movement; others are more critical and analytical - in particular Beware, One Striking Train may Conceal Another. Finally, Last (but not least) Exit to the Strike, is a lively illustration of the relationship between workers and bosses towards the end of the rail strike.

The final three pieces were articles written around January 1996, at the end of the strike movement. The first, The Strike and After, was written by a printer-cum-proofreader in Paris involved in the strike in his workplace. The article describes some of the radical tendencies of the movement, but suggests that as a whole the movement was limited by the failure to grasp the function of work and the role of the state. The writer describes the new forms of insubordination against state power which developed, and points to the need to clarify a critique of the unions. The second article, France End of 1995: Anger and Huge Strikes, was written by M in Athens, for a foreign readership. The piece analyses the defensive nature of the strike movement. Unlike the offensive of 1968, here was a movement defending prior gains in the face of the march of economic liberalization. The final article, On the Eve of Battle, was written by a train driver in the Paris region. The article is a vivid account of the experiences of solidarity and creativity within the movement, and of the conflicts both between the movement and its opponents and among different participants within the movement - particularly trade union players.

ONE MORE EFFORT!

The government which came to office in May promised change and to fight against social fracture. Finally, we have had the police state and the awakening of social antagonism by the mass of waged and casual workers and the unemployed.

From the foundation of the Vigipirate (government plan to prevent terrorism), to the social security reform plans, only three months have passed. Three months during which the state, after having pursued the Islamisists, is now attacking public sector workers. The objective is to set up one section of the population as the enemy within.

The anti-terrorism plans are designed to reassure people by pointing a finger at anyone who looks like an immigrant. With the Juppé reforms it is civil servants who are denounced as the privileged who want to keep hold of their privileges.

Between the two, there are a mass of citizens held hostage in a no-mans land in which the silence only seems like proof of a tacit acceptance of the current political situation.

In the case of the anti-terrorism plan, this device has worked rather well: voices have barely been raised, there has been little resistance to the increase in controls, arrests, expulsions the cities and outlying areas. Only certain suburbs have been the site of clashe s in a situation already tense for several years. But as the young people in the cities have been well aware, far from hunting down terrorists, the anti-terrorist measures are aimed primarily at the domestication of new dangerous classes stuck in certain districts and on the edge of the big cities. Vigipirate is the policing aspect of the crisis which is being imposed on unstable populations

The social security reform plan is participating in the same politics of generalized policing for those who cannot afford the medicine of wealth: photos on social security cards, obligatory health books, advance payment for health care for foreigners. But above all the attack on social gains and corporatism is a question of breaking down the last bastions which are protected from the crisis and reaching the final stage of the long road of neo-liberal enterprise of the last fifteen years. The restructuring of the process of production must not remain at the doors of the public sector. In order to reach it, the Chirac state is ready for anything. Including mobilizing the army and giving rise to the creation of so-called passenger committees.

The policing, the firm and scornful no confronting the strikers are the sign of the reinforcing of the states authority which appeals to a sense of history to eradicate what remains for us of revolt. So comrades, one more time, its now or never!

Contact: La Bonne Descente, Paris

NOW OR NEVER!

The growing social movement gives us, for the first time for ages, the opportunity to create our own history. Without opposing some reform or other, the students are rebelling against misery, against the empty hole of the future, against the society which has dug this hole. Led at first by unions scared of losing their breaks, hundreds and thousands of workers have today thrown themselves into a strike which goes beyond opposition to the Juppé plan. When the demands multiply, when the transport workers remain mobilized, when the postal workers go on strike, when the Air France workers are on the runways again, we can feel that the submission to sacrifice, after twenty years of fighting the crisis, is finally in the process of being broken... When the metro workers strike means that the Vigipirate plan is out of the question... When, as in Marseilles, the unemployed lead the front of the demo... When, as in Jussieu, the youth from the suburbs and students join to defend themselves against the cops... When students and permanent and casual workers meet on demos and in assemblies... When, as in Toulouse, the students come to help strikers stop the buses... When the categories which imprison us disappear...Thats when a generalized social revolt takes shape against the capitalist order.

On the other side, the Prime Sinister and his Notat, the boss of the professional left, all chant the usual blackmail to us: We must adapt to survive in the World Market.

In the face of a government which is playing all their cards, everyone senses that, behind todays struggle, is the risk of serious defeat, followed by social regression for everyone.

Will the Law of Economics condemn us to this? Lets smash the laws! So that we can struggle, speak to each other, and imagine other ways of living together.

We must take back the time that wage slavery has stolen from us.

Long live the GENERAL STRIKE!

A country which is entirely on strike is a new world shaping itself!

THE MOMENT HAS COME...

IF IT ESCAPES US WE WONT FIND IT AGAIN FORA LONG TIME.

anonymous poster on the walls of Toulon, 23 March 1789

Behind the specific demands there is often a general feeling of dissatisfaction, of having had enough. The profound misery of the majority of the population derives from not being able to express the fact of their isolation.

Everyone who finds themselves stuck in their roles as unemployed, casual workers...are today in the position many will find themselves in tomorrow.

These past few days we have been demonstrating with the strikers.

We are convinced that the present turmoil is asking for more than it is letting on. We hear the refusal of the deterioration of living conditions, the refusal of the usury produced by the constraints of money, the refusal of the erosion of everything that makes a human being a being who does not take it lying down.

This refusal bursts through the surface of specific demands here and there.

In many towns, demos have not been so big for three generations.

In Merlebach, Orly, Nantes, Paris, Montpellier, Sainte Etienne... strikers, demonstrators rise up against the police armada deployed to defend the commodity, to contain people coming together, to prevent people meeting each other and talking, to neutralize the struggle.

In the street, in the places where there are strikes, waged workers, unemployed, students are starting to talk. In Nantes, Montpellier, Paris, the demonstrators refuse to disperse, occupy the street, seek places to be together.

In Clermont-Ferrand, railworkers invite other strikers and passengers to a banquet in the station, The following week, they organize a ball...

In several towns, EDF (electricity) workers put the electricity onto the cheap rate.

Others restore the electricity to EDF sources. Elsewhere, striking postal workers ensure a minimal service for the unemployed, people on benefits... And all other initiatives which have happened in silence or been twisted by media corrosion.

This confrontation which sets the people in opposition to the state has already claimed its victims - those who attack objects: cars, dustbins, cameras, shop windows, riot shields...have bled, been dragged to the courts, imprisoned.

- One years prison sentence for a shop window and two shirts in Montpellier...

- Three months for the destruction of a table in Paris...

- Two months for overturning two cars in Paris...

Casseurs? These are students, the unemployed, the homeless, waged workers, teachers...They are all expressing a general anger, like the miners of Merlebach or the strikers of Orly.

To demand liberation and amnesty for all the demonstrators is to refuse false divisions: public sector workers, private sector workers, casseurs and demonstrators, waged workers and the unemployed, strikers and passengers...

Combating the fear, the fear of tomorrow, of the unknown, of the self, of others, of losing what little we have...

Reversing the situation against those who sustain it, getting our confidence back, giving ourselves the means to meet each other, in the workplace, in the job centres, the universities, schools, or other places, by opening them up...inviting people in...?

Divided, we are conquered. Our power lies in meeting together.

Just because its raining cats and dogs, thats no reason to stop pissing.

Paris, 10 December 1995

WHAT DO WE WANT?

What do we want?

Not difficult to know: its enough to listen to whats being said, not in the anti-chambers or screens of power, but in the processions and the bars, in the occupied stations and the individual modes of transport that have been joyfully collectivized.

We want to talk

For the twenty years that the crisis has lasted, we have been told that its very complicated, that we dont understand anything about it, in short, that we must make sacrifices, that is the price of economic progress. Now, what do we see? The only real crisis is that of a system which rests on the exploitation of wage labour: There is less and less work, while there is more and more wealth. It is the system and its pseudo-rationality that is in crisis, thats what we want to talk about.

We want to get away from the categories that imprison us

In transforming privileged work, we have been isolated in categories which are supposed to oppose each other to defend or reclaim the morsels of privilege: private salaries against public, against CDI, unemployed against workers, homeless against those who live in rabbit hutches, with the homeless to call everyone who waits for them if they are not wise. It is against this society of generalized blackmail that we have been set in movement. Its against this tendency to increasingly set everyone against each other that we have started to reunite. Railworkers, posties, students, teachers, unemployed etc. have met at strikes with an ease, a confidence, a desire to listen never seen until now. While eating, singing, drinking and resisting police intimidation, we have discovered a new way of being together. Those who have started to talk are numerous, no longer under the title of their category, but under the title of human. Thousands of people whom the system has separated have woven lines between each other: This is the main benefit that we have gained in this struggle, and we will fight to keep it

We want to keep the strong position

Already, we have succeeded in putting the brakes on the triumphant rationality of the capitalist economy. No, the movement is not finished. Its up to us to develop the newest elements it has brought:

Lets get away from our categories!

Lets get away from our workplaces to go and meet others!

Lets transform places of pain into places for parties!

Lets take other places, pleasant and heated, and open them to everyone, included and excluded!

Why oblige the SDF to sleep in metro stations? Lets occupy the national palaces!

All possibilities are still open to us!

From those without categories

mid-December 1995

Contact: La Bonne Descente

BEWARE, ONE STRIKING TRAIN MAY CONCEAL ANOTHER

The purpose of a social movement is to continually overthrow aspects of a situation and transform the certitudes of yesterday into the doubts of today and to supply tomorrow's questions. As the relations of power evolve, problems pose themselves with more clarity. The questions raised by the present strike movement are decisive for what follows.

Today the strike has a grip on almost the totality of the public sector. At the same time - at least in Paris - student agitation seems to be having difficulty in transforming itself into a true movement. A minority is engrossed in an assemblyist activism which cannot go beyond the corporatist framework controlled by the unions. The real relations between delegates, students and co-ordinations are being masked by clashes between groupuscules at the heart of co-ordinations which are gradually losing all credibility and are only co-ordinating manipulative projects. The activism of this minority only survives thanks to the new breath brought by the strikes of waged workers. Despite the energy of a few put into making political proposals, despite the radicalization of one section of students, this movement has not been capable, up to now, of going beyond its corporatism, of inventing or liberating a subversive creativity.

In the striking public sector, some aspects are also appearing in a new light. The movement has been set in motion at the grassroots level and is carried by a profound sense of discontent which has existed for a long time in society. However, the great majority of workers seem to have become consumers of their own strike: active participation is being left to union militants. In some cases only collective engagement has been preserved. Whatever it is, the volume of the movement has already carried a dynamic which transcends the initial objectives. In the face of the brutality of the choice of power - which is as determined as the strikers themselves - one can examine the state of the strengths of the movement and its perspectives. Globally, the strike remains under the control of the unions, even if the delegates seem to carry a determining weight. The unions are the only ones negotiating the market which presents itself as the reasonable issue in the conflict. The dawning of the great day of class struggle is necessary for capitalists to measure the situation and to define the framework of a new general interest. A confrontation of this order does not displease them, as long as the market can regulate itself in a friendly manner. The unions also need this struggle to reinvigorate themselves just when they are at their worst. The form taken by this conflict is an indirect consequence of the crisis in French syndicalism and the urgent necessity for it to regain a minimal ability to represent. This weakness in syndicalism is also the strength of the movement. Recently especially, the strikers are showing themselves to be very open, concerned about what is happening elsewhere in society. They have been capable of extending their struggle from their own strength, leaving their places of exploitation in order to meet other waged workers and to persuade them to join them. And there are many who support the students in struggle.

The absence of forms of organization capable of expressing the determination and new aspirations of the struggle is the movements main weakness. It explains the passive attitude of one section of proletarians. This absence is even more remarkable given that the isolated struggles of the preceding years had seen the birth of numerous autonomous organizations. Today any generalization of strikes is for the profit of the unions, further reinforcing their capacity for negotiation. From now on the lack of the movements autonomy in the face of the union apparatus will bring its defeat. If the movement is not capable of transcending itself and creating independent organizations, uniting with those who are unionized or non-unionized, it will also be incapable of connecting with workers from the private sector, who have become, for now, hostages of the bosses. It will no longer be a question of struggling against the selling out of the movement by the unions. It will be too late. The union leaders and the powers that be will share the fruits of all our energy and generosity. Those who submit to this today will be held responsible for it tomorrow From now on only the transcending of the leadership of the unions can put the strikes, and the youth in struggle in the universities and schools onto a new level.

The opening out of the struggle towards others by the strikers is one of the strengths of the movement. It allows those who fight alone against the capitalist order to express themselves and to confront their opinions. It is the only activity which seems to me to have any sense today.

INSURRECTION!

GENERAL STRIKE!

No, the railworkers are not privileged!

No, the railworkers are not responsible for the financial hole in the SNCF (railways)!

The state is responsible - let it pay! Its got the money!

Yes, each worker repays more than 6000F per month in interest to the banks.

Revolt is good!

Railworkers

local union - Northern Paris

23 November 1995

A rebel without frontiers

LAST (BUT NOT LEAST) EXIT TO THE STRIKE.

END OF THE STRIKE IN NIMES

Tuesday 19 December 1995

Since Friday the media have been chanting the same chant about the tendency of a return to work, the strike is suffocating, the general assemblies are becoming angry, railway depots are voting for a return to work. On Saturday 16th December, they were proved right: the Strasbourg depot voted for a return to work. The next day this general assembly voted again for strike action: this fact was for the most part not mentioned.

For some days, the union confederations have made an awful come back. They began certain negotiations with ministers. On the night of Saturday/Sunday, a fax sent from the minister of transport arrives in all the depots via the unionists. The contrat de plan is frozen. Pensions are not being touched. All the reforms which concern the railworkers are delayed until later. The return of corporatism. (During the entire time of the strikes, the men of the state and their collaborators have maintained that the movement was corporatist and political in order to denigrate it. The state and the unions have been busy making of it what they would like it to be and what it was not.) The return of confederations is the return of the traditional union order: channelling, falsification, demagogy. It is the return to injunctions and threats to the local union branches who have been a part of the strike everywhere as an extended inter-union whatever union they belonged to.

On the afternoon of 19th December railworkers in Nimes vote for a suspension of the strike. The last step towards achieving momentarily, as they say, the movement of negotiations are engaged with the local leadership of the SNCF on this theme: for each worker who leaves, another will be hired (whether they retire or are moved).

A large rectangular table was placed in a room under the station. The principal director, surrounded by directors of related services, as well as the union delegates (CGT, CFDT, FO) and, standing, encircling this conventional intimateness, 200 railworkers. The local director, (who is called M. Verité which means Mr. Truth in French), does not manage to get in touch with the regional director of Montpellier on his mobile phone. He declares that his plans of hiring will not be questioned again and will follow the procedures previously fixed.

Scattered conversations with some railworkers explain this demand by the fact that for them it is not a question of calling to be hired in order to deal with a lack of staff on certain posts, but of giving a job to someone who is unemployed: We are not fighting for our little SNCF. We are fighting for our children, for everyone. We are fighting for all those who can no longer fight, in the private sector and elsewhere. We voted for a suspension of the strike because we want to spend the holidays peacefully, so that people can travel. To gather strength. In any case, the general assemblies have already been called out for the beginning of January. Another who declared himself non-unionized regrets that the strike was suspended: It shouldnt be stopped like that. After three weeks, they are going to think were tired. And he starts speaking with a vaguely sing-song tone to no-one in particular: Youre tired... And everyone responds: Were not tired...

There is excitement in the room. For two hours, the railworkers chat and tease each other. The director says that he will telephone again. He is left alone with his mobile. Ten minutes go by and he returns to the room. No news from Montpellier. One railworker declares: Youd better tell them something in Montpellier. And that is that there are two hundred of us in the room, that youre in the middle of us and that we have no intention of letting you leave. The director: Are you holding me hostage? The railworker: Thats exactly it. The director demands some time to telephone again. A train conductor explodes: Verité, youre nothing but an arsehole, youre really taking us for a load of bloody idiots. One phone call to Montpellier only means that the financiers gain thousands in one second. Verité, Im going to kill you(!) if you carry on. His colleagues rush towards him. Calm down, calm down, come outside for a breath of fresh air. The CGT delegate speaks: You see M. Verité, until now the strike was dignified and responsible. You see whats going to happen. Youre going to have to deal with a strike which we can no longer control, and you alone will be responsible. One railworker cuts short the Stalinist speech. Right, thats enough. Were going to look for equipment, and were going to lock the door of the room with Verité in it. Then well solder the doors of the depot. I propose that we vote for or against going back out on strike. Well vote! Well vote! The delegates huddle among the railworkers. Who is in favour of the strike? All the hands go up followed by a jovial, Everyone together! Everyone together! One railworker who has remained outside proposes to some others that they find the directors car and set fire to it. Another, who had arrived with cans of beer on a trolley, proposes saving the empty bottles. They make good missiles, you never know. A gang comes out of the room and invites everyone to blockade the two trains that are about to leave. Everyone together! Processions in the stations. Trolleys are thrown onto the tracks. Some railworkers get onto the trains, firmly make the conductors leave and let off the alarms. Beautiful music. Another gang decides to shut the station. They get hold of bars, rods, trolleys, and run around the station. They block the doors and set up barricades. The average man in the street is surprised after hearing the TV and the radio announce that the strike is finished everywhere. One passenger says: The press, they really are a bunch of liars. And everyone proclaims Everyone together! Everyone together! Everyone is smiling, especially the railworkers. Everyone goes in front of the room. Why didnt you come to the general assemblies, they were open to everyone. Everyone could speak. There were unemployed people, teachers, kids from the electricity board, from Cacharel, the homeless, secondary schoolkids, housewives who all spoke. The CGT delegate starts speaking again: Comrades, we know how to remain dignified, we have shown that we are responsible and proud of our company. We have known how to resist all provocations and we will continue to resist them. The attitude of the directors is a provocation. We will not respond to it. This wanker had barely finished when everyone applauded and started again Everyone together! etc.

Provocation? Where? When?

The delegate goes into a dark corner. He also has a mobile phone and is probably calling his own boss. Long conversation.

Return to the room. The director has not moved. Some railworkers have gone to find the passengers who are in the blockaded trains. The room fills up with children, young people carrying bags, women old people. One railworker states that the passengers are with us and he describes Verité as responsible for the situation. Tell him what you think. One woman manages to approach him. Monsieur, theyre right, you should accept what they are demanding. The whole room: Everyone together! Everyone together!

Journalists from the local paper arrive. One striker tells them, from the back of the room: Watch it boys, weve clocked your faces and were going to read the paper tomorrow; if you lie again well find you. The journalists stare at their feet. Insults and piss-takes fly in the direction of the director. There is a jokey atmosphere. Everyone comes out again, and no-one is left in the room except for the unionists and the directors. Outside, there is talk of other depots which have, it seems, relaunched the strike over the same issues. Some of them are telling their families, their children. Its pointless to think only of yourself. Others regret the fact that the private sector has not joined the strike. It was an opportunity for them. If they havent done it now, when will they do it? Another describes the job of his cousin in a private company and says that everyone is fed up, that everything has to change, that the private sector will come out too: They have to. I talk about the miners of Freyling-Merlebach who attacked public buildings, the police and set fire to the directors offices. The railworker replies: With them its not the same, its a question of survival. A question of survival? Its a question of survival for us as well, you can see the kind of world theyre trying to make.

Return to the room. The director is there as well as the CGT. The director: Messieurs, I've just been speaking to Montpellier. The regional director is in agreement. For each worker who leaves another is hired for the next three months. The delegate starts to speak: You understand clearly what M. Verité has just said. For each person who leaves, one is hired for the period of renegotiation of the contrat de plan. Were going to vote for or against the strike. Cheers of Weve won! etc. The noise stops. One railworker: Look! Thats not the same thing, what the delegate and the director say. Murmuring in the room. The delegate becomes smaller. The director comes to shake his hand: During the period of the contrat de plan, one leaves, one is hired. When the Stalinist smiles again the whole room starts with: Weve won, etc. It gets quieter again and another railworker: No, no! Thats not how it happens. Verité must sign now. Hes already stitched us up. Verité says: Ill sign tomorrow during the negotiations which are a planned with the unions. No, you sign now. One point thats all. The room is filled with as much laughter as the Stalinist and the director are green. Paper for Verité. This is the moment of truth (Verité) etc. And of course a railworker: No! Verité has signed but not the other directors; they must sign as well. One of the directors states that he cannot be involved. We dont give a toss, you sign and if those above you dont agree with it, well, you can jump, you're nothing but a fuse. The guy complies. The delegate breathes a sigh of relief and in a beautiful outburst: Comrades, weve just had a beautiful victory. I think that the moment has come to re-vote with responsibility and dignity. I propose that we call off the strike. One conductor proposes not the stopping of the strike but its suspension. Everyone agrees with using this expression. Unanimous voting for suspension. Weve won! Everyone together! etc.

Everyone leaves. In the car park adjacent to the room, red fireworks burn and envelop the atmosphere in smoke. Various conversations, and paradoxically, an atmosphere of bitterness and sadness. One railworker says to me: What a bummer, Ill have to go to work tomorrow. I really dont feel like it... Another says: You say weve won. Weve only won the pleasure of making the directors bend a little bit and its really miserable. We want so much more. We want more from this society. But this kind of talk is articulated among only a few even though everyone thinks it. There is nobody to say it loud and strong, speech is left up to the professionals, the unionists. I start to be more annoyed with the attitude of the anonymous railworkers who are getting excited in small groups and losing themselves in jokes than with the unions who are going about their usual business which everyone expects of them. The delegate takes the microphone and tries to turn the impressions upside down. Comrades, we have achieved a great victory there. We achieved this victory by virtue of our sense of responsibility. We have come out bigger through this. This strike will have been exemplary in its calmness and dignity. He begins to applaud. A delegate from the FO says: Its true weve won. But nothing is finished. The general assemblies will take place at the beginning of January to make the point. The applause gets warmer. Some railworkers with whom Id been chatting and whose hands Id shaken when the station had been closed pushed me towards the microphone: Everyone here knows that Im not a railworker. I represent no-one. What I want to say is: Thanks. Thanks for fighting for everyone, for having given expressed the feelings in this country where for years and years we havent stopped taking it lying down. Thanks for having given us back the desire and the taste of talking and talking to each other. Thanks and see you soon. Everyone together, everyone together, the railworkers replied. Even the CGT applauded. Some railworkers hugged me. For one moment... I disappeared into the darkness. Some railworkers joined me again and asked me how they could get in touch with me again. I leave my address.

The next day, at a final, poxy demo, I will meet up with a railworker who will say to me: This morning at work, there was no joy. No-one felt like working. We were changed. Imagine, for 23 days, I had never taken so much pleasure in going to the depot. And Ive been working at the SNCF for fifteen years. My wife moaned a bit, she didnt see much of me. Thats to be expected. But the atmosphere was extraordinary. We didnt want it to stop. When you see the unions saying that its a beautiful victory, not one railworker thinks that. We lost, thats it. We won nothing. But morale is good. Above all, we are really angry now. When people say we suspended the strike, its not to show off. The strike has been suspended. Well wait for the new year holiday to pass. And afterwards well start again. Everyone is saying so. I bring up the attitude of the railworker who had threatened to attack the director the day before: Of course hes right. Everyone thinks the same. They really dont give a toss about us. But we mustnt give in to these bastards. That weakens us. As if we dont already have enough to defend. We speak of situations where there is nothing left to say. We speak of the running of the trains by strikers themselves and for free. Its a long running debate amongst us. We can do it. The problem is that we are prosecuted. As long as the movement is strong, we can hold out, the conductors and the others are risking nothing. But when the movement gets weaker, the cops will come and nick people who they pick out and isolate. So...The movement must always exist. Its not simple of course.

The Strike and After

Foreword

The following text has no pretension of drawing the full picture of the 1995 winter crisis on the scale of the whole country,but of giving my point of view based on my own reflection and my own, very modest, participation in the movement of insubordination in Paris. Its aim is not to end discussion but, on the contrary, to encourage the opening up of debate amongst those who intend going further than just recording events. To understand today the advances as well as the failures seems essential - in order to avoid being tossed about by unseen situations tomorrow.

To reflect is not to genuflect.

Whatever the admirers of neo-liberal democracy might think, capitalism at the end of this century is the inverse of the image it presents. Behind the humanitarian mask appears the increasingly implacable inhumanity of exploitation and domination. The aggravated capitalization of life generates horrors without end to such an extent that, in the most civilized countries it is henceforth difficult to regard them as contingent and temporary.

From the point of view of the masters of this world, the World Bank being the appointed manager, many things remain to be done to crush their slaves and give free reign to their all-consuming ambitions: to devastate the planet and let loose the domesticating power of capital. For the factions in power in France it is necessary to get it over with - and quickly. They are impelled by the expiry dates for European integration, and in a more general way, by the requirements of the world market for which they are, in the final analysis, only acting as proxies. But it was enough for state employees to demonstrate their refusal to submit for the well-oiled machine, set in primed motion by the present managers, to begin to seize up.

For the leadership of the trade unions, who are always hostile to individual and collective initiatives which escape their control, the decision to call a strike was the result of exhausting negotiations conducted with all the pedantry and ceremony proper to democracy with the objective of gaining credibility from people concerned. But individuals not lacking in decision already know from experience that the formal unanimity thus achieved doesn't signify anything in itself. Without waiting for the approval of all their still hesitant comrades, they not only went on strike but also began to seize the signal control centres.

Such initiatives were denounced by the SNCF management as irresponsible acts which put the security of the rail network and equipment at risk whereas it is them who have been responsible for numerous railway catastrophes on the lines which don't pay - by letting them fall into disrepair. In reality, such acts reveal the vulnerability of the transport network which is more and more centralized and computerized. The generalization of the latest technology is at once the source of the power and the general weakness of the system. It is an arm of capital to domesticate humans and to render their presence more and more obsolete. At the same time, all that was necessary was for a handful of individuals to occupy the control centres and signal power boxes, carry out some basic acts of sabotage, like erasing the computer memory, for the network to be paralysed in its entirety.

The leadership of the trade unions viewed with suspicion the first spontaneous outbursts which took place without their approval and which would have enormous unforeseen consequences. For those responsible for labour power, work is life itself and a strike is merely one of the unfortunate means the wardens of survival are sometimes obliged to use in order to attain their desired end. They do not understand that to stop work, even in a momentary fashion, forms part of the pleasures of life even though it absorbs a lot of energy and you lose money sometimes.

For a great deal of the strikers, the strike, on average, was set to become an end in itself. An activity breaking with the everyday. It allowed heads to be lifted up and the cycle of resignation to be broken, to break somewhat, trade separation, to speak, to party, to demonstrate in the street and - and why not? - to feast with the people in the neighbourhood, which, by the way, happened much more on the fringes than in the centre of Paris, now being transformed into a museum and into a commercial centre for luxury goods.

The holders of state power, apologists for social Darwinism[2], have denounced such unwillingness as the corporatism of the privileged worker, in short, as a survival reflex of antediluvian species unable to adapt. This view has nothing new about it. It dates from some fifteen years ago when the workers in traditional industries resisted, sometimes very violently, their disappearance ...a primordial situation in order to bring the stubborn under control and permit the reconversion of capital.

The workers in state industries like the SNCF are, by tradition, marked by corporatism and underpinned by professional pride. But when the initiators of the first strikes affirmed that they were striking for themselves but also for all proletarians waged and unwaged, they showed that they were overcoming their habitual shopkeepers' outlook which had caused so much wrong during the preceding strikes, in particular during the winter of 1986.

The content of the first intense discussions held, as often as not, in cafés as well as in assemblies, showed that there had been some subterranean maturation well before the outbreak of the strike. The majority were, to be sure, mainly preoccupied with the many questions relating to the status of the state workers. But a more conscious and determined minority went much further and attempted to tackle all the problems of daily survival. The responses were very confused, tainted with ideology and the language of pure democracy[3], but one felt a critical reflection, a search for real perspectives which would permit the human to be replaced at the centre against the dictatorship of the market, beyond capital's inhuman categories and the separations and roles which accompany them.

Thus, the strikers at SNCF, telecom, RATP (metro) and even the electricity industry accepted that people not belonging to the state industries were present in the general assemblies, organizing soup kitchens for down-and-outs and reconnecting, in part, electricity to shelters for the poor. These were the seeds of helping one another break with the ideology of belonging to a firm and the insane egotism peculiar to contemporary capitalism.

Ridicule failed to kill anymore: the wretched attempts by the state to set the population against the strikers failed. After the fiasco of the first demonstration of angry passengers held hostage by the strikers, it decided to cancel the following demos. In spite of the generalization of disorder on urban transport, the population were not at all unsympathetic to the strikers, an attitude which stood out clearly from the latent hostility during the preceding SNCF strikes, in particular during the winter of 1986. In general, the sympathy was passive sometimes active: the setting up of a support fund for the strikers, putting up those occupying depots in the centre of Paris and who lived too far away on the outskirts to return every evening to their home, etc.

There were moments when it was possible to think that things were going to go much further. But the initial dynamism foundered, then came to a halt, without the demands which had caused the strike even being met, in spite of the general bitterness when the strikes were called off and the continuation of certain pockets of resistance.

The repression had been restrained, except in ultra-sensitive sectors to the functioning of capital, like in the electricity industry, where it was directed at isolated pockets of unyielding resistance. The absence of cash, the fear of being without it and of being laid-off, had been some factors which had contributed to the general inertia, in particular in the most structured sectors of capital where self-reliance, the war of one against all and of each against themselves, are, hence-forth the rule. But the strikers themselves were less hamstrung by lack of money, at least immediately. Moreover, the determined among them replied to people who proposed to raise money on their behalf: we are fed up with striking by proxy. Better to go out on strike yourselves. The critique of striking by delegates was to the point. It put in relief the somewhat amorphous behaviour of ordinary citizens, accustomed at work to delegate the resolution of their problems to official and officious individuals and therefore, scarcely inclined to show any spirit of initiative. Moreover, on the whole they continued to work, willingly or reluctantly, at best marching behind the trade union leadership, with the unemployed sometimes by their side. Even the mass of strikers were less and less mobilized. They stuck to the simple matter of renewing the strike through the general assemblies, participating in demonstrations and in the parties organized at their workplaces.

Against the prevailing passivity, the most combative strikers called for the generalization of the strike. The formula was ambiguous: it meant they considered their own activity, the strike they had embarked on, as the obligatory reference point for all potential revolts.

The unblocking of the situation could not come from the simple increase in the number of strikes. The extension was, in part, subordinate to radicalization, to bypassing the limited character of the initial initiatives which had stirred the mass of protesters. The contradiction between the breadth of the protest and the near general absence of a subversive perspective was clear to those who had not lost their clarity. In spite of their combativity, the protesters had stumbled over two essential questions, that of the function of work and comcomitantly, the role of the state and in particular, the welfare state.

The strikers in the state sector were rejecting the devalorization of their situation. But they had taken on board as unassailable their alleged mission, to be at the service of all citizens. They had valorized what their survival was based on: their work. They endowed it with unique virtues whereas here, as elsewhere, work has become something very functional, with no particular meaning to workers except that it permits them to have money and to be recognized as citizens. Their sole peculiarity is to be an integral part of the state's communication system.

Furthermore, the state workers who had been able to profit from the weakness of the latest technology in their workplaces had not understood the modifications these had already led to in the rest of society. They were hoping their strike would paralyse the economy in its entirety and would therefore force the State to give in over the essentials. Nothing of the sort happened.

In the Paris region, the transport blockade had been total, much more so than in the winter of 1986, but the impact had been less. Industry has practically disappeared to the benefit of finance, the press, etc. There the computerization of work processes predominate. Firms have been capable, much more so than previously, of carrying out their essential activities thanks to flexi-time and the use of home based computer terminals. Some managers had hesitated to put similar measures into operation because they were in doubt about the enthusiasm of their personnel and preferred to have them under their watchful eye in order to control them. Moreover, the nature of work did not always permit it, in particular in the retail trade. But the tone was set.

The concept of a communication network less and less overlaps that of the transport network. To increase the pressure, it would have been necessaryfor strikers to block other networks which was difficult to achieve without the connivance of employees in telecom, The electricity industry, etc. The strike in the electricity industry (EDF) would have had a much greater impact to the degree where the communications network couldn't function without electricity. But the trade union leadership, aware of dangers, broke the few strikes which took place in the electricity industry and warned the over-excited against acts which endangered the security of power stations and the grid.

Behind the fixation on retaining acquired privileges, there appeared ambiguities at the same time towards the welfare state. For example, calls for guaranteed employment, even payment for not being employed.

The system of labour protection, put in place on the morrow of the Liberation, was indispensable to the reconstruction of the basis of the state, and a prelude to the subsequent frenzied accumulation of capital over the next 30 glorious years. Labour power was then considered as the most precious capital. The recent changes within capital, in particular technological changes, have brought into question its centrality and as a consequence, the state treats it as a depreciating commodity whose upkeep is expensive and worthy of being thrown in the waste paper basket.

Moreover, the domination of the welfare state was of a piece with the helping-out mentality. It had accustomed citizens to seeing their survival problems taken in hand and decided by a supreme authority in a practically quasi-automatic fashion without there being any need to intervene themselves. This renunciation had been the reverse of protection. In particular, it wasn't for nothing that in the atomization and partial asthenia that stubborn individuals, because of their hatred of work, fled firms in order to try and live a little. Despite the partial questioning of the welfare state, the need for social security wastes and encourages the partial neutralization of energies which, if not, would become dangerous to society.

Neo-liberalism is to be sure inhuman. But it does no more than reveal the internal essence of capital: for it, the human is only of interest to the degree it is capitalizable. From now on, more than ever, it will be too much. When state power becomes the apologist for labour, it is not because it thinks that the employment of all potential workers remains the primordial condition for the value creating process of capital but in order to try to make good, at the least cost, a life of inactivity, the origin of revolts. The state has a horror of emptiness. So to keep order, any kind of activity is better than none at all, such is the credo of neo-liberalism which has taken over from the apologists of the welfare state. Work remains the best cop even though the mode of contemporary capital's functioning rends practically impossible the employment of all available human beings, even on the cheap.

It might appear paradoxical that some protesters who were indifferent to politics should have granted so much importance to the idea of democracy: faced with the authoritarianism of state power, the defence of citizenship appeared to them indispensable.

In France, the myth of the sovereignty of the people has always been of great importance in the minds of the average citizen. They see there the means of disposing of despotisms, although it resurfaces without ceasing from the representation they have themselves chosen. But the myth would never have a similar hold on them if the state had not also appeared as their protector with the setting up of the welfare state. Not only did it assimilate, in the last analysis, citizens with workers, but also as workers it protected them somewhat, they and their families, against the upset and risks inherent to wage workers in the service of capital. In France, the welfare state had thus realized up to the end the democratization of the state.

From now on, the transformation of capital shall make citizenship appear as a pure political form without a socially effective content. That is why the reduction of the protective role of the state is linked to the partial, and even total questioning by the excluded, of the statute of citizenship. Here also, neo-liberalism plays a revelatory role. Democracy appears, even under a benign appearance, as what it always had been: the domination of capital.

The winter crises also revealed the paradoxes of contestation for official unionism. The protesters have, en masse, expressed willy-nilly, their refusal of neo-liberalism following union officials to the degree that, with the exception of those in the CFDT, they made a show of mobilizing them.

It is, however, notorious that in France disaffection with trade unionism has considerably increased over the years. At the risk of abstraction, the period of radicalization after May '68 had not shown a surpassing of the trade union strait jacket. Rather, it had sanctioned atomization, the dissolution of former combative communities and submission to the imperatives of capitalist restructuring.

But the principal characteristics of the welfare state in France is to have integrated the trade unions, who at times have preserved the facade of contestation, into organs for the protection of labour. Paritarisme (the equal representation of both sides when management and trade union leaders meet) gave the impression to the trade union rank and file, and continues to give it despite de-unionization, of having a direct hold over state management through the intermediary of their leaders.

From their angle, the majority of trade union bosses were apprehensive; the reduction in the contractual function of the state would mean to them the loss of sinecures and positions even if the tendency to participate in the mode of neo-liberal management was pronounced among them and not only in the CFDT. What's more, they knew that their acknowledgement as partners by state power depended on their being representatives and their capacity to enclose and derail trouble in the enterprises, especially in attracting and controlling the most combative individuals which appeared.

Already for a number of years, the day belonged not to exclusion (except in the CFDT) but to recuperation, in order to try to broaden the base of the pyramid whose mummified summit was in danger of falling to pieces. The shop floor delegates' development is henceforth very different from that of preceding generations. The oldest had often participated in radical groupings which had sprung up after May '68, particularly in workshop committees outside of the main trade unions. The bankruptcy of their revolutionary political pretensions had led them to devote the majority of their energy to rank and file trade unionism even when they were sometimes members of Trotskyist/anarchist groups, etc. The youngest have come from the co-ordinations of winter '86. They are pretty indifferent to trade union labels; not uncommonly they belong at one and the same time to several organizations including the libertarian wing of the CNT. Their combativity is at times real. But, as long as they manoeuvre within a framework of a trade unionism approved by the state, they are tolerated by their leaderships as elements necessary to their survival and to the maintenance of their influence over the incredulous who, for want of better, accorded them some credit for trying to limit the damage.

The trade union leadership played the game well. The basis of their subtle sabotage was double language. They had, in part, consigned to the basement their stall-holder slanging matches and sought to consolidate, for the moment at least, the branch on which they were sitting and which they had contributed to sawing through. Hence the demagogic appeals to a unitary inter-trade action through the generalization throughout the country of strikes and demonstrations for the scrapping of the Juppé Plan. In reality they refused to extend the strikes, in particular in the electricity industry (EDF), monopolizing speech and communication in the strikers' assemblies, controlling demonstrations and causing them to degenerate into inoffensive, repetitive marches in which the aim was exhausting their energies and preventing the most radical of them taking over the local branches after their own fashion.[4]

The winter crises confirmed the breakthrough of a renewed rank and file trades unionism recomposing itself outside of traditional confederations, very much upsetting the different leaderships, in particular the leadership of the CFDT. From now on the model is the SUD.

The frequent references by the founders of the SUD to the origins of revolutionary syndicalism, indeed of anarcho-syndicalism for those who are also members of the CNT, to the original trade unions and to the first associations which had as their objective the emancipation of the workers, could be deceptive. Likewise their hostility to the most narrow minded corporatism.

But their steps were more the result of the exclusion imposed by the leadership of the CNT than of any critical reflection. In reality, they are participating in the renewal of trades unionism, a renewal based both on taking up the theme of self-management and the taking into account of the phenomenon of exclusion, up to then neglected by the main unions. They combine the traditional defence of the right of state employees with the defence of the workless, the homeless and illegal immigrants, participating in the creation of charitable organizations and multiplying contacts with those religious and lay people who are taking over from the state in matters of social assistance.

The SUD is already an integral part of a combination movement such as the purest democrats of our epoch dream of, champions of the defence of civil society against the attacks of state power. But the renovated combination movement is rotten even before flowering: it is born out of the decomposition of the former professional trade unionism, based on the identification of individuals with their type of work, and from the emergence of new reformist associations based on the aim of integrating into the world of work all those who have been excluded, so that they become citizens in their entirety. In spite of the good will of a number of SUD members, this atypical trade unionism, as they like to call it, has nothing revolutionary about it.

The irony is that the bureaucratism of the main unions does not stop them from participating in the institutional mechanisms in the state industries, in particular, in elections which allow them to be recognized by the state as the official representatives of the staff. The notion of not abandoning the terrain of power-sharing institutions, from workers' committees to administrative councils, to the managers is completely worn through. The terrain is full of pitfalls, delegates are admitted as co-managers of labour-power.

Faced with the institutionalization of the SUD, some protesters propose to limit the duration of delegates' participation in the co-management organizations and even to elect and revoke them on the basis of only the decisions taken in general assemblies and strike committees. But no formal procedure has ever impeded the appearance of a hierarchy within the institutions even when the base is regarded as sovereign. As long as individuals express the need to be represented, they are always confronted by the fact that the representation that they have chosen escapes their control.

It is customary in France for demonstrators to try to get round obstacles encountered in concrete struggle through a recourse to abstract recipes. Faced with the incapacity to understand what was shackling the development of the content and the contents of the movements unfolding, there was a return to apologetics regarding well-known forms. But, detached from the context that gave them life and meaning, they were nothing more than dead, hollow formulas, phantoms which no longer arouse fear in the holders of state power and their acolytes in the trade union hierarchy. Because the trade unions, for fear of throwing petrol on the fire, have avoided using the term general strike, some protesters thought they saw in it the miracle solution. But whatever their good intentions, they have only tried to outbid their rivals.

The general strike of May '68 constituted their blue-chip stock par excellence. In so doing, they no longer demonstrated any critical spirit. For the mass radical movement which broke out then had already passed the very limited confines of the general strike. It began to question work and many other aspects of daily survival: the family, school, urbanism, etc. Under the control of the unions, the occupations quickly shut themselves away and sometimes turned hostile to anything which wasn't to do with the corporate struggle. So leave the dead in peace. The wheel has turned. The structure of society has undergone an in-depth transformation with the commodity invading the totality of relations plus the near total demolition of working class communities which had, in spite of their corporatism, put up a resistance to capital. It has become impossible in France to identify the modern islets of contemporary capitalism, workers and non-workers, with the former workers of industrial capitalism which then constituted the heart of the economy, with the exception of, partly, state industries and what remains of the classical industrial firms.

To go on strike is not reduced in importance because work, as a feature of the domestication of individuals, remains the basis of society's functioning. But the general disruption of the work process throughout the country is, less than ever, the model for combat for every particular revolt. The ensemble of roles and the straight-jackets which suffocate us overwhelm the confines of work. Henceforth, work disruptions are only one of the moments of the movements of insubordination against state power and contemporary society. Witness the urban riots endemic to the megalopolis of the most advanced countries which already, in spite of the limited character of their objectives, are no less a very characteristic manifestation of revolt in our epoch.

It is impossible to say today what will happen tomorrow. The outcome of the winter movement has not been settled in advance. In relation to those of the recent past it has achieved some advances but, at the same time, it has revealed the existence of enormous obstacles. Of course these are not, a priori, insurmountable and must not become the pretext for kow-towing. Nothing is inevitable, and as the celebrated saying recalls: the power of the masters also rests on the weakness of the slaves.

However, it none-the-less remains true that historical conditions have been modified. The Juppé plan is not the only fruit of the neo-liberal fads of the technocrats in delirium who are today in power in France. In this case the mass strikes of winter would have been enough to cause its withdrawal. But behind them looms the menacing shadow of the real enemy whose managers they only are. The enemy is global capitalism which has decided, on a planetary scale, to deliver the coup de grace to those it has not yet got under control. It's also the reason why the shrewd Juppé plan has the capacity to take a lot of punishment.

Moreover, the victims of neo-liberalism are in a corner. On the one hand, the oldest are scarcely enthused by the programmes coming from bygone periods which in general were reformist. On the other hand, young people have grown up in the shadow of the crises, in an atmosphere of generalized nihilism, which characterizes contemporary capitalism.

Even when the determination to unravel it is real, the absence of a global perspective for overcoming the survival which envelopes them condemns them to explosions of anger which are considerable but without any follow up at the moment, when even a simple resistance to the encroachment of capital is a very arduous thing to achieve. Capital has always taken back what it granted the night before and one cannot appraise the winter movement in terms of a balance sheet. But the non-satisfaction of basic demands had a part to play in the feeling of powerlessness. We don't live only for the pleasures of the flesh but when they aren't to be had those of the spirit offer no consolation.

The absence of great aims does not prompt the use of great means except in very particular situations. Power understood this. In spite of the fear the massive work stoppages in state industries aroused in them, they relied more on the likelihood of decay than on savage repression and gave way to sectional demands only to accelerate the decomposition.

A handful of irreducibles in Paris and the regions, in order to struggle against defeatism and the return to atomization following the return to work, have taken it upon themselves to think and act in a co-ordinated fashion in expectation of a hypothetical resumption. The initiative is not without interest. But it is essential to comprehend that it cannot be a matter of reconstituting the action committees, such as existed in the period of radicalization inaugurated by May '68. And still less the co-ordinations, in the image of those which arose during the preceding strikes and which sought to be the representatives of different trades and professions in struggle. Without neglecting the exchange of information and the rest, it is, more than ever, necessary to draw up a critique of the movement of insubordination which we participated in. The possibility that individuals refusing to accept resignation will converge depends on it. What is necessary, in particular, is the critique of trades unionism, even atypical trades unionism. It is difficult because it could be the cause of a distancing, not only as regards trade union leaderships, but also as regards friends who are still full of illusions on the question of rank and file trade unionism, and not comprehending the critique, the latter could liken it to a rupture in relations forged during the strike. But it is today one of the conditions enabling us to act by ourselves and for ourselves.

ANDRé

France End of 1995: Anger and Huge Strikes

Governments today are so accustomed to hammering into peoples' heads arguments to do with economic logic (calculability, profitability, competitiveness). Used repeatedly they believe it will enable them to pass no matter what measure. It is true that in Europe since the commencement of the big neo-liberal offensive some ten years ago the movements which arose to oppose it have only rarely been able to prove the contrary. To date, the last which succeeded in France was against the CIP (creation of a minimum wage for those under 25 and obviously inferior to the minimum salary in force). In any event the present French government has starkly shown itself to have a large appetite for economic adjustments: privatizations (which have been a bad experience for a far from negligible part of the population) had, when they touched on the public sector, aroused deep suspicion. And, it was at this point that Prime Minister Juppé had sought to put into effect the plan for restructuring the SNCF which had been on the cards for several years, comprising an undermining of railway workers' social benefits, a reduction of the SNCF'spublic function and, as an inevitable consequence, lay-offs to come (after tens of thousands over the last few years). At the same time a plan for the reform of social security was put forward with the aim of balancing the budget - that old monster.

It was already practically inevitable and foreseen several months previously that the railworkers were going to go on strike to protest against the agreed on plan, that is, the projected restructuring of the SNCF. Any eventual overhaul such as specific retirement provisions had not yet been announced. The railway workers had for some years vigorously denounced the logic of profitability which they were the butt of. The plan would only push things further. The logic of the TGV had profoundly altered the SNCF's financial politics and reduced to a secondary role the notion of public service. This meant firstly a huge indebtedness and hence the technocratic necessity to make the railways pay - therefore railway staff had to be reduced, and fares increased according to market logic.[5] Reservations were to be obligatory and tickets purchased an hour before departing practically like air travel. Bit by bit, the notion that there existed non-profitable lines which had to be axed, no matter what problems this would pose to passengers, began to command attention. When work loads become punishing and are not acknowledged as such the more it becomes the norm. Hence proposals to reduce any advantage linked to this aspect.

In these conditions, where conflict was already virtually inevitable, the announcement, at the same time, of a plan levelling down specific public sector provisions and a plan to redress social security financing, substantially modifying its administration, could only unleash the railway workers' anger. The public sector, whose privileges were also threatened, supported them on a massive scale as relatively did people who found the social security reforms disquieting. All this has unleashed a wave of strikes in the public sector, principally in the transport sector (trains, metro, bus, Paris at a complete standstill) and the post office, virtually paralysing the entire country for three weeks.

It is hardly a matter of indifference that the strike was, in large part, catalysed by the overhaul of the social security system bringing it solely under the control of the state. What people feared, and doubtless with good cause given the European priority of profitability in all areas of the public sector, is that once it became a state concern, nothing could prevent it from making economies in the future - even the prospect of privatization - a reduction in contributions increasing the difficulties of average and below-average wage earners. Besides, it wasn't surprising that a majority of French people had no confidence in a government when it came to reforming social security. Over the last few years adjustments have already taken place which, each time, have entailed a reduction in entitlements, making life even harder for poor people. In the era of privatization frenzy, increased competitiveness and relocations, social security had become a symbol of something which had escaped the globalization of the economy, something which still vaguely belonged to the public.

Generally this strike wave had revealed more precisely a latent feeling on behalf of a considerable number of the badly paid that, after ten years, they were not going to put up with any more sacrifices in the name of global competition which had not sensibly improved the precarious nature of their survival, and quite the contrary of what had been affirmed in economic circles. What was starkly revealed was a weariness with the politics of profitability at any price practised by both the state and enterprises. That is the European logic, the logic of budgets, the control of spending which necessarily signifies a reduction in social investments by the state and an increase in insecurity which had begun to befelt as insupportable. The promised compensation of a reduction in unemployment corresponding to a renewed acceleration of the economy increasingly appeared as a mirage wheeled out solely to reassure. People have not yet got around to openly and explicitly criticizing this Europe such as statesmen and bosses conceive it but, being obliged to submit a little more to the yoke of balance sheets and profitability, to seeing the promised jobs going to Asia or South America, a permanent doubt has set in. In order to participate in the development of international markets, it is not necessary to count on the enthusiasms of the crowds. People are only trying to save their bacon.

In this movement of discontent, there is a determination to contest economic logic, refusing the proposed new plans according to this economic logic even though doing so on a defensive terrain, desperately clinging on to previous gains.

Some hundreds of thousand people regularly demonstrated in the streets simply shouting down with the overhaul of pensions, down with the overhaul of social security, and ending by calling for Juppé's sacking. All this could often be compared with a trade union demo with the usual predictable break-aways. Except that the number of demonstrations in the regions were striking (sometimes around 100,000 in towns with around several hundreds of thousand inhabitants) and that the demonstrations lasted for several weeks without peoples determination, in response to the arrogance of power, weakening - in spite of the loss of a not negligible amount of money. This had been seen to such a marked degree for a very long time, some said, not even since 1968.

The movement has expressed an interesting tendency desiring a real dialogue and a clean sweep of authoritarian decisions and the ever-ready plans of experts which are implemented shamelessly, even violently, and, if the resistance is too powerful, by negotiations which invariably end up agreeing on something, (which seems to be the case now, given that the strike has ebbed and the government has not given a proper guarantee, at least as far as concerns social security reform).

This tendency to take democracy at its face value showed up regularly in the remarks of strikers and people who were interviewed. It even happened one Wednesday evening on December 1st during a live TV broadcast which laid claim to being democratic by letting strikers speak (in fact, the time allocated to them was far less than to the crew of invited experts). The strikers however, detournéd and extended democracy. We were able to hear directly the statements of postal workers and striking railway workers in spite of TV contrivances not allowing them to speak for long enough so they could not really develop their ideas. (All the same, they succeeded in making their presence felt sufficiently to be given a little time to talk). We were able to hear a SNCF striker remind us that if the SNCF was so in debt it was because it had been financed for ten years without adequate funding, the Pharaoh-like TGV project which had been decided on solely by the experts and which now everyone had to pay for and that there was no reason to look elsewhere for the famous SNCF debt. Finally, each group of strikers interviewed managed to get in a direct live appeal to generalize the strike - all this at a peak viewing hour (between 21 and 23.30 hours). The programme's presenter was definitely in for a roasting that night.

It is necessary however to temper the enthusiasm which could inspire a relatively massive strike in Europe at the present time where such movements have a tendency to be uncommon.

Firstly, it was only at SNCF and the Parisian transport network (RATP and the buses) that there was an overwhelming majority for strike action followed by the post and sorting offices (around 100 out of the 130 offices paralysed) - but, less well in the financial department sectors and FOS) (only a few days and not everywhere). In the EDF (French electricity industry) only around 40 per cent came out on strike in the second week of the conflict with cuts occurring regularly in certain regions. In French Telecom it was less. Teachers joined in only after two weeks had elapsed although on a massive scale. In the rest of the public sector the support was considerably less, joining in on the three or four most important demonstrations in large numbers but not subsequently going on strike. The private sector for its part had only marginally been represented. All the same, it is essential to note that in spite of the daily difficulties created by the absence of transport (especially in the Parisian region) many people who continued to go to and from work reserved their smiles and sympathies for the strikers claiming solidarity with their demands even if they didn't see their way forward to the possibility of joining in.

Secondly, the nature of the proposals having led to the strike (social security/public sector pensions and the agreed-on plan for the SNCF), had provided a staging post for the major trade unions who kept control over the movement and its opportunities even if they were sometimes thrust aside and necessarily had to go along with strikers determined to demonstrate their anger. But it had always been at stake that the demanded withdrawal of the proposals would be followed by their subsequent re-negotiation. By whom? The trade union experts naturally. Obviously such control of the movements possibilities had weighed on the ideas, the development of the debate and the furtherance of a critique of society. The trade unions had shifted this onto the political terrain against the government in power nicely aided by Juppé's boasting stance. And this tendency in the movement to express a profound dissatisfaction with the neo-liberal transformation of society and the dismantling even of the idea of public service (because what counts, above all, is profitability imposed by experts whilst, by definition, the notion of public service must come from the public deriving satisfaction according to its will and deliberation) has only been incompletely sketched out and expressed under the form of defensive slogans. Swept along by the groundswell, the unions decided to calm things down by calling for militant demonstrations which passed off to the detriment of reflecting on the reasons for this discontent and to communicating this essential aspect.

It is not by chance that this time there wasn't any autonomous co-ordination leading the movement. On the one hand, concerning the planned restructuring of the SNCF, the CGT, which is still very influential in this sector, had the time to foresee the conflict and prepare to be an active force. Regarding the issue of social security, the FO, which has been partly responsible for its management for several decades, was not going to let such a bastion fall without doing anything. Marc Blondel, its leader, had not ceased to let rip during the conflict in order to obtain what he wanted: a subsequent re-negotiation with the unions and, once he obtained it, he had made haste on one thing only: that the strikes end. These elements marked the weakness, the movement's lack of an independent spirit which, in spite of its determination and pugnacity, let its possibilities be pretty well smothered by the trade unions.

The force of the movement has, at times, been compared with May '68. In fact the relationship with '68 is far from being a direct one and the size and of the demonstrations, at least in the regions, could only make one think so sometimes.

There has been a change of mentality. Insecurity has grown since then. People defend themselves more than they go on the attack and, although their determination is great, they increasingly feel they have their backs to the wall. Perhaps it is still a matter of changing the social systembut it does not directly express itself as such. What hasn't changed much are the methods used by governments and trade unions to limit conflicts in a way that enables them to be resolved without changing anything essential in life. In 1968 people gave free reign to their enthusiasm for destabilizing a far too peaceful France, staid governments, the daily grind. The question of social activity was posed in its essence: attack on hierarchies, the questioning of work itself as alienation (never work). Peace finally had been bought through a hefty wage rise. But society had burnt with an intense flame.

The atmosphere today is far from being so inflammatory, the imagination is not always there at the appointed time, spirits are flagging, people have retreated generally, globalization strides implacably onwards. They fear for their children and daren't stride out (especially in the private sector literally knocked sideways by lay-offs and insecurity). they are ready to protest that they want no more aggravation and seek to pose the social question in terms of guaranteed employment. Unfortunately, it is not just a trade union slogan. Employment has become a national obsession in France and that, of course, prevents any fundamental questioning of government means (whether right or left, they fundamentally obey the logic of profitability and global competition) and the aims and means of firms. How far away it seems from the popular need to seize real power in society and, starting right from wherever it may be, to assemble and decide on what to do and what sort of activity. There is a tendency to want more than simply holding on to past gains but it remains powerless, paralysed by the apparent immensity of its task: the questioning of global logic.

The strike has become serious, responsible. It lacks a dose of madness in order to think beyond social security, retirement and the future of the railways.

One thing is certain, the apparently unstoppable managerial dialogue finished up, on account of reducing the mass of wage earners to a precarious existence, by colliding headlong with determined resistance. The entire logic of the economic arguments seeking to justify austerity plans could not prevent people from feeling that the only thing that made their lot supportable, if not enviable - that is a minimum of security - was being blown sky high by global competition. For now, this is expressed only by the defence of past gains, in the need for a return to security (wages, pensions, social security, state support) and trade union experts are well placed to channel these ideas springing from dissatisfaction. It is the social wrapping indispensable to survival in a world that is fundamentally competitive and individualistic. Bit by bit, this social wrapping is eroding, the forward march of Europe wants it thus because it fits perfectly with the world movement of markets and economic liberalization. There is therefore a good chance that one will often see the return of such movements against insecurity elsewhere in Europe. The problem that is posed is knowing how these movements can break free from ideas limited to the defence of a security that is not exactly exciting and enviable. The leaden weight of the trade unions is still capable of limiting the debate, but beyond this problem it is in the hands of each and everyone that the limitation of ideas thrives. Between the mostly aimless and violent outbursts in French suburbs and the fatalism dominating society as regards the advance of commodity logic, there is not today an influential pole of opposition that has succeeded in establishing itself. Over the last few years there have certainly been new things like the homeless movement, those of the excluded and unemployed which have freely denounced and forced state bureaucracy to insist that immediate concrete solutions be found for people in a state of pressing need, deprived of all material support and slipping into vagrancy. By occupying government buildings, in forcing open in a real sense the doors of ministries, they have ensured that some attention and comfort are accorded to them. But, up to now, their aim, the satisfaction of urgent needs, has become more or less mingled with that of survival. Their appeals for solidarity, if completely justifiable, have been too tainted with humanism, even by Christian good will (Abbot Pierre for example), to dare to attack the social logic at the very root of the problem which leads to these sinister consequences. Increasingly people are to be seen without a roof over their heads, wandering aimlessly about, totally discarded. One extremely disabling thing in France (and, no doubt, more generally in Europe) is that there does not seem to be any alternative for society other than, on the one hand, an ultra-liberal destructive privatization which doesn't give a hoot for those countless people who don't figure in the statistics, and on the other, an appeal to state protection under the sign of extended provision. It's as if society had lost all ability to organize itself, to generate its own values, its own richness and material, other than participation in the market (whether European or the world). In any case, the least one can say today is that this blocking of a social alternative has two poles: the affirmation of ultra-liberalism and the defence of the welfare state manifests in every way the same acceptance of the everlastingness of the system, stopped from casting any real doubts, beyond a simple pin prick, on the fatal march of progress. And yet I will not be the last to draw whatever benefits I can from the state. These exist so autonomously from society, from the will of the people - a monstrous bureaucracy - that the sanest relationship one can still have with it is not to hesitate to profit, where possible, from its ungainliness and blindness. To demand a just return, whether in maintaining the gains of wage earners or, from the recruitment of new aides, or to profit from the bureaucratic shortcomings of the system is one thing. But it definitely does not constitute a point of departure for a reversal of perspective in social life. Far from it.

It was pleasurable obviously to see economic activity reduced to a crawl for several weeks and feel that its smooth functioning corresponded to a form of slavery, to a general stupefaction. To a certain extent, the massive mobilization in the streets restored confidence because one could see it was possible to resist, to refuse new austerity measures and to effectively oppose the authoritarian decisions of experts. The expression of a mass of people, of the average French person, that is a poor person, confirmed the possibility of a return to pressure in the streets which the movement against the CIP in the spring of '94 had already signified clearly. When it came to a return to work people dragged their feet. With sectors continuing to remain on strike, one saw that the outcome of the conflict, pensions and unwritten guarantees, satisfied no one. Defiance persists and the atmosphere is one of readiness in the event of negotiations fouling up. One last point in favour of this type of strike movement in our times is the extreme fragility of the economy confronted with a transport stoppage. After a few weeks of strikes the whole system grinds to a halt. All firms lose money on a vast scale and are economically asphyxiated. It is more than ever a solid basis on which to make a practical critique, the problems remaining being those of clarity of critique and effective solidarity with strikers who still rely a lot on trade union organization.

On the last point it doesn't to amount much to unreservedly enthuse about the force of the movement when one sees how the beginning of a vital public debate, experienced as such, was so easily eaten away, often disarmed by slogans and ready-made ideas.

Reflection has not managed to effectively break the vicious circle of obsession with employment and purchasing power, the imagination of people always seeming to stumble over the vision of social struggle. Finally, the impression is of a movement which attacks the real enemy, the absolutism of money, without finding its true voice to speak about a general situation and which remains clouded by a still corporatist language. The protest has not fulfilled its promise, thus leaving the field open to trade union experts and government specialists skilled at a realistic negotiation concerning benefits and who won't risk changing anything making up life's mediocrity and misery.

Provisional end to the state of things.

1. The particular system in place at the SNCF forces on-track workers into retirement at 50 and others at 55, while elsewhere the retiring age for some years had been at least 60 following a lengthening of contributions imposed on the private sector under the pretext of course of competition and profitability to 40 years in place of 37.5.

2. It is necessary to clarify some features of the French social security system. Up to now the system has been directed at once by the state and by the unions, FO essentially, with in second place, representatives of management. The state had, to be sure, determined the general orientation, the overall budget, the rules concerning the repayment of debt and regulated the structure in general but which was financed by wage earners on the one hand and firms on the other. And, in fact at the level of the regional funds, the trade union FO, so steadfastly opposed to reform, had power over budget decisions and was free to make important appointments. It is necessary to establish whether or not the system is still very indebted, many people including economic experts suspecting and even accusing the state of having taken certain important moneys out of the social security account, which they should have taken from other sources. Thus the state now had no bother pointing to the debt which it could largely have contributed to and created by abusing its decision making powers. Through the reform, social security would be fiscalized, that is financed entirely from taxes and therefore would fall wholly and exclusively under the control of the state, requiring an annual parliamentary debate before making major decisions, particularly budgetary ones (obligatory democracy). In fact the masters have to change which might appear of little consequence. In fact it is nothing of the sort because the trade union representatives who participated in its management actually immobilized the system for years and therefore kept its evolution in check (i.e. submitting completely to criteria of profitability) without having the foggiest idea how to improve it. And in any case, all governments not daring to confront the inevitable discontent were, up to now, afraid to countenance a general reform that solely privileged the profitability of the system and the sums involved. Rocard, the leftist minister, had prepared the movement, Juppé had jumped into the driving seat.

FO: Force Ouvrier. A trade union traditionally little to the fore of militant workers' struggles with a strong presence in corporate branches like prison officers, social security but barely represented in the SNCF, or the sorting offices.

CGT: Confédération Générale du Travail. The union traditionally linked to the Communist Party but over the last ten years more concerned with purely trade union matters than political ones following the gradual weakening of the French Communist Party. It has a tradition of participating in militant workers' struggles which it has made its business to control somewhat. It is still relatively influential in statist sectors like the SNCF and the metro, but generally it is weakening and for some ten years it has gone from a predominant position in industry to the position of a simple constituent - hardly more important than others in a parcellized French trade unionism.

On the Eve of Battle

In spite of the hopes it raised, the strike movement that began to develop from the end of November to mid-December 1995 hadn't anything revolutionary to it. The announcement of a new round of negotiations and possible conflict between the unions and government after Chirac's election to the head of the French state had anticipated the defensive stance, on the part of the workers, against the agreement over measures dictated by the World Bank, the IMF and their flunkeys in a technocratic Europe.

No one was deceived: the key word of the strikers was liars as regards Juppé and cohorts. These people have scarcely the demeanour and talent to allow the poor to dream whilst continuing to enfeeble them. Mitterand is dead and his style has followed him. Chirac got himself elected on promises which lasted less than the illusions.

Right from the moment a government assumed power co-opted by the preceding[6] one and international finance, the official French Mafia had decided that its financial protectors had to be first served. One recognized the master from a slave by their priorities.

The reform of the social security system, the Juppé plan, had followed the raising of taxes. Under the pretext of an imbalance in the accounts, made up and unverifiable, the technocrats had drawn out of their briefcases a bag of measures destined, on the one had, to reduce to the lowest denominator the growing level of retirement pensions (alignment of the so called public sector with the private) and, on the other, to tax poverty (the means testing of the family allowance, RDS[7] etc.).

Under the domination of the economy the majority of individuals have been stripped of the faculty of simple analysis. Not being able to write, people have learned how to add up, and when the bill is wrong, it is reason itself which is brought into question.

The nobility of the state (in the words of the sociologist Bourdieu), the estate holders of this democracy in its death throes, has burdened the mass of the population with a state debt whose benefits they alone are in receipt of. They went about cashing in on their situation with the same ruthlessness as a boss exploits his workers. The despicable and arrogant greed of a government casting aside all legitimacy had provoked a movement of waged workers limited to the defence of what exists.

After 20 years of social disintegration which shaped the working class in France, the state which, in the era of Mitterand, had substituted culture for social links[8], found itself faced with tenacious resistance, in workplaces where a solidarity of conditions is a mode of acknowledgement. The railworkers began: employees belonging to the metro, the electricity industry, telecom and the Post Office joined in the dance. In the regions, municipal employees joined in the mêlée and its was precisely there, far from the capital, that the most intensely lived experience occurred. There, the strikers, their neighbours and people generally acted in solidarity using their time and their proximity to encounter one another, discuss, have a ball, criticizing this world before remaking it for themselves.

In spite of the near total paralysis of all the means of transport, good humour tinged with the perfume of an at times pronounced resignation, had won out over the bitterness exuded by managerial bastards. Such was its consistency, the mood so widespread that if people stood up and refused further humiliations, it was for the good of all, as much as for themselves. Poor people living on their knees but in search of vengeance and have a jealous regard forthose who say no.

At the heart of the different sectors, the hierarchies, abasing themselves to a fault, and rightly disturbed, were under pressure to carry out their next function: to disappear.[9] Except for some aborted attempts to get the trains running, some buses and tubes, cadres and other flunkeys did not intervene hoping to benefit from the beneficial financial consequences of a conflict which, in the beginning, did not threaten them.[10] In the Post Office (PTT) as in the electricity industry (EDF-GDF), the matter was treated with less managerial politeness. Parallel sorting offices were opened, defended by security guards to deal with the former, and for the latter, punitive sanctions accompanied by lay-offs and court cases.

Except in Marseilles there wasn't any significant conflict. Going on strike two weeks after the start, the Marseilles train drivers found themselves isolated when other sectors resumed work. The municipal council of Marseilles linked up with the RTM (Regionale Transporte Marseilles) to decide, counting on an apparent weakness, to send cops against the workers. It wasn't a good idea because the strikers hardened until they gained a provisional concession.

The CGT-CFDT-FO-FSU unions called for four big days of local and regional demonstrations which took place at an accelerated tempo of sorts to stop the emergence of other forms of action which could have escaped their control. Whilst reducing the subversive risk of an absence of demands, the planned demonstrations, in spite of everything, were to the good of people who, up to then, had neglected to seek in the occasion a basis on which to begin to do something together.

At the conclusion of demonstrations, notably in Toulouse and Nantes, there was a ritual clash which smashed the harmonic decor and left the terrain open to the enemy.[11] The time gained by the state to desocialize individuals was not made good by an ephemeral barricade of litter bins. On the contrary, the isolated violence brought home how powerless they were to reconquer the territory of encounter, and fed the states imprisoning bulimia.[12]

Although latent, the tension between unions and strikers, evident during the 1986-87 conflict in the SNCF (the French railways strike) were not apparent and have not yet been revived. The railway strike began on the 22nd of November without prior warning and union approval in the majority of places threatened with closure by the state-SNCF plan.

Feeling the anger mount and not having the initiative, the trade union organizations decided to support the strikers; the unanimity at the base of the strikes was such that the unions could only accompany the movement and seek to contain its development.

The Stalinist old guard had nearly disappeared from the ranks of the CGT to be replaced by Bolshevik militants less aware of bureaucratic manoeuvres or wage arbitration and the necessity of power sharing. The same applied to the militant wing of the CFDT where libertarian currents jostled delightfully. These young bureaucrats are not yet worn down by lying and about turns, nor unmasked by the betrayal inherent in their function: tell me who you associate with and I shall tell you what you are.[13]

Hence, internal trade union conflicts are expressions of factional rivalries sharing the same ambitions. This endemic quarrel is to be seen at the approach of elections to union office but this time it was between unions. The sincerity of individuals employed by these organizations is not proof of their honesty but of their blindness. The rottenest practised a similar sort of opportunism culminating in a show of scorn for the non-unionized, who have nothing to gain from the commerce of waged misery; for the traffic in poverty wages there was nothing on offer.[14]

Prior to haggling over the remains of a movement they could not lead, the trade union crew presented a united front. The unity proclaimed from the top was the inevitable result of alliances brought about by lower ranking militants, in the course of daily assemblies, which had the dual function of keeping the strikers under-informed and voting for the continuation of the strike.

The possibility of transforming these open assemblies into forums where the free exchange of views could flower was scarcely more concrete. Happily, uniformity did not reign across their entirety, but geographical differences were cruelly felt. People discussed more (providing material and financial support) on the forecourt of Bayonne station or in Parisian stations, where the perplexing Vigipirate plan made access to meeting places difficult.[15]

Pickets and the occupation of SNCF premises often allowed ideas to be expressed which surpassed the assemblyist consensus: the return of the repressed swept aside the omnipresent bureaucratic mantras.

Between the never ending never again like before numerous poems, quotations and scant consolation:

We begin to live when we retire,

We join battle and open fire,

Juppé - we ain't no whores,

You'll be fucked by our struggle and cause.

Prominently, flanking a roll call of scabs:

Annihilate forever everything that can screw up your movement.

(Depot de Paris Saint-Lazare)

The gradual resumption of work which, at times, was stormy, was not due to trade union ploys as was often the case in the past. Tiredness, exhaustion, lack of money, the announcement that some reforms were to be frozen contributed to ending the strikes. The most pessimistic strikers were unhappy about the fact that the movement was not generalized: They ignored the degree of control attained by the domesticating power of liberalism. Many who wanted to continue were filled with bitterness, rage and nausea when the strikes were called off. They did not wish to break the bonds that had united them with others for three weeks and create division to the possible detriment of friendships formed and the social adventures to come. Everyone agreed on a pause to recover breath and to critically examine the movement.

It is imperative to understand its deficiencies, its qualities and limits because the state will not go back on its decisions.

To reflect is not to yield.

A railway proletarian

Paris, January 17 1996.

Acknowledgements

For help with translations of these texts, thanks to: ex-Blob and friends, BM Combustion and Christelle.

Notes

1 Title of both a leaflet distributed in the movement and an article in the recent French edition of Echanges et Mouvement.

2 Doctrine which justifies predatory relations between individuals.

3 A very widespread ideology which opposes a literal to a real meaning of democracy.

4 Sporadic demonstrations happened in neighbourhoods outside of official ones.

5 This even extends to the timetable itself. The more useful the borrowed indexed timetable, the more expensive it is - a process already in force in the TGV and which it is intended to apply generally.

6 Normally in French politics there is a formal separation between the election of the Presidency and the previous government and its Prime Minister. For the first time, however, this pretence was dropped, as the whole government had already been chosen by the previous administration (both of them Gaullist, though before Chirac, Mitterand, a Socialist, had been nominally Head of State).

7 Increased national insurance contributions of 3.5 per cent.

8 For example, nationally organized state-subsidized free music festivals, usually several days long and mostly held in the streets in every town throughout France.

9 This refers to the fact that these cadres, unlike in '86-7 when they fully participated in the repression and scabbing of the railworkers' strike, were themselves threatened with redundancy by the latest State reforms.

10 It's of no importance to us to have found out that some cadres, or even high functionaries, participated in the demos and the strikes! How far does this go, this team spirit of which these managers speak, these high level scabs who break most movements and then change their tune when it's their arse that's threatened.

11 A largely marginal pro-situ/autonomist milieu tend, in France, to go on demos in order to wait for the end when they have a traditional stone-throwing, window-smashing, conflict with the cops, maybe overthrowing a car or two. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, but it has no strategy behind it and doesn't arise out of the rest of the demo; the vast majority of demonstrators aren't touched by it. It's largely a voluntaristic affair which doesn't develop from the concerns and anger of the vast majority, who remain, and are treated as, spectators of this predictable reflex punch up; it doesn't subvert marginality, but tends to reinforce it. The media and the State exaggerate these conflicts in order to be that much more repressive with those arrested.

12 A reference to the fact that French prisons are being stuffed to bursting point.

13 These people spend half their time in the CGT and the CFDT offices.

14 According to the latest news, SNCF management have increased the amount payable to striking union delegates. It has always deliberately confused bureaucratic dialogue with social dialogue. Union delegates have for ages only represented a handful of wage workers.

15 The plan drawn up under the pretext of combating Islamic terrorism resulted in a vast increase in CCTV cameras, the presence of the army and gendarmerie everywhere and secret access codes on gates to places where assemblies had been held in the '86-7 strike.

Escape from the Law of value?

However, we were ultimately critical of the book, arguing for example that it appeared to grasp the dynamic of modern capitalism simply in terms of the power of capital to (deliberately) manipulate prices to attack the working class. Below, we publish a reply to our review, from one of the editors of Midnight Oil.

And below that we have our counter-reply, in which we argue that the position(s) developed in Midnight Oil, and re-affirmed in the editor's reply, fail to take sufficient account of the mediations that constitute capital's operation through the "law of value"­.

A reply to Aufheben's review of Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-92

by George Caffentzis

Aufheben, v.a. irr. lift (up), pick up; keep, preserve;

(laws) repeal, abolish; (agreements) rescind, annul;

(philosophy) overcoming, preservation.

These remarks are personal responses to a review of a book entitled Midnight Oil: Work Energy, War, 1973-1992 which appeared in an English-language journal entitled Aufheben in 1994. I am responding to the Aufheben review because I am one of the editors of Midnight Oil and because the review was lengthy and very critical. Its thesis is this: "It is not merely that we find Midnight Oil is inconsistent, as is only to be expected from a collective project developing over 20 years, rather it is that we find its underlying theory incoherent." I will argue that the "underlying theory" is not incoherent and that the arguments the Aufheben reviewer uses to prove Midnight Oil's theory incoherent are not sound because the views attributed to the Midnight Notes collective are simply not its views. In other words, the Aufheben reviewer has read Midnight Oil wrong-headedly.

Who is to blame for this misreading, if that is what it is, the authors or the readers or both? Here let me take on a bit of mea culpa for the Midnight Notes editorial collective. The text of Midnight Oil is a strange and complex animal. The first part deals directly with the Gulf War and with aspects of the petroleum extraction and refining industry internationally during the 1980s. Its purpose was to describe and explain why the war (with or without quotation marks) happened as it did. Parts two and three include articles from Zerowork I (1975) and issues of Midnight Notes from 1979 to 1990 whose purpose is to trace the development both of that period's class relations in general and of the theory the Midnight Notes collective uses to explain the Gulf War. But the development implies contradiction and some later articles (especially "The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse") were clearly in a polemic with earlier ones (especially "Notes on the International Crisis"). All this happens without much stage direction for the reader. The only place where there is some reflection on the whole project is in the Introduc tion and there the accent is on the continuity and coherence of the book's articles, although the difference between Zerowork and the Midnight Notes collectives is noted.

Thus the reader who notices a contradiction between articles in Midnight Oil has some work to do for him/herself. The reader has to ask and answer the questions: "Is the contradiction a sign of theoretical incoherence or of theoretical development? Is it a sign of a plain confusion or of an aufheben (i.e., a repealing and a preserving)?" Is this too much to ask of a reader? Not necessarily, if the reader is a member of a collective that calls itself "Aufheben" (even ironically). I will show that at a number of points the Aufheben reader-reviewer did not ask him/herself these questions and simply assumed the worst, for reasons that are not clear to me.

The clearest example of this failure has to do with the notion of value. In the Aufheben review's section on "Value and the Apocalypse", the reviewers note that there is a rather obvious contradiction between "Notes on the International Crisis" and "The Work Energy/ Crisis and the Apocalypse". The second article clearly rejects the first article's view that capitalism has entered into a period of "labourless production liberating capital from labour as a value-producing activity". The reviewer did not note that the first article appeared in Zerowork I in 1975 and the second in Midnight Notes #3 in 1980. In fact, he/she assumes a continuity of views even when there is an explicit rejection of such continuity in the later article, which the reviewer notes! But she/he continues to claim that the "underlying theory" of Midnight Notes abandons the "law of value" when in Midnight Oil article after article, from beginning (p. xiv: "Despite all its high-tech machines, space shuttles, laser beam weapons and genetic engineering, capital still depends upon human work") to end (p. 326: "How can we understand anything about this world without using the axioms of Marx's theory of work, money and profit?") the application of this law forms the basis of explanation.

Our interest, has not been in swearing allegiance to "the Law" but to show how capital is even more constrained by it at the end of the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth. The most important consequence of this constraint is that any increase in the capitalization of the highly mechanized industries (such as the nuclear power industry and the petroleum extraction and refining industry) must be accompanied by a major increase in unmechanized, "wretch" and "housework"­ labour. That is why computerization and robotization must be accompanied by a major increase in sweatshops and slavery, i.e., the expansion of areas of absolute surplus value and unwaged labour. This theme has been repeated so often in Midnight Notes writing that it is hard to believe that any reader can mistake it, even if he/she disagreed with it, as the Aufheben reviewers certainly do.

The reviewer also argues (a bit incoherently) that Midnight Notes collective uses the law of value incorrectly, since the petroleum industry is not a high organic composition industry and that the proper analysis of oil price is through seeing it as a product of rent. This is not the place to deal with the matter of organic composition at length but a glance at page 237 of Midnight Oil will show that the derivation of the three sectors of industry organized by the ratio of invested capital to wages was empirically based. Anyway, if the collective was empirically wrong, then the Aufheben reviewer should show us some numbers. As for the rent analysis of the oil price, it is not that Midnight Notes did not consider it, but it was rejected as a minor aspect of the story. The idea that a few oil sheikhs' and autocrats' "property rights" determined such a vital commodity's price was hard to believe in the context of the increasing marginalization of rental income with the development of capital in the twentieth century. This is especially the case with former colonial nations which are being recolonized in new ways at this very moment. As I wrote in "Rambo on the Barbary Shore": "For the US state considers itself the custodian for world capital of the planet's energy resources, whether these residues of geologic evolution happen to be immediately below US territory or not... "Libyan terrorism" is simply the belief that the petroleum resources locked in the Libyans' soil is theirs. Such presumption is intolerable, according to the present capitalist order" (pp. 292, 294). One might agree or disagree with these expressions, but they hardly constitute neglect of the question of rent.

Disagreement is one thing, but the inability to read what one is disagreeing with is another. Therefore, it is not surprising that some other elements of "incoherence" in Midnight Oil the Aufheben reviewer claims to see are also cases of her/his disagreement with the Midnight Notes position presented as Midnight Notes' own confusion (N.B.: don't mingle aufhebens, please). Let me take them in order: (1) the importance of energy commodities in the present period of capitalist accumulation, (2) the way in which capitalists plan, strategize, and conspire, (3) Midnight Notes' predictions concerning the Gulf War made in October of 1990, (4) the role of class struggle as the major variable in historical analysis.

Is it true, as the Aufheben reviewer contends, that "Midnight Notes contends, that the history of post-war capitalism is the history of oil price changes?" (my italics). No, it is not, as a reading of the full title of the book - Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992 - and even a superficial reading of chapter headings and random paragraphs throughout the book would indicate. "Work", "energy"­ and "war"­ are clearly as important as "oil"­ in the book's conceptual economy, while its dramatis personae include not only roughnecks and Exxon executives. Autoworkers, coal miners, nuclear power technicians, housewives and communal farmers are as central to Midnight Oil's history of post-war capitalism as are people formerly connected with the oil industry.

Why then does the Aufheben reviewer mistakenly claim that Midnight Notes collective "attempt[s] to reduce the history of capitalism to the history of oil price fluctuations"? My most charitable explanation is as follows. Knowledge of the role of energy commodities and their prices, especially petroleum, play in class relations is crucial for the understanding of the post-war history of capitalism. This is not an insight especially given to Midnight Notes, it is contemporary common sense. This knowledge is especially important in explaining the Gulf War of 1990-91 which was fought, literally, on, over and within oil wells, pipelines, terminals and refineries. Since Midnight Oil is a book aiming to explain the main characteristics of the Gulf War through the application of class analysis, oil qua commodity and its price had to be the central topic of the book.

Further, the Midnight Notes collective has argued more generally that with the demise of a Keynesian strategy - which focused class struggle in the mass assembly line factories making "consumer durables"­ - the centre of gravity of class relations shifted to basic commodities that are essential to both capitalist production and the reproduction of the working class. Energy commodities, especially petroleum, are the most basic of the basic commodities. Consequently, changes in the prices of such commodities penetrate all nodes of the commodity field and are obviously crucial for understanding the history of post-1973 capitalism.

Finally, there is the question of prices. Midnight Notes is not alone in arguing that all the prices of commodities are determined by socio-political struggle. It is the starting point of the critique of political economy both logically and historically. After all, prices of commodities, especially prices of their production, reflect (1) the existence of exploitable labour (hence the continually renewed, violent expropriation of workers from the means of subsistence), (2) the struggle over the value of workers' labour power (indeed, often the establishment of the existence of such value in the first place) in the production of the commodity, (3) the struggle over the surplus value extracted during the production of the commodity (involving battles over length and intensity of the work day), (4) the transferring in or out of the total surplus value generated by the capitalist system as a whole in order to determine the price of production (which involves the global accumulated struggles of capital and proletariat in all aspects of production).

Though these geological strata of class struggle can be found in the prices of all commodities, they are especially evident in commodities on the top and bottom of the production tree - i.e., in branches where there is a very high or a very low machinery/direct labour ratio. This is so because the global social character of capital is made most evident in these branches. Energy commodities, especially those produced in the nuclear or petroleum cycle, are on the higher branches, and so their prices reflect the indices of struggle throughout the system.

Taking these aspects of oil prices as essential to Midnight Oil's analysis, it would certainly be wrong to say that Midnight Notes reduces the history of capitalism to oil price fluctuations, as the Aufheben reviewer charges. The most accurate claim one can make is that Midnight Notes interprets major changes in oil prices in the 1973-1992 as indices and complex reflections of class struggles throughout the world capitalist system. This too is not such a wild view. the problem is to provide such an interpretation. Midnight Oil sketches a narrative that attempts to explain basic inflections in the oil price from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. The particular narrative might be crude and full of gaps. it certainly does not claim to be necessarily true. Other, perhaps better, narratives are possible and I look forward to studying them. But one thing that Midnight Notes's approach does is to show how the most dispossessed and apparently wretched people of the planet have changed capitalism and are putting its hegemony in question on the most basic level. The narrative satisfies a minimum condition from my perspective, for any correct understanding of oil price changes or any other important feature of the history of capitalism.

The Aufheben reviewer certainly finds fault with particulars of the Midnight Oil narrative, but more importantly s/he sees a deeper logical flaw in it: the conflation of "capitalism with the actions of individual capitalists"­ for "Midnight Oil is fatally undermined by Midnight Notes's tendency to ascribe outcomes to the conscious strategy of a unified capital."­ In a word, the Midnight Notes collective commits a fallacy of composition - by arguing that since individual capitalists have strategies, then capital as a whole has a strategy - which leads it to hold a simplistic and vacuous "conspiracy theory"­.

Here again I argue that the reader has misread the work. First, since the Aufheben reviewer recognizes the Midnight Notes collective's efforts to read working class action as a determining element in the analysis of any recent historical event or tendency, then surely Midnight Oil cannot be ascribing outcomes to the conscious strategy of a unified capital, any more than an outcome can be ascribed to a conscious unified proletarian strategy. So in a war, the victory of side A cannot be ascribed to A's actions and strategy alone, the actions of Side Band its strategy for victory must be included in any account of the victory itself. Since almost every important feature of capitalism is rife with struggles, then any outcome cannot be ascribed to a single strategy. The Midnight Notes collective certainly does not believe in the myth of an absolute, omnipotent totality called capital determining values, prices and profits round the planet. That God was never born, it need hardly be killed by Midnight Notes or Aufheben!

Second, what of the fallacy of the composition retort: "Capitalism does not have a strategy, although individual capitalists pursue different strategies"? We should remind the Aufheben reviewer that not every inference from parts to whole is illegitimate. For example, though "Each atom in this piece of chalk is indivisible. Therefore, the chalk is indivisible" is a fallacious argument, "Every atom in this piece of chalk has mass. Therefore, the piece of chalk has mass" is not. What of capitals and strategies? Let our reviewer attend: there may be a genuine aufheben lurking here. For individual capitals and capitalists are not merely mutually repulsive identities, they form a system and a class. Can this system and class, though not conscious, have a strategy? Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Foucault and many others have taught us that strategies need not have self-conscious, Cartesian subjects owning them. Certainly individual capitalists have collective interests (prime among them "the intensity of exploitation of the sum total of labour by the sum total of capital") and they embody these "freemason"-like interests in ever more elaborate organizational forms, beginning with mercantile combinations within a city (as noted by Smith) and ending in the most refined international coordinating bodies like the IMF, the World Bank and the W.T.O. (prefigured in the writing of Saint-Simon). But even in the absence of any formal organizational form, one can ascribe a strategy (tacitly, as Locke would say) to capitalists operating collectively. Is this logically improper, fallacious or incoherent? Not necessarily. Is it useful? Perhaps, if it helps in describing, explaining, predicting and retrodicting our history.

The matter of prediction and retrodiction brings us, finally, to the Midnight Notes pamphlet, When Crusaders and Assassins Unite, Let The People Beware, quickly written in September and October 1990, as an intervention in the anti-war debate in the US which tended to be hysterical and/or apocalyptic at times. The pamphlet tried to soberly describe, explain and predict the outcome of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the US/UN response months before the shooting started and stopped.. The Aufheben reviewer begins and ends the review with this pamphlet and gives the impression that it was a total failure and a proof of the "incoherence" of Midnight Oil'­s "underlying theory". But this assessment is off the mark. Indeed, the following facts - the actual outcome of the war (which led to a status quo ante as far as the governments of Iraq and Kuwait are concerned), the elaborate backroom monetary dealings between the Hussein regime and the Bush administration preceding the invasion, the permanent stationing of the US military in the Gulf, the ability of the Iraqi military to remain intact and destroy the southern "Shiite" and northern "Kurdish"­ rebellions, the US government's application of "marginal [instead of absolute ] military force", and the refusal of the US to fight "a large-scale, conventional shooting war" - were correctly predicted or retrodicted by the pamphlet. Of course, the pamphlet was sketchy and ad hoc, but it was the starting point of Midnight Notes collective's year-long study of the background of the war which eventually led to the writing of Part 1 of Midnight Oil.

Surely, it shouldn't be surprising that this study would have led to a deepening of our analysis of the Gulf War, especially in allowing us to see its connection to the Debt Crisis and the New Enclosures. Nor should the construction of a more complex analysis of the game played by the major capitalist players among each other, separately, and of the struggle they fought against the oil-producing proletariat, collectively, be surprising either. Somehow the Aufheben reviewer wants to blame the Midnight Notes collective for studying the issues more thoroughly and putting forth more complex hypotheses on the basis of this study. I really do not understand their game in this regard.

Let me end this reply by responding to Aufheben's broadest criticism of the book with a brief observation. The reviewers claim that the Midnight Notes collective "overemphasize[s] class struggle" and does not understand the importance of capitalist competition on the world market. If Midnight Notes would just tone down that struggle bass and amplify the competition melody, then perhaps they would play more agreeably, the Aufheben critic suggests. But this suggestion implies a parallelism between class struggle and capitalist competition, i.e., competition is intra-class antagonism while class struggle is inter- class antagonism. Are competition and class struggle just parts of a larger Hobbesian field of human antagonism? No. Competition operates by the rules of the capitalist game, within a given mathematical framework of risk and probability, and it helps determine the average rate of profit inside the system. Class struggle questions the very rules of the game (and so operates on a meta-level immediately), its mathematics is one of chance and possibility, and it results in the total surplus value that competition presupposes.

Midnight Notes is interested in action that violates the rules of capital, that opens up new possibilities and that reduces the total surplus value; that is the music the collective tries to hear and to play. Do we hear it, all of it, do we play it right? That is our problem. Does competition exist and is it important? Of course. But you don't need to open your window 'round midnight to hear that stuff.

Portland, Maine

December, 1994

A response to Caffentzis

In his reply, Caffentzis puts forward a seemingly formidable defence against our criticisms, the centrepiece of which is his insistence that in our review we have seriously misread Midnight Oil. We believe this warrants a considered response, which we hope will serve both to clarify and to refine our criticisms of Midnight Oil. Before responding directly to the points raised by Caffentzis, we should perhaps begin by placing our critical review of Midnight Oil in the broader context of how we see our relation to the work of the Midnight Notes and Zerowork collectives.

In devoting space to a lengthy review article of Midnight Oil we did not merely seek to highlight a counter-argument to the prevalent Leninist or liberal perspectives on the Gulf War and "imperialism"; nor did we merely seek to review critically a work that is influential amongst political circles with which we are engaged - although either of these reasons would have perhaps been sufficient in themselves. We did not hesitate to review Midnight Oil because we have had a long-standing respect and sympathy for the work of both Zerowork and Midnight Notes over the years. We have all, at one stage or another, been captivated by the audacious leaps of logic which, in drawing together so apparently disparate elements, broke free from the stultifying confines of orthodox Marxism; and we have all been inspired by the assertion of the primacy of class subjectivity and the political centrality of the "refusal of work". This is perhaps particularly true of Zerowork, whose path-breaking work in the 1970s seemed to grasp the salient featuresof the crisis of Keynesianism and the post-war settlements that were just erupting at the time.

Unfortunately times change. In the 1970s, state intervention in the economy had become increasingly frantic in the face of a growing working class militancy across the world. In such circumstances, the notion of two conflicting class strategies, around which the analysis of Zerowork revolved, seemed to have considerable credence. But since then capital has restructured. The "law of value" has everywhere been reimposed by the increasing international fluidity of capital which has been able to outflank the old bastions of working class power. With the rise of unbridled global finance markets, the power of the nation state to consciously plan and regulate capital has declined.

This change in circumstances has brought with it important political implications for the interpretation of the two strategies theory that had been developed during the proletarian offensive of the 1960s and 70s. On the one hand, with the retreat of the working class throughout much of Europe and America, many autonomists have simply sat round waiting for the materialization (or immaterialization as Negri might have it) of a "new social subject"), or else latched on uncritically to any half-baked liberal or nationalist struggle as a sign of the resurgence of a working class strategy. On the other hand, many erstwhile revolutionaries, in the face of working class retreat, have slipped down the slope to conspiracy theories and concluded that capital is omnipotent and able to impose its strategy almost at will.

In these changed circumstances, the weaknesses of the work of both Zerowork and Midnight Notes have come to the fore. Their audacious leaps of logic now appear all too cavalier. As a consequence, we have felt it necessary to try to move beyond the positions of Zerowork and Midnight Notes, without in the process falling back into the objectivism of orthodox Marxism. To do this it has been necessary to critically reconsider their work to see what must be preserved, at the same time as retrieving those useful aspects of traditional Marxism, which in their over-exuberance, they have thrown overboard.

This then is our work of "aufheben", and it is in this light that we approached the review of Midnight Oil. Caffentzis, however, argues that we failed to recognize the development and process of 'aufheben" within Midnight Oil itself. Caffentzis insists that with the reaffirmation of the "law of value" the later writings of the Midnight Notes collective stands in opposition to that of the earlier writings of Zerowork which had rejected the continuing validity of this law. Indeed, for Caffentzis, some of these later writings should be read as nothing short of a polemic against the excessive positions first put forward within the pages of Zerowork. For Caffentzis, what we see as incoherence is in fact the contradictory process of "aufheben" at work in the very pages of Midnight Oil, bringing together as it does fifteen years of theoretical development.

However, Caffentzis does admit that the Introduction overemphasizes the continuity of the various articles that make up Midnight Oil, and, as a consequence, fails to point out the contradictory process of development that had occurred over these fifteen odd years in which they were written. We would say this is a serious omission, particularly for readers who can only be unaware of the internal debates within the Midnight Notes and Zerowork collectives which presumably occurred more than a decade ago. However, we would be the first to concede that such a omission is perhaps understandable given the political imperative to present a distinct and unified intervention in the debates surrounding the Gulf War and its aftermath.

Also, in his reply, Caffentzis clarifies certain important points. Not only does he underline the reaffirmation of Marx's theory of value in his own and the contemporary writings of the Midnight Notes collective, he also makes clear his understanding of the concept of strategy. As he states:

For individual capitals and capitalists are not mutually repulsive entities, they form a system and a class. Can this system and class, though not conscious have a strategy? Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Foucault and many others have taught us that strategies need not have self-conscious, Cartesian subjects owning them.

So it would seem, for Caffentzis, capital does not have a conscious strategy as such. The "strategy" of capital as a whole emerges out of the conflicting and competing strategies of individual capitals and their agencies such that, with hindsight, it appears as if it possessed a conscious strategy. With all this we can only concur. It would seem that we have indeed misread Midnight Oil - or that we have at least been guilty of interpreting it in the worst possible light.

But have we misread Midnight Oil? If we look at Midnight Oil again we find that nowhere is this crucial notion of strategy made clear, not even as an aside. Throughout Midnight Oil, whether in the earlier or later articles, the "as if" is elided. Indeed, in all the historical narratives that we find in Midnight Oil, capital appears as a predetermined totality possessing a conscious strategy whose only limit and problem is the counter-strategy of the working class. Even the most assiduous reader would find it hard put to discover Caffentzis's sophisticated notion of strategy in the pages of Midnight Oil, let alone discern a change in position on this point between its earlier and later articles.

So what of Caffentzis's reaffirmation of Marx's theory of value? Clearly there is a major change of position between the later writings of Midnight Notes and the earlier writings of the Zerowork collective. We would be the first to admit that Midnight Notes and Caffentzis make important points regarding the continuing importance of Marx's labour theory of value but we still think their account is ultimately inadequate. We shall argue that Caffentzis and Midnight Notes fail to really break from the earlier writings of Zerowork on this question and this is why they are unable to clarify the notion of two strategies in their historical narratives. This perhaps becomes clear once we consider Caffentzis's treatment of the question of rent.

The problem of rent was central in the development of Marx's theory of value, and would seem to be of vital importance for anyone concerned with the formation of the price of a natural resource such as oil. Yet, as we noted in our review, Midnight Oil ignores the whole question of rent in their account of the determination of oil prices.

In his reply Caffentzis simply dismisses the relevance of rent theory on what seems to be two grounds. First he asserts that, in general, rent is no longer significant in the determination and regulation of prices. Of course it can be argued that, with the development of capitalism, more and more of production is subordinated to the capitalist production process and as such capital comes to directly produce more and more of its own inputs. As a consequence, capital is able to escape its dependence on non-produced natural resources and thereby undermine the material basis for the existence of a distinct class of landowners whose ownership of natural resources allow them to pocket surplus-profits as rent.

But this is only an abstract tendency. It in no way means that rent is no longer significant, any more than the tendency for production to be automated means that we have now reached the stage that labour is no longer the measure of value! If nothing else rent still remains vitally important in particular sectors and industries. For example, how can we possibly understand the issue of housing or the capitalist organization of urban space without reference to a theory of rent? And perhaps more pertinently, how are we to explain the pricing of oil in terms of a labour theory of value without reference to a theory of rent!?

This brings us to Caffentzis's second grounds for dismissing the need to consider rent. In the particular case of oil, Caffentzis simply argues that it is absurd to think that the property rights of a few sheikhs can be allowed to interfere in the determination of such a strategic commodity as oil. For Caffentzis, although it may appear that the oil is owned by these sheikhs, or Middle Eastern governments, it is really owned by the USA. But oil is not simply owned, even formally, by a "few sheikhs". The oil is owned by governments who not only garner vast revenues from their ownership of oil but also possess some of the most formidable armed forces in the world. What is more, it is from these rights of ownership that some of the most powerful multinationals in the world - the major oil companies - obtain the concessions to produce oil. If the USA really owned the oil in the Middle East, rather than thinking they ought to own it - if all the Middle Eastern oil states were simply puppets of the American government - there would be no need for the US government to worry about Middle Eastern affairs. There would be no need to whip up propaganda about Libyan terrorism nor would there have been any need, for example, to have bombed Tripoli in 1986!

Of course this is not to say that armed force or sanctions, or the diplomatic threat of force or sanctions, cannot alter property rights or be used to modify the effect of property rights, particularly in relation to such a vital commodity as oil. But the notion that the apparent ownership of oil can be simply dismissed as an illusion, that such property rights can simply be dismissed out of hand when capital is founded on the mutual recognition of the rights of property, is typical of the cavalier logic that we find throughout Midnight Oil - a point driven home by the fact that Caffentzis seems to feel little obligation to substantiate such assertions.

This then brings us back to the question of value. It would seem that the notion that rent is no longer significant, at least in the case of basic commodities such as oil, might open the way for the conscious manipulation of oil prices which seems so central to much of the historical analysis we find in Midnight Oil, without at the same time requiring the complete abandonment of Marx's theory of value. While such a line of argument may be implicit elsewhere in Midnight Oil, Caffentzis himself refuses to take this way out. Instead, it would seem, he argues that it is the high organic composition of capital in the energy sector which allows the energy prices, such as that of oil, to escape in some way the "law of value" and thereby allow its conscious manipulation against the working class.

In "The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse", Caffentzis's analysis of the polarization of the organic composition of capital, away from the medium compositions exemplified by the car production towards the high organic composition industries such as nuclear power on the one side and the counter-balancing low composition industries such as fast foods on the other, offers us important insights. This is particularly true with regards to how this has affected how the working class experiences its exploitation. But neither in "The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse" nor in his reply does Caffentzis adequately explain how the variations of in the organic composition of capital allow energy prices to escape the "law of value".

In "The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse" Caffentzis, drawing on Marx's theory of the transformation of values into prices, seems to argue that because prices are necessarily much higher than values in industries with high organic compositions of capital (i.e., the price of commodities produced by these industries are above that warranted by the socially necessary labour-time added in their production) then this means that such industries are in a position to escape the "law of value" and therefore are open to manipulation. As we pointed in our review, this argument is far from being sufficient. Indeed, in his theory of the transformation of values into prices Marx was seeking to show the very opposite! With his theory of transformation, Marx sought to show how, although prices may deviate from values between industries with varying compositions of capital, such deviations are systematic and therefore are still regulated by the socially necessary labour-time embodied in their production.

Significantly, neither in "The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse" nor in his reply does Caffentzis explain the basis for standing Marx's theory of the transformation of values into prices on its head in this way. As a consequence, it would seem that Caffentzis fails to show how certain prices - such as energy prices - can escape the "law of value".

But, as we now know from his reply, Caffentzis doesn't after all see capital as a "Cartesian subject" with a conscious strategy. Since for Marx the "law of value" was the primary means through which capital constituted itself as a totality "behind the backs" of the conscious intentions of individual capitalists, then perhaps Caffentzis doesn't need to "escape" from the "law of value". But if this is so, how does this square with Midnight Oil's "two strategies" theory? And perhaps more importantly, how does it relate to the historical narratives in which various agents of social capital seem able to manipulate the prices of oil, food and exchange rate more or less at will? The answer would seem clear: it doesn't!

The fundamental problem that unites all the analysis that we find in Midnight Oil is that is fails to grasp the mediations through which capital as a totality must continually constitute itself. Caffentzis may seek ultimate refuge in the plea that he and Midnight Oil simply seek to emphasize class struggle which, when all is said and done, is the basis of all such categories as value, capital and prices. But, as he should know, essence must appear. It is necessary to see how and why class struggle becomes both reified and manifest in such categories as value, price and capital: that is, how capital as a totality constitutes itself out of its apparently disparate parts; and obversely how the working class comes to constitute itself against capital. And we have to make clear how such mediations and processes come to be circumscribed and modified in particular historical conditions and circumstances.

In the absence of any serious analysis of such mediations the reader has no option but to invoke capital as a "Cartesian subject" with a conscious strategy, or else arbitrarily nominate various agents of the capital in the form of the US government, the UN, the IMF etc.

In failing to seriously consider these questions of mediation, Caffentzis fails to overcome the fundamental problem of the analysis that is developed throughout Midnight Oil. As a consequence, his supposed process of "aufheben" at work in Midnight Oil between the early and late writings turns out to be little more than a rectification which produces more problems than it solves. In failing to seriously consider the question of mediations the analysis in Midnight Oil fails to stick together, it fails to cohere - it is incoherent.

Caffentzis concludes that ultimately it is all a matter of emphasis: while we want to turn up the melody of competition, he wants to turn up the volume of the bass of class struggle that breaks all the rules. We would conclude with a slight variation on his metaphor: however much you turn up the volume you can't hear the rhythm of the drummer without his drum.

Notes

Perhaps significantly, it was through the very development of his theory of rent that Marx came to show how "labour-values" determine production prices, and hence market prices.

Caffentzis claims in his reply that Midnight Notes do consider the question of rent in Midnight Oil. But to support this claim all he does is refer us to a couple of sentences buried deep in the article about the US bombing of Libya. Such a sketchy treatment of the theory of rent merely reflects Midnight Notes's position that the question of rent has little relevance in the determination of oil prices.

Having broken from the second claim, Caffentzis has not broken from the first!

If rent no longer applies then price of oil is no longer regulated by its value (the socially necessary labour required for its production). In terms of value, it becomes indeterminate, allowing a "degree of freedom"­ for political intervention in pricing.

Review: Bad: the autobiography of James Carr

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"I've been struggling all my life to get beyond the choice of living on my knees or dying on my feet. It's time we lived on our feet."

An Afterword that appeared in the Pelagian Press edition of Bad can be read here; http://libcom.org/library/james-carr-black-panthers-all-that

Review:

Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr

Pelagian Press, BCM Signpost, London WC1N 3XX

This book tells the story of the development of James Carr from an apolitical gang member, to a black nationalist associated with the Black Panther Party, and finally to a Korsch/Lukacs/Situationist-influenced position critical of the vanguardism of the Panthers. The book was first published in 1975. This new edition comes with an useful Afterword, written by BM Blob and News from Everywhere. Carr died young, and most of the book is taken up with the gang life and particularly the prison experiences preceding his eventual politicization. The Afterword puts his life in context (the then dominance of varieties of New Leftism, conflicts within the Black Panthers, and the crisis in the US prison system in the 1960s). It also points to the important differences between this book and other autobiographies of politicized prisoners: “it avoids portraying the prisoner as a passive victim of social injustice - and also refuses the martyr role that liberals and leftists try to impose on convicts for their own fantasies and careers” (p. 200).

James Carr survived prison through strength, intelligence and ruthlessness, qualities which he applied not just to the screws and governors but also to his fellow inmates. Like other cons, Carr was involved in a war of all-against-all on two levels: first the interpersonal competition and bullying, and second the “race” war between blacks, whites and Mexicans. In the book, graphic examples of inter-ethnic violence among prisoners illustrate how this relationship of divide-and-rule served the prison system. But the significance of Carr's experience and perspective is that he was in some of the biggest and most violent Californian prisons in the mid 1960s when a more politicized and united movement of prisoners began to develop. The movement emerged through a turn to black nationalism, which, Carr suggests, at least offered the possibility of enabling cons to see their connections with others in struggles outside the prison. The nationalist movement later developed into a movement against the prison structure itself, and attracted all the ethnic groups.

Carr has some acute comments to make on the limits of the movement. Though the conscious anti-racism was a great advance, the form of the movement remained guerrilla. In a memorable phrase, Carr says that “[g]uerrilla ideology reduces all revolutionary questions to quantitative problems of military force” (p. 169). The disastrous effects of this reduction included the death of his friend and influential militant activist George Jackson, as well as increasingly violent attacks by the authorities on organized prisoner revolts: a “fight to the finish” was what the reactionary prison authorities wanted, says Carr.

The repressive response of the authorities to the movement only confirmed the opposition between the prison system and the cons as a whole. But Carr argues that “even when the cons realized that they were all opposed to the system, they were prevented from locating themselves realistically within it: rather than recognize that they were on the margins of society and study strategically the development of society as a whole, they saw themselves as a class apart from the proletariat, or as its vanguard, and adopted an ideology of class war by whichthe only battleground was the prison itself. They mistook the system's arm for its heart” (pp. 168-9).

In this ideology, because modern capitalism relies on coercion, then its coercive institutions are its essense or highest expression. It is true that, along with torture and the death penalty in many places, prison is typically the capitalist state's “ultimate” sanction. But Carr is surely correct in suggesting that the prison is not a representative microcosm of modern class society. In fact, the reverse would seem to be the case: the prison is more an echo of feudalism, with its irrational petty rules, its separation of amount of work undertaken from means of subsistence, its social immobility, and its entrenched sets of interests in the form of the prison guards' organizations.

Carr also links this vanguardism with what he sees as leftism's romantic fetishization of crime. During the time of the political movement among prisoners, those on the outside promoted figures like George Jackson into rebel heroes; but, as Carr says, they were always tragic figures because their value to the movement was as martyrs. Leftists and anarchists rightly point out that there is a relation between capital and criminality; but the problem is how to grasp this relation without seeing the con, on the one hand, as necessarily a rebel hero or, on the other, as necessarily an anti-social element. Carr's analysis of what he calls the criminal mentality (“born to lose”) shows how criminality in the form of robberies etc. is based on an antipathy to capital without necessarily being revolutionary. We steal because we don't want to work, says Carr - we want to have control over our lives. But if we have to keep on pulling bigger and bigger robberies to live and meet our developing needs, then we just perpetuate ourselves as robbers and ultimately as cons. As robbers and particularly as cons we might go beyond ourselves, as Carr and others did: by co-ordinating with others to resist the state, we fight capital rather than exist within its interstices. The experience of prison - the other side of the coin of the liberal-democratic ideology of rights and freedoms - has been shown on many occasions to have a politicizing effect on prisoners: cons commonly come to hate and resist the viciousness of the state machine. On the other hand, however, without potential support for such a project, the experience of state power and antagonism easily leads to individual survivalism or even to suicide.

Carr is scathing of prison reform, quoting Marx's argument that basing a revolutionary movement on it is like basing abolitionism on demands for better food for slaves. He criticizes his own actions for merely reacting to the initiative of the enemy - for fighting on their terrain. It is certainly true that all the time that the struggle remains within capital's procedures and concepts it remains a struggle within capital (for more fairness, rights etc.) rather than against it. However, Carr is perhaps being rather harsh on himself since, quoting Marx again, “Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (1934/1852, p. 13) As Carr's own story shows, rather than existing fully formed prior to the struggle, tendencies to push beyond given limits typically emerge from initial demands and conflicts which are more limited. If the present form of the capital relation - the current class composition - is a result of struggle between capital and proletariat, then neither of these forces are always pure; anti-capitalism is mediated by existing capitalism, particularly the latter's progressive tendencies.

More pessimistically, perhaps, just as moderate demands can go beyond themselves in the struggle itself, so militant struggles can feed back into a reassertion of the legitimacy of the prisons ystem on a new basis. Prison history is the history of violent prison struggles and with them various kinds of liberal reforms and reactionary backlashes. Strangeways, 1990, for example, progressed from an initial plan among prisoners for a limited protest, to a practical critique of the prison in the struggle itself (with cons taking over and trashing the building); the riot then fed into a set of liberal reforms (the ending of slopping out); and finally it served as the justification for legislation for harsher punishments for future rebels (the offence of prison mutiny). This is not of course an argument against resistence or demands for better conditions among prisoners, since any victories by militant prisoners are to be welcomed, and all support (in the form of letters etc.) for individual militants is to be encouraged, particularly if there are links with struggles on the outside.

This book is an autobiography rather than a book of theory, and James Carr led a pretty incredible life by anyone's standards. Of all the incredible things in the book, including the massacres, killings and maimings Carr took part in, it is perhaps his weight-lifting feats that are most hard to believe. The prison lifestyle was often one of privation and drug-taking, yet at one stage Carr apparently trained for five hours a day (exhausting even for today's steriod-fuelled bodybuilders) and bench-pressed 520lb! Not only this, but despite the fact that he was a heavyweight, his waist measurement was only 27 inches.

Notes

1 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapart. Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society. (Originally published 1852.)

Review of Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultural Resistance Since the Sixities by George McKay

Review of Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties by George McKay. London: Verso

This is a book that has already been dismissed with contempt by many people we know within the movement(s) it describes. Various types of criticisms have been expressed, but what they share overall is a dislike of McKay's 'approach'­ to his subject matter. In our language, this approach is one of recuperation - it is an attempt (not necessarily deliberate) to appropriate antagonistic expressions and render them harmless through transformation and integration into some form of commodity (in this case, academia and the world of coffee-table publishing). Recuperation is a constant danger for anti-capitalist practice. However, we don't think that this book is a particularly powerful example of this, because it is too flawed even within its own terms.

The purpose of the book, according to the author, is to show the historical continuity in such movements as the free festivals, ënew ageí travellers, anarcho-punk, rave, anti-roads and anti-Criminal Justice Bill (CJB). The book's publication might be viewed as symptomatic of the growing trend among academics (McKay ëhas beení a punk, anarchist and squatter, according to the blurb, but is now a university lecturer) to come to terms with the popularity of direct action, particularly in the eco-movement. McKay's book is within the cultural studies tradition, which allows it to depart from other recent work (typically written from the perspectives of sociology and political science) in an important way: it presents itself as not only an academic work but one from within the movement itself.

From a marketing point of view, this is obviously the best of both worlds. The book appears in the sociology sections of the book shops, but is also displayed prominently in the new books promotions in order to attract those within or sympathetic to the movements (its cover features a well-known photograph from the Twyford Down anti-road campaign). From our point of view, however, McKay's attempt to commentate simultaneously as both insider and outsider has serious problems. In the first place, surely if anything is of value in an academic work, it is its systematicity and scholarship. Cultural studies, however, while breaking down interdisciplinary boundaries, has little of the empirical rigour, of say, sociology. This book is impressionistic, not in the sense that it lacks evidence, but in that its choice of material and subject matter heavily reflects the author's personal experience and liberal preferences.

Second, the value of a piece of analysis or theory from within an antagonistic movement is its grasp of the nature of the movement in practical terms: why certain activities are carried out, how the movement might succeed in its practical aims, etc. McKay's book certainly takes sides (against the police and government, albeit from a civil rights perspective), but too often he analyses the nature of the movement(s) in terms of ideas and symbols rather than practices.

The sections on the free festivals and fairs of the 1970s are written by McKay in his role as someone who took part. For those of us who don't know much about these scenes, McKay's account presents itself as a detailed and useful history, indicating some of the conflicts among those involved as well as their run-ins with the cops etc. However, given what McKay has written about movements that we do have some knowledge of, it might be best to treat this early history with some caution.

Thus in the chapters on the anti-roads and CJB movement, McKay appears very much as someone looking in from the outside and relying on secondary sources. His references to features of the No M11 Campaign, in particular, are strewn with minor unnecessary errors of the sort we expect from journalists. For example, to refer to the ëancient chestnut tree of Wanstoniaí (p. 150) is an anachronism; the ëindependent free area of Wanstoniaí only came into being around a month after the felling of the Wanstead chestnut tree. Similarly, the first collective action against the Criminal Justice Act was on the M11 link road (November 3rd 1994) not the M25 (p. 169). McKay is only saved from making still worse mistakes by the benevolent intervention of some of those involved in SchNews (the anti-CJA newsletter) who checked some of his early drafts.

In the chapters on the anti-roads and CJB/A movements, the book draws upon some of the analysis presented previously in Aufheben but also badly misrepresents some of our arguments, as well as those of Counter Information, in order to position McKay as supporting ëdiversityí and us as narrow-minded and sectarian. For example, in our commentary on the Brighton ëJustice?í courthouse squat of 1994, we argued that the different uses to which those involved wanted to put the building (e.g., discussion groups on squatting, art displays, drumming workshops) meant that the squat was neither a centre for a ëcommunity of struggleí nor a community arts centre as such; it fell between stools. However, although demands were often contradictory and competed with each other for space, they did express the participants' various needs. This was unlike the attempt by the fluffier elements involved to deny their own needs by subordinating them to media representationalism. For example, their own desires for sensual pleasure took second place to appeasing the media through a public anti-drugs policy. Worse still, in order to portray a certain image of themselves and their struggle, they argued (unsuccessfully) that the courthouse squat should be abandoned without any resistance; in other words, they were even prepared to give up their own ëcommunity arts spaceí for the sake of a media representation of themselves! McKay simply characterizes our criticism as Aufheben regarding ëpoetryí as not ëhardlineí enough.

McKay is perhaps right to observe that those involved in the present movement(s) could benefit from being more aware of previous struggles. But in what sense do they share a ëheritageí, as McKay suggests? What is the nature of their common resistance? For McKay, what these movements share are ëthemesí. Thus, what renders the free party movement political rather than merely hedonistic, he argues, is its reproduction of counter-cultural features of the 1960s - the free festival ëethosí, for example. In the book, this essentially cultural approach to struggles reaches its nadir in the chapter on anarcho-punk. The chapter is solely taken up with the band Crass rather than with the movement itself and is particularly concerned with analysing the meanings in the band's textual productions.

A telling example of the clash between McKay's analysis of ëmeaningsí and the perspective of the participants he writes about is relegated to a footnote in the anti-roads chapter. McKay interprets the tunnels, tree-houses and benders constructed on the anti-A30 camps between Honiton and Exeter as ëa politicized retreat into the pleasure sites of childhoodí (p. 156). The Road Alert! bods rebuked him, arguing that these constructions were rather ëinnovative, low-tech, good defensive tactics, cheap and easy to build with readily available materials, low-impact, movable, and don't leave marksí (p. 202).

Similarly, McKay emphasizes some participants' comments on the symbolic features of the Claremont Road scaffold tower (ëa critical parody of the Canary Wharf tower, an update of Tatlin's unbuilt monument to the Russian Revolution...í), adding almost as an afterthought that it functioned as an effective obstruction to bailiffs. Though he lauds the artwork of Claremont Road, McKay does not mention that the Aufheben article he quotes from so extensively highlights the tension in Claremont Road between art and barricading. This was not a conflict over the importance of aesthetics and symbols per se, but an eminently practical matter. It was a struggle over which strategy would be most effective in the overall anti-roads argument - whether exposing the brutality of the state or physically hindering the state would contribute most in the anti-roads war. The perspective taken in this book, then, tends to get things precisely backwards: symbols appear more important than the social relations that bear them.

McKay wants his book to be seen as a part of the movement(s) he describes, but its approach is quite alien to them. Essentially it renders the movements as fodder for the cultural studies industry. From the perspective of those of us who have been participating in the contemporary movement(s), through its commitment to the cultural studies approach, Senseless Acts of Beauty is not only weak as a history but blinkered in its analysis. Although the book is supposedly a history of struggles, McKay fails to develop the obvious point that otherwise ëescapistí or pleasure-seeking movements become ëpoliticizedí because of their (often unexpected) antagonistic relations with the forces of the state: in the struggles, they are forced to defend themselves, and to see the incompatibility between their initially limited desires for ëfreedomí and the incessant demands for conformity and compromise from capital and the state. The themes and cultural expressions that particular struggles share with others emerge because of their parallel practical relations with their class enemy in the form of the cops.

Notes

1. See ëAuto-Strugglesí in Aufheben 3.

2. See ëKill or Chillí in Aufheben 4.

3. This article, ëThe politics of anti-roads protestí, appears in the M11 fanzine The End of the Beginning: Claremont Road (Clare Zine, PO Box HP 171, Leeds, LS6 1XX).

Aufheben #6 Editorial

Aufheben #6 Editorial: If nothing else, New Labour's landslide victory last May has brought into sharp focus the crucial issue of the crisis and retreat of social democracy. The retreat of social democracy has been gathering pace for several years now; and it is a phenomenon which is not merely confined to Britain but one that has world-wide significance.

Yet although this retreat of social democracy is profoundly altering the terrain of class struggle, opening up new dangers and possibilities, it is an issue that has not been adequately addressed by revolutionaries. Instead it has remained an issue that has haunted both our practical and theoretical political activity. It used to be a major revolutionary task to oppose the left's role of recuperating working class struggle into social democratic channels. Now that capital has itself undermined the credibility of such 'leftist' manoeuvres - what does this mean for us?

In the next edition of Aufheben we plan to confront this central issue of our time. We shall begin by exploring the historical context of the rise and fall of social democracy both in Britain and elsewhere and consider how this has given rise to Tony Blair's New Labour. We shall then consider the prospects of New Labour and the implications of the decline of social democracy for the future of class struggle both here and abroad. However, lest our readers become a little restive at waiting for our thoughts on this pressing matter we shall make a few preliminary remarks here which will serve to sketch out the outlines of our forthcoming analysis.

Some preliminary remarks on the crisis and retreat of social democracy and New Labour

Of course, of all the major capitalist powers it is perhaps the USA where 'neo-liberalism' has gone the furthest. The dismantling of the welfare state, the criminalization of the poor and unemployed, declining real wages and the introduction of flexible labour regimes have all accelerated in Clinton's America. Yet social democracy, particularly its political expression, was never as strong in the USA as it was Europe. In Europe it is Britain, after twenty years of Thatcherism, that has gone the furthest in emulating the USA, and it is in Britain where we can see the crisis and retreat of social democracy most clearly with the victory of Tony Blair.

Tony Blair, and his fellow so called modernizers, have made no secret of the fact that they want to consign social democracy, which they designate as ëOld Labourí, to the past. Having already jettisoned Clause Four of Old Labour's constitution, distanced himself from the trade unions and re-positioned the Labour Party to the right of the Liberal Democrats, Tony Blair has gone a long way in transforming the Labour Party into a new Liberal Party, restoring the old bourgeois division of British politics before the rise of Labour Party, and with it the political representation of the working class, at the beginning of this century.

Now, having won such a convincing election victory, the way seems open for Tony Blair to completely marginalize the last remnants of social democracy within the Labour Party. As such Tony Blair is completing one of Thatcher's great aims, the eradication of 'socialism' from the mainstream of British politics. Indeed, in many respects Tony Blair is Thatcher's true heir, as he himself readily admits when he expresses his admiration for her. To understand New Labour and the decline of social democracy in Britain it is necessary to consider the rise of Thatcherism.

Compared with much of mainland Europe, Britain escaped much of the devastation caused by the Second World War. This, combined with Britain's continued legacy from her imperial past, meant there was neither the opportunity nor incentive for British capital to radically refashion the social relations of production. In the post-war era Britain never fully adopted Fordism. Instead British industrial capital remained content to maintain outdated production methods and working practices. Thus, whereas Germany, France and Italy all experienced rapid economic growth and transformation during the 1950s and ë60s, Britain continued its long term relative economic decline.

As a consequence, British capital was ill-placed to weather the upsurge in class struggle and the crisis in capital accumulation which broke out in the late 1960s. By the late 1970s the British ruling class faced a dire situation. Following the miners' strike of 1974, which had brought down the Heath government, there were increasing fears that it would not be long before the government would be unable to govern, and management unable to manage, in the face of the 'sheer bloodymindness' of the working class. It was as a last desperate attempt to resolve this growing political and economic crisis in the favour of British capital that Thatcherism took shape.

Social democracy, as the political and economic representation and integration of labour within capital and the bourgeois state, had played a central role in the construction of the post-war settlement. Social democracy provided the basis of the class compromise, established through the post-war settlement, in which the working class gave up all hope of revolution in return for improved housing, health care, the welfare state, and above all a commitment to full employment. However, while the post-war settlement had provided the relative social peace that served as the basis for the post-war economic boom, with the onset of the crisis of capital accumulation and the upsurge of class struggle in the 1960s, it had become an increasing burden on the capitalist class and served to strengthen the hand of the working class.

Armed with monetarism, Thatcher set out to radically reshape the post-war settlement in favour of capital. To do this she not only sought to attack and marginalize social democracy but also the social democratic consensus through which the post-war settlement had been constructed. Through mass unemployment, a succession of anti-strike laws and carefully staged industrial disputes, Thatcher not only succeeded in inflicting serious defeats on the working class but also broke the power of the trade unions as mediators in the sale of labour-power. Yet in order to carry out this barely disguised class war Thatcher had also to overcome the reluctance of those fainthearts in her own camp who still clung to the certainties of the old class compromise. As a result, Thatcher's rule was marked not only by confrontation but also by the increasing concentration of political power.

Ironically Thatcher's success can be seen to be rooted in the previous success of social democracy. During the post-war era, social democracy had succeeded in demobilizing large sections of the working class but in doing so had come to undermine its very own basis. Thatcher was able to exploit the gap between the aspirations of individual working class people and their collective representation. While she launched uncompromising attacks on the bastions of trade union militancy, wages for the majority of workers were allowed to outstrip inflation. Collective action was everywhere punished while individualism was encouraged.

Yet Thatcher's populism, which was centred around the illusion of the 'property and share-owning democracy' in which everyone could feel that they were a capitalist, could not last long beyond the late 80s economic boom. Thatcher's refusal to take heed of warnings from outside her by now narrow circle of advisers ultimately led to her downfall with the mass revolt against the poll tax. In succeeding Thatcher, John Major sought to press on with Thatcherism but with a different presentation. However, despite weathering the depths of early 90s recession, Major's weak leadership eventually left him unable to cope with the growing splits in the Tory Party as the Thatcherite project became exhausted.

The recession of the early 1990s, and, until recently, the subsequent jobless boom which seemed to benefit no one other than the fat cats of the privatized utilities and the city speculators, brought home the bitter fruits of Thatcherism. With job insecurity reaching the very heart of the middle classes there came a growing disillusionment with the Tory policies of social division and crass individualism. It was through mobilizing this widespread disillusionment with the Tories that Blair was able to win his landslide victory.

As the first months of the new government has confirmed, New Labour is committed to maintaining much of the Conservative economic and authoritarian social policies of the previous government. However, Blair is seeking to build a new social consensus around the de facto class compromise established after Thatcher. Thus instead of pushing through reforms with little regard to any opposition, New Labour seeks consultation. Instead of concentrating power in order to push through unpopular measures, New Labour is concerned with devolving power, as we can see in their plans for radical constitutional reform. Blair then, in consolidating the Thatcher revolution, is the true heir to Thatcher.

So what are the prospects for New Labour: and what are the prospects for social democracy? The continuing success of Blair's government depends crucially on relative social peace and economic prosperity. Of course, it could be argued that the crisis of capitalism which broke in the late 1960s with the upsurge in working class struggle, and which led to the radical restructuring of capital in the subsequent decades, has been more or less resolved. The working class has everywhere been beaten back, while the huge imbalances caused by the restructuring of capital which emerged in the 1980s in the form of both the huge US budget and trade deficits and in an enormous overhang of Third World debt, have been unwound. If this is the case, Blairism would seem to fit the needs of the bourgeoisie in this period of social and economic quietude. However, even if the world-wide crisis of capitalism has been resolved for the time being, this does not mean that the long-term relative decline in British capitalism has been arrested.

And what of social democracy? If social democracy ceases to exist will it be re-invented again? And how are we to relate to the decline and possible resurgence of social democracy? For our answers to these and related questions you will have to wait until the next issue!

Notes

In some ways the attack on social democracy has gone further in the UK than in the USA. For example, the sacking of the 500 Liverpool dockers would have been illegal in the USA; while the solidarity action taken by American dockers would have been illegal in Britain, since it would have been regarded as secondary action. It should also be noted that Clinton's new Democratic Party has recently prompted a renewed trade union activism that is less inclined to lobby Congress and is more committed to building a militant rank and file trade unionism. We shall have course to examine the possible renewal of social democracy in our next issue.

With a rather poetic vagueness, Clause Four committed the Labour Party to the extension of public ownership of the means of production and exchange. It was originally written into the constitution in 1918 as means of heading off the growing revolutionary deman ds within the labour movement which had been given added impetus by the Russian Revolution. From that time onwards Clause Four has taken by the left as ultimately committing the Labour Party to socialism. In rewriting Clause Four, Blair has sought to make it quite clear that New Labour had abandoned commitment to 'socialism' and social democracy.

Of course it could be argued that if Blair has his way, and if the Tories die out or become an extreme right-wing nationalist party, New Labour is more likely to end up as the new Conservative Party!

The shift to the right by the New Labour Party is perhaps clearly demonstrated by the recent debate between Roy Hattersley and Gordon Brown - the new Labour Chancellor of the exchequer. A few years ago Roy Hattersley was considered as being on the right of the Party. However, his continued belief in using tax and welfare policies to ensure a minimal amount of redistribution of wealth now seems to place him on the far left of the Party!

Having won power, Thatcher proceeded to purge what she saw as the 'wets' in the Conservative Party who were wary of her policy of confrontation. At the same time the main employersí organization, the Confederation of British Industry, which had represented British capital in the various corporatist forums set up in the post-war era, was displaced by the more Thatcherite Institute of Directors.

What was the USSR? Part I: Trotsky and state capitalism

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What was the USSR? Aufheben
- What was the USSR? Part I: Trotsky and state capitalism
- What was the USSR? Part II: Russia as a non-mode of production
- What was the USSR? Part III: Left communism and the Russian revolution
- What was the USSR? Part IV: Towards a theory of the deformation of value

The Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the USSR as a 'workers' state', has dominated political thinking for more than three generations.

In the past, it seemed enough for communist revolutionaries to define their radical separation with much of the 'left' by denouncing the Soviet Union as state capitalist. This is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. Many Trotskyists, for example, now feel vindicated by the 'restoration of capitalism' in Russia. To transform society we not only have to understand what it is, we also have to understand how past attempts to transform it failed. In this and future issues we shall explore the inadequacies of the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state and the various versions of the theory that the USSR was a form of state capitalism.

What was the USSR?

Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value under State Capitalism Part I1

Introduction

The question of Russia once more

In August 1991 the last desperate attempt was made to salvage the old Soviet Union. Gorbachev, the great reformer and architect of both Glasnost and Perestroika, was deposed as President of the USSR and replaced by an eight man junta in an almost bloodless coup. Yet, within sixty hours this coup had crumbled in the face of the opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, backed by all the major Western powers. Yeltsin's triumph not only hastened the disintegration of the USSR but also confirmed the USA as the final victor in the Cold War that had for forty years served as the matrix of world politics.

Six years later all this now seems long past. Under the New World (dis)Order in which the USA remains as the sole superpower, the USSR and the Cold War seem little more than history. But the collapse of the USSR did not simply reshape the 'politics of the world' - it has had fundamental repercussions in the 'world of politics', repercussions that are far from being resolved.

Ever since the Russian Revolution in 1917, all points along the political spectrum have had to define themselves in terms of the USSR, and in doing so they have necessarily had to define what the USSR was. This has been particularly true for those on the 'left' who have sought in some way to challenge capitalism. In so far as the USSR was able to present itself as 'an actually existing socialist system', as a viable alternative to the 'market capitalism of the West', it came to define what socialism was.

Even 'democratic socialists' in the West, such as those on the left of the Labour Party in Britain, who rejected the 'totalitarian' methods of the Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and who sought a parliamentary road to socialism, still took from the Russian model nationalization and centralized planning of the commanding heights of the economy as their touchstone of socialism. The question as to what extent the USSR was socialist, and as such was moving towards a communist society, was an issue that has dominated and defined socialist and communist thinking for more than three generations.

It is hardly surprising then that the fall of the USSR has thrown the left and beyond into a serious crisis. While the USSR existed in opposition - however false - to free market capitalism, and while social democracy in the West continued to advance, it was possible to assume that history was on the side of socialism. The ideals of socialism and communism were those of progress. With the collapse of the USSR such assumptions have been turned on their head. With the victory of 'free market capitalism' socialism is now presented as anachronistic, the notion of centralized planning of huge nationalized industries is confined to an age of dinosaurs, along with organized working class struggle. Now it is the market and liberal democracy that claim to be the future, socialism and communism are deemed dead and gone.

With this ideological onslaught of neo-liberalism that has followed the collapse of the USSR, the careerists in the old social democratic and Communist Parties have dropped all vestiges old socialism as they lurch to the right. With the Blairite New Labour in Britain, the Clintonite new Democrats in the USA and the renamed Communist Parties in Europe, all they have left is to openly proclaim themselves as the 'new and improved' caring managers of capitalism, fully embracing the ideals of the market and modern management methods.

Of course, for the would-be revolutionaries who had grown up since the 1960s, with the exception of course of the various Trotskyist sects, the notion that the USSR was in anyway progressive, let alone socialist or communist, had for a long time seemed ludicrous. The purges and show trials of the 1930s, the crushing of the workers' uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956, the refusal to accept even the limited liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the continued repression of workers' struggles in Russia itself, had long led many on the 'revolutionary left' to the conclusion that whatever the USSR was it was not socialist. Even the contention that, for all its monstrous distortions, the USSR was progressive insofar as it still developed the productive forces became patently absurd as the economic stagnation and waste of the Brezhnev era became increasingly apparent during the 1970s.

For those ultra-leftists2 and anarchists who had long since rejected the USSR as in anyway a model for socialism or communism, and who as a result had come to reassert the original communist demands for the complete abolition of wage labour and commodity exchange, it has long since become self-evident that the USSR was simply another form of capitalism. As such, for both anarchists and ultra-leftists the notion that the USSR was state capitalist has come as an easy one - too easy perhaps.

If it was simply a question of ideas it could have been expected that the final collapse of the USSR would have provided an excellent opportunity to clear away all the old illusions in Leninism and social democracy that had weighed like a nightmare on generations of socialists and working class militants. Of course this has not been the case, and if anything the reverse may be true. The collapse of the USSR has come at a time when the working class has been on the defensive and when the hopes of radically overthrowing capitalism have seemed more remote than ever. If anything, as insecurity grows with the increasing deregulation of market forces, and as the old social democratic parties move to the right, it would seem if anything that the conditions are being lain for a revival of 'old style socialism'.

Indeed, freed from having to defend the indefensible, old Stalinists are taking new heart and can now make common cause with the more critical supporters of the old Soviet Union. This revivalism of the old left, with the Socialist Labour Party in Britain as the most recent example, can claim to be making just as much headway as any real communist or anarchist movement.

The crisis of the left that followed the collapse of the USSR has not escaped communists or anarchists. In the past it was sufficient for these tendencies to define their radical separation with much of the 'left' by denouncing the Soviet Union as state capitalist and denying the existence of any actually existing socialist country. This is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. As we shall show, many Trotskyists, for example, now feel vindicated by the 'restoration of capitalism' in Russia. Others, like Ticktin, have developed a more sophisticated analysis of the nature of the old USSR, and what caused its eventual collapse, which has seriously challenged the standard theories of the USSR as being state capitalist.

While some anarchists and ultra-leftists are content to repeat the old dogmas concerning the USSR, most find the question boring; a question they believe has long since been settled. Instead they seek to reassert their radicality in the practical activism of prisoner support groups ('the left never supports its prisoners does it'),3 or in the theoretical pseudo-radicality of primitivism. For us, however, the question of what the USSR was is perhaps more important than ever. For so long the USSR was presented, both by socialists and those opposed to socialism, as the only feasible alternative to capitalism. For the vast majority of people the failure and collapse of the USSR has meant the failure of any realistic socialist alternative to capitalism. The only alternatives appear to be different shades of 'free market' capitalism. Yet it is no good simply denouncing the USSR as having been a form of state capitalism on the basis that capitalism is any form of society we don't like! To transform society we not only have to understand what it is, we also have to understand how past attempts to transform it failed.

Outline

In this issue and the next one we shall explore the inadequacies of various versions of the theory that the USSR was a form of state capitalism; firstly when compared with the standard Trotskyist theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state, and secondly, and perhaps more tellingly, in the light of the analysis of the USSR put forward by Ticktin which purports to go beyond both state capitalist and degenerated workers' state conceptions of the nature of the Soviet Union.

To begin with we shall examine Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, which, at least in Britain, has served as the standard critical analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union since the 1930s. Then we shall see how Tony Cliff, having borrowed the conception of the USSR as state capitalist from the left communists in the 1940s, developed his own version of the theory of the USSR as a form of state capitalism which, while radically revising the Trotskyist orthodoxy with regard to Russia, sought to remain faithful to Trotsky's broader theoretical conceptions. As we shall see, and as is well recognized, although through the propaganda work of the SWP and its sister organizations world wide Cliff's version of the state capitalist theory is perhaps the most well known, it is also one of the weakest. Indeed, as we shall observe, Cliff's theory has often been used by orthodox Trotskyists as a straw man with which to refute all state capitalist theories and sustain their own conception of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state.

In contrast to Cliff's theory we shall, in the next issue, consider other perhaps less well known versions of the theory of the USSR as state capitalist that have been put forward by left communists and other more recent writers. This will then allow us to consider Ticktin's analysis of USSR and its claim to go beyond both the theory of the USSR as state capitalist and the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state.

Having explored the inadequacies of the theory that the USSR was a form of state capitalism, in the light of both the Trotskyist theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state and, more importantly, Ticktin's analysis of the USSR, we shall in Aufheben 8 seek to present a tentative restatement of the state capitalist theory in terms of a theory of the deformation of value.

Section 1: Trotsky's theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state

Introduction

It is now easy to deride those who have sought, however critically, to defend the USSR as having been in some sense 'progressive'. Yet for more than a half a century the 'defence of the Soviet Union' was a central issue for nearly all 'revolutionary socialists', and is a concern that still persists today amongst some. To understand the significance of this it is necessary to make some effort to appreciate the profound impact the Russian Revolution must have had on previous generations of socialists and working class militants.

i The Russian Revolution

It is perhaps not that hard to imagine the profound impact the Russian Revolution had on the working class movements at the time. In the midst of the great war, not only had the working masses of the Russian Empire risen up and overthrown the once formidable Tsarist police state, but they had set out to construct a socialist society. At the very time when capitalism had plunged the whole of Europe into war on an unprecedented scale and seemed to have little else to offer the working class but more war and poverty, the Russian Revolution opened up a real socialist alternative of peace and prosperity. All those cynics who sneered at the idea that the working people could govern society and who denied the feasibility of communism on the grounds that it was in some way against 'human nature', could now be refuted by the living example of a workers' state in the very process of building socialism.

For many socialists at this time the revolutionary but disciplined politics of Bolsheviks stood in stark contrast to the wheeler-dealing and back-sliding of the parliamentary socialism of the Second International. For all their proclamations of internationalism, without exception the reformist socialist parties of the Second International had lined up behind their respective national ruling classes and in doing so had condemned a whole generation of the working class to the hell and death of the trenches. As a result, with the revolutionary wave that swept Europe following the First World War, hundreds of thousands flocked to the newly formed Communist Parties based on the Bolshevik model, and united within the newly formed Third International directed from Moscow. From its very inception the primary task of the Third International was that of building support for the Soviet Union and opposing any further armed intervention against the Bolshevik Government in Russia on the part of the main Western Powers. After all it must have seemed self-evident then that the defence of Russia was the defence of socialism.

ii The 1930s and World War II

By the 1930s the revolutionary movements that had swept across Europe after the First World War had all but been defeated. The immediate hopes of socialist revolution faded in the face of rising fascism and the looming prospects of a second World War in less than a generation. Yet this did not diminish the attractions of the USSR. On the contrary the Soviet Union stood out as a beacon of hope compared to the despair and stagnation of the capitalist West.

While capitalism had brought about an unprecedented advance in productive capacity, with the development of electricity, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, cars, radios and even televisions, all of which promised to transform the lives of everyone, it had plunged the world into an unprecedented economic slump that condemned millions to unemployment and poverty. In stark contrast to this economic stagnation brought about by the anarchy of market forces, the Soviet Union showed the remarkable possibilities of rational central planning which was in the process of transforming the backward Russian economy. The apparent achievements of 'socialist planning' that were being brought about under Stalin's five-year plans not only appealed to the working class trapped in the economic slump, but also to increasing numbers of bourgeois intellectuals who had now lost all faith in capitalism.

Of course, from its very inception the Soviet Union had been subjected to the lies and distortions put out by the bourgeois propaganda machine and it was easy for committed supporters of the Soviet Union, whether working class militants or intellectuals, to dismiss the reports of the purges and show trials under Stalin as further attempts to discredit both socialism and the USSR. Even if the reports were basically true, it seemed a small price to pay for the huge and dramatic social and economic transformation that was being brought about in Russia, which promised to benefit hundreds of millions of people and which provided a living example to the rest of the world of what could be achieved with the overthrow of capitalism. While the bourgeois press bleated about the freedom of speech of a few individuals, Stalin was freeing millions from a future of poverty and hunger.

Of course not everyone on the left was taken in by the affability of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin. The purge and exile of most of the leaders of the original Bolshevik government, the zig-zags in foreign policy that culminated in the non-aggression pact with Hitler, the disastrous reversals in policy imposed on the various Communist Parties through the Third International, and the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution in 1937, all combined to cast doubts on Stalin and the USSR.

Yet the Second World War served to further enhance the reputation of the Soviet Union, and not only amongst socialists. Once the non-aggression pact with Germany ended in 1940, the USSR was able to enter the war under the banner of anti-fascism and could claim to have played a crucial role in the eventual defeat of Hitler. While the ruling classes throughout Europe had expressed sympathy with fascism, and in the case of France collaborated with the occupying German forces, the Communist Parties played a leading role in the Resistance and Partisan movements that had helped to defeat fascism. As a result, particularly in France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece, the Communist Parties could claim to be champions of the patriotic anti-fascist movements, in contrast to most of the Quisling bourgeois parties.

iii The 1950s

The Second World War ended with the USA as the undisputed superpower in the Western hemisphere, but in the USSR she now faced a formidable rival. The USSR was no longer an isolated backward country at the periphery of world capital accumulation centred in Western Europe and North America. The rapid industrialization under Stalin during the 1930s had transformed the Soviet Union into a major industrial and military power, while the war had left half of Europe under Soviet control. With the Chinese Revolution in 1949 over a third of human kind now lived under 'Communist rule'!

Not only this. Throughout much of Western Europe, the very heartlands and cradle of capitalism, Communist Parties under the direct influence of Moscow, or social democratic parties with significant left-wing currents susceptible to Russian sympathies, were on the verge of power. In Britain the first majority Labour government came to power with 48 per cent of the vote, while in Italy and France the Communist Parties won more than a third of the vote in the post-war elections and were only kept from power by the introduction of highly proportional voting systems.

What is more, few in the ruling circles of the American or European bourgeoisie could be confident that the economic boom that followed the war would last long beyond the immediate period of post-war reconstruction. If the period following the previous World War was anything to go by, the most likely prospect was of at best a dozen or so years of increasing prosperity followed by another slump which could only rekindle the class conflicts and social polarization that had been experienced during 1930s. Yet now the Communist Parties, and their allies on the left, were in a much stronger starting position to exploit such social tensions.

While the West faced the prospects of long term economic stagnation, there seemed no limits to the planned economic growth and transformation of the USSR and the Eastern bloc. Indeed, even as the late as the early 1960s Khrushchev could claim, with all credibility for many Western observers, that having established a modern economic base of heavy industry under Stalin, Russia was now in a position to shift its emphasis to the expansion of the consumer goods sector so that it could outstrip the living standards in the USA within ten years!

It was this bleak viewpoint of the bourgeoisie, forged in the immediate post-war realities of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which served as the original basis of the virulent anti-Communist paranoia of the Cold War, particularly in the USA; from the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era to Reagan's 'evil empire' rhetoric in the early 1980s.

For the bourgeoisie, expropriation by either the proletariat or by a Stalinist bureaucracy made little difference. The threat of communism was the threat of Communism. To the minds of the Western bourgeoisie the class struggle had now become inscribed in the very struggle between the two world superpowers: between the 'Free World' and the 'Communist World'.4

This notion of the struggle between the two superpowers as being at one and the same time the final titanic struggle between capital and labour was one that was readily accepted by many on the left. For many it seemed clear that the major concessions that had been incorporated into the various post-war settlements had been prompted by the fear that the working class in the West, particularly in Western Europe, would go over to Communism. The post-war commitments to the welfare state, full employment, decent housing and so forth, could all be directly attributed to the bourgeoisie's fear of both the USSR and its allied Communist Parties in the West. Furthermore, despite all its faults, it was the USSR who could be seen to be the champion the millions of oppressed people of the Third World with its backing for the various national liberation movements in their struggles against the old imperialist and colonial powers and the new rapacious imperialism of the multinationals.

In this view there were only two camps: the USSR and the Eastern bloc, which stood behind the working class and the oppressed people of the world, versus the USA and the Western powers who stood behind the bourgeoisie and the propertied classes. Those who refused to take sides were seen as nothing better than petit-bourgeois intellectuals who could only dwell in their utopian abstractions and who refused to get their hands dirty in dealing with current reality.

Of course, by the early 1950s the full horrors and brutality of Stalin's rule had become undeniable. As a result many turned towards reformist socialism embracing the reforms that had been won in the post-war settlement. While maintaining sympathies for the Soviet Union, and being greatly influenced by the notion of socialism as planning evident in the USSR, they sought to distance themselves from the revolutionary means and methods of bolshevism that were seen as the cause of the 'totalitarianism' of Russian Communism. This course towards 'democratic socialism' was to be followed by the Communist Parties themselves 20 years later with the rise of so-called Euro-communism in the 1970s.

While many turned towards 'democratic socialism', and others clung to an unswerving commitment to the Communist Party and the defence of the Soviet Union, there were those who, while accepting the monstrosities of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, refused to surrender the revolutionary heritage of the 1917 Revolution. Recognising the limitations of the post-war settlement, and refusing to forget the betrayals experienced the generation before at the hands of reformist socialism,5 they sought to salvage the revolutionary insights of Lenin and the Bolsheviks from what they saw as the degeneration of the revolution brought about under Stalin. The obvious inspiration for those who held this position was Stalin's great rival Leon Trotsky and his theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state.

Leon Trotsky

It is not that hard to understand why those who had become increasingly disillusioned with Stalin's Russia, but who still wished to defend Lenin and the revolutionary heritage of 1917 should have turned to Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had played a leading role in the revolutionary events of both 1905 and 1917 in Russia. Despite Stalin's attempts to literally paint him out of the picture, Trotsky had been a prominent member of the early Bolshevik Government, so much so that it can be convincingly argued that he was Lenin's own preferred successor.

As such, in making his criticisms of Stalinist Russia, Trotsky could not be so easily dismissed as some bourgeois intellectual attempting to discredit socialism, nor could he be accused of being an utopian ultra-leftist or anarchist attempting to measure up the concrete limitations of the 'actually existing socialism' of the USSR against some abstract ideal of what socialism should be. On the contrary, as a leading member of the Bolshevik Government Trotsky had been responsible for making harsh and often ruthless decisions necessary to maintain the fragile and isolated revolutionary government. Trotsky had not shrunk from supporting the introduction of one-man management and Taylorism, nor had he shied away from crushing wayward revolutionaries as was clearly shown when he led the Red Army detachments to put down both Makhno's peasant army during the civil war and the Kronstadt sailors in 1921. Indeed, Trotsky often went beyond those policies deemed necessary by Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders as was clearly exemplified by his call for the complete militarization of labour.6

Yet Trotsky was not merely a practical revolutionary capable of taking and defending difficult decisions. Trotsky had proved to be one of the few important strategic and theoretical thinkers amongst the Russian Bolsheviks who could rival the theoretical and strategic leadership of Lenin. We must now consider Trotsky's ideas in detail and in their own terms, reserving more substantial criticisms until later.

Trotsky and the Orthodox Marxism of the Second International

7
There is little doubt that Trotsky remained committed throughout his life to the orthodox view of historical materialism which had become established in the Second International. Like most Marxists of his time, Trotsky saw history primarily in terms of the development of the forces of production. While class struggle may have been the motor of history which drove it forward, the direction and purpose of history was above all the development of the productive powers of human labour towards its ultimate goal of a communist society in which humanity as a whole would be free from both want and scarcity.

As such, history was seen as a series of distinct stages, each of which was dominated by a particular mode of production. As the potential for each mode of production to advance the productive forces became exhausted its internal contradictions would become more acute and the exhausted mode of production would necessarily give way to a new more advanced mode of production which would allow the further development of the productive powers of human labour.

The capitalist mode of production had developed the forces of production far beyond anything that had been achieved before. Yet in doing so capitalism had begun to create the material and social conditions necessary for its own supersession by a socialist society. The emergence of modern large scale industry towards the end of the nineteenth century had led to an increasing polarization between a tiny class of capitalists at one pole and the vast majority of proletarians at the other.

At the same time modern large scale industry had begun to replace the numerous individual capitalists competing in each branch of industry by huge joint stock monopolies that dominated entire industries in a particular economy. With the emergence of huge joint stock monopolies and industrial cartels, it was argued by most Marxists that the classical form of competitive capitalism, which had been analysed by Marx in the mid-nineteenth century, had now given way to monopoly capitalism. Under competitive capitalism what was produced and how this produced wealth should be distributed had been decided through the 'anarchy of market forces', that is as the unforeseen outcome of the competitive battle between competing capitalists. With the development of monopoly capitalism, production and distribution was becoming more and more planned as monopolies and cartels fixed in advance the levels of production and pricing on an industry-wide basis.

Yet this was not all. As the economy as a whole became increasingly interdependent and complex the state, it was argued, could no longer play a minimal economic role as it had done during the competitive stage of capitalism. With the development of large scale industry the state increasingly had to intervene and direct the economy. Thus for orthodox Marxism, the development towards monopoly capitalism was at one and the same time a development towards state capitalism.

As economic planning by the monopolies and the state replaced the 'anarchy of market' in regulating the economy, the basic conditions for a socialist society were being put in place. At the same time the basic contradiction of capitalism between the increasingly social character of production and the private appropriation of wealth it produced was becoming increasingly acute. The periodic crises that had served both to disrupt yet renew the competitive capitalism of the early and mid-nineteenth century had now given way to prolonged periods of economic stagnation as the monopolists sought to restrict production in order to maintain their monopoly profits.

The basis of the capitalist mode of production in the private appropriation of wealth based on the rights of private property could now be seen to be becoming a fetter on the free development of productive forces. The period of the transition to socialism was fast approaching as capitalism entered its final stages of decline. With the growing polarization of society, which was creating a huge and organized proletariat, all that would be needed was for the working class to seize state power and to nationalize the major banks and monopolies so that production and distribution could be rationally planned in the interests of all of society rather than in the interests of the tiny minority of capitalists. Once the private ownership of the means of production had been swept away the development of the forces of production would be set free and the way would be open to creating a communist society in which freedom would triumph over necessity.

Of course, like many on the left and centre of the Second International, Trotsky rejected the more simplistic versions of this basic interpretation of historical materialism which envisaged the smooth evolution of capitalism into socialism. For Trotsky the transition to socialism would necessarily be a contradictory and often violent process in which the political could not be simply reduced to the economic.

For Trotsky, the contradictory development of declining capitalism could prompt the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class long before the material and social preconditions for a fully developed socialist society had come into being. This possibility of a workers' state facing a prolonged period of transition to a fully formed socialist society was to be particularly important to the revolution in Trotsky's native Russia.

Trotsky and the theory of permanent revolution

8
While Trotsky defended the orthodox Marxist interpretation of the nature of historical development he differed radically on its specific application to Russia, and it was on this issue that Trotsky made his most important contribution to what was to become the new orthodoxy of Soviet Marxism.

The orthodox view of the Second International had been that the socialist revolution would necessarily break out in one of the more advanced capitalist countries where capitalism had already created the preconditions for the development of a socialist society. In the backward conditions of Russia, there could be no immediate prospects of making a socialist revolution. Russia remained a semi-feudal empire dominated by the all powerful Tsarist autocracy which had severely restricted the development of capitalism on Russian soil. However, in order to maintain Russia as a major military power, the Tsarist regime had been obliged to promote a limited degree of industrialization which had begun to gather pace by the turn of century. Yet even with this industrialization the Russian economy was still dominated by small scale peasant agriculture.

Under such conditions it appeared that the immediate task for Marxists was to hasten the bourgeois-democratic revolution which, by sweeping away the Tsarist regime, would open the way for the full development of capitalism in Russia, and in doing so prepare the way for a future socialist revolution. The question that came to divide Russian Marxists was the precise character the bourgeois-democratic revolution would take and as a consequence the role the working class would have to play within it.

For the Mensheviks the revolution would have to be carried out in alliance with the bourgeoisie. The tasks of the party of the working class would be to act as the most radical wing of the democratic revolution which would then press for a 'minimal programme' of political and social reforms which, while compatible with both private property and the limits of the democratic-bourgeois revolution, would provide a sound basis for the future struggle against the bourgeoisie and capitalism.

In contrast, Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that the Russian bourgeoisie was far too weak and cowardly to carry out their own revolution. As a consequence, the bourgeois-democratic revolution would have to be made for them by the working class in alliance with the peasant masses. However, in making a revolutionary alliance with the peasantry the question of land reform would have to be placed at the top of the political agenda of the revolutionary government. Yet, as previous revolutions in Western Europe had shown, as soon as land had been expropriated from the landowners and redistributed amongst the peasantry most of the peasants would begin to lose interest in the revolution and become a conservative force. So, having played an essential part in carrying out the revolution, the peasantry would end up blocking its further development and confine it within the limits of a bourgeois-democratic revolution in which rights of private property would necessarily have to be preserved.

Against both these positions, which tended to see the historical development of Russia in isolation, Trotsky insisted that the historical development of Russia was part of the overall historical development of world capitalism. As a backward economy Russia had been able to import the most up to date methods of modern large scale industry 'ready made' without going through the long, drawn out process of their development which had occurred in the more advanced capitalist countries. As a result Russia possessed some of the most advanced industrial methods of production alongside some of the most backward forms of agricultural production in Europe. This combination of uneven levels of economic development meant that the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia would be very different from those that had previously occurred elsewhere in Europe.

Firstly, the direct implantation of modern industry into Russia under the auspices of the Tsarist regime had meant that much of Russian industry was either owned by the state or by foreign capital. As a consequence, Russia lacked a strong and independent indigenous bourgeoisie. At the same time, however, this direct implantation of modern large scale industry had brought into being an advanced proletariat whose potential economic power was far greater than its limited numbers might suggest. Finally, by leaping over the intermediary stages of industrial development, Russia lacked the vast numbers of intermediary social strata rooted in small scale production and which had played a decisive role in the democratic-bourgeois revolutions of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

On the basis of this analysis Trotsky concluded as early as 1904 that the working class would have to carry out the democratic-bourgeois revolution in alliance with the peasant masses because of the very weakness of the indigenous Russian bourgeoisie. To this extent Trotsky's conclusions concurred with those of Lenin and the Bolsheviks at that time. However, Trotsky went further. For Trotsky both the heterogeneity and lack of organization amongst the peasant masses meant that, despite their overwhelming numbers, the Russian peasantry could only play a supporting role within the revolution. This political weakness of the peasantry, together with the absence of those social strata based in small scale production, meant that the Russian proletariat would be compelled to play the leading role in both the revolution, and in the subsequent revolutionary government. So, whereas Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisaged that it would be a democratic workers-peasant government that would have to carry out the bourgeois revolution, Trotsky believed that the working class would have no option but to impose its domination on any such revolutionary government.

In such a leading position, the party of the working class could not simply play the role of the left wing of democracy and seek to press for the adoption of its 'minimal programme' of democratic and social reforms. It would be in power, and as such it would have little option but to implement the 'minimal programme' itself. However, Trotsky believed that if a revolutionary government led by the party of the working class attempted to implement a 'minimal programme' it would soon meet the resolute opposition of the propertied classes. In the face of such opposition the working class party would either have to abdicate power or else press head by abolishing private property in the means of production and in doing so begin at once the proletarian-socialist revolution.

For Trotsky it would be both absurd and irresponsible for the party of the working class to simply abdicate power in such a crucial situation. In such a position, the party of the working class would have to take the opportunity of expropriating the weak bourgeoisie and allow the bourgeois-democratic revolution to pass, uninterrupted, into a proletarian-socialist revolution.

Trotsky accepted that the peasantry would inevitably become a conservative force once agrarian reform had been completed. However, he argued that a substantial part of the peasantry would continue to back the revolutionary government for a while, not because of any advanced 'revolutionary consciousness' but due to their very 'backwardness';9 this, together with the proletariats' superior organization, would give the revolutionary government time. Ultimately, however, the revolutionary government's only hope would be that the Russian revolution would trigger revolution throughout the rest of Europe and the world.

Trotsky and the perils of transition

While Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution may have appeared adventurist, if not a little utopian, to most Russian Marxists when it was first set out in Results and Prospects in 1906, its conclusions were to prove crucial eleven years later in the formation of the new Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy which came to be established with the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

The revolution of February 1917 took all political parties and factions by surprise. Within a few days the centuries old Tsarist regime had been swept away and a situation of dual power established. On the one side stood the Provisional Government dominated by the various liberal bourgeois parties, on the other side stood the growing numbers of workers and peasant soviets. For the Mensheviks the position was clear: the organizations of the working class had to give critical support to the bourgeois Provisional Government while it carried out its democratic programme. In contrast, faced with a democratic-bourgeois Government which they had denied was possible, the Bolsheviks were thrown into confusion. A confusion that came to a virtual split with the return of Lenin from exile at the beginning of April.

In his April Theses Lenin proposed a radical shift in policy, which, despite various differences in detail and emphasis, brought him close to the positions that had been put forward by Trotsky with his theory of permanent revolution. Lenin argued that the Bourgeois Government would eventually prove too weak to carry out its democratic programme. As a consequence the Bolsheviks had to persuade the soviets to overthrow the Provisional Government and establish a workers' and peasants' government which would not only have the task of introducing democratic reform, but which would eventually have to make a start on the road to socialism.

With this radical shift in position initiated by the April Theses, and Trotsky's subsequent acceptance of Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party, the way was opened for Trotsky to join the Bolsheviks; and, together with Lenin, Trotsky was to play a major role not only in the October revolution and the subsequent Bolshevik Government but also in the theoretical elaboration of what was to become known as Marxist-Leninism.

While both Lenin and Trotsky argued that it was necessary to overthrow the Provisional Government and establish a workers' government through a socialist-proletarian revolution, neither Lenin nor Trotsky saw socialism as an immediate prospect in a backward country such as Russia. The proletarian revolution that established the worker-peasant dictatorship was seen as only the first step in the long transition to a fully developed socialist society. As Trotsky was later to argue,10 even in an advanced capitalist country like the USA a proletarian revolution would not be able to bring about a socialist society all at once. A period of transition would be required that would allow the further development of the forces of production necessary to provide the material basis for a self-sustaining socialist society. In an advanced capitalist country like the USA such a period of transition could take several years; in a country as backward as Russia it would take decades, and ultimately it would only be possible with the material support of a socialist Europe.

For both Lenin and Trotsky then, Russia faced a prolonged period of transition, a transition that was fraught with dangers. On the one side stood the ever present danger of the restoration of capitalism either through a counter-revolution backed by foreign military intervention or through the re-emergence of bourgeois relations within the economy; on the other side stood the danger of the increasing bureaucratization of the workers' state. As we shall see, Trotsky saw the key to warding off all these great perils of Russia's transition to socialism in the overriding imperative of both increasing production and developing the forces of production, while waiting for the world revolution.

In the first couple of years following the revolution many on the left wing of the Bolsheviks, enthused by the revolutionary events of 1917 and no doubt inspired by Lenin's State and Revolution, which restated the Marxist vision of a socialist society, saw Russia as being on the verge of communism. For them the policy that had become known as War Communism, under which money had been effectively abolished through hyper-inflation and the market replaced by direct requisitioning in accordance with the immediate needs of the war effort, was an immediate prelude to the communism that would come with the end of the civil war and the spread of the revolution to the rest of Europe.11

Both Lenin and Trotsky rejected such views from the left of the Party. For them the policy of War Communism was little more than a set of emergency measures forced on the revolutionary government which were necessary to win the civil war and defeat armed foreign intervention. For both Lenin and Trotsky there was no immediate prospect of socialism let alone communism12 in Russia, and in his polemics with the left at this time Lenin argued that, given the backward conditions throughout much of Russia, state capitalism would be a welcome advance. As he states:

Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism, that would be a victory. (Lenin's Collected Works Vol. 27, p. 293)

Trotsky went even further, dismissing the growing complaints from the left concerning the bureaucratization of the state and party apparatus, he argued for the militarization of labour in order to maximize production both for the war effort and for the post-war reconstruction. As even Trotsky's admirers have to admit, at this time Trotsky was clearly on the 'authoritarian wing' of the party, and as such distinctly to the right of Lenin.13

It is not surprising, given that he had seen War Communism as merely a collection of emergency measures rather than the first steps to communism, that once the civil war began to draw to a close and the threat of foreign intervention began to recede, Trotsky was one of the first to advocate the abandonment of War Communism and the restoration of money and market relations. These proposals for a retreat to the market were taken up in the New Economic Policy (NEP) that came to be adopted in 1921.

The NEP and the Left Opposition

By 1921 the Bolshevik Government faced a severe political and economic crisis. The policy of forced requisitioning had led to a mass refusal by the peasantry to sow sufficient grain to feed the cities. Faced with famine, thousands of workers simply returned to their relatives in the countryside. At the same time industry had been run into the ground after years of war and revolution. In this dire economic situation, the ending of the civil war had given rise to mounting political unrest amongst the working class, both within and outside the Party, which threatened the very basis of the Bolshevik Government. Faced with political and economic collapse the Bolshevik leadership came to the conclusion that there was no other option but make a major retreat to the market. The Bolshevik Government therefore abandoned War Communism and adopted the New Economic Policy (NEP) which had been previously mooted by Trotsky.

Under the NEP, state industry was broken up in to large trusts which were to be run independently on strict commercial lines. At the same time, a new deal was to be struck with the peasantry. Forced requisitioning was to be replaced with a fixed agricultural tax, with restrictions lifted on the hiring of labour and leasing of land to encourage the rich and middle-income peasants to produce for the market.14 With the retreat from planning, the economic role of the state was to be mainly restricted to re-establishing a stable currency through orthodox financial polices and a balanced state budget.

For Trotsky, the NEP, like War Communism before it, was a policy necessary to preserve the 'workers' state' until it could be rescued by revolution in Western Europe. As we have seen, Trotsky had, like Lenin, foreseen an alliance with the peasantry as central to sustaining a revolutionary government, and the NEP was primarily a means of re-establishing the workers-peasants alliance which had been seriously undermined by the excesses of War Communism. However, as we have also seen, Trotsky had far less confidence in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry than Lenin or other Bolshevik leaders. For Trotsky, the NEP, by encouraging the peasants to produce for the market, held the danger of creating a new class of capitalist farmers who would then provide the social basis for a bourgeois counter-revolution and the restoration of private property. As a consequence, from an early stage, Trotsky began to advocate the development of comprehensive state planning and a commitment to industrialization within the broad framework of the NEP.

Although Trotsky's emphasis on the importance of planning and industrialization left him isolated within the Politburo, it placed him alongside Preobrazhensky at the head of a significant minority within the wider leadership of the Party and state apparatus which supported such a shift in direction of the NEP, and which became known as the Left Opposition. As a leading spokesman for the Left Opposition, and at the same time one of the foremost economists within the Bolshevik Party, Preobrazhensky came to develop the Theory of Primitive Socialist Accumulation which served to underpin the arguments of the Left Opposition, including Trotsky himself.

Preobrazhensky's theory of primitive accumulation

As we have already noted, for the orthodox Marxism of the Second International whereas capitalism was characterized by the operation of market forces - or in more precise Marxist terms the 'law of value' - socialism would be regulated by planning. From this Preobrazhensky argued that the transition from capitalism to socialism had to be understood in terms of the transition from the regulation of the economy through the operation of the law of value to the regulation of the economy through the operation of the 'law of planning'. During the period of transition both the law of value and the law of planning would necessarily co-exist, each conditioning and competing with the other.

Under the New Economic Policy, most industrial production had remained under state ownership and formed the state sector. However, as we have seen, this state sector had been broken up into distinct trusts and enterprises which were given limited freedom to trade with one another and as such were run on a profit-and-loss basis. To this extent it could be seen that the law of value still persisted within the state sector. Yet for Preobrazhensky, the power of the state to direct investment and override profit-and-loss criteria meant that the law of planning predominated in the state sector. In contrast, agriculture was dominated by small-scale peasant producers. As such, although the state was able to regulate the procurement prices for agricultural produce, agriculture was, for Preobrazhensky, dominated by the law of value.

From this Preobrazhensky argued that the struggle between the law of value and the law of planning was at the same time the struggle between the private sector of small-scale agricultural production and the state sector of large-scale industrial production. Yet although large-scale industrial production was both economically and socially more advanced than that of peasant agriculture the sheer size of the peasant sector of the Russian economy meant that there was no guarantee that the law of planning would prevail. Indeed, for Preobrazhensky, under the policy of optimum and balanced growth advocated by Bukharin and the right of the Party and sanctioned by the Party leadership, there was a real danger that the state sector could be subordinated to a faster growing agricultural sector and with this the law of value would prevail.

To avert the restoration of capitalism Preobrazhensky argued that the workers' state had to tilt the economic balance in favour of accumulation within the state sector. By rapid industrialization the state sector could be expanded which would both increase the numbers of the proletariat and enhance the ascendancy of the law of planning. Once a comprehensive industrial base had been established, agriculture could be mechanized and through a process of collectivization agriculture could be eventually brought within the state sector and regulated by the law of planning.

Yet rapid industrialization required huge levels of investment which offered little prospects of returns for several years. For Preobrazhensky there appeared little hope of financing such levels of investment within the state sector itself without squeezing the working class - an option that would undermine the very social base of a workers' government. The only option was to finance industrial investment out of the economic surplus produced in the agricultural sector by the use of tax and pricing policies.

This policy of siphoning off the economic surplus produced in the agricultural sector was to form the basis for a period of Primitive Socialist Accumulation. Preobrazhensky argued that just as capitalism had to undergo a period primitive capitalist accumulation, in which it plundered pre-capitalist modes of production, before it could establish itself on a self-sustaining basis, so, before a socialist society could establish itself on a self-sustaining basis, it too would have to go through an analogous period of primitive socialist accumulation, at least in a backward country such as Russia.

The rise of Stalin

With the decline in Lenin's health and his eventual death in 1924, the question of planning and industrialization became a central issue in the power struggle for the succession to the leadership of the Party. Yet while he was widely recognized within the Party as Lenin's natural successor, and as such had been given Lenin's own blessing, Trotsky was reluctant to challenge the emerging troika of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who, in representing the conservative forces within the state and Party bureaucracy, sought to maintain the NEP as it was. For Trotsky, the overriding danger was the threat of a bourgeois counter-revolution. As a result he was unwilling to split the Party or else undermine the 'centrist' troika and allow the right of the Party to come to power, enabling the restoration of capitalism through the back door.

Furthermore, despite Stalin's ability repeatedly to out-manoeuvre both Trotsky and the Left Opposition through his control of the Party bureaucracy, Trotsky could take comfort from the fact that after the resolution of the first 'scissors crisis'15 in 1923 the leadership of the Party progressively adopted a policy of planning and industrialization, although without fully admitting it.

By 1925, having silenced Trotsky and much of the Left Opposition, Stalin had consolidated sufficient power to oust both Kamenev and Zinoviev16 and force them to join Trotsky in opposition. Having secured the leadership of the Party, Stalin now openly declared a policy of rapid industrialization under the banner of 'building socialism in one country' with particular emphasis on building up heavy industry. Yet at first Stalin refused to finance such an industrialization strategy by squeezing the peasants. Since industrialization had to be financed from within the industrial state sector itself, investment in heavy industry could only come at the expense of investment in light industry which produced the tools and consumer goods demanded by the peasantry. As a result a 'goods famine' emerged as light industry lagged behind the growth of peasant incomes and the growth of heavy industry. Unable to buy goods from the cities the peasants simply hoarded grain so that, despite record harvests in 1927 and 1928, the supply of food sold to the cities fell dramatically.

This crisis of the New Economic Policy brought with it a political crisis within the leadership of the Party and the State. All opposition within the Party had to be crushed. Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Party, with Trotsky eventually being forced into exile, leaving Stalin to assume supreme power in both the Party and the state. To consolidate and sustain his power Stalin was obliged to launch a reign of terror within the Communist Party. This terror culminated in a series of purges and show trials in the 1930s which led to the execution of many of the leading Bolsheviks of the revolution.

Perhaps rather ironically, while Stalin had defended the New Economic Policy to the last, he now set out to resolve the economic crisis by adopting the erstwhile policies of the Left Opposition albeit pushing them to an unenvisaged extreme.17 Under the five year plans, the first of which began in 1928, all economic considerations were subordinated to the overriding objective of maximizing growth and industrialization. Increasing physical output as fast as possible was now to be the number one concern, with the question of profit and loss of individual enterprises reduced to a secondary consideration at best. At the same time agriculture was to be transformed through a policy of forced collectivization. Millions of peasants were herded into collectives and state farms which, under state direction, could apply modern mechanized farming methods.

It was in the face of this about turn in economic policy, and the political terror that accompanied it, that Trotsky was obliged to develop his critique of Stalinist Russia and with this the fate of the Russian Revolution. It was now no longer sufficient for Trotsky to simply criticize the economic policy of the leadership as he had done during the time of the Left Opposition. Instead Trotsky had to broaden his criticisms to explain how the very course of the revolution had ended up in the bureaucratic nightmare that was Stalinist Russia. Trotsky's new critique was to find its fullest expression in his seminal work The Revolution Betrayed which was published in 1936.

Trotsky and the Leninist conception of party, class and the state

As we shall see, in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky concludes that, with the failure of the revolution elsewhere in the world, the workers' state established by the Russian Revolution had degenerated through the bureaucratization of both the Party and the state. To understand how Trotsky was able to come to this conclusion while remaining within Marxist and Leninist orthodoxy, we must first consider how Trotsky appropriated and developed the Leninist conception of the state, party and class.

From almost the very beginning of the Soviet Union there had been those both inside and outside the Party who had warned against the increasing bureaucratization of the revolution. In the early years, Trotsky had little sympathy for such complaints concerning bureaucratization and authoritarianism in the Party and the state. At this time, the immediate imperative of crushing the counter-revolutionary forces, and the long-term aim of building the material basis for socialism, both demanded a strong state and a resolute Party which were seen as necessary to maximize production and develop the productive forces. For Trotsky at this time, the criticisms of bureaucratization and authoritarianism, whether advanced by those on the right or the left, could only serve to undermine the vital role of the Party and the state in the transition to socialism.

However, having been forced into opposition and eventual exile Trotsky was forced to develop his own critique of the bureaucratization of the revolution, but in doing so he was anxious to remain within the basic Leninist conceptions of the state, party and class which he had resolutely defended against earlier critics.

Following Engels, theorists within the Second International had placed much store in the notion that what distinguished Marxism from all former socialist theories was that it was neither an utopian socialism nor an ethical socialism but a scientific socialism. As a consequence, Marxism tended to be viewed as a body of positive scientific knowledge that existed apart from the immediate experiences and practice of the working class. Indeed, Marx's own theory of commodity fetishism seemed to suggest that the social relations of capitalist society inevitably appeared in forms that served to obscure their own true exploitative nature.18 So, while the vast majority of the working class may feel instinctively that they were alienated and exploited, capitalism would still appear to them as being based on freedom and equality. Thus, rather than seeing wage-labour in general as being exploitative, they would see themselves being cheated by a particular wage deal. So, rather than calling for the abolition of wage-labour, left to themselves the working class would call for a 'fair day's pay for a fair day's work'.

Trapped within the routines of their everyday life, the majority of the working class would not be able by themselves to go beyond such a sectional and trade union perspective. Hence one of the central tasks of a workers' party was to educate the working class in the science of Marxism. It would only be through a thorough knowledge of Marxism that the working class would be able to reach class consciousness and as such be in a position to understand its historic role in overthrowing capitalism and bringing about a socialist society.

In adapting this orthodox view of the Party to conditions prevailing in Tsarist Russia Lenin had pushed it to a particular logical extreme. It was in What is to be Done? that Lenin had first set out his conception of a revolutionary party based on democratic centralism. In this work Lenin had advocated a party made up of dedicated and disciplined professional revolutionaries in which, while the overall policy and direction of the party would be made through discussion and democratic decision, in the everyday running of the party the lower organs of the party would be completely subordinated to those of the centre. At the time, Trotsky had strongly criticized What is to be Done?, arguing that Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party implied the substitution of the party for the class.

Indeed, Trotsky's rejection of Lenin's conception of the party has often been seen as the main dividing line between Lenin and Trotsky right up until their eventual reconciliation in the summer of 1917. Thus, it has been argued that, while the young Trotsky had sided with Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks over the crucial issue of the need for an alliance with the peasantry, he had been unable to accept Lenin's authoritarian position on the question of organization. It was only in the revolutionary situation of 1917 that Trotsky had come over to Lenin's viewpoint concerning the organization of the Party. However, there is no doubt that Trotsky accepted the basic premise of What is to be Done?, which was rooted in Marxist orthodoxy, that class consciousness had to be introduced from outside the working class by intellectuals educated in the 'science of Marxism'. There is also little doubt that from an early date Trotsky accepted the need for a centralized party. The differences between Lenin and Trotsky over the question of organization were for the most part a difference of emphasis.19 What seems to have really kept Lenin and Trotsky apart for so long was not so much the question of organization but Trotsky's 'conciliationism'. Whereas Lenin always argued for a sharp differentiation between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks to ensure political and theoretical clarity, Trotsky had always sought to re-unite the two wings of Russian social democracy.

To some extent Lenin's formulation of democratic centralism in What is to be Done? was determined by the repressive conditions then prevailing in Tsarist Russia; but it was also premised on the perceived cultural backwardness of the Russian working class which, it was thought, would necessarily persist even after the revolution. Unlike Germany, the vast majority of the Russian working class were semi-literate and uneducated. Indeed, many, if not a majority of the Russian working class were fresh out of the countryside and, for socialist intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky, retained an uncouth parochial peasant mentality. As such there seemed little hope of educating the vast majority of the working class beyond a basic trade union consciousness.

However, there were a minority within the working class, particularly among its more established and skilled strata, who could, through their own efforts and under the tutelage of the party, attain a clear class consciousness. It was these more advanced workers, which, organized through the party, would form the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat that would be the spearhead of the revolution. Of course this was not to say that rest of the working class, or even the peasantry, could not be revolutionary. On the contrary, for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, revolution was only possible through the mass involvement of the peasants and the working class. But the instinctive revolutionary will of the masses had to be given leadership and direction by the party. Only through the leadership of the proletarian vanguard organized in a revolutionary party would it be possible to mediate and reconcile the immediate and often competing individual and sectional interests of workers and peasants with the overall and long-term interests of the working class in building socialism.

For Lenin, the first task in the transition to socialism had to be the seizure of state power. During his polemics against those on the right of the Bolshevik Party who had, during the summer of 1917, feared that the overthrow of the bourgeois Provisional Government and the seizure of state power might prove premature, Lenin had returned to Engels' conception of the state in the stage of socialism.

Against both Lassalle's conception of state socialism and the anarchists' call for the immediate abolition of the state, Engels had argued that, while it would be necessary to retain the state as means of maintaining the dictatorship of the working class until the danger of counter-revolution had been finally overcome, a socialist state would be radically different from that which had existed before. Under capitalism the state had to stand above society in order both to mediate between competing capitalist interests and to impose the rule of the bourgeois minority over the majority of the population. As a result, the various organs of the state, such as the army, the police and the administrative apparatus had to be separated from the population at large and run by a distinct class of specialists. Under socialism the state would already be in the process of withering away with the breaking down of its separation from society. Thus police and army would be replaced by a workers' militia, while the state administration would be carried out increasingly by the population as a whole.

Rallying the left wing of the Bolshevik Party around this vision of socialism, Lenin had argued that with sufficient revolutionary will on the part of the working masses and with the correct leadership of the party it would be possible to smash the state and begin immediately the construction of Engels' 'semi-state' without too much difficulty.20 Already the basis for the workers' and peasants' state could be seen in the mass organizations of the working class - the factory committees, the soviets and the trade unions, and by the late summer of 1917 most of these had fallen under the leadership of the Bolsheviks.21 Yet this conception of the state which inspired the October revolution did not last long into the new year.

Confronted by the realities of consolidating the power of the new workers' and peasants' government in the backward economic and cultural conditions then prevailing in Russia, it was not long before Lenin was obliged to reconsider his own over-optimistic assessments for the transition to socialism that he had adopted just prior to the October revolution. As a result, within weeks of coming to power it became clear to Lenin that the fledging Soviet State could not afford the time or resources necessary to educate the mass of workers and peasants to the point where they could be drawn into direct participation in the administration of the state. Nor could the economy afford a prolonged period of disruption that would follow the trials and errors of any experiment in workers' self-management. Consequently, Lenin soon concluded that there could be no question of moving immediately towards Engels' conception of a 'semi-state', which after all had been envisaged in the context of a socialist revolution being made in an advanced capitalist country. On the contrary, the overriding imperative of developing the forces of production, which alone could provide the material and cultural conditions necessary for a socialist society, demanded not a weakening, but a strengthening of the state - albeit under the strict leadership of the vanguard of the proletariat organized within the party.

So now, for Lenin, administrative and economic efficiency demanded the concentration of day to day decision making into the hands of specialists and the adoption of the most advanced methods of 'scientific management'.22 The introduction of such measures as one-man management and the adoption of methods of scientific management not only undermined workers' power and initiative over the immediate process of production, but also went hand-in-hand with the employment of thousands of former capitalist managers and former Tsarist administrators.

Yet, while such measures served to re-impose bourgeois relations of production, Lenin argued that such capitalist economic relations could be counter-balanced by the political control exercised over the state-industrial apparatus by the mass organizations of the working class under the leadership of the Party. Indeed, as we have already noted, against the objections from the left that his policies amounted to the introduction not of socialism but of state capitalism, Lenin, returning to the orthodox formulation, retorted that the basis of socialism was nothing more than 'state capitalism under workers' control', and that, given the woeful backwardness of the Russian economy, any development of state capitalism could only be a welcome advance.

As the economic situation deteriorated with the onset of the civil war and the intervention of the infamous 'fourteen imperialist armies',23 the contradictions between the immediate interests of the workers and peasants and those of the socialist revolution could only grow. The need to maintain the political power of the Party led at first to the exclusion of all other worker and peasant parties from the workers' and peasants' government and then to the extension of the Red Terror, which had originally been aimed at counter-revolutionary bourgeois parties, to all those who opposed the Bolsheviks. At the same time power was gradually shifted from the mass organizations of the working class and concentrated within the central organs of the Party.24 As a result it was the Party which had to increasingly serve as the check on the state and the guarantee of its proletarian character.

The degeneration of the revolution

There is no doubt that Trotsky shared such Leninist conceptions concerning the state, party and class, and with them the view that the transition to socialism required both the strengthening of the state and the re-imposition of capitalist relations of production. Indeed, this perspective can be clearly seen in the way he carried out the task of constructing the Red Army.25 What is more, Trotsky did not balk at the implications of these Leninist conceptions and the policies that followed from them. Indeed, Trotsky fully supported the increasing suppression of opposition both inside and outside the Party which culminated with his backing for the suspension of Party factions at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 and his personal role in crushing the Kronstadt rebellion in February 1921.

It can be argued that Trotsky was fully implicated in the Leninist conceptions and policies, and that such conceptions and policies provided both the basis and precedent for Stalinism and the show trials of the 1930s. However, for Trotsky and his followers there was a qualitative difference between the consolidation of power and repression of opposition that were adopted as temporary expedients made necessary due to the civil war and the threat of counter-revolution, and the permanent and institutional measures that were later adopted by Stalin. For Trotsky, this qualitative difference was brought about by the process of bureaucratic degeneration that arose with the failure of world revolution to save the Soviet Revolution from isolation.

In his final years Lenin had become increasingly concerned with the bureaucratization of both the state and Party apparatus. For Lenin, the necessity of employing non-proletarian bourgeois specialists and administrators, who would inevitably tend to work against the revolution whether consciously or unconsciously, meant that there would be a separation of the state apparatus from the working class and with this the emergence of bureaucratic tendencies. However, as a counter to these bureaucratic tendencies stood the Party. The Party, being rooted in the most advanced sections of the working class, acted as a bridge between the state and the working class, and, through the imposition of the 'Party Line', ensured the state remained essentially a 'workers' and peasants' state'.

Yet the losses of the civil war left the Party lacking some of its finest working class militants, and those who remained had been drafted into the apparatus of the Party and state as full time officials. At the same time Lenin feared that more and more non-proletarian careerist elements were joining the Party. As a result, shortly before his death Lenin could complain that only 10 per cent of the Party membership were still at the factory bench. Losing its footing in the working class Lenin could only conclude that the Party itself was becoming bureaucratized.

In developing his own critique of Stalin, Trotsky took up these arguments which had been first put forward by Lenin. Trotsky further emphasized that, with the exhaustion of revolutionary enthusiasm, by the 1920s even the most advanced proletarian elements within the state and Party apparatus had begun to succumb to the pressures of bureaucratization. This process was greatly accelerated by the severe material shortages which encouraged state and Party officials, of whatever class origin, to place their own collective and individual interests as part of the bureaucracy above those of working masses.

For Trotsky, the rise to power of the troika of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev following Lenin's death marked the point where this process of bureaucratization of the state and Party had reached and ensnared the very leadership of the Party itself.26 Drawing a parallel with the course of the French Revolution, Trotsky argued that this point represented the transition to the Russian Thermidor - a period of conservative reaction arising from the revolution itself. As such, for Trotsky, Russia remained a workers' state, but one whose proletarian-socialist policies had now become distorted by the privileged and increasingly conservative strata of the proletariat that formed the bureaucracy, and through which state policy was both formulated and implemented.

For Trotsky, these conservative-bureaucratic distortions of state policy were clearly evident in both the internal and external affairs. Conservative-bureaucratic distortions were exemplified in foreign policy by the abandonment of proletarian internationalism, which had sought to spread the revolution beyond the borders of the former Russian empire, in favour of the policy of 'building socialism in one country'. For the bureaucracy the disavowal of proletarian internationalism opened the way for the normalization of diplomatic relations with the capitalist powers throughout the rest of the world. For Trotsky, the abandonment of proletarian internationalism diminished the prospects of world revolution which was ultimately the only hope for the Russian Revolution if it was to avoid isolation in a capitalist world and further degeneration culminating in the eventual restoration of capitalism in Russia. Domestically, the policy of building socialism in one country had its counterpart in the persistence of the cautious economic policies of balanced and optimal growth represented by the continuation of the NEP, which for Trotsky, as we have already seen, threatened the rise of a new bourgeoisie amongst the rich peasantry and with this the danger of capitalist restoration.

However, just as the Thermidor period of conservative reaction had given way to the counter-revolution of Napoleon Bonaparte which imposed the dictatorship of one man, so the Russian Thermidor, which ended with the crisis in the NEP, gave rise to Stalin as the sole dictator. For Trotsky then, the dictatorship of Stalin represented a 'Bonapartist counter-revolution' from within the revolution itself, which marked the final stage in the degeneration of the Russian workers' state. Yet, just as Bonaparte's counter-revolution was a political revolution which while restoring the monarchy did so by preserving the transformation of property relations achieved by the revolution, so likewise Stalin's counter-revolution preserved the fundamental gains of the Russian Revolution in that it maintained public ownership of the means of production along with state planning. Indeed, while Trotsky dismissed Stalin's claims that, with the collectivization of agriculture and introduction of comprehensive centralized planning of the five year plans, Russia had become fully socialist, he accepted that these were major achievements in the transition towards socialism.

So, for Trotsky, however degenerated Stalin's Russia had become, it remained a workers' state and as such preserved the fundamental gains of the revolution. By preserving public ownership of the means of production and state planning, which opened the way for the rapid development of the forces of production, Stalin's regime could be seen to develop the objective social and material conditions necessary for socialism. As such, for all its crimes, Stalin's Russia objectively represented a crucial historic advance over all capitalist countries. Therefore, for Trotsky, Stalin's Russia demanded critical support from all revolutionaries.27

Yet, as we shall see, the increasing tension between the barbarism of Stalin's regime, which condemned millions of workers, peasants and revolutionaries (including many of Trotsky's own former comrades) to death or hard labour, and Trotsky's insistence of its objectively progressive character, prompted many, including Trotsky's own ardent followers, to question his notion that Stalinist Russia was a degenerated workers' state.

The obvious objection was that the totalitarianism of Stalin's regime was virtually indistinguishable from that of Hitler's which had also gone a long way towards nationalizing the economy and bring it under state planning. Trotsky dismissed any resemblance between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany as being merely superficial. For Trotsky, during its period of decline capitalism would necessarily be forced into an increasing statification of the economy which would give rise to authoritarian and fascist regimes. This process towards state capitalism had already reached an extreme in such countries as Italy under Mussolini and Germany under Hitler but could also be seen in the growing statism and authoritarianism in other 'democratic' countries such as France. However, such statification of the economy and the growth in public ownership of the means of production was being carried out as a last ditch effort to preserve its opposite, private property. Stalin's Russia, on the other hand, was developing on the very basis of the public ownership of the means of production itself. Stalinist Russia had crossed the historical Rubicon of the socialist revolution. Thus, while it may have appeared that Stalin's Russia was similar to that of Hitler's Germany, for Trotsky they were essentially very different.

Bureaucracy and class

A more penetrating objection to Trotsky's critical defence of Stalinist Russia concerned the question of the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Against Trotsky, it could be argued that under Stalin, if not before, the Soviet bureaucracy had established itself as a new exploitative ruling class. If this was the case then it could no longer be maintained that Stalinist Russia was in any sense a workers' state, however degenerated. Further, if the bureaucracy was not simply a strata of the proletariat that had become separated from the rest of its class, but a class in itself, it could no longer be claimed that the bureaucracy ultimately ruled in the interests of the working class, albeit in a distorted manner. The bureaucracy could only rule in its own narrow and minority class interests. As a result it could be concluded that either Russia had reverted back to a form of state capitalism, or else had given rise to a new unknown mode of production; either way there could be no longer any obligation for revolutionaries to give Stalin's monstrous regime 'critical support'.

Given that this charge that the Stalinist's bureaucracy constituted a distinct exploitative class threatened to undermine the very basis of his theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state, Trotsky was at great pains to refute it. Of course, it was central to Trotsky's critique of the Soviet Union under Stalin that the bureaucracy had emerged as a distinct social group that had come to dominate the working class. Indeed, as Trotsky himself put it, the bureaucracy constituted 'a commanding and privileged social stratum'. Yet despite this Trotsky denied that the bureaucracy could in any way constitute a distinct exploitative class.

In denying that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted a distinct social class Trotsky was able to directly invoke the orthodox Marxist conceptions of class and bureaucracy. In doing so Trotsky was able to claim at the same time that he was defending Marxism itself against the revisionist arguments of his opponents; but, as we shall see, by invoking the authority of Marx, Trotsky was spared the task of setting out the basis of his own conception of the nature of class and bureaucracy with any degree of clarity.

For both Marx and Engels social classes were constituted through the social relations that necessarily arose out of the particular mode of production upon which a given society was based. Indeed, for Marx and Engels, the specific nature of any class society was determined by the manner in which the exploitative classes extracted surplus labour from the direct producers.

For orthodox Marxism, such social relations were interpreted primarily in terms of property relations.28 Hence, within the capitalist mode of production the essential social relations of production were seen primarily in terms of the private ownership of the means of production. While the capitalist class was constituted through its private ownership of the means of production, the working class was constituted through its non-ownership of the means of production. Being excluded from the ownership of the means of production, the working class, once it has consumed its means of subsistence, had no option but to sell its labour power to the capitalist class if it was to survive. On the other hand, in buying the labour power of the working class the capitalist class obtained the rights of possession of all the wealth that the working class created with its labour. Once it had paid the costs of production, including the costs of reproducing labour-power, the capitalist class was left in possession of the surplus-labour created by the working class, as the direct producers, in the specific social form of surplus-value.29

On the basis of this orthodox interpretation of the nature of class, backed up by various political writings of both Marx and Engels, it was not hard to argue that, at least within capitalism, the state bureaucracy could not constitute a distinct social class. The state bureaucracy could clearly be seen to stand outside the immediate process of production and circulation, and as such was not directly constituted out of the social relations of production. Even insofar as the state was able to go beyond its mere function as the 'executive committee of the bourgeoisie' so that the state bureaucracy could act as a distinct social group which was able to pursue its own ends and interests, the state bureaucracy still did not constitute a distinct class since its social position was not based in private property but in its extra-economic political and administrative functions. So, even insofar as the state bureaucracy was able to appropriate a share in the surplus-value it did so not by virtue of its private ownership of the means of production or capital but through extra-economic means such as taxation and tariffs.

So, at least under capitalism, it seemed clear that the state bureaucracy could not constitute a distinct social class. But what of the transition from capitalism to socialism? For Trotsky, following Marxist orthodoxy, the question was clear cut. The revolution of 1917 had swept away the private ownership of the means of production and with it the basis for the exploitation of 'man by man' which had been perfected under capitalism. With the nationalization of the means of production and the introduction of social planning there was no basis for the state bureaucracy to exist as an exploitative class.

Trotsky made clear his position at the very outset of his consideration of the social position of the Soviet bureaucracy:

Classes are characterized by their position in the social system of economy, and primarily by their relation to the means of production. In civilized societies, property relations are validated by laws. The nationalization of land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitute the basis of the social structure. Through these relations, established by the proletarian revolution, the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us basically defined. (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 248)

To this extent Trotsky's position is little different from that of Stalin: the abolition of private property ends the exploitation of 'man by man'.30

Of course, Trotsky could not simply remain content with Stalin's denial that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted an exploitative class. Indeed Stalin's position even denied the existence of the bureaucracy as a distinct social group. To make his critique of Stalin's Russia, Trotsky had to look beyond the formal and judicial transformation of property relations brought about by the Russian Revolution in 1917. Trotsky recognized that, although the nationalization decrees that followed the October revolution had formally and juridically transferred the ownership of the means of production from the hands of private capitalists to society as a whole, this was not the same as the real transfer of the ownership to the people as a whole. The nationalization of production had merely transferred the ownership of the means of production from the capitalist to the state, which, while a necessary step in the transition to socialism, was not the same as real public ownership. For Trotsky, in a real sense the 'state owns the economy and the bureaucracy owns the state'.

As Trotsky himself points out, the real property relations, as opposed to the formal and juridical property relations, is a social reality acutely apparent to the Soviet worker:

"The worker in our country is not a wage slave and is not a seller of a commodity called labour-power. He is a free workman" (Pravda). For the present period this unctuous formula is unpermissible bragging. The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically. In reality, he is compelled to live in want and work a definite amount of hours for a definite wage. Those hopes which the worker formerly placed in the party and the trade unions, he transferred after the revolution to the state created by him. But the useful functioning of this implement turned out to be limited by the level of technique and culture. In order to raise this level, the new state resorted to the old methods of pressure upon the muscles and nerves of the worker. There grew up a corps of slave drivers. The management of industry became super-bureaucratic. The workers lost all influence whatever upon management of the factory. With piecework payment, hard conditions of material existence, lack of free movement, with terrible police repression penetrating the life of every factory, it is hard indeed for the worker to feel himself a free workman. (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 241)

For Trotsky, the overriding need to develop the productive forces in the backward conditions prevailing in Russia required the state ownership of production. Through the state the Soviet bureaucracy had, in a sense, taken real possession of the means of production and as such had come to constitute a distinct social group. Just as Marx and Engels had observed that under capitalism the state bureaucracy could in certain situations obtain a relative degree of autonomy from the bourgeois ruling class, so in the transition to socialism the state bureaucracy was able to obtain a relative autonomy from the proletarian ruling class. Indeed, Trotsky argues that the autonomy of the Soviet bureaucracy is all the greater than its counterparts under capitalism since the working class is not an inherently dominating class.

Thus, while the revolution had formally freed the worker from the dictates of private property and made him a co-owner of the means of production, in reality the worker found himself in a situation that seemed little different from that under capitalism. Indeed, subordinated to the demands of the state bureaucracy the worker may well feel just as exploited as he had been under capitalism. But for Trotsky, although the worker may subjectively feel exploited, objectively he was not. The plight of the workers' situation was not due to exploitation but to the objective need to develop the forces of production. Of course, like all bureaucracies the Soviet bureaucracy could abuse its position to obtain material and personal advantages and this could reinforce the workers' perception that the bureaucracy was exploiting them. But for Trotsky such material and personal advantages were not due to the exploitation of the working class by the state bureaucracy, but due to the bureaucracy's privileged position within the workers' state.

Hence while the nationalization of the means of production by the workers' state had ended capitalist relations of production and thereby ended exploitation, the backward conditions in Russia had allowed the Soviet bureaucracy to gain a privileged and commanding position and maintain bourgeois norms of distribution. The bureaucracy no more exploited the working class than monopolist capitalists exploited other capitalists by charging monopoly prices. All the Soviet bureaucracy did was redistribute the surplus-labour of society in its own favour. This is perhaps best illustrated by Trotsky's own analogy with share-holding in a market economy:

If we translate socialist relations, for illustration, into the language of the market, we may represent the citizen as a stockholder in a company which owns the wealth of country. If property belonged to all the people, that would presume equal distribution of "shares", and consequently a right to the same dividend for all "shareholders". The citizens participate in the national enterprise, however, not only as "shareholders", but also as producers. On the lower stage of communism, which we have agreed to call socialism, payments for labour are still made according to bourgeois norms - that is, dependence upon skill and intensity etc. The theoretical income of each citizen is thus composed of two parts, a + b - that is, dividend plus wages. The higher the technique and the more complete the organization of industry, the greater is the place occupied by a as against b, and the less is the influence of individual differences of labour upon the standard of living. From the fact that wage differences in the Soviet Union are not less, but greater than in capitalist countries, it must be inferred that the shares of the Soviet citizen are not equally distributed, and that in his income the dividend as well as the wage payment are unequal. Whereas the unskilled labour receives only b, the minimum payment which under similar conditions he would receive in a capitalist enterprise, the Stakhanovist or bureaucrat receives 2a + b, or 3a + b, etc., while b also in turn may become 2b, 3b, etc. The differences in income are determined, in other words, not only by differences of individual productiveness, but also by a masked appropriation of the products of labour of others. The privileged minority of shareholders is living at the expense of the deprived majority. (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 240).

So, for Trotsky, insofar as the revolution of 1917 had abolished the private ownership of the means of production the basis for socialist relations of production had been established. However, in the backward conditions in which the revolution had been made, bourgeois norms of distribution still persisted and had become exacerbated by the growing power of the state bureaucracy in such conditions.

Trotsky and the question of transition

Trotsky's attempt to develop a Marxist critique of Stalin's Russia, while at the same time denying that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted an exploitative class, was far from being unproblematic. In developing this critique of the Soviet Union through his polemics against Stalinists on the one hand, and the left communists and some of his own followers on the other, Trotsky had little time to present in detail the theoretical foundations of his arguments. Instead, as we have already noted, Trotsky for the most part appealed to the commonly accepted tenets of orthodox Marxism. As a consequence Trotsky failed to set out clearly his ideas on such fundamental matters as the connection between the productive forces and the social relations of production, the social relations of production and property relations, and between production and distribution. As we have already indicated, perhaps the most important weakness of Trotsky is his acceptance of the orthodox reduction of social relations of production to simple property relations, we shall briefly examine this now.

As we have seen, not only did Trotsky interpret the social relations of production primarily in terms of property relations but, along with Stalin, insisted that these property relations had to be given an immediate expression in the juridical property relations that regulated society. As Trotsky asserts: 'In all civilized societies, property relations are validated by laws'. But, as we have also seen, in order to press home his critique of the Soviet bureaucracy Trotsky had to go beyond the apparent legal property relations of the Soviet Union and in doing so, at least implicitly, acknowledge that real property relations may differ from their formal and juridical expression.

Of course, this disjunction between real and formal property relations is not unknown in capitalism itself. With the development of the modern corporation from the end of the nineteenth century there has arisen a growing divergence between the ownership of the means of production and their management. The modern joint stock company is formally owned by its shareholders while the actual running of the company is left to the senior management who can be said to have the real possession of the means of production. For Trotsky, the social relations of production would be transformed simply by nationalizing the firm so that it is run for society as a whole rather than for a few shareholders. With nationalization, legal ownership is transferred to the state while the real possession of means of production may remain in the hands of the management or bureaucracy. Hence, just as under certain circumstances the management of joint stock company cream off some of the profits in the form of huge salaries and share options, so under conditions of underdevelopment the management of state enterprises may also be in a position to cream of the economic surplus produced by the nationalized industry.

Yet few would deny that while the management of a capitalist enterprise may not themselves legally own the firm they still function as capitalists with regard to the workers. The management functions to extract surplus-value and as a consequence they function as the actual exploiters of the workers. Within the Soviet enterprise the workers may formally own the means of production but in real terms they are dispossessed. They have to sell their labour-power for a wage. On the other side the 'socialist' management are obliged to extract surplus-labour just as much as their capitalist counterparts, as even Trotsky admits. It would seem that the actual social relations of production between the workers who are really dispossessed and the management who have real possession of the means of production is the same. What has changed is the merely the formal property relations which affects the distribution of the surplus-labour, not its production.

In this view Trotsky's position becomes inverted: the revolution of 1917 only went so far as to socialize the distribution of the economic surplus while leaving the social relations of production as capitalist. This line of argument provides the basis for a telling critique, not only against Trotsky's theory of a degenerated workers' state, but also the 'politicism' of the entire Leninist project which had been inherited from the orthodox Marxism of the Second International.31 Indeed, as we shall see, this line of argument has often been taken up in various guises by many anarchists and left communists opposed to the Leninist conception of the USSR and the Russian Revolution. Yet, if we are to grasp what has given Trotsky's theory of a degenerated workers' state its hold as one of the principle critiques of the USSR it is necessary to consider the importance of 'transition' to Trotsky.

As we have seen, the notion that the Soviet Union was in a state of transition from capitalism to socialism was central for Trotsky. Indeed, it is this very notion of transition which allowed Trotsky to defend the orthodox Leninist and Marxist positions alongside Stalin, while at the same time distancing himself sufficiently from Stalin to make a thorough critique of the USSR. As we have already pointed out, both Stalin and Trotsky supported the orthodox position that the real social relations of production of any established mode of production would have to find their immediate legal and formal expression. Yet, while Stalin asserted that with the five year plans and the collectivization of agriculture the USSR had become socialist, Trotsky insisted that the USSR was still in a state of transition from capitalism to socialism. Since the USSR was in transition from one mode of production to another, the formal and legal property relations could be in advance of the real relations of production. The disjunction between the real and formal property relations of the USSR was the result of the real contradictions in the transformation of capitalist social relations into those of socialism.

Of course for Trotsky, sooner or later formal property relations would have to be brought into conformity with the real social relations of production. Either the development of the productive forces would eventually allow the formal property relations to be given a real socialist content or else the USSR would collapse back into capitalism with the restoration of the private ownership of the means of production.

Furthermore, for Trotsky, it was this contradiction between the formal property relations and the social relations of production that placed the bureaucracy in a precarious and unstable position which prevented it from constituting itself as a class. To defend its position the bureaucracy had to defend state property and develop the forces of production. Yet, while the social position of the individual capitalist was rooted in the private ownership of the means of production that was backed by law, the individual bureaucrat was simply an employee of the state who owed his or her position to those higher up in the bureaucracy. Unable to reproduce itself over the generations through inheritance Trotsky believed that the Soviet bureaucracy could not last long. The Soviet bureaucracy was merely a fleeting phenomena of transition that would one way or another have to pass away.32

It was on this basis that Trotsky argued:

To the extent that, in contrast to decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, [the bureaucracy] is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration. (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 244)

So, for Trotsky, either the Soviet Union would make the transition to socialism, in which case the bureaucracy would be swept away, or else it would into capitalism and the bureaucracy would legalize their position through the reintroduction of private property and capitalism, and in doing so transform themselves into a new capitalist class.

Trotsky's notion that the USSR was in a state of transition from capitalism to socialism was central to his theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state and, at the time of writing, seemed to give his theory substantial explanatory power. Yet Trotsky's prognosis that the end of the Second World War would see the Soviet Union either become socialist with the support of world revolution or else face the restoration of capitalism was to be contradicted by the entrenchment of the Soviet bureaucracy following the war. As we shall see, this was to provoke a recurrent crisis amongst Trotsky's followers.

Section 2: The theory of the USSR as a form of state capitalism within Trotskyism

Introduction

For Trotsky, the Stalinist system in the USSR could only be but a transitory historical phenomena. Lacking a firm legal basis in the ownership of the means of production, the Stalinist bureaucracy was doomed to a mere fleeting appearance in the overall course of history. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Trotsky had been convinced that the days of the Stalinist bureaucracy were numbered.

For Trotsky, world capitalism was in terminal decline. The economic stagnation that had followed the Wall Street crash in 1929 could only intensify imperialist rivalries amongst the great capitalist powers which ultimately could only be resolved through the devastation of a Second World War. Yet Trotsky firmly believed that, like the First World War, this Second World War would bring in its wake a renewed revolutionary wave that would sweep the whole of Europe if not the world. In the midst of such a revolutionary wave the Russian working class would be in a position to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy in a political revolution which would then, with the aid of revolutions elsewhere, open the way for Russia to complete its transition to socialism. Even if the worst came to the worst, and the post-war revolutionary wave was defeated, then the way would then be open for the restoration of capitalism in Russia. With the defeat of the proletariat, both in Russia and elsewhere, the Stalinist bureaucracy would soon take the opportunity to convert itself into a new bourgeoisie through the privatization of state industry. Either way the Stalinist bureaucracy would soon disappear, along with the entire Stalinist system that had arisen from the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

As the approach of the Second World War became more and more apparent, Trotsky became more convinced that Stalin's day of reckoning would not be far off. Yet not all of Trotsky's followers shared his optimism.

Following his expulsion from Russia in 1929 Trotsky had sought to re-establish the Left Opposition on an international basis seeking to oppose Stalin within the Third International of Communist Parties. However, in the face of Stalin's resolute hold over the Third International and its constituent Communist Parties Trotsky's efforts to build the International Left Opposition within the official world Communist movement soon proved to be futile. In 1933 Trotsky decided to break from the Third International and attempt to regroup all those Communists opposed to Stalin in an effort to build a new Fourth International.

With the international upturn in class struggle of the mid-1930s, which culminated in the Spanish Revolution in 1936, increasing numbers of Communists who had become disillusioned with Stalinism were drawn to Trotsky's project. By 1938 Trotsky had felt that the time had come to establish the Fourth International. Although the various groups across the world who supported the project of a Fourth International were still very small compared with the mass Communists Parties of the Third International, Trotsky believed that it was vital to have the international organization of the Fourth International in place before the onset of the Second World War. Trotsky believed that just as the First World War had thrown the international workers' movement into confusion, with all the Socialist Parties of the Second International being swept along in patriotic fervour, so the same would happen with the onset of the Second World War. In such circumstances the Fourth International would have to provide a resolute point of reference and clarity in the coming storm which could then provide a rallying point once the patriotic fever had given way to the urge for revolution amongst the working class across the world.

Yet by 1938 the upturn in class struggle had more or less passed. The Spanish Revolution had been defeated and Franco's fascists were well on their way to winning the Spanish Civil War. With fascism already triumphant in Italy and Germany and advancing elsewhere in Europe the situation was looking increasing bleak for those on the left that had become disillusioned with Stalinism. Furthermore, few could have been as convinced as Trotsky was that the onset of a Second World War, which promised to be even more terrible than first, would bring in its wake a renewed revolutionary situation in Europe, if not the world.

As a consequence, many, even within the Fourth International, came to draw rather pessimistic conclusions concerning the world situation. Within such a pessimistic perspective it was easy to conclude that the socialist revolution had failed, both in Russia and the rest of Europe, in the early 1920s. From this it was but a short step to argue that capitalism was not being replaced by socialism, as Marx had foreseen, but by a new and unforeseen form of society in which all political and economic life was subsumed by a totalitarian state, which had become evident not only in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany but also in Stalin's Russia. This new form of society now seemed destined to dominate the world, just as capitalism had done before it. This view found its expression in the various theories of 'bureaucratic collectivism' that increasingly gained support amongst Trotskyists towards the end of the 1930s.

The theory of bureaucratic collectivism was originally put forward by Bruno Rizzi in the early 1930s. Yet it was in 1939 that this theory became central to the first grave crisis in Trotskyism. As we have seen, on the basis of his theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, Trotsky had argued that, despite all the crimes perpetuated by the Stalin's regime, it was necessary, in order to defend the proletarian gains of the Russian Revolution, to give critical support to the Soviet Union. As we have also noted, this position became increasingly difficult to defend as true nature of Stalin's regime became apparent, particularly after the Moscow show trials of the 1930s and the role of the Stalinists in crushing the workers' revolution in Spain in the May Days of 1937. For many Trotskyists the last straw came when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Here was the USSR openly dealing with a fascist regime!

In September 1939 several leading members of the Socialist Workers' Party of the USA, which, with several thousand members, was one of the largest sections of the Fourth International, announced the formation of an organized minority faction opposed to the official stance towards the USSR. In their polemics with Trotsky and his supporters in the American SWP the notion central to bureaucratic collectivism - that Stalin's Russia was little different from that of Hitler's Germany - proved to be a powerful weapon. Indeed, many of the leading figures in this oppositional faction, which eventually split from the SWP in 1940 to form the Workers' Party, came to adopt the theory of bureaucratic collectivism as their own. As such the theory of bureaucratic collectivism came to pose the main challenge to orthodox Trotskyism from within Trotskyism itself.

In his interventions in the fierce polemics that preceded the split in the American SWP, Trotsky made it clear that he saw the theory of bureaucratic collectivism as nothing less than a direct attack not merely on his own ideas, but on Marxism itself. The notion that the capitalist mode of production was destined to be surpassed, not by socialism but by a form of society based on bureaucratic collectivism, clearly broke with the fundamental understanding of history that had underpinned Marxism from its very inception. Yet, if this was not bad enough, none of the various versions of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism went as far to provide an adequate materialist and class analysis of what bureaucratic collectivism was and how it had come about. As a result, as Trotsky ceaselessly pointed out, these theories of bureaucratic collectivism were unable to go beyond the level of appearance and as such remained merely descriptive.

Such criticisms were seen to be borne out by the eventual fate of the various theories of bureaucratic collectivism and their leading proponents. Having abandoned Marxism, the theories of bureaucratic collectivism lacked any theoretical grounding of their own. As a consequence they were obliged to look to various strands of bourgeois sociology and ended up joining the growing stream of bourgeois theories that saw the increasing totalitarianism and bureaucratization of modern societies as an inevitable result of the complexities of industrial society. This was perhaps best illustrated by one of the leading figures in the split from the American SWP in 1940, James Burnham. As a university professor, Burnham was recognized as one of the leading intellectuals in the minority that split from the American SWP, but he went on to become one of the originators of the theory of the 'managerial society' which was to become popular amongst bourgeois sociologists in the '50s and '60s. Yet while the logic of bureaucratic collectivism led Burnham to become a liberal, for Schachtman, who had been one of the prime proponents of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, it meant eventually ending up as a virulent anti-Communist who openly backed the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s. For those who remained loyal to Trotsky the fate of these supporters of the bureaucratic collectivism could only be taken as a stern lesson in the dangers of straying too far from the teachings of Trotsky and Marxist orthodoxy.

Yet it should be noted here that not all those who split from the American SWP at this time were proponents of a theory of bureaucratic collectivism or variants of one. From the very foundation of the Fourth International there had been a significant minority with the Trotskyist movement who had opposed Trotsky's stance to the USSR by arguing that Russia was not a degenerated workers' state but was simply state capitalist.33 It was this theory of the USSR as being state capitalist which was to re-emerge with greater force after the Second World War, as we shall now see.

The theory of state capitalism and the second crisis in Trotskyism

Trotsky's predictions for the end of the Second World War, which had sustained the hopes of those who had remained loyal to him, were soon proved to be false. There was no repeat of the great revolutionary wave that had swept Europe at the end of the First World War; nor was the grip of either Stalinism or social democracy on the workers' movements weakened. On the contrary, both Stalinism and social democracy emerged from the Second World War far stronger than they had ever been.

As it became increasingly apparent that the realities of the immediate post-war world contradicted the predictions that Trotsky had made before his death in 1940, and with them the basic orientation of the Fourth International, the strains within the Trotskyist movement between those who sought to revise Trotskyism to meet these new realities and those who feared such revisionism reached the point of crisis. In 1953, less that eight years after the end of the war the Fourth International finally split giving rise to the '57 varieties' of Trotskyism that we find today. One of the crucial issues at the heart of this crisis within Trotskyism was that of the question of the respective natures of the USSR and Eastern Europe.

The retreat of the German armies during the final stages of the war had prompted popular uprisings across Eastern Europe. For the most part these uprisings had either been contained by the Stalinists, where they provided the popular base on which to build broad-based anti-fascist governments, or, to the extent that they could not be contained, they were either crushed by the advancing Red Army, or else abandoned to the vengeance of the retreating German forces.

At first Stalin did not seek to impose the economic or political model of the Soviet Union on the countries of Eastern Europe. The broad-based anti-fascist governments were elected on traditional bourgeois-democratic lines and in most cases came to include not only Communists and socialists but also liberals and representatives of the peasant and rural classes. Although these governments were encouraged to carry out nationalizations of key industries, and implement various social and agrarian reforms, in many respects this differed little from the policies of nationalization of ailing industry and welfare reforms that were happening elsewhere in Europe. But as the Cold War began to set in, and Europe began to polarize between East and West, Stalin began to impose the Soviet economic and political model on to Eastern Europe. If necessary, the post-war coalitions were pushed aside and the wholesale nationalization of industry was carried out and the market was replaced by centralized planning.

The initial phase of the post-war era in Eastern Europe had presented Trotskyists with few problems. The uprisings at the end of the war could be seen as portents of the coming world revolution, while the repression by the Stalinists could be righteously condemned. Furthermore, the fact that these uprisings had for the most part failed explained why Eastern Europe remained capitalist. However, once the 'Russification of Eastern Europe' began to take place, Trotskyist theory began to face a serious dilemma.

Of course, the transformation of property relations that had been brought about by the wholesale nationalization of industry and the introduction of centralized planning could be seen to reaffirm Trotsky's insistence on the objectively progressive role of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Indeed, it could now be argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy had not only defended the proletarian gains of the Russian Revolution but had now extended them to the rest of Eastern Europe.

Yet, if this was the case, did this not imply that the countries of Eastern Europe had now become degenerated workers' states like the USSR? But how could you have a degenerated workers' state when there had been no revolution, and thus no workers' state, in the first place?! It was now no longer just that a workers' state was supposed to exist where the workers had no state power, as Trotsky had argued for Stalinist Russia, but workers' states' were now supposed to exist where the working class had never been in power! With the question of Eastern Europe the fundamental dichotomy of Trotsky's theory of a degenerated workers' state, in which the objective interests of the working class are somehow able to stand apart from and against the working class in the form of the alien power of the bureaucracy, now stood exposed.

But if the countries of Eastern Europe were not admitted as being degenerated workers' states then what were they? The obvious answer, given that the principle means of production had been simply nationalized by the state without a workers' revolution, was that they were state capitalist. However, such an answer contained even greater dangers for orthodox Trotskyists than the first. As Eastern Europe became reconstructed in the image of the USSR it became increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that if the countries of Eastern Europe were state capitalist then so must the Soviet Union be nothing other than a form of state capitalism.

After numerous attempts to resolve this dilemma the official line which emerged within the leadership of the Fourth International was that the uprising at the end of the war had all been part of a proletarian revolution that had been mutilated and deformed by Stalinism. The countries of Eastern Europe were therefore not degenerated workers' states as such, but 'deformed workers' states'. Yet this attempted solution still implied that the Stalinist bureaucracy was an active agent in creating the objective conditions of socialism. As we have seen, Trotsky had argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was progressive in that in defending its own basis in state property it was impelled to defend the objective gains of the proletarian revolution, that is the state ownership of the means of production. Now Trotskyism had come to argue that the Stalinist bureaucracy not only defended such proletarian gains but could now actually extend them! With the Stalinist bureaucracy now deemed to be a primary agent in the transition to socialism the importance of the revolutionary role of the working class became diminished. The way was now opened for Trotskyists in the coming decades to support all sorts of nationalist movements regardless of the role within them of the proletariat.34

Cliff and the neo-Trotskyist theory of the USSR as state capitalist

Perhaps rather ironically, Tony Cliff was originally sent to Britain by the leadership of the Fourth International in an effort to head off any potential support within the British Section for the theory that Eastern Europe and the USSR were in any way state capitalist. As it turned out, it was not Gerry Healey, Ted Grant or any of the other leading figures of the British Revolutionary Communist Party35 at that time who came to adopt the theory of state capitalism but none other than Cliff himself.

Yet in coming to the viewpoint that it was not only Eastern Europe that was state capitalist but also the USSR, Tony Cliff was determined not to follow in the footsteps of so many former Trotskyists who, having rejected Trotsky's theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state, had come to reject Trotsky and even Marxism itself. Instead, Cliff was committed to developing a state capitalist theory of the USSR which remained firmly within both the Trotskyist and orthodox Marxist tradition. Against those who argued that the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state was central to Trotsky's Marxism, Cliff replied by arguing that not only were there numerous examples in Trotsky's own writings where he indicated serious doubts concerning his conclusion that the USSR was a degenerated workers' state but that towards the end of his life Trotsky had shown signs of moving away from such conclusions altogether. Indeed, Cliff sought to claim that had Trotsky lived then he too would have eventually come round to the conclusion that the USSR had become state capitalist, and certainly would not have dogmatically defended a position that flew in the face of all the evidence as his loyal followers in the leadership of the Fourth International had done.

Cliff originally presented his rather heretical ideas in 1948 in the form of a duplicated discussion document entitled The Nature of Stalinist Russia. After several editions and accompanying amendments and additions, this text now takes the form of a book entitled State Capitalism in Russia which provides us with a definitive statement of Cliff's position.

Cliff devoted much of the first third of State Capitalism in Russia to presenting a mass of evidence with which he sought to show both the exploitative and repressive nature of the USSR. Yet, as powerful an indictment of the Stalinist regime as this may have been, the evidence Cliff presented was far from sufficient to convince his opponents within either the Revolutionary Communist Party or the broader Fourth International. For orthodox Trotskyists such evidence could simply be taken to confirm the extent of the degeneration of the Soviet Union and did little to refute the persistence of Russia as essentially a workers' state. As Cliff himself recognized, it was necessary to demonstrate that the apparent exploitative and repressive character of the Soviet Union necessarily arose, not from the degeneration of the Soviet Union as a workers' state but rather from the fact that under Stalin the USSR had ceased to be a workers' state and had become state capitalist. Yet to do this Cliff had first of all to clarify what he meant by 'state capitalism' and how such a conception was not only compatible with, but rooted within the orthodox Marxist tradition.

For orthodox Marxism, capitalism had been defined as a class society dominated by generalized commodity exchange which arises from the private ownership of the means of production. On the basis of such a definition it would appear, at least at first sight, that the notion of state capitalism in the absolute sense was a contradiction in terms. If all of the means of production are nationalized, the capitalist class expropriated and the law of value and the market replaced by state allocation and planning, then it would appear that capitalism must have been, by definition, abolished. If it was accepted that, for the most part, the Russian Revolution had led to the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production, then it would seem clear that, from a Marxist point of view, capitalism in any form could not exist in the USSR. (And of course this is the common objection we find advanced against all theories of state capitalism in the USSR.)

However, as Cliff was keen to point out, it had also been central to orthodox Marxism that the capitalist mode of production was transitory. Capitalism was merely a phase in human history whose very development would eventually undermine its own basis. As capitalism repeatedly revolutionized methods of production it advanced the forces of production to an unprecedented degree. Yet in advancing the forces of production capitalism was obliged to increasingly socialize production as production was carried out on an ever larger and more complex scale. The more social the production process became the more it came into conflict with the private appropriation of the wealth that it produced. As a result capitalism was obliged to negate its very own basis in the private ownership of production and in doing so it prepared the way for socialism.

As we have noted before, already by the end of the nineteenth century most Marxists had come to the view that the classical stage of free competitive capitalism, that had been described and analysed by Marx in the 1860s, had given way to the final stages of the capitalist era. The growth of huge cartels and monopolies and the increasing economic role of the state was seen as negating the market and the operation of the law of value. At the same time the emergence of joint stock companies and the nationalization of key industries meant the replacement of individual capitalist ownership of the means of production by collective forms of ownership which implied the further negation of private property. Indeed, as Engels argued, the development of both monopoly and state capitalism was leading to the point that the capitalist class was superfluous to the production process itself. Capital no longer needed the capitalist. As Engels himself states:

[T]he conversion of the great organizations for production and communication into joint-stock companies and state property show that for this purpose the bourgeoisie can be dispensed with. All the social functions of the capitalists are now carried out by salaried employees. The capitalist has no longer any social activity save the pocketing of revenues, the clipping of coupons and gambling on the stock exchange, where different capitalists fleece each other of their capital. Just as at first the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so now it displaces the capitalists, relegating them, just as it did the workers, to the superfluous population, even if in the first instance not to the industrial reserve army.

But neither the conversion into joint stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of capitalists, the ideal collective body of all capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of all capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution. (Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 330)

So for the old orthodoxy of the Second International it was undoubtedly accepted that there was an inherent tendency towards state capitalism. Indeed it was this tendency which was seen as laying the basis for socialism. Yet it had also been central for both Lenin and the new Bolshevik orthodoxy. Not only did the increasing negation of private property and the law of value indicate the ripeness for socialism, but the fusion of the state and capital within state capitalism explained the increasing imperialist rivalries that had led to the First World War. As the competitive struggle between capital and capital became at the same time a struggle between imperialist states, imperialist war became inevitable. As Bukharin remarks in Imperialism and the World Economy, which provided the theoretical basis for Lenin's theory of imperialism:

When competition has finally reached its highest stage, when it has become competition between state capitalist trusts, then the use of state power, and the possibilities connected with it play a very large part. The state apparatus has always served as a tool in the hands of the ruling classes of its country, and it has always acted as the their "defender and protector" in the world market; at no time, however, did it have the colossal importance that it has in the epoch of finance capital and imperialist politics. With the formation of state capitalist trusts competition is being almost entirely shifted onto foreign countries; obviously the organs of the struggle that is to be waged abroad, primarily state power, must therefore grow tremendously... If state power is generally growing in significance the growth of its military organization, the army and the navy, is particularly striking. The struggle between state capitalist trusts is decided in the first place by the relation between their military forces, for military power of the country is the last resort of the struggling "national" groups of capitalists. (Bukharin, p. 124)

So it could not be doubted that the notion that capitalism was developing towards state capitalism, such that its very basis within both the law of value and private property was increasingly becoming negated, was clearly rooted within orthodox Marxism. The question then was whether state capitalism in an absolute sense was possible. Could it not be the case that after a certain point quantity would be transformed into quality? Was it not the case that once the principle means of production had been nationalized and the last major capitalist expropriated capitalism had necessarily been objectively abolished? And was this not the case for Russia following the October revolution?

To counter this contention, that could all too easily be advanced by his Trotskyist critics, Cliff argued that the qualitative shift from capitalism to the transition to socialism could not be simply calculated from the 'percentage' of state ownership of the means of production. It was a transition that was necessarily politically determined. As we have seen, the tendency towards state capitalism was a result of the growing contradiction between the increasingly social forms of production and the private appropriation of wealth. Collective, and ultimately state ownership of the means of production were a means to reconcile this contradiction while at the same time preserving private appropriation of wealth and with it private property. Thus the tendency towards state capitalism involved the partial negation of private property on the basis of private property itself.

So at the limit, state capitalism could be seen as the 'partial negation of capitalism on the basis of capitalism itself'. So long as the state economy was run to exploit the working class in the interests of an exploitative class then the economy remained state capitalist. However, if the working class seized power and ran the state economy in the interests of the people as whole then state capitalism would give way to a workers' state and the transition to socialism could begin. Thus state capitalism was a turning point, it was the final swan song of capitalism, but once the working class seized the state it would be the basis for the transition to socialism.

However, it could be objected that many revolutionary Marxists, including Trotsky himself, had explicitly denied that capitalism could reach the limit of state capitalism. Indeed, against the reformists in the Second International, who had argued that capitalism would naturally evolve into state capitalism which could then be simply taken over by democratically capturing the state, revolutionary Marxists had argued that, while there was a tendency towards state capitalism, it could never be fully realized in practice due to the rivalries between capitalists and by the very threat of expropriation of the state by the working class.

Cliff countered this by arguing that such arguments had only applied to the case of the evolution of traditional capitalism into state capitalism. In Russia there had been a revolution, that had expropriated the capitalist class and introduced a workers' state, and then a counter-revolution, which had restored capitalism in the form of state capitalism run in the interests of a new bureaucratic class. For Cliff, the Russian Revolution had created a workers' state, but, isolated by the failure of socialist revolutions elsewhere in Europe, the workers' state had degenerated. With the degeneration of the workers' state the bureaucracy increasingly became separated from the working class until, with Stalin's ascendancy, it was able to constitute itself as a new exploitative class and seize state power. With the bureaucracy's seizure of power the workers' state was over-turned and state capitalism was restored to Russia.

This periodization of post-revolutionary era in Russia not only allowed Cliff to overcome the objection that Trotsky had denied the possibility of bourgeois society fully realizing the tendency towards state capitalism, but also allowed him to accept most of Trotsky's analysis of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Cliff only had to part ways with Trotsky for the analysis of the ten years following 1928, where Trotsky maintained that the USSR has remained a degenerated workers' state while Cliff argued that it had become state capitalist. Yet, as we shall see, this periodization, despite all its advantages for Cliff's credibility as a Trotskyist, was to prove an important weak point in his theory. But before looking at the weak points of Cliff's theory of state capitalism we must first examine more closely what Cliff saw as the nature of state capitalism in Stalin's Russia.

As we have seen, although Cliff uncritically defended the orthodox Marxist definition of capitalism, he was able to counter the objections that the USSR could not be in any sense capitalist because there was neither the law of value nor private property, by arguing that state capitalism was the 'partial negation of capitalism on the basis of capitalism itself'. So what did he mean by 'the partial negation of capitalism'? Clearly capitalism could not be completely negated otherwise it would not be capitalism; so in what sense is the negation of capitalism partial? With Cliff the meaning of the partial negation of capitalism becomes most evident in terms of the law of value.

Following Marx, Cliff argued that under capitalism there is a two-fold division of labour. First of all there is the division of labour that arises between capitalist enterprises which is regulated by the law of value that operates through the 'anarchy of the market'. Secondly there is the division of labour that arises within each capitalist enterprise which is directly determined by the rational and conscious dictates of the capitalists or their managers. Of course the second division of labour is subordinated to the law of value insofar as the capitalist enterprise has to compete on the market. However, the law of value appears as external to it.

For Cliff the USSR acted as if it was simply one huge capitalist enterprise. As such the law of value no longer operated within the USSR, it had been negated with the nationalization of production and the introduction of comprehensive state planning. But, insofar as the USSR was obliged to compete both economically and politically within the capitalist world system it became subordinated to the law of value like any capitalist enterprise. In this sense, for Cliff, the law of value was only 'partially negated on the basis of the law of value itself'.

Yet, if neither market nor the law of value operated within the USSR this implied that products were not really bought and sold within the USSR as commodities, they were simply allocated and transferred in accordance with administrative prices. If this was true then it also implied that labour-power was not really a commodity; a conclusion that Cliff was forced to accept. Indeed, as Cliff argued, if labour-power was to be a commodity then the worker had to be free to sell it periodically to the highest bidder. If the worker could only sell his ability to work once and for all then he was little different from a slave since in effect he sold himself not his labour-power. Yet in the USSR the worker could only sell his labour-power to one employer, the state. Hence the worker was not free to sell to the highest bidder and labour-power was not really a commodity.

The flaws in Cliff's theory of state capitalism

At first sight Cliff provides a convincing theory of state capitalism in the USSR which not only remains firmly within the broad orthodox Marxist tradition, but also preserves much of Trotsky's contribution to this tradition. As the post-war era unfolded leaving the Stalinist bureaucracy more firmly entrenched than ever, Cliff's analysis of the USSR became increasingly attractive. Without the problems facing orthodox Trotskyist groupings following the apparent failure of Trotsky's predictions of the fall of the Stalinist bureaucracy, Cliff, under the slogan of 'neither Washington nor Moscow', was in a perfect position to attract supporters with the revival of interest in Leninism and Trotskyism of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, with the International Socialists Group, which then became the Socialist Workers' Party, Cliff has been able to build one of the largest Leninist groupings in Britain whose most distinctive feature has been its refusal to takes sides in the Cold War.36

However, despite the attractiveness of Cliff's theory of state capitalism in the USSR, on close inspection we find his theory has vital weaknesses which have been seized on by more orthodox Trotskyists. Indeed, these weaknesses are so serious that many have concluded that Cliff's theory is fatally flawed. This opinion has even been recognized within the SWP itself and has resulted in various attempts to reconstruct Cliff's original theory.37 As we shall argue, these flaws in Cliff's theory arise to a large extent from his determination to avoid critical confrontation with both Trotsky and the broader orthodox Marxist tradition.

There are three main flaws within Cliff's theory of state capitalism in the USSR. The first concerns Cliff's insistence that the final ascendancy of Stalin, and with this the introduction of the first five year plan, marked a counter-revolution which overthrew the workers' state established by the October revolution and turned Russia over to state capitalism. The issue of when the USSR became state capitalist is clearly a sensitive one for Trotskyists since, if Cliff is unable to hold the line at 1928, then what is to stop the date of the defeat of the revolution being pushed right back to 1917? Lenin and Trotsky would then be seen as leading a revolution that simply introduced state capitalism into Russia! Such fears were clear expressed by Ted Grant in his response to Cliff's original presentation of his theory in The Nature of Stalinist Russia. Then Ted Grant warned:

If comrade Cliff's thesis is correct, that state capitalism exists in Russia today, then he cannot avoid the conclusion that state capitalism has been in existence since the Russian Revolution and the function of the Revolution itself was to introduce this state capitalist system of society. For despite his tortuous efforts to draw a line between the economic basis of Russian society before the year 1928 and after, the economic basis of Russian society has in fact remained unchanged. (Ted Grant, The Unbroken Thread, p. 199)

The first line of attack that has been taken by orthodox Trotskyists has been to argue that if there had been a counter-revolution against, rather than from within, the revolution itself, which restored Russia to capitalism, then the workers' state would have to have been violently smashed. Any attempt to argue for a gradual and peaceful restoration of capitalism would, as Trotsky himself had said, simply be 'running backwards the film of revisionism'.38 Yet, despite the expulsions of Trotsky and the United and Left Oppositions in 1928, the leadership of the Party and the state remained largely intact. Indeed there seems more of a continuity within the state before 1928 and afterwards rather than any sharp break that would indicate a counter-revolution, let alone any violent coup d'état or violent counter-revolutionary action.

Cliff attempted to counter this line of attack by arguing that while it is necessary for a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state in order to construct a new revolutionary proletarian state, it is not necessarily the case that a counter-revolution has to smash an existing workers' state.39 The example Cliff used was that of the army. In order to create a workers' state the bourgeois standing army has to be transformed into a workers' militia. But any such transformation inevitably would be resisted by the officer corp. Such resistance would have to be violently crushed. In contrast, the officers of a workers' militia may become increasingly independent to the point at which they become part of the bureaucracy thereby transforming the workers' militia into a bourgeois standing army. Such a process, in which a workers' militia becomes transformed into a standing army, does not necessarily meet any concerted resistance, and as a consequence may occur gradually.

Yet such an argument by itself fails to pin the counter-revolutionary break on 1928. Indeed, Cliff's example would seem to imply that the counter-revolution was brought about by Trotsky himself when he took charge of re-organizing the Red Army in 1918 on the lines of a conventional standing army! The only overt political indication Cliff is able to present for the bureaucratic counter-revolution is the Moscow show trials and purges, which he claims were:

the civil war of the bureaucracy against the masses, a war in which only one side was armed and organized. They witnessed the consummation of the bureaucracy's total liberation from popular control. (State Capitalism in Russia, p. 195)

Yet the Moscow show trials occurred in the 1930s, not in 1928.

What was crucial about 1928 was that it was the year that marked the beginning of the first five year plan and the bureaucracy's commitment to the rapid industrialization of Russia. For Cliff, by adopting the overriding imperative of industrializing Russia, regardless of the human cost this would involve, the Soviet bureaucracy had taken on the historic role of the bourgeoisie. In adopting both the economic and historic functions of the bourgeoisie the bureaucracy had transformed itself into an exploitative class. Whereas before 1928 the bureaucracy had simply been a privileged layer within a degenerated workers' state that was able to gain more than its fair share of the nation's wealth, after 1928 the bureaucracy became the state capitalists who collectively exploited the working class.

Of course, it was not difficult for Cliff to show that there had been a sharp decrease in the material conditions of the working class following the introduction of the first five year plan as the bureaucracy sought to make the proletariat pay the huge costs of the policy of rapid industrialization. However, Cliff's argument that this sharp decrease in material conditions of the working class represented a qualitative shift towards the exploitation of the working class by the bureaucracy was far from convincing. If anything Cliff's attempts to show a qualitative shift in social relations of production only serve to indicate that bureaucratic exploitation of the working class had existed before 1928.

Yet perhaps more devastating to the credibility of Cliff's line of argument among Trotskyists was that by suggesting that with the imposition of the policy of rapid industrialization the bureaucracy had finally transformed itself into an exploitative class, and in doing so transformed Russia from a degenerated workers' state into state capitalism, Cliff was in effect attacking Trotsky! Had it not been the main criticism advanced by Trotsky and the Left Opposition against Stalin that he had not industrialized soon enough?! Was not the central plank of Trotsky's understanding of the Russian Revolution that the productive forces had to be advanced as fast as possible if there was to be any hope of socialism? If this was so, was not Cliff accusing Trotsky of advocating state capitalism?! Ultimately Cliff is unable to circumvent Trotsky's intrinsic complicity with Stalin. As a consequence, the failure to break with Trotskyism led to this vital flaw in Cliff's theory of state capitalism in Russia.

Yet this is not all. Cliff's failure to critically confront orthodox Marxism opened up another even more important weakness in his theory of state capitalism which has been seized upon by his more orthodox Trotskyist critics. This weakness stemmed from Cliff's denial of the operation of the law of value within the USSR.

As we have seen, for Cliff the USSR was constituted as if it was one huge capitalist enterprise. As such there could be no operation of the law of value internal to the USSR. However, as Marx pointed out, it is only through the operation of the law of value that any capitalist enterprise is constrained to act as capital. If there was no law of value internal to the state economy of the USSR what made it act as if it was a capitalist enterprise? The answer was the Soviet Union's relation to world capitalism. It was through the competitive political and economic relation to the rest of the capitalist world that the Soviet Union was subordinated to the law of value, and it was through this subordination to the law of value that the capitalist nature of the USSR became expressed.

However, as Cliff recognized, the Soviet Union, with its huge natural resources, had become largely self-sufficient. Foreign trade with the rest of the world was minimal compared with the amount produced and consumed within Russia itself. As a result Cliff could not argue that the international law of value imposed itself on the Russian economy through the necessity to compete on the world market. Instead, Cliff had to argue that the law of value imposed itself indirectly on the USSR through the necessity to compete politically with the major capitalist and imperialist powers. In order to keep up with the arms race, particularly with the emergence of the Cold War with the USA, the USSR had to accumulate huge amounts of military hardware. This drive for military accumulation led the drive for accumulation elsewhere in the Russian economy. Indeed, this military competition could be seen to spur capital accumulation, and with it the exploitation of the working class, just as much, if not more so, than any economic competition from the world market could have done.40

However, as Cliff's Trotskyist critics point out, for Marx the law of value does not impose itself through 'competition' as such, but through the competitive exchange of commodities. Indeed, it is only through the exchange of commodities that value is formed, and hence it is only through such exchange that the law of value can come to impose itself. Military accumulation is not directly an accumulation of values but an accumulation of use-values. In a capitalist economy such an accumulation can become part of the overall process of the accumulation of value, and hence of capital, insofar as it guarantees the accumulation of capital in the future by protecting or else extending foreign markets. However, in itself military accumulation is simply an accumulation of things, not capital. So in capitalist countries military spending suppresses value and the law of value temporarily in order to extend it later. Given that the Soviet Union did not seek to expand value production through the conquest of new markets, military production meant the permanent suppression of value and the law of value in that it was simply the production of use-values required to defend a system based on the production of use-values.

For the more sophisticated Trotskyists, Cliff's attempt to invoke military competition as the means through which the USSR was subordinated to the law of value exposed the fundamental theoretical weakness of Cliff's theory of state capitalism in Russia. The argument put forward by Cliff that under state capitalism 'the accumulation of value turns into its opposite the accumulation of use-values' is nothing but a sophistry which strips away the specific social forms that are essential to define a particular mode of production such as capitalism. As they correctly point out, capital is not a thing but a social relation that gives rise to specific social forms. The fact that military hardware is accumulated is in no way the same thing as the accumulation of capital. Without the production of commodities there can be no value and without value there can be no accumulation of capital. But Cliff argues there is no production of commodities in the USSR, particularly not in the military industries, since nothing is produced for a market, thus there can be neither value nor capital.

This point can be further pressed home once Cliff's critics turn to the question of labour-power. For Marx the specific nature of any mode of production was determined by both the manner and forms through which the dominant class are able to extract surplus-labour from the direct producers. Within the capitalist mode of production surplus-labour is extracted from the direct producers by the purchase of the worker's labour-power as a commodity. As a consequence, surplus-labour is expropriated in the form of surplus-value which is the difference between the value of labour-power (i.e. the costs of reproducing the worker's ability to work) and the value the worker creates through working. However, for Cliff, labour-power was not a commodity in the USSR and was not therefore really sold. But if labour-power was not a commodity it could not have a value, and hence any surplus-labour extracted could not take the form of surplus-value. If surplus-labour did not take the form of surplus-value how could the USSR be in any sense capitalist in strict Marxist terms?!

The third fatal flaw in Cliff's theory of state capitalism in Russia, and one that arises from his commitment to orthodox Marxism, is the view that state capitalism is the highest stage of capitalism. As we have seen, it is central for Cliff that state capitalism was the highest stage of capitalism since it was from this premise that he could claim that state capitalism was at the point of transition from capitalism to socialism. But if state capitalism is the highest stage of capitalism, and if it is accepted that the USSR is state capitalist, then this would seem to imply that, in some fundamental sense, the USSR should be in advance of Western capitalism. Of course, this may have seemed reasonable in the late 1940s. After all, under Stalin the USSR had made an unprecedented leap forward with the rapid industrialization of Russia, and it seemed that the Soviet Union was set to out-perform most of capitalist economies in the West in the post-war era. However, in the following decades the economic stagnation and economic waste of the 'Soviet system' became increasingly apparent, culminating with the collapse of the USSR in 1990. This, combined with the globalization of capital, which has seriously undermined the efficacy of state intervention in Western capitalism, has meant that the notion that capitalism is tending towards state capitalism is now far less convincing than it was fifty years ago. As we shall see in the next issue, although Cliff did develop a theory to explain the economic stagnation in the Soviet Union it proved insufficient to explain the final crisis and collapse of the USSR. This point has been taken up with relish by Cliff's more orthodox critics, who now feel vindicated that the Stalinist system has proved ephemeral and, as Trotsky predicted, capitalism has been restored, albeit after some delay.

So, despite its practical appeal during the post-war era, Cliff's theory of state capitalism in Russia was theoretically, at least for orthodox Trotskyists, fatally flawed. Indeed, for the more sophisticated Trotskyists Cliff's theory is usually dismissed with little more ado, and then presented as an example of the weakness of all theories of state capitalism. But Cliff's theory of state capitalism in the USSR is by no means the original or foremost one, although it is perhaps the most well known. In the next issue we shall begin by considering other theories of state capitalism in the USSR that have arisen amongst the left communists before turning to examine Ticktin's efforts to go beyond both the theory of Russia as a degenerated workers' state and state capitalist theories.

• 1. For convenience we shall at times use the term 'state capitalism' for all theories that consider the Soviet Union to have been capitalist. As N. Fernandez points out in a forthcoming book, Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR, many theories, for example those of Bordiga and more recently Chattopadhyay, have for good theoretical reasons avoided the term 'state capitalism' in their accounts of the USSR. We will deal with some of the issues raised by the term 'state capitalism' in more detail in Aufheben 8.
• 2. 'Ultra-left' is a loaded and ambiguous term. It was originally a term of abuse used by Lenin against communists and revolutionaries, particularly in West European countries such as Holland, Germany and Italy, who refused to accept the Bolshevik model of revolution and the right of the Russian Communist Party to determine the tactics and leadership of the world Communist movement. These communists were among the first to put forward the idea that Russia was a form of state capitalism. We shall examine such theories in the next issue. On the term itself it should be noted that most people accused of ultra-leftism by Leninists would argue that they are simply communists and that the left, including their accusers, are not. The matter is further confused by the tendency of Leninists to denounce each other for 'ultra-leftism' for such heinous crimes as not voting Labour. Perhaps more importantly for us, the term 'ultra-leftism' indicates an acceptance, along with Trotskyism, of the idea of tracing one's tradition back to the social democracy of the Second and Third Internationals. While we will happily restate our position that the German, Dutch and Italian left communists did maintain some important lessons from the revolutionary wave following the First World War, we do not think they had the last word on what revolutionary theory and practice is for us today. This will become clearer once we come to examine their theories of the Soviet Union.
• 3. Of course, prisoner support work is an important part of any serious movement against the state, and in the particular circumstances of the anti-poll tax movement when Militant threatened to grass people to the police it did define a radical engagement in the struggle. But there is nothing inherent in leftism that leads it to ignore prisoners. Simply criticising the 'left' for not supporting prisoners ends up as little better than ritual denunciation of the left for being 'boring middle class wankers', a poor excuse for a proper critique. Yet it is perhaps little surprise that prisoner support has become an almost definitive position amongst many anarchists now that denouncing the left for supporting the USSR is no longer viable.
• 4. There is little doubt that it was the fear that the whole of Western Europe might go over to the Eastern Bloc in the years following the Second World War which prompted the American bourgeoisie to pour billions of dollars into shattered West European economies in the form of Marshall Aid.
• 5. It should be remembered that the reformist parties of the Second International not only betrayed their commitment to opposing the First World War and, as such, were complicit in the decimation of a whole generation of the European working class, but they also played an important role in crushing the revolutions that swept much of Europe following the war. For example, it was under the orders of a Social Democratic government that the German Revolution was crushed and such revolutionary leaders as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht killed. Such crimes could not be that easily forgotten.
• 6. Of course, at this point some may object that Trotsky's record proves that he was a counter-revolutionary and, as a consequence, dismiss any detailed consideration of his theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. For us an extensive consideration of Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state is important not only because this theory has become a central reference point for criticisms of the Soviet Union, but also because it is important to show how Trotsky's theory emerged directly from the objectivism of orthodox Marxism and was in no way a betrayal of such traditions. Hence our focus will remain on the political economy that developed in the USSR, rather than offering a blow by blow account of the revolution/ counter-revolution. For details on the 1917-21 period that undermine the Leninist account of the Russian Revolution see M. Brinton The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control (London: Solidarity). For a more general critique of the orthodox Marxism of both the Second and Third Internationals see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter IV (Detroit: Black and Red, 1974).
• 7. In what follows some readers may think we are treating Trotsky's theory with too much respect. For some it is enough to list his bad deeds. Some focus on his actions in 1917-21, others more on Trotsky's later failure to maintain revolutionary positions which culminated with his followers taking sides in the Second World War. From this it often concluded that Trotsky's Marxism was always counter-revolutionary or, as many left communists argue, that at some point Trotsky crossed the class line and became counter-revolutionary. Either way Trotsky's theory of a degenerated workers' state can be summarily dismissed as a position outside the revolutionary camp. For us, however, Trotsky's theory of the USSR, and its dominant hold over many critical of Stalinism, reflects fundamental weaknesses of orthodox Marxism that should be grasped and overcome. There are very powerful reasons why heterodox Marxists have found it hard to grasp the USSR as capitalist. In rejecting Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state it is not for us a matter of showing how he 'betrays the true revolutionary heritage of pre-1914 social democracy and orthodox Marxism', but rather it involves recognizing how true he was to this tradition.
• 8. Trotsky originally developed the theory of permanent revolution in collaboration with Parvus. After Parvus withdrew from Marxist politics the theory eventually became ascribed to Trotsky.
• 9. Trotsky is himself not very clear at this point as to why the very backwardness of peasantry would lead a substantial part of this class to maintain its support for a workers' government committed to introducing socialist policies. However, this apparently paradoxical position can be resolved if we consider a little more closely Trotsky's view of the peasantry. For Trotsky the backwardness and heterogeneity of the peasantry meant that it was inherently incapable of developing a coherent organization that could formulate and advance its own distinct class interests. As a consequence the peasantry could only accept the leadership of other classes i.e. either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. From this Trotsky could conclude that once the peasantry had accepted the leadership of the proletariat it would have little option but to be swept along by the policies of a workers' government, even beyond the point where such policies began to impinge on the peasants' own immediate class interests, since they would be unable to formulate any viable alternative.
• 10. See The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky (Pathfinder Press, 1972).
• 11. We shall give more attention to the ideas Lenin's left communist opponents in Aufheben 8.
• 12. Following Engels, it was generally accepted within orthodox Marxism that there could be no leap from capitalism to a fully fledged communist society in which the state, money and wage-labour had been abolished. It was envisaged that any post-capitalist society would have to pass through a lower stage of communism during which the state, money and wage-labour would gradually whither away as the conditions for the higher stage of communism came into being. This lower stage of communism became known as socialism.
• 13. For example, in his Leon Trotsky's Theory of Revolution, John Molyneux says 'Suffice it to say that in the early years of the revolution Trotsky stood on the authoritarian wing of the party'. Of course, as Kowalski has pointed out, the divisions of left/right, libertarian/ authoritarian may over simplify the complex of political positions taken up among the Bolsheviks during this period. However, it is quite clear that Trotsky was neither on the left nor the libertarian wings of the Party at this time.
• 14. As both Engels and Kautsky had pointed out in relation to Germany, the fundamental barrier to the development of industrial capitalism was the low productivity of traditional forms of small-scale peasant agriculture. If the urban populations necessary for industrialization were to be fed then the peasants had to produce an agricultural surplus over and above their own immediate needs. So long as traditional forms of agriculture persist the total amount of agricultural produce is limited. Thus the only way to produce the surplus necessary for industrialization is to depress the living standards of the peasantry through such means as high rents and taxation. Yet the scope for squeezing the peasants' already impoverished living standards is limited. Sooner or later there has to be an agricultural revolution which, by concentrating production in large scale farms, allows the introduction of modern mechanized production methods. Under capitalism this occurred either through the landlords or the richer peasants appropriating land and transforming themselves into capitalist farmers. The socialist alternative was to collectivize agriculture. By grouping peasants together in collectives large scale production would be made possible without dispossessing vast numbers of poor peasants. In Russia this agrarian problem was particularly acute. Before the revolution the peasants had been forced to produce for the market in order to pay rents and taxes to the landlords and the state. This surplus had then been used both to feed the urban populations and for export to earn the foreign currency needed to pay for the import of foreign capital required for industrialization. However, with the Stolypin reforms of 1906, the Tsarist regime had made a decisive effort to encourage the development of capitalist agriculture amongst the richer peasants. But this 'wager on the strong' peasant was cancelled by the revolution. The expropriation of the landlords and the redistribution served to reinforce small-scale subsistence agriculture. With neither the compulsion nor any incentive to produce a surplus on the part of the peasant, food supplies to the urban areas fell. It had been this that had compelled the Bolshevik Government to introduce direct requisitioning under War Communism. With the NEP, the Bolshevik Government now sought to provide incentives for the richer peasants to produce for the market. Collectivization was ruled out since for it to succeed on a large scale it required a sufficient level of industrialization to allow the mechanization of agriculture. To this extent the NEP represented, in part, a retreat to the Tsarist policy of encouraging the growth of capitalist agriculture amongst the rich peasants. We shall examine further this crucial agrarian question in more detail in the next issue.
• 15. Trotsky coined the phrase 'scissors crisis' in his speech to the 12th Party Congress in April 1923. Trotsky argued that, left to the market, the uneven development between agriculture and industry could only lead to violent fluctuations between the prices of industrial goods and agricultural prices which could only undermine the NEP. Although agricultural production recovered rapidly after the introduction of the NEP, industrial production lagged behind. As a result the price of industrial goods had risen far faster than agricultural prices, 'opening the price scissors' and threatening to undermine the incentives for the peasants to produce for the market in the following season. By October the predicted crisis struck home with the sales of grain plummeting. Following this 'scissors crisis', measures were introduced to control industrial prices.
• 16. While Stalin had established his power-base as head of the organization of the Party through out the USSR, Zinoviev had built his power-base as head of the Party in Leningrad, and Kamenev had his power-base as the head of the Moscow Party.
• 17. During the industrialization debate in the mid 1920s, Trotsky, along with the rest of the Left Opposition, was repeatedly attacked by Stalin and his followers for being a 'super-industrializer' who wished to abandon the NEP and industrialize at the expense of the peasantry. This has been a common accusation made against Trotsky by Stalinists ever since. But it has also been a criticism taken up by anarchists and others to the left of Trotsky who argue that in adopting the policy of forced industrialization and forced collectivization after 1928 Stalin was simply implementing Trotsky's own ideas. In this way the essential complicity between Stalin and Trotsky can be demonstrated. In his article 'The Myth of the Super-Industrializer', which was originally published under a different title in Critique, 13, and now reprinted in The Ideas of Leon Trotsky edited by Michael Cox and Hillel Ticktin, Richard Day has sought to defend Trotsky from such accusations by both distancing him from the more polemical positions of Preobrazhensky and stressing his support for the workers' and peasants' alliance embodied in the NEP. But this does not prove much. None of the main protagonists in the industrialization debate, not even Preobrazhensky, argued for the abandonment of the NEP and the workers' and peasants' alliance. What is telling is Trotsky's own criticisms of Stalin's eventual policy of forced industrialization and collectivization. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky does not criticize Stalin's industrialization policy as such - indeed he is careful to praise the great achievements made by Stalin under this policy - but rather the 'zig-zags' made in bringing this policy about. For Trotsky the problem was that Stalin's reluctance to adopt the policy of industrialization put forward by the Left Opposition in the mid-1920s meant a sharper 'turn to the left' and a more rushed and unbalanced industrialization later in order to solve the crisis of 1928. But the crucial question is: if Stalin had shifted the burden of industrialization onto the peasantry a few years earlier, would this have been really sufficient to have averted the grain procurement crisis in 1928 and avoided the disaster of forced collectivization in which millions of peasants died?
• 18. For a critique of orthodox Marxist interpretations of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism see 'The Myth of Working Class Passivity' by David Gorman in Radical Chains, 2.
• 19. It should be noted that What is to be Done? was a particularly extreme formulation of democratic centralism that emerged out of a polemic against those Marxists who had argued that the class consciousness of the working class would necessarily develop out of economic struggles during a period of retreat in the class struggle. However, Lenin's position concerning democratic centralism can be seen to have undergone sharp shifts in emphasis depending on the political circumstances. At various points before 1917 Lenin's position would have been little different from that of Trotsky.
• 20. As well as Bolshevik left communists, many anarchists were also taken in by the 'libertarian flavour' of the conception of post-revolutionary power outlined in Lenin's State and Revolution. This led to accusations that Lenin's actions after seizing power were a betrayal of the ideas he had himself set out in State and Revolution, and it is then suggested that Lenin had never really believed in them. But while it is undoubtedly true that Lenin did abandon some of the measures he called for in State and Revolution, that text was itself ambiguous, calling for a 'socialist revolution with subordination, control, and foremen and accountants'.
• 21. See for example 'Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?' in Lenin's Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 87.
• 22. The methods of 'scientific management' advocated by Lenin were based on those developed by the most advanced capitalist enterprises in the West and which had become known as Taylorism. Taylorism had been specifically developed to break the control of the skilled worker over the immediate production process. Under Taylorism the production process was re-organized and rationalized in a way which removed the initiative of the individual worker and concentrated the overall knowledge and control of how things were produced into the hands of specialized managers. Lenin's enthusiasm for Taylorism, an enthusiasm shared by Trotsky, is perhaps one of the areas where Lenin most clearly distinguishes his position from a communist one.
• 23. It should be recognized that most of these armies did not seriously fight the Bolsheviks. The civil war, as a war between organized armies, was a battle between the Red Army and the Whites, who had material support from the West. But, as well as this, vast numbers of peasants and deserters fought both sides. Indeed, one could say the 1918-21 period was as much a peasant war as anything else.
• 24. The introduction of one-man management and scientific management, together with the consequent transfer of power away from the factory committees to, first the trade unions and then to the Party, is well documented in The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control by M. Brinton. As Brinton shows this process began at a very early stage in the Revolution, well before the start of the civil war in the Summer of 1918.
• 25. Given the task of organising the military defence of the revolution Trotsky spent little time in abandoning the Red Guard militias that had been formed immediately after the October Revolution in favour of building a conventional standing army. At first Trotsky sought to recruit from volunteers amongst the more advanced sections of the working class, and in accordance with the procedures established within the Red Guards, allowed officers to be elected directly from Soldiers' committees and assemblies. However, once he had established a reliable core for the new Red Army, Trotsky introduced conscription drawing recruits from the broad masses of peasants and workers. With what he considered as less reliable troops, Trotsky abandoned the direct election of officers in favour of the appointment of professional commanders which were mostly drawn from the former Tsarist army. To oversee and check any counter-revolutionary tendencies amongst this officer corp., Trotsky appointed political officers, or commissars, drawn from the Party each of whom were attached to a particular military commander.
• 26. As Knei-Paz has pointed out, the idea that the emergence of the bureaucracy represented a Russian Thermidor had been first advanced by the Democratic-Centralist Opposition in the early 1920s. At that time, when he still held a leading position within the Party, Trotsky had firmly rejected the idea of a Russian Thermidor as being 'ultra-leftist'. However, by 1929, facing disgrace and exile, Trotsky began to come round to the idea and it was only by the mid-1930s that came to fully formulate it within his criticisms of Stalinism. See B. Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 394-5.
• 27. Trotsky's 'orthodox Marxist' and objectivist idea of history as fundamentally about the progressive development of the productive forces is perhaps the key to understanding the underlying weakness of his theory of the degenerated workers' state. For Trotsky's lyrical accounts of how Stalinist Russia developed the forces of production we need go no further than the opening pages of The Revolution Betrayed. On page 8 of this work Trotsky declares: 'With the bourgeois economists we no longer have anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not in the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth of the earth's surface - not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity'.
• 28. With the publication of Marx's early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, it is clear that for Marx the basis of capitalism is not private property but alienated labour. This point, as we shall see, is vital not only in making a critique of orthodox Marxism but in any attempt to develop a materialist theory of the USSR.
• 29. Of course, at a more concrete level, it is clear that not all of the capitalist class directly exploit the working class. Bankers and merchant capitalists, for example, draw a share of the surplus-value produced by the industrial capitalists by virtue of their special functions in financing production, and by circulating the commodities subsequently produced. Yet these functions can themselves be seen to be rooted in private property. The bank advances money to finance production as a loan of its own private property, and duly obtains a share in the surplus-value in the form of interest. Likewise, by buying the commodities produced by the industrial capitalist, the merchant capitalists advance their own money-capital to realize the value produced for the industrial capitalist ahead of the commodities' actual circulation. In doing so the merchant capitalists appropriate a slice of the surplus-value expropriated by the industrial capitalists in the form of the difference between what they pay the industrial capitalists and what they sell the commodities for to the consumers.
• 30. See The New Constitution of the USSR.
• 31. As we have already noted, the notion that the concentration and centralization of capital inevitably led towards the fusion of state and capital had been central to the orthodox Marxism of the Second International. It had followed from this that the decisive shift from capitalism to socialism occurred with the working class seizing state power. The main question that then divided orthodox Marxism was whether this seizure of state power required a revolution or whether it could be achieved through peaceful democratic means. In What is to be Done? Lenin came to define his own position regarding the primacy of the political. Against the 'economism' of those who saw socialist revolution arising directly out the economic struggles of the working class, Lenin had argued for importance of establishing a political party which could seize state power. Of course, it was the basis of this 'politicism' which, by implying that the realm of the political can to some extent determine the nature of society, has allowed Leninists to argue that the USSR was a workers' state while at the same time admitting that the social relations of production may have remained capitalist. As we shall see in the next issue, it was the inability of most left communists to fully break from this 'politicism' that undermines their critique of the Bolsheviks.
• 32. It was this very transitional character of the Soviet bureaucracy which meant that it was difficult to define what it was. So although Trotsky settled on calling it a 'caste' he accepted this was an unsatisfactory categorization of the Soviet bureaucracy.
• 33. One of the first groups to develop a proper theory was the 'state capitalist' minority within the Workers' Party. This minority later emerged as the Johnson-Forest Tendency after the pseudonyms of its main theorists - C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. With the collection of previously unavailable writings we can now see that this theory is much stronger than it appears from some of their earlier published works and is far superior to Cliff's version. See The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State Capitalism, by R. Dunayevskaya, (Chicago: News & Letters, 1992). Since the Johnson-Forest Tendency quickly broke from Trotskyism by rejecting vanguardism and emphasizing workers' autonomy we shall deal with them in more detail in the next issue.
• 34. See C. Hobson and R. Tabor, Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism (Westport: Greenwood, 1988).
• 35. The Revolutionary Communist Party subsequently broke up and should not be confused with the Revolutionary Communist Party that is around today.
• 36. Though this has not stopped the SWP giving 'critical support' to some nationalist and Stalinist movements in 'non-imperialist' parts of the world.
• 37. For a critique of Cliff's theory of state capitalism from a Trotskyist point of view see the collection of articles on the nature of the USSR in Open Polemic, 4 & 5.
• 38. That is the reformism that had been put forward by Bernstein and his followers in the debates in the Second International that there could be a peaceful transition to socialism through democratically won reforms.
• 39. Cliff was able to cite Trotsky's reaction to Stalin's constitution where he argued that it was the basis for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR as support for the possibility of peaceful counter-revolution.
• 40. While most Trotskyists in the 1940s clung on to the belief that the immediate post-war economic boom would be short lived and as a consequence repeatedly predicted an imminent return to an economic slump, Cliff was one of the first to seek to explain the persistence of the post-war economic boom. Central to this explanation was Cliff's theory of 'a permanent arms economy' in which high levels of military spending acted to defer the full effects of the overaccumulation of capital which had led to the great slump of the 1930s. The notion that the permanent arms economy was mirrored in the Soviet Union fitted neatly into Cliff's overall emphasis on the importance of military accumulation for modern capitalism.

Death of a paper tiger: reflections on Class War

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The Class War Federation have recently announced their decision to dissolve themselves. The last issue of their paper (Summer 1997) gives some reasons why and also serves as a post mortem on the history of Class War. This prompted the following reflection by some comrades, which we have included as the Intakes article for this issue. [Note from libcom editors: many members of Class War Federation decided to keep the group going. They still publish the paper, and have active groups, for example http://www.londonclasswar.org]

(Note: although the article dwells on the aspects of Class War we feel need to be most criticized, this is partly to counteract the somewhat self-congratulating boastful attitude that lies alongside the more useful self-critical insights in the final issue of the paper. But we do recognize that some people joined Class War out of a sincere desire to challenge this society and did some good things to further that goal while in Class War. Our point is that the effectiveness of such actions was not determined by their membership in the publicity machine called Class War (except on those occasions when the group orthodoxy became an obstacle to action); their participation was not necessarily any more effective than others trying to achieve the same goals. Organizational loyalties only became relevant in struggles when they become a hindrance and a cause for separation.)

On the level of appearances, which was always their main form of existence, Class War was essentially a marketing concept of the 80s - a kind of anarcho-Saatchi and Saatchi. Like the Tories under Thatcher, they invented a new way to sell politics to the working class. Thatcherism achieved a crushing victory in the arena of class conflict, and its tactics have been copied by ruling classes across the globe. Politically it has even succeeded in redefining its opposition; Tony Blair's New Labour is only the most obvious example, but we can also see Class War as the bastard child of Thatcherism. At a time when Thatcherite policies were destroying or radically restructuring the industries and communities that had been the strongholds of class struggle (and thereby also destroying the old forms of struggle) Class War responded by publicising themselves as the defenders of the traditional working class values of these communities. This took the form of various kinds of opportunism such as the Bash the Rich marches; media spectacles designed only to publicize the organization and keep its personnel occupied. 1

The Hampstead Bash the Rich march was not allowed into the area and was instead diverted by the cops through the back streets of Camden. It was ironic to see council tenants watching from their balconies as a couple of hundred predominantly anarcho-punk types marched down their streets with a banner proclaiming 'Behold Your Future Executioners'! Publicising a Bash the Rich march in advance is like informing the law beforehand of your intention to hold up a bank. Other opportunisms included their adoption of archaic cockney slang - denouncing swanky toffs etc - the sub-Chas 'n' Dave mockney style betraying the London-centrism of the 'national' paper. Logically, to be really populist, they should have done other regional dialect issues of the paper - perhaps an 'ee by gum' Yorkshire issue or 'De Cluss War' in Jamaican patois to be truly patronising?

Class War's other main stereotype was of the typical proletarian rebel as young, white, living on an estate and swearing a lot; like all organizations looking for a constituency to recruit from and sell to, Class War reduced all the individual and collective diversity of real people down to a convenient lowest common denominator.

Class War always projected an anti-intellectual pose as part of their identikit working class image; in effect this meant being generally anti-theoretical and ahistorical. This denial of an historical perspective led them to define the working class, its interests and consciousness in terms of their most immediate, temporary and shallow manifestations. This was the basis of Class War's adopted tabloid style.

Obsessed with the powerful social influence of the content of the media, and constantly prostituting the organization as a public image, Class War failed to grasp any real understanding of the social function of the media form. Populist journalism was an invention of middle class tabloid hacks which claimed to speak for and represent the working class - but like all media representatives, the real function was to pacify and manipulate. Its intention was to mould working class identity, not merely to reflect it. The desired effect of all populist journalism (of whatever creed) is to suspend critical thought on the part of the reader and to reduce choices of opinion down to a simple duality - good/bad, black/white - through a simplistic representation of reality. Constant repetition of this tends to numb thought and encourage predictable (Pavlovian) responses.

Class War failed to see tabloid populism as an historical trend needing to be ridiculed, but instead took it at its face value and embraced it. As the mass media came to invade daily life more and more, this and other factors combined to close off areas within working class culture where people could find time and space to think, read, reflect, discuss and debate social questions and organize struggle around their needs. There has been a massive and unprecedented decline in class struggle in the UK since its high point in the '70s. A working class under attack and in retreat from Thatcherite monetarism, a more repressive architecture and policing changing the use of public space, new more isolated forms of leisure consumption etc. - all this contributed to a withering of a combative proletarian culture. More than ever before, opinion is no longer created but only received.

We live in the age of the sound-bite, where carefully constructed pre-arranged fragments of words and images are constantly recycled in the media. (The average length of a Party leader's sound-bite in the 1992 election was 18 seconds.) As always, the media is a one way transmission belt from Power to the passive spectator, offering only various impotent false choices. The whole process is a closed circuit, completely stage managed, denying the possibility for collective discussion and development of complex ideas and realities. An historical development of the repression of critical thought or cretinization process - influencing the whole of society - is at work here. With their anti-theoretical attitude, Class War unconsciously became a part of this process.

Class War's anxiety and awkward self-consciousness about using long words, abstract concepts, political terminology etc. was a symptom of the retarding effects of their populism. (It was sometimes implied that being theoretical was 'elitist' or 'middle class' - a patronizing insult to the self-educating efforts of the historical working class movement. This was quite dishonest, as many Class War members had studied for degrees, and many were well read in what they might call 'difficult theory' - the Situationists, left communism, Barrot, Blob and Combustion. etc. The assumption seemed to be that while politicos like them could grasp it and were influenced by it, your mythical average prole couldn't or wouldn't be interested. 2

This retarding influence meant that Class War's analysis and coverage of events was usually quite limited and shallow, avoiding dealing with the real contradictions within the working class; especially the conservative aspects of working class culture, e.g. the internalized and conditioned values, attitudes and practices that are an obstacle to liberation.

'Apart from opportunism, they also embody the other side of practical anarchism, elitism. Witness the weirdly affected tone of articles with titles such as "Why I hate the rich", written as though throughout our lives we only experience poverty because we are bossed about and because we have less money than the rich. There is no doubt that readers off Class War are supposed to be recruited opportunistically. The perfect reaction would be for Joe Worker or Joan Housewife to say, "Class War is the only paper which really puts the verbal boot in against the rich in real working class language; they really know the business."' (Anarchism Exposed, London, 1985). 3

Underlying this populism were certain patronizing assumptions about what the 'average prole' was capable of comprehending and what projected image of Class War would make them most popular to the largest number of 'average proles'. While Class War remained on the terrain of wanting to escalate class struggle, their chosen methods only reinforced certain tendencies of existing society. Being basically anarchist, there could be no hierarchical leader figures to worship (although inevitably there was some informal internal hierarchy) but the real star of the show was the media image of the Class War organization itself - and all those associated with it could bask in its reflected glory. This was the source of the boring arrogance often displayed by Class War, along the lines of 'Class War is the bizness and does the bizness.'

For most of the history of the proletarian movement, a demanding critical thought was not seen as alien or elitist. In fact research into the use of union libraries, workers' book collections, radical publishers etc shows that 'deep' theoretical works were often far more widely read amongst sections of the proletariat than the upper classes. Knowledge was something that had to be fought for collectively and did not come cheap to the poor, and was therefore all the more highly valued. Proles were open to theory if it could be seen to be useful and related to their own reality and struggle. There were also many lectures, debates, meetings and workers educational events regularly held; 'it can be estimated on the basis of published speakers' lists in various journals that between 1885 and 1939 there were approximately 100 street corner meetings per week throughout London.' 4 Self-educated artisan/worker theoreticians produced by this international culture include; Weitling, Proudhon, Dietzgen, Bill Haywood, B. Traven, Paul Mattick, Lucy Parsons, Makhno, Arshinov, Jack Common, Fundi the Caribbean Situationist etc.

All this is mentioned not in the interests of romantic nostalgia, but to show how much autonomous working class culture has been repressed, and the consequences of its loss that we have to suffer today. Class War's resort to tabloidism could never be a solution; you could never cure the problem by using the very form that had helped to create it.

The contradiction between Class War's stock-in-trade populism, which was their basis of existence, and the growing need of some members for greater theoretical clarity could not be resolved and ultimately it killed off Class War. The tabloid form, although a dead-weight, could not be abandoned without robbing Class War of its only identity and character. But this form was, by its very design, simplistic and reductive; wholly inadequate for and incompatible with theoretical expression and development.

'Class War's main fault, and it includes all the others, is to be a political organisation as hundreds have existed in the world before, imbued with ideology, unable to look at the past and gain knowledge from it, more concerned with denouncing this society than with searching for its weaknesses and go on the offensive in a considered and coherent manner.' (A view on Class War by a former member, op. cit.)

In any future proletarian social movement channels of direct collective communication will need to reappear as practice; in exactly what forms remains to be seen. Class War's populism pandered to the anti-intellectual/anti-theoretical tradition within British culture; as one of them put it, 'We want action not theory' - a slogan fit only for headless chickens. Many of the criticisms in this article were shared by some of Class War and were voiced internally; but these contradictions were never allowed to surface publicly, so as to preserve a 'sussed' group public image. This is the opposite of what is necessary - rather than the working class itself searching for an adequate theory and practice by confronting openly its own contradictions, instead a political faction attempting to recruit people around a false image of unity which is the result of repressed contradictions. If these criticisms and contradictions are worth mentioning now in the final post mortem issue of the paper, why were they not worth sharing with the readers when Class War was a functioning organization?

At the Anarchist Bookfair in 1985, when Class War were in their ascendancy, intoxicated by media attention and believing their own hype, a Class War celebrity got on stage and drunkenly announced to the assembled anarchoes, 'You pacifists and liberals have had the anarchist movement for long enough - now its our turn. And if we haven't turned this place into rubble within five years then you can have it back'. Well, 12 years on and it's Class War that are in ruins, with little but a collection of fading newspaper cuttings to show for it, while this society carries ruthlessly on. Testimony to the fact that you can't fight alienation with alienated means.

Sept 1997

Dedicated to Julian

• 1. According to an ex-member: 'Class War isn't based on any practically applicable theory, hasn't any practice to build a theory on and these deficiencies have often been felt during the low activity periods. But instead of discussing these gaps and ways to tackle them, the leadership - aware it has nothing to gain from such debates - prefers loud speeches and has always managed to impose its diversions: at the end of the miners' strike, during which no revolutionary critique of the NUM was published for fear of putting off the miners, the first problem cropped up: what was Class War and what was it to become as it had not much left to go on about? Inspired by its nostalgia for the '81 summer [riots], the leadership took the Bash the Rich Campaign out of the hat - a smoke screen that effectively prevented any profound discussion for over 6 months. This campaign ... failed for the ... simple reason: the proletariat doesn't give a shit for militants nor for these artificial, desperate calls for action.' From 'A view on Class War by a former member' [Julian] Flamethrower, London 1986.
• 2. 'The separation of "theory" from propaganda stems from an ... elitist motive: get the workers interested on a simple level and "politicise" them on the heavy stuff later.' Refuse, BM Combustion, 1978. The Heavy Stuff was Class War's theoretical journal; it contained some useful articles alongside a lot of vague generalities that often read like someone's rewritten sociology thesis. Articles were submitted by various individual members, but it was never a collective theoretical effort. The Heavy Stuff sank like a stone after a few issues.
• 3. Class War were always ready to answer attacks from the Left and the media, but valid criticisms from a radical perspective, such as the Flamethrower article or Anarchism Exposed, were met with a deafening silence. To have dealt with these critiques demanded some theoretical self-reflection and discussion that would have threatened the fragile unity of the group, based as it was on an uneasy compromise, and challenged the arrogance of the group with facing its own repressed self doubt.
• 4. Quoted from Stilled Tongues - From Soapbox to Soundbite, Stephen Coleman, Porcupine Press, 1977.

Reply to Animal's Reply

NottingHill2.jpg

The third text in an exchange of views prompted by Aufheben's publishing in 1997 of a critique of the Class War organisation. (For the other texts, see links at end of article.)

As the reply-proper (below) to the Animal reply makes clear, the article 'Death of a Paper Tiger' was not written by Aufheben. 'Intakes' articles in Aufheben are 'guest' articles and so do not go through the normal editorial process (of editing, criticism etc.) but nevertheless are considered useful contributions. For these reasons, we do not necessarily have to agree with everything written in an 'Intakes' article (although such articles usually share basic assumptions with us). We saw nothing we disagreed with in 'Death of a Paper Tiger', and would be quite happy to defend it. However, we thought it more appropriate to get the original author to make the reply himself. Therefore, below, we present a summary describing Aufheben itself, and then the reply to the Animal reply.

Aufheben

The Aufheben magazine is a project initiated by a number of individuals who came together through participation in various struggles in the Brighton area, notably that against the poll tax, in the late '80s early '90s. Feeling a need to develop our ideas and come to terms with the significance of Marx for the revolutionary project we started a reading group reading Capital and the Grundrisse. Partly out of the common understanding developing through this reading, and discussion and through our experience of the class struggle, we decided to produce a magazine.

A central theme for us has been the need for a unity of theory and practice. We opened the editorial in Aufheben (Autumn 1992) with a quote to this effect:

Theoretical criticism and practical overthrow are... inseparable activities, not in any abstract sense but as a concrete and real alteration of the concrete and real world of bourgeois society.
(Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy)

For us this has a fairly straightforward meaning that our struggle against this world as individuals and as a class needs to involve reflection on what we do. Without knowing who actually reads the magazine, we imagined an audience of those who are engaged in struggle and who feel the need to reflect on this process, to think about capitalism and the movement to abolish it. Essentially this means writing for ourselves, about the subjects we think important and at the theoretical level necessary to address them.

The title Aufheben describes for us an important concept/process and one for which there is no adequate English translation. It poses the issue of finding communism not in an abstract negation of this society or as an ideal but as a movement within and against what exists. It also indicates the need to appropriate and go beyond previous theoretical attempts to understand capitalism and the process of its supersession. Finally choosing the title Aufheben was in a sense a confrontation with the anti-theoretical prejudice very prevalent among activists in Britain. Feeling ourselves the need to think about what is going on and what we are doing, we reject this anti-theoretical stance as self-defeating. Nevertheless we can understand it as a reaction against the use of theory by those claiming to represent the proletariat's interests. As has been pointed out, the division of mental and manual labour is the fundamental basis of the capitalist division of labour as a whole, thus of alienation. Those assigned to proletarian labour with little room for mental expression rightly distrust the experts in it. Hence also the correct distrust of academic Marxism. Theory for us is not academic.

We feel influenced by, among other currents, class struggle anarchism, the German and Italian left communists, the situationists, the Italian autonomists, and the non-party-ist French currents influenced but critical of the Italian left. We don't however identify ourselves completely with any particular tradition. If communism is the real movement that abolishes existing conditions then 'theoretical clarification', becoming conscious of what is happening and what needs to happen, is a moment of the process. While some aspects of such 'theory of the proletariat' can be found in these traditions, not all. Also the most valid theory can become ideology if it is held in a rigid and frozen manner. Thus, for example, it seems to us that groups like the situationists did more to recover and make live the contributions of the German/Dutch lefts than did those groups claiming an unbroken heritage with them. There is always something provisional in theoretical clarification - and this would include the ideas expressed in Aufheben articles.

While we, like many before us, have gone 'back to Marx' in order to escape what has been known as 'Marxism' we don't see his writings as having all the answers. However, we do find the critique of political economy an essential reference. Marx did not invent communism but his critique of capitalism, his attempt to reproduce the 'concrete in thought', made a fundamental contribution to the task of the overthrow of capitalism. In particular, we find very helpful the recognition that Marx's work was incomplete, that issues of proletarian subjectivity and of the crisis of capitalist social relations are not dealt with fully in the critique of political economy. We also see some of the failures of Marxism as lying in the failure to recognise this.

The individuals who produce Aufheben are not a group with a membership or interest in recruitment. We have not defined ourselves by a set of 'aims and principles'; probably however we are more coherent in our ideas than most groups who have done so. Indeed it seems to us that the aims and principles of most formal organisations are compromises aimed at repressing and covering up the contradictions and disagreements within those groups. While Aufheben articles are generally written by individuals, there is a collective process of reading, discussion and revision so that the final version is something on which there is general agreement though it may not extend to every last point. (We do also publish articles from outside sources, which we don't subject to the same editorial process.) With our own articles, the individual does not necessarily know what he or she is going to come up with until it is written, then there is the discussion before the final article is agreed. It is largely through this process that Aufheben can be said to develop collective positions. Aufheben's positions then are defined by what appears in it. The magazine speaks for itself.

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Publicity of the Organization
and the Organization of Publicity

The ANIMAL remains a paper tiger
In the three years since the 'Paper Tiger' article was written and published, the ANIMAL article is the first written response received. Other reactions varied; from a few ex-CW members in Leeds who said they agreed with most of it but felt I should have been more self-critical; but one of them, who admitted not having read it, said I shouldn't have written a critical article on CW at all. One of them, I think, later wrote a decent piece on CW for Smash Hits which made some similar points to mine. Two other ex-CW people got angry, upset and sulky about it; one tried to slag me off for 'not doing anything' - presumably meaning not going to as many boring political meetings as he does. He also tried to trash the reputation of the long dead ex-CW person I quoted in my piece, all the while avoiding dealing with any of the specific critical points I made. Such people, while accusing others of being 'intellectuals', will become hostile and stop speaking (no great loss) to those who dare to hold opinions different from theirs - revealing how completely ideological and intellectual their relationships with other people really are. One or two more grown up ex-CW people disagreed with the article but were happy to remain on good terms. All a bit of a storm in a teacup really...

So somebody who has bothered to sit down and draft a response deserves the courtesy of a requested reply. Though I have to say that I approach this with little enthusiasm; partly because from the start of their response there are basic errors in understanding the meaning of points made in my article. These misinterpretations could have been avoided by a more careful, less sloppy reading of the text. (I will charitably rule out the possibility of deliberate distortion.)

Most readers have not seen my original article; so ANIMAL's misreadings and distortions will not help them grasp my meaning. Nor will the fact that they have ignored some of my most important points. In my reply I have tried to get a balance between correcting some of their misinterpretations without repeating myself too much. (Those interested can get a copy of my original article from Aufheben.)

* * *

For a start, ANIMAL's whole response is written as if the article is the work of Aufheben - yet this is obviously not true, as it's clearly stated at the top of the page that this is an 'Intake' - coming from outside their group. So all criticism based on the idea that 'Paper Tiger' was written by an intellectual is mistaken; like everyone else I have an intellect that I sometimes use, but that does not make me an intellectual. It's not my job or defining social role. It's not even true that Aufheben are just intellectuals uninvolved in real struggles (but they are quite able to defend themselves and I'll deal with my own criticisms of them further on). But even if it had been written by an 'intellectual' that wouldn't in itself invalidate all criticisms; you can't try to dodge difficult questions by tagging dismissive labels on to those who ask them or assume that CW's supposed working class pedigree always ultimately wins the argument. Which is not to say that intellectuals don't need criticising...

The 'Stillborn' article is written as if only middle class intellectuals would make these kind of criticisms - ignoring the fact that some of them were also made inside CW during its history (but were not allowed to surface publicly).

The ANIMAL reply continually distorts what I actually said in my article; or asks me to defend things I never said. It also asks questions whose answers can easily be found in my original article. Some examples: ANIMAL asks for an example of "occasions when the group orthodoxy became an obstacle to action". Well, one example is given in the first footnote on the first page in the quote from an ex-CW member: "...the leadership ... managed to impose its diversions: at the end of the miners' strike...no revolutionary critique of the NUM was published for fear of putting off the miners..." even though there were those in CW who saw the necessity for such a critique. And the Bash the Rich March was another example; a pretended attack preventing a real one occurring. They ask "Do you really think you can organize anything effectively without publicizing it?" Of course you can - if CW really wanted to go into Hampstead and do some bashing they could quite easily have secretly organized it amongst themselves, gone in and done it and disappeared into the night.[1] But instead they organized a big publicity stunt, thereby forewarning the cops and media, and were prevented from even entering Hampstead - as CW must have known would happen. But the real goal of the event was achieved - CW's lifeblood, publicity of the organization and the organization of publicity.

And I didn't "slag off CW for saying young working class men swear a lot". I criticized CW for reducing the diversity of the working class down to a crude stereotype image as part of its recruitment strategy; moral judgements about swearing didn't even come into it.

But the most revealing thing about the ANIMAL reply is that as they try to refine and justify the logic of their position they only expose more of their own contradictions; for instance, while claiming that CW have always encouraged the working class to realise that 'the rich are always greedy selfish gits', CW were always ready to suck up to and praise various soap (Lofty) and pop stars such as Joe Strummer - whose early presence in Notting Hill encouraged the gentrification of the area - as long as CW could gain more publicity from it. The 'Rock Against the Rich' Tour starring the extremely rich bastard Strummer trying to revive both his and CW's flagging career and fading pseudo-rebel image - pathetic. And a recent issue of ANIMAL continues this with an article slavishly praising super rich footballer Eric Cantona, basically because he mouthed a few vague liberal sentiments saying that poverty and inequality are bad. No criticism is made of his extreme wealth and exclusive lifestyle, his advertising appearances (for products of Third World sweatshops) and his readiness to play his part in the star system that reinforces this hierarchical society. Where do CW think these celebrities invest their vast fortunes? In business and trade, meaning investing in the exploitation of the working class. Presumably CW are happy to ignore all this because one of their present campaign bandwagons is for a better deal for all football supporters - and they don't want to alienate potential recruits from the terraces by dissing their heroes. Footballers (along with many other sport and music stars) get much of their influence from the fact that most of them are from working class backgrounds and therefore represent one of the few escape routes to wealth and fame. You can't say anything very meaningful or useful about football (or the rest of culture) without dealing with these kind of contradictions. But CW, so desperate to popularise themselves, are too afraid to criticise what is popular with the sections of the working class they want to recruit from, so instead they opportunistically ignore these contradictions. But by pretending they don't exist they reinforce them... "It's the old con. Present yourselves as allies of what's going on (which means opportunistically refraining from criticising what you know to be its weaknesses), and hope to add your 'political dimension' once you've won confidence and been accepted as knowing the business." (Anarchism Exposed, London 1985).

According to CW, 'if you're not popular you're nothing'. So their politics are always going to be led and defined by the other far stronger forces in society that determine what is immediately popular. Tail-ending the dominant media and cultural forces is not much of a recipe for autonomous class struggle or a radical critique of such forces.[2]

* * *

CW's tabloid populism was a triumph of style over substance and form over content. Creating genuinely subversive relationships amongst even a minority (whether thru writing or whatever activity) is ultimately worth far more than all CW's fleeting moments of media attention and popularity. The theory that has been shown to have any lasting value is not at all that which was immediately the most popular - when times of upheaval arrive this becomes clear. CW seem to think about tabloidism and fame the same way others mistakenly think about Parliament - that it's a neutral form which, if it only had the right people installed in it with the right ideas, then it would cease to have any harmful effect and become beneficial. But the form to a large degree determines the content and traps people in pre-determined, static social relationships. Which leads to CW's simplistic analysis, opportunism etc.

Of course we should try to express ourselves as clearly as possible. But there is a contradiction that has to be dealt with - much of what is known as 'common sense' is the medium or currency for the circulation and expression of the taken-for-granted dominant values of this society. To express the subversive thru language it is sometimes necessary to use words that have retained a clearer meaning thru less use. Everyday language is a terrain largely occupied by the enemy: we tend to speak the language of our masters. (A beautiful example of a counter-tendency to this occurred in the 1992 LA Riot when the rioters coined the phrase 'image looters' to describe the media: a neat reversal of perspective.)

In a world where appearances and the truth of things almost never coincide, theory is necessary to penetrate the lies. This society encourages a fragmented consciousness that craves only immediacy in its consumption (e.g. tabloidism). But a partially understood text that resists complete immediate understanding may not be just unnecessarily dense and wordy. It may be that it has a depth, subtlety and value worth pursuing. And it may grasp and reflect more accurately the real complexities of class society. "I assume of course they will be readers who want to learn something new, who will be prepared to think while they are reading." - Marx on Capital.

* * *

ANIMAL say we are wrong to say that "the desired effect of all populist journalism (of whatever creed) is to suspend critical thought on the part of the reader and to reduce choices of opinion down to a simple duality - good/bad, black/white - through a simplistic representation of reality..." because, according to ANIMAL, "it implies that people are already capable of critical thought which is gradually closed down (can younger people immediately read well?)..." This is more of CW's patronising attitude revealed - why is the ability to think critically automatically identified with being able to already read well? A strangely elitist intellectual view.

CW's idea of theory/critical thought as something separate and external to the working class that they have to learn from reading and more 'educated' people (such as CW of course) is influenced by Paulo Freire, whose book they quote from at length. CW are always ready to throw the accusation of 'intellectual' at those they see as their rivals and critics in the political arena, yet they rarely if ever attack the role of the professional intellectual and their ideas.[3] Freire puts a libertarian gloss on his ideas by saying that educators and educated should work together in creating 'educational projects'; the educators are middle class radicals and/or 'the revolutionary leadership' and the educated the ignorant masses incapable of liberating themselves by their own efforts alone. Freire praises the Stalinist regimes of Cuba and China as fine examples of his theories being practised! (p. 36, p. 75, pp. 145-6 - Penguin 1996 edition). And according to ANIMAL, "what Class War does is in the same league as Paulo Freire", this great friend and defender of these butchers and dictators. Freire, the Stalinists - and apparently CW - all share the belief that they are the necessary bearers of consciousness and knowledge that the working class lacks.[4] The Stalinists and other leftists use this belief as a justification for their leadership and authority over the working class. ANIMAL are using it as a justification for CW's populist style - either way, it's elitist bullshit.

CW seem unaware that throughout their lives people use critical thought to make decisions and form opinions - the schoolkids who turned their school chemistry labs into molotov-cocktail factories during the Hungarian revolution of 1956 didn't need to 'read well' to be 'capable of critical thought' and practice it. Neither did the peasants, mostly illiterate, who created the Mexican Revolution. And the slave revolts? The working class can use various sources critically in the development of its own theory - but it has to be a process located in people's own activity and circumstances. Theory is not a product of intellectuals that can be taken ready-made off the shelf of the ideological supermarket. Nor can theory and consciousness be reduced to verbal and written forms of expression. Acts of solidarity and subversion, writing and discussions, spontaneity and reflection - are all components of the expression and development of theory.

ANIMAL talk about theory as if it is a body of written knowledge that can be learned off by heart and mastered - a typical bourgeois and leftist assumption. This 'theory' is really only ideology - a set of fixed ideas, congealed eternal truths - 'ideas that serve masters' very well as party lines and group orthodoxies.

* * *

The letters from prisoners that ANIMAL quotes from show that CW is doing some useful prisoner support work. ANIMAL preface the letters with the long quote from the Freire book. (The quotes are not actually Freire's words at all, but are from the Foreword by R. Shaull.) They say that CW, like Freire, work on the basis of "dialogical encounters with others" where these others, when provided by CW "with the proper tools for such encounters, the individual can gradually perceive ... reality as well as the contradictions in it, become conscious of his or her own perception of reality, and deal critically with it". A very touching image of CW kindly providing us all 'with the proper tools' for 'becoming conscious'.[5] Bet you weren't so explicitly patronising in your 'dialogical encounters' with the prisoners whose letters you quote.

The letters show that the prisoners are grateful for the help and support that CW provide - and all due respect goes to CW for doing so. But if CW are trying to claim that the letters are examples of how, in a Freire-like fashion, the prisoner 'comes to a new awareness' and how their 'eyes have been opened' due to their contact with CW then this is just unconvincing (and probably gives a worse view of CW's prisoner support work than it deserves). Having read the full letters you sent us, it's clear that the prisoners' hatred of authority, the rich, the system etc. is a result of their real experiences, the struggles they have lived - and are positions they had developed long before they had any 'encounter' with CW. Most other groups doing similar work could produce similar letters. The letters prove only that the prisoners are grateful and see CW as being on their side - nothing else. And there's little evidence of a 'critical dialogue' going on.

It seems odd that CW should choose these letters as supposed evidence of their educating efforts and popularity. After all, prisoners mainly doing long stretches (armed robbers and the like), in isolated conditions whose main form of contact with the outside world is via letter writing - these are hardly the most typical representatives of the working class. But then even in the heyday of its 15 minutes of fame the CW paper was always a bit short of letters from their readers. CW even felt obliged to sometimes make them up - as was admitted in their Internal Bulletin (no. 18, Minutes of delegate meeting). Again, creation of the right image being more important than honesty.

Even in its own terms, the populist strategy has failed. Most of the shrinking CW Fed. were eventually forced to recognise the absurdity of a populism that is less and less popular. The decline and split of CW is a reflection of a double-edged apathy towards politics among the working class; a healthy cynicism towards all the political rackets that claim to represent others[6] - but also a resignation and acceptance of conditions born of the defeats of the past 15 years.

CW could at least be seen as a (voluntaristic) attempt to assert a collective class identity and subjectivity when all such subjectivity is being crushed under the weight of isolation and uniformity being imposed on social relations. (In this sense society is more totalitarian now than ever.) To retain any meaningful subjectivity is to retain a point of view - and the ability to act on it. The old forms of struggle and communication have been outmanoeuvred and the working class have yet to adequately create new ones. The tragedy is that CW have tried to resist these developments by adopting the same methods that created them - marketing of politics, simplistic 'analysis', tabloidism etc. (described in more detail in my original article).

CW constantly compare themselves favourably to the rest of the Left. Yet Militant in the 1980s and early '90s had a far better claim to the popularity, influence and membership among the working class that CW dreamed of and still seek - and their politics were still total crap. Which only goes to show the limits of populism and the appeal of simplistic solutions and mechanical activism.

* * *

As one of those mentioned by ANIMAL belonging to the high percentage of people who left school with no qualifications (and have never gained any since) I can only humbly say to my more educated friends at ANIMAL that it's you who should know better than to think you have any monopoly on 'A Working Class Point Of View'. Mine (and many others) just don't coincide with yours.

ACATAC - Summer 2000
A Class Act to Abolish Classes

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Footnotes

[1] Obviously this can't be misunderstood as support for the dominance of conspiratorial politics. But you use the tactics most appropriate to achieving the goal.

[2] "Like the Leftists they are, Class War has recently proposed a strategy of entrism into these [Neighbourhood Watch] para-State bodies. They dream of kicking out the cops from these cop-initiated Neighbourhood Watch Schemes, a vanguardist fantasy doomed to failure but which may help to boost the image of these schemes amongst the poor and confused. Such entrism is an imagined short-cut, a substitute for the harder task of initiating some anti-mugging, anti-cop, anti-heroin, anti-rapist etc. project completely independent of the State. It's about as subversive as the Trots whose delirium leads them to believe the Labour Party can be turned into a Bolshevik party; that the State can be turned into a Workers' State." (Once Upon a Time There was a Place Called Nothing Hill Gate; BM Blob, London 1988).

[3] Ironically, despite their dismissal of Aufheben as intellectuals and detached theorists, ANIMAL/CW seem to share some of their attitudes with regards to intellectuals and academics: both are too uncritical and respectful of academia. Aufheben's best articles are the ones about recent events (e.g. LA Riots) or struggles they've been involved in (anti-roads, anti-workfare etc.) and the worst are the ones where they abstractly theorise about other theories (USSR, Decadence) to no real practical consequence - except, perhaps, to gain some kind of acceptance from a few boring lefty hackademics. The worst articles in Aufheben are only relevant to the academic study of the class struggle - and not to the practice of the real struggle. Which is ironic considering how active the Aufs have been in various struggles (on occasion alongside CW members!)

"The popular element 'feels' but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element 'knows' but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel. The two extremes are therefore pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion on the other..."
(Gramsci - Prison Notebooks).

[4] In essence, Freire's ideology boils down to replacing the ideological dominance of the present rulers over 'the oppressed' with the ideological dominance of the educated Leninist leadership, with the willing co-operation and participation of the oppressed (Freire, p. 144, op. cit.). The religious overtones of his servant of the people/guide to consciousness role are shown by one of his enthusiastic quotations: "German Guzman says of Camilo Torres: '...he gave everything. At all times he maintained a vital posture of commitment to the people - as a priest, as a Christian, and as a revolutionary.'" (p. 144, footnote). Freire's libertarian brand of Leninism is plain naive; idealising from afar the heavenly Cuban and Chinese regimes and taking their leader's pronouncements as the gospel truth, he believes these regimes are practising his libertarian educational theories. Yet in his descriptions of the misconceived 'libertarian' equality (really a hierarchical benevolence) he seeks to create in his educational projects, Freire describes everything that social relationships are not under the Stalinist regimes. And in 30 years of various reprints of his book, Freire has never felt the need to revise his opinion of Stalinism expressed in it. Maybe Freire lacks a 'dialogical encounter' with himself and the educator needs educating... Freire's ideas are so threatening to the ruling class that he has for four years been funded by those well-known organs of subversion, the United Nations and the World Council of Churches.

[5] The quote goes on to say that eventually the paternalistic teacher-student relationship can be overcome - but Freire's theories never doubt the need for professional educational specialist and/or revolutionary leadership in their role as deliverers of consciousness and the tools for it. (Free Brains for the working class, anyone?)

[6] The decline of the Left as well as in numbers of people voting are evidence of this.

Review: Whatever happened to the Situationists?

These historically-determined limits cannot detract from the vitality of many of the SI's contributions, including, amongst others, their critique of the 'militant'.

Public Secrets by Ken Knabb

Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997.

What is Situationism? A Reader edited by Stewart Home

Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996.

The Situationist International (SI) was one of the most important revolutionary groups in the last 30 years. As many of our readers will know, the SI developed revolutionary theory to explain the misery and hence revolutionary potential that exists even in supposedly affluent modern capitalist societies. Their analysis predicted the character of the May 1968 almost-revolution in France, and members of the SI participated enthusiastically in the events of that period. We could pick out any number of their arguments to illustrate the SI's vital contributions to revolutionary theory. Their most famous contribution is the concept of the spectacle, of course, an account of the contemporary form of alienation: ëThe spectacle is not an aggregate of images but a social relation among people, mediated by imagesí. The SI are also known for their sharp analysis of the revolutionary movement itself. Perhaps no other revolutionary group has subjected the idea of what it means to be a revolutionary to such searching self-criticism.

The critique of ëthe militantí

The SI's critique of ëthe militantí is a key example of their self-questioning and self-criticism, which at its best can re-invigorate revolutionary struggle - both by helping comrades to re-evaluate their own practice, and by identifying what is wrong with those who call themselves revolutionaries but who are not.

The argument is that the way of life of ëthe militantí is a role just as much as that of the ëcop, executive or rabbií. ëThe militant'sí supposedly revolutionary practices are in fact hackneyed and sterile, a set of compulsive duties and rituals. Against the dull compulsion of duty, sacrifice and routine, the writings of the SI offered a vision of revolutionary practice as involving risk-taking, spontaneity, pleasure etc.: roles should be restored ëto the realm of playí.

The role of ëthe militantí can make ëpoliticsí appear boring and unattractive to the outsider. But more importantly, the demands of the role are contradictory to the needs of the subject inhabiting that role. In the world of ëthe militantí, ëpoliticsí is a separate realm from that of pleasure, adventure and self-expression. The role, as a form of alienated activity, feeds vampire-like on real life; it represents a disjunction between ends (communism as free creativity and love etc.) and means (stereotyped, constrained and ritualized methods). Hence the SI slogan ëboredom is always counter-revolutionaryí.

Why does ëthe militantí role occur? The answer of the SI and their followers was that the role of ëthe militantí had a certain psychological appeal. It offers certainty and safety to ëthe militantí herself. Most of us will have experienced how, when a struggle suddenly takes an unexpected turn (for example, the opportunity to occupy a building or get past the cops), the leftist ëmilitantí will hesitate or actively try to limit the situation. The role of 'the militant' creates a way of life, a routine, a structured mindset (guilt, duty etc.) such that change - including revolution itself - would be experienced as a threat to ëthe militant'sí sense of herself and her relation to the world.

Although we might perhaps sometimes recognize features of ëthe militantí in ourselves and our comrades, those of us in the non-Leninist revolutionary milieu will characteristically share certain basic assumptions which distinguish us from the leftist ëmilitantí. We are not engaged in struggles to overthrow capitalism out of a sense of altruism, charity or self-sacrifice, but for ourselves as alienated proletarian beings, interdependent with others in our class for our liberation. As Vaneigem puts it, ëI want to exchange nothing - not for a thing, not for the past, not for the future. I want to live intensely, for myself, grasping every pleasure firm in the knowledge that what is radically good for me will be good for everyoneí. Those on the left whose support for struggles elsewhere (whether in the ëThird Worldí or just for a group of local workers materially worse off than themselves) takes the place of their acknowledgement of and resistance to their own alienation might be said to not understand the nature of their own anti-capitalist impulses.

The historical vagaries of pleasure-seeking

The name of Ken Knabb will be known to many readers as the translator and editor of the most comprehensive collection of SI writings published in English, the Situationist International Anthology. Public Secrets comprises for the most part a collection of nearly all Knabb's writings and leaflets, going back to 1970. It therefore expresses the flavour of the self-analysing post-SI situationist scene in the 1970s.

Consistent with the rejection of the role of ëthe militantí and compulsive hack-like activism, the Knabb book, as an account of the ësecond waveí of situationists in the United States, is notable for its lack of references to the routine meetings and ongoing activism familiar to many of us. For example, when he had finished editing the Situationist International Anthology, instead of involving himself in another struggle, Knabb took up rock-climbing.

This puts us in mind of a common criticism of Vaneigem's account of radical subjectivity: that it risks degenerating into bourgeois individualism. While it was a necessary attack on the sterility of the typical leftist approach during a period of upturn in interest in revolutionary ideas, how is it applied during times when the movement and its ideas are in retreat? Was Knabb burnt out after editing the Anthology, or were there really no struggles going on around him at that time in which he could usefully participate?

The revolutionary movement is so small today, and the threat of leftism so diminished, that it is easy to feel that pendulum of 'pleasure' versus commitment should swing the other way. To get even the most modest of activities going, it is sometimes all hands to the pump! Those comrades who donít turn up to meetings, pickets and demonstrations arenít for the most part inventing new, more creative, consistent and pleasurable forms of resistance. Instead, they are expressing their critique of routine and mundane activism merely by staying in bed or going to the pub.

Of course, there have been some relatively effective struggles in recent years which have come to characterize themselves in many ways as the very antithesis of the mode of ëthe militantí. For example, recall the defence of Claremont Road in the No M11 Link Road Campaign, when ëactivismí for most people consisted for a large part in simply occupying the street and so presented the opportunity for regular parties and other forms of hedonism. However, the anti-work ëstrategyí of lying in bed till late in the morning despite all the barricading etc. that some people argued needed to be done led to some embarrassment when bailiffs and hundreds of riot police turned up to evict three houses and just walked in to find the occupants still asleep. Another example is the street party associated with Reclaim the Streets (RTS) groups. It seems undeniable that RTS get loads of people to mass actions against capital's beloved car-culture by billing such events as a ëpartyí. But, as has been noted elsewhere, a tension exists in such street parties in that some participants are satisfied with just the party aspect rather than the ëpoliticalí point of the action. In the Claremont Road case, many of us agreed that we needed to get beyond the guilt-tripping work ethic proposed by some of the hard-core barricaders. But its simple inverse was not a practical solution.

One of the sources for the situationists' rejection of compulsive ëmilitantí activism is thesis 220 of The Society of Spectacle where Debord contends that ëthe critique which goes beyond the spectacle must know how to waití. The SI's rejection of the 'compromises of reformism' or 'pseudo-revolutionary common actions' seemed justified only months later when a near-revolutionary situation developed apparently from nowhere. But May '68 and its aftermath both confirmed the SI's analysis and pointed to its limits. If the situationists were waiting for another '68-type explosion, what they got instead was the retreat of radical subjectivity in the face of the re-assertion of capital's dead objectivity. We may prefer ëlifeí to ësurvivalí, but in the face of capital's current counter-attack - unforeseen by the SI - even the most radical subjects must sometimes orient their activity around surviving.

Reduction of the political to the personal

The second wave of situationists, in particular, held that in the same way that we should give expression to our desires rather than suppress them - since it is our desires that are the motor of our struggle against alienation - so it is necessary to realize the political in the personal. This wasn't simply an attack on inconsistency in one's personal relations, but an argument that sorting yourself out could help you in your quest to sort out the world. The argument went: how can one criticize workers for not breaking with capital if not questioning one's own collusion in alienated personal relations?

Those who made this claim were adamant that it wasn't an argument for the revolutionary value of therapy, and that therapy was not some kind of solution. But they certainly made use of certain ideas from therapy by drawing on the work of Wilhelm Reich. Reich's influence is evident both in Vaneigem's work and in the practices of Knabb and his sometime cohorts. Public Secrets includes a piece by Voyer, ëReich: How to Useí, which argues that character (in Reich's sense) is the form taken by the individual's complicity in the spectacle. To end this complicity, Knabb and others continued the SI's practice of breaking, sometimes using an individual's character as their rationale. In circulated letters announcing breaks, they detailed each other's limitations such as superficiality and pretentiousness, both in understanding the SI and in personal relations.

Breaking has a long history in the SI. As What is Situationism? reiterates tediously, the SI's origins lay in an art/anti-art movement. Arguably, then, as the SI moved beyond art/anti-art to a revolutionary position, breaking was a necessary part of defining itself: arty-types were seen as involved in a completely different project and hence had to be expelled. The book also relates how, following further breaks, by the early 1970s the SI comprised just three people. The SI finally appears ludicrous in its preciousness and self-absorption.

The same can be said of the breaks taking place amongst the second-wave situationists described and documented by Knabb. However, the history of breaks in this case seems less excusable, since Knabb and his comrades were not part of an emerging movement in the first place, but merely a minor scene. Theirprincipled breaking appears to have been seen by them as a measure of their radicality. But the quest for ëauthenticityí, openness and honesty became important in its own right, and breaking became a compulsion. Defending the practice of breaking, Knabb says that the SI and their followers were doing ënothing more than choosing their own companyí (Public Secrets, p. 132). Well that's very nice for them, but in many struggles you can't choose who is on your side; you may have to act alongside people you don't like personally. Breaking helps draw clear lines, as Knabb says. But it comes across to us as self-indulgent purism, and the result is smaller and smaller groupuscules. What has that got to do with a revolutionary movement? Far from overcoming the personal/political dichotomy, what these post-SI situationists showed in totally politicizing their personal relations was that they themselves were the most obsessively one-sided politicos!

As illustrated in Public Secrets, the obsession with personal relations seems to have substituted itself for a proper concern with collective relations - how a group in struggle relates to the wider proletariat. Did all this meticulous navel-gazing at the level of personal relations really help those involved to engage more effectively in the class struggle as has been claimed? It would seem that those who indulged in this kind of self-analysis have not intervened any more effectively in the class struggle than the rest of us. It therefore comes as no surprise that SI-influence proponents of ëfriendship strikesí, personal breaks and other forms of character analysis such as Knabb now look back upon this period with some regret and embarrassment (Public Secrets, p. 133).

Knabb as a loyal situationist

Knabb went through the pre-hippy scene and anarchism before he discovered the writings of the SI. After Knabb had - in his own words - ëbecome a situationistí (p. vi), he and others produced ëOn the Poverty of Hip Lifeí (1972), an analysis of what was valid in the hippy movement as well some of its profound limitations:

ëIf the hippie knew anything he knew that the revolutionary vision of the politicos didn't go far enough. Although the hip lifestyle was really only a reform movement of daily life, from his own vantage point the hippie could see that the politico had no practical critique of daily life (that he was "straight").í (Public Secrets, p. 177)

And yet, because hippies understood alienation as simply a matter of the wrong perception, their own innovations were easily recuperated as further roles, giving new life to the spectacle:

ëBut as culture such a critique only serves to preserve its object. The counterculture, since it fails to negate culture itself, can only substitute a new oppositional culture, a new content for the unchanging commodity form...í (Ibid., pp. 176-7).

However this early 70s stuff applying situationist critique to wider movements gives way by the mid 70s to increasingly introverted 'theorizing about theorizing'. Two of the more recent pieces in the Knabb collection, ëThe Joy of Revolutioní and his interesting autobiography ëConfessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the Stateí place pieces like these in context. Knabb's discovery of the SI's texts provided him with the basic theory which he stuck with and applied loyally for the rest of his life. There has been little subsequent development of the pioneering SI analyses, either by Knabb or anyone else. Debord himself, post 1968, was more concerned with his reputation than with developing new theory. Loyal followers of the SI seemed to live off past glories; carrying forward the authentic SI project seemed to them to be a matter of repeating the ideas rather than superseding them where necessary, as the SI superseded previous revolutionary theory. Hence, Knabb's ëThe Joy of Revolutioní is not meant to be original; rather it is a somewhat didactic but readable introduction to the ëcommon senseí of non-hierarchical revolutionary theory, intended for readers not otherwise convinced. Although, within these terms, the article has its merits, some readers, like us, will find Knabb's treatment of democracy far too uncritical - another unchallenged inheritance of the SI.

If the ideas of the SI are more or less complete, as Knabb seems to believe, then the most important thing is to get them across. What is striking in Knabb's account of his activity is how much of it was text-centred: his ëinterventionsí were mostly writings, posters and leaflets. Within this ëpedantic precision fetishismí it was essential to Knabb to choose the correct words, even if this meant writing and re-writing his leaflets repeatedly till he got it right. Hence his short leaflet in response to the Gulf War took almost two months to write and wasn't distributed until the campaign against the war was almost over. Other documents in the collection express the same loyalty to the insights of the SI. Knabb's response to the LA riot of 1992 was not a fresh analysis, learning from the new expressions of anti-capitalist practice of the uprising. Instead, he issued a new translation of the classic SI text ëWatts 1965: The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economyí!

The worst feature of Knabb's loyalty is his Debord-like lumping together of all the different critics of the SI. In ëThe Blind Men and the Elephantí, Knabb juxtaposes a number of critical quotations on the SI, not just from shallow bourgeois commentators, but also from revolutionaries. Among them is a critical comment from Barrot & Martin's Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement. The inclusion of the quote demonstrates not Barrot & Martin's dogmatic refusal to comprehend, but Knabb's. Barrot's critique, expounded at length elsewhere, is, from a revolutionary perspective, perhaps the most useful critical analysis of the SI published to date.

The critique of the SI

The Barrot article known to many readers as ëWhat is Situationismí is republished in What is Situationism? A Reader under its original title ëCritique of the Situationist Internationalí. Along with the article is a useful introductory piece by the translator which critically traces the SI's influences in the form of Socialism or Barbarism (S ou B), as well as the currents which the SI neglected to its detriment - notably the Italian left.

The key point made by Barrot is that the analysis of the SI, as exemplified in Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, remains at the level of circulation, ëlacking the necessary moment of production, of productive labourí (What is Situationism? A Reader, p. 28). The great strength of the SI was to show how alienation existed not just in production but in ëeveryday lifeí, and hence in consumption. But, as Barrot suggests, the works of the SI leave the impression that a further analysis of production is unnecessary. In doing so, Debord ëreduces capitalism to its spectacular dimension aloneí (Ibid., p., 28). The spectacle is a sort of shorthand for all the social relations of contemporary capital. But it is not obvious from reading Debord's pithy exegesis quite how ëthe spectacleí can cover and distinguish as many forms of production and circulation relations as does ëcapitalí. Hence, though it is sometimes presented as the modern Capital, The Society of the Spectacle falls short of this ambition.

However, if The Society of the Spectacle is not the modern Capital, let's admit that it is one of the few books that could make that claim with any expectation of it being believed. As Barrot puts it, the SI analysed the revolutionary problem

ëstarting out from a reflection on the surface of society. This is not to say that The Society of the Spectacle is superficial. Its contradiction and, ultimately, its theoretical and practical dead-end, is to have made a study of the profound, through and by means of superficial appearance. The SI had no analysis of capital: it understood it, but through its effects. It criticized the commodity, not capital - or rather, it criticized capital as commodity, and not as a system of valuation which includes production as well as exchange.í (What is Situationism? A Reader, p. 28.)

But there are other merits to The Society of the Spectacle - for example, its treatment of the historical workers' movement in ëThe Proletariat as Subject and as Representationí is exceptional and its analysis of time and space adds to Marx. Barrot's overall critique is perhaps just a little too dismissive, but is possibly an understandable and necessary moment of reaction to the way The Society of the Spectacle has been treated by others.

Barrot notes that the SI's background in art/anti-art leaves its mark in their theory. They generalize from the anti-capitalist strengths of non-wage-earning social layers to labour in general, for example. He also observes that they borrowed S ou B's councilism and democracy far too uncritically. They were ignorant of the Italian left and hence of Bordiga's critique of councilism. As Bordiga argued, with its emphasis on forms of revolutionary organization and on workers' control, councilism neglects that the content can still be capitalist. Workers in control of their own work-place are still workers - are still alienated - if the work-place remains an enterprise and there is a separation between the work-place and the community.

Finally we would agree with the translator that Barrot underestimates Vaneigem. For Barrot, ëVaneigem was the weakest side of the SI, the one which reveals all its weaknesses. The positive utopia [which Vaneigem describes in The Revolution of Everyday Life] is revolutionary as demand, as tension, because it cannot be realized within this society: it becomes derisory when one tries to live it todayí. But that is exactly the point; The Revolution of Everyday Life is a revolutionary book because it connects to a tension between what one desires and knows as possible, but what cannot fully exist short of insurrection. That Vaneigem totally 'lost it' after the SI and that ëVaneigemismí became more and more preposterous as capital responded to the upsurge in class struggle of the 60s and 70s with crisis and mass unemployment does not deny that there are still important insights in his book. There is also an irony in Barrot's critical attitude here. As mentioned above, it was Vaneigem who most cogently developed the critique of ëthe militantí. The original foreword to Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement opens with a critique of ëthe militant attitudeí which echoes Vaneigem's argument almost exactly:

ëThe militant attitude is indeed counter-revolutionary, in so far as it splits the individual into two, separating his needs, his real individual and social needs, the reasons why he cannot stand the present world, from his action, his attempt to change this world. The militant refuses to admit that he is in fact revolutionary because he needs to change his own life as well as society in general. He represses the impulse which made him turn against society. He submits to revolutionary action as if it were external to him...í (p. 7)

The criticism of -isms

It is not incidental to understanding what the SI were about that they rejected the term ësituationismí and all who used it. The critique of ë-ismsí is well expressed by Vaneigem: ëThe world of -isms ... is never anything but a world drained of reality, a terribly real seduction by falsehoodí. To make an -ism of a set of practices and their accompanying theory is to render them as an ideology. The rejection of -isms is part of the rediscovery of the anti-ideological current in the work of Marx, which Marxism, in becoming an ideology, has repressed.

It therefore seems no coincidence that the edited Reader uses this rejected term in its title. It indicates where the editor locates himself in relation to the SI - as someone making a career out of snidely attacking them. This informs the selection of articles in the rest of the book. The only worthwhile piece apart from Barrot is ëThe end of musicí, a critique of punk and reggae, by Dave and Stuart Wise. The book was an opportunity for the editor to present to an English-speaking audience either as yet untranslated SI texts, other critiques of the situationists from within the revolutionary movement, or some of the largely unavailable 70s Anglophone situationist texts. Instead, most of the pieces are by academics and easily available elsewhere. The articles that have been slung together here mostly concern the SI's art heritage (the editor's own obsession) and are not worth reading.

The recurring question of the reception and recuperation of the SI

The vehement attacks on the ëpro-situí followers of the SI was part of a conscious attempt to prevent the ideas of the SI becoming an -ism: to escape the ideologization of their insights. Of course these attempts have not been completely successful; but this is only to be expected. Within academia, the hegemony of the postmodernist situ-vampires is one example of this. The fact that such recuperation has taken place should lead loyal situationists like Knabb to be a bit more critical of his beloved theory. Some pro-situ French fans of Voyer held that the economy doesn't exist - that it is all just ideology! This very ëpostmoderní and very preposterous notion was in this case then not developed by academic recuperators like Baudrillard, but by loyal situationists. Will Knabb now make the connection between the theory and its ideologization?

Why review these books? We didn't like What is Situationism? A Reader. We had reservations about the Knabb book, but felt it illustrated something about the post-SI situationist scene. The books' publication is evidence of the continued interest in the SI, and the SI must be counted as a basic reference point for any future revolutionary movement. The SI's powerful critique of the revolutionary herself may have degenerated in the period of counter-revolution into a dead-end addiction to navel-gazing; but this cannot obscure the continued necessity of engaging with their arguments. Despite the attention the SI receives, and the attempts over the years by various toss-pots to claim them for modern art or cultural studies, the SI remains in some sense irrecuperable. The continued attempts by organized knowledge either to dismiss or co-opt the SI itself provides evidence of the enduring antagonism of their ideas, as does the conscious echo of their approach in a number of contemporary struggles.

Notes

See R. Vienét (1968). Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May '68. Autonomedia, New York/ Rebel Press, London, 1992.

Guy Debord (1967) The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 4. Black and Red, 1983

Raoul Vaneigem (1967) The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 139. London: Rebel Press/ Left Bank Books, 1994.

Ibid., p. 131.

Ibid., p. 116.

Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.

(Public Secrets p. 142) One sees in Knabb's life-story a tendency to rationalize and politically justify his own personal interests. His own attraction to ëneo-religious tripsí, in particular Zen Buddhist practices, is turned into a question for all situationists and revolutionaries in his article ëThe Realization and Suppression of Religioní. Luckily, this urge to politicize his hobbies didn't result in a text calling for the ëRealization and Suppression of Outdoor Pursuitsí!

For a critical appraisal of the London RTS/ ëSocial Justiceí event on 12 April this year, see the spoof news-sheet Schnooze, available from Brighton Autonomists, c/o Prior House, 6 Tilbury Place, Brighton BN2 2GY.

Another, and in many ways better, text that tries to use the work of Reich to aid revolutionary politics is Maurice Brinton's The Irrational in Politics, Solidarity (1971).

However, the SI's self-dissolution is not without merits.. The SI resisted the ëLeninistí temptation to ërecruit and growí as an organization on the basis of the notoriety they had won since í68. Such a quantitative expansion would have covered up the qualitative crisis in the organization. However in ending it the way they did the last members collaborated in the growth of the legend of the SI. (See The Veritable Split in the International (1972) by G. Debord & G. Sanguinetti. London: BM Chronos, 1985.)

Daniel Denevert had a quite prominent role in the 1970s situationist scene, detailed by Knabb (e.g., pp. 126-7, 129-31). They carried the ëpursuit of individual autonomyí and attacks on people's ëcharacterologicalí complicity within the spectacle to an extreme point before finally sending out ëa set of "Lettres sur l'amité" in which they discussed their recent experiences on the terrain of political and personal relationships and declared a "friendship strike" of indefinite durationí (Knabb, p. 136). We hear that Daniel Denevert did eventually give himself over to an even more isolated way of resisting this world, a way that opens one to 'one of modern society's increasingly sophisticated forms of control over people's lives': psychiatrists and mental hospitals.

'This deliberate narrowing of the scope of critical inquiry marks a retreat from an historical plane of analysis... In the Knabbist cosmos, which is surprisingly impervious to historical change, the theorist becomes the "experiencing subject," who develops endlessly through a sequence of subjective "moments," arriving finally at the ultimate goal of "realization."' (At Dusk: The Situationist Movement in Historical Perspective by D. Jacobs & C. Winks, Berkeley, 1975). Knabb quotes this critique as part of his situ honesty. He could have made a more interesting and less narcissistic book by including longer extracts from the writings of other American situationists or - as with these authors - ex-situationists. For example, Two Local Chapters in the Spectacle of Decomposition and On The Poverty of Berkeley Life by Chris Shutes are two of the most interesting products of the American situationists.

Of course, these second wave situationists thought that their focus on character etc. was indeed carrying theory and the revolution forward. This was part of their tendency to reduce revolution to essentially a problem of consciousness: their own consciousness.

For all the SI's interesting critique of 'roles' Knabb seems to have never broken from the role of 'the theorist'!

Re-Fuse: Further Dialectical Adventures into the Unknown London: Combustion, 1978, p. 36 This is an interesting British situationist text but it should be noted the author stopped distributing this text in 1980 and does not necessarily hold to every opinion expressed within it.

Detroit: Black & Red, 1974. A new edition of this important book is to be published soon.

The title of the earlier pamphlet version of Barrot's article was in fact given to it by the publisher, though nowhere in it does Barrot use the term ësituationismí (see below).

For more on S ou B and indeed on the SI, see the article on ëDecadenceí in Aufheben 3, Summer 1994.

All this is dealt with well in Barrot & Martin's Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement.

What is Situationism? A Reader, p. 35.

Barrot acknowledges the SI here but references The Society of the Spectacle rather than Vaneigem's book.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 24.

Its not that the insights of the SI completely escaped being turned into an ideology (see below), nor are we accepting Debord and Sanguinetti's all too easy dismissal of such ideologization as ëpro-situí and thus 'nothing to do with us'. On the basis of The Veritable Split some loyal situationists have been ideologically against 'situationism' just as some have been militantly anti-militant. The issue is not about whether one should use the term ësituationismí or not, but about whether one can use the SI's ideas for revolutionary purposes. As The Veritable Split, itself expresses it, ëit is not ... a question of the theory of the SI but of the theory of the proletariatí (p. 14).

In his Introduction, the editor describes the authors as ëentrepreneursí whose article helped make SI ideas into ëa saleable commodityí (p. 1). This claim is contradicted in the Reader itself by the account of how the text was never published by its authors but distributed in typescript form among a few people mainly in the Leeds area. A Glasgow group then produced it as a pamphlet and now the editor uses it alongside Barrot's piece to spice up an otherwise bankrupt product.

See Re-Fuse p. 39

The attempts at academic criticism and co-option following the death of Debord in 1994 are detailed by T.J. Clark & Donald Nicholson-Smith in their article ëWhy art can't kill the Situationist Internationalí in the art journal(!) October, 1997.

Intakes: Fascism/Anti-Fascism - Barrot Replies

Fascism.jpg

Aufheben's introduction

In Aufheben 1 (summer 1992) we carried a short review of the influential text Fascism/Anti-fascism by Jean Barrot. We reviewed it because it related to struggles that were going on at that time, and because it was an analysis to which we were basically sympathetic. The critique of anti-fascism is necessary and important; but we also felt that such a critique tended to dogmatism. This is part of a more general weakness of the Italian left from which it derives.

Like other parts of the left communist opposition to the orthodoxy promoted from Moscow, the Italian left tried to maintain communist positions in the face of a virtually complete capitulation to opportunism in the workers' movement. Part of the price it paid was that it became rigid and mechanical, with principles tending to become dogmas. If, as the situationists put it, we must be against sectarianism but the only defence against sectarianism is a strict theoretical line, that needs to be balanced by a equally vigilant resistance to the tendency of theory to degenerate into ideology. Opposition to anti-fascism, as opposition to trade unions and leftism generally, should be more than ritual denunciation; it should involve an attempt to understand contradictions which arise within movements and individual proletarians. Intransigence, the notion of the invariance of the communist programme, resolute opposition to opportunism - these aspects of the Italian left enabled it to hold on to the insights of the revolutionary wave that followed the first world war. But they have also been its weaknesses: a refusal to see anything new, an inability to relate to and learn from the class struggle effectively, a tendency to become a sect preaching its 'truths' to a world that does not listen.

In repeating in our review the translator's attributions of the weaknesses of left communism to Barrot we were in retrospect unfair. Moreover,in voicing our reservations on the Italian left's position on anti-fascism here and in our review we would not want to support the liberal and leftist misrepresentations of these Italian communists' opposition toanti-fascism. Historically, as indicated in the Barrot text, and in our review, the Italian Left did not hold back from fighting fascists among other enemies of the proletariat. As they pointed out, the real 'united front' of this period was the alliance of the democratic government and fascism against the proletariat:

"The government ... had, by a decree of 20th October 1920, sent 60,000 demobilised officers into the training camps, with the obligation to sign up for the groups of "squadristi". Whenever fascists burned down the premises of unions or the socialist or communist parties, the army and the gendarmerie were always on the side of the fascists. And these armed forces were those of the liberal democratic state."
(The Italian Communist Left 1926-45; A Contribution to the History of the Revolutionary Movement, ICC, p. 21)

Our review of Fascism/Anti-fascism was published six years ago. We return to it now because we have only just received this reply from 'Jean Barrot' himself, which we welcome.

Barrot's reply

This letter is about your 1992 review of Fascism/Antifascism, a pamphlet published in England twice, and then again by Wildcat, under my pen name Jean Barrot, an alias I got rid of a few years ago. (A new revised version of The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, first published by Black & Red, Detroit, 1974, has now been published in London by Antagonism Press under my name 'Gilles Dauvé'.)1

Although I'm happy to see Fascism/Anti-fascism available in English, it was never intended to exist in that form. In 1979, I wrote a 90-page preface to a selection of articles from the 'Italian left' magazine Bilan (1933-38) on Spain. Years later, I found comrades then and now unknown to me had edited a much shorter English version, as of course they were perfectly free to do. But what was meant to be a reflection on communization (analysing Russia and Spain among other historical examples, and actually criticizing Bilan), has been narrowed to an anti-anti-fascist stand. Maybe this is why your article regards my views as both valid and unfortunately one-sided.

I'll try to make myself clearer.

1. Can the proletariat prevent capitalist society from periodically turning into a dictatorship?

No.

Class conflict commands modem times, and centres around working class submission and/or resistance, rebellion, insurrection... It does not follow that the workers could divert the political course at any time and avoid the after-effects of their own attempts to change history.

For instance, active class struggle determined the birth and life-span of the Weimar Republic. After World War 1, revolution was stifled in Germany by a combination of democracy and fascism (the Freikorps used by the SPD-led government to crush workers' risings in 1919-20 were real fascist groupings, with many future nazis in their ranks). The Weimar system was built out of proletarian assaults and setbacks. Then the workers had a say, albeit a degraded and mystified one: the councils movement was reduced to a bureaucratic institution, and the revolution that failed gave way to a left-dominated socialist-orientated regime. Working class pressures, and the conflict between a reformist majority and revolutionary minorities, shaped the post-war period. Even when right-of-centre politicians were in office, even with Hindenburg as president (the SPD called to vote for him in 1932 as a bulwark against Hitler...), workers remained the pivotal force of Weimar's early days, and often its decisive factor.

But the combined and rival weights of SPD and KPD made their ownweaknesses. With the 1929 crash, when even the ruling class had to be disciplined, this time capital found that not just radicals but alsorespectful union leaders could be a burden. The bourgeois-reformist compromise set in motion by the workers 14 years before became more a hindrance than a help.

Hitlerism was not inevitable, with its grotesque and murderous paraphernalia. But on January 30th, 1933, some strong central power was the order ofthe day, and the only options left to Germany were straightforwardly statist and repressive ones, to be settled out of proletarian reach.

Paradoxically, it's the sheer strength of wage-labour (reformist and radical) that deprives it now and again of any say in the running of affairs.

2. How far can anti-fascism contribute to a revolutionary movement?

Of course, anti-fascism is not a homogeneous phenomenon. Durruti, Orwell and Santiago Carrillo all qualify as antifascists. But the question remains: What is anti-fascism anti? And what is it 'pro' exactly?

I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an 'anti-imperialist', since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.
I am (and so is the proletariat) against fascism, be it in the form of Hitler or Le Pen. I am not an 'anti-fascist', since this is a political position regarding fascist state or threat as a first and foremost enemy to be destroyed at all costs, i.e. siding with bourgeois democrats as a lesser evil, and postponing revolution until fascism is disposed of.

Such is the essence of anti-fascism. 'Revolutionary antifascism' is a contradiction in terms - and in reality. Anything communist inevitably goes beyond the boundary of antifascism, and sooner or later clashes with it.

When Spanish workers took arms against the military putsch in July '36, they were obviously fighting fascism, but (whatever they may have called themselves) they were not acting as anti-fascists, as their move aimed both at the fascists and the democratic state. Afterwards, however, when they let themselves be trapped within the institutional framework, they became 'anti-fascists', fighting their fascist foes while at the same time supporting their own democratic enemies.

Revolutionary critics of anti-fascism have been repeatedly accused of sabotaging the fight against fascism, of being Franco's or Hitler's 'objective' allies - which soon comes close to 'subjective'... The sad irony is, only the proletariat and communists are fundamental opponents of fascism.

Anti-fascism is always more supportive of democracy than opposed to fascism: it won't take anti-capitalist steps to repel fascism, and will prefer its own defeat rather than risk proletarian outbursts. It was no accident or mistake that the Spanish bourgeoisie and the Stalinists wasted time and energy getting rid of anarchist peasant communes when they were supposed to do everything to win the war: their number one priority was not and had never been to smash Franco, but to keep the masses under control.

So the point is not that there are lots of ways of being an anti-fascist, and that non-revolutionary anti-fascist individuals can turn revolutionary, as of course many will, but that anti-fascism as such, in order to avoid a dictatorial state, submits to the democratic state. That's its nature, its logic, its proven past, and all the 'yes buts' about it got drowned in the Barcelona May '37 blood of those workers who'd hoped to outsmart moderate anti-fascism. Anti-fascism is not like a meeting one bursts into and forces to adopt a new programme. It's not a form: it has a content and a political substance of its own. It's not a 'bourgeois' shell wherein subversion could put proletarian flesh.
Needless to say, I am not suggesting die-hard communists should only take part in 'pure' anti-wage-labour attacks and keep clear of all anti-fascist groups, waiting for them to catch up with us. No doubt the rejection of everything fascism stands for (ethnicism,racism,sexism,nationalism, law and order, outright reactionary culture, etc.) is often a first step to rebellion. In fact, quite a few young wo/men take part in demos against the French National Front because they realize it asks for even more submission to a social order they hate, not so much because it is a threat to a parliamentary democracy they don't care about all that much. Then politics comes along trying to channel this into a support for democracy. These spontaneous gestures will develop into a critique of the roots of this world if they reject the basis of anti-fascism: a respect for democratic capitalism. Only by pointing out the issues at stake can we contribute to this maturation.

Beating off fascism means destroying its pre-conditions, i.e. its social causes = capitalism.

3. How can we defeat one of the worst divisive forces within proletarians: racism?

Certainly not by treating racism as another issue to be added to anti-capitalism.

Racism stresses a difference. Anti-racism does the opposite: it emphasizes something in common between those that racism divides. This common element is usually humankind or humanity. Now, when a bourgeoisie also appeals to that in relation to his workers, what will revolutionaries object? Obviously this common factor can't be the same for those who manage this world and those who'd like to change it.

Actually, what we often tend to do is replace 'We're all humans' by 'We're all proles'. We say: (a) a black worker is the same as a white worker, (b) both aren't the same as a black boss or a white boss. The snag is, this does not attack racism; it supports solidarity, as indeed we must, but solidarity is precisely what's lacking because of racism. So we're just substituting a proletarian anti-racism for a humanist one. Yet both contend with racism in its visible form and miss its causes.
In '68, though there were racists around, including among wage-earners, the French bourgeoisie could not use racism as a major dividing weapon, because of the unifying effect of mass class struggle. Later, as workers' militancy subsided, divisions appeared. To mention just one important landmark, the Talbot 1983 strike revealed a growing split between so-called national and foreign car-workers. Such a rift was more a result than a cause. Is it mere coincidence that 1983-4 also witnessed the rise of the National Front? It's not the lack of adequate anti-racist campaigns that helped Le Pen get now as much as 15 per cent of the votes. It's the decline of collective resistance among the workers. Racism manifests itself as an ideology, but is not first ideological. It's a practical phenomenon, a social relation: one of the most vicious aspects of competition between wage-labourers, a consequence of the decay of living and fighting communities. The 'racialization' of the working class goes along with its atomization.

The proletariat is not weak because it's divided: its weaknesses breed division. So anything that makes it stronger strikes a blow at racism. While avoiding organized humanistic anti-racism, one can combat racism when one comes across it in real life, as many non-racist proles spontaneously do in a pub, on the shopfloor or in a picket line, recreating some form of autonomous community.
For example, the December '95 movement silenced Le Pen's rhetoric. Likewise, a numberof estate riots have brought together people from north Africa, black and 'white' origins.

The communist movement has both a class and a human content. An interesting question is: which class struggle activity gets proletarians together, and practically tends to do away with racism?
Workers can be militant and racist at the same time.

In 1922, South African bosses lowered white miners' wages and opened a number of jobs to blacks. 'White' riots ended in a blood-bath: over 200 miners killed. As in strikes against female or foreign labour, this was wage-earners' self-defence at its worst.

On the other hand, while Holland was occupied by nazi Germany, Dutch workers went on strike against the way Jews and Jewish workers were being deported and discriminated against.
The key to South African labour's reactionary stand, or to Dutch solidarity, does not lie in racist/non-racist minds. Minds are moulded by past and present social relationships and actions. The more open, global, potentially universal and therefore 'human' a demand or an action is, the least likely it is to be narrowed to sexist, xenophobic or racist lines.

Imagine a workplace. Fighting to save jobs could more easily bring the workforce closer to racism than, say, asking for a flat £20 per week increase for every single employee on the premises. The former encloses people within defensive gestures, confines them to 'their' plant, isolates them from other workplaces and eventually divides them, between themselves (Who'll get the sack? My work-mate, I hope, not me!) However small, the latter demand unites proles irrespective of gender, nationality or professional skill, and can link them with workplaces outside their own, since many other people can take it up and start asking for the same increase, or for something that's even more unifying.

Some claims and tactics reinforce trade, local or 'race' differences. Others involve the interplay of an ever larger community, open up new issues, and break 'ethnic', etc. divisions.

The only way to defeat racism is to address it on a general and 'political' level, showing how any division between proles (and racism even more viciously than xenophobia) always ends in them (all proles) being worse off, more degraded, more submissive.

Racism is to be addressed, not as a separate question, and never as an obnoxious ideology to be smashed by a warm-hearted one.

Gilles Dauve, 1997

• 1. Editors' footnote:We came close to reviewing and would recommend this revised edition of the classic exposition of communism as the real movement.The eclipse and re-emergence of the Communist Movement by Gilles Duave and Francois Martin is available from Antagonism Press,c/o BM Makhno,London WC1N 3XX,price £3.00.

Social Democracy: No Future? An Introduction to Articles on the Retreat of Social Democracy (Part I)

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Introduction to articles on the retreat of social democracy

Relating to the retreat

The question of how we grasp social democracy and its current retreat is now more than ever a practical one. The institutions of social democracy continue to be the focus of many contemporary struggles. In the UK context, this is exemplified in recurrent conflicts over privatization, employment rights and cuts in welfare spending. Hence we face the question of how we relate to these struggles: what do we want and how should we fight?

The question always arises because our immediate experience as proletarians of the institutions of social democracy is characteristically twofold. Consider the example of the welfare state. In the first place, the organs of the welfare state - benefits, health care, free education - present themselves simply as a means of survival. But our experience of such organs is also one of domination, control, objectification. These institutions do not belong to "us"­; their processing of us often seems to be for alien and bureaucratic aims and purposes - for ourselves only as bourgeois citizens, or in the interests of "the public"­, "the law",­ or other such abstractions.

Leftists, emphasizing the first aspect of this immediate experience, campaign for the maintenance and extension of the conditions of the post-war settlement: full employment, the restoration of "trade union rights"­, reversal of cuts in the health, education and benefits systems, plus a meaningful minimum wage. Yet "defence of the welfare state"­ and the other leftist demands represent either adherence to reformist social democracy as progress or a misconceived and disingenuous strategy of "transitional demands".

An anarchist or "ultra-left"­ analysis often emphasizes instead the second aspect of our immediate experience of social democracy: social democratic institutions as control mechanisms. Some anarchist types claim that, without the welfare state, genuine forms of mutual aid will necessarily develop, and thus that we need not resist attacks on the welfare state. However, while it is undeniable that the welfare state has served to atrophy working class community traditions of mutual aid, given the present absence of growth of militant networks and organs of support, this kind of analysis is simply ahistorical posturing. The restructuring of the welfare state is taking place at the initiative of capital and the bourgeois state - albeit in response to previous rounds of working class struggle. This is a time of chronic weakness in the working class and revolutionary movement. Simply to accept the present programme of "welfare reform"­ is a capitulation to the autonomy of global finance capital and its ideology of neo-liberalism - a force which is currently growing in self-assurance and audacity. This kind of account seems to see the working class as passive and in need of a good kick up the backside to get it to do anything - the more life-threatening the kicking the better. The present New Labour Government's abandonment of social democracy will not in itself bring us closer to communism: only the self-activity of the proletariat can do that.

The nature of social democracy

The practical questions we face and the one-sidedness of the responses of some so-called revolutionaries each points to the importance of a deeper understanding the nature of social democracy. In previous issues of Aufheben, we have already given a basic definition of this social form: social democracy, in all its variants, can be considered as the representation of the working class as labour within capital and the bourgeois state - politically through social democratic parties, and economically through trades unions.

Social democracy therefore presupposes both the state and democracy itself. In terms of the state, social democracy is the representation of the working class within national boundaries. On the one hand, social democracy sets the interests of a postulated national working class against that of other national working classes. On the other hand, within national boundaries, social democracy seeks to act on behalf not just of the working class, but all classes. Rather than being abolished, the bourgeoisie will be taxed to pay for services for the working class. In terms of democracy, social democracy can be conceptualized as the extension of the principle of democracy - political equality between individual citizens - to the relations between classes.

The function of social democratic parties is to represent the working class as wage-labour in the bourgeois political-legislative realm. The social democratic party in power therefore operates to include the interests of the working class within the state form through institutional intervention against some of the excesses of the market.

Trade unions represent the working class economically, as labour-for-capital. Their role is to mediate between the owners of capital and the individual sellers of labour-power as a social category. They negotiate the price of labour-power and they therefore presuppose that labour takes the form of wage-labour - a commodity. Their function is thus premised on alienated labour. As such, trade unions unite the working class in the form that it is constituted by capital - that is, as individual commodity-sellers and by specific trade or industry.

From the working class perspective, what was progressive about social democracy, first as a movement then as a state form, was its recognition of different classes with opposing interests. Social democracy begins from the recognition that it is the whole working class, not just individual owners of the commodity labour-power, that exists in relation to capital. Social democratic parties therefore gave the working class as such an independent voice (i.e., separate from relying on progressive bourgeois parties such as the Liberals and, in the USA, the Democrats). When in power, such parties were seen to be able to transform society to reflect the needs of the workers (qua workers) not just those of the bourgeoisie: hence nationalizations, employment rights and welfare state services. The practical importance of social democracy for working class militants, then, was that it provided an organizational form through which concessions could be demanded and won from capital for the national working class as a whole.

Yet in recognizing and representing the working class within capital, social democracy is essentially in a contradictory position. On the one hand, to assert its power against that of the bourgeoisie, social democracy must mobilize the working class: the organs of social democracy are animated by the working class, who join and vote for parties and unions, and who take part in union-organized industrial action. On the other hand, social democracy must prevent the working class from mobilizing too far - from becoming a class-for-itself - since it must preserve the capital relation. Social democracy must therefore both mobilize and demobilize the working class if it is to represent it. The working class is recognized and enabled to act as an agent but is simultaneously reified. As such, social democracy functions to recuperate proletarian antagonism but is also vulnerable to such antagonism.

Social democracy embodies the tensions of the commodity form itself. The production of commodities requires subjective activity, but also that such subjectivity be subsumed within an alien subject - be alienated and hence objectified within capital. However, such subsumption is necessarily provisional; in order to objectify labour, capital must confront labour-power as a free subject - a free seller of the commodity of labour-power - on a daily basis. The daily reproduction of alienated labour means the daily possibility of rupture in the labour-capital relationship. What is specific to social democracy as a political-ideological expression of the commodity form, however, is that it proposes to extend the bourgeois principle of fair exchange between individual commodity-owners to the relationship between the classes.

Social democracy as an historical form

The requirement of capital politically to mediate working class needs within itself emerged, developed and reached ascendancy in conjunction with the threat of the proletariat to go beyond itself. To maintain the continued existence of the working class as such, and hence its own existence, capital had to find a form adequate to satisfy some of the desires of the working class from within capital. It is worth pointing out in this context that the requirement to mediate working class needs within capital does not have to be achieved through the social democratic form. Thus Mafia protectionism and philanthropic liberalism each represent alternative forms of capitalist mediation of working class needs. In order to grasp the crisis, retreat and possible future of social democracy, it is therefore necessary to briefly trace out how and why it came to its moment of triumph.

Historically, social democracy emerged in the bourgeois democratic struggle against the reactionary forces in the nineteenth century as the distinct voice of the working class. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie in some places meant that social democracy had to take the lead in the bourgeois revolution - for example in Russia and to a lesser extent in Germany. In 1917, social democracy split between reformists and revolutionaries, although these two wings shared a Second International conception of socialism as state control of the means of production. Following the second world war, the dominant reformist wing of social democracy split again between democratic socialists and the revisionists who sought to reform capitalism through Keynesian economic policies. This latter form of social democracy was the basis of the post-war settlement.

The triumph of social democracy in the UK though the post-war settlement was a crucial class compromise. Pressure from the working class, and ruling class fear of revolution - in light of the revolutionary waves that swept Europe at the end of first world war - forced the provision of comprehensive and inclusive welfare, full employment, rising real wages, wealth redistribution through taxation, and corporatism - tripartite organizations and trade union rights. The new "consensus"­ was both political and economic. By enforcing rising wage levels against individual capitals, the trade unions ensured the rising effective demand necessary for the general accumulation of capital under the Fordist mode of accumulation.

In return for these concessions, the working class as such gave up the desire for revolution. The triumph of social democracy therefore meant that class conflict became both mitigated and fragmented. In the first place, with the provision of comprehensive welfare, the stakes were seen to be lowered: unlike in the 1920s and '30s, losing your job no longer meant the threat of starvation. In the second place, with the working class as such giving up the idea of revolution, a split was created between everyday demands over issues such as wage levels and the "ideals"­ of a free society. In the old workers' movement, bread-and-butter demands and "utopian" desires had been seen as inextricably linked. Now the first was largely institutionalized and de-politicized through the machinery of the trades unions and the second had to find new forms to express itself. The various "counter-cultural"­ movements - beatniks and hippies for example - were such forms of expression. Despite the truth of their critique of capital, all the time these movements remained largely estranged from the working class qua the working class, they developed no means of realizing their desires for "freedom"­ beyond travelling, drugs, communes, festivals, mysticism etc.

However, as class struggle rose across Europe and the USA in the late 1960s, and with the subsequent crisis of capital accumulation, this situation changed. Workers' demands for more money and less work began to exceed the limits of the social democratic compromise, and even questioned the terms of this compromise. The fruits of Fordism - televisions, cars, washing machines, steady employment and rising real wages - were not enough. At this point, there was a convergence of everyday needs and "utopian" desires - as best exemplified in the French and Italian movements of 1968 and 1969-77 respectively. This was a creative time for the working class and revolutionary movement, for the convergence of tendencies and desires opened new possibilities and developed new revolutionary analyses of capitalism.

Across the world, capital responded by taking flight from traditional bastions of working class power. Finance capital became increasingly autonomous, outflanking areas of working class entrenchment by shifting to regions where labour was cheaper and more malleable. Social democracy served to tie the interests of national capitals and working classes; but, with the upsurge in working class struggles against the social democratic compromise, capital in the form of finance capital began to free itself from national boundaries and their particular regulations and restrictions. This became reflected in the ideas of those politicians who recognized that the working class and the social democratic forms in which its needs were expressed had to be confronted. The politics of "neo-liberalism" is thus the ideological expression of this new freedom of finance capital.

In the UK, the flight of finance capital led to crisis for sectors of the British economy, most notably in manufacture and heavy industry. Unemployment rose, and it became one of the key weapons used by the Thatcher Government explicitly to restructure the terms of the post-war settlement. The defeat of the miners, the strongest section of the working class, was the turning point in this project.

The subsequent development and election of "New Labour"­ represents the recognition by the political wing of British social democracy that the renegotiation of the post-war settlement begun by Thatcher et al. was irreversible. The project of "New Labour" is to create a new "one nation"­ consensus on the basis of the "neo-liberal" encroachment on wages, conditions and welfare.

The future of social democracy?

Does the retreat of social democracy mean that capital will develop new forms of mediation of working class needs? Certainly, this is New Labour's hope as they scrabble around for ideological clothes to gloss over the brutal indecency of "neo-liberalism". Appeals to patriotism, and use of terms such as "communitarianism" and "third way" are examples of this.

Or will the rejection of social democracy by the bourgeoisie see its eventual re-emergence from within the working class - perhaps in a more radical form? This is what the left is hoping. For our part, of course, we want to see new forms of struggle, politicizing everyday needs and connecting them with revolutionary desires, developing in the space vacated by both social democracy and Stalinism.

In the UK context, there is only limited evidence to support both the leftist analysis and our own aspirations. The most iconic industrial disputes of recent years - Magnet, Hillingdon and Merseyside - took place with little or no official union support, despite the wishes of their participants. These small groups of workers in struggle instead had to approach other workers directly, and to look to others outside of the unions and workplaces - most notably Reclaim the Streets (RTS) - to find the forms and networks of support necessary for their struggles. Similarly, London tube workers in the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union looked to RTS occupations and Critical Mass bike blockades for support in 1996. In January 1997, 2000 tube drivers took militant direct action themselves by occupying the Department of Transport building at Victoria. A further interesting development was the use of the "sickie"­ by British Airways workers in summer 1997.

However, some of these examples may represent isolated local incidents rather than a growing trend. Moreover, whereas the convergence between "basic"­ workplace demands and "utopian"­ desires in the late 1960s was due to a growing sense of possibility, hope and strength, with Governments on the defensive, today's celebrated acts of unity are based on mutual weakness. Today, working class and small "utopian"­ movements come together out of self-defence against the growing attacks from state and capital. This is particularly clear in the case of the Liverpool dock workers' dispute. In the past, the sacking of 500 dockers for refusing to cross a picket line would have brought half of the major ports in the country to a halt and the economy to the brink of crisis. But, in the present case, even the dockers' own union - the Transport and General Workers Union, the largest union in the country - refused to officially recognize the dispute for fear of legal penalties. It was this lack of traditional trade union support within Britain that led the dockers to make the links with the small but high-profile militant ecological movement and to other dockers abroad.

In sum, the retreat of social democracy has so far seen only a limited convergence of struggles over bread-and-butter issues with the desire for revolutionary social change. Thus while the working class (qua working class) gains preserved within social democracy are being rapidly eroded, there is as yet no sign of the return of what was lost with the triumph of social democracy.

The present series of articles

Class struggle today appears fragmented and the working class itself relatively weak. But the tendency to antagonism is of the essence of the capital relation, and inevitably appears. The issue then becomes one of grasping and relating to the trajectory of antagonistic forms from a communist perspective.

Will working class struggles over the institutions of social democracy serve as the basis for a resurgence of this social form? Any successes, however radical, might legitimize a new class compromise and thus marginalize any revolutionary struggle. The present crisis and weakness of the left means that it is today less of a threat to the class struggle. Indeed, there is little at the present time for the left to recuperate! But, of course, working class struggles may produce their own leftism; so the weakness of existing leftist organizations should not lead us to assume a clear path to communism. Social democracy could still be revived as the dominant form of working class mobilization.

On the other hand, could struggles over the "gains" of social democracy, which typically revolve around mundane needs, promote militant activity more generally, develop new movements, and take us beyond both social democracy and its "neo-liberal" counterpart? The retreat has been taking place for over 20 years, but there is still much at stake. Understanding social democracy and its dynamic remains an urgent task.

With this issue of Aufheben, we therefore begin a series of articles on the retreat of social democracy. We have raised rather than answered the question of how we should respond to the various skirmishes and struggles taking place over the retreat of social democracy. This is because we believe that each type of struggle needs to be analysed in itself and in some depth. This is the aim of the present series.

We also recognize that the present Introduction has focused largely on the UK, which is in many ways a special case. In certain other European countries, for example, the Communist Party has assumed a far more important role than here in entrenching social democracy; this might help explain the fact that social democracy remains stronger in certain other countries across the channel. There is a need, therefore, to look at the struggle over social democratic organs and institutions in the form of analyses of particular cases.

For all its peculiarities, however, the UK case is seen by some European governments as a model for their own restructuring, and may indicate a possible future for them. The restructuring in the UK, in turn, is modelled on that in the USA, the subject of our first major article in the present series. Social democracy was never so well established in the USA as in most of Europe. Yet at the present time, both unions and militant workplace struggles in the USA are currently undergoing a renaissance.

Footnotes

We use the term "survival"­ in Vaneigem's sense when he distinguishes it from "living"­. See Raoul Vaneigem (1967) The Revolution of Everyday Life, London, Rebel Press/Left Bank Books.

In fact, of course, it is mostly workers' ability to strike rather than their right to operate in unions that has been attacked. While union membership has declined overall, the bank-balances of many unions - now operating as little more than mediators of services such as insurance - has been enhanced.

See the opening section of "Kill or Chill: Analysis of the opposition to the Criminal Justice Bill­" (Aufheben 4, summer 1995) and the Editorial in Aufheben 6 (autumn, 1997).

Demarcation into particular trades and sectors might be said to encourage inter-working class struggles over wage differentials. While this is an example of the channelling by social democracy of proletarian antagonism, struggles over wage differentials may have the potential to go beyond themselves and threaten capital. As we discuss further below, social democracy produces its own grave-diggers.

As we shall see, the historical distinction between social democracy as a movement coming out of the working class and its institutionalization as a form of government is an important one.

As we discuss further below, the dominant form of social democracy in advanced capitalist states in the post-war boom period has entailed the use of Keynesian economics - harnessing working class subjectivity in the form of demand for commodities as the motor for capital accumulation.

Indeed, in the UK, it was enlightened (and threatened) liberalism in the form of the Liberal Party that made most of the early concessions to the working class, paving the way for the full development of social democracy, before the Labour Party was mature enough to do these things for itself.

However, this well-known split in social democracy between reformists and revolutionaries obscures a more interesting current - the communist left - that broke from social democracy at this time but which also came to reject the radical social democracy promoted by Moscow. See our forthcoming article on left communist accounts of the USSR.

The former existed as a meaningful wing within the Labour Party until the 1980s. In Europe, the situation was slightly different, but a similar "democratic socialism"­ is expressed in the Communist Parties and in particular their "Euro-communist" wings.

For a useful discussion of the antagonism and limits of the "counter-cultural"­ movements, see "On the poverty of hip life"­ in Ken Knabb's Public Secrets (1997, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets).

By no means all of those in the British labour movement accepted the "inevitable"­. A number remained within the Labour Party. Some left and formed the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), referred to with some accuracy by some who remained within the Labour Party as a "stillborn Stalinist sect­."

Strictly speaking, the forms of mediation hankered after by New Labour are not new at all; New Labour are redefining themselves as an old-fashioned liberal party.

The space we give here to links between these groups and non-workplace struggles should not obscure the fact that the direct links with other workers were typically far more important. For example, in the Merseyside case, the boycott actions of dock workers in other countries regularly put economic pressure on the Merseyside Docks and Harbour Company.

The sickie is catching. The UK Cabinet Office recently reported that public sector sickies cost £3 billion last year (Guardian, 15 August 1998).

For example, the London executive of the RMT union, dominated as it is by the SLP, is politically distinct from the union as a whole; and some of the link-ups seem due to personal relations between a small number of individuals rather than reflecting a militant mood in the union membership as whole.

Our recent text Dole Autonomy versus the Re-imposition of Work: Analysis of the Current Tendency to Workfare in the UK is intended as a further contribution to an understanding of the retreat of social democracy. See the back page of this issue of Aufheben for details.

What was the USSR? Part II: Russia as a non-mode of production

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What was the USSR? Aufheben
- What was the USSR? Part I: Trotsky and state capitalism
- What was the USSR? Part II: Russia as a non-mode of production
- What was the USSR? Part III: Left communism and the Russian revolution
- What was the USSR? Part IV: Towards a theory of the deformation of value

Its strength is its attention to the empirical reality of the USSR and its consideration of the specific forms of class struggle it was subject to. However, while we acknowledge that the USSR must be understood as a malfunctioning system, we argue that, because Ticktin doesn't relate his categories of 'political economy' to the class struggle, he fails to grasp the capitalist nature of the USSR.

What was the USSR?

Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value Under State Capitalism Part II: Russia as a Non-mode of Production

Here we present the second part of our article 'What was the USSR?'. In our last issue, we dealt with Trotsky's theory that it was a 'degenerated workers' state', and the best known theory of state capitalism which has emerged within Trotskyism - that of Tony Cliff. Our original intention was to follow that up by dealing with both the less well-known theories of state capitalism developed by the left communists and with Hillel Ticktin's theory that sees itself as going beyond both Trotsky's theory and the state capitalist alternative. Due to foreseeable circumstances totally within our control, we have been unable to do this. Therefore we have decided not to combine these sections, and instead here complete the trajectory of Trotskyism with an account and critique of Ticktin's theory, and put off our treatment of the left communists till our next issue. However, this effective extension of the article's length leads us to answer some questions readers may have. It can be asked: Why bother giving such an extended treatment to this question? Isn't the Russian Revolution and the regime that emerged from it now merely of historical interest? Shouldn't we be writing about what is going on in Russia now? One response would be to say that it is not possible to understand what is happening in Russia now without grasping the history of the USSR. But, while that is true to an extent, the detail we are choosing to give this issue does deserve more explanation.

As Loren Goldner puts it, in a very interesting article published in 1991:

Into the mid-1970s, the 'Russian question' and its implications was the inescapable 'paradigm' of political perspective on the left, in Europe and the U.S. and yet 15 years later seems like such ancient history. This was a political milieu where the minute study of the month-to-month history of the Russian Revolution and the Comintern from 1917-1928 seemed the key to the universe as a whole. If someone said they believed that the Russian Revolution had been defeated in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, or 1936, or 1953, one had a pretty good sense of what they would think on just about every other political question in the world: the nature of the Soviet Union, of China, the nature of the world CPs, the nature of Social Democracy, the nature of trade unions, the United Front, the Popular Front, national liberation movements, aesthetics and philosophy, the relationship of party and class, the significance of soviets and workers' councils, and whether Luxemburg or Bukharin was right about imperialism.1

However, that period seems to be at a close. It seems clear that the Russian Revolution and the arguments around it will not have the same significance for those becoming involved in the revolutionary project now as it did for previous generations.

Posing the issue slightly differently, Camatte wrote in 1972: "The Russian Revolution and its involution are indeed some of the greatest events of our century. Thanks to them, a horde of thinkers, writers and politicians are not unemployed."2 Camatte usefully then draws attention to the way that the production of theories on the USSR has very often served purposes quite opposed to that of clarification of the question. To be acknowledged as a proper political group or - as Camatte would say - gang, it was seen as an essential requirement to have a distinctive position or theory on the Soviet Union. But if Camatte expressed reluctance to "place some new goods on the over-saturated market", he nonetheless and justifiably thought it worthwhile to do so. But is our purpose as clear? For revolutionaries, hasn't the position that the Soviet Union was (state-) capitalist and opposed to human liberation become fairly basic since '68? Haven't theories like Trotsky's that gave critical support to the Soviet Union been comprehensively exposed? Well, yes and no. To simply assert that the USSR was another form of capitalism and that little more need be said is not convincing.

Around the same time as Camatte's comments, the Trotskyist academic Hillel Ticktin began to develop a theory of the nature and crisis of the Soviet system which has come to hold a significant status and influence.3 Ticktin's theory, with its attention to the empirical reality of the USSR and its consideration of the specific forms of class struggle it was subject to, is certainly the most persuasive alternative to the understanding of the USSR as capitalist. But again it can be asked who really cares about this issue? Ultimately we are writing for ourselves, answering questions we feel important. To many it seems intuitively the politically revolutionary position - to say the Soviet Union was (state) capitalist and that is enough. We'd contend, however, that a position appears to be revolutionary does not make it true, while what is true will show itself to be revolutionary. For us, to know that Russia was exploitative and opposed to human liberation and to call it capitalist to make one's condemnation clear is not enough. The importance of Marx's critique of political economy is not just that it condemns capitalism, but that it understands it better than the bourgeoisie and explains it better than moralistic forms of criticism. The events in Russia at the moment, which reflect a profound failure to turn it into an area for the successful accumulation of value, show that in some ways the question of the USSR is not over. In dealing with this issue we are not attempting to provide the final definitive solution to the Russian question. Theory - the search for practical truth - is not something that once arrived at is given from then on; it must always be renewed or it becomes ideology.

The origins of Ticktin's theory of the USSR

Introduction

In Part I we gave a lengthy treatment of what has probably been the best known critical theory of the Soviet Union: Leon Trotsky's theory of the 'degenerated workers' state'. While critical of the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy, lack of freedom and workers' democracy, Trotsky took the view that the formal property relations of the USSR - i.e. that the means of production were not private property but the property of a workers' state - meant that the USSR could not be seen as being capitalist, but was instead a transitory regime caught between capitalism and socialism which had degenerated. It followed from this that, for Trotsky, despite all its faults and monstrous distortions, the Soviet Union was ultimately progressive. As such, the Soviet Union was a decisive advance over capitalism which, by preserving the proletarian gains of the October Revolution, had to be defended against the military and ideological attacks of the great capitalist powers.

However, as we saw, for Trotsky the Soviet Union's predicament could not for last long. Either the Russian working class would rise up and reassert control over their state through a political revolution which would depose the bureaucracy, or else the bureaucracy would seek to preserve its precarious position of power by reintroducing private property relations and restoring capitalism in Russia. Either way, for Trotsky, the rather peculiar historical situation in which Russian society found itself, stuck half-way between capitalism and socialism, could only be a fleeting phenomena. Indeed, Trotsky believed that this situation would be resolved one way or another in the immediate aftermath of the second world war.

Yet, as we now know, Trotsky's prediction that the Soviet Union would soon be either overthrown by a workers' revolution or else revert back to capitalism with the bureaucracy converting itself into a new Russian bourgeoisie failed to come about. Instead the USSR persisted for another forty years rendering Trotsky's theory increasingly untenable. As a consequence many Trotskyists were led to break from the orthodox Trotskyist position regarding Russia to argue that the USSR was state capitalist. In Britain the main debate on the nature of Russia arose between orthodox Trotskyism's 'degenerated workers' state' and the neo-Trotskyist version of state capitalism developed by Tony Cliff. As we pointed out in Part I, while the orthodox Trotskyist account obviously had big problems, this alternative theory of state capitalism had three vital weaknesses: 1) Cliff's attempt to make the point of counter-revolution and the introduction of state capitalism coincide with Stalin's first five year plan (and Trotsky's exile); 2) his denial that the law of value operated within the USSR; and 3) his orthodox Marxist insistence that state capitalism was the highest stage of capitalism which implied that the USSR was more advanced than Western capitalism.4

As a result, throughout the post-war era, orthodox Trotskyists were able dogmatically to defend Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state; they were content that, while the rival state capitalist theory may appear more politically intuitive, their own was more theoretically coherent. Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, many Trotskyists felt vindicated in that Trotsky's predictions of the possible restoration of capitalism now seemed to have been proved correct, albeit rather belatedly.5

However, there have been a few more sophisticated Trotskyists who, in recognizing the inadequacies of the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, have sought to develop new conceptions of what the USSR was and how it came to collapse. One of the most prominent of these has been Hillel Ticktin.

Ticktin and the reconstruction of Trotskyism

By the 1970s, the chronic economic stagnation and gross economic inefficiencies of Brezhnev's Russia had become widely recognized. Few 'sovietologists' were not now sceptical of the production figures pumped out by the Soviet authorities; and everyone was aware of the long queues for basic necessities and the economic absurdities that seemed to characterize the USSR.

Of course, Trotsky himself had argued that, in the absence of workers' democracy, centralized state planning would lead to waste and economic inefficiency. Yet, for Trotsky, it had been clear that, despite such inefficiencies, bureaucratic planning would necessarily be superior to the anarchy of the market. Yet it was now becoming apparent that the gross inefficiencies and stagnation of the economy of the USSR were of such a scale compared with economic performance in the West that its economic and social system could no longer be considered as being superior to free market capitalism.

In response to these perceptions of the USSR, orthodox Trotskyists, while accepting the inefficiencies of bureaucratic planning, could only argue that the reports of the economic situation in the Soviet Union were exaggerated and obscured its real and lasting achievements. Yet it was a line that not all Trotskyists found easy to defend.

As an academic Marxist specializing in the field of Russian and East European studies, Ticktin could not ignore the critical analyses of the Soviet Union being developed by both liberal and conservative 'sovietologists'. In the face of the mounting evidence of the dire state of the Russian economy it was therefore perhaps not so easy for Ticktin to simply defend the standard Trotskyist line. As a result Ticktin came to reject the orthodox Trotskyist theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state and the notion that the Soviet Union was objectively progressive that this theory implied.

However, while he rejected the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, Ticktin refused to accept the notion that the USSR was state capitalist. Immersed in the peculiarities of the Soviet Union, Ticktin maintained the orthodox Trotskyist position that state capitalist theories simply projected the categories of capitalism onto the USSR. Indeed, for Ticktin the failure of all Marxist theories of the Soviet Union was that they did not develop out of the empirical realities of the USSR. For Ticktin the task was to develop a Marxist theory of the USSR that was able to grasp the historical peculiarities of the Soviet Union without falling foul of the shallow empiricism of most bourgeois theories of the USSR.

However, in rejecting Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state Ticktin was obliged to undertake a major re-evaluation of Trotsky. After all, alongside his theory of permanent revolution and uneven and combined development, Trotsky's theory of the degenerated workers' state had been seen as central to both Trotsky and Trotskyism. As Cliff's adoption of a theory of state capitalism had shown, a rejection of the theory of a degenerated workers' state could prove problematic for anyone who sought to maintain a consistent Trotskyist position. However, as we shall see, through both his re-evaluation of Trotsky and the development of his theory of the USSR, Ticktin has been able to offer a reconstructed Trotskyism that, by freeing it from its critical support for the Soviet Union, has cut the umbilical cord with a declining Stalinism, providing the opportunity for a new lease of life for Leninism in the post-Stalinist era.6

Ticktin and Trotsky's theory of the transitional epoch

For orthodox Trotskyism, the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state stood alongside both the theory of combined and uneven development and the theory of permanent revolution as one of the central pillars of Trotsky's thought. For Ticktin, however, the key to understanding Trotsky's ideas was the notion of the transitional epoch. Indeed, for Ticktin, the notion of the transitional epoch was the keystone that held the entire structure of Trotsky's thought together, and it was only by fully grasping this notion that his various theories could be adequately understood.

Of course, the notion that capitalism had entered its final stage and was on the verge of giving way to socialism had been commonplace amongst Marxists at the beginning of this century. Indeed, it had been widely accepted by most leading theoreticians of the Second International that, with the emergence of monopoly capitalism in the 1870s, the era of classical capitalism studied by Marx had come to an end. As a result the contradictions between the socialization of production and the private appropriation of wealth were becoming ever more acute and could be only be resolved through the working class coming to power and creating a new socialist society.

Faced with the horrors and sheer barbarity of the first world war, many Marxists had come to the conclusion that capitalism had entered its final stage and was in decline. While nineteenth century capitalism, despite all its faults, had at least served to develop the forces of production at an unprecedented rate, capitalism now seemed to offer only chronic economic stagnation and total war. As capitalism entered its final stage the fundamental question could only be 'war or revolution', 'socialism or barbarism'.7

Yet while many Marxists had come to the conclusion that the first world war heralded the era of the transition from capitalism to socialism, Ticktin argues that it was Trotsky who went furthest in drawing out both the theoretical and political implications of this notion of the transitional epoch. Thus, whereas most Marxists had seen the question of transition principally in terms of particular nation-states, Trotsky emphasized capitalism as a world system. For Trotsky, it was capitalism as a world system that, with the first world war, had entered the transitional epoch. From this global perspective there was not some predetermined line of capitalist development which each nation-state had to pass through before it reached the threshold of socialism. On the contrary the development of more backward economies was conditioned by the development of the more advanced nations.

It was to explain how the development of the backward nations of the world were radically reshaped by the existence of more advanced nations that Trotsky developed his theory of combined and uneven development. It was then, on the basis of this theory of combined and uneven development, that Trotsky could come to the conclusion that the contradictions of the transitional epoch would become most acute, not in the most advanced capitalist economies as most Marxists had assumed, but in the more backward nations such as Russia that had yet to make the full transition to capitalism. It was this conclusion that then formed the basis of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution in which Trotsky had argued that in a backward country such as Russia it would be necessary for any bourgeois revolution to develop at once into a proletarian revolution.

Thus, whereas most Marxists had assumed the revolution would break out in the most advanced capitalist nations and, by destroying imperialism, would spread to the rest of the world, Trotsky, through his notion of the transitional epoch, had come to the conclusion that the revolution was more likely to break out in the more backward nations. Yet Trotsky had insisted that any such proletarian revolution could only be successful if it served to spark proletarian revolution in the more advanced nations. Without the aid of revolutions in these more advanced nations any proletarian revolution in a backward country could only degenerate.

Hence Trotsky was later able to explain the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. The failure of the revolutionary movements that swept across Europe following the end of the first world war had left the Russian Revolution isolated. Trapped within its own economic and cultural backwardness and surrounded by hostile capitalist powers, the Russian workers' state could only degenerate. With this then we have the basis of Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state.

Yet the importance of Trotsky's notion of transitional epoch was not only that it allowed Trotsky to grasp the problems of transition on a world scale, but also that it implied the possibility that this transition could be a prolonged process. If proletarian revolutions were more likely at first to break out in less advanced countries it was possible that there could be several such revolutions before the contradictions within the more advanced nations reached such a point to ensure that such revolutionary outbreaks would lead to a world revolution. Further, as happened with the Russian Revolution, the isolation and subsequent degeneration of proletarian revolutions in the periphery could then serve to discredit and thereby retard the revolutionary process in the more advanced capitalist nations.

However, Ticktin argues that Trotsky failed to draw out such implications of his notion of the transitional epoch. As a result Trotsky severely underestimated the capacity of both social democracy and Stalinism in forestalling world revolution and the global transition to socialism. Armed with the hindsight of the post-war era, Ticktin has sought to overcome this failing in the thought of his great teacher.

For Ticktin then, the first world war indeed marked the beginning of the transitional epoch,8 an epoch in which there can be seen a growing struggle between the law of value and the immanent law of planning. With the Russian Revolution, and the revolutionary wave that swept Europe from 1918-24, the first attempt was made to overthrow capitalism on a world scale. With the defeat of the revolutionary wave in Europe and the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, capitalism found the means to prolong itself. In the more advanced capitalist nations, under the banner of social democracy, a combination of concessions to the working class and the nationalization of large sections of industry allowed capitalism to contain the sharpening social conflicts brought about by the heightening of its fundamental contradiction between the socialization of production and the private appropriation of wealth.

Yet these very means to prevent communism have only served to undermine capitalism in the longer term. Concessions to the working class, for example the development of a welfare state, and the nationalization of large sections of industry have served to restrict and, as Radical Chains put it, 'partially suspend' the operation of the law of value.9 With its basic regulatory principle - the law of value - being progressively made non-operational, capitalism is ultimately doomed. For Ticktin, even the more recent attempts by Thatcher and 'neo-liberalism' to reverse social democracy and re-impose the law of value over the last two decades can only be short lived. The clearest expression of this is the huge growth of parasitical finance capital whose growth can ultimately only be at the expense of development truly productive industrial capital.

As for Russia, Ticktin accepts Trotsky's position that the Russian Revolution overthrew capitalism and established a workers' state, and that with the failure of the revolutionary wave the Russian workers' state had degenerated. However, unlike Trotsky, Ticktin argues that with the triumph of Stalin in the 1930s the USSR ceased to be a workers' state. With Stalin the bureaucratic elite had taken power. Yet, unable to move back to capitalism without confronting the power of the Russian working class, and unable and unwilling to move forward socialism since this would undermine the elite's power and privileges, the USSR became stuck half-way between capitalism and socialism.

As a system that was nether fish nor foul - neither capitalism or socialism - the USSR was an unviable system. A system that could only preserve the gains of the October Revolution by petrifying them; and it was a system that could only preserve itself through the terror of the Gulag and the secret police.

Yet it was such a monstrous system that presented itself as being socialist and demanded the allegiance of large sections of the world's working class. As such it came to discredit socialism, and, through the dominance of Stalinism, cripple the revolutionary working class movement throughout the world for more than five decades. Thus, although the USSR served to restrict the international operation of the law of value by removing millions from the world market, particularly following the formation of the Eastern bloc and the Chinese Revolution, it also served to prolong the transitional epoch and the survival of capitalism.

By drawing out Trotsky's conception of the transitional epoch in this way, Tictkin attempted finally to cut the umbilical between Trotskyism and a declining Stalinism. Ticktin is thereby able to offer a reconstructed Trotskyism that is free to denounce unequivocally both Stalinism and the USSR. As we shall now see, in doing so Ticktin is led to both exalt Trotsky's theoretical capacities and pinpoint his theoretical weaknesses.

Ticktin and the failure of Trotsky

Following Lenin's death, and with the rise of Lenin's personality cult, Trotsky had endeavoured to play down the differences between himself and Lenin. As a consequence, orthodox Trotskyists, ever faithful to the word of Trotsky, had always sought to minimize the theoretical differences between Lenin and Trotsky. For them Trotsky was merely the true heir to Lenin.

However, by focusing on Trotsky's key conception of the transitional epoch, Ticktin is able cast new light on the significance of Trotsky's thought as a whole. For Ticktin, although he may well have been more politically adept than Trotsky, Lenin's overriding concern with immediate Russian affairs constrained the development of his theoretical thought at crucial points. In contrast, for Ticktin, the sheer cosmopolitan breadth of Trotsky's concerns in many respects placed Trotsky above Lenin with regards to theoretical analysis.

But raising the standing of Trotsky as a theorist only serves to underline an important question for Ticktin's understanding of Trotsky. If Trotsky was so intellectually brilliant why did he persist in defending the USSR as a degenerated workers' state long after lesser intellects had recognized that such a position was untenable? To answer this Ticktin puts forward several explanations.

First of all Ticktin argues that Trotsky made the mistake of regarding Stalin as a 'centrist'.10 Throughout the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) what Trotsky feared more than anything was the restoration of capitalism through the emergence of a new class of capitalist farmers and middlemen. For Trotsky at this time, Stalin, and the bureaucratic forces that he represented, was a bulwark against danger of capitalist restoration. He was a lesser of two evils. Thus Trotsky had always ended up deferring to Stalin rather than risk the triumph of the Right. It was this attitude towards Stalin as a centrist that was carried through in Trotsky's perception of Stalin's Russia throughout the 1930s.

While this immediate political orientation might explain the origin of Trotsky's position with regard to Stalin's Russia of the 1930s it does not explain why he persisted with it. To explain this Ticktin points to the circumstances Trotsky found himself in. Ticktin argues that with his exile from the USSR Trotsky found himself isolated. Being removed from the centre of political and theoretical activity and dulled by ill health and old age the sharpness of Trotsky's thought began to suffer. As a result, in the final few years of his life Trotsky could only cling to the positions that he had developed up as far as the early 1930s.

The decline of Trotsky's thought was further compounded by the weakness of rival theories of the USSR with the Trotskyist movement. As we saw in Part I, Trotsky was easily able to shoot down the theory originally put forward by Bruno Rizzi, and later taken up by the minority faction within the American SWP, which argued that the USSR was a new mode of production that could be described as bureaucratic collectivism. The ease with which Trotsky was able to dismiss such rival theories of the nature of the USSR as being unMarxist meant that he was not obliged seriously to reconsider his own position on the Soviet Union.

Yet, as Ticktin recognizes, while such circumstantial explanations as old age, exile and lack of credible alternatives may have contributed to an understanding of why Trotsky failed to radically revise his theory of the nature of Stalin's Russia they are far from constituting a sufficient explanation in themselves. For Ticktin there is a fundamental theoretical explanation for Trotsky's failure to develop his theory of the USSR at this time which arises due Trotsky's relation to Preobrazhensky.

For Ticktin, the fundamental obstacle which prevented Trotsky from developing his critique of the USSR is to be found in the very origins of this critique. As we saw in Part I, Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state originated from earlier criticisms of the Party leadership and the NEP that had been advanced by the Left Opposition during the 1920s. In advancing these criticisms, there had been a distinct division of labour. Trotsky, as the sole member of the Left Opposition within the Politburo, had concentrated on the broad political issues and detailed questions of policy. Preobrazhensky, on the other hand, had been left to set out the 'economics' which underlay these political and policy positions of the Left Opposition.

As we saw in Part I, Preobrazhensky had sought to develop a political economy for the period of the transition of Russia from capitalism to socialism in terms of the struggle between the two regulating mechanisms of capitalism and socialism that had been identified by the classical Marxism of the Second International. For the orthodox Marxism of the Second International, the basic regulating principle of capitalism was the blind operation of the 'law of value'. In contrast, the basic regulating principle of socialism was to be conscious planning. Form this Preobrazhensky had argued that during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism these two principles of economic organization would necessary co-exist and as such would be in conflict with each other.

However, for Preobrazhensky, in the relatively backward conditions prevailing in Russia there was no guarantee that the principle of planning would prevail over the law of value on purely economic grounds. Hence, for Preobrazhensky, it was necessary for the proletarian state to actively intervene in order to accelerate accumulation in those sectors of the economy, such as state industry, where the principle of planning predominated at the expense of those sectors, such as peasant agriculture, where the law of value still held sway. It was this theory of 'primitive socialist accumulation' which had underpinned the Left Opposition's criticisms of the NEP and their advocacy of an alternative policy of rapid industrialization.

When Stalin finally abandoned the NEP in favour of centralized planning embodied in the five year plans many members of the Left Opposition, including Preobrazhensky himself, took the view that the Party leadership had finally, if rather belatedly, come round to their position of rapid industrialization. As a consequence, Preobrazhensky along with other former members of the Left Opposition fully embraced Stalin's new turn and fell in line with leadership of the Party. Trotsky, on the other, maintained a far more critical attitude to Stalin's new turn.

Of course, even if he had wanted to, Trotsky was in no position to fall in behind Stalin and the leadership of the Party. Trotsky was too much of an enemy and rival to Stalin for that. However, Trotsky's broader political perspective allowed him to maintain and develop a critique of Stalin's Russia. While Trotsky welcomed Stalin's adoption of a policy of centralized planning and rapid industrialization he argued that it was too long delayed. The sudden zig-zags of policy from one extreme position to another were for Trotsky symptomatic of the bureaucratization of the state and Party and indicated the degeneration of Russia as a workers' state.

Through such criticisms Trotsky came to formulate his theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. Yet while Trotsky was able to develop his critique of the new Stalinist regime in political terms, that is as the political domination of a distinct bureaucratic caste that had taken over the workers' state, he failed to reconsider the political economy of Stalin's Russia. In accordance with the old division of labour between himself and Preobrazhensky, Trotsky implicitly remained content with the political economy of transition that had been advanced in the 1920s by Preobrazhensky.

For Ticktin it was this failure to develop Preobrazhensky's political economy of transition in the light of Stalin's Russia that proved to be the Achilles' heel of Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. Of course, given that Trotsky could at the time reasonably expect the USSR to be a short-lived phenomenon he could perhaps be excused from neglecting the long and arduous task of developing a political economy of the USSR. For Ticktin, his followers have had no such excuse. As we shall now see, for Ticktin the central task in developing Trotsky's analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union has been to develop a political economy of the USSR.

Ticktin and the political economy of the USSR

So, for Ticktin, the Achilles' heel of Trotsky's theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state was his failure to develop a political economy of Stalinist Russia. Yet, at the same time, Ticktin rejected the notion that the USSR was in any way capitalist. For him, Trotsky had been correct in seeing the October revolution, and the subsequent nationalization of the means of production under a workers' state, as a decisive break from capitalism. As such any attempt to develop a political economy of the USSR could not simply apply the categories developed by Marx in his critique of capitalism since the USSR had ceased to be capitalist. Instead it was necessary to develop a new political economy of the USSR as a specific social and economic system.

Ticktin began his attempt to develop such a political economy of the USSR in 1973 with an article entitled 'Towards a political economy of the USSR' which was published in the first issue of Critique. This was followed by a series of articles and polemics in subsequent issues of Critique and culminated, 19 years later, with his Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System. Although Ticktin's work undoubtedly provides important insights into what the USSR was and the causes of its crisis and eventual collapse - and as such provides an important challenge to any alternative theory of the USSR - after all these years he fails to provide a systematic political economy of the USSR. As the subtitle to Origins of the Crisis in the USSR indicates, his attempt to develop a political economy of the USSR was overtaken by events and all we are left with is a series of essays which seek to link his various attempts to develop a political economy of the USSR with an explanation of the Soviet Union's eventual demise.

As we shall argue, this failure to develop a systematic presentation of a political economy of the USSR was no accident. For us it was a failure rooted in his very premise of his analysis which he derives from Trotsky. Yet before considering such an argument we must first of all briefly review Ticktin's attempt to develop a political economy of the USSR.

A question of method?

The task facing Ticktin of developing a Marxist political economy of the USSR was not as straightforward as it may seem. What is political economy? For Marx, political economy was the bourgeois science par excellence. It was the science that grew up with the capitalist mode of production in order to explain and justify it as a natural and objective social and economic system. When Marx came to write Capital he did not aim to write yet another treatise on political economy of capitalism - numerous bourgeois writers had done this already - but rather he sought to develop a critique of political economy.

However, even if we admit that in order to make his critique of political economy Marx had to develop and complete bourgeois political economy, the problem remains of how far can a political economy be constructed for a mode of production other than capitalism? After all it is only with the rise capitalism, where the social relations come to manifest themselves as relations between things, that the political economy as an objective science becomes fully possible. But this is not all. Ticktin is not merely seeking to develop a political economy for a mode of production other than capitalism but for system in transition from one mode of production to another - indeed for a system that Ticktin himself comes to conclude is a 'non-mode of production'!

Unfortunately Ticktin not only side-steps all these preliminary questions, but he also fails to address the most important methodological questions of how to begin and how to proceed with his proposed 'political economy' of the USSR. Instead he adopts a rather heuristic approach, adopting various points of departure to see how far he can go. It is only when these reach a dead end that we find Ticktin appealing to questions of method. As a result we find a number of false starts that Ticktin then seeks to draw together. Let us begin by briefly examine some of these false starts.

Class

In Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, Ticktin begins with an analysis of the three main groups and classes that could be identified within the USSR: namely, the elite, the Intelligentsia and the working class. Through this analysis Ticktin is then able to develop a framework through which to understand the social and political forces lying behind the policies of Glasnost and Perestroika pursued in the final years of the USSR's decline. Yet, despite the usefulness such class analysis may have in explaining certain political developments within the USSR, it does not itself amount to a 'political economy of the USSR'. Indeed, if we take Marx's Capital as a 'model of a political economy', as Ticktin surely does, then it is clear that class analysis must be a result of a political economy not its premise.11

Laws

If 'class' proves to be a non-starter in developing a political economy of the USSR then a more promising starting point may appear to be an analysis of the fundamental laws through which it was regulated. Of course, as we have seen, this was the approach that had been pioneered by Preobrazhensky and adopted by Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the 1920s. Preobrazhensky had argued that the nature of the transition from capitalism to socialism had to be grasped in terms of the conflict between the two regulating mechanism of capitalism and socialism: that is between the law of value and the law of planning. Indeed, as we have also seen, one of Ticktin's most important criticisms of Trotsky was his failure to develop Preobrazhensky's political economy of the Soviet Union after the triumph of Stalin in the early 1930s.

It is not surprising then that we find Ticktin repeatedly returning to this line of approach in his various attempts to develop a political economy of the USSR. Ticktin proceeds by arguing that Preobrazhensky's theory was correct for Russia up until the collectivization of agriculture and the first five year plan. Up until then there had existed a large market-oriented peasant agricultural sector alongside a state-owned and planned industrial sector (although even this was still based on quasi-autonomous enterprises run on a 'profit and loss' criteria). As such, the 'law of planning'12 and the law of value co-existed as distinct regulating mechanisms - although they both conflicted and conditioned each other through the relations both between and within the industrial and the agricultural sectors of the economy.

With the abolition of peasant agriculture through forced collectivization, and the introduction of comprehensive central planning geared towards the rapid industrialization of Russia, the two laws could no longer co-exist as distinct regulatory mechanisms that predominated in different sectors of the economy. The two laws 'interpenetrated' each other, preventing each other's proper functioning. As a result there emerged under Stalin a system based neither on the law of value nor on the law of planning. Indeed, for Ticktin these laws degenerated, the law of planning giving rise to the 'law of organization' and the law of value giving rise to the 'law of self-interest of the individual unit'.

Yet it soon becomes clear that as the number of laws in Ticktin's analysis proliferate their explanatory power diminishes. In the Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, where he pursues this line of argument the furthest, Ticktin is eventually obliged to ask the question what he means by a 'law'. He answers that a law is the movement between tow poles of a contradiction but he does not then go on consider the ground of these contradictions.

Waste

Perhaps Ticktin's most promising point of departure is that of the problem of the endemic waste that was so apparent even for the least critical of observers of the USSR. This became most clearly evident in the stark contrast between the increasing amounts the Soviet economy was able to produce and the continued shortages of even the most basic consumer goods in the shops.

Following the rapid industrialization of the USSR under Stalin the Soviet Union could boast that it could rival any country in the world in terms of absolute levels of production of industrial products. This was particularly true for heavy and basic industries. Russia's production of such products as coal, iron, steel, concrete and so forth had grown enormously in merely a few decades. Yet alongside such colossal advances in the quantity of goods produced, which had accompanied the startling transformation of Russia from a predominantly peasant society into an industrialized economy, the standard of living for most people had grown very slowly. Despite repeated attempts to give greater priority to the production in consumer industries from the 1950s onwards, the vast majority of the population continued to face acute shortages of basic consumer goods right up until the demise of the USSR.

So while the apologists of the USSR could triumphantly greet the publication of each record-breaking production figure, their critics merely pointed to the lengthy shopping queues and empty shops evident to any visitor to Russia. What then explained this huge gap between production and consumption? For Ticktin, as for many other theorists of the USSR, the reason clearly lay in the huge waste endemic to the Russian economic system.

Although Russian industry was able to produce in great quantities, much of this production was substandard. Indeed a significant proportion of what was produced was so substandard as to be useless. This problem of defective production became further compounded since, in an economy as integrated and self-contained as the USSR, the outputs of each industry in the industrial chain of production became the inputs of tools, machinery or raw materials for subsequent industries in the chain. Indeed. in many industries more labour had to be devoted to repairing defective tools, machinery and output than in actual production!

As a result, waste swallowed up ever increasing amounts of labour and resources. This, together with the great resistance to the introduction of new technology and production methods in existing factories, meant that huge amounts of labour and resources had to be invested in heavy industry in order to provide the inputs necessary to allow just a small increase in the output of consumer goods at the end of the industrial chain of production.

Taking this phenomenon of 'waste', Ticktin sought to find a point of departure for a political economy of the USSR analogous to that which is found in the opening chapter of Marx's Capital. In Capital Marx begins with the immediate appearance of the capitalist mode of production in which wealth appears as an 'immense accumulation of commodities'. Marx then analysed the individual commodity and found that it is composed of two contradictory aspects: exchange-value and use-value. By examining how this contradictory social form of the commodity is produced Marx was then able to develop a critique of all the categories of political economy.

Likewise, Ticktin sought to take as his starting point the immediate appearance of the Soviet economic system. However, for Ticktin, this economic system did not present itself as an immense accumulation of commodities. Indeed, for Ticktin, wealth did not assume the specific social form of the commodity as it does for capitalist societies.

Of course, as Bettelheim has pointed out, although all production is formally state owned actual production is devolved into competing units. These units of production, the enterprise and the various trusts, buy and sell products to each other as well as selling products to consumers. Therefore the market and commodities still persisted in the USSR. In response, Ticktin argues that such buying and selling was strictly subordinated to the central plan and were more like transfers of products rather than real sales. While money was also transferred as a result of these product transfers such transactions were simply a form of accounting with strict limits being placed on the amount of profits that could be accumulated as a result. Furthermore, the prices of products were not determined through the market but were set by the central plan. These prices were as a result administered prices and were therefore not a reflection of value. Products did not therefore assume the form of commodities nor did they have a value in the Marxist sense.

Hence, for Ticktin, the wealth did not present itself as an immense accumulation of commodities as it does under capitalism but rather as an immense accumulation of defective products.

So, for Ticktin, since products did not assume the form of commodities, the elementary contradiction of Soviet political economy could not be that between use-value and value, as it was within the capitalist mode of production. Instead, Ticktin argued that the elementary contradiction of the Soviet system presented itself as the contradiction between the potential use-value of the product and its real use-value. That is, the product was produced for the purpose of meeting a social need determined through the mediation of the bureaucracy's 'central plan'; as such, it assumed the 'administered form' of an intended or potential use-value. However, in general, the use-value of the product fell far short of the intended or potential use-value - it was defective. Thus as Ticktin concludes:

The waste in the USSR then emerges as the difference between what the product promises and what it is. The difference between the appearance of planning and socialism and the reality of a harsh bureaucratised administration shows itself in the product itself.

(Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, p. 134)

The question then arises as to how this contradiction emerged out of the process of production which produced such products.

For Marx the key to understanding the specific nature of any class society was to determine the precise way in which surplus-labour was extracted from direct producers. With the capitalist mode of production, the direct producers are dispossessed of both the means of production and the means of subsistence. With no means of supporting themselves on their own accord, the direct producers are obliged to sell their labour-power to the capitalist class which owns the means of production. However, despite how it may appear to each individual worker, in buying the labour-power of the workers the capitalists do not pay according to the amount of labour the workers perform, and thus the amount of value the workers create, but they pay the level of wages required to reproduce the labour-power of the workers as a whole. Since workers can create products with a value greater than the value they require to reproduce their own labour-power, the capitalists are able to extract surplus-labour in the form of the surplus-value of the product the workers produce.

Thus for Marx the key to understanding the essential nature of the capitalist mode of production was the sale of the worker's labour-power and the consequent expropriation of surplus-labour in the specific social form of surplus-value by the class of capitalists. For Ticktin, however, the workers in the USSR did not sell their labour-power.13

Yet, although he denies that labour-power was sold in the USSR, Ticktin does not deny that the working class was dispossessed of the means of production. There is no question that Ticktin rejects any idea that the workers somehow owned their means of production due to the persistence of some form of 'degenerated workers' state'. Indeed, it is central to Ticktin's argument that the workers alienate the product of their labour.

However, the dispossession of the direct producers of the means of production is not the only essential pre-condition for the sale of labour-power. The other all-important pre-condition of the capitalist mode of production is that there exists generalized commodity exchange. If, as Ticktin maintains, there was no generalized commodity exchange in the USSR - and thus, as he infers, neither value nor real money - how could labour-power itself assume the form of a commodity that could be sold?

Of course, Ticktin admits that workers were formally paid wages in the USSR, just as goods were bought and sold, but for him this did not amount to the real sale of labour-power. To understand why Ticktin thought this, it is necessary to look at his conception of the wage and money in the USSR.

Under capitalism the principal if not exclusive means of obtaining wealth is money. For the worker, money assumes the form of the wage. However, in the USSR, money, and therefore the wage, was far from being a sufficient or exclusive means of obtaining the worker's needs. Other factors were necessary to obtain the goods and services the worker needed - such as time to wait in queues, connections and influence with well-placed people in the state or Party apparatus, and access to the black market. Such factors, together with the fact that a large proportion of the workers' needs were provided for free or were highly subsidized - such as housing, child-care, and transport - meant that the wage was far less important to the Russian worker than to his or her Western counterpart. In fact it could be concluded that the wage was more like a pension than a real wage.

Under capitalism the wage appears to the individual worker as the price of their labour. The more that individual workers labour the more they are paid. As a consequence, the wage serves as a direct incentive for each individual worker to work for the capitalist.14 In the USSR, the wage, being little more than a pension, was a far weaker incentive for the Soviet worker.

But not only was the wage an inadequate carrot, management lacked the stick of unemployment. Under capitalism the threat of the sack or redundancy is an important means through which management can discipline its workforce and ensure its control over production. In the USSR, however, the state guaranteed full employment. As a result, managers, facing chronic labour shortages, had little scope to use the threat of dismissals to discipline the work force.

Lacking both the carrot of money-wages and the stick of unemployment, management was unable to gain full control of the workers' labour. From this Ticktin concludes that, although the workers may have been paid what at first sight appears as a wage, in reality they did not sell their labour-power since the workers retained a substantial control over the use of their labour. As the old British Rail workers' adage had it: "management pretends to pay us and we pretend to work!"

However, although for Ticktin the workers in the USSR did not sell their labour-power, and therefore did not alienate their labour, Ticktin still argues that the workers alienated the product of their labour. Since the workers were alienated from the product of their labour they had no interest in it. Therefore the workers' main concern in exercising their control over their own labour was to minimize it. On the other side, management, although taking possession of the final product of the labour process, lacked full control over the labour process that produced it. As a result, the elite lacked control over the production of the total product of the economy, and with this the production of surplus-product necessary to support itself.

It is with this that Ticktin locates the basis of the fundamental contradiction of the Soviet system. On the one side stood the demands of the elite for increased production necessary to secure the extraction of a surplus-product; on the other side, and in opposition to it, stood the negative control of the working class over the labour process which sought to minimize its labour. The resolution of this contradiction was found in defective production.

Through the imposition of the central plan, the elite sought to appropriate the products of the labour of the working class necessary both to maintain its own privileged position and for the expanded reproduction of the system as a whole. To ensure the extraction of a surplus-product that would be sufficient to meet its own privileged needs, and at the same time ensure the expansion of the system, the elite was obliged to set ambitious and ever-increasing production targets through the system of central planning.

However, the actual implementation of the central plan had to be devolved to the management of each individual enterprise. Faced with the ambitious production targets set out in the central plan on the one side and the power of the working class over the labour process on the other, the management of the enterprise were obliged to strike a compromise with its workers which in effect subverted the intentions of the plan while at the same time appearing to fulfil its specifications. To do this, management sought to meet the more verifiable criteria of the plan, which were usually its more quantifiable aspects, while surrendering the plan's less verifiable qualitative criteria. As a consequence, quality was sacrificed for quantity, leading to the production of defective products.

Yet this was not all. In order to protect itself from the ever-increasing unrealizable demands of the central planners, the management of individual enterprises resorted to systematically misinforming the centre concerning the actual conditions of production at the same time as hoarding workers and scarce resources. Without reliable information on the actual conditions of production, the production plans set out in the central plan became increasingly divorced from reality, which led to the further malfunctioning of the economic system which compounded defective production through the misallocation of resources.

Thus, for Ticktin, because the Russian workers did not sell their labour-power, although they alienated the product of their labour, the elite was unable fully to control the labour process. As a consequence the economic system was bedevilled by waste on a colossal scale to the point where it barely functioned. As neither capitalism nor socialism, the USSR was in effect a non-mode of production. As such, the crucial question was not how the USSR functioned as an economic system but how it was able to survive for so long. It was in addressing this problem that Ticktin came to analyse the crisis and disintegration of the USSR.

The question of commodity fetishism and ideology in the USSR

Despite the fact that the capitalist mode of production is based on class exploitation, capitalist society has yet to be torn apart and destroyed by class antagonisms. The reason for the persistence of capitalist society is that the capitalist mode of production gives rise to a powerful ideology that is rooted in its very material existence.

The basis of this ideology lies in commodity fetishism.15 In a society based on generalized commodity exchange, the relations between people appear as a relation between things. As a result, social relations appear as something objective and natural. Furthermore, in so far as capitalism is able to present itself as a society of generalized commodity exchange, everyone appears as a commodity-owner/citizen. As such, everyone is as free and equal as everyone else to buy and sell. Thus it appears that the worker, at least in principle, is able to obtain a fair price for his labour, just as much as the capitalist is able to obtain a fair return on his capital and the landlord a fair rent on his land.

So capitalist society appears as a society which is not only natural but one in which everyone is free and equal. However, this 'free market' ideology is not simply propaganda. It arises out of the everyday experience of the capitalist mode of production in so far as it exists as a market economy. It is therefore an ideology that is rooted in the everyday reality of capitalism.16 Of course, the existence of capitalism as a 'market economy' is only one side of the capitalist mode of production and the more superficial side at that. Nevertheless it provides a strong and coherent foundation for bourgeois ideology.

However, if, as Ticktin maintains, there was no commodity exchange in the USSR there could no basis for commodity fetishism. Furthermore, lacking any alternative to commodity fetishism which could obscure the exploitative nature of the system, there could be no basis for a coherent ideology in the USSR. Instead there was simply the 'big lie' which was officially propagated that the USSR was a socialist society.17 But this was a lie which no one any longer really believed - although everyone was obliged to pretend that they did believe it.18

As a consequence, Ticktin argues that the nature of social relations were fully transparent in the USSR. With their privileged access to goods and services, everyone could see the privileged position of the elite and their exploitative and parasitical relation to the rest of society. At the same time, given the blatant waste and inefficiency of the system, no one had any illusions in the efficacy of 'socialist planning'. Everyone recognized that the system was a mess and was run in the interests of a small minority that made up the elite of the state and Party bureaucracy.

But if the was no ideology in the USSR, what was it that served to hold this exploitative system together for more than half a century? Ticktin argues there were two factors that served to maintain the USSR for so long. First, there were the concessions made to the working class. The guarantee of full employment, free education and health care, cheap housing and transport and an egalitarian wage structure all served to bind the working class to the system. Second, and complementing the first, there was brutal police repression which, by suppressing the development of ideas and collective organization not sanctioned by the state, served to atomize the working class and prevent it from becoming a revolutionary class for-itself.

It was through this crude carrot-and-stick approach that the elite sought to maintain the system and their privileged place within it. However, it was an approach that was riven by contradictions and one that was ultimately unviable. As we have seen, it was these very concessions made to the working class, particularly that of full employment, which meant that the elite were unable to gain full control of the labour process and which in turn resulted in the gross inefficiency of the system. Unwilling to surrender their own privileged position, the Soviet elite were unable to move towards socialism. Therefore the elite's only alternative to maintaining the grossly inefficient system of the USSR was to move towards capitalism by introducing the market. But such a move towards the market necessarily involved the introduction of mass unemployment and the withdrawal of the elite's concessions to the working class.

The elite therefore faced a continual dilemma. On the one side it sought to move away from its inefficient economic system by introducing market reforms; but on the other side it feared that the introduction of such reforms would cause a revolutionary response in the Russian working class. Ticktin argues that it was this dilemma which underlay the history of the USSR following the death of Stalin and which explains the crisis that confronted Gorbachev and the final demise of the USSR.

Ticktin's analysis of the history of the USSR and its final crisis and demise does not concern us here.19 We now need to examine the problems of Ticktin's 'political economy' of the USSR.

Problems of Ticktin's 'political economy of the USSR'

We have devoted considerable space to Ticktin's theory of the USSR since it provides perhaps the most cogent explanation of the nature of the USSR and the causes of its decline which has arisen out of the Trotskyist tradition. Shorn of any apology for Stalinism, Ticktin is able to develop a theory which seeks to show the specific internal contradictions of the Soviet system. As such, it is a theory that not only goes beyond the traditional Trotskyist theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, it also provides a formidable challenge to any approach which sees the USSR as having been in some sense a capitalist system.

Indeed, it would seem to us that any attempt to develop a theory of the USSR as being essentially a capitalist system must take on board and develop a critique of some of the central positions put forward by Ticktin. Perhaps most importantly, after Ticktin and of course the collapse he describes, it is obvious that the USSR can in no way be seen as some higher and more developed stage of capitalism, as some state capitalist theories might imply. What becomes clear from Ticktin is that any understanding of the USSR must start from its malfunctioning: it must explain the systematic waste and inefficiencies that it produced. If the USSR was in any way capitalist it must have been a deformed capitalism, as we shall argue.

However, while we accept that Ticktin provides a powerful theory of the USSR, we also argue that it has important deficiencies which lead us ultimately to reject his understanding of the nature of the USSR.

When we come to develop and present our own theory of the USSR, we will necessarily have to critique in detail the central premise of Ticktin's theory - that the USSR was in transition from capitalism to socialism. For the moment, however, we will confine ourselves to criticizing the problems that arise within the theory itself.

As we have already noted, Ticktin not only fails to present a systematic presentation of a 'political economy of the USSR', he also fails to clarify his methodological approach. As a result, Ticktin is able to escape from addressing some important logical questions regarding the categories of his political economy.

Although he attacks state capitalist theories for projecting categories of capitalism onto the Soviet Union, Ticktin himself has to admit that many categories of bourgeois political economy appeared to persist in the USSR. Categories such as 'money', 'prices', 'wages' and even 'profits'. In capitalism these categories are forms that express a real content even though they may obscure or deviate from this content. As such they are not merely illusions but are real. Ticktin, however, fails to specify how he understands the relation between the essential relations of the political economy of the USSR and how these relations make their appearance, and is therefore unable to clarify the ontological status of such apparent forms as 'money', 'prices', 'wages' and 'profits'. Indeed, in his efforts to deny the capitalist nature of the USSR, Ticktin is pushed to the point where he has to imply that such categories are simply relics of capitalism, empty husks that have no real content. But, of course, if they have no real content, if they are purely nominal, how is that they continue to persist? This failure to address fully the question of form and content becomes most apparent with the all important example of the wage and the sale of labour-power.

The wage-form

As we have seen, the crux of Ticktin's analysis of the USSR was his contention that, although they alienated the product of their labour, Soviet workers did not sell their labour-power. So, although they were paid what at first sight appears as a wage, on close inspection what the workers received was in fact more akin to a pension.

However, in his attempt to compare and contrast the form of the wage as it exists under capitalism with what existed in the USSR in order to deny the application of capitalist categories to the Soviet Union, Ticktin fails to gasp the full complexities of the wage-form as it exists within the capitalist mode of production. As we have already noted, under capitalism workers are obliged to sell their labour-power to the capitalists. However, to both the individual capitalist and the individual worker, this sale of labour-power appears in the wage-form as not the sale of labour-power as such but the sale of labour;20 that is, the worker appears not to be paid in accordance to the value of his labour-power (i.e. the value incorporated in the commodities required to reproduce the worker's capacity to work), but in terms of labour-time the worker performs for the capitalist.

There is, therefore, a potential contradiction between the wage-form and its real content - the sale of labour-power - which may become manifest if the wages paid to the workers are insufficient to reproduce fully the labour-power of the working class. There are two principal situations where this may occur. First, an individual capitalist may be neither willing nor able to offer sufficient hours for an individual worker to be able to earn a 'living wage'. Second, the individual capitalist may pay a wage sufficient to reproduce the individual worker but not enough to meet the cost of living necessary for the worker to bring up and educate the next generation of workers. In this case, the individual capitalist pays a wage that is insufficient to reproduce the labour-power in the long term.

In both these cases the interests of the individual capitalist conflicts with the interests of capital in general which requires the reproduction of the working class as a whole. Of course, this is also true in the case of unemployment. An individual capital has little interest in paying workers a wage if it has no work for them to do that can make it a profit; however, social capital requires an industrial reserve army of the unemployed - unemployed labour-power - in order to keep wages down, and this has to be maintained. The result is that the state has to intervene, often under pressure from the working class itself, in order to overcome the conflict of interest between individual capitals and social capital. It was through this imperative that the welfare state was formed. Health care, free state education and welfare benefits all have to be introduced to overcome the deficiencies of the wage-form in the social reproduction of the working class.

Thus, under capitalism, there is always an underlying tension within the wage-form between the wage being simply a payment for labour-time and the wage as a payment to cover the needs of the worker and her family. As a result, under capitalism, the payments made to ensure the reproduction of the labour-power of the working class is always composed not only of the wage but also benefits and payments in kind. In this light, the USSR only appears as an extreme example in which the needs of social capital have become paramount and completely subsume those of the individual capital.

Labour-power as a commodity

Yet, in denying the capitalist nature of the USSR, Ticktin also argues that the working class did not sell its labour-power in the USSR because labour-power did not exist as a commodity. But then again, as Ticktin fails to recognize, labour-power does not exist immediately as a commodity under capitalism either. A commodity is some thing that is alienable and separable from its owner which is produced for sale. However, labour-power is not produced primarily for sale, although the capitalist may regard it as such, but for its own sake. It is after all simply the potential living activity of the worker and is reproduced along with the worker herself: and as such it also inseparable from the worker.

Labour-power is therefore not immediately a commodity but must be subsumed as such in its confrontation with capital. Labour-power therefore is a commodity which is not a commodity; and this does not simply cease to be the case when it is sold. Normally when someone buys a commodity they obtain the exclusive possession and use of it as a thing - the commodity ceasing to have any connection with its original owner. But this cannot be the case with labour-power. Labour-power, as the subjective activity of the worker, is inseparable from the worker as a subject. Although the worker sells her labour-power to the capitalist, she must still be present as a subject within the labour process where her labour-power is put to use by the capitalist.

Capital must continue to subsume labour-power to the commodity form and this continues right into the labour process itself. The struggle between capital and labour over the labour process is central to the capitalist mode of production. The attempt to overcome the power of the working class at the point of production is the driving force of capitalist development, with the capitalists forced to revolutionize the methods of production in order to maintain their upper hand over the resistance of their workers.

The fact that the workers in the USSR were able to assert considerable control over the labour process does not necessarily mean that they did not sell their labour-power. It need only mean that, given the state guarantee of full employment, the workers enjoyed an exceptionally favourable position with regard to management and were able to resist the full subsumption of labour-power to the commodity form within the labour process.

Again, as with the case of the wage-form, it could be argued that the difference between the USSR and the capitalism that exists in the West, at least in terms of the essential relation of wage-labour, was simply a question of degree rather than of kind. The failure to recognize this and grasp the full complexities of the wage-form and the commodification of labour-power could be seen as a result of Ticktin's restrictive understanding of capitalism which he inherits from objectivist orthodox Marxism.

First, in accordance with orthodox Marxism, Ticktin sees the essential nature of capitalism in terms of the operation of the 'law of value'. Hence, for Ticktin, if there is no market there can be no operation of the 'law of value' and hence there can be no capitalism. Having shown that products were not bought and sold in the USSR, Ticktin has all but shown that the USSR was not capitalist. The demonstration that even labour-power was not really sold simply clinches the argument.

However, we would argue that the essence of capitalism is not the operation of the 'law of value' as such but value as alienated labour and its consequent self-expansion as capital. In this case, it is the alienation of labour through the sale of labour-power that is essential.21 The operation of the 'law of value' through the sale of commodities on the market is then seen as merely a mode of appearance of the essential relations of value and capital.

Second, Ticktin fails to grasp the reified character of the categories of political economy. As a consequence, he fails to see how labour-power, for example, is not simply given but constituted through class struggle. For Ticktin, there is the 'movement of the categories and the movement of class struggle' as if they were two externally related movements. As a result, as soon as the working class becomes powerful enough to restrict the logic of capital - for example in imposing control over the capitalist's use of labour-power - then Ticktin must see a decisive shift away from capitalism. Ticktin is led to restrict capitalism in its pure and unadulterated form to a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century.22

The question of the transitional epoch

As Ticktin admits, contemporary capitalism has involved widespread nationalization of production and the administration of prices, the provision of welfare and the social wage; moreover, in the two decades following the second world war, capitalism was able to maintain a commitment to near full employment. As such, contemporary capitalism, particularly in the years following the second world war, had features that were strikingly familiar to those in the USSR. However, for Ticktin, such social democratic features of twentieth century capitalism were simply symptoms of the decline of capitalism in the transitional epoch. The USSR was therefore only like contemporary capitalism insofar as both Russia and Western capitalism were part of the same transitional epoch: the global transition of capitalism into socialism. Whereas in the USSR the 'law of value' had become completely negated, in the West the advance of social democracy meant only the partial negation of the 'law of value'.

The problem of Ticktin's notion of the transitional epoch is not simply the restrictive understanding of capitalism which we have already mentioned, but also its restrictive notion of socialism and communism. For Ticktin, in the true tradition of orthodox Marxism, socialism is essentially the nationalization of production and exchange combined with democratic state planning. As a consequence, for Ticktin, the Russian Revolution must be seen as a successful socialist revolution in that it abolished private property and laid the basis for state planning under workers' control. It was only subsequently that, due to the backwardness and isolation of the Soviet Union, the workers' state degenerated and as a result became stuck half-way between capitalism and socialism.

Yet, as many anarchists and left communists have argued, the Russian Revolution was never a successful proletarian revolution. The revolution failed not simply because of the isolation and backwardness of Russia - although these may have been important factors - but because the Russian working class failed fully to transform the social relations of production. This failure to transform the relations of production meant that, even though the working class may have taken control through the Bolsheviks' seizure of power and established a 'workers' state', they had failed to go beyond capitalism. As a result, the new state bureaucracy had to adopt the role of the bourgeoisie in advancing the forces of production at all costs.

If this position is correct and Russia never went beyond capitalism, then the basic assumption, which Ticktin himself admits is the very foundation of his analysis, that the USSR was stuck half-way between capitalism and socialism, falls to the ground. Nevertheless, Ticktin's notion that the USSR was a distorted system due it being in transition from one mode of production to another is an important insight. However, as we shall argue in Part IV of this article, the USSR was not so much in transition to socialism as in transition to capitalism. However, before considering this we shall in Part III look in more detail at the various theories of state capitalism that have arisen within the left communist tradition.

• 1. Loren Goldner, Communism is the Material Human Community (Collective Action Notes, POB 22962, Balto., MD 21203, USA.). Also published as 'Amadeo Bordiga, the Agrarian Question and the International Revolutionary Movement', in Critique, 23, 1991.
• 2. Jacques Camatte, Community and Communism in Russia.
• 3. This influence is not confined to the Leninist left. The recent book from Neil Fernandez - Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR - while opposed to Ticktin's Leninism acknowledges his work as a 'major theoretical achievement' in terms of grasping the forms taken by the class struggle in the Soviet Union. The journal Radical Chains has attempted to develop revolutionary critique by combining some of Ticktin's ideas with others from the autonomist and left communist traditions.
• 4. With the growing crisis in the USSR in the 1980s, there were several attempts by leading theoreticians within the Socialist Workers Party to revise Cliff's theory of state capitalism to overcome its inherent weaknesses.
• 5. The collapse of the USSR has forced a major rethink amongst both Trotskyists and Stalinists. One of the first attempts to draw together the various positions on the USSR was made in Open Polemic, 4 & 5.
• 6. In fact, Ticktin's theory has assumed a strong role among the remnants of the British far left that goes beyond just Trotskyism. The ideological crisis that has accompanied the collapse of the USSR has led the smaller groups to some fairly serious rethinking. Ticktin's theory seems to offer the best hope of keeping their Leninist assumptions while fundamentally disentangling themselves from what has happened in Russia. Showing some of the strange realignments that have followed the collapse of the USSR, a Ticktinite analysis of the USSR seems now to be the dominant position within the ex-Stalinist group previously known as the Leninist. Having reclaimed the CPGB title abandoned by the old Euro-Stalinists (now New Labourites), this group seems to be attracting quite a few homeless leftists to a project based on going back to the 1920 formation of the original CPGB before the split of Trotskyism and Stalinism. However, we'd suggest that, for Leninists, now that the USSR has collapsed, overcoming the division of Stalinism and Trotskyism is not too hard; understanding much less crossing the gap between Leninism and communism is a more difficult task.
• 7. For a discussion of the different ways Trotskyism and left communism interpreted the meaning of these slogans, see our article 'Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part I' in Aufheben 2 (Summer 1993).
• 8. See, again, our article 'Decadence' in Aufheben 2.
• 9. See 'The Leopard in the 20th Century: Value, Struggle and Administration' in Radical Chains, 4.
• 10. The notion of centrism had originally been applied to those within the Second International who sought to combine a commitment to proletarian revolution with a reformist practice - a position best exemplified by Karl Kautsky.
• 11. In Marx's Capital the question of class is not presented until the very end of Volume III.
• 12. For a critique of this identification of communism with 'a law of planning', or indeed even with planning per se, see 'Decadence Part III' in Aufheben 4 (Summer 1995).
• 13. Tony Cliff Puts Forward a Similar Position That in the USSR the Workers Did Not Really Sell Their Labour-Power.
• 14. Under capitalism, the individual worker can earn more by working harder or longer than the average or norm. However, if the individual worker's colleagues follow suit, the average or norm of working will be increased and the individual worker will soon find his wages revised down to the value of his labour-power.
• 15. Focusing on commodity fetishism helps one avoid the mistake of seeing ideology as predominantly a creation of state and other ideological apparatuses or institutions. To make people work for it, capital neither has to rely on direct force nor on somehow inserting the idea that they should work into people's heads. Their needs, plus their separation from the means of production and each other, makes working for capital a necessity for proletarians. Commodity fetishism in one sense, then, is not in itself an ideology but an inseparable part of the social reality of a value- and commodity-producing society: "to the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e., they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things" (Capital, vol. 1, Chapter 1, Section 4). On the other hand, people generate ideology to make sense of their alienated practice; to the extent that most people's existence most of the time is within capitalist relations, they generate and adopt ideas to rationalize and make sense of this existence. Because that reality is itself contradictory, their ideas can both be incoherent and quite functional for them. The point here, though, is that no 'battle of ideas' will disabuse them of such ideas which are expressive of their reality. Only in relation to practical struggle, when the reified appearance of capitalist relations is exposed as vulnerable to human interference, are most people likely to adopt revolutionary ideas. On the other hand, leftist intellectuals attempt to be both coherent and critical of this society. It is in relation to such 'critical ideas' that, following Marx and the Situationists, we oppose revolutionary theory to revolutionary ideology.
• 16. There is a key passage in Marx's Capital that would seem at first to support Ticktin's argument that the lack of normal market relations in the USSR meant that it did not generate the powerful 'dull compulsion of everyday life' that the worker experiences in the West:
  

  the advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labour, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital's valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the "natural laws of production", i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them. (Capital, vol. 1, Chapter 28).

  But the lines that immediately follow suggest a quite different way of grasping the Russian situation:
  

  It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to "regulate" wages, i.e. to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation.

  A lot of the strange features of the USSR vis-a-vis 'normal' capitalism become clear when one sees it as attempting to make the transition towards capitalism.

• 17. The observation that there was a fundamental contradiction between the reality of the Soviet regime and what it said about itself is hardly new. The original title of The Russian Enigma by Anton Ciliga, which brilliantly combines an account of his personal experiences of the Stalinist regime and its camps with his reflections on the nature of its economic system, was Au Pays du Grand Mensonge: 'In the Country of the Big Lie'.
• 18. It is interesting to contrast the views of Ticktin with Debord on the Soviet lie.

  Ticktin argues that, unlike the false consciousness of the Western bourgeoisie, the set of doctrines promoted by the Soviet elite doesn't even partially correspond to reality and thus the system has no ideology. Ticktin's motivation to deny that these falsehoods are an ideology is theoretical: 'Systematic, conscious untruthfulness is a symptom of a system that is inherently unstable' (Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, p. 18). His view that it is not a viable system leads him polemically to assert that it has no ideology; for something that is not a mode of production does not generate a coherent false consciousness.

  Debord (Society of the Spectacle, Theses 102-111) similarly describes Soviet society as based on a lie that no one believes and which has thus to be enforced by the police. He also points at the way that its reliance on falsification of the past and present means that it suffers "the loss of the rational reference which is indispensable to the historical society, capitalism", making it a poor imitation of the West in terms of industrial production (108). However Debord does not feel the need to say that, because it has become manifestly incoherent, Stalinist ideology is no longer ideology; rather, it is for him an extreme victory of ideology.

  While it has a theoretical consistency, Ticktin's polemical insistence that there was no ideology in the USSR imposes a very restricted sense on the notion of ideology. Essentially it limits the meaning of ideology to that false consciousness generated by a mode of production which partially grasps the reality of the world which that mode produces and which is thus functional to those identifying with that world. However, ideology can also infect the thought of those who see themselves as critical of and wishing to go beyond that mode of production. For example, the Marxism of the Second International, of which Leninism is essentially a variant, absorbed bourgeois conceptions of the relation of knowledge to practice, of the need for representation and hierarchical organization and of progress, which made it into a revolutionary ideology. Ticktin's limited conception of ideology allows him to escape the questions of the relation of the Soviet Union's ideology of 'Marxism-Leninism' to its origins in Leninism, and the ideological assumptions Trotskyism shares with Stalinism. Debord however, grasps the totalitarian falsehood of Soviet ideology as a dialectical development of the revolutionary ideology of Leninism. As he puts it: "As the coherence of the separate, the revolutionary ideology, of which Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression, governed the management of a reality that was resistant to it; with Stalinism, this ideology rediscovered its own incoherent essence. Ideology was no longer a weapon but an end in itself. But a lie which can no longer be challenged becomes a form of madness" (105).

• 19. On the basis of this dilemma for the Russian elite, Ticktin is able to provide a persuasive account of the post-war history of the USSR which in many respects is far superior to most attempts by state capitalist theorists to explain the crisis of the Soviet Union.
• 20. See Part VI of Volume I of Capital.
• 21. We shall take this point up in far more detail in 'What was the USSR? Part IV'.
• 22. Again, see 'Decadence Part III' in Aufheben 4 (Summer 1995).

State of the Unions: Recent US Labour Struggles in Perspective

In the USA, the recent resurgence of workplace struggles and their mediation through unions indicate a possible future for the UK and Europe: will social democracy be reborn from its ashes, perhaps in a more radical form, through the initiative of rank-and-file militants? In the first major article in our new series on the retreat of social democracy, we trace the background and explore the peculiarities of the class struggle and its forms of mediation in the USA. We also draw out some implications the American situation may have for Britain and the rest of the world.

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State of the unions

Recent US labour struggles in perspective
The USA has beaten the UK in the league table of strikes. Hardly a great achievement, but not without promise. A strike by 2,000 newspaper workers from six different unions, with mass blockades, office occupations, invasions of council meetings, battles with cops. United Parcel Services (UPS) forced to cave in by national strike of 185,000 workers.[1] General Motors shut down by a strike of 9,200 autoworkers at one plant. 40,000 construction workers bringing Manhattan to a halt and clashing with the NYPD, to the dismay of the union bureaucracy.

On July 12th 1998, newspaper workers locked out by the Detroit News and Free Press and their supporters marked the third anniversary of their walkout over contracts and merit pay with a strikers' picnic. Their three-year struggle against the media giants Gannet and Knight Ridder was part of a general upsurge in industrial unrest in the USA. This has been accompanied by an increase in the confidence and apparent militancy of the traditionally conservative US trade union hierarchy, as they seek to represent the subjects emerging from this struggle.

There is a certain irony in this, considering that Clinton's new Democrats have become the model for the Labour Party following the retreat of social democracy in the UK. As we shall see, the recent wave of strikes and labour struggles in the USA indicates a possible revival of social democracy. Is this really the case? We will investigate this through a close examination of the history of the class struggle in the US, allowing us to draw out some implications for Britain and the rest of the world, particularly in the light of the recent financial crises.
American English: Labour and the Democrats

The USA hardly seems like the ideal choice for an analysis of the future of social democracy, but Blair's Americanization of the Labour Party, if nothing else, makes an analysis of recent developments in the USA necessary. It was in Philadelphia, the site of a recent militant transport workers' strike, that early last century a group of artisans formed the world's first embryonic Labour Party.[2] There have been several subsequent abortive attempts to achieve an independent political representation for the working class within the state, most recently in 1996. But, unlike in Britain, a mass Labour Party capable of assuming the reigns of government and delivering reforms to the working class has never emerged within the USA. With the help of the unions, the Democrats have tended to divert attempts to form a mass reformist workers' party and have performed the social democratic function of integrating the US working class within the state, in particular through the reforms embodied in Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s and Johnson's Great Society of the 1960s.[3]

The Americanization of the Labour Party reflects the Democrats' recent success in reversing the defeats of the Reagan era. However, the Labour Party's political and ideological links with the Democrats did not begin with Blair. For example, the 1964-70 Labour Government's loyalty to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was embodied in its adoption of Polaris and its support for the Vietnam war. For its part the US bourgeoisie has sought to influence the development of the Labour Party and British trade unions in a right-wing direction through 'Atlanticist' bodies.[4] Blair looks to the Democrats as a model for a Labour Party divorced from the unions, but ironically the recent labour upsurge is forcing the Democrats towards a more pro-union position.

Bill Clinton's triumph as the first Democrat in the White House for over a decade was a signal to the Labour Party of how to break the Tory stranglehold on British politics, already weakened by the poll tax revolt and the schism over Europe. Clinton had campaigned on a platform of 'tough love', and since his election, the dismantling of the welfare state, the criminalization of the poor and unemployed, reductions of real wages[5] and the imposition of flexible labour regimes have all been stepped up.

It was not long before Blair as Shadow Home Secretary spoke of being 'tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime'. Once elected leader, he expressed his admiration for Thatcher, and showed his commitment to her legacy by marginalizing the last remnants of social democracy within the Labour Party. When New Labour won the general election, it was clear that the tendencies in Clinton's America outlined above were likely to be duplicated here. So the 'modernizers' of the Labour Party have been trying to turn a social democratic party into a bourgeois liberal party, taking as their inspiration a bourgeois liberal party which became, under pressure from the struggles of the working class, a 'surrogate social democratic party'[6]. In the following section, we examine the historic peculiarities which gave rise to this situation in the USA.

Social democracy, American style! A labour movement in search of a labour party 'Exceptionalism'

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky and Trotsky were all fascinated by the possibilities for class struggle in the USA. The present analysis must avoid orthodox Marxism's tendency to equate the political maturity of the working class with the development of a mass workers' party; but it must nevertheless acknowledge the common leftist explanation for the lack of a mass labour, social democratic or Communist Party in America: the belief that US working class is a special case. American working class exceptionalism has been attributed to the frontier, 'racial' divisions and continuous immigration, agrarian-democratic ideologies bound up with petit bourgeois property and the international hegemony of US capital.[7]

The early adherents of these kind of explanations predicted that once the frontier was closed, immigration restricted, petit bourgeoisie expropriated by monopoly capital and US capital in decline, an economic crisis would lead to escalating class conflict and the emergence of a mass workers' party. But how did the orthodox Marxist crystal ball compare with the reality?

The ideology of frontier democracy

In the nineteenth century, American workers had a get-out clause from the wage relation in the form of the frontier, which enabled workers to join the wagon-train out west and stake out their own piece of land. This internal migration eased class tensions in several ways. It enabled some workers to participate in the expropriation of the indigenous population. It also softened the wage relation, and inhibited the development of a unified industrial proletariat antagonistic to capital. But when the supply of free land ran out and the wage relation became absolute, the ideology of frontier democracy persisted[8] and along with it the tendency to individualism in the American working class. By the use of internal migration, US capital was able to impose a greater malleability and fluidity of labour, allowing a more efficient reduction of the working class simply to labour power, leading Marx to comment that the US working class was the closest to abstract labour.[9]

Thus 'America' has become synonymous with capitalism; and communism, socialism or any kind of collective working class organization was denounced as 'un-American'. So the American Plan was a term for the union busting 'open shop'; and socialism is widely seen as an ideology alien to the USA - even by the left: 'American workers have rarely gone beyond a "libertarian populism" which is part syndicalism, part reformism, part socialism and part religion.'[10]

Class violence and the tendency to labour racketeering
In the introductory article in this issue of Aufheben, we mentioned that Mafia protectionism and liberal philanthropy each represent possible alternative methods of mediating working class needs, as distinct from social democracy. In the USA, both of these forms played a part in the mediation of the class struggle by trades unions. In the days before the social democratization of the Democrat Party became the preferred form of mediation, the tendency towards 'labour racketeering' had emerged to mediate class violence.[11]

The crisis of the 1870s triggered a wave of bitter class struggle over the length of the working day, beginning with wildcat rail strikes and rioting by the unemployed in Baltimore, and spreading as far as Chicago and San Francisco. The agitation for the eight hour day produced a new wave of trade unionism in the form of the Knights of Labor (KofL). In 1884, Engels regarded the emergence of the KofL as the birth of mass labour politics in the USA.[12] Workers rushed into the KofL after their victory against Jay Gould's Wabash railroad. But, with the industrial depression of 1884-6, the Socialist Labour Party's defeat in the 1885 election in Chicago and the Chicago KofL executive's last minute retreat from the Mayday general strike for the eight hour day, the prospects for American social democracy on the emerging European model looked bleak.

Nevertheless class violence continued, not least that by the US bourgeoisie itself in bloody reprisals against the working class. Not all of the bourgeoisie were as blatant as Jay Gould when he boasted that he could 'hire one half of the working class to kill the other half', but the history of American labour struggles is littered with massacres by cops, soldiers and hired goon squads. Those liberals who insist that armed violence is the preserve of subjects operating under dictatorships would do well to study the history of the USA, whose political system has always been democratic, but whose industrial relations in the '20s were the envy of Hitler. American workers have frequently had to resort to their guns where they haven't been disarmed by their leaders.

As we discuss further below, the AFL-CIO, the equivalent of Britain's TUC, is the amalgamation of two rival organizations, the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The AFL's way of mediating proletarian violence was to specialize it, exemplifying a long-standing tradition of links between US trade unions and organized crime. Though the AFL's founding father Samuel Gompers said he was 'opposed to violence', he refused to grass up rioters. But after the McNamaras confessed to the 1911 LA Times bombing, linking the crime with union officials, the AFL swung to the right again in an attempt to regain its respectability with the US bourgeoisie. Despite this, however, the links between the unions and organized crime continued until the 1970s, only declining in recent years.

'Race', immigration and class composition

Until the 1890s, America's doors were open to the millions of workers displaced from the Old World by dispossession from the land and by their defeats in industrial struggles, as well as to those seeking to improve their standard of living in what had been promised to them as a land of plenty. So while the US bourgeoisie took a dim view of the left-wing and social democratic ideologies emerging in Europe, it was compelled by its own need for living labour to import them. Unlimited immigration allowed the early US bourgeoisie to import new labour-power to replace that lost to the frontier and to compete with the 'native' labour remaining. However, this was at the price of attracting more working class militants, experienced in the class struggle.

In Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, Louis Adamic mentions the role of Irish factory and harbour workers in the riots in early nineteenth century New York and Pennsylvania. The Irish immigrants also brought the militant tactics of the Molly Maguires gangs, notorious for bumping off landlords who evicted peasants. When the MMs arrived in the Pennsylvania coalfields, they took to dispatching mine owners instead!

The ethnically diverse composition of the US proletariat could lead to intra-class conflict as much as to anti-capitalist class struggle. In the USA, the division of the working class on 'racial' and religious lines, together with the vast distances between different concentrations of population, have hindered both the formation of a class-for-itself on the national terrain and the emergence of a mass labour party to represent it.[13] Racism has been the spectre haunting the US proletariat ever since the seventeenth century, when concessions to European bonded labourers were used by the colonial rulers to help quell the bloody slave revolts by both European and African labourers. Thus the American working class was split into a black slave class in the South and a white wage-labouring class in the North. The early trade unions tended to represent the interests of the latter section, and feared competition from the newly freed slaves, leading to racial segregation within the trade unions.

The temporary convergence of the interests of Northern capital with those of the Southern slaves led to the temporary emergence of two mutually hostile forms of working class representation. At the end of the Civil War, the newly enfranchized former slaves were attempting to turn the Republican Party in many places into a de facto labour party through the post-Civil War reconstruction governments. Meanwhile, in the North, white workers were looking to the Workingmens' Party to oppose the Republicans whose interests they equated with their bosses. The failure of the white working class to find common cause with the Southern blacks and turn the abolition of slave labour into the abolition of wage labour, allowed the Northern bourgeoisie to withdraw troops from the South to suppress the struggles of the rail strikers who had seized the terminals from Baltimore to Chicago in 1877, and had established mass workers' assemblies in St. Louis.[14]

Since then, the descendants of the former slaves have inherited the role of a lower caste within the US working class: 'the last hired, and the first fired'. Many were taken on by Ford who saw them as a compliant labour force of strike-breakers, and much of the white working class resentment of them centred on their perceived tendency to scab. However, once incorporated into the workforce, they refused this role. For example, black rank-and-file militants led mass wildcat walkouts in the 1940s and formed the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW)[15] in Detroit in the 1960s.

But if the black-white division has been a crucial part of working class weakness, there have been others, such as between 'native' (Protestant) and immigrant (mainly Catholic) labour. The early crafts unions of the American Federation of Labour (AFL) tended to represent the interests of white Protestant workers, a kind of US aristocracy of labour distinguished from the unskilled immigrant labour by the ability to use their skills as the counter in collective bargaining. In 1912, Lenin saw Eugene Debs's electoral achievements for the Socialist Party as the breakthrough for mass labour politics in the USA, but it turned out to be the high watermark for the SP, which collapsed due to intra-class conflict between white, Protestant craft workers and unskilled, non-union black or immigrant workers.[16] However these latter were already in the process of developing a new union of all workers dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism!

From revolutionary syndicalism to reformist industrial unions

As craft unions became increasingly irrelevant due to the move from the formal to the real subsumption of the labour process, the new unions emerged which preserved their bargaining role by recruiting the black, immigrant and female labour despised by the AFL. To represent the class interests of these new subjects, a union needed to recruit and organize across an entire industry rather than across a craft. German brewery workers displaced by Bismarck's anti-socialist laws pioneered this form, after realizing that the brewers played such a limited role in the industry that the union would have to represent all brewery workers to be effective.

The industrial union form became more widespread with the rise of American revolutionary syndicalism in the shape of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a union of all industrial workers[17] with the stated aim of abolishing the wages system. Speakers at its first convention in 1906 hailed the previous year's revolution in Russia, and its members included workers in exile from Russia following the repression of that revolution. Two years later, the direct action tendency won control of the IWW, resolving the contradiction between these elements and the more electoralist faction associated with Daniel DeLeon and Eugene Debs. With its base in 'blanket stiffs' (migrant workers), the ideology of the IWW was hostile towards social democracy; it even refused to enter into written agreements with the bosses.[18]

Their actions launched daring assaults on capitalist production and circulation in the form of sit-in strikes, mass pickets and sabotage. 8,000 IWW strikers at McKees Rocks drove the Pennsylvania Cossacks off the streets in bloody gun battles. The outstanding incident in the early IWW history, the textile strike at Lawrence in 1912, started as a wildcat strike. Women workers in the Massachusetts textile centre walked out spontaneously smashing the machinery of anyone who tried to scab. Even when the union was in decline, IWW members were instrumental in the success of the Seattle general strike in 1919.

The IWW were one of the most radical labour organizations in the world at this time. They committed themselves to a general strike if America entered the first world war. When America did enter the war, they were unable to deliver on this. Nonetheless, the AFL helped to get hundreds of wobblies imprisoned to show that, unlike the IWW, they were an all-American union bureaucracy that US capital could do business with. The US bourgeoisie saw in the IWW the possibility of their own expropriation. They feared that the revolutionary wave sweeping Europe following 1917 might reach the USA. The demand for timber in the war industries escalated the suppression of the IWW, as armed gangs of patriotic businessmen ransacked IWW halls and offices. The backlash continued in Bisbee, with the forced deportation of striking miners from Arizona the same summer. Though the IWW itself was crushed by a combination of vigilantism, infiltration and outright state repression, the industrial union form it had established blossomed after the first world war.

Once the IWW was crushed, the way was open for the emergence of inclusive and racially integrated (but reformist) industrial unions under the umbrella of the CIO. Following the disintegration of the IWW, many of its tactics, such as the 'sit-down' strike, were adopted by militants in the reformist industrial unions of the CIO. Despite the IWW's rejection of political representation in favour of direct action, many ex-wobblies became the back-bone of the US Communist Party (CPUSA), whose role in the development of the CIO we discuss below. In the words of a veteran wobbly, 'Although we never became a major force in industry, we definitely showed the way for the CIO. Don't think its an accident that the United Auto Workers adopted "Solidarity Forever" as their main song'.[19] The IWW had tried to create 'a new world in the shell of the old', whereas the new industrial unions helped reshape the old world in the shell of the new.

Ford and Fordism

Following the first world war, Ford's production methods became the motor of the 1920s boom. The relative success of the struggle of the working class to secure more free time at the expense of absolute surplus-value production gave rise to a mode of accumulation based on relative surplus-value in which rising productivity was rewarded with high wages and increased access to consumer goods. The cutting of prices meant that not only could Ford manufacture more Model Ts, but he could sell them to the workers: Fordism allowed the integration of mass production with mass consumption.
However, in the face of competition from other more established firms who adopted his production methods, Ford was compelled to impose speed-ups on the production line, and wages were driven down by the intense competition for jobs at Ford's plant. The speed-ups in turn enabled Ford to sack more workers. Despite this intensification of work enforced by his private police force, Ford's initial phase of expansion fell foul of the Great Depression.

Thus Ford began to show how working class needs could be turned into the motor of accumulation, but the Fordist mode of accumulation could not become fully established without its counterpart in the realm of social capital: Keynesian demand management to keep mass consumption in line with mass production.

The social democratization of the Democrats

In the early 1930s, the crisis in the social and political institutions of the US bourgeoisie, coupled with the disorderly flouting of the laws of private property by the unemployed and dispossessed, called for drastic action. To Franklin D. Roosevelt, the survival of capitalism itself was in the balance. His New Deal was the culmination of a political realignment of US bourgeoisie, which had seen Roosevelt switch his alignment from Republican to Democrat. The New Deal coalition expressed a social consensus on the part of those sections of the bourgeoisie who favoured state intervention and corporatism. This new tendency within American capital sought to replace the traditional policy of confrontation with one of recuperating working class struggles as the motor of accumulation to 'get America working again'.

However, the New Deal needed the input of the new CIO unions to mobilize the working class behind Roosevelt's electioneering. This involved the subordination of the needs of individual capitals to those of social capital, particularly in large-scale industries such as steel, rubber, electrics, and motors. These industries were crucial to the emerging Fordist mode of accumulation which underpinned the new class compromise, but were largely non-unionized before the Depression. The New Deal corporatism embodied in Section 7a of the National Recovery Act (NRA) and the Wagner Act granted concessions on union recognition and collective bargaining. However it was one thing for Roosevelt to pass a law, and quite another to impose it on the bosses, particularly the steel barons who were virtually a law unto themselves, complete with private armies and 'company towns'. The new laws had to be contested in the work-place, leading to the sit-down strike fever of 1936-7, with its basis in second-generation immigrants excluded from the '20s boom then thrown onto the breadline in the early '30s. This new wave of struggle was launched by autonomous shop committees in the rubber, electric and motor industries. At Akron, a union official was shouted down when he tried to end the strike and stop the strike-wave spreading. At Flint, General Motors body-plant workers twice forced police back when they attempted to attack the occupied plant, and forced the United Autoworkers (UAW) and CIO leadership to back them. By spring 1937, there were 477 sit-down strikes involving 400,000 workers.[20]

Nonetheless, these struggles were still more amenable to union control than those of the unemployed during the Great Depression. CPUSA-controlled unemployed councils were organizing raids on restaurants, fights against bailiffs and mass hunger marches which turned into riots in Detroit, New York and Cleveland. But the CPUSA also played its part in the triumph of social democracy, as did other Communist Parties in other countries. In 1935 the New Deal was losing the support of the progressive section of the bourgeoisie committed to corporatism, and Roosevelt needed the support of the four million workers in the CIO in order to win the 1936 presidential election. In return for support from the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), set up under the Wagner Act, the CIO helped to abort attempts by the workers to establish an independent social democratic party. The CPUSA fell in with the CIO leadership, and the militants of Flint were mobilized behind Roosevelt's election campaign. The CIO leadership also managed to foil attempts at an occupation at Chrysler and a general strike in Detroit. But the convergence of the interests of the industrial working class as represented by the CIO bureaucracy with those of the cotton plantocracy, presupposed the exclusion of the cotton tenant farmers and sharecroppers from the New Deal. 'The party of the northern liberals was also the party of the southern lynchers.'[21]

For some on the left, the lack of a mass labour party and of socialist ideology is symptomatic of the political immaturity of the US working class. But lack of such a party is not the same as a lack of class struggle. Quite the reverse, if we use the level of class violence as our yardstick rather than the level of reformism! In US labour history, as elsewhere, upsurges in class struggle are often followed by the emergence of social democratic forms - rather than the other way round. The crisis of the early '30s was only resolved in favour of capital by the Democrats' CIO-assisted programme of Keynesian reflation and demand management, which it only really achieved with the outbreak of the war. Commenting on the unemployed Pennsylvania miners who excavated and distributed coal from company land during the Depression, Paul Mattick wrote:

The bootleg miners have shown in a rather clear and impressive way, that the so-much bewailed absence of a socialist ideology on the part of the workers really does not prevent workers from acting quite anti-capitalistically, quite in accordance with their needs. Breaking through the confines of private property in order to live up to their own necessities, the miners' action is at the same time a manifestation of the most important part of class consciousness - namely that the problems of the workers can only be solved by the workers themselves.[22]

By harnessing the militancy of the US working class with the help of the CIO, the New Deal planner-state allowed the needs of US social capital to subsume those of the aggressive individual capitals personified in Tom Girdler, 'the benevolent dictator' of Little Steel, as well as accommodating an increasingly assertive working class. Thus the US experience has been that of a labour movement minus a labour party. The consequent social democratization of the Democrat Party manifests a contradiction. On the one hand, social democracy as a 'labour movement' mediates working class struggle through trade union demands for social reforms and political representation within the bourgeois state; on the other hand, there is the compromised delivery of these concessions by a party representing a broad coalition of interests, rather than by a proper labour party better able to demobilize the class properly.

From New Deal to no-strike deal

The 'Roosevelt recession', the repression against the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee (SWOC) and competition from the AFL brought the initial phase of CIO expansion to an end. Then the USA's entry into World War II in 1941 revived industrial production due to rearmament and lend-lease, leading to 'an unprecedented recomposition of the US working class'.[23]

With accelerated agricultural mechanization, industrialization of the South and West and the collapse of the cotton tenancy, 4.5 million people moved permanently from the farm to the city. The war-time labour shortage allowed women to be admitted into heavy industry for the first time, and enabled strikers to win wage increases for the first time since 1937.

However, on the shop floor, workers faced speed ups as the demand for military production increased. At the same time, although profits were soaring on the back of guaranteed rising demand, wages were frozen. The CIO leadership was anxious to avoid the fate of the IWW, so they agreed a war-time no-strike pledge. However many of the militants whose struggles had provided the motor for the initial phase of CIO expansion, by contesting the NRA and the Wagner Act in the work-place, now turned their anger against the war-time corporatism in a wave of wildcat strikes against the no-strike deal and the National War Labor Board (NWLB) set up to police it.[24] This was a large and scattered group of workers consciously sabotaging the war effort without any union support. In one dispute, the workers' representative stated that the workers were on strike not against the company but against the NWLB.

After the army had been sent in to crush the North American Aviation strike of 12,000 militant rank-and-file, the CIO helped dislodge the CPUSA from the strategic aircraft industry in return for state support for the unionization of the defence industry. The CPUSA supported this strike and that at Allis-Chalmers. When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the line from Moscow had been that the war was an imperialist conflict which should be actively opposed by all Communist Parties. However, by the time of USA's full entry into the war, Germany's invasion of Russia had led to a dramatic reversal in the line from Moscow. The war was now a war against fascism; and the fight against the axis powers had now to be fully supported by all Communists Parties. As a result, both the 'social patriotic' leadership of CIO and its Stalinist opposition gave their full backing to the war effort and were united in giving a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war.

As a result, the wave of wildcat strikes which swept the USA was resolutely opposed by the unions and the CPUSA. Despite the CIO's exhortations to 'work! work! work! produce! produce! produce!', the struggles against the no-strike deal lasted from 1942-45.[25] Thus the second world war demonstrated a shift in the relationship between the unions and the state, and between the unions and the working class in the USA. In the NRA strikes and the sit-down fever of the '30s, the working class had used the New Deal's social democratic institutions as an opportunity to strike, forcing the CIO leadership to back their autonomous actions. In wartime, the CIO itself fully became a social democratic institution for the prevention of strikes. The establishment of 'union towns', where cops were not permitted to attack picket-lines,[26] was symptomatic of the CIO's accommodation with capital and its state.

From New Deal to no-strike deal

With the devastation of much of Europe, the USA emerged from the second world war as by far the strongest military and economic nation on earth. The only nation that could seriously rival the USA was the USSR. For the American bourgeoisie at the time, the USSR appeared as a formidable opponent. In little more than two decades, the USSR had managed to transform itself from a largely agrarian economy into a world superpower which threatened to bring large swathes of the world under its influence. With even much of Europe on the verge of 'going communist', American capital was faced with the prospect of being hemmed in and deprived of its foreign markets which were vital for its continued profitability and survival.

It was this threat of the spread of 'Communism' which served to mobilize an otherwise introverted and isolationist American bourgeoisie around an active foreign policy which sought both to contain the military, economic and ideological expansion of the USSR, at the same time as constructing a world order amenable to the accumulation of American-based capital.
The first and most urgent task facing this new active foreign policy was to prevent as much of Europe as possible from 'going communist'. Using its continued military presence, its political connections with the European ruling classes and the substantial sums of money channelled through the Marshall Aid programme, the US sought to reconstruct a Europe firmly committed to 'free market capitalism' and therefore open to the expansion of American capital. However, such efforts only served to prompt the USSR into consolidating its own hold over Europe. As a result, as the relations between the two superpowers and former war time allies cooled into the Cold War, Europe became divided between the Eastern bloc which aligned itself to the USSR and Western Europe which aligned itself to the USA.

With the division of Europe, and with it the rest of the world, between the two superpowers, the US sought to organize western capitalism around new international economic and political structures which would ensure the rapid accumulation of American capital. With Britain as its junior partner, the US through the Bretton Woods agreement set up a system of fixed exchange-rates in which all currencies were to be readily convertible into dollars. To protect such system from short term imbalances in trade or from attacks by speculators, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was established in order to provide governments with emergency loans to support their currencies on the foreign exchange markets. Alongside the IMF, the World Bank was established whose purpose was to provide governments with longer term loans necessary for the development and reconstruction of their economies so that they had no excuse for not competing in the world market.
The US also pressed for the opening up of all national economies to 'free trade'. The barriers to 'free trade' that had grown up during the world depression of the 1930s and the second world war were to be progressively dismantled as the war-torn European economies recovered through successive rounds of trade agreements under the auspices of the General Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). At the same time, the US took up the slogan of the 'right of national self-determination' to demand the break up and decolonization of the British and French empires so that the 'third world' could also be opened up to American capital.

At home, like its Western European counterparts, the American bourgeoisie was obliged to accept the need for greater state intervention and regulation of the economy. However, unlike many of its European counterparts, the American ruling class didn't feel the need to concede a fully fledged social democratic settlement. Thus, while American economic policy, like that in Britain, was based on Keynesian demand management in which the expansion of state spending was used to sustain demand and prevent the return of economic stagnation, this increased spending was directed less towards the provision of welfare, than in Britain and the rest of Europe, and more towards military spending. Hence American post-war economic policy can be described as a form of military Keynesianism.

With the international framework established by the Bretton Woods agreement and the adoption of Keynesian economic policies, the basis was laid for the post-war economic boom which was to last for more than twenty years. Fordist production methods which had been pioneered in the inter-war years were now adopted by an increasing number of industries in the USA and exported abroad. As a result, the productivity of labour rose rapidly, allowing rising profits to coincide with rising wages which in turn led to high and sustained rates of economic growth and capital accumulation. In establishing these conditions for the post-war economic order the American trade unions played a vital role.

Although the leadership of the CIO were for the most part moderate social democrats, their commitment to militant industrial action meant that they were obliged to tolerate union activists and officials who were either members or supporters of the CPUSA. As a result, there emerged a distinct Stalinist opposition to the leadership within the CIO. After the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the CPUSA's support for the war effort muted this opposition, with the Stalinists becoming enthusiastic supporters of the no-strike deal.

With the end of the war the divisions between the leadership of the CIO and Stalinist opposition reopened over the issue of the presidential elections. The left within the CIO sought to break with the tradition of supporting the Democrats and urged that the CIO throw its organized weight behind an independent candidate - Henry Wallace - for the 1948 Presidential elections. This move was defeated.

Meanwhile, in 1947, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act. This law required all union officials to declare that they were not Communists before they could be given recognition by the National Labour Relations Board. The left within the CIO argued that the unions should defy the law and that all union officials should refuse to sign the declaration thereby making it unworkable. The right-wing and the leadership of the CIO, however, saw it as an excellent opportunity to rid themselves of increasingly troublesome left-wingers.

The failure to oppose the Taft-Hartley Act led to the mass expulsion of CPUSA members from union positions and contributed to the anti-communist witch-hunts that culminated in the McCarthy trials in the early 1950s. These anti-communist witch-hunts, combined with the growing prosperity of post-war America, brought about the eradication of left-social democracy and socialism from both the unions and American politics in general.

Having established its position as the mediator in the sale of labour-power, the CIO no longer needed to maintain the tradition of militancy which it had built up in the 1930s. With the expulsion of the Stalinist opposition, the CIO leadership was free to find a rapprochement with the AFL which resulted in their merger in 1955. Together, the AFL and CIO proceed to play their crucial role within the Fordist mode of accumulation ensuring that wages, and thus consumption, rose in line with increased production despite the immediate interests of individual employers in holding down the wages of their own workers.

The American labour movement also played a vital part in the struggle over the division of Europe following the second world war. One of the most important issues was the control of the newly re-established labour movements across Europe. From the start the AFL acted as conduit for US foreign policy, channelling cash and influence into the heart of the European labour movement. In contrast, the CIO, with its strong Stalinist wing, at first played a more ambiguous role. While the CIO in some respects supported US foreign policy, it also joined the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which was dominated by Stalinist-led trade union federations and which, despite its protestation that it was neutral, was widely seen as aligned with the USSR. However, following the defeat and expulsion of the CPUSA officials in the CIO, and with onset of the Cold War, the CIO broke with the WFTU in 1948 and fell into line with AFL.

The economic and political framework established after the second world war provided the basis for an unprecedented period of economic growth throughout the industrialized nations within the Western bloc. However, by the 1960s the limits of Fordism were becoming apparent. As elsewhere, the prolonged economic boom had led to a rising organic composition of capital and with it a decline in the rate of profit for US capital. At the same time, a new generation of workers emerged who were no longer content with the concessions won by their parents at the end of the war. New social movements arose, such as the Civil Rights movement, which made new demands on the state; while at the workplace full employment gave workers the power and confidence to assert their own needs and demands in the form of wildcat strikes and labour indiscipline. As a result, state spending and wages grew rapidly, squeezing profits further.

In addition, the USA found itself facing a relative decline in economic position. The Marshall Aid programme, and other post-war arrangements aiding the devastated economies of Europe, had not only saved Western Europe from 'going communist' but had provided the basis for their rapid reconstruction. By the late 1950s the economies of Western Europe, particularly that of West Germany, had re-emerged as serious rivals to the USA in many crucial sectors. The competitive advantage of American capital, that had led to a huge trade surplus with Western Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, was eroded, giving rise to a mounting trade deficit and a glut of dollars in the vaults of the European banks.

As a result, by the late 1960s the US was in crisis. Faced with growing workplace militancy and a generalized revolt against work, the unions were forced to adopt more militant bargaining positions in order to head off working class dissent. The unions' demands for higher wages could only be reconciled with company profits through accelerating inflation as wage rises were passed on as price increases. At the same time, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the social and welfare programmes introduced by the Democrats in the early sixties, led to a rapid increase in public spending.

With the Democrats split over the issue of involvement in the Vietnam War, it was left to the Republicans under the Presidency of Richard Nixon to resolve the crisis of American capital. Faced with accelerating inflation and a ballooning trade deficit, the Nixon administration introduce strict new labour laws and wage controls in order to hold wages down. This ran the danger of politicizing industrial relations as demands for higher wages had to challenge both government policy and the law of the land. However, unlike their British counterparts who not only smashed both Labour's and the Tories' attempts to introduce and enforce an industrial relations act and in the end brought down the Heath government by breaking its pay policy, the American unions were not compelled to take on the government.

At the same time, with his foreign policy détente, Nixon sought a new understanding with both China and the USSR which paved the way for arms control and with it a substantial reduction in military spending. And in 1971 the dollar was devalued in order to boost the competitiveness of American industry, which eventually led to the break up of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1973.

While Nixon's attempt to resolve the crisis within the old post-war framework averted the immediate crisis, American capital, like its counterparts in Europe, remained mired in declining profitability throughout the 1970s. In response, capital sought to break out of the rigidities of existing Fordist production and sought opportunities elsewhere. As a result, investment in industrial production declined and unemployment throughout America and Europe rose giving rise to stagflation (i.e., rising inflation combined with rising unemployment and low levels of economic growth).

The quadrupling of the price of oil in 1973 in effect shifted capital out of the hands of industrial capital into the coffers of the banks. This allowed capital a greater degree of fluidity with which it could outflank the working class. No longer confined and committed to the old industrial circuits, capital was able to shift out of the old heavily unionized industries of the North and East of the USA to low waged and non-unionized industries situated either in the South and West or in newly industrializing countries such as Brazil, Mexico and South Korea - a process that was to gather pace in the 1980s as we shall see.

By the late 1970s the attempt to stem the flight of capital had become exhausted. The gradual devaluation of the dollar, wage controls and attempts to control military spending had all proved to be futile attempts to swim against the tide, opening the way for the sharp reversal of economic and foreign policy which was to occur under Reagan. As in Britain the unions had contained working class militancy and then defused it; but in doing so they had undermined their own position. Reagan's electoral success reflected the emergence of the 'Reagan Democrats', corresponding to the 'C2' skilled workers who transferred their allegiance from Labour to the Conservatives in the 80s.[27]

Star Wars and the class war: Reaganomics and the retreat of social democracy

Many militants involved in UK trade unions will be watching events in the USA with keen interest. The decline of trade unions in the USA mirrors Britain's recent history of labour defeats: steelworkers, the miners, the printers. With the crisis of the '70s, the American New Right became one of the ideological inspirations for Thatcherism, with the US economist Milton Friedman providing in monetarism the rationale for imposing unemployment and austerity on the 'bloody-minded British worker'.

Like Thatcher, Reagan swiftly replaced the policy of accommodating the working class via the unions to one of outright confrontation, exemplified in the defeat of the air-traffic controllers strike (with the assistance of the machinists and other unions, who ordered their members to cross PATCO picket-lines). As we noted in our introductory article, social democracy was never as well established in the USA as in most of Europe. The British Labour Party's initial response to its defeat in the 1979 General Election was to swing to the left.

In the USA at the time of Reagan's victory, there was already widespread cynicism among working class voters with the bourgeois political process, expressed in a general perception that there was little difference between the two main parties. The attempt by the more social democratic elements within the Democrats to regroup around a 'rainbow coalition' and reverse the party's drift to the right failed. Thus in the 1984 general election Reagan was able to portray himself as the natural heir to Roosevelt, in contrast to the monetarist 'new realism' of the Democrats under Walter Mondale.

Although Reagan had come to power on a promise to balance the books by 'rolling back' public welfare spending, Reaganomics included an element of military Keynesianism in the form of a revival of the post-war tendency towards military accumulation. While Thatcher's bouts of red-baiting tended to concentrate on the 'enemy within', Reagan's attacks were directed at the USSR, characterized as 'the evil empire'. Abandoning the policy of 'détente', Reagan attempted to rally the American bourgeoisie still traumatized by their pasting in Vietnam. In doing so he re-oriented global capital accumulation around the needs of American military production.[28]

This policy involved a massive expansion of the defence budget at the expense of post-war working class gains in the form of the rising social wage. This was accompanied by an ideological 'backlash' against the 'new social subjects' who had emerged in the '60s and '70s, notably the Women's Liberation Movement which had begun contesting their unwaged role in reproducing the waged worker. Though the 'family values' of the religious right sought to confine women in the home, the '80s and '90s have seen capital attracting women as a low-paid, non-union workforce, alongside the tendency to repel the traditionally male bastions of working class entrenchment in heavy industry. The seemingly contradictory ideologies of monetarism and fundamentalism found their expression in the ruthless attack on benefits aimed at single mothers, culminating in the replacement of Aid for Dependent Families (ADFC) by Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF). This relentless clawing back of the concessions of the 1960s has continued into the Clinton era with the wide scale adoption of 'workfare', forcing black single mothers on the dole to combine unwaged domestic labour with unwaged drudgery outside the home, as they sweep the streets with their children in tow.[29]

Far from balancing the books, Reagan's military Keynesianism meant abandoning the policy of competitive devaluation of the dollar favoured by previous administrations; and interest rates were pushed up to finance the growing trade and budget deficits. This devastated large swathes of the concentrations of working class entrenchment in the 'rust-belt' industries of the North East. The military Keynesianism of Reagan's policy of military expansion helped US capital to outflank the working class by capital migration within the USA itself (whose federal system enables capital to migrate internally from areas of working class entrenchment to so-called 'right to work' sunbelt states in the South and West). The Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), nick-named 'Star Wars', represented a massive state subsidy for the non-union computer software and electronics industries at a critical stage in their battle with their Far East competitors. This was part of a growing tendency within the USA for the centre of accumulation to shift from unionized heavy industry to the non-unionized service sector and 'Silicon Valley', a tendency which has continued in the Clinton era.

The USA could only sustain its vast military expansion by vast borrowing, reducing the USA to the status of the world's most indebted nation. Meanwhile, the renewed pressure of the arms race sharpened divisions within the Soviet bureaucracy, with the result that Gorbachev was unable to accommodate the demands of the working class and the 'managerial faction' of the bureaucracy within the USSR's institutional framework. The eventual collapse of the Eastern bloc due to both these pressures and the gross inefficiencies of the Russian form of capitalism was hailed by the bourgeoisie as final confirmation of the triumph of capitalism, as the gangrenous vampires slavered over the new markets to be conquered, and as the end of any possibility of radical change. The demise of 'actually existing socialism' was yet another nail in the coffin of social democracy.

As the US economy slid into recession and George Bush fell victim to the loose cannons of the fundamentalist right, the Republican Party's hegemony over the White House was finally ended by Bill Clinton's victory in the 1992 presidential elections. As it followed hot on the heels of Neil Kinnock's failure to end 13 years of Conservative government, Labour 'modernizers' were watching it closely. Far from rehabilitating social democracy, Clinton showed himself the natural heir to Reagan's legacy. Under Clinton, the Democrats were able to shake off their image as 'tax and spend liberals' with a continuation of the draconian welfare cuts which had helped to provoke the LA uprising, and the adoption of workfare as a national policy. To pre-empt any further unrest, Clinton's 'tough love' law and order policies amounted to the criminalization of the black population, disproportionately affected by this impoverishment and re-imposition of work. So, following the trend set by Reagan, his rejection of traditional Keynesian accommodation of working class demands has been accompanied by a huge rise in the prison population, the infamous 'three strikes', and, as promised, 100,000 new cops.

Clinton has presided over the consolidation of the capital restructuring initiated in the late '70s: the rapid growth in part-time, insecure work, the migration of labour from the 'rustbelt' North East to the 'right to work' sunbelt states of the South and West and the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to facilitate capital flight to the low-wage haven of Mexico. Thus the early 1990s saw a continuation of the dismal catalogue of defeats for the American labour movement begun in the '80s. This has been manifested in a decline in union membership from 20 million in 1979 to 16 million in 1996. The effect of this long-term decline has been contradictory: on the one hand, an attempt at a neo-corporatist accommodation with capital and the state on the part of the AFL-CIO leadership; on the other hand, a recruitment drive and a resurgence of industrial militancy.

The US working class is dead!
Long live the US working class!

In the early '90s, the US working class was widely seen as hopelessly demoralized, divided and defeated, with strikes reaching an all-time low. In 1994, according to US Labour Department statistics, the average American worker would stand to reclaim a day from work through a strike once every 100 years should current trends continue![30] By contrast, in the last few years, there have been more strikes in the USA than in the UK.

Of course, strikes are far from the only form of class struggle, and in the light of the dismal history of the previous two decades, it would hardly be surprising if the US working class would turn to other forms of resistance.[31] It is interesting at this point to mention the role of black proletarians, marginalized both within the unions and the workplace, in one of the most inspiring manifestations of the class struggle in that period, the LA uprising.[32]

If LA was a struggle in which union mediation had no role, the recent strikes are partly an expression of the unions' need to regain their influence within the working class. The unions' increase in militancy was also linked to a period of reflation. This reduced unemployment to a 24 year low of 4.9%. This major change in monetary policy followed a period of deflation under the Republican-controlled Congress. Their victory in November 1994, on a platform of spending cuts known as the 'contract for America', ended 40 years of Democrat control of Congress, undermining the union bureaucracy's neo-corporatist policy of lobbying congress. Liberal commentators put this result down to the disillusionment of the 'blue collar Democrat' with Clinton's neo-liberal economic policies .

In 1996, trade union financial contributions of $50 million helped the Democrats to win the presidential and congressional elections. This helped to create a climate in which the US bourgeoisie was becoming sympathetic towards trade union demands. During the 19 month long Detroit News strike, the Democrats even had a policy of refusing to speak to the scab papers. The UPS strike also attracted very favourable media coverage.

The upsurge in militancy is also linked to the swing to the left within the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). This was the union involved in the UPS strike, and two out of the six unions in the Detroit News strike were Teamster locals (branches). Historically the Teamsters are notorious for corruption and racketeering, a trend synonymous with the presidency of Jimmy Hoffa Sr. But in 1991, a split in the old guard allowed Ron Carey to beat Hoffa Jr. on an anti-corruption ticket. This was the culmination of a rank-and-file movement dating back to the '70s, called Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) seeking democratic control of 'their' union. Though Carey was himself not immune to charges of corruption, his election created a climate favourable to the new mood of militancy within this union, which has 1.4 million members and strategic positions in transportation.[33]

Upsurge in industrial militancy

For many on the left, notably the SWP, the high-point of this resurgence in trade union militancy was the United Parcel Services (UPS) strike in August 1997. For the SWupPies, the UPS strike was a historic turning point in the fortunes of the US working class: 'the first time in over 20 years that a major national strike (in the US) has won a victory.'[34] Clearly they would like to see this perceived pattern reproduced in the UK; but an analysis of the relevance of the US situation to the future of trade unionism and social democracy in this country must avoid the Trots' miserable trade-union consciousness.
However, we can't accept as the only alternative to seeing trade unions as 'workers' organizations who unfortunately sell out their members' that of seeing them as in an undifferentiated conspiratorial unity with employers. Correctly, the International Communist Current (ICC) point out that the 10,000 new full-time jobs gained by the UPS strikers would be more than cancelled out by the 15,000 lay-offs expected due to loss of business during the strike. But the ICC suggests a grand conspiracy between the government, the bosses and the unions to stitch up the working class. Certainly all three are the enemy, but they don't always work together. The ICC go so far as to say that 'there is no conflict of interests between UPS and the Teamsters' union', on the basis that the UPS bosses deliberately provoked the strike in the summer months when the retail trade was slack. Though this is undeniable, it does not provide a case for saying that there is no conflict of interests between management and unions. After all, there are conflicts of interest within the bourgeoisie itself, because of the imperatives of the market forcing different capitals to compete with each other. This can be seen in the UPS strike, when rival delivery firms used the strike to grab a share of UPS's market.

As the ICC correctly point out, the union gave management plenty of warning of an impending showdown in the form of their 'countdown to contract' campaign within the union, enabling management to time the strike to their advantage. In spite of this, the strike halted an estimated 75% of US deliveries. The National Retail Federation appealed to Washington to intervene. As for UPS themselves, the company lost $800 million dollars not to mention customers lost to competitors; so if they were so happy to concede the unions' demand, why didn't management stitch up a deal with them before the strike? Probably because the recent history of labour defeats, including a failed UPS strike in 1994, had made them over-confident in their ability to weather a strike.

The ICC article points out that UPS invited the Teamsters to unionize its workforce in the '20s. But there have been enormous changes in the structure of US capital and the composition of the US working class since then, not least of these the new tendency towards militancy within the IBT itself. Originating as an AFL craft union, the Teamsters were involved in battles against the CIO in 'labour's civil war' in the '40s. More recently, the IBT transformed its structure to become a CIO-style industrial union. Though the UPS strike was widely seen as a victory because of the new contract negotiated by the union, there is no sign that it will stop the gruelling intensification of work endured by UPS employees. This hidden grievance was mediated by the unions in the form of 'health and safety issues'. It also undeniable that the Teamsters did their best to stop the strike from spreading and to keep a lid on the class antagonism they had unleashed. However despite the limitations of the UPS strike, its undoubted success in shaking the complacency of the US bourgeoisie was nevertheless a considerable psychological victory if nothing else for the US working class.

We shall expand upon the nature of unions as mediators of class struggle below. Now we must turn to the changes within capital which are being contested in these struggles.

The new militancy within the Teamsters has led it into defeats as well as victories, such as the strike by 2,000 newspaper workers in Detroit. This 18 month long battle, and the lock-out which followed the unions' unconditional surrender, was again provoked by the bosses to a certain extent in an effort to break the union's control of the workplace. In the light of the apparent conquest of the Teamsters by the rank-and-file, it is inadequate simply to denounce the union as class collaborationist. Our task is to expose the contradictions between the antagonistic subjectivity of the proletariat and its representation in the unions. The success of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the resulting militant stance of the Teamsters' union expresses a convergence of interests between the union as and its members. As we shall see, the Detroit strike was not a simple case of the unions stitching up the workers. The unions lost out too from the imposition of an 'open shop', displacing them from their role in hiring and firing in the workplace.

Counter Information was not far off the mark when it labelled the Detroit News and Free Press strike a 'Wapping style dispute'.[35] The bosses of Detroit News saw the strike as an opportunity to impose an open shop, in order to reduce the workforce and realize more profits from the scab labour remaining. DN were prepared for a long siege, with scabs housed in makeshift sleeping quarters inside the DN building.
Scab newsroom staff registered their submission to the bosses' intensification of work by displaying a notice outside the newsroom: 'Twice the work. Half the time. None of the whining.'[36] Despite technological changes, before the strike DN had been burdened with job classifications and restrictive practices which were now obsolete. The six unions in the industry resisted management's proposal to atomize wage bargaining with merit pay. But when the union demobilized the strikers with its unconditional return to work offer,[37] DN president Frank Vega claimed that the strike 'handed us $35 million in savings - 700 jobs we don't need anymore.'[38]

In the end, the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that the strike was caused by management's attempt to impose 'unfair labour practices', making them liable for back-pay for the strikers who weren't reinstated after the union's unconditional return to work. But while the legal processes have been dragging on, strikers have been 'scattered to the four winds' and have sought other employment.[39] Besides, any reinstatement would exclude the 200 militants sacked for picket line violence.

The DN/FP bosses gave new technology much of the credit for enabling them to continue publishing their papers during the strike, failing to mention the more traditional strike-breaking methods: scabs, cops, goon squads and injunctions. Whatever the decisive factor, other newspaper bosses sent teams to Detroit to study how DN/FP published despite the strike. The Gannet and Knight Ridder media giants also had the advantage of a joint operating agreement, and were rich enough to be able to afford running at a loss until the unions caved in.[40]

The trends mentioned in the section above on Reaganomics haven't changed significantly: the capital migration from unionized heavy industry to the non-unionized information technology industries and the service sector and the service sector continues, and with it the unions' long-term decline. The unions' recruitment drive has made gains in the service sector, notably among hotel workers in Las Vegas. But most of the major workplace struggles in the USA's recent past have been in traditional centres of militancy, such as Detroit, the birthplace of the mass worker. The recent strike by 9,200 General Motors (GM) workers has been taking place in Flint, which was at the centre of the sit-down strike movement in 1936-7. The 1998 GM strike is of its time though, highlighting the vulnerability of the USA's biggest motor firm. By cutting off supplies of vehicle parts, the strike has forced GM to close 27 out of their 29 assembly plants, and has lost them over $1.2 billion. The strikers' use of the motor industry's 'just-in-time' inventory system meant a swift shutdown of GM's motor production,[41] turning capitalist restructuring into its own negation. That a walk-out in one place can halt production 1,100 miles away is evidence of capital's falling victim to its own division of labour. A use-value may have travel half-way round the world before its value can be realized, completing its transformation into a commodity.

The struggle of the GM workers highlights the use of capitalist restructuring in the form of 'out-sourcing' and 'downsizing' to outflank working class. In Flint, the number of GM employees has dropped from 76,000 to half that number since the '70s - an example of the capital migration from the North which accounts for the decline in union membership. GM has started 'out-sourcing' its parts to other, smaller plants, who need to cut labour costs in order to compete with non-union firms in the South of the US.[42] NAFTA has also encouraged capital flight to Latin America: GM has 10,000 employees in parts plants in Mexico.[43] This exemplifies the contradictory process of attraction and repulsion inherent in capital accumulation.
Despite the fact that much of the shift of capital has been within the USA, the UAW leadership has been attempting to mobilize the strikers behind a racist and neo-protectionist 'Buy American' campaign.

The earlier strike at Flint four years ago was over the use of 'temps' and a 66 hour week. This summer, the United Autoworkers have mentioned 'health and safety' on their list of the workers' official grievances, along with job losses to cheaper labour markets.

However the two issues are linked. In the UK, the recent death of Simon Jones, someone hired as a stevedore with no training by a scab temping agency, demonstrates the lethal effect of casualization in the wake of the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme.[44] The issue of 'health and safety' raised in both the GM and UPS strikes is a trade union mediation of the proletariat's day-to-day experience of the risk of injury and death in the workplace. The 500 Liverpool dockers sacked for refusing to cross a picket-line were also casualties of casualization. As the introductory article pointed out, one of the Liverpool dockers' more effective tactics was their direct approaches to dockers around the world, confronting capital as a supra-national subject with the dockers' tradition of international solidarity. Ironically their sacking would have been illegal in the USA, whereas the American dockers' actions in support of them would have been illegal over here due to the laws on secondary picketing!

Another instance of workers attempting to transcend national borders occurred in the UPS strike, when the German transport union OeTV organized solidarity actions over UPS sub-contracting and the resulting intensification of work. Limited though these actions were, they jeopardized UPS's international trade. The Teamsters and the dockers, as well as the French truckers, are all conscious of the role of their industries in the circulation of capital, its transformation through transportation. Their actions deliberately target the weak points in this circulation, and impact 'on crucial nodes in the increasingly important routes of international trade'.[45] The Teamsters' strategic targets were the time-sensitive next-day second-day delivery system, the fastest growing and most profitable sector of UPS. Such actions constitute a response, however tentative and limited to union channels, by the working class to the increasing fluidity of global finance capital.

The neo-protectionism of the UAW bureaucracy characterizes this tendency as 'Pearl Harbour II', emphasizing the role of competition from Japan in the relative decline of US capital. It is also a characteristically social democratic attempt to use the notion of a cross-class 'national interest' to demobilize the working class. However such a model of social democracy presupposes distinct national centres of accumulation. With the increasing ability of money capital to transcend national borders, the cohesion of these 'national economies' has been called into question.

Before finally concluding our consideration of the future of American social democratic forms and relating this to the British situation, the pressure of recent events has made it necessary for us to locate this issue in the context of the global economic crisis.

Clinton, Blair and the paper tiger economies

As we have seen, the integration of social democracy within state and capital was based on the Fordist class compromise established after the second world war. Profits were ploughed back into industry in order to expand production and raise the productivity of labour. This in turn allowed both wages and profits to rise, creating the demand to absorb the increase in production. This process was underwritten by the Keynesian state which, through an active fiscal and monetary policy, maintained rising levels of demand and provided the framework through which the class compromise was sustained. As such, social democracy provided the means through which the aspirations and demands of the working class could be harnessed as the motor for capital accumulation.

However, by the late 1960s, the Fordist class compromise had reached its limits. As the rate of profit began to fall, the working class, strengthened by years of near full employment, went on the offensive. Social democratic mediation translated this offensive into demands for higher wages and social spending which nonetheless exceeded the growth in labour productivity and hence led to a further squeeze on profits. As a result, capital across the world entered into a severe crisis of profitability.

To resolve this crisis capital had to radically restructure. With the growth of global finance capital, capital sought to outflank the entrenched working class of the advanced industrialized economies. Investment was now shifted out of high waged and unionized industry into low wage non-unionized sectors, while the capital that remained in the old industries no longer aimed to produce more from the same workforce but to maintain existing production levels with fewer workers. As the emphasis has shifted away from the production of relative surplus-value to the production of absolute surplus-value, the role of social democracy has become restricted.

This process of restructuring has been long and drawn out and has created a series of further crises and imbalances in the world economy. First there was the flight of capital from the USA and Europe at the end of 1970s, which had taken the form of huge bank loans to Latin and central American governments. With the onset of recession in 1981 these governments found themselves unable to meet the debt repayments causing a severe crisis in the global banking system whose collapse was only narrowly averted by the intervention of the IMF. The implementation of Reaganomics created a huge and unsustainable American budget and trade deficits together with a vastly over-valued dollar. Following this there was the world stock market crash of October 1987. In order to avert a repeat of the 1928 stock market crash, which plunged the world into a slump in the 1930s, the central banks of the leading capitalist powers eased their monetary policies fuelling the late 1980s credit boom which then turned into the prolonged recession of the early 1990s, seriously afflicting the USA, Japan and the UK.

The election of Clinton in 1992 seemed to mark the end of the after-effects of this long, drawn out process of restructuring - at least for the USA. Under Clinton, the USA has experienced six years of economic growth and falling unemployment. The huge trade and budget deficits of the 1980s have been gradually unwound and inflation has been subdued. With the economies of Japan and much of Europe stagnating, Clinton has presided over the resurgence of the USA as an economic power. As a result many of the more hopelessly optimistic US economists have talked about a new economic paradigm - the 'Goldilocks economy' - in which booms and slumps have been abolished and economy enjoys steady growth and low inflation.

This revival of the American economy under Clinton has, by reducing unemployment, served to strengthen the hand of some sections of workers. As such it is no doubt an important factor in the resurgence of industrial militancy. However, it seems unlikely that the unions will be able to return to the position they enjoyed during the post-war era in the foreseeable future. Even at the end of the post-war boom, the productivity of labour rose by around 2.6% per year,[46] allowing ample room for higher wages and social spending without jeopardizing company profits. In recent years the average rate of increase in productivity has slumped to 0.8%[47] and shows no signs of increasing. The growth in both the economy and profits has come from drawing women and immigrants into the workforce and paying them low wages.
The room for the working class to gain social democratic concessions without seriously damaging capital's continued profitability is therefore far more restricted than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, America's successful re-establishment of its hegemonic position vis-a-vis Japan and Europe does perhaps allow more room for such concessions than in other countries. Given capital's current reliance on the production of absolute surplus-value - increasing the intensity and length of labour rather than its productivity - even such concessions are likely to be meagre even in America. Of course, of greatest interest to us is the possibility of the working class realizing that it can only meet its interests by going beyond social democratic mediations of its struggles - as the construction workers in New York pointed the way this summer.

In Britain, Goldilocks has arrived late and the three bears are due back soon. In contrast to Reagan, Thatcher, facing a far more entrenched working class, was unable to cut average real wages, nor was she able to launch a full scale assault on the welfare state. In order to smash the bastions of 'union power', such as the miners and the print workers, she was obliged to allow the wages of other workers to rise. Also the universal nature of the welfare state made it much more difficult to cut without arousing howls of protest from the middle classes whom she needed for electoral success. As a consequence, it was only with the recession of the early 1990s that the average rate of increase in wages in the private sector was brought down to below 7%; it was only after the recession that the Tories were able to impose a sustained real cut in wages for those working in the public sector.

Like Clinton, Blair, it seemed, inherited a economy enjoying steady growth and low inflation with budget and trade deficits well under control. The days when economic policy was plagued by recurrent crises appeared to be over and long term policy-making seemed to be a possibility. Fully embracing 'neo-liberalism' and the conservative economic orthodoxy of the bankers, the first act of Gordon Brown was to hand over day-to-day monetary policy to the Bank of England and announce rigid rules to restrict public spending. By being more conservative than the Conservatives, Brown announced that at this one stroke he would be able to smooth out the cycle of boom and slump that has dogged capitalism since its inception!

Having abolished the business cycle in its first few days in office, New Labour could then concentrate on reforming the welfare state and increasing the level of training and education which they hoped would raise the 'trend rate of growth of the economy'. With faster economic growth, and a reduction in welfare spending due to welfare reform, more resources would be available for 'priority areas' of public spending such as health and education.

The problem of course is that even if Brown had managed to find a way of smoothing out the booms and slumps of British capitalism, and even if welfare reform and investment in education and training could lead to an increase in the long term rate of growth of the economy, the two sides of New Labour's economic policy do not add up. Financial orthodoxy requires strict controls on public spending if not further cuts, yet any attempt fundamentally to reform welfare would in the short to medium term be very expensive, as would raising the levels of education and training.

Even without the effects of the financial crisis emanating from the Far East it would seem that after six years of growth the British economy would slow down. Indeed, the government has accepted this, arguing that there is a need for the economy to grow below the trend rate of growth for a year or so to take the heat out of the economy. However, the Bank of England's policy of raising interest rates has made matters worse. High interest rates, and a consequently over-valued pound, has already forced manufacturing industry into a recession and this now seems set to spread into the previously booming 'service' sector. As the growth in the economy falls below 2%, unemployment will begin to rise sharply, swamping Blair's underfunded 'welfare to work' programmes and making welfare reform difficult if not impossible without considerable opposition.

Yet the biggest danger to the arrogant complacency of both Blair and Clinton is of the financial crisis of the Far East causing a world slump - a danger that is beginning to dawn on Blair with recent redundancies announced in his own constituency. As we have argued, the growth of global finance capital provided the means through which capital as a whole could outflank the entrenched working classes of the advanced industrial economies. However, it has brought with it the danger of greater instability to the world capitalist system as a whole. The crisis in the Far East is a prime example of this.
In the late 1980s, facing declining profits at home, combined with an over-valued Yen, Japanese capital either took flight into property speculation, or else moved abroad to the newly industrializing economies of the Pacific rim whose currencies where pegged to the US dollar. On the basis of Japanese investments, these 'tiger economies' were able to rapidly expand their exports to the USA and achieve high rate of export-led economic growth. Seeing the huge profits that were being made, the Western Banks pressed for these tiger economies to open up their finance markets. With such financial deregulation, Western finance capital poured into the Far East looking for a fast buck.

Last July the inevitable happened. Unable to keep up with the growing demands and expectation of the financial speculators, having taken on more and more speculative ventures, the banks in Thailand found they could no longer service their debts. The financial markets panicked and began withdrawing their money from all the tiger economies, pushing even the solvent banks in these countries to the point of bankruptcy. With the Western speculators trying to turn their investments into hard dollars, the currencies of each of the tiger economies could no longer maintain their parities with the dollar and went into free fall.

With these devaluations, the price of imported raw materials have rocketed, forcing into bankruptcy even those companies that have managed to survive demands for loan repayments made by banks desperate for cash. Thus millions of people in Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea are facing redundancy and rapid rises in the prices of imported goods.

Of course, the intervention of the IMF has done nothing for the working class in these countries. Its main aim has been to protect the interests of global capital and the Western banks. By lending billions of dollars which are then used to maintain loan repayments to the Western banks, the IMF buys time until the implementation of the usual austerity measures can be put in place so that working class of these countries can pay off the loans in the form of lower wages and cuts in social spending.

Even though the IMF has been able to contain the crisis in the Far East, as it has done previous financial crises over the past two decades, there is now a question of whether it has sufficient resources to cope with the crisis if it spreads to Latin America. Quite simply, the IMF is running out of money. The main source of funds for the IMF is the USA, but the Republican Congress is reluctant to an release the increase in funds promised by Clinton's administration. As many Republicans argue, if the IMF bails out the Banks and speculators every time there is a crisis they will have little disincentive for making risky and irresponsible loans in the future. They will in effect be given a one way bet: either they make big profits from successful loans or else the loans fail and are instead paid by the IMF! Thus there is a serious dilemma. Either the IMF is allowed to continue to bail out the present financial crisis at the risk of making the next one even bigger, or else crisis will have to be allowed to take its course, which could mean it spreading to the USA and Europe, causing a collapse in the world financial system.

Obviously, these events would represent a complete change in the context in which the recent militancy has unfolded. However, it is too early to speculate on this. We now turn our attention back to the recent strikes and struggles to see what they can tell us about the nature of the unions in the present period.

'Casey Jones, the union scab':[48]
Analysis of the function of trade unions

Now that large-scale class confrontation is returning to the American workplace, and with it the role of trade unions, the moribund British left has been looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. Both the SWP and the Teamster boss Ron Carey are in agreement that the UPS strike marks an 'historic turning point' for the US working class.

Recognizing the limits of the tendency towards militancy within the US trade unions helps us to avoid the pitfall of bemoaning the 'betrayals' and 'sell-outs' of the working class by right-wing union leaders. This position provides the ideological basis for the Trotskyite strategy of left unity: campaigning for the replacement of right-wing leaders by their own left-wing candidates. It fails to see that union leaders of whatever political persuasion are forced into these 'sell outs' by the logic of their own position within capital and by the nature of unions, whose function is to regulate the sale of labour-power.

The Teamsters since the rise of TDU are a good example of this. The union leadership is committed to democracy and 'the organizing model' of trade unions, which means opening up the union to membership participation. At UPS, they negotiated a leave-of-absence clause enabling rank-and-file leaders to take time off for full-time campaigning. This is part of the TDU's strategy of promoting an active membership. Time and again rank-and-file initiatives rejuvenate trade union hierarchies to create a new layer of leaders who then in turn stitch workers up. This exposes as a sham the leftist condemnation of 'sell-outs' by the leadership. It is not the union leaders who sell the workers out, but the workers who sell themselves out, and it is the left who encourage them.[49]

Teamster leader Ron Carey also rook on as an assistant Harold 'Eddie' Burke, a veteran of the Pittston coal strike of 1989. In an echo of the IWW/CIO sit-down strikes, the Pittston strikers occupied a coal processing plant for several days. The Detroit strike also involved more limited occupations of suburban DN/FP offices, as well as invasions of council meetings. The office occupations were intended to be media stunts, but were also disruptive and led to arrests. Burke's prominence in the Teamster leadership indicates the unions' need to harness the militancy of the subjects they represent, by sanctioning direct action and law-breaking. In Burke's words, 'if any union plans on striking their employer in this day and age and is uncertain as to breaking laws that are on the books, my advice is not to strike'.[50]

But by mobilizing these subjects in confrontations with the cops, the 'militant' union leaders began losing control of the workers. The struggle was attracting support outside the unions directly involved in the dispute, from other workers who saw newspaper bosses' imposition of casualization and atomization of wage bargaining as an attack on them. These included Detroit GM workers in the UAW, themselves under threat from 'downsizing' and 'out-sourcing'.

As bricks, bottles and sticks rained on the Detroit cops during mass pickets of up to 3,000 strikers and their supporters, the unions applied to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a hearing to determine whether the strike was caused by 'unfair labor practices'. The involvement of the NLRB, a legacy of the New Deal, highlighted the role of social democratic institutions in demobilizing the working class. Although the NLRB was quicker to define picketing rather than casualization as an 'unfair labour practice', the use of a Federal racketeering suit against the six unions, and eventually against the UAW as well, suggests that the NLRB was insufficient to compel the unions to control the class anger they had unleashed.
According to the NLRB, the unions violated an informal agreement banning violence and sabotage, so the unions accepted a legally binding agreement which eventually had to be backed up by fines.

It seems that the US union bureaucracy is having considerable difficulty in maintaining control over the class antagonism it has been attempting to harness. The union leaders were as surprised as anybody by the eruption of class violence at a recent construction workers' rally in New York, which left 18 cops injured and caused consternation among the yuppies of Manhattan. Having prepared for 10,000, the cops were overwhelmed by the turnout of 40,000 in what amounted to a mass, one-day wildcat strike. The predictable response of the construction unions was to cancel plans for a further rally.

Ironically, the issue behind this conflict of the workers and the union was an attempt to re-establish unionization in the New York construction industry. Thus in order to reverse their long-term decline US unions have had to mobilize the working class against capital. However in the process of negotiating the price of labour within capital, unions also need to be able to reduce the working class to labour-power, which means demobilizing the working class. To be taken seriously by employers, unions must be able to mobilize workers, but in doing so they risk losing control of them. In this sense, trade unions are an expression of the contradiction of working class autonomy, of a class both within and against capital.

On the other hand, the unions have managed to keep the recent strikes sectional, reflecting the tendency for class consciousness to become subsumed in 'job consciousness' in the US working class.[51] It is useful to contrast the recent wave of strikes with the struggles of the '30s and '40s, especially in the light of the recent GM strike's origins in the town which provided the nucleus of the sit-in strike fever - Flint, Michigan. As with most of the labour struggles of the '30s, the pretext for this occupation was the contestation of the new social democratic institutions embodied in the New Deal (the NLRB, the NRA, and so on). But the audacity of seizing and holding 'one of the most expensive piece of corporate real estate in the world'[52] offered a direct challenge to the power of the state and its laws of private property. The CIO and UAW leaders were forced to back them, and were powerless to stop the movement from escalating. In the end the CIO was able to use this movement to consolidate its power, so that Flint became a 'union town', an expression of working class entrenchment. Nevertheless, the second world war saw a movement which achieved an exemplary autonomy and antagonism in relation to the unions. The contradiction between proletarian subjectivity and its representation via unions was apparent in the fact that most voting UAW members voted to maintain the no-strike deal, although the majority of workers in the motor industry went on strike shortly after.[53]

In contrast, the recent wave of strikes have largely been initiated through the official channels of the unions, partly under pressure from the rank-and-file, partly as a rear-guard action against their own marginalization, reflecting the comparative weakness of the proletariat. In Britain, this weakness seems even more irreversible, though the solidarity demonstrated by American longshoremen towards the sacked Liverpool dockers reminds us that struggles in the USA and UK are inextricably linked. With this in mind, we now turn to a consideration of the prospects for social democracy in the UK, where Blair's coronation followed a Clinton-style presidential campaign.

Social democracy in the '90s and beyond

The limitations of the USA's revival pale into insignificance when compared with the weakness of the working class in Britain, which has yet to see any comparable developments. As we have seen, the last two decades have seen the retreat of social democracy in the UK, and the USA installed as the social model for the renegotiation of the post-war settlement. Blair has continued this trend, venerating Clinton's policies as the model for a 'third way' between social democracy and the free market New Right. New Labour even echoes Roosevelt in the name of its US-style workfare programme. However, Roosevelt's 1930s and Blair's 1990s New Deal have little in common historically. Roosevelt had to bail the banks out to avert financial collapse. By contrast, Blair inherited a growing economy and falling unemployment from the Tories! More importantly, the 1930s New Deal in America, whose work-schemes were often voluntary, reflected the threat of working class antagonism and was used by militants as an opportunity for contestation; but Blair's compulsory 'welfare to work' programme, like the US workfare schemes which inspired it, is symptomatic of the defeat of the working class in both countries and extends the imposition of the regime of 'labour flexibility'.

But individual capitals have been slow to respond to the needs of UK capital-in-general, and Labour's New Deal is under threat from the very problems it was intended to solve. Employers have been lukewarm in their response to the scheme, and have been conceding private sector wage claims, pushed up by labour shortages in areas such as skilled construction. House prices have been falling as estate agents anticipate a repeat of the collapse of the 1980s housing boom. The pound's strength against the DM has led to renewed fears of stagflation, with factories laying people off at the highest rate for five years and Rover imposing a four day week on its workforce, the government will have a job persuading them to employ and train New Deal people. The Employment Service will be under pressure to force more claimants to take unsubsidized jobs with no training.

In our previous issue we remarked that Blairism had emerged in a period when the crisis of the '70s had been resolved in favour of capital by the Thatcher's radical renegotiation of the post-war settlement. Blair appeared to the bourgeoisie as a means of consolidating the gains of Thatcherism in a period of relative economic social stability, at a time when the Tories had become too weak and divided to carry out this task effectively.

The problems of the US trade and budget deficits had been laid to rest, and it was enjoying an economic revival; nevertheless recent events have shown how rapidly capitalism can plunge into crisis with the prospect of financial meltdown in the Far East - not to mention the financial collapse in Russia. Facing the possibility of its own negation, it is possible to see the attractions for the bourgeoisie in a revival in social democratic forms both for mediation of working class needs and, more to the point in a period of crisis, imposing capital's needs on the working class.[54]

The recent wildcat strike in Glasgow social services was blamed in the bourgeois press on the election of a leftist shop-steward; but surely what must be really worrying them is that 2,000 workers were willing to take wildcat strike action against a Labour council. UNISON's role in ending the wildcat strike and its subsequent ballot for official strike action shows that Labour still needs the unions to police its members.

However, it seems unlikely that social democracy will re-emerge as the dominant form of mediating working class needs at a national level. The post-war order in which social democracy matured presupposed a structure of distinctly defined poles of national accumulation - national economies- with money-capital subordinated to the accumulation of national capital. With the increasing fluidity of global finance capital, the cohesion of the nation state and its ability to intervene in the market has been undermined. Blairism represented an acknowledgement of the impossibility of reversing the legacy of the Thatcher years. Having given the Bank of England complete autonomy over the control of interest rates, the Labour Government has abandoned any attempt to accommodate the needs of the working class.

Conclusion

This analysis of recent US labour struggles has sought to show the relevance of tendencies originating in America to the development of social democracy, both here and on the continent. We began by commenting on the influence of the Democrats on the British Labour Party generally and in particular its role in New Labour's abandonment of social democracy under Blair, in favour of more liberal ideologies such as 'communitarianism', which relate to the working class not as a class but as an interest group or as atomized bourgeois customer-citizens. We examined social democracy's transition from a movement of opposition, expressed in union militancy and embryonic labour parties, to its expression in state intervention, Keynesian demand management, Fordism and corporatism (in America, happening through the medium of a non-social democratic party - the Democrats). At this stage, the unions themselves became integrated within the state, as US capital sought to use its hegemonic role to reorient global accumulation around the needs of military expansion.

Then we saw how the working class forced social democracy into crisis by the self-valorization and expansion of its needs, and the response to the crisis by the out-flanking of the working class by capital flight. The retreat of social democracy was accompanied by a succession of defeats for both the US and UK working class, and a decline in the size and influence of the unions in both countries. Our examination of the recent revival of industrial militancy in the USA tended towards the conclusion that it represented a rear-guard action by the unions against their continuing marginalization. The renewed confidence and militancy of the working class is also linked to Clinton's success in balancing the books. The resulting economic expansion has minimized the disciplinary power of unemployment, but has also subjected workers to speed-ups and other work intensification.

The movement of the 1930s and 1940s showed that struggles over emerging social democratic forms could provide opportunities for the development of proletarian subjectivity. The resulting institutions were used to police and pacify the working class until its needs outgrew social democratic forms. The recent labour struggles in the USA show the possibility of new struggles over social democratic forms, in an age where the comparative decline of US capital has limited their ability to mediate working class needs.

Traditional social democratic methods of mediation which presupposed a 'national interest' have been undermined by the mobility of money-capital, leading to Clinton and Blair's embracing of 'neo-liberalism'. However, the threat of global financial meltdown has exposed the instability of capitalism, raising the possibility of a future revival of some form of social democratic mediation of working class needs on a continental or bloc level. Moreover, at present, in the United States, as well as in Korea and elsewhere, struggles are taking place in which proletarians are coming up against the repressive side of social democratic forms such as unions - and hence invite the possibility of going beyond these forms.
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[1] Though this is debatable, as we acknowledge below.
[2] Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economics in the History of the US Working Class (Verso editions, the Haymarket series, 1986).
[3] The Great Society reforms extended US welfare provision reflecting the new demands made on the state by the Civil Rights movement. We examine the New Deal in more detail below.
[4] These bodies were set up by the US state department due to perceived links with the USSR within the British 'labour movement'.
[5] Between 1989 and 1993, median family incomes in the USA fell by $2,737, a trend that has continued under Clinton (Guardian, 20th February, 1995).
[6] See Davis, op. cit.
[7] Mike Davis, op. cit. See also Noel Ignatiev, Introduction to the United States: An Autonomist Political History (Final Conflict Publishing, 1992): 'Why has the US, alone among the developed countries, failed to produce a mass labor or social-democratic party? Is American prosperity so overwhelming or are US workers so backward that they have felt need to take any initiative that would lead them out of the two main capitalist parties?'
[8] The persistence was due to the relatively greater possibility of social mobility that has existed in the USA compared to Europe. Whereas in Europe, the bourgeoisie's power grew up within pre-existing class privileges which restricted class mobility, in the USA, due to bourgeois society starting from an almost clean slate, the egalitarianism and freedom of money had a free hand.
[9] '...nowhere are people so indifferent to the type of work they do as in the United States, nowhere are people so aware that their labour always produces the same product, money, and nowhere do they pass through the most divergent kinds of work with the same nonchalance.' Capital Vol. 1, p. 1014 (Penguin edition).
[10] Letter from Bob Rossi in Discussion Bulletin (DB) 88, March-April 1998. This was one of two pieces in response to Dave Stratman's 'Strategy for Labor' in DB 87, in which he describes the labour defeats of the preceding 25 years as 'a litany of rank-and-file heroism and AFL-CIO betrayal'. Both respondents offer a more pessimistic view of the American working class than Stratman's.
[11] Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1963, Harper and Brothers).
[12] Mike Davis, op. cit.
[13] Noel Ignatiev's Introduction to the United States: An Autonomist Political History suggests a Faustian bargain between white workers and the US bourgeoisie, at the expense of black workers. Revolutionary southern blacks forced Lincoln to rally Northern industrial capital behind the abolition of slavery, but they were abandoned to lynch mobs after the reconstruction period. When blacks moved to the Northern cities they faced the entrenched racism of the unions.
[14] Ignatiev, op. cit.
[15] The LRWB was a 'federation of groups from various industrial plants in the Detroit area who had organized themselves outside the union structures and built links with the black schools and community, as part of a conscious effort to link Marxism with the Black Revolution.' (Ignatiev, op. cit.).
[16] Davis, op. cit.
[17] In fact, the IWW's strength was not so much in the industrial North, where its leaders tended to come from, but in the casual and migrant workers of the West.
[18] The case of the IWW shows us that the weakness of social democratic forms in the USA should not make one see the American working class as simply lagging behind their European brothers and sisters. As a form of organization, the IWW was exceptionally radical and important. When, at the end of the first world war, revolutionary workers in Europe broke from their social democratic parties and unions, they were inspired by and looked to the IWW as a model. See for example Sergio Bologna's 'Class composition and the theory of the party at the origin of the workers' councils movement' in Telos 13, 14-21 (1972).
[19] Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas and Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever. The IWW: An Oral History of the Wobblies (1987, Lawrence & Wishart, London). 'Solidarity Forever' was an IWW song.
[20] Davis, op. cit.
[21] Ignatiev, op. cit. Whereas the industrial working class could be mobilized to vote for the New Deal, the sharecroppers of the south were disenfranchised by a poll tax. However, the rural poor began to organize as the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU), under the leadership of Clay East's Socialist Party, which undermined segregation by uniting blacks and poor whites. The STFU contested the Wagner Act in the 1935 Arkansas cotton pickers' strike, which forced planters to raise wages after rumours that strikers were shooting scabs! After the government agreed to compensate tenant farmers directly under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the planters started just evicting them.
[22] Cited in A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.
[23] Mike Davis, op. cit.
[24] See Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes (Detriot, Bewick).
[25] For a good discussion of this, see Glaberman's Wartime Strikes and The Working Class and Social Change (Detriot, Bewick).
[26] Ignatiev, op. cit.
[27] However this period also saw a definite tendency towards mass electoral abstentionism within the US working class.
[28] The limitations of this policy can be seen in the fact that the only NATO country to support America's proposed three per cent military expansion target was Britain.
[29] See our recent text Dole Autonomy versus the Re-imposition of Work: Analysis of the Current Tendency to Workfare in the UK; the pamphlet's appendix gives details of American workfare programmes.
[30] See Curtis Price, 'The Refusal of Work in the '90s' in Collective Action Notes (No. 2, summer 1994); reprinted in Discussion Bulletin 68.

[31] Price, op. cit. Price draws attention to 'micro level resistance' within the American working class.
[32] See 'The rebellion in Los Angeles: The context of a proletarian uprising' in Aufheben 1 (autumn, 1992).
[33] Slingshot, Spring 1998.
[34] Socialist Worker, quoted in World Revolution, No. 208, October 1997.
[35] Counter Information (No. 47).
[36] 'Inside the news',
[37] Labor Notes (No. 217, April 1997).
[38] 'Analysis: Back to work offer reflects strike's reality', Detroit News (16th February 1997).
[39] 'Newspaper strikers pin their hopes on injunction', DN (23rd March 1997).
[40] Collective Action Notes, Dec. 1996.
[41] 'UAW keeps big three wages at parts plants sold by GM', Labor Notes 217.
[42] Labor Notes, op. cit.
[43] With over 80,000 workers in Mexico, GM is Mexico's largest private sector employer.
[44] See Where's My Giro? No. 2, Newsletter of Brighton Against Benefit Cuts.
[45] Smash Hits, No. 2.
[46] Between 1960 and 1973 output per worker in the business sector of the US economy grew at an average rate of 2.6%. Source: OECD.
[47] Between 1979 and 1996 output per worker in the business sector of the US economy grew at an average annual rate of 0.8%. Source: OECD.
[48] The title of a wobbly song. The IWW were fond of detourning popular contemporary music, adapting their lyrics as propaganda for their militant activities.
[49] See the Wildcat pamphlet Outside and Against the Unions and the discussion of this in Echanges et Mouvement.
[50] 'Detroit takes on tones of '89 coal walkout', Detroit News, June 16th, 1996
[51] A notable exception was Detroit News, which united six different unions and attracted support from members of the UAW, a union not directly affected by the dispute.
[52] 'The Flint Sitdown Strike 60th Anniversary', Detroit Journal NEWS, Sunday 29th December. DNJ is the newspaper of the striking Detroit newspaper workers.
[53] See Glaberman op. cit.
[54] We are seeing this in Korea at the moment where the unions are rallying to the national interest in order to impose the IMF-directed job-cuts, privatizations and other austerity measures. Instead of pushing the price of labour-power up, they are negotiating wage-cuts, extended unpaid holidays and increased working hours. Their main role of course is that of demobilizing a working class that is moving to radical actions such as factory occupations.

Aufheben #8 Editorial

For the first time in more than half a century, the main Western powers have been conducting a war in Europe. The tragedy of the Kosovo war was the sheer absence of an adequate internationalist response.

The war itself and the paucity of opposition can both be understood in terms of the current state of the class struggle. For bourgeois ideologues, the 'defeat of socialism' (in actual fact the retreat of social democracy and the collapse of Stalinism) was supposed to usher in a new golden age of free trade and economic growth. Yet only just over a year ago the financial crisis originating from the Far East sparked fears among the bourgeoisie that a world slump and even the collapse of the world financial system was in the offing. The crisis spread, but the US economy has so far proved able to withstand the pressures. Indeed, since then, with the continued recession in Japan and with Germany still in the doldrums, it is only the strong growth in the USA that has kept the rest of the world economy afloat.
A world financial crisis would have seen a return to austerity and mass unemployment in the USA and Britain. But the fading of the imminent threat of crisis has instead allowed the continued implementation of 'Third Way' policies in Britain and America, and their 'new reformist' equivalents in Europe. As we discuss in our latest article on the retreat of social democracy, at the heart of the Third Way is a relatively expensive ideological offensive intended to drive into the labour-market many categories of people that have hitherto subsisted outside it. This form of re-imposing work is different from the old social democratic 'concession' of full employment. Unlike the 'gains' of social democracy, the policies of the Third Way and the new reformism reflect the weakness rather than the strength of the working class.
The limits of the opposition to the war can likewise be attributed to the retreat of social democracy and the chronic weakness of the working class. Whereas in the past a broad anti-war movement could have been be expected in Britain, on this occasion many of the kind of people that would have comprised such a movement - 'Old Labour' socialists, pacifists, CND-types etc. - have lined up behind the New Labour Government. Sharing Third Way and new reformist values of 'fairness' and 'justice', the NATO nations' expressed rationale for the bombing was 'humanitarian intervention'. In the absence of any obvious vested material interest to explain the war, the only choice that disillusioned leftists and confused liberals could therefore recognize was between the Third Way and barbarism. Of course, as the war proves, the Third Way simply is barbarism: it has served to legitimize a war in a way that traditional appeals to 'the national interest' would have found impossible.
However, the absence of an adequate opposition to the war does not reflect a general acquiescence, an absence of overt antagonism. Only a few weeks after the war ended, London witnessed the most impressive outbreak of mass 'public disorder' since the 1990 poll tax riot. Despite the eclecticism and the one-sided equation of capital with the financial markets in the June 18th publicity, the event itself was uncompromising. It provided a superb opportunity for antagonistic tendencies to express themselves - which they did in exemplary fashion by smashing the properties of the financial centre and bricking the cops. The resistance simply asserted itself without permission or mediation from anyone. Those 'revolutionary' critiques of June 18th which focus only on its literature and prior ideology miss the point; criticisms of the ideas might be correct in themselves, but they are only at the level of ideas.[1] The action was considerably more eloquent and articulate than the leaflets in its critique of capital.
Thus June 18th was far beyond the imagination of the depressing and leftist-dominated national demonstrations against the war. Yet if the war was a function of the current state of the class struggle, why didn't those involved in the 'carnival' turn their energies towards fighting the war? No doubt most of those at the June 18th event in London felt opposed to the war, but it is apparent that few of them regarded the war as the central and most pressing crisis of the moment.[2] We must acknowledge and welcome the fact that this co-ordination strove for a greater coherence than past anti-car Reclaim the Streets events by turning its attention to what it understands as the source: capital. But there is an issue of what capital is. If we are fighting 'capital' then we must constitute ourselves as the proletariat. From a proletarian perspective, the war should have been the central concern rather than one issue amongst others.
While the triumph of social democracy demobilized the working class as the agent embodying and linking struggles over bread-and-butter issues (such as wages) with 'utopian' desires (such as revolution), the decline of social democracy has seen no organic re-linking of the different moments of resistance to capital in a single practical critique: no re-born proletarian movement. The antagonistic tendencies remain fragmented. June 18th at least offered a forum for unity through shared practical opposition to the G8 and capital. Yet it was a formal unity which pre-supposed the existing fragmentation of the struggle against capital into different 'issues'.
A recurrent theme in both our articles on the retreat of social democracy and our series on the nature of the USSR, is that it is not markets that define capitalism, but wage-labour: markets only realize value; they do not produce it. Yet, of course, capital, as self-expanding value, seeks to extend and realize itself; it seeks markets even where state-forms and class struggle restricts it. War and G8 summits are both means of achieving this extension and realization. Capital is not a thing but a social relationship that develops and takes different forms. Recognizing capital and its moments is to recognize ourselves as the proletariat.
September 1999

[1] See the two critical articles in Uniundercurrents 6 and 7 (c/o Sussex Autonomous Society, Falmer House, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 8DN) and the article 'Wrong direction: On reclaiming a one-way street' by George Forrestier in the forthcoming Reflections on June 18th.
[2] See 'War is the health of the state: An open letter to the UK direct action movement' In Do or Die 8 (c/o 6 Tilbury Place, Brighton, BN2 2GY).

Conkers or bonkers? Humanitarian war in Kosovo

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Introduction

After the Gulf War we carried an article that considered the failure of No War But the Class War to make an effective communist intervention in the anti-war movement. This time round, despite the fact that support for the war was incredibly weak on the part of the population at large, there was barely a credible anti-war movement to make an intervention in!

The liberal-left that had grown up around CND and the peace movement since the Suez crisis in 1956, and which has always provided the mainstream of anti-war movements in Britain ever since, was irrevocably split. Many of those who had been the most vocal in denouncing the Gulf War now lined up behind Blair and became the most vociferous of the warmongers. As a result opposition to the war was left to a motley collection of die hard old labourites, Serbian nationalist exiles and the depleted ranks of the various Trotskyist and Stalinist parties.

This is of course hardly surprising. The liberal-left and the British peace movement have always supported the imperialist aims of British foreign policy. They have only disputed the means of carrying such policies out. Thus CND was quite prepared to support the Falklands war so long as nuclear weapons were not involved, while against the bombing of Iraq Tony Benn and co. simply argued that it was more 'humane' to starve Iraq into submission through UN sanctions than to carpet bomb them. The latter policy subsequently was adopted by the US and British State to great effect. With the war in Kosovo, the moralism that has been so central to the British peace movement was turned against it with devastating effect. In the face of a 'humanitarian war' that 'aimed to prevent mass ethnic cleansing' the peace movement was flummoxed.

Yet it was not only the liberal-left and the peace movement that were paralysed by this 'humanitarian war' but also the DIY/Direct Action movement that has grown up since the Gulf War.(1) Confronted by their own argument 'that you have got to do something!' the DIY movement was unable to do anything against the war. At most a few lined up behind the ex-WRP and 'Workers Aid to Kosovo' but in doing so ended up effectively, or even openly, supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). If anything has exposed the limits of Direct Actionism and the moralism of what passes for the left in Britain it has been the Kosovo war. What the war has emphasised is a need for a clear analysis of the current world situation that has rendered many old assumptions obsolete.

Oil and chestnut trees
The immediate cause of the Gulf War could be summed up in one word - 'oil'. Of course the Gulf War was not simply about securing oil supplies and the profits of the major oil companies. The war was also about securing the recycling of petrodollars through the Kuwaiti banks, crushing the militant 'oil proletariat' of both Iraq and the Middle East in general and asserting a New World Order following the collapse of the USSR. However, the existence of a tangible and obvious material interest such as oil meant that few could be taken in by the facile justifications concerning the 'violation of international law' that were put forward to legitimate 'Operation Desert Storm'.

In contrast there are no immediate economic interests in Kosovo. All attempts to discover an immediate but hidden tangible interest in Kosovo have failed. Whether it is the strategically important chestnut forests so vital to western economies, the mines of northern Kosovo or the prospect of routing oil from the Caspian Sea 1000 miles away through this area, all attempts to expose the 'humanitarian war' as a conflict over economic resources have failed to stand up. Furthermore, not only is there a lack of immediate economic resources, Kosovo itself appears to have very little strategic interests for the western powers.

It was this absence of any obvious economic or strategic interests involved in Kosovo which lent credence to those pro-war liberals who saw the war as a 'humanitarian war' whose sole aim was to prevent 'ethnic cleansing'. Of course, the fact that this 'humanitarian war' unleashed the very 'ethnic cleansing' that it was supposed to have prevented led to the wholesale bombing of civilian targets in Serbia and has now created conditions for retribution and revenge against the Kosovan Serbs which NATO forces have proved incapable of preventing, only goes to show the justifications for the war in Kosovo were just as facile as those used to justify the Gulf War.

However, the question remains: why did NATO bomb Serbia into submission? What implications does such 'humanitarian imperialism' have for the future? What is clear is that the underlying causes of the war do not lie in Kosovo as such. In fact it could be argued that it was the very insignificance of Kosovo in economic and strategic terms that allowed it to become a site of conflict. The war in Kosovo can only be understood as being symptomatic of wider conflicts that have emerged with the break up of Eastern Europe and the attempt to impose a New World Order.

Yet in setting Kosovo in a global context it is not sufficient to simply dismiss all the obvious and immediate explanations that have been put forward and then merely assert some abstract tendency for decaying capitalism to generate wars or to become 'senile and irrational'(2). It is necessary to see how such general tendencies of capitalism have come to manifest themselves in such concrete situations as the Balkans. In considering the war in Kosovo we must therefore first of all consider the general tendencies towards war and peace in capitalism.

War and Peace
Capitalism enters the historical stage drenched in blood. In coming into being capitalism must destroy, or transform, all pre-capitalist social relations and replace them with its own world of competitive individuals united through the abstract unity of money and the state. But while money itself is an effective solvent for the dissolution of pre-capitalist social relations, it is insufficient to create the pre-conditions for capital. Capitalism requires force - both in order to tear the direct producers from the land and the means of production to create an exploitable proletariat and to batter down all the traditional and customary barriers to the free circulation of money and commodities. Furthermore, the emergence of capitalism calls forth the modern bourgeois nation state as its protector. A state that can only be forged through war and patriotism.

As a result the emergence of capitalism has necessarily involved war, plunder and genocide. Yet once capitalism becomes established on its own basis - once exploitation can assume the veil of the free exchange of commodities - capital can stride forth in the guise of the cosmopolitan liberal, extending the hand of trade and friendship to all across the globe. Of course, the need to create and preserve the preconditions of capital remain, yet they exist only at the peripheries and are no longer, except in times of crisis, of central concern, least of all for the individual capitalist. Industrial capital demands law and order - peace and stability - in order to protect its investments. War no longer represents a chance to make quick profit but only means disorder, disruption and higher taxes(3).

It is therefore no surprise that those pioneers of industrial capitalism - the cotton lords of 19th century Lancashire - were often Quakers, nor that modern secular pacifism arose amongst the liberal intellectual bourgeoisie. In dissociating itself from the necessary evil of the state - that guarantees capitals preconditions through the ultimate threat of force - capital can proclaim itself as the envoy of peace, civilisation and reason. Therefore those who oppose the spread of capital and bourgeois reason can only be unenlightened, criminal or insane,(4) or a combination of all three.

During the Pax Britannica of the 19th century liberals could believe that the spread of bourgeois rationality and free trade would eventually civilise the world and bring an end to war. However, such illusions in capitalism as the harbinger of peace were to be shattered by the world wars of the 20th century. Of course, for the liberal pacifists of the 20th century the cause of endless wars was not so much capitalism as such but those evil capitalists of the arms industry whose close connection with the state allows them to hijack foreign policy.

Of course, it is important not to underestimate the considerable influence of the military-industrial complex that has grown up in the 20th century and the effect this has had on the foreign policy of the modern state. Yet it is an insufficient explanation of the drive to war that has emerged so forcefully within 20th century capitalism. War, and the preparations for war, are hugely expensive and a drain on the surplus-value that could otherwise be invested. Why should an otherwise 'peace loving' bourgeoisie allow the state to be run for the profits of a few arms manufacturers at their expense? Are they simply dupes or do they recognise their own interests in the drive towards war and arms production?

The first world war not only shattered the illusions of capitalist progress and peace but also exposed capitalism's inherent tendency towards war. Of course, war has existed long before capitalism. But with capitalism war is completely transformed. If nothing else, capitalism's development of the forces of production allows it to produce forces of destruction on an unprecedented scale. More than ever before the balance of military power rests ultimately on the balance of economic power(5). As such war, and the long preparations for war, come to encompass the whole of society. In capitalism war becomes total war, galvanising whole nations and continents as was seen in the world wars. Yet, at the same time, as the war becomes more technological it also can become more specialised. As we have seen in Kosovo, mass destruction can be wrought by a few bomber pilots while the effects and demands of such a war can remain remote from the domestic population of those nations inflicting such devastation.

These two forms of modern war - total war between major imperialist powers and specific or punitive wars between major and minor imperialist powers or between minor powers - can be seen to be inherent in capitalism, emerging in the alternating phases in capital accumulation. How then do such forms of war arise?

As Hobbes recognised, behind all its civilised formalities, bourgeois society is ultimately based on a war of all against all. Life in capitalist society is a competitive battle where individuals are pitted against each other and are forced to survive by fair means or foul. Yet this competitive struggle is most intense between capitals which by their very nature must 'expand or die'. However, these conflicts of capitalist society are contained and mitigated through the capitalist state. By concentrating legitimate violence into its hands, the bourgeois state is able to impose law and order and provide the social cohesion necessary for the relatively peaceful development of capital accumulation. At the same time the state provides protection for the expansion of its own domestic capital abroad - and as such all states become actual or potential imperialist powers at some level.
Yet at the international level there is no world state, only an 'anarchy' of competing nation states each seeking to further capital accumulation of their own national capitals. The war of all against all that is reconciled at the national level re-emerges as imperialist rivalries at an international level. However, such rivalries can be contained to the extent that there are plenty of profits to be made and that there exists a dominant nation state which, in pursuing its own national interests, can impose a general interest of capital world-wide.

During a period of stable capital accumulation, in which there is an uncontested hegemonic power, war can be confined to the peripheries of the capitalist world. War is then merely a means of 'policing' the capitalist world order, or reflects mere squabbles within the imperialist pecking order. However, capital tends to undermine its own conditions of accumulation. The eventual overaccumulation of capital on a world scale leads to falling profits and an intensification of competition. As the international cake of surplus-value shrinks relative to the claims on it, economic competition gives way more and more to imperialist rivalries and political power. At the same time the growth of capital brings with it the development of an antagonistic proletariat. To the extent that such barriers to capital accumulation appear in the most advanced capitalist powers first then the hegemonic power declines. In such a situation capitalist competition becomes world war.

Total war serves as means to forcibly break down the barriers capital itself has created to its own further accumulation. War provides the means through which a New World Order can be established. At the same time it serves to destroy excess capital, accelerate technological innovations and exterminates the superfluous population. But above all war serves as a weapon against the development of an international proletarian movement.

This was the situation at the beginning of the 20th century. Britain as a hegemonic power had gone into decline and economic stagnation and growing class conflict had intensified imperialist rivalries leading to world war. Many of the communist and socialist theories of war and imperialism date from this time when the issue was quite clearly 'war or revolution'. Yet the failure of the world revolution following the first world war meant that this issue was resolved in favour of war. The second world war finally broke through the barriers to capital and opened a new era of capitalist expansion within a New World Order. It is to this period that we must now turn.

Pax Americana

The Peculiarities of U.S. Hegemony
Apart from the hysterical denunciation of those opposing the bombing of Serbia as being supporters and appeasers of fascism, the main argument advanced by the former peaceniks of New Labour was that opposition to the war was based on a 'crude anti-Americanism'. Of course it could be said that this accusation was more to do with their own past crude anti-Americanism than anything else, but it also reflected the realities of power that these New Labourites now faced. Like the Attlee Government before it, New Labour now sees NATO not merely as a means to tie Germany down and keep Russia out, but also as a means to keep the US in Europe. The danger for Britain is once more the danger of American isolationism(6). The USA has always been a rather reluctant hegemonic power. Being isolated from Europe by 3000 miles of ocean and having grown up outside and against the absolutist states of Europe, the American bourgeoisie, after the war of independence, never had to unite behind an immediate foreign threat, nor did it have to bother about European power rivalries. As a continent wide nation state, the USA was able to industrialise behind tariff barriers which, while keeping competitors out, provided enough space to allow ample room for capital expansion at the time. As a result large sections of the American bourgeoisie have always tended to be inward looking and isolationists in terms of foreign policy.

To the extent that the USA had never faced an immediate external threat from a foreign power, nor a cohesive internal threat from its own working class, it had retained a rather ideal pluralistic bourgeois constitution that allowed all sections of the American bourgeoisie to express their particular interests. As a result it was not so easy when the US was called on to play a world role to override the many particular and narrowly focused interests, which advocated lower taxes and isolationism, in order to pursue the general interest of American capital with an active, but expensive, foreign policy.

As with the first world war, the second world war rather belatedly mobilised the American bourgeoisie behind an active foreign policy. In the immediate post-war period the US attempted to construct a New World Order with which the USA was to be the dominant world power. The US had no need for direct rule or an empire. With the devastation of Europe, the USA came out of the war as the foremost military and economic power. In most industries US capital was the most advanced in the world and could easily out compete all potential competitors. The US wanted a world open to American capital and as such sought to dismantle all the European Empires that had grown up at the end of the last century. In their place the US sought to construct a series of international organisations at the economic and political level which would provide the forms through which the powers of the world would be represented and united behind the leadership the USA. Thus with such organisations as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank the US state sought to unite the world bourgeoisie behind it under the banner of free trade and democracy.

Unlike the inter-war years, the US was not to abandon its active foreign policy and return to isolationism. The threat of 'Communism', that took hold with the cold war, served to mobilise both the American and the European bourgeoisie behind an active US foreign policy. In order to protect US capital at home and abroad the US state had to contain 'Communism', and in Europe this took the form of NATO that bound the western European powers together behind the military leadership of the USA(7).

However, at the same time, the onset of the Cold War, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, prevented the full development of Pax Americana. The existence of nuclear weapons inhibited an outright confrontation between the two superpowers - the US and the USSR. Instead the world became divided into two blocs maintained through a balance of terror based on the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. The slogan of the right of national determination, which had been advanced by the US against the old European Empires, now became turned against the US itself as numerous third world national liberation movements sought to take power and break from the dictates of the international law of value by adopting state capitalist forms of economic development in alliance with the USSR. As a result numerous 'proxy wars' were fought in the 'third world' as each superpower sought to extend or protect its 'sphere of influence'(8).

Yet the full realisation of Pax Americana was not merely prevented by the fact that a third of the world's population lived under state capitalism and thus outside the economic dominance of American led Western capital. In order to prevent the 'spread of Communism' the US had to tolerate restrictions on the free movement and operation of capital within the Western Bloc itself. Hence the US had to tolerate not only the social democratic concessions made to the European working class, but also the state led models of economic development in Asia, firstly with Japan and later with the so called Asian tigers such as South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia etc.

The new Pax Americana
The rapid break up of the Eastern Bloc that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent disintegration of the USSR, transformed the world situation. After forty years of stalemate the USA emerged as the sole superpower that could now extend its economic and military hegemony over the entire planet. As such the end of the Cold War heralded a new era which held out the promise of new opportunities, as well as new dangers, for the realisation of a renewed Pax Americana.

As we have argued repeatedly elsewhere, the working class offensive of the 1960s and 1970s had produced a serious crisis in western capitalism and had prompted a major restructuring of capital. Central to the restructuring had been the development of global finance capital, which by facilitating a greater mobility of capital both between countries and industries, had allowed capital to outflank the well-entrenched working classes of the advanced industrial economies. Now, with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, whole areas of the world were opened up to Western capital. At the same time the collapse of the USSR discredited all forms of state led development. Under the banner of neo-liberalism, global finance capital could now triumphantly roll back the frontiers of state interference without the fear of opening the door to 'Communism'.

Yet the collapse of the Eastern Bloc also contained serious dangers. The chief danger being that, in the absence of a common threat of 'Communism', the US would retreat once more into isolationism allowing a revival in old imperialist rivalries amongst the European powers or the break up of the world into protectionist regional blocs. Indeed, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall the full fruits of Reaganomics in reviving the profitability of American capital had yet to become apparent. The attempt to facilitate the transfer of capital from the highly unionised sectors of the North East of the USA to the new industries of South and West, through huge levels of military spending financed by borrowing on the international money markets, had only served to transform the USA from being the world's largest creditor nation into the world's most indebted nation. Far from arresting the relative decline of the USA as an economic power, the huge growth of military spending under Reagan seemed to have accelerated the demise of American hegemony. In the face of the apparently remorseless economic growth of Japan and its exports, increasing sections of the American bourgeoisie were calling for protectionism and the abandonment of the burdens of 'world leadership'.

The Gulf War and the New World Order
Saddam Hussein had long been supported by the US both as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalism of Iran and as the only strong man that could contain the militant Iraqi proletariat. Yet Saddam Hussein could only maintain power through the militarisation of Iraqi society. A policy that led to ten years of war against Iran and ultimately to the invasion of Kuwait.

The defence of the oil fields of Kuwait provided George Bush with the opportunity to mobilise both the American bourgeoisie and the West as a whole around a renewed Pax Americana. Under the auspices of the United Nations, Bush was not only able to draw together a multinational military operation on an unprecedented scale but was also able to make Japan and Germany pay for it. In doing so Bush laid the basis for his 'New World Order'. An order uniting all the major imperialist powers under the leadership of the US that would aim to make the world safe for capital. An order in which any nation unable or unwilling to subordinate itself to the dictates of the international law of value could be isolated and crushed. And above all an order in which the costs of policing the world would be shared by all the major imperialist powers.

By insisting that the burdens and responsibilities of sustaining the New World Order should be shared by all the major powers under the auspices of the various international organisations Bush had sought to placate the isolationist voices within the American bourgeoisie. But what has served to sustain the New World Order more than anything else since the Gulf War has been the economic recovery in the USA. Since the Gulf War the USA has undergone an economic boom the length of which has not been seen since that which ended in the Wall Street crash and the world depression of 1929. While Japan has been mired in a prolonged period of economic stagnation, and European economic growth has slowed, the USA has seen eight years of sustained economic growth. As a result the US has been able to reassert its economic hegemony.

The bourgeoisie of the Western powers, particularly those of western Europe, now look to America. They all hope to emulate America's success by adopting neo-liberal and neo-reformist policies to promote 'labour flexibility', 'free markets' and capital mobility seeing in them the means to overcome their problems of an entrenched working class. Thus the bourgeoisie of the West can speak a common language in following the lead of the USA.
Europe and the New World Order

As we have already noted, the development of global finance capital had served to outflank the entrenched working classes of the advanced capitalist nations. In America finance capital, supported by the 'military Keynesianism' of Reaganomics, had facilitated the relocation of industrial capital from the car plants of the North and East to the new electronic and information based industries of the South and West of the USA and Mexico. In Japan industrial capital was able to shift to the newly industrialising countries of the Pacific rim. In contrast Europe had lacked any such immediate hinterland within which to relocate industrial capital. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc seemed to offer the bourgeoisie of Western Europe a chance to remedy this disadvantage.

First of all, many of the countries of Eastern Europe possessed both a relatively advanced economic infrastructure and an urbanised and educated proletariat. While the workforce of Eastern Europe was not known for its efficiency it had been trained to turn up for work on time and had the transport to do so. However, even if it proved unprofitable to produce in Eastern Europe it could provide a pool of cheap immigrant labour. Secondly, Eastern Europe possessed a large peasantry, which with a little investment could perhaps provide Western Europe with an ample supply of cheap food. Such a supply of cheap food from the East would then provide the means with which to accelerate both the displacement and proletarianisation of the peasant/small farmers of Western Europe. This might then increase the supply of labour as well as reducing the costs of the Common Agricultural Policy.

A unified Germany appeared to be well placed to exploit the great potential opened up by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, many feared that after being occupied and divided for the forty years of the cold war Germany would re-emerge as the unchallengable economic power of the new Europe. In response, the other powers of western Europe sought to tie the newly unified Germany into the structures of the European Union. As a result of this danger of a resurgent Germany, and in the face of the growing competition from Japan and East Asia, the process of European integration was accelerated. The introduction of the single market in 1992 was rapidly succeeded by plans for European monetary union and the expansion of the European Union to the East.

In the long term, the process of European integration would seem to inevitably lead to a United States of Europe which would be an economic power that could seriously rival that of the USA. However, despite the future prospect of a United States of Europe, US foreign policy has been to support this process of European integration, but on two crucial conditions. Firstly, European integration has to be committed to free market principles and be open to the competition of US capital. Secondly, the European Union has to remain committed to NATO and hence the military leadership of the USA. Given the Europeans' compliance to these two conditions, the US has attempted to constitute the European Union as a central pillar in the New World Order. To the extent that the European Union allows the Western European powers to speak and act with one voice it facilitates the mobilisation of the major imperialist powers behind US leadership, and at the same time provides a reliable means through which the US can delegate its responsibilities to sustain the world order within the European region(9).

The extent and limits to which the European Union has acted in partnership with US is perhaps most clearly illustrated with the reconstruction of Eastern Europe.

The Break up of the Eastern Bloc

Eastern Europe
The fall of the Berlin Wall raised the crucial question of the break up of the Eastern Bloc and its reintegration into the world economic system. The predatory logic of the 'free market' pointed towards the integration as industrial nations of a limited number of the more profitable regions and industries while the bulk of Eastern Europe would be destined to be deindustrialised and dumped into the 'third world'.

At first proposals emanating both within East and West Europe argued for a huge state led investment programme, on the scale of the post war Marshall Aid programme, which would allow the gradual transition of Eastern Europe to the 'German model' of social democratic capitalism. However, the western powers were both unwilling and unable to take up such an ambitious programme. Germany had enough on its plate integrating East Germany, while the rest of West European powers were reluctant to underwrite such an expensive endeavour. The US was anxious to impose a 'free market' led solution which was not only cheaper but ensured that Eastern Europe would be open to American capital.

As a result the Eastern European states had to scramble to ingratiate themselves with the more adventurous and predatory western capitalists. Harvard economists were dispatched to advise East European states on how to introduce widespread privatisation, close unprofitable factories, slash subsidies and phase out price controls. While a few members of the ruling classes of Eastern Europe were made fabulously rich, rising unemployment, cuts in subsidies on food and housing and soaring inflation had a disastrous effect on the majority of the East European working classes.

According to the quack remedies of the Harvard whiz kids, a short sharp shock of mass unemployment and declining living standards for the working class, and deregulation and incentives for prospective capitalists would be sufficient to release the entrepreneurial skills of the nation and transform the economy. While they accepted that this shock therapy would produce a few years of dislocation, most were confident that with five years the blood letting would have done the trick and the Eastern European economies would be embarking on a period of rapid economic growth.

After nearly ten years such prophecies remain unfulfilled. While the more well placed economies such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have recovered from the short sharp shock policies imposed by western capital, and with modest foreign investments have managed to resume low levels of economic growth, much of the rest of the former Eastern Bloc has made little progress.

Apart from offering loans through the IMF, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank in return for pro-market reforms, the West has sought to encourage the transition in the former Eastern Bloc through the offer of membership of NATO and the European Union. While admittance to NATO is costly for it requires a commitment to a certain level of military expenditure and the purchase of NATO standard equipment, it is a badge showing that the country concerned is committed to western-style capitalism and is a stepping stone towards membership of the European Union which promises easy access to West European markets and economic aid. Of course, for the US, the extension of both NATO and the European Union to the former Eastern Bloc serves to tie these countries into the New World Order and commits them to the 'free market' and democracy.

Russia
If the 'short sharp shock' policies imposed by western capitalism on the former Eastern Bloc countries were disastrous for the working classes of these countries, they have been a near catastrophe for the Russian working class. If nothing else the dismemberment of the highly integrated economy of the USSR, whose development had been based on the specialisation and economies of scale of huge industrial plants, could only present major problems for its transition to a fully fledged free market capitalism. None of which have been solved by wholesale privatisation(10).

After 8 years of economic 'reforms' the Russian economy languishes at 50% of its former GNP. Of course apologists for the economic reforms imposed by western capital clutch at the fact that such figures exclude the flourishing black market. But such a black market only demonstrates the gradual disintegration of the Russian state and the emergence of a Mafia system based on extortion and crime rather than any emergence of a capitalist class willing to make productive investments(11).

The US had little objection to the dismemberment of the USSR. After all it provided easier access to the former Soviet Union's vast natural resources(12). However, the American government was concerned that the disintegration of the USSR might go as far as Russia itself. So long as Russia retains its formidable nuclear arsenal its break up threatens to create an uncontrollable myriad of statelets and petty fiefdoms armed with nuclear weapons. However, while the US policy towards Russia is governed by the fear of it breaking up, it is also governed by the fear that a new 'hard-line' nationalist government may come to power and regroup the less well placed countries of the former USSR and the former Eastern Bloc into a renewed autarchic state capitalist Bloc. In its efforts to avoid these twin dangers the US has been led to support Boris Yeltsin as the only man who can hold together the warring factions of the Russian ruling class at the same time as keeping the Stalinist and nationalist threat at bay.

Amidst the neo-liberal triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the break up of the USSR, US policy makers were confident that, with sufficient encouragement and western influence, Russia under the firm leadership of Yeltsin would be able to make the transition to the 'free market' and democracy and in doing so would be able to take it place, albeit in a subordinate role, in the New World Order. Of course, it was soon recognised that this period of transition may be prolonged and as a consequence lead to a growing backlash against the necessary economic reforms. But the US policy makers seemed to be confident that by supporting Yeltsin and his pro-western supporters, together with the drip feeding of IMF led loans with tight conditions to prevent backsliding, Russia could be kept on course. It was simply a matter of holding out until the economic reforms had begun to take effect and the Russian economy entered the inevitable period of free market prosperity.

Yet while each tranche of IMF loans serves to prop up the Russian Government and keep the Russian economy ticking over, the economic reforms which are the price extracted for such loans have simply contributed to the slow disintegration of the state and its authority. Economic reforms have simply provided the means through which members of the Russian ruling class in alliance with Western capital have plundered the Russian economy. As taxes and wages remain unpaid for months, as the burden of debt with the west mounts and with the long promised economic miracle receding into distant future, both the state and the economy of Russia is slowly disintegrating. As US policy makers are coming to recognise, the current policy towards Russia is untenable. Sooner or later Yeltsin will be gone and the USA will have to confront one of the twin dangers of Russian disintegration or a neo-Stalinist-Nationalist Russia.

It is such a prospect that overshadows US policy in Europe and it is in this light that we should perhaps consider the war in Kosovo.

The Origins of the War in Kosovo
The war in Kosovo has been widely seen as the final act in the break up of Yugoslavia: a break up which is itself part and parcel of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and its reintegration into global capitalism. The economic crisis of Yugoslavia and the resulting social tensions and class struggle that led up to the disintegration of the Yugoslavian state, and the subsequent wars in Croatia and Bosnia, have been well documented(13). There is therefore little need to provide a detailed analysis here. However, it is perhaps necessary to sketch out the broad developments that led up to the recent Kosovan crisis before analysing the crisis itself.

The class struggle and the break up of Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia's break from Stalinism and its adoption of its own model of a 'decentralised' and 'self-managed socialism' meant that it developed as something of a half-way house in the division of Europe between the two capitalist blocs. As a consequence, Yugoslavia was far more open to the rhythms of capitalist accumulation of Western capitalism than any other of the 'socialist' economies of Eastern Europe. Hence, while Yugoslavia prospered during the post-war economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, it was particularly hard hit by the economic crisis of the 1970s and the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979.

Confronted by a militant working class response to the economic crisis, the Yugoslavian state had sought to take advantage of the flight of capital from the more advanced capitalist countries of the west in order to borrow its way out of trouble. However, like many other countries on the peripheries of western capitalism, Yugoslavia was caught out when western capitalism lurched back into recession in the late 1970s. With the recession in the west the foreign earnings needed to service the debts that had been built up diminished. At the same time the policies of the major western economies changed in dealing with the recession. Rather than spending their way out of recession, as they had done before, the governments of the US and western Europe adopted stringent monetary policies which led to a sharp rise in interest rates. Thus Yugoslavia faced being squeezed between having to pay out more in hard currencies to pay the interest on its loans and a fall in its foreign currency earnings.

At first the Yugoslavian state could respond by borrowing more to bridge the gap but this only led to a further escalation in its total debt burden. Faced with the western banks demanding their pound of flesh, the Yugoslavian ruling class had little option but to launch an attack on its working class. To this end inflation was allowed to take off and firms were allowed to go bankrupt producing increasing unemployment. However, the use of inflation to erode the living standards of the working class only served to unite and politicise the Yugoslavian working class around the demand for higher wages. During the 1980s wildcat strikes became endemic, while political protests against the bureaucracy took on an increasingly threatening form.

Although there were numerous instances of workers' solidarity actions across Yugoslavia and moves towards a Yugoslav wide general strike, most strikes and protests remained largely directed at the level of each constituent republic. This allowed room for various factions of the ruling bureaucracy to mobilise around national and ethnic lines and exploit the real material conditions that increasingly divided Yugoslavia in order to divide the Yugoslavian working class.

The economic crisis had accelerated the economic polarisation between the relatively prosperous republics of Slovenia and Croatia and the rest of Yugoslavia. From the point of view of these wealthier republics the rest of Yugoslavia, with its demands for subsidies, was a drag on their economic development. For both the ruling and middle classes of Croatia and Slovenia the obvious solution to crisis was to jettison the rest of Yugoslavia through secession and become fully-fledged members of the Western Bloc. At the same time, with the severe conditions of economic austerity, the growing disparity of wealth between the northern republics and the rest of Yugoslavia could easily be turned into a cause of resentment in Serbia and the poorer republics. While the prospect of secession by Croatia and Slovenia was a direct threat to all those dependent on the continued position of Serbia as the political centre of Yugoslavia.

These social tensions that had been developing through the 1980s were finally brought to a head with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Riding the popular enthusiasm for reform generated by the overthrow of the old Stalinist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, the nationalist factions of the Yugoslavian ruling class were able to sweep away the last remnants of the Titoist old guard which had sought to retain the unity of Yugoslavia. For Slovenia and Croatia the way was now open for secession and integration into the West. For Serbia the question was how to limit the break up of Yugoslavia.

Seeing that the eventual secession of Slovenia and Croatia was inevitable Milosevic, as the new leader of Serbia, pursued a policy of uniting all the Serbs into a Greater Serbia which would encompass as much of the former Yugoslavia as possible. But this required reasserting a Serb identity, which had been submerged for nearly two generations, through a policy of repression of ethnic minorities such as the Albanians in Kosovo.

For Slovenia, as a small but most economically advanced republic of Yugoslavia, and the one with the closest ties to the West, the option of secession and integration into western capitalism was a relatively easy way out of the problems of Yugoslavia. The economic advantages of secession were apparent not merely to both the ruling and middle classes, which had most to gain from such a development, but also to the Slovenian working class, which could look forward to stable prices, lower taxes and to western wage levels. However, for the less developed Croatia the economic advantages were far less apparent. Of course, for those in the ruling and middle classes who could hope to act as economic and cultural intermediaries in Croatian integration into western capitalism, secession offered the prospect of making a fortune, as it had for the similarly placed throughout Eastern Europe. For the working class of Croatia, on the other hand, the economic prospects of secession were far less clear. The creation of an independent Croatia, against the interests of the Croatian working class, therefore, required the virulent nationalism provided by Tudjman and his reinvented neo-fascist and anti-Serbian Ustashe movement.

An independent Croatia and a greater Serbia could only be forged through war and ethnic cleansing. Tudjman and Milosevic were complicit in mutually reinforcing terror against the working class of Yugoslavia. The atrocities committed by one side only served to inflame the fears and hatreds of the other widening the divisions in the working class along national and ethnic lines(14). Thus with Slovenia's and Croatia's secession war and ethnic cleansing became inevitable; firstly in Croatia as Serbia sought to rescue the Serbian regions there, and then in Bosnia as both Croatia and Serbia attempted to carve it up between them.
The policy of the Western powers towards the disintegration of Yugoslavia

The generally agreed policy of the western powers to the break up of the Eastern Bloc was, where possible, to maintain the existing international boundaries. However, in the case of Yugoslavia, neighbouring western powers - Italy, Austria and most importantly Germany - were all eager to see the secession of Slovenia and Croatia. In contrast Britain and France had little strategic or economic interests in Yugoslavia and as a result were little concerned with its fate. As a result Britain and France were quite prepared to concede the early recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence in their bargaining over the terms of the Maastricht treaty: France in order to secure Germany's acceptance of European Monetary Union, Britain in order to extract an opt out from the social chapter of the agreement.

At first US policy had been to preserve the unity of Yugoslavia - if nothing else to avoid the complications that would arise in attributing Yugoslavia's debts to its various states that may replace it. However, the recognition by European governments of Croatia and Slovenia soon rendered such a policy untenable. Faced with the isolationist tendencies within the American bourgeoisie, the US government was reluctant to become involved in a war where the US had little economic interests. Instead the US policy was to delegate responsibility to the European Union to sort out the problems on its own doorstep. However, the European Union lacked both the political will and the ability to produce a coherent policy towards the crisis in Yugoslavia. Of course the European Union could not ignore the war in Yugoslavia given its geographical position, but divisions between the main west European powers meant that the only policy that could be agreed was to contain the conflict to Yugoslavia, impose an arms embargo and mount various token peace keeping efforts to bring the conflict under control.

The dismal failure of the European Union to bring the wars in Yugoslavia to a conclusion eventually prompted the US to make its first major about turn in policy towards the break up of Yugoslavia and to become involved in the war in Bosnia. The US now aligned itself with the official Bosnian Government. Unable to convince the other major powers to lift the arms embargo so that it could openly arm the Bosnian Government, the US eventually entered the war itself on the side of the alliance between the Bosnian Government and the Croatian Bosnians against the advancing Bosnian Serbs. Providing air supremacy to the anti-Serbian ground forces the US was able to inflict a decisive defeat on the Bosnian Serbs forcing them to the negotiating table.

As a result the US was not only able to bring the fighting to a halt but to impose a peace settlement in the form of the Dayton Agreement. According to the Dayton Agreement Bosnia was to become a multi-ethnic confederal state. The three way division of Bosnia would be consolidated in the form of distinct republics with their own Parliaments but an overarching confederal structure was to be put in place that would prevent Bosnia being broken up and divided between Croatia and Serbia. The US would lead the policing of the agreement for a year while the European powers would be responsible for organising the economic reconstruction of the war-torn Bosnia.

Central to the Dayton Agreement was the tacit compliance of Milosevic. In return for calling his dogs of war to heel and persuading the Bosnian Serbs to accept the Dayton Agreement Milosevic gained US support for preventing the further break up of the rump of Yugoslavia, including the acceptance of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia, and the relaxation of economic sanctions against Serbia. Having been cast as the villain of the Yugoslav conflict by the Western press, Milosevic became temporarily transformed into a responsible and reliable leader, a bulwark against further instability in the region particularly following the Albanian insurrection of 1996-7.

However, while the US had been able to impose a cessation of the Bosnian war, the vision of a multi-ethnic confederal state soon proved to be unworkable. The recalcitrance of all sides to allow the return of refugees and to hand over war criminals and the election of hard-line nationalists in the elections thwarted the US hopes of a quick end to the affair.

Increasingly Milosevic, by encouraging the Bosnian Serb in their defiance of the various details of the Dayton Agreement, was seen as the main obstacle to progress towards 'peace' and the return of American troops. By the beginning of 1998 the US was beginning to 'lose patience' with Milosevic and began to advocate the reimposition of sanctions against Serbia.
Then, around September 1998, the US made its second and most important turn about in policy with regard to the former Yugoslavia. As we have seen, as part of the tacit agreement with Milosevic, and later in order to contain the Albanian insurrection, the US had backed Serbia's dominance of Kosovo. After all Kosovo had little economic or strategic importance and its secession could only threaten the stability of other states in the area with substantial Albanian populations. As a consequence, the US had provided no encouragement for the pro-western Rugova in his opposition to Serbia and repeatedly denounced the KLA as a band of criminals and bandits. The failure of Rugova to elicit western support for the cause of Kosovan autonomy led many Albanian Kosovans to turn to the KLA, which in the Spring of 1998 launched an offensive against the Serbian security forces in Kosovo. The ill-organised KLA were soon driven into the hills by the Serbian Army and Police. The atrocities committed by the Serbian forces against Albanian Kosovan villages suspected of supporting the KLA were tacitly accepted by the US as necessary in the fight against the 'terrorism' of the KLA.
In September this changed. The KLA now became transformed into 'freedom fighters' as the US threatened military action against Milosevic(15). The KLA was reorganised and rearmed, no doubt with US backing, and the US intervened to broker a cease-fire in October. In February, with the KLA now recognised by the US as the representatives of the Albanians in Kosovo, the US sought to impose a 'peace deal' between the KLA and Milosevic.

As the details of the Rambouillet Agreement have emerged it has become clear that this 'peace deal' was little more than a pretext for war. Not only did the proposed agreement require that a referendum on independence should be held within three years, almost certainly leading to the secession of Kosovo from the rump of Yugoslavia, but that NATO forces were to have free access to Serbia itself and have immunity to Serbian law. In other words the US could occupy Serbia at will! There could be little doubt that however many 'last miles that NATO was prepared to go for peace', so long as the US insisted on such conditions, Serbia would have to reject the agreement. Having promoted the stories of atrocities perpetrated by the Serbian forces and warned of the potential for wholesale ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population of Kosovo, the US government was now able to mobilise the governments that make up NATO to go to war.

What is perhaps significant is that the offending conditions of the Rambouillet agreement were dropped in the final settlement that ended the war. Given that Milosevic could have accepted the Rambouillet agreement without such conditions before the war, and that there is no evidence that Milosevic was planning mass ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, it would seem that the ten weeks of bombing and the displacement of 100,000s of Kosovans was completely unnecessary. Why then did NATO go to war? Was it some irrational sentimentality induced in the leaders of the west?

To understand the underlining causes of the Kosovan conflict we must look at the two about turns in US policy towards the break up of Yugoslavia that we have identified in the broader context of Europe in the New World Order.

'Humanitarian Imperialism' and the New World Order
As we have seen there have been two sharp turns in US policy towards the break up of Yugoslavia. Firstly there was the decision to back the official Bosnian Government which finally led to armed intervention and the imposition of the Dayton Agreement. Secondly there was the about turn in the US policy towards the KLA in September 1998, which was to lead directly to the war over Kosovo. Both of these decisions can be seen to be concerned with the 'projection of US power into Europe', but this only raises the question of why should the US want to 'project its power' when there are no immediate economic interests to defend. It does not tell us why such sharp changes of policy occurred. To answer such questions we must place these sharp turns in US policy in the context of both the integration of the European Union and the break up of the Eastern Bloc that we outlined above(16).

The Bosnian about turn
As we have argued the US have supported the process of European integration on the condition that it created a Europe open to American capital and remains committed to US foreign policy through the structures of NATO. However, the failure to adequately respond to the conflicts in Yugoslavia had raised the question in the chancelleries of the European Union of developing structures through which it could formulate a common foreign policy. Yet a common foreign policy implied a common defence policy and ultimately an integrated European army(17).

Fearing such a development policy makers in the US saw the need to show the indispensability of US diplomacy and military power in Europe. As a result the US diplomatically shifted its position to a more active role by backing the Bosnian Government - a distinct but not necessarily opposed position to that of Germany which was tacitly backing Croatia.
However, the US policy makers in the Clinton administration were held back by isolationist elements in the American bourgeoisie who were reluctant to allow an open ended commitment to a conflict where there were no immediate economic interests at stake. It was only when the European 'peacemaking efforts' had clearly failed that the US Government could make an armed intervention and impose a 'peace settlement' and only then on the basis of air power and a time limited commitment to police the settlement with ground troops.

Yet a further consideration may have entered into the calculations of the US foreign policy formulators and that was the state of Russia and its transition to fully fledged market capitalism. As we have seen, US policy towards Russia has been to encourage its rapid transformation into a western style capitalist nation so that it can play an important but subordinate role in the New World Order. Yet such a policy has faced serious difficulties. Firstly, while much of the Russian elite accepts the 'need for reform' - and is doing quite well out of it in the process - it has insisted on retaining the vestiges of its former superpower status, both in maintaining and using its veto on the UN Security Council, which could then be used as a valuable bargaining counter in its negotiations with the US and the IMF over economic reforms. A position backed up by its rather decrepit but nonetheless formidable nuclear arsenal. Secondly, the policy has depended on the continuance in power of the rather sickly and alcoholic Boris Yeltsin.

The failure of the miracle cures, hawked by the Harvard whiz kids, to bring quick results to Russia's economic woes had become apparent by 1995. With the coming Russian Presidential elections in 1996 it seemed that the popular backlash against 'economic reform' and austerity would bring the Red-Brown Alliance of the Communists and ultra-Nationalists to power derailing US plans for Russia. Hence there was a need for the US to make a display of force in Eastern Europe. Yet such considerations were to play an even more important role in the second about turn in policy that was to occur over Kosovo.

Kosovan about turn
What was the cause of the abrupt about turn in US policy towards both Kosovo and Serbia in September 1998? Why did the US suddenly abandon its previous support for the status quo and risk undermining the stability in the Balkans? Of course, under pressure to 'bring the boys back home' and in the face of the intransigence of Bosnian Serbs it was no doubt true that US diplomats and envoys charged with the implementation of the Dayton Agreement had been losing patience with Milosevic. However, this was far from being a sufficient reason to take the considerable risk of launching a war against Serbia and putting the credibility of US foreign policy on the line. After all the Bosnian Serbs were not the only ones blocking the Dayton Agreement. The US could have easily extricated themselves from Bosnia by quietly accepting its de-facto division between Croatia and Serbia and shifting the policing responsibilities to its European Allies.

As for Kosovo, the fact that thousands of civilians had already been driven from their homes by the Serbian security forces in the war against the KLA was hardly a reason for the US to go to war against Serbia. Furthermore, the failure of the KLA to defeat the Serbian security forces meant that there was no pressing reason for the US to reconsider its relation with them. After all the defeat of the KLA meant that Milosevic was doing his job in containing the threat to the stability of the region of a resurgent Albanian nationalism.

The cause of the abrupt turn in US foreign policy in September 1998 therefore had little to do with the situation in the former Yugoslavia as such. To find the cause we must look at the impact of the financial crisis that had been unfolding during 1998 on US foreign policy both in regards to the relations between the US government and Russia and its own isolationist critics at home.

1998 was a critical year for US foreign policy. US policy efforts were being stretched in its efforts to contain the unfolding financial crisis in the Far East, which threatened to bring down the entire global financial system with catastrophic economic consequences. Against protests from isolationist Republicans and Democrats complaining about the waste of tax payer's money bailing out speculators, the Clinton administration was concerned with saving the US and western banks and shifting the burden of the crisis on to working class of the afflicted countries through the mechanism of the IMF. In order to turn the crisis to its own advantage, US foreign policy had to head off proposals to establish an Asian Monetary Fund that could rival American dominance exercised through the IMF. Only then could it use IMF loans as a means to open up Asian financial markets to western capital in its crusade against the newly discovered 'crony capitalism' of the former miracle economies of the Far East.

Yet despite all the efforts to contain the crisis in the Far East the lack of confidence of financial speculators began to spread to all 'emerging markets', the obvious weak point being Russia.

Following Yeltsin's re-election as President in 1996 there was renewed western confidence in Russia. As part of this a new wheeze was dreamt up by Yeltsin's western advisors to bridge the gap between government spending and declining tax revenues without recourse to printing money. This was to issue special short term and high interest Government bonds known as GKOs to finance the deficit(18). These government bonds attracted both foreign investors and internal funds of various institutions and deepened the fledgling money markets. Yet it depended crucially on the Government maintaining the exchange rate of the rouble and investor confidence.

In 1998 the IMF loans were up for renewal leading to intense negotiations over the pace of
economic reforms and deregulation. At the same time political developments were creating uncertainty. The miners, who had played an active role in supporting Yeltsin's rise to power, were camped on the Presidential lawn in protest at the chronic delay in the payment of wages, an indication that the previously acquiescent Russian working class may have been about to throw its weight into the political arena around the crucial issue of the non-payment of wages. Secondly, the governments of both the Ukraine and Belarus were beginning to make noises that they were disillusioned with the IMF and its programme for reform and were considering realignment with Russia(19).

In August, after the IMF negotiations were completed, the confidence of foreign investors collapsed. Capital took flight and the repayment of the GKOs were suspended. The Rouble went into free fall on the foreign exchange markets bringing down the 'pro-reform' Prime Minister with it. Yeltsin then proposed Chernomyrdin as the new Prime Minister but he was rejected by the Russian Duma. For the first time Yeltsin was forced to back down in his first choice of Prime Minister and was obliged to appoint the 'hard-liner' Primakov. For most commentators at the time it seemed that Yeltsin's days as President were numbered.
The financial crisis that hit Russia in August 1998 brought to a head the contradictions of American foreign policy both in regard to Russia and Eastern Europe, and in regard to the isolationists in the USA itself. The resolution of such contradictions demanded that the US policy makers take decisive action. Action that was made all the more urgent given the need to restore confidence in the midst of the unfolding financial crisis that was threatening to engulf the entire global economic system.

With the economic and political crisis sweeping Russia, the twin dangers of anarchy or autarky that haunted US policy towards the Russia, but which had abated following Yeltsin's re-election in 1996, now re-emerged all the more starkly. Whatever reassurance Yeltsin and his pro-western ministers might make that Russia was committed to 'economic reform' and westernisation, there was now no certainty that either Yeltsin or his pro-western policies would survive long. In September 1998 it seemed that either Yeltsin would be shortly deposed or else become a prisoner of the Communist controlled Duma. Even if Yeltsin did cling to office, it seemed unlikely that he would last beyond the presidential elections scheduled for the year 2000.

Yet, while the crisis in Russia presented the danger of a Russian rebellion against its subordination to the dictates of western capital, it also presented an opportunity for the US to force the issue within the Russian ruling class: that is, was Russia for or against the West? While Yeltsin remained in power, and presided over a pro-western policy committed to 'economic reform', the financial and political crisis in Russia weakened its bargaining position in its negotiations with the US and the IMF. With Russia having to go cap in hand to borrow money necessary to feed its population over the winter the US could insist on a renewed commitment to 'economic reform'.

But this opportunity to wring further concessions from the Russian government could only last so long as the opposition to pro-western policies amongst the Russian ruling class was unable to mobilise around a viable alternative economic and foreign policy. If the US was to secure Russia's adherence to IMF led 'economic reforms', and its subordinate role within the New World Order, it had to act to pre-empt the emergence of any such alternative economic and foreign policies. To do this the US had to underline Russia's political and economic isolation in Eastern Europe.

War against Serbia, over the economically and strategically insignificant province of Kosovo, provided a perfect opportunity to isolate Russia. Serbia is Russia's last remaining overt ally in of the former Eastern Bloc. By attacking Serbia, the US could expose the weakness of both Russia itself, and the ultra-nationalist opposition within the Russian ruling class. With little or no economic interests in Kosovo the Yeltsin government would not be compelled to intervene to defend its ally. Instead Yeltsin's government could be counted on to try to act as an intermediary, using its influence over Serbia as a bargaining counter with the West. On the other hand the ultra-nationalist and Stalinist opposition, to which pan-Slavism is an important ideological motif, would be left impotently demanding solidarity with Russia's Slav brethren.

However, the US was determined not to allow Yeltsin to use Russia's position as Serbia ally as a means to lever concessions out of the IMF. By operating through NATO rather than the UN, the US was able to outflank Russia's veto on the Security Council. As a result Russia's role was reduced from being an essential intermediary to that of a mere messenger boy carrying Nato's ultimatums to Milosevic.

In addition the use of NATO not only served to mobilise the West European powers behind the war against Serbia it also served to force the issue of which side the new and prospective members of NATO were on. Countries such as Hungary, which had recently joined NATO, now had to show a practical commitment to US foreign policy in Europe. A policy that was implicitly in opposition to Russia. At the same time the bombing of Serbia served to assert a new role for NATO as an overtly offensive organisation that could through 'out of area operations' serve to impose Pax Americana throughout Europe and the Middle East.

The old assurances made to Gorbachev that NATO would not be extended beyond Germany, or the subsequent assurances made to Yeltsin that Nato's extension to the former borders were merely for the peaceful purposes of promoting democracy, could be buried. Russia could now be in no doubt that NATO could intervene militarily on its very doorstep if necessary.
Yet the war against Serbia not only underlined Russia's isolation and non-viability of any alternative to the IMF and economic reform, it also served as a show down against the isolationists at home. It showed that the US administration could mobilise a 'humanitarian war' to defend the general interests of Pax Americana even if there was no immediate economic or sufficient interest around which to mobilise the American bourgeoisie. As such it was a risky venture only justified by the critical conditions confronting the US administration in the Autumn of 1998. We can not tell as yet whether the US policy makers thought that Milosevic would cave in early or whether they were prepared to go all the way to ground war. They were after all saved from the ultimate showdown of convincing Congress to commit US troops to a war by the mutiny of Serbia's reservists that finally brought Milosevic to the negotiating table(20).

Conclusion
With the end of the Cold War the USA has managed to renew its position as the world's hegemonic power. Having overcome the crisis of the 1970s through the radical restructuring of its economy the US has once again become the centre of world accumulation dragging the rest of the world behind it. The potential re-emergence of inter-capitalist rivalries have been mitigated by continued capitalist expansion and submerged through the continuing dominance of the USA as the world's sole superpower.

Of course, the current performance of the US is not without its problems. Rising profits that have fuelled capital accumulation in recent years has been based primarily on eroding real wages rather than raising productivity whose growth remains at historically low levels(21). Much investment has become speculative fuelling a stock market that is vastly overvalued in comparison with any prospects of increasing profitability of American capital. Whether the inevitable collapse of the US stock market can be contained or whether it will plunge the real economy into a slump or a period of prolonged stagnation is yet to be seen. But it could well be that the current period is the Indian summer of Pax Americana.

Nevertheless, to the extent that the present period is one of continued capitalist expansion under a stable and unchallenged hegemonic power then the war in Kosovo must be seen as war on the periphery - albeit a periphery uncomfortably close to capitalist heartland of Western Europe - rather than as some symptom of capitalism decomposition and irrationality as some would have it.

However, the Kosovan conflict does highlight certain peculiarities and contradictions of the new Pax Americana. There is always a problem of constituting a general interest out of the competition of particular capitals. Yet such problems have become exacerbated not only by the fall of the USSR as a common threat to western capital and the resurgence of the US bourgeoisie's particular propensities towards isolationism, but also with the growing importance of global finance capital.

The investment of industrial capital demands long term commitment to particular concrete conditions and circumstances that generate specific interests. When an oil company builds an oil refinery its capital is tied up for years in a particular place. For finance capital investment is less committed. It can always cut its losses and invest somewhere else by calling in its loans or selling its shares. Yet while each finance capital can cut and run it can only do so long as everyone else does not do the same. The conversion of particular uncertainties into abstract and tradable risk, which is central to finance capital, depends on the confidence in the system as whole. Thus for finance capital there is no particular interest as such just a general interest in the confidence of the system as a whole.
This creates both problems and opportunities for the implementation of foreign policy on the part of the hegemonic capitalist power. Finance can be used as an effective instrument of foreign policy that avoids the use of direct armed intervention, as the operations of the IMF clearly shows. At the same time, to the extent that USA is the home to much of global finance, the foreign policy of the USA must guarantee the operation of the global financial system. But because monied capital has little particular long term interests (because it can also cut its losses and run) it becomes difficult for the US foreign policy makers to mobilise such capital behind a concerted foreign policy.

The outcome of the particular isolationism of the American bourgeoisie and the emergence of global finance is firstly the rather ludicrous situation where the US has to fight wars without suffering any casualties. Secondly, because it can not necessarily mobilise around specific economic interests it has to mobilise for war around abstract principles such as 'human rights' and wage 'humanitarian wars'. Yet the limits of such ideological covers of war are all too obvious. In 'humanitarian' terms armed intervention usually makes things worse. A point taken up by American isolationists to argue that the USA should let conflicts in the world burn themselves out(22).

Of course, the Kosovan war ended with much triumphalism for the advocates of humanitarian war, although the subsequent events of reverse ethnic cleansing has undermined many of their claims. But the true shallowness of these pro-war liberals is exposed in the recent events in East Timor. It is perhaps no coincidence that the new President of Indonesia announced that there would be a referendum on East Timor's independence last January in the middle of the ideological mobilisation for the war in Kosovo. No doubt this was an important concession wrung from the new Indonesian government desperate for IMF loans in order to placate the conscience of the former anti-war Greens and leftists in the various West European Governments. Now the East Timorese are paying with their lives for such humanitarian concern.

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1 See 'War is the health of the state:An open letter to the UK direct action movement' in Do or Die 8 (c/o 6 Tilbury Place,Brighton,BN2 2GY).
2 This is a position put forward by Left Communists such as the ICC.See also 'Humanitarian Barbarism:Nato's war against Yugoslavia' in Uniundercurrent 7,June 1999.
3 Unlike industrial capital,mercantile capital is unable to produce suplus-value since it is confined to the sphere of circulation.In the absence of industrial capital,mercantile capital's profits depend on either accidental or enforced monopoly that allows the mercantile capitalist to the law of equal exchange so as to buy cheap and sell dear.With the development of the world market in the sixteenth century mercantile capital became increasingly dependent on state power to enforce its monoploly position.Piracy and war were central to the accumulation of mercantile capital until the development of industrial capital in the nineteenth century.
4 The obvious example of those who have offended cosmopolitan liberal reationality for attempting to defend their own national accumulation of capital are Stalin,Saddam Hussein,Milosevic. 5 Of course the obvious exception to this was the Vietnam war where the worlds greatest economic power was defeated by one of the weakest.However,the defeat of the US was caused,not by the superior military prowess or tactics of the Viet Cong,but by the insubordination of the the American conscripts and social unrest at home.The fear of war inciting insubordination and class struggle that followed Vietnam is one that still haunts the American Bourgeoisie and has proved a powerful argument in the hands of America's isolationists.Ultimately the overwhelming economic and military power of the US depends on the compliance of its working class.
6 As British capital becomes increasingly dependent on the appropriation of surplus-value produced elsewhere in the world,through its position as one of the principal centers of global finance capital,it has become increasingly dependent on the global system guaranteed by the intervention of the USA as the hegemonic power.The danger of America retreating from both Europe and the world stage,and the break up of the global economic system into distinct regional blocs threatens all the major powers of Western Europe but it would be particularly serious for the UK.
7 France was something of an exception to this.Refusing to subordinate itself to the military command of the USA it was nominally independent of NATO throughout much of the Cold War.
8 While there were no wars in Europe for forty years following the second world war more than a hundred wars were fought in the 'third world'.
9 For a clear statement of this strategy see Madelaine Albright,US Secretary of State,in the Financial Times,7th December 1998:'Our interest is clear:we want a Europe that can act.We want a Europe with modern,flexible military forces that are capable of putting out fires in Europes backyard and working with us through the alliance [NATO] to defend our common interests'.
10 This highly integrated nature of the Russian economy meant that the 'short,sharp,shock' policies have not been so short and sharp.Seeing that such policies would not only be disasterous for the Russian economy and their own interests within it sections of the Russian ruling class have been highly resitant to many aspects of reform.
11 During the entire period of'economic reform' not one major plant or factory has been built anywhere in Russia!
12 The privatisation of the major oil and natural gas monopolies took the form of distributing shares to workers and Russian citizens, most of which were then sold back to management. Thus in effect privatisation transferred ownership to the former industrial bureaucracy rather than opening up these potentially profitable companies to westem capital. An important aspect of rb/if led reforms has been to pressure these monopolies with the aim of opening them up for foreign investment. The IMF insistence on cuffing the huge budget deficit has been directed at breaking the power and influence of the oil and natural gas companies by forcing them to pay their huge tax arrears.
13 See 'Class Decomposition in the New World Order:Yugoslavia Unravelled' in Aufheben 2,1993 and 'Yugoslavia:From wage cuts to war' in Wildcat 18,Summer 1996.
14 As Wildcat (op. cit.) pointed out,ethnic cleansing did not suddenly erupt between neighbours who lived side by side for years as a result of some long repressed collective subconscious as is often portrayed.Ethnic cleansing was deliberately created by state sponsored gangs.Once the enmities had been created through terror they then became self-sustaining.
15 By December 1998,James Rubin,US State Department spokesman,could say of Milosovic that "He is not simplt part of the problem.He is the problem.We have no illusions about milosovic and do not see him as a guarantor of stability."Financial Times 7th December,1998.
16 A useful analysis of the origins of the war in Kosovo in the break up of Yugoslavia is Peter Gowan's, 'The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy' in New Left Review May-June 1999. Gowan also identifies the two about turns in US policy. However, his explanation of the sharp turn in US policy in September 1998 in terms of the personal ambitions of Madeline Albright is far from adequate.
17 Talks to this effect also took place in the closing months of 1998. In November there was an 'informal EU Security meeting in Geneva and Anglo-French talks in December. Both meetings were to discuss developments towards a unified EU defence policy, especially in light of the Kosovo crisis. However, the idea of a coherent EU defence policy, championed most by Britain, falls into line with the US vision for the future of NATO and the EU. See Financial Times, 4th November 1998 and 3rd December 1998.
18 Of course all developed capitalist states borrow money on the money markets to finance their budget deficits. But usually persistent budget deficits are financed through issuing long term government bonds that are redeemed after several years. In contrast short term treasury bills, which are redeemable in a matter of a few months, are usually issued to bridge the gap between day to day government spending and the receipt of tax revenues. However, few speculators were willing to hold long term bonds for fear that a future Russian Government might not redeem them. Hence short term GKOs, which were more akin to treasury bills, were presented as the answer to financing Russia budget deficits, as well as deepening the limited money markets. But financing a budget deficit by issuing treasury bills is like buying a house with a credit card.
19 In the Ukraine confidence in IIVF loans had waned by the end of September with the collapse of the Rouble. With this disillusion with the West attention was being turned East with the Presidents of Ukraine and Russia meeting to 'discuss ways of re-invigorating the Russia-dominated Common-wealth of Independent States as a way out of the crisis.' However, while Ukraine insisted that it was not seeking to break its ties with the West it would obviously have to choose which economic model it was going to follow - 'East or West.' See Financial Times, 23rd September 1998. The situation in Belarus was of a more serious nature for US policy towards the former USSR: 'Workers under orders from the Belarusan government welded shut the gates to the US ambassador's residence yesterday in order to prevent him from entering. 'This concerns me greatly," Ambassador Daniel Speckhard said outside the gate with his wife and three children. "If the government wants to lock us out, we will have to leave the country." At a news conference earlier, Mr Speckhard said: "If diplomats in the Drozdy residences are expelled, this will be the first incident of its kind after the end of the cold war. We hope that (Belarus president) Alexander Lukashenko. . . will correct this situation in time." Mr Lukashenko, condemned by western governments for his authoritarian-style rule, has repeatedly lashed out at the west and accused it of seeking to isolate his country of 10m people.' See Financial Times, 9th June 1998. Of further concern to the West was 'Belarus's Independence Day parade... complete with tanks, rocket trucks, goose-stepping paratroopers, in­line skaters, athletes pretending to play ping-pong, and ranks of children holding up model aircraft. The event was a chance for Alexander Lukashenko, the country's stern, moustachioed president, to showcase his country's march back to Soviet-style communism.. The parade and its stage-management were vintage Lakashenko. A former collective farm boss, he ran for president of his country in 1994 on a platform of restoration of Soviet virtues and won a resounding victory. Last month, he improved his image among his supporters by taking over the residences of several western ambassadors, who promptly left the country in protest. Many western diplomats believe the crisis was in fact a tactic to bolster Mr Lukashenko's popularity in Belarus and in neighbouring Russia. Some say he has one eye on a bid for the Russian presidency in 2000. Since taking power, Mr Lukashenko has cracked down on dissent, changed the constitution to increase his powers, and begun re-nationalising the economy. His hope is that this "Belarusan model" appeals not just to Belarusans, but to Russians as well. Part of his prograrrune for Belarus is the eventual re-unification of his country with Russia, and though real unity is a long way off, analysts are nearly unanimous in their view that Mr Lukashenko sees a role for himself in Russian politics. The problem - according to Valery Karbalevich, a political analyst at the Minsk-based National Centre for East West Strategic Initiatives - is that "Russia may well want to integrate with Belarus, but they don't want to integrate with Lakashenko". Financial Times, 4th July 1998.
20 See "'We won't go to Kosovo": The movement of draft refusal and desertion in Krusevac, Aleksandrovac, Prokuplje. . .May 1999- a chronology of events' in No War but the Class War! Discussion Bulletin 3 (Escape, c/o P0 Box 2474, London N8 OHW).
21 For most years of the 1990s economic growth in the USA has been based on employing more workers and making them work longer hours rather than investing in plant and machinery to make them more productive. This is indicated by the fact that during this period the annual growth in the average hourly output of American workers rarely exceeded 1%. However, since 1996 there are indications that both real investment and growth in productivity have picked up as limits to extending the working day and enlarging the workforce have been reached. However, this surge in productivity seems unlikely to be sulficient to support the high expectations for profit growth implied by the current levels of the stock market.
22 In his election campaign George Bush jnr., front running Republican Presidential hopeful, has made it quite clear that the main problem for American foreign policy is the recalcitrance to the free movement of western capital on the part of Russia and China. Affempting to rally the Republican Party around an active interventionist foreign policy, he has sought to articulate the growing criticisms of the Clinton adrninistration's policy of 'humanitarian wars'. See The Guardian, 24th September 1999.

The Retreat of Social Democracy ... Re-imposition of Work in Britain and the 'Social Europe' (Part 2)

In this, the latest exciting instalment of our analysis of social democracy in retreat, we show how the left-of-centre governments now dominating the European political arena are attempting to re-impose work through common neo-reformist policies. We argue that reports of social democracy's rebirth have been greatly exaggerated: and we never lamented its passing anyway.

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Re-imposition of work in Britain and the 'social Europe'

In a series of articles, we have argued that social democracy is in retreat(1). As this retreat has unfolded over time - with neo-liberal policies themselves now apparently out of favour - a further analysis is required. Such an analysis is neither an academic enquiry, nor does it entail any nostalgia for 'good old-fashioned social democracy' as opposed to the 'false Labourism' of 'Tory' Blair.

It should be clear from our conception of social democracy that we are neither lamenting its passing or calling for its defence. While we must acknowledge the real material gains for the working class embodied in the post-war social democratic settlement (rising real wages, decent council housing, free health care etc.), this has had a price. As we have stated previously, for us social democracy is essentially the representation of the working class as labour within capital and the bourgeois state - politically through social democratic parties, and economically through trades unions. As such, social democracy necessarily entails the division of the working class into 'national working classes' and the demobilization of the working class as a subject.

The retreat has been taking place for some years. Yet in the past year or so, parties of the left of centre - 'social democrats' and 'socialists' - have made something of a comeback in Europe, and now govern most of the major European states. Is social democracy back from the grave, perhaps?

Our argument is that it is not. Despite their differences, Europe's 'new reformism' shares with New Labour's 'Third Way' the central aim and similar methods of re-imposing work. For most us this means working harder and longer.

The necessity and crisis of imposing work

From a revolutionary perspective, a principal line of enquiry in our effort to understand the nature of the current forms of political mediation - the 'Third Way' in Britain, the 'new reformism' in Continental Europe - is to examine how they relate to the dynamics of class struggle. In order to do this, we must address the centrality of work to capital and briefly review what happened following the failure of social democracy to discipline the working class to accept work, focusing for the moment just on the UK.

All bourgeois political forms are about the imposition of work. Capital takes the appearance of generalized commodity production. But the essence of capital - what it is - is self-expanding value. And value is nothing with the labour - the work - that produces these commodities. For capital to exist, the imperative of valorization must prevail; capital must subordinate our creative activity in the form of wage-labour - alienated labour - in order to produce value. Capital is therefore a vampire on human subjectivity. It needs working human subjects to produce and reproduce itself; and it exists as a subject only by virtue of our reification - the objectification of our subjectivity within the needs of capital. Capital as value - as accumulated alienated labour - is not animate, has no power, is nothing without its potential antagonist, not-value(2).

If work is of the essence of capital, one of capital's central tasks, both historically and from day to day, is the imposition of work and thus work-discipline(3). Since capital's needs are alien, by their nature human subjects have innumerable needs and desires incompatible with those of capital. To impose work and hence order on human subjectivity, whose inherent tendency is to escape such order, capital must confront these human needs.

Before the working class was mature, this was done simply in terms of brute force, by throwing the 'proud English yeoman' off his land and hence obliging him to work in the mill or starve. Later, capital was obliged to accede to the needs of particular powerful groups of workers as workers, who, through their possession of valuable skills, were able to win relatively high wages and exercise control within the production process. At the same time, with both bourgeoisie and working class as such becoming organized, political forms of mediation became necessary at the level of the state. Philanthropic liberalism was the political form within which working class needs were first acknowledged by the bourgeois state. It served to guarantee the conditions whereby individual capitals could continue to pump surplus-value out of the workers without the latter either being killed by the conditions of work or destroying those conditions.

In Britain, with the triumph of social democracy following the second world war, the needs not just of particular powerful skilled groups of workers but of the working class as such became recognized and included in the bourgeois state. Mediated by the trade unions and social democratic parties, working class pressure for change led to such gains as free health care, a universal welfare system and social housing. Prior to this post-war social democratic settlement, work was imposed on the majority of workers through the stick of mass unemployment, which, coupled with the most meagre welfare provision, often forced workers to compete for the available jobs at almost any price. By contrast, social democracy imposed work through the Keynesian carrot of 'full employment' and virtually guaranteed rising real wages, in return for the working class conceding control over the labour process. These higher wages provided the demand for the ever increasing production of consumer commodities - cars, washing machines, televisions etc. - by the new Fordist(4) industry.

The post-war settlement provided the relative social peace which served as the basis for the post-war economic boom. But, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a massive upsurge in class struggle and the onset of the crisis of capital accumulation across Europe and the USA meant that the conditions of the post-war settlement became an increasing burden on the capitalist class and strengthened the hand of the working class. Within work, struggles took new directions, most notably in the form of the 'refusal of work'(5). In the UK, the restrictive practices and continued demands for higher wages of 'bloody-minded' workers threatened the stability of capital accumulation. This threat became acute when a political strike by the miners toppled the Heath government of 1974.

Altogether, this wave of struggles and the ongoing resistance that followed it undermined the terms of the Keynesian social democratic settlement. The settlement had ultimately failed to discipline the working class. Capital therefore responded by taking flight from centres of working class strength, and a new era of globally autonomous finance capital emerged. In Britain, the Thatcher Government abandoned the social democratic consensus around corporatism, welfare and full employment. Letting unemployment rip was one of the central planks of the Government's attempt to re-affirm capital's right to manage. This eliminated some of the most militant sections of the working class. Indeed, once the miners had been defeated, most others lost faith in collective struggle. Social democracy went into a decline, as reflected in the ideological crisis of the left, and the inability of the Labour Party and trades unions to represent and mobilize the working class in the way that they had done in the past.

However, the creation of a reserve army of labour failed to have quite the effect that the government hoped for. In effect a dual labour-market emerged. The problem for British capital was that too many people simply got accustomed to long-term unemployment. Those outside work were perceived by the bosses as being unemployable - lacking not just 'skills' but basic work-discipline. Work-refusal - or, more broadly, 'recalcitrance' - had become displaced from the workplace to the reserve army of labour. This recalcitrance of the unemployed had the effect that, in many sectors, existing workers were simply poached across enterprises and were still able to command relatively high wages. Indeed, wage levels remained relatively high throughout the Thatcher years. Large sectors of British capital therefore remained uncompetitive(6 ).

With the exhaustion of the Thatcherite project, 'New Labour' has seen its task as that of re-integrating the working class as a whole back into the discipline of the market and thus re-invigorating the conditions for capital accumulation in the UK. We now examine how 'New Labour' has been setting about this task.

The 'Third Way' and the ideology of work

New Labour's 'Third Way' defines itself as an attempt to forge a new 'consensus' beyond and yet combining elements of both social democracy and neo-liberal ideology. Many of the policies that go to make up this Third Way are modelled on those New Labour sees as responsible for the recent American 'success story': the American recovery from the recession at the end of the 1980s and its subsequent surge in growth. Before examining New Labour's version of the Third Way, we therefore briefly describe the American situation.

One of the indicators of the success of the US economy is the massive drop in unemployment(7). Although the American 'jobs miracle'(8) has seen the creation of many new management posts, the category of manager has been increasingly extended to cover low-level jobs, and many more of the new jobs are simply poorly-paid service jobs. Work itself has been intensified, yet with none of the across-the-board rises in wages that served to sugar the pill in the 1950s and 60s. Thus, in the last 20 years or so, American workers have become more productive, but have suffered a massive drop in living standards. (9)

The welfare rolls have come down not simply through the creation of new jobs but also because of the 'Welfare-to-Work' Zeitgeist. Cuts in eligibility (time limited benefits,(10) sanctions for not looking hard enough for work etc.) and workfare together mean that shit service jobs are now what people regularly have to do instead of get the dole. The State of Wisconsin recently boasted that it has no more welfare recipients, and the State of New York currently has more than 40,000 people enrolled in its workfare programme. The explosion of workfare and 'Welfare-to-Work' schemes began with legislation passed under the Reagan administration. But, significantly, it was only under Clinton that such programmes have more or less replaced 'welfare as we know it'. It is likely that, as a committed 'neo-liberal' who preferred cutting to spending money on welfare, Reagan would not have sanctioned such an ambitious project. Although the welfare rolls have been cut, this has not actually been matched by a fall in spending. Workfare and the other programmes cost money rather than save it (at least in the short term). These programmes, with their anti-'dependency' ideology, are actually strategic interventions designed to inject competitiveness and drive into the labour-market. Pushing previous 'unemployables' into the labour-market - workfare schemes specialize in 'including' (Black) single parents - means more desperate labour-fodder for employers who are thus able to pick and chose. Workfare programmes serve to drive down wages not simply through job substitution and subsidies for low-paying employers; their principal effect is to 'encourage' people at the 'job counselling' stage to take the existing jobs at the bottom end of the jobs market - in order to escape workfare itself.(11)

Just as a clear continuity can be traced from Reagan's Republican administration to Clinton's New Democrats, New Labour accepts as given much that has been achieved under the Conservative government (e.g., anti-strike legislation, Job Seeker's Allowance, privatization of public utilities). New Labour even seeks to maintain the Conservatives' key economic principle of economic prudence: hence the primacy of inflation targets, the handing over of interest rate decisions to the Bank of England, and a privatization programme which they argue is not. (The term 'public-private partnership' that the government uses to refer to a programme, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), that already existed under the Conservatives(12) is an example of New Labour-speak at its most patronizing.

The attraction of PFI for an 'economically prudent' government is that someone else other than the treasury makes the investments. In the case of the London Underground, for example, the private sector is supposed to provide the capital investment and makes profits from running the system, while the network still remains owned by the Government. Workplace resistance to the continued incursion of the private sector makes clear what such 'prudence' means in class-struggle terms: both New Labour and the Conservatives are agreed that private companies can be more 'efficient' - that is, they serve a vital role in 'market-testing out' some of the more entrenched public sector workers. We discuss other examples of this further below.)

Yet, despite the New Labour Government taking for granted much of the 'free market' groundwork laid by the Conservatives, a number of its key policies are relatively expensive interventions that would never have been passed under the previous administration. Spending (or, rather, re-allocating money) within the Third Way reflects an attempt to reconcile an efficient well-functioning economy with social cohesion. While the Thatcherite Conservatives were happy to let the market rip in order to break up bases of working class power, enhancing state interventions mostly only at the level of criminal justice (public order legislation, more cops, more prisons), New Labour's policies are more interventionist in relation to employment and ideological issues. Whereas under the Conservatives mass unemployment was regarded as necessary, under New Labour it will not be tolerated; hence 'full employment' is back on the agenda, albeit by a rather different definition: everyone readily available and active in the labour-market at some point in time.

As we have seen, the de facto dual labour-market inherited from the Conservatives had to be broken down if the restructuring begun under Thatcher could be completed. Unless this vital task could be achieved, too many sectors of the British economy would be hampered by entrenched working practices and the threat of wage inflation would never be far away; hence the whole British economy would lag behind its rivals as a centre of accumulation. In short, Britain could not become what Blair refers to as a 'modern economy'.

For New Labour, the project of re-integrating the different elements of British society back into the world of work requires the development of a new 'consensus' around certain values such that those currently not fully 'included' become more motivated to become so. The principal value is that of work. While New Labour's famous slogan, at least during the election, was the moronic 'education, education, education', its ideology is more precisely 'work, work, work'. Yet this is different in important ways than the promotion of 'hard work' by Thatcher in the overtime boom of the 80s. The ideology of the 80s was concerned solely with selfish individualism and personal ambition. While these spontaneously generated ideologies of capitalism obviously remain, New Labour adds a work ethic which is universalizing and oriented around such concepts as 'community' and 'society'. New Labour wants work for all.

But this is not an easy task, even were every boss to be begging for more workers. Before the potential workers can be successfully delivered from the Jobcentre to the labour-market, their recalcitrance (what New Labour calls 'passive benefits dependency'), whether intentional or otherwise, must be overcome. New Labour is interventionist not in the way social democracy used to claim to interfere in the market in order to distribute risks and benefits more evenly, but in the 'paternalistic' sense of interfering with people's everyday lives in order 'to help them to help themselves' (to be better workers and citizens).(13) Rather than social democracy, New Labour's Third Way is therefore more akin to the social engineering of Lloyd George's new Liberalism at the turn of the century.(14)

The 'Welfare-to-work' programme, which has been modelled on the programmes of the same name in the USA, is the emblem of New Labour's Third Way. Indeed the programme can be said to embody the key principles or 'values' behind much of New Labour's economic and social policies: links between government and business; 'responsibilities as well as rights'; a utilitarian approach to education; and the importance of work and self-reliance. The centrepiece of Welfare-to-Work is the 'New Deal' for 18-24 year olds, which the government has described as its 'flagship' policy(15). The New Deal and the other Welfare-to-Work programmes do not seek to create jobs: that would be far too Keynesian. Rather Welfare-to-Work is a 'supply-side' measure which seeks to get the reserve army of labour up to scratch so that, as the economy improves, employers are able to draw upon it instead of competing with each other for the existing 'job-ready' workers. And if the economy doesn't improve, the job-readiness of the reserve army of labour will serve as more than just a threat to those in work; in conjunction with the trend towards short-term contracts, it will enable a faster turnover of labour-power in order to keep wage costs down. Indeed, the 'modern economy' is all about just such 'flexibility' - employers being able to take up and shed labour when and where and under whatever conditions are demanded by the market.

New Labour seeks to promote a greater sense of 'responsibility' in each individual to match their 'rights'. From this general 'sense of responsibility' will flow, it is hoped, a more participative and active engagement in 'the world of work' - whether through some kind of petty entrepreneurship or through accepting a shit job or crappy placement just to get a toe-hold in the labour-market. Despite how they appear to many claimants, therefore, the 'work experience' aspects of the New Deal programme aren't simply there to cut the dole figures as under the old Conservative approach: they are there to change people's expectations, their mentality, their acceptance of work-discipline and hence their labour-market position.

'Welfare-to-work' itself is part of a much broader programme of 'welfare reform' designed to 'modernize' an obsolescent welfare system. As the New Labour ideologues point out, Beveridge's system of unemployment insurance was designed for an era of 'full employment' and was intended only for those short periods when workers were temporarily between jobs.

From capital's point of view, it has instead become a system that promotes and sustains claimant recalcitrance, with the consequences for the labour-market that we have already described. These same ideologues also bemoan the expense of keeping people on benefits. But from a bourgeois perspective, there are better ways of saving money for the state than cuts to benefits and the recurrent 'benefit fraud crackdowns'. The much-vaunted 'problem of the welfare budget' has only ever been a propaganda tool to justify harsher treatment of claimants, which itself has always been a means of attempting to liberalize the labour-market(16). The critical analysis which only understands New Labour's welfare restructuring in terms of 'cuts' to save money is therefore mistaken. This should be obvious from the fact that programmes such as the New Deal for 18-24-year-olds cost much more(17) than is saved in getting people off benefits, at least in the short to medium term. Indeed, New Labour is hardly cutting the welfare budget overall; rather it is simply allocating it differently - to 'reward work instead of benefits dependency'.(18)

The coherence of New Labour's Third Way social policies as a whole, and their difference from the way social democratic interventions imposed work, is clear from the role of the recently introduced minimum wage(19). The left has responded to the minimum wage, albeit critically, as something which in essence can be built upon in a progressive direction: they simply want the minimum wage to be a lot more and have been seeking to mobilize around this (sometimes 'transitional') demand. Yet, in times of working class strength, a minimum wage would not have been 'necessary'; workers would in many cases have been able to fight for and get rising real wage.(20)

The minimum wage today is not a concession to working class strength. Instead, it needs to be understood in relation to the Government's attempt to re-allocate welfare payments from non-workers towards those in work. While non-working claimants (e.g., unemployed, single parents, disabled, asylum seekers) are to be subject to greater means testing and cuts in eligibility, those in low-paid jobs are to receive a new 'Working Families Tax Credit' plus a 10p rate of income tax to make such low-paid work more attractive. In the context of benefits becoming in effect wage-subsidies, a minimum wage serves to contain such subsidies within reasonable limits and thus acts as a safeguard against employers shifting the cost of reproducing labour-power onto the state. It is not, therefore, a social democratic concession to a strong working class, but part of the broad project of re-imposing work.

Limits of the re-imposition

As the emblem and embodiment of the Third Way, 'Welfare-to-Work' can serve as a barometer of the success of New Labour's attempt to re-impose work. Overall, the bourgeois commentators continue to be broadly supportive of New Labour and regard its 'Welfare-to-Work' programmes as broadly going in the right direction. This relative degree of success can be seen in the progress of the New Deal for 18-24-year-olds. At the time of writing (August 1999), over a quarter of a million people have entered the scheme. (21)The programme is claimed to have led to an increase in the rate at which 18-24-year-olds have left the claimant count, over and above the fall in unemployment that has been taking place anyway in most parts of the country simply due to the economic recovery.( 22)

The Government has felt confident enough to press on with its programme of welfare restructuring, implementing versions of the New Deal for other sections of non-employed people, such as the over-24s, over-60s, partners of the unemployed, single mothers and the disabled. At the moment, however, these programmes are not compulsory, unlike that for 18-24 year olds. On top of this, the various benefits are to be consolidated under the 'single work focus gateway', or 'One' as it now called, whereby all claims will be dealt with in one location (instead of the current multi-agency arrangement). For all categories of non-working people except pensioners and children, there will be interviews about 'the possibility of taking work' at every stage in the claiming process. The only real setbacks the Government has suffered over the past two years are the concessions it has had to make to placate back-benchers and 'public opinion' over cuts in eligibility for single parent benefits, means testing for disability benefits and the virtual abolition of benefits for asylum seekers. The programme as whole has continued unchecked, since even 'old Labour' opponents of some of New Labour's most extreme policies share with them support for the underlying values of work.

The relative success of the New Deal has corresponded to a decline in organized resistance to welfare restructuring. When the Job Seekers Allowance was proposed by the Conservative Government back in 1995, the main organized opposition took two forms. First, a small anti-JSA network of anarchist and similar groups from around the country was formed. These 'Groundswell' groups were often connected to claimants' unions or community action groups. Most participants were unemployed themselves, and had in an important sense chosen to be so. The Groundswell network held a number of marches, pickets and occupations, but attempts to build local solidarity through leafleting and advice (e.g., on getting through Jobcentre interviews) was the most prevalent tactic.

Second, many Jobcentre (dole) workers themselves were opposed to the JSA, since it threatened to increase the policing aspect of their work and hence bring them into conflict with claimants. The Jobcentre workers' strike in the winter of 1995-6 was not over the JSA as such, but it served to delay the implementation of the JSA by three months. It also undermined the ability of management to impose performance-related pay, whereby dole-workers are rewarded according to the number of claimants that they pressurize off the dole.

The network of claimants' campaign groups never developed into a movement, but they found the JSA relatively easy to mobilize around because it was so obviously punitive. But the New Deal has had some success in winning cynical claimants over. This is evidenced in the fact that few new claimants are coming forward to join the remaining claimants action groups - particular not young claimants, the group most affected by the New Deal. Despite the continuing use of the dole by thousands of people as a trouble-maker's grant, most claimants think they can escape the changes to the dole simply through individual strategies (bullshitting, travelling, petty entrepreneurship etc. etc.).

The customer-friendly 'new ethos' of the New Deals has also served to dampen some of the militancy of the dole-workers. Most of them didn't want the stress of giving claimants a hard time, and now they don't have to so much, so there is less reason for them to resist Welfare-to-Work as they did with previous changes to the dole.

Yet the New Deal for 18-24-year-olds has not gone completely to plan. Despite the lack of organized support, the unemployed are still proving resistant to the Government's attempts to render them 'job-ready' and willing.

In the first place, even when they are apparently willing, too many people coming off the dole are still perceived by the bosses as not job-ready. For example, most of New Deal candidates in London are apparently seen as 'unemployables'. It is less the skills of New Dealers that are missing or at fault than their attitudes. Too many lack what are called 'soft skills' - such as the ability to communicate, present themselves and get on with other people - and many businesses have complained of attendance problems. (23) Soft skills and punctuality are qualities that even the most low-paid office cleaning jobs now demand.

But willingness is also a problem for the New Deal. A year after the programme was rolled out nationally, more than 12,000 people have now been sanctioned. Offences include leaving work placements, failure and refusal to attend such placements, and the catch-all 'misconduct'. As might be expected, 'Environmental Task Force' placements, the 'option' that most obviously echoes the discredited make-work schemes of the past, has the highest percentage of sanctions. The Environmental Task Force and the Voluntary Sector 'option' have an 'image problem', according to the commentators; many claimants would rather lose their money for four weeks than endure them! (24)

Employment Minister Andrew Smith has complained of New Deal claimants 'raising two fingers' and 'misusing the system in a way unanticipated'. The 'new ethos' of the New Deal has enabled many claimants to delay being put on placements for as along as possible. Around a quarter of those who have entered the scheme are still in the 'job-counselling' ('Gateway') phase. Jobcentre staff have often colluded with claimants; they have taken the 'new ethos' so literally that in many cases they have stopped hassling people and instead let them remain on the Gateway long past the four-month limit. The Government has now responded to this claimant creativity. In a speech to 'think-tank' Demos,(25) David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Employment, announced a strategy of 'three strikes and you're out'. If this policy is passed, after their third JSA sanction (of four weeks) 18-24-year-olds stand to lose benefits for six months.

Yet the Government still faces the possibility of resistance from the other flank. The Government's attempt to improve the 'value-for-money' of the Jobcentres and other departments of the welfare state is pushing benefit workers towards confrontation with their employers. In a number of pilot-areas, private firms are involved in the running of the New Deal. In Hackney, for example, employees of Reed Employment (a private employment agency) work alongside the dole-workers; in such cases, the dole-workers are brought brutally to face a possible future: a non-unionized workforce, on lower pay, and subsisting on the number of bonuses gained by finding jobs or placements for the unemployed 'clients'. The performance of these private companies has been consistently poorer than the Employment Service. Despite this, and despite the campaigns by Jobcentre staff, the contracts of firms such as Reed have been renewed. Private companies have also been invited to compete with the Jobcentres in tendering for the running of the 'single work focus gateway' schemes(26) and the planned 'Employment Zones'. (27)

Struggles over privatization have already been won and lost in the council-run housing benefits services. Despite a strike, housing benefits in Sheffield have been partially out-sourced. Similarly, the private firm Capita is now running housing benefits in Lambeth. But Capita's bid to run the service in Brighton and Hove was defeated earlier this year after an intense workers' campaign, including the threat of an illegal 'political' strike; many of the workers involved felt that they had little to lose by threatening such action.

The 'social Europe' is the New Europe

While one of the purposes of this article is to point out that the 'Third Way' in the UK and the 'new reformism' in Europe are each attempting to re-impose work through similar post-social-democratic policies, we must also acknowledge their differences - differences which reflect different national histories. The restructuring and rebuilding that took place in Continental Europe following the second world war meant that, by the 1970s, working practices in Germany and France in particular were more competitive than those of the UK, which remained antiquated and entrenched. Therefore, UK capital, unlike most of the other major European states, had to take drastic action to restructure its economy.

But as well as UK capital finding it more necessary than the Europeans to restructure, the UK also had rather more scope to do so. Given the existence of a large finance-capital sector which could continue to cream off surplus-value from abroad through the money markets, the backward manufacturing sector could simply be sacrificed. By contrast, in Germany, for example, there was no alternative to continuing to base the economy on manufacturing. Hence Germany, unlike Britain, retained key social democratic policies such as corporatism, even during the decades during which it was forced, like Britain, to pursue policies aimed at controlling the money supply.

The continued reliance of European national capitals on manufacture, and hence the absence of precipitous Thatcherite restructuring in these countries, has meant that the working class in Continental Europe has for the most part remained stronger than in the UK. Social democracy has therefore not retreated as far in Europe as here in Britain. Thus whereas the election of New Labour in the UK was understood by most on the left as signalling the continuation of the 'neo-liberal' agenda of the Thatcherite period, the re-emergence of the 'socialists' elsewhere in Europe was interpreted by many as a partial resurgence of social democracy - a turn to the left.

Yet, even to the extent that the ruling parties in Europe are to the left of New Labour (not difficult - even the Liberal Democrats are to the left of New Labour!) theirs is now a hollowed out social democracy. Since the 1970s, all nation-states have been experiencing broadly similar political-economic pressures due to the global autonomy of finance capital. This apparent externalization of the imperatives of capital accumulation has prompted all the European countries to continue to re-structure and hence to think again about how they impose work. Thus, for example, the consensus now amongst the bourgeoisie is that the German social model, once an exemplar of social democratic progress and productivity, must be 'reformed' if it is to retain its place as the economic powerhouse of Europe: its workforce is seen as pampered, over-regulated and inflexible and its welfare system unaffordably generous.

Some of the European governments have expressed reservations about following the UK model too closely. Yet key aspects of the Third Way are already ascendant on the Continent. The major European states have implemented workfare or other intensive programmes to 'help the unemployed back to work', paralleling the emblematic New Deal in Britain: for example, the 'law against exclusion' in France and 'Jump' in Germany. Indeed, the most successful European role-model for the Third Way is not Britain but Denmark, where the introduction of intensive job-search programmes is claimed to have led to a growth in the workforce far beyond that of the UK. Like the New Deal, the European employment-counselling and work-experience programmes are a conscious echo of old-style job-creation programmes - yet without the job-creation.

Some of the other 'reforms' similarly echo a social democratic heritage. Principal among these are measures to reduce working time (e.g. in Germany and France) which, where already implemented, have served as a justification for intensifying work, increasing overtime and freezing wages.
For example, Volkswagen's 'pioneering' of a much-reduced working week has been the means through which production has been restructured and rationalized at its German factories.

At the beginning of the 90s, prior to the reduction in working time, workers at the Wolfsburg plant had the highest wages and bonuses, the longest breaks and the best holiday arrangements among comparable workers - and their cars took longest to assemble. A reduction in working time to 28.8 hours per week was proposed as a way of restructuring without getting into an expensive and confrontational programme of mass redundancies.

In fact, the labour force at VW has been reduced through 'natural wastage'. Those that remain have in effect sacrificed much of their collective control over how their work is organized. There are no common breaks between different teams of workers, thus reducing their opportunities for communication. Depending on the demands of production, workers may be sent to sites many miles away. With the nominal 28.8 hour week, flexible schedules - four, five or six days a week plus night shifts - have enabled production to be intensified. The assembly time per car has now dropped from 30 hours in 1993 to 20 hours in 1998. Production was raised in that year, and a further productivity raise is on the agenda. At the same time, regular monthly wages have stayed the same, but cuts in the yearly bonus payments mean that the annual wage has dropped by 16 per cent.(28)

Current limits of resistance

Due to the workerism of the left 'opposition', the so-called 'social democrats' who govern Europe in the late 1990s have perhaps been more successful then their more right-wing predecessors in creating a new 'consensus' around the value of work for all. Thus, the rallying cry of the 'new reformists' in government - 'against neo-liberalism' - is precisely that of the left 'opposition'. And thus for example the demands articulated by the Euromarchers - 'against unemployment, job insecurity and social exclusion' - are, except perhaps for the middle one, values which are dear to hearts of the 'new reformers' in government.(29) The demands of the extra-parliamentary left for 'real jobs' have been outflanked, undercut and superseded. The relative success of the 'new reformist' governments in beginning to impose their programmes of flexibility, workfare and labour-discipline shows that 'real jobs' have already been redefined!

However, the network of campaigns and groups endeavouring to become a European social movement around un\employment issues is made up of many different strands, not all of which take the same attitude to the 'new reformist' governments. Yet it is some of the more apparently radical groups who appear to pose the greatest danger of recuperation through their attempt to represent a proletarian movement.
In France, for example, 'AC!' network, which has been involved with both the unemployed movement(30) and the Euromarches, includes some radical tendencies which seek to develop the network to confront wage-labour as such. Yet they do this through attempting to create unity around a demand - that of a guaranteed income.(31) The German group FelS, which grew out of the autonomen movement but now seeks to escape from the ultra-radical ghetto, likewise is attempting to mobilize around this demand. They are quite up-front in stating that it is merely tactical - a transitional demand which they don't expect to be realized yet which appears halfway reasonable in the given political climate.(32)

A problem with this 'tactical' use of social democratic demands is that it reflects a conception of the working class as passive. The working class is seen as in need of leadership from outside in the form of disingenuous and artificial demands which supposedly unite them. Such demands are artificial in that they do not express a genuine tendency of a movement; indeed, the aim is to create, not consolidate, a movement. (33)
This approach also fails to appreciate that progressive welfare-state reforms are not some linear stepping stone to a world without wage labour. They are a form of mediation; and to the extent that the working class becomes mobilized behind them, then the proletariat, as the obverse of capital, becomes demobilized. Thus the leftists who regard the recent 'resurgence of social democracy' as an opportunity to mobilize around and build upon through a set of ('transitional') demands are therefore doomed to legitimize and support the re-imposition of work, arguing only about its terms.

The 'transitional demand' approach is not the only form of resistance inadequate to the current re-imposition of work. Across Europe, some of the more informal strategies of resistance are already being superseded and recuperated. Partly, the limits of these forms of resistance reflect the fact that they were based on a narrow and dated understanding of 'the world of work'. It is not enough to oppose 'our work' to 'their work'. This false opposition is all too clear in the post-social-democratic governments' co-option and integration of so many forms of 'escape' into their own programmes and hence into the labour-market as a whole: the 'intermediate labour market',(34) the 'voluntary' sector (now not so voluntary), forms of low-level workers' control such as co-operative enterprises (in which workers work harder for less pay),(35) petty entrepreneurship (the 'alternative' economy) and black market casual jobs on the side (now to become your subsidized real job!).

The argument of this article has been that the Third Way and the 'social Europe' are attempting to impose work in a way distinct both from social democracy, with its 'bribe' of social protection and 'full employment', and from 'neo-liberal' policies, with their lumpen mass unemployment. Social democracy is still in retreat and purely neo-liberal policies were merely a moment of restructuring.

By the same token, however, it is not clear how long Third Way policies themselves will be seen as appropriate for capital's task of consolidating the restructuring that has been taking place. We have devoted much space to the Welfare-to-Work programme; but when the New Deal reaches the end of its four-year life-span, will there be a different 'emblem' to represent the government's approach?

While certain forms of resistance are today largely superseded, at some point this supersession will itself be superseded by resistance. New Labour and the 'new reformist' governments of Europe will continue their active interventions to enhance work-discipline only to the extent that they see these interventions as having the desired effect on the labour-market. When the labour-market fails to respond, capital may be obliged once more to turn to the more traditional means of imposing and re-imposing work: mass unemployment.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 'Kill or chill?:analysis of the opposition to thre Criminal Justice Bill'(Aufheben 4,Summer 1995) suggested that traditional forms of mediation of proletarian needs are in crisis,as expressed in the failure of official labour movement to represent recent struggles(poll tax,CJB). The Editorial in Aufheben 6(Autumn 1997) raised the quwstion of what the retreat,or possible resurgence of social democracy might mean for revolutionaries. 'Social Democracy: No Future?' developed this question by conceptualizing and situating social democracy historically.The possibility that the high point of neo-liberal triumphalism has passed was illustrated in our review of recent US workplace struggles(State of the Unions:Recent US labour struggles in perspective, Aufheben 7, Autumn 1998).In our analysis of the recent trend towards workfare-like schemes,and the relative weakness of unemployed struggles,we argued that,while the post-war triumph of social democracy served to create a split between mundane needs and utopian desires within the proletariat,the decline of social democracy has yet to see the end of this fragmentation of our struggles (Dole Autonomy versus the re-imposition of work:Analysis of the current tendency to workfare in the UK')Our recent article,'Unemployed recalcitrance andwelfare re-structuring in the UK today',summarizes and develops the arguments of 'Dole autonomy',arguing that what has happened in Britain has relevance for Europe,where the 'new reformism' has been taken by some as an opportunity to mobilize the working class around a series of radical-reformist demands.This last article is available in 'Stop the clock:Critiques of the new social workhouse'.

2 'Separation of property from labour appears as the necessary law of this exchange between capital and labour. Labour posited as not-capital as such is .. (2) Not-objectified labour, not-value, conceived positively, or as a negativity in relation to itself, is the not ­objectified, hence non-objective, i.e subjective existence of labour itself Labour not as an object, but as an activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value.' Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin edition, pp.295-6).

3 We do not share the late autonomist view that capital has transcended value, that the class struggle is now about power, and therefore that work-discipline is about discipline for its own sake. Capital is a subject only by virtue of the 'law of value'. See 'Escape from the Law of Value?' in Aufheben 5 (Autumn 1996).

4 Our use of the term 'fordism' does not mean that we accept notions of 'post-fordism' nor the overall technological determinism of the Regulation School.For us the class struggle is detrminant.The concept of Fordism is a useful descriptive term which helps us to understand a particular period of class relations which the struggle produced and within which it then developed.

5 See Toni Negri, 'Capitalist domination and working class sabotage' in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis.Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class Movement:1964-79, (1979, Red Notes/CSE Books). See also the discussion of the Zerzan-Reeve argument in The Refusal of Work (1979, Echanges et Mouvement).

6 High levels of overtime also contributed much to these relatively high wages. People worked harder for less, and with cut-backs in social spending and the elimination of various scams the general development has been to impose the need for money all the more acutely.

7 America's official unemployment rate is only half the 11% of the European OECD nations. However, the official figure of around 4.5% (August 1999) doesn't include the huge section of the US population currently in prison.

8 Eighteen million new jobs have been created since 1993, with, it is claimed, little evidence of price pressures or the economy overheating.

9 Since 1973, the US working class has suffered a 20% fall in living standards and a 10-20% increase in the working week. See Loren Goldner, 1998, International liquidity crisis and class struggle: First approximation. Between 1989 and 1993, median family incomes fell by $2,737 p.a. (Guardian, 20th February, 1995) 10 There are now 7.3 million people in the USA collecting welfare payments. This compares with 12.2 million when President Clinton signed the legislation authorizing time-limited benefits and 14.1 million when he took office in 1993. (The Times, August 4, 1999).

11 There is loads of literature on the economies and politics of workfare. See, for example: F.F. Piven & RA. Cloward (1993) Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare (2nd edition), New York, Vintage; Jamie Peek (1998) 'Workfare: A geopolitical etymology' (Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 16); Chris Tilly (1996) 'Workfare's impact on the New York City labour market: Lower wages and worker displacement'

12 The Conservatives introduced PFI only when there was nothing else left that they could sell off wholesale.

13 This extends to promoting a particular kind of family life - hence the teaching of parenting skills (compulsory?), the talk of cooking lessons for the poor and the plan to install teenage mothers in hostels, where they can be 'guided'.

14 The social-interventionist and work-worshipping tendencies of New Labour and the Third Way invite comparisons with fascism. But such a comparison would be somewhat superficial; the Third Way is more 'modern' than fascism. Indeed, it is social democracy that perhaps has a closer relation to fascism. Fascism is social democracy's dark shadow, and both mobilize the working class and attempt to socialize capital through the state-form more than does the Third Way. See 'When Insurrections Die' by GilIes Dauve'

15 This programme of job-counselling, training, schemes and subsidized work is compulsory for 18-24 year olds who have been unemployed six months or more.

16 Welfare spending is only about 12% of GDP and declining.

17 In this case £3.5 billion over four years.

18 'The Government's aim is to rebuild the welfare state around work ('The importance of work', Chapter 3 of the Government's welfare reform green paper.)

19 Currently £3.60 an hour for those over 21.

20 Indeed, until the 1980s, the trade union movement was against a minimum wage, recognizing that it would act as a wage ceiling. Trade unions were concerned to keep the state out of interfering with their 'free collective bargaining' over wages.

21 Of these, nearly 30% have been placed in unsubsidized jobs, with around 20% currently on one of the placements, euphemistically known as 'options' (subsidized work, 'voluntary' sector, environmental task force' and education/training - the latter being the 'option' with by far the largest take-up).

22 For example:Working Brief,May 1999;J.Atkinson(1999) The new Deal for Young People:A Summary of Progress
(Employment Service/Institute for Employment Studies)

23 See, for example, Evening Standard, 31st March 1999.

24 The sanctions were introduced under the JSA, which illustrates the underlying continuity between the punitive approach of the Conservatives and the New Deal.

25 Demos was formed by ex-Communist Party leftovers.

26 One name mentioned in connection with running the 'Gateway' is Andersen Consulting, a firm already notorious for their both incompetent and ruthless running of the benefits system in Ontario, Canada. See the article in Where's My Giro? 6

27 In the 'Employment Zones', due to be introduced in April 2000 to a number of unemployment 'black spots', long-term unemployed people over 25 have to make themselves more employable by managing a sum of money that would otherwise be spent on them through benefits and training.

28 See the Wildcat (Germany) article '35 hour week: Lower incomes and more work', the Movement Communiste (France) article '35 hours against the proletariat', and the article by Amici di Marinus van der Lubbe (Italy) 'The awkward question of times.' All are in a forthcoming publication provisionally sub-titled Illusions of the Welfare State and Working Time Reduction.

29 Is it any wonder that at least one of the groups involved with Euromarch, 'Different Europe', is funded by the European Parliament!

30 The unemployed 'movement' of 1997 demanded and got improvements in benefits. Yet the more we have leamed about the nature of the French unemployed struggle since its high point of December 1997, the less of a 'movement' does it appear. See, for example, 'The unemployed movement: A struggle under the influence...' by Olga Morena in Oiseau-tempete 3, Summer 1998 (c/o AB Irato, BP 328, 75525 Paris Cedex 11, France) and the Movement Communiste article 'Considerations on agitations of unemployed people and precarious' in the forthcoming publication provisionally sub-titled Illusions of the Welfare State and Working Time Reduction.

31 See, for example, 'Steps towards a European network for income' by the AC! Commission on Income, December 1998.

32 See also the useful critique of the FelS position by Walter Hanser, from the Freiburg Alliance Against Work, which is available at the FelS website

33 All this is dealt with in more detail in the excellent Wildcat (Germany) article 'Reforming the welfare state for saving capitalism' in the forthcoming publication provisionally sub-titled Illusions of the Welfare State and Working Time Reduction.

34 Squatting initiatives in parts of Europe have in a number of cases accepted the double-edged sword of workfare by formalizing their activities and lifestyles within subsidized work schemes. See for example'Desire is speaking: An overview of the European squat-punk culture' in Do or Die 8 (c/o 6 Tilbury Place, Brighton 8N2 2GY).

35 Encouragement of worker involvement in co-operative enterprises in Italy have led to an intensification of work and served to undercut the pay and conditions of other workers, See Precari Nati (c/o Diego Negri, Casella Postale 640, 40124 Bologna, Italy).

What was the USSR? Part III: Left communism and the Russian revolution

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What was the USSR? Aufheben
- What was the USSR? Part I: Trotsky and State Capitalism
- What was the USSR? Part II: Russia as a Non-mode of Production
- What was the USSR? Part III: Left communism and the Russian revolution
- What was the USSR? Part IV: Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value

In the previous articles we examined various Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist positions on the nature of the USSR.

We now turn to the theories of the less well known but more interesting Communist Left, who were among the first revolutionary Marxists to distance themselves from the Russian model by deeming it state capitalist or simply capitalist. The Russian Left Communists' critique remained at the level of an immediate response to how capitalist measures were affecting the class, whereas in both the German/Dutch and Italian Lefts, we see real attempts to ground revolutionary theory in Marx's categories in a way distinct from Second International orthodoxy.

What was the USSR?

Towards a Theory of the Deformation of Value

Part III: Left Communism and the Russian Revolution

Any analysis of the USSR necessarily involves an underlying conception of what the Russian Revolution was. The Trotskyist approaches that we have previously considered are all based on the conception of the Russian Revolution as being an essentially proletarian revolution that somehow degenerated. By contrast a consideration of Left Communist theories allow us to question this underlying assumption, and as a result provides vital insights into the development of a theory of what the USSR was.

The Russian revolution seemed to show for the first time that workers could actually overthrow a bourgeois capitalist state and run society themselves. After almost all of the socialist parties and trade unions of the mainstream Second International workers movement patriotically supported the slaughter of the first world war, the Bolsheviks it seemed had reasserted an internationalist revolutionary Marxism. But if the Russian revolution was initially a massive inspiration to proletarians across the world, being a first outbreak in the revolutionary wave that ended the war, its impact after that is more ambiguous. The word 'communist' became associated with a system of state control of the means of production, coupled with severe repression of all opposition. The workers movement across the world was dominated by this model of 'actually existing socialism', and the parties who oriented themselves to it. The role of these regimes and parties was to do more to kill the idea of proletarian revolution and communism than ordinary capitalist repression had ever been able to. So those in favour of proletarian revolution had to distinguish themselves from these official communist parties and to make sense of what had happened in Russia. A group that did so was the Left Communists or Communist Left.

Who was this communist left?

The Communist Left emerged out of the crisis of Marxist Social Democracy that became acutely visible during the war. Left Communist currents emerged across the world. Those with politics that we and Lenin could describe as left communist were generally the first revolutionary militants from their respective countries attracted to the Russian Revolution and to the Communist International (Comintern) set up in 1919. In some countries notably Germany, Italy a majority of those who formed their respective communist parties had left communist politics. However their experience was - sooner or later - to find themselves in disagreement with the policies promoted from Moscow and eventually excluded from the Communist International.

Two main wings of the Communist Left managed to survive the defeat of the revolutionary wave as traditions: the German/Dutch Left1 (sometimes known as Council Communists) and the Italian Left (sometimes referred to as Bordigists after a founding member). While their analyses were not the same on all points, what really defined them was a perception of the need for communist revolutionary politics to be a fundamental break from those of Social Democracy. Such a break necessarily implied an attempt to overcome the dichotomy between the political and the economic that was central to the theory of the Second International.

Although they disagreed at what time it occurred, their perception was that the Bolshevik party slipped back into, or never quite left Social Democratic positions. Identifying themselves as revolutionary and as Marxist the common problem for these currents was to understand what had happened in a way that was true to both. While saying the Soviet Union was capitalist allowed a revolutionary position to be taken up against it, they found it necessary to do this in a way that made sense in terms of Marx's categories and understanding of capitalism. Out of their different experiences they developed very different theories of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and of the capitalism that developed in the USSR.

However these oppositions to the Moscow line were largely eclipsed by the strength of Stalinism in the workers' movement and by a later opposition to this that grew up around Leon Trotsky, the exiled leader of the Russian Communist Party and state. Due to the revolutionary credentials and prestige of its founder, Trotskyism established itself as the most visible and numerous opposition to the left of the official 'Communist' movement. Particularly in Britain, which has not really generated its own left Marxist tradition, it managed to plausibly present itself against Stalinism as the genuine revolutionary Marxism. For this reason we devoted the previous articles to a presentation and critique of theories of the USSR coming out of Trotskyism: the orthodox Trotskyist theory of the degenerated workers state, Tony Cliff's version of state capitalism, and Hillel Ticktin's recently influential theory of Russia as a specifically distorted and untenable society.2

We argued that a weakness of all these theories was that they moved within a certain kind of orthodox Marxism. Identifying with the Soviet state under Lenin and Trotsky, they assumed that, on the basis of the traditional Marxist premise that socialism is the abolition of private property in the means of production through its wholesale nationalisation by the state, that there had been a successful socialist revolution in Russia which in some way had degenerated. They disagreed on what type of system had emerged, but they generally saw it as hinging on the lack of workers' democratic control of nationalised property. For Trotskyism, Leninism is the revolutionary alternative to the Second International, and Trotskyism was the revolutionary continuation of Leninism against Stalinism. The existence of a Communist Left threatens this picture. It shows that Trotskyism was by no means the only Marxist opposition to Stalinism. In fact, as we'll see, it questions whether Trotskyism has been a 'revolutionary' opposition at all.

However while Trotskyism, through the flexible tactics it was willing to adopt, could exist on the fringes of a Stalinist and social democratic dominated workers' movement, the left communists, their politics fundamentally oriented to revolutionary situations, were reduced by the thirties to a far smaller and more isolated existence. It was only after Stalinism's hold on the revolutionary imagination began to break in 1956 and with the wave of struggles beginning in the sixties that there was a resurgence of interest in revolutionary tendencies to the left of Trotskyism, like the Communist Left. The focus on Councils and workers' self-activity that was basic to the German Left was taken up by groups like Socialism or Barbarism (and its linked British group Solidarity) and by the Situationist International.3 The German Communist Left which declared itself anti-Leninist was more immediately attractive to those rejecting Stalinism and the critical support given it by Trotskyism than the Italian Left which, because it emphasised the party, seemed like another version of Leninism. However after '68 partly due to a perceived weakness of a merely 'councilist' or 'libertarian' opposition to Leninism, there was a renewal of interest in the Italian Left which was the other main Communist left to have handed down a tradition.4

In this article we shall look at the various theories of the Russian, German/Dutch and Italian Communist Left. We shall ignore certain other communist lefts because either they have not managed to pass down any theoretical writings on the question or because as, say, with the British Left they largely followed the German/Dutch left on the question of the Russian Revolution.5 Our point of departure is that Communist Left which developed within the Russian Revolution itself and which received Lenin's wrath before the rest. Though the Russian Left cannot be said to have developed the same body of coherent theory as the other two, its very closeness to the events gives its considerations a certain importance.

The Russian Left Communists

What is striking about the Russian Left Communist current is that it emerged out of an environment that was both dissimilar and similar to the their European counterparts. As we will see in the following sections, the German and Italian Communist Lefts emerged as an opposition to social democracy's accommodation with and incorporation into bourgeois society. In Russia the situation was somewhat different. Still being an overwhelmingly agricultural and peasant country under the autocratic rule of the tsar, bourgeois society had not become dominant, let alone allowed the establishment of social democracy within it. In fact, the very repressive character of the tsarist regime meant that the gradualist approach of stressing legal parliamentary and trade union methods that prevailed in Western Europe was largely absent in Russia, and there was a general acceptance of the need for a violent revolution. This need was confirmed by the 1905 revolution, which saw mass strikes, the setting up of soviets, wide-spread peasant uprisings - in general a violent confrontation of revolutionary workers and peasants with the forces of the state. But whilst this context set the Russian Social Democrats apart from their European counterparts, there was also an underlying continuity between the two. In fact, Lenin throughout tried to stay true to the orthodoxies of Second International Marxism, and accepted Kautsky, the chief theorist of German social democracy, as an ideological authority.6 Basic to this form of Marxism was the notion of history inevitably moving in the right direction by concentrating and centralising the productive forces, so that socialism would be simply the elimination of the private control of those forces by the capture of state power and social democratic administration of them in the interest of the whole of society. But whereas the developed character of West European capitalism meant that in these countries this theory dove-tailed with a gradualist and parliament centred approach, due to the backwardness of Russian society, it took a revolutionary form.

The revolutionary side of Lenin's Marxism, as against other European social democrat leaders, was expressed most clearly when he took an uncompromising position of revolutionary opposition to the war.7 On this fundamental issue Russian left communists had no reason for disagreement with Lenin. Nevertheless, this was to occur on other issues, such as Lenin's position on nationalism, and his view (until 1917) that Russia could only have a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Consequently, an opposing left fraction around Bukharin8 and Pyatakov formed within the Bolsheviks. They contended that the war had prompted great advances of finance capital and state capitalism in Russia that made socialist revolution a possibility.. Fundamentally they saw the issue as one of world revolution of which Russia could be part. A key text for them was Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy. In it he drew heavily on the essentially reformist Hilferding to argue that world capitalism, including Russia, was moving in the direction of state capitalist trusts where the state became appropriated by a finance capital elite. However, he took a much more radical interpretation of the political significance of these developments. The 'symbiosis of the state and finance capital elite' meant that the parliamentary road of Social Democracy was blocked and socialists had to return to the anti-statist strand in Marx's thought. The state had to be destroyed as a condition of socialism. However for the Russian situation, what was key about Bukharin's analysis of imperialism and state capitalism was that it allowed Russian left communists to abandon the classical Marxist line (held by both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks) that Russia was only ready for a bourgeois-democratic revolution..

But despite Lenin's initial hostility to the heretical ideas coming out of this left fraction,9 after the February revolution he showed that he would not let his orthodoxy prevent him from being open to events. Just as the Bolshevik leadership thought that a long period of development of bourgeois society was on the horizon, it was clear from the continuing actions of the workers and peasants that the revolutionary period was by no means over. Workers were setting up factory committees and militantly contesting capitalist authority at the point of production; peasant soldiers were deserting the front and seizing land. Responding to this, and against the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin in 1917 seemed to take up all the essential positions of the left communist tendency within the party. In the April Theses he called for proletarian socialist revolution. To give this a Marxist justification, he argued in The Impending Catastrophe and How to Avoid It that the war had revolutionised Russian society by developing state capitalism. Meanwhile, he was writing State and Revolution, which saw him at his most un-social democratic; he even acknowledged the Dutch left communist, Pannekoek. Due to the now clearly revolutionary line of the Bolshevik party, it consequently became the pole of re-groupment for revolutionary Social Democrats and for radicalised workers. All those against the war and for taking the revolution forward were drawn to the Bolsheviks: Trotsky's followers, many left Mensheviks, but most importantly vast numbers of radicalised workers. Thus revolutionaries with politics closest to the European left communists were not as with them, fairly small minorities fighting within Social Democratic parties against their clearly non-revolutionary politics, but instead were a sizeable part of a party - the Bolsheviks - whose leader Lenin seemed to accept many of their theoretical positions, and what's more brought the party to act on these by overthrowing the provisional government and declaring 'All Power to the Soviets'.

Organic Reconstruction: Back to Orthodoxy

But if the revolutionary side of Lenin seemed in 1917 to break from social democratic orthodoxy - if it seemed to the left that he had become one of them - soon after October, they were to doubt it. A dichotomy between political and economic aspects of the revolution became apparent in his thinking. For Lenin, the proletarian character of the revolution was assured in the political power of a proletarian party; 'economic' issues, like the relations at the point of production, were not of the essence. More and more Lenin's attention returned to Russia's backwardness, its unripeness for immediate social transformation and thus the paradoxical notion that state capitalist economic developments under the proper political guidance of the party might be the best path towards socialism. This turn in Lenin's thinking was obscured at first by another question: how to respond to Germany's terms for peace at the Brest Litovsk negotiations. Whilst the group known as the Left Communists were for rejecting these conditions and turning the imperialist war into, if not an outright revolutionary war, then a defensive revolutionary partisan war,10 Lenin insisted on accepting Germany's terms for peace. Peace, he argued, was needed at any price to consolidate the revolution in Russia; to win 'the freedom to carry on socialist construction at home'.11

The Left responded again by stressing the internationalist perspective, and argued that an imperialist peace with Germany would carry as much danger as the continuation of the imperialist war. Such a peace, by strengthening Germany - which had faced a massive wave of wildcat strikes in early 1918 - would act against the prospects of world revolution. Hence, Lenin's apparent choice of temporarily prioritising the consolidation of the Russian revolution over spreading the world revolution was, for them, a false one. By taking a limited nationally oriented perspective at Brest Litovsk what would be consolidated, they argued, was not 'socialist construction' but the forces of counter-revolution within Russia. As such, the left communists were then the earliest proponents of the view that you cannot have socialism in one country.

But whilst the Left Communists position initially had majority support from the Russian working class, this support faded as Germany launched an offensive. Lenin's arguments, which he pursued with vigour, then prevailed leading to the treaty of Brest Litovsk, under which the Bolshevik government agreed to German annexation of a vast part of the area in which revolution had broken out including the Baltic nations, the Ukraine and a part of White Russia.12

The sacrifice of pursuing world revolution for national 'socialist construction' became all the greater as it became clear exactly what Lenin meant by this term. In face of the Bolsheviks not having a very clear plan of what to do economically after seizing power, the first five months were characterised by the self-activity and creativity of the workers. The workers took the destruction of the provisional government as the signal to intensify and extend their expropriation of the factories and replacement of capitalist control by forms of direct workers control. This process was not initiated by the Bolshevik government, but by the workers themselves through the Soviets and especially the factory committees. The Bolsheviks reluctantly or otherwise had to run with the tide at this point. This period was a high point of proletarian self activity: a spontaneous movement of workers socialisation of production, which the Bolsheviks legitimized (one might argue recuperated) after the event with the slogan 'Loot the Looters', and their decrees on Workers Control and the nationalisation of enterprises. The workers were euphoric with the communist possibilities of abolishing exploitation and controlling their own destinies.

However, by spring (as the treaty of Brest Litovsk was signed), Lenin pushed the Bolsheviks to initiate a different economic policy called the New Course involving a more conciliatory attitude towards "creative elements" in the business community'. While Lenin didn't disown entirely what the workers had done, there was the clear message they had gone too far. Their acts should now be curtailed and controlled. In their place, he talked of setting up joint state/private capitalist trusts. The basic idea seemed essentially to be a mixed economy with co-operation between public and private sectors. Although the Mensheviks welcomed these measures as the abandonment of the 'illusory chase after socialism' and a turn to a more moderate realistic path, Lenin still tried to differentiate himself from the Mensheviks, by stating that as long as the state remains in the hand of the proletarian party, the economy would not degenerate into normal state capitalism. Significantly, the other side of this focus on the 'proletarian state' was that Lenin, while wanting a return to capitalist methods of economic organisation saw no need for the other main Menshevik demand: for independent workers organisation. As Lenin put it, "defence of the workers' interests was the task of the unions under capitalism, but since power has passed to the hands of the proletariat the state itself, in its essence the workers state, defends the workers interests.'

It is this New Course which the Left Communists were to oppose in their theses13 published in response to the peace treaty. In it they identified the peace treaty as a concession to the peasants, and as a slide towards 'petty bourgeois politics of a new type'. They saw bureaucratic centralisation as an attack on the independent power of the soviets, and on the self-activity of the working class, and warned that by such means something very different from socialism was about to be established. The New Course talk of accommodation with capitalist elements in Russia was seen as expressive of what had become clear earlier with Lenin's willingness to compromise with imperialism over Brest Litovsk, namely an overall drift towards compromise with the forces of international and internal capital. The left communists warned that behind the argument for saving and defending Soviet power in Russia for international revolution later, what would happen was that "all efforts will be directed towards strengthening the development of productive forces towards 'organic construction', while rejecting the continued smashing of capitalist relations of production and even furthering their partial restoration." [10] What was being defended in Russia was not socialist construction, but a 'system of state capitalism and petty bourgeois economic relations. The defence of the socialist fatherland' will then prove in actual fact to be defence of a petty bourgeois motherland subject to the influence of international capital." [9]

Lenin's Arguments for State Capitalism Versus the Left Communists

It is not surprising that Lenin was forced to reply to this accusation of pursuing state capitalist economic policies. What is revealing though is that when he did so in Left Wing Childishness and Immediate Tasks, it was not by justifying the recent measures as a form of socialism, but by fully endorsing state capitalism and arguing it would be an advance for Russia. He now brought into question his prior arguments that Russia was part of a world state capitalism and thus ripe for socialism, which had seemed necessary to justify proletarian revolution in 1917. Lenin again returned to the notion of Russia's backwardness. A theory of transition based on the Second International acceptance of unilinear 'progressive' stages came to the fore. He noted that all would agree that Russia being in transition meant that it contained elements of socialism and capitalism, but he now said the actual situation was even more complicated. In a model that we will see was key to his understanding, Lenin argued that Russia's backwardness meant it actually combined five types of economic structure:

(1) patriarchal, i.e. to a considerable extent natural, peasant farming;

(2) small commodity production (this includes the majority of those peasants who sell their grain);

(3) private capitalism;

(4) state capitalism;

(5) socialism

Russia, he claimed, while having advanced politically was not economically advanced enough for direct advances towards socialism. The state capitalism, that he had earlier seemed to agree with the left communists had arrived in Russia was, now he said only a shell pierced by the lower forms of economy. The real battle in Russia, he contended, was not that of socialism and capitalism, but of state capitalism and socialism on one side versus all the other economies on the other. Economic growth and even economic survival he contended depended on state capitalist measures. The ones he argued for included the paying of high salaries to bourgeois specialists, the development of rigid accounting and control with severe penalties for those who break it, increased productivity and intensity of labour, piece work and the 'scientific and progressive' elements of the Taylor system.

The overarching repeated demand from Lenin was for 'discipline, discipline, discipline' and he identified this with the acceptance by the workers of one-man management - that is 'unquestioned obedience to the will of a single person.' The arguments of the left that this was suppressing class autonomy and threatened to enslave the working class was just dismissed by Lenin with the insistence that there was "absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals." [ p 268] All it was apparently, was a matter of learning "to combine the "public meeting" democracy of the working people - turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood - with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work.'" [ p 271] The point for Lenin was that as long as it was a proletarian state that introduced these measures it could prevent regression down the rungs of the ladder and prepare for the eventual movement up towards socialism.

Left wing opposition to Lenin's line at this point had two main thrusts, which in part reflected a division in the 1918 left communists. One side we might call 'technocratic', emphasised opposition to precisely what the Mensheviks welcomed, namely the suggested compromises with private capitalists. They argued that whoever controlled the economy would control politics, capitalist economic power would dissolve the power of the Soviets and 'a real state capitalist system' and the rule of finance capital would be the result. The other thrust of left communist criticism was against the re-employment of authoritarian capitalist relations and methods within production. As Ossinsky in particular argued, one man management and the other impositions of capitalist discipline would stifle the active participation of workers in the organisation of production; Taylorism turned workers into the appendages of machines, and piece-wages imposed individualist rather than collective rewards in production so installing petty bourgeois values into workers. In sum these measures were rightly seen as the re-transformation of proletarians within production from collective subject back into the atomised objects of capital. The working class, it was argued, had to consciously participate in economic as well as political administration. In this best tendency within the 1918 Left Communists, there was an emphasis on the problem with capitalist production being the way it turned workers into objects, and on its transcendence lying in their conscious creativity and participation, that is reminiscent of Marx's critique of alienation. It is the way the Russian left communists arguments expressed and reflected workers reactions and resistance to the state capitalist direction of the Bolsheviks and workers aspirations to really transform social relations, that there importance lay. Such sentiments ran through the left oppositions, even if until 1921 their loyalty to the party generally stopped them supporting workers practical expressions of resistance. As Ossinsky put it:

"We stand for the construction of the proletarian society by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by the ukases of the captains of industry. If the proletariat itself does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation of labour, no one can do this for it and no one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the soviet power.. Socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all: something else will be set up - state capitalism."14

These arguments of Ossinsky represented the best element in the left communists' positions: a recognition that the mass creativity and autonomy of the workers was essential to any move towards communism, thus that nationalisation or statisation of production was not enough. Lenin's view was that direct workers control of their own activity was an issue for the future and that in the meantime iron discipline was required.

'War Communism'

The conditions of civil war and imperialist invasion that Russia fell into in the second half on 1918, altered the conditions of debate and broke the Left Communists as a cohesive opposition. On the one hand, where the alternative to the Bolsheviks was White armies committed to the restoration of the old order, criticism by workers and peasants of the measures the party was taking, was tempered. But apart from this pragmatic issue, the civil war also exposed the inadequate foundation much the left communist criticism had been based on. Considering that, for many left communists, their critique of the New Course, and the consequent accusation of state capitalism, was based mainly on the notion of compromise with private capitalists, and perceived concessions to the peasantry, in the face of what was to be called 'war communism' they had very little left to criticise. Not only did a whole wave of nationalisations take place, virtually wiping out the previous role of the private capitalist, but if there was one thing war communism was not, it was system based on concessions to the peasants. It consequently became difficult for them to describe Russia as state capitalist.

In fact, the technocratic wing of the Left Communist even went as far as welcoming 'war communism' as a real advance to communism. And when war communism resulted in mass inflation virtually wiping out money, they equally saw it as a general move to an economy in kind with all sorts of transactions, even wages, ceasing to use money. The self-emancipatory wing, (which was to provide both the original arguments as well as personnel of the later left oppositions of the Democratic Centralists and the Workers Opposition) took a more cautious stand. They had tended to focus their criticism on the excessive centralisation of power and the bureaucratic capitalist methods of the state economy, to which they counter-posed a restoration of power and local initiative to the soviets and other workers' bodies. But without the other components of their earlier critique, and considering that Lenin himself had described state capitalism - with all its management methods - as playing a progressive part, the left oppositions ceased to describe it as such.

The mistake of confusing the war-time measures as a step in the direction of socialism became clear as the war came to an end and the Bolsheviks tried to step up the war economy measures.15 The fallacy of associating state-control with socialism, despite the intensification of capitalistic production relations, became clear as workers and peasants reacted to their material situation with a wave of strikes and uprisings. The Kronstadt revolt in particular showed the giant gulf between the state and the working class. Despite this general discontent, both outside and within the party, Lenin responded with, on the one hand, the New Economic Policy (NEP), and on the other, the banning of factions with the famous statement that was to characterise the regime thereafter: 'Here and there with a rifle, but not with opposition; we've had enough opposition'.

New Economic Policy: New Opposition

It is important then to grasp that the NEP, which was essentially a return to the moderate state capitalism championed by Lenin in the New Course debate, did not mark an abandonment of communism, but merely a change in the form of state capitalism. Central to the New Economic Policy (NEP) was a changed relation to the peasantry with a progressive tax in kind replacing state procurement and leaving the peasants free to trade for a profit anything left above this. Free trade which had not disappeared was now legal. On the industrial front small scale production was totally denationalised and many, though not the largest factories, leased back to their former owners to run on a capitalist basis. For the working class there was reintroduced payment of wages in cash and charges for previously free services. The command economy of the 'war communism' years was abandoned in favour of the running of the economy on a commercial basis. Nevertheless the commanding heights of the economy remained under state control and the basis for systematic state planning in terms of forecasting etc. continued to be developed. In fact, the very continuity between the New Course and the NEP also showed up in the fact that Lenin, in trying to justify the NEP in the pamphlet Tax in Kind, reprinted large parts of his earlier critique of the Left Communists, including the '5 socio-economic structures' model of the Russian economy.

In 1921 Lenin gave the same reply to Workers Opposition accusations of state capitalism as he had to the Left Communists in 1918, namely that state capitalism would be a tremendous step forward from what Russia actually was, which was a 'petty producer capitalism with a working-class party controlling the state.'16 The key thing about the regime developing at the time of NEP was that, accompanying economic concessions to private capitalism, was intensified political repression, the banning of factions in the party, and non-toleration of any independent political tendencies in the working class. As Ciliga later observed, before the NEP the intensity of repression of left opposition had varied, after this date all opposition was repressed on principle and the treatment of prisoners grew worse.17

It was in this context of political repression and economic re-imposition of capitalist forms that a number of small opposition groups emerged, which again took up the notion of state capitalism. What was common to these new groups was that, unlike the previous left communist tendency and the later left opposition of Trotsky, these groups did make a decisive break from the Bolshevik party. One such group that emerged was the Workers Truth centred around an old left adversary of Lenin, Bogdanov. In issuing an Appeal, starting with Marx's famous 'the liberation of the workers can only be the deed of the workers themselves', they argued that the Bolshevik party was no longer a proletarian party, but rather the party of a new ruling class, and thus they called for a new party.18

With at first a little less theoretical clarity, it was however, the Workers Group, centred around Miasnikov, that made the biggest impact on the class. The main opposition strand had been the Workers Opposition, which while appearing to support the working class, had essentially been demanding a transfer of power from one party faction to another, namely that organised in the trade unions. Miasnikov and his supporters had at this point rejected both the state economic bodies and the trade unions as bureaucratised forms, and in arguing for a return of power to the soviets, had implicitly questioned the party. Miasnikov stood out even more by not supporting the repression of Kronstadt, which he described as an abyss the party had crossed. This willingness to break with the party was crucial because oppositions until then, though reflecting discontent outside the party, had remained wedded to it seeking refuge in organisational fixes that failed conspicuously to deliver.

In 1923 they produced a Manifesto appealing to both the Russian and international proletariat. Rather than theoretical considerations their description of the NEP as standing for the 'New Exploitation of the Proletariat' simply tries to express the conditions that the workers were facing. They denounced the attacks on the working class the Bolshevik regime was carrying out making a point that echoed Luxemburg:19 "the bourgeoisie has, and will have, no better advocate' than the 'socialists of all countries' because they have the ability to disorientate the proletariat with their phrases. Or again: 'a very great danger threatens the achievements of the Russian proletarian revolution, not so much from outside as from inside itself.' Expressing this emphasis on the world proletarian movement the workers group took a resolutely internationalist line. They were sure that the Russian proletariat's only hope lay in aid from revolution elsewhere. They argued that the Bolshevik policies of a 'socialist united fronts' and workers governments were acting against that hope of world revolution.20

However, the real significance of the group was the fact that they took their criticism of the state capitalist direction of the Bolsheviks to its logical conclusion of supporting proletarian opposition to the regime. In late '23 a wave of strikes broke out and the Workers Group became involved gaining an influence for their Manifesto among the proletariat and prompting their suppression by the secret police. Soon their existence was relegated to the prison camps or in exile. It was here that they moved away from their focus on the NEP, and started to question war communism. There their state capitalist analysis became more and more influential in the camps where, as Ciliga observed, a political life repressed elsewhere continued. They extended their critique to the sort of 'socialism' that the Bolsheviks had tried to create even before NEP, arguing that because it was based on coercion over the working class and not the free creation of the class, was in reality a bureaucratic state capitalism.

We have looked then at those arguments of the Russian Left most illuminating for an understanding of the Revolution. The importance of the 1918 Left Communists was not just the fact that they right from an early stage argued that there was a danger that not socialism, but capitalism would emerge from the revolution, but also because in his battles with them, Lenin most explicitly revealed his own support for 'state capitalism'. The importance of Miasnikov's Workers Group lay in them being the most significant of the post 1921 groups who took their criticism of the state capitalist direction of the Bolsheviks to its logical conclusion of supporting proletarian opposition to the regime. Their confrontation with the Russian state was far more consistent and coherent than that of Trotsky's Left opposition. However we cannot say that they provided the theoretical arguments to solidly ground a theory of state capitalism. We will turn now to the tendencies in Europe, with whom they made contact, to see if they had more success.

The German/Dutch Communist Left

In Germany the beginning of the century was characterised by a tension between official and unofficial expressions of working class strength. On the one hand, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had founded and dominated the Second International, had grown to an unprecedented scale (almost becoming a 'state within a state'), and was receiving steadily larger proportion of votes in elections. On the other, there was also an increased militancy and radicalisation of class struggle, manifesting itself in more and more strikes and lockouts21 - struggles that in many cases went beyond economic demands and took on a mass and political character. While a left radical current within the SPD was to see these as a way the class was developing towards revolution, the mainstream party and trade union leadership set itself against these new forms of class struggle. In the years to come these two expression of the working class were to drastically clash. Indeed the direct struggle between class and capital would become that of revolutionary tendency of the proletariat and social democracy siding with and representing capital.

The counter-revolutionary character of the gradualist practice of the SPD first came brutally to light when, in the interest of preparing for the next election, the party stepped in to demobilise a wave of industrial struggles and suffrage agitation that swept Prussia in 1910. Although leading to some fierce arguments over strategy between Kautsky and the emerging radical left tendency, it was only with the war that these oppositions made moves towards a split with the party. Despite always having had a position of opposing imperialist wars, the SPD and the unions turned to social patriotism - the party voted for war credits and the unions signed a pact to maintain war production and prevent strikes. As a result, two main opposition tendencies emerged: the left-communist tendency that split from the party, and the Spartacists that at first tried to stay within the party and reform it from within. However, their different responses to the SPD's turn to social patriotism, was emblematic of what was to follow. Whilst the left communists throughout put themselves on the side of revolution, the Spartacist leadership never entirely managed to break from social democratic conceptions.

The German Revolution: Breaking from Social Democracy

But whilst SPD's support for the war was important in generating a radical left tendency, it was only in the face of the German Revolution that the overtly counter-revolutionary character of social democracy became clear to large numbers of workers. The Russian Revolution had been a massive inspiration for revolutionaries and the class struggle in Germany. In early 1918 there was a wave of mass wildcat strikes. And although the SPD put a lid on these struggles, the opposition kept growing. Finally in November, revolution broke out when sailors mutinies and a generalised setting up of workers councils ended the first world war. The ruling class, knowing that it could in no way contain the revolutionary wave, turned to social democracy to save the nation, and appointed the SPD leader as chancellor. Knowing that direct confrontation would get them nowhere, they set themselves to destroy the councils from within. The Spartacists, trapped within a 'centrist' faction of social democracy, could only watch while it helped the SPD in this task. The SPD thus managed to get a majority vote at the first National Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils in favour of elections to a constituent assembly and for dissolving the councils in favour of that parliament. At the same time the trade unions worked hand in hand with management to get revolutionary workers dismissed and to destroy independent council activity in the factories. Councils against parliament and trade unions became the watch word of revolutionaries.

Recognising the depth of their failure, the Spartacists broke from social democracy and joined the left communists to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). And in January 1919, within days of this founding conference, the KPD was tested in combat. Prematurely provoked to action by the government, revolutionary workers in Berlin attempted to overthrow the SPD government in favour of a council republic. The KPD put itself on the side of the insurrection, which was crushed by the SPD minister Noske's freicorps - a volunteer army of proto-fascist ex-officers and soldiers. The Spartacist leaders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, were arrested and murdered. Over the next months revolutionary attempts in Bavaria, Bremen, Wilhemshaven and other places, were likewise defeated in isolation. Social democracy, through armed force when necessary, but more fundamentally through the ideological hold it and its trade unions had over the working class, had defeated the revolution and saved German capitalism.

However, within the class there was also a process of radicalisation. Large numbers of workers, recognising the counter-revolutionary role of the SPD and the unions, and having fought SPD troops and police on the streets, rejected the parliamentary system and left the unions. As an alternative they formed factory organisations to provide a means for united proletarian action, and to be ready for the re-formation of revolutionary council power. While the majority of the KPD, including the rank and file Spartacists, supported these developments, the Spartacist leadership still wanted to participate in elections and the trade unions. In mid-1919, by a series of bureaucratic manoeuvres they managed to exclude the majority from the party. The Bolsheviks essentially sided with this rump leadership. The basis of the split between the German communist left and the Bolsheviks was prepared.

In March/April 1920 the split in the KPD was to become permanent. At this time the freicorps that the SPD had used to crush the revolution, turned on their masters and launched a coup: the Kapp putsch. The trade unions called a general strike, which the working class responded to solidly, bringing the country to a stop. The coup collapsed, but workers were now mobilised across the country. In the revolutionary stronghold of the Ruhr the workers had formed a 80,000 strong Red Army that refused to disarm. Although having been saved by this revolutionary upsurge, the SPD saw their role as the same as it had been a year previously, namely to make sure than the struggles did not develop into full scale revolution. Only this time, they did not have the same working class credibility that had previously allowed them to control the situation. Faced by this, they chose a dual strategy: to re-establish their socialist credibility they talked of forming a government composed only of workers parties, whilst at the same time sending in their - now loyal once more - troops to attack and disarm the Ruhr.

The two sides of German 'communism' reacted totally differently to these events. The excluded majority of the party put themselves with the working class reaction from the beginning and supported the Red Army in the Ruhr when the SPD troops attacked it. The rump leadership of the KPD, while it had initially said it would not 'lift a finger' for the SPD government, quickly changed its position to total support. It offered itself a 'loyal opposition' to the proposed 'workers government', and called on the armed workers to not to resist the SPD troops. Thus the revolutionary potential of the situation was defeated by social democracy with the support of the Moscow supported KPD, who claimed to be a revolutionary break from social democracy. The left communist side of the KPD, feeling no rapprochement was possible with a group that had tacitly supported the violent suppression of the class, formed itself as the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), orientated totally towards the councils. The question is of course how these lessons affected their view of the Russian Revolution.

The German Left and the Comintern

For these revolutionaries the history of the German workers movement had shown the fundamental opposition between the methods of social democracy and revolution. It had seemed to them that 'Bolshevik principles' such as the suppression of bourgeois democracy and its replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat through workers councils, were key to overcoming the opportunism of the SPD and winning the revolution in Germany. It was in this sense that 'Bolshevism' had helped their break from Social Democracy. The fact that the line coming out of Moscow seemed to favour some of the social democratic elements the left communists were breaking from, was merely seen as being based on their unfamiliarity with the West European situation. They thought the Bolsheviks were falsely generalising from the Russian situation, in which the use of parliamentary methods etc. might have been necessary, to the west European situation where the break with parliamentary practices, and the emphasis on councilism was essential for the revolution to succeed. Even when Lenin launched Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder a vicious polemic against them and in support of the KPD line, they still thought it was a matter of Lenin not understanding the conditions for revolution in the West. Even when [Otto] Ruhle, their delegate to the Second Congress of the Comintern, returned arguing that Russia was 'soviet' only in name, the majority opposed his view. However, Ruhle's councilist argument that what Russia showed was that party-rule was a bourgeois form, that 'revolution was not a party affair', but a matter of councils and unitary factory organisations only, was later to become the dominant position of the remains of the German Left.

However, at this time, it was only when the Comintern adopted a line of a 'united front', and ordered the KAPD to liquidate and re-join the KPD, which had by then merged with left social democrats, did they start to rethink their position. By late 1921 - as a result of hearing about the NEP, the suppression of strikes, as well as Russia's willingness to make commercial and military treaties with capitalist powers - they decided that the Bolsheviks and the Comintern had left the field of revolution. They began to consider that there might have been internal conditions forcing the counter revolutionary policies abroad. The White counter-revolution had failed, yet Russia was acting in a capitalist way both at home and abroad. What was the explanation for this?

The spectre of Menshevism: October, a bourgeois revolution?

In 1917, when the German Social Democrats had supported the Menshevik line that Russia was only ready for a bourgeois revolution, the German Left had welcomed October as the first crack in bourgeois power - the start of world revolution. Now with it appearing that the Bolsheviks were retreating from the proletarian socialist path, the German Left started a move back to orthodoxy. Starting with a revised notion that October was a dual revolution, they were to end by deciding it was a bourgeois revolution through and through. Key to their understanding was the perceived dominance of the peasants in Russia.

This first manifested itself when, in the Manifesto of the International they tried to set up as a revolutionary alternative to the Comintern, they not only qualified their previous view of the socialist character of the revolution by going for a notion of dual revolution, but drew the further conclusion that the end result had not been socialism, but state capitalism. As Gorter put it, "in the large towns it was a change from capitalism to socialism, in the country districts a change from feudalism to capitalism. In the large towns the proletarian revolution came to pass: in the country the bourgeois revolution."22 The reference to the passing of the socialist side of the revolution was a reference to how, as they argued, the NEP had not merely been a 'concession' to the peasantry, as the Bolsheviks talked of it, but had been a complete capitulation to the peasant - for them, bourgeois - side of the revolution. The effect was that the proletarian side of the revolution had been sacrificed, and what had been put in its place was instead a form of state capitalism.

Back to Luxemburg?

It was the central, if implicit, role of the Agrarian Question and the Internationalist perspective was to play in their theories that led them to return, ironically to Luxemburg. In 1918 she wrote a text - The Russian Revolution - in which, while declaring solidarity with the Bolsheviks, she made some deep criticisms of their actions in Russia, nearly all of which the German Left were to take up as their own. Written before the German Revolution, her condemnation of the Bolsheviks was, however, secondary to her condemnation of the passivity of the German Social Democrats for not following their revolutionary example. She had no time for the Menshevik line echoed by the Social Democrats in Germany that Russia was only ready for a bourgeois revolution. Instead she insisted that the problems of the Russian Revolution were "a product of international developments plus the Agrarian Question' which 'cannot possibly be solved within the limits of bourgeois society' and thus that the fate of the revolution depended on the international proletariat, especially the German proletariat without which aid the Russian Revolution could not fail to become distorted, becoming 'tangled in a maze of contradictions and blunders.' (p. 29) The German Left - not guilty like the Social Democrats of betraying the Russian revolution - could see itself as theoretically untangling these contradictions and blunders which the failure of world revolution had led the Russian Revolution into.

The blunders Luxemburg criticized the Bolsheviks for were: their line on national self determination; their suppression of the constituent assembly and voting; their tendency towards a Jacobin Party dictatorship rather than a real dictatorship of the proletariat involving the masses; and their land policy which she said would create 'a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners." [p 46] Giving this last point decisive importance, the German Left supported all of Luxemburg criticisms except for her position on the Constituent Assembly.

In fact the importance they attached to this last point became even clearer when Gorter, in drawing upon Luxemburg's assessment of the party dictatorship, nevertheless put a different slant on it. This came out when in The International Workers Revolution,23 started by quoting her statement: "Yes: dictatorship... but this dictatorship must be of the work of the class and not that of a leading minority in the name of the class: that is to say, it must, step by step, arise from the active participation of the class, remain under its direct influence, and be subordinated to the control of publicity and be the outcome of the political experience of the whole people." In other words, Gorter agreed with Luxemburg that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not the undemocratic dictatorship of the party, but rather the quite democratic dictatorship of the whole class. However he added that what she 'did not understand' was 'that all this could not happen in Russia; that no class dictatorship was possible there, because the proletariat was too small and the peasantry too mighty.' This orientation to the need for a majority proletariat had thus taken him to question the possibility of socialist revolution in Russia.

Gorter moved to the view that the bourgeois measures the Bolsheviks had made were being forced by Russia's backwardness. He argued that the minority status of the proletariat in Russia had forced a 'party dictatorship', and stated that despite not being organised, the 'elementary power' of the peasantry 'forced the Bolsheviks - even men like Lenin - to stand against the class from which it had sprung, and which was inimical to the peasantry.' But what he did criticise the Bolsheviks for, however, was their programme and the action they had prescribed to the proletariat in advanced countries, which had blocked the world revolution, and hence made the building up of world capitalism possible. It was only because of the latter that the bourgeois measures in Russia had become unredeemable.

Ruhle was to go even further than Gorter in this fatalistic direction. Going away from Gorter's notion of a dual revolution, he argued that the revolution had been bourgeois from the start. He grounded this view on what he called 'the phaseological development as advocated by Marx, that after feudal tsarism in Russia there had to come the capitalist bourgeois state, whose creator and representative was the bourgeois class.'24 So considering the historical circumstances, the Russian Revolution could only have been a bourgeois revolution. Its role was to get rid of tsarism, to smooth the way for capitalism, and to help the bourgeoisie into the saddle politically. It was in this context that the Bolsheviks, regardless of the subjective intentions, ultimately had to bow for the historical forces at play. And their attempt to leap a stage of development had not only showed how they had forgotten the 'ABC of Marxist knowledge' that socialism could only come from mature capitalism, but was also based 'the vague hope of world revolution' that Ruhle now characterised as unjustified 'rashness.'

But whilst this move to a semi-Menshevik position was indeed a move back to the exact same position they had previously criticised the Social Democrats for having, it also had its merits. Where the earlier German Left focus on the New Course and NEP as a reversion to capitalism had the deeply unpleasant implications that both war communism and Stalin's 'left turn' was a return to socialism, the rigidly schematic position of Ruhle's theory allowed him to question the measures of nationalisation used in both these periods:

'nationalisation is not socialisation. Through nationalisation you can arrive at a large scale, tightly run state capitalism, which may exhibit various advantages as against private capitalism. Only it is still capitalism. and however you twist and turn, it gives no way of escape from the constraint of bourgeois politics'.

It was Ruhle's semi-Menshevik and fatalistic interpretation of Russia that, like his full blown councilism, was at first resisted, but then largely accepted by the German Left. This came out in what was its closest to a definitive statement on the Russian question: the Theses on Bolshevism.25

Theses on Bolshevism

The position the German Left was arriving at, and which came out in their Theses, was that the class and production conditions in Russia, first forced the dictatorship to be a party rather than class one, and second forced that party dictatorship to be a bourgeois capitalist one. But where this general idea, in Ruhle, had been solely confined to describing the historical forces that were at play behind the backs of the Bolsheviks, and regardless of their subjective intentions, in the Theses it took a more conspiratorial form. The Bolsheviks had not merely been forced into a position of unwittingly carrying out a bourgeois revolution, but had done so intentionally. From the very start they had been a 'jacobinal' organisation of the 'revolutionary petty bourgeoisie', who had been faced with a bourgeoisie that neither had the collective will nor strength to carry out a bourgeois revolution. So by manipulating the proletarian elements of society, they had been able to carry out a bourgeois revolution against the bourgeoisie. Consequently, 'the task of the Russian Revolution [had been] to destroy the remnants of feudalism, industrialize agriculture, and create a large class of free labourers'. But despite this rather conspiratorial element of the theory of the German Left, they escaped arguing that if the revolutionary proletariat had just realised the true nature of the Bolsheviks, they could have avoided the fate that was awaiting them. Rather, the fact that the Bolsheviks had taken the form of a revolutionary bourgeoisie was precisely because of the backwardness of Russia, and the consequent development had been inevitable.

It was this notion of the Bolsheviks taking the role of the bourgeoisie that allowed them, like Ruhle had done, to avoid seeing Stalin's 'left turn' as a step in the right direction, and instead they saw it as an attempt by the Soviet state to master the contradictory tension of the two forces it had been riding: a 'bolshevistic, bureaucratically conducted state economy' based on a regimented terrorised proletariat, and the peasant economy which 'conceals in its ranks the private capitalist tendencies' of the economy. [57] Or in other words, not as with Trotsky's Left Opposition, a tension between the socialist and capitalist sectors, but between the state capitalist and petty capitalist sides of the economy.

So like the Russian left communist current, the German Left was to end up characterising Russia as state capitalist, or as they called it 'state production with capitalist methods.' Whilst the commanding heights of the economy were bureaucratically conducted by the Bolshevik state, the underlying character was essentially capitalist. This they grounded by arguing that 'it rests on the foundation of commodity production, it is conducted according to the viewpoint of capitalist profitability; it reveals a decidedly capitalist system of wages and speedup; it has carried the refinements of capitalist rationalisation to the utmost limits.' Furthermore, the state form of production, they argued, was still based on squeezing surplus value out of the workers; the only difference being that, rather than a class of people individually and directly pocketing the surplus value, it was taken by the 'bureaucratic, parasitical apparatus as a whole' and used for reinvestment, their own consumption, and to support the peasants.

These arguments were a statement of the classic state capitalist case: Russia was capitalist because all the categories of capitalism continued to exist only with the state appropriating the surplus value and the bureaucrats playing the role of capitalists. And in keeping with the notion of state capitalism postulated by Marx and Engels, they ended up grasping it as a higher stage of capitalism. As they argued, 'The Russian state economy is therefore profit production and exploitation economy. It is state capitalism under the historically unique conditions of the Bolshevik regime, and accordingly represents a different and more advanced type of capitalist production than even the greatest and most advanced countries have to show.'[58-59]

However, the problems with grounding the accusation of state capitalism on the basis that all the capitalist categories continued to exist soon became apparent. To say that production was oriented to capitalist profitability seemed questionable when the immediate aim seemed to be the production of use-values, particularly of means of production with no concern for the immediate profitability of the enterprise. Also to say that goods were produced as commodities when it was the state direction rather than their exchange value which seemed to determine what and how many goods were produced, also required more argument. While the state unquestionably seemed to be extracting and allocating surplus products based on exploitation of surplus labour, to say that it took the form of surplus value seemed precisely a point of contention. It was these apparent differences between Russian and western capitalism that led them to use the terms 'state capitalism' and 'state socialism' interchangeably. And it was these theoretical problems of the German Left that Mattick was later to try and solve. However, the main direction of German Left theoretical effort in relation to the Russia question was not to analyse the system in the USSR, but to build alternative models of transition to the statist one they identified as responsible for the Russian disaster. On the one hand, they were tempted by a mathematical model of labour accounting that was supposed to overcome money and value,26 on the other, they made elaborate plans of how workers councils could run society instead of the a party-state.27

Mattick: Its capitalism, Jim, but not as we know it

Seeing his role as one of continuing the German council communist tradition, and preserving its insights, Mattick first made explicit what had been implicit in their assessment of Bolshevik policies.28 Recognising that Leninism was merely a variant of Kautskyist social democracy, he made it clear that the Bolshevik conception of socialism was from the start very different from, and in opposition to, the one coming out of the councilist left. The reality of what Russia turned out to be was not merely a reflection of the particular historical circumstances it was faced with, but was embedded in the very ideology of the Bolsheviks. This essentially Second International ideology had seen the fundamental contradiction of capitalism as consisting in it being, on the one hand, an anarchic system in which the law of value regulated the market 'behind people's back' and, on the other hand, having a tendency towards the socialisation of the productive forces, and the development of more and more centralised planning and control. Socialism was thus seen as the rational solution to this anarchy through the appropriation, by a workers party, of the planning and centralisation that capitalism was itself developing.

Mattick, following the councilist tradition, saw this statist vision as having entirely lost the perspective of socialism as the abolition, by the workers themselves, of their separation from the means of production; of the abolition of the capital/labour relation and their consequent ability to control the conditions of life - to establish a society based on the free association of producers, as Marx had called it. It was this perspective that allowed him, like previous left communists, to say that the Bolsheviks, by taking the means of production into the hands of the state, had not achieved socialisation, but only the 'nationalisation of capital as capital' ownership by government rather than private capitalists. It was in this way that he, against Trotsky and Stalin, could make the obvious point that the means of production were not controlled by society as a whole, but still existed vis a vis the workers as alien capital, and as such Russia had not abolished the capital/labour relation fundamental to capitalism. However, while this point was important, it was not enough proof in Marxian terms of the existence of capitalism. The questions remained: how did the system operate?, what was its drive or regulating principles?, what laws governed it? And on these questions he was orthodox enough a Marxist to accept that complete statification of the means of production was a modification of capitalism with serious implications for the validity of fundamental value categories.

Specifically the problem consisted in to what extent the law of value still governed the economy in Russia. As Marx had argued, one of the main defining characteristics of capitalism is that the market is governed by the law of value. This means that instead of having a system in which production is consciously planned so as to meet people's needs, we have a system in which these needs are only meet indirectly through the exchange of commodities on the market. And the only regulatory principle on the market is that of supply and demand. Against the previous left communist tendency to classify Russia as state capitalist without trying to ground it in the categories of value, Mattick even made the further point that "to speak of the law of value as the 'regulator' of the economy in the absence of specifically capitalist market relations can only mean that the terms 'value' and 'surplus value' are retained, though they express no more than a relation between labour and surplus labour." [321] The problem for Mattick was of course that, considering he took Russia at face value and thought it was a genuinely planned system, it became difficult to at the same time call it capitalist. Considering that the market would no longer be run along the lines of indirect forms of commodity exchange governed by the law of value, but would be directly planned according to need, it would be problematic to say that the law of value existed at all.

Ultimately, this led Mattick to concede that state capitalism in Russia lacked what was a defining feature of capitalism, namely the law of value. No longer having this option open to him, Mattick reverted back to his previous reasons for calling Russia capitalist, coupled with the vague point that it was 'a system of exploitation based on the direct control of a ruling minority over the ruled majority.'[321]. But while he still insisted on the continuity of exploitative social relations, the fact that Mattick thought that the law of value had ceased to exist, led him to affirm the argument of the previous German Left that Russia was an advanced form of capitalism. This even to the extent that it had overcome some of the main problems of private-property capitalism, namely competition, crises and, as a result of the consequent stability, to some extent class antagonisms.

The notion that Russia could not have a problem with crisis sounds ironic today. There is also the further irony that while the main point of Mattick's book - on which it succeeded pretty well - was to attack the view, so prevalent in the post-war boom, that Keynesianism had resolved capitalism's crisis tendency. But a more pressing problem with his theory of Russia lies exactly with what he set out to prove, namely that Russia, despite its apparent differences from western capitalism was still capitalist in Marx's terms. Although trying to say that what he was describing was just a change in the form of capitalism, from 'market' to 'state-planned', this was open to the objection that value relations such as those that occur through the market are not incidental - they are of the very essence of the capital relation. And although Mattick rightly pointed to the fact that Russia was still based on the exploitation of the majority by the minority, one could easily argue that the defining point about capitalism is exactly that this exploitation occurs through the indirect form of commodity exchange with all its mystifications. Indeed, it could be argued that Mattick virtually implied that Russia was a non-capitalist form of exploitation that used capitalist forms to cover up the arbitrary nature of its exploitation. It is in the light of the major concessions to the differences between the state system and normal capitalism Mattick was willing to make, that critics would be justified in doubting the validity of the term at all. Hence instead of solving the problems of the theory of the German Left, that led them to use the terms 'state capitalist' and 'state socialist' interchangeably, he merely exposed them.

In a 1991 interview, his son Paul Mattick (Jnr) speculated that the collapse of the USSR might have indicated that his father was wrong and:

whether it wasn't a mistake of all the people, members of this ultra-left current, among whom I would include myself, to think of the Bolshevik form, the centralized, state controlled economy, as a new form, which we should think of as coming after capitalism, as representing, say, a logical end point of the tendency to monopolization and centralization of capital, which is a feature of all private property capitalist systems. Instead, it seems to really have been a kind of preparation for capitalist, development, a pre-capitalist form, if you want. '

This is exactly what the leading thinker of the Italian Left had argued.

The Italian Left

Origins

We now turn to the other main left communist position, that of the Italian left. Like the German and Dutch Lefts the Italian Left originated, in the years before the first world war as a left opposition within a Second International party, in their case the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI). But whereas German social democracy had exposed itself as both reactionary and actively counter-revolutionary, the very radicality of the Italian working class, and consequent strength of the Left, meant that reformism in the PSI was not as hegemonic as in the SPD. In 1912 the party even expelled an ultra-reformist wing over its support for Italy's Libyan war, and when the world war broke out and the Italian working class responded with a Red Week of riots across the country reaching insurrectionary proportions in Ancona, the PSI alone among the western Social democratic parties did not rally to the nation. Their apparent difference from the SPD further came out when in 1919 the PSI affiliated to the Comintern. The enemy of the Italian Left was thus not an obviously counter-revolutionary party, but one dominated by the revolutionary posture of 'Maximalism', that is, combining verbal extremism with opportunist economic and political practice, or more to the point, inaction. This discontinuity between the social democracy in Italy and Germany was to greatly influence their theoretical developments. Where the German Left had very quickly reacted to the current events by making a final break with social democracy and going for a full blown councilist line, the Italian Left remained much more favourable to partyism. In a sense we could say that while the German Left tendency was to overcome the social democratic separation of the 'political' and 'economic' struggle by putting their trust in a revolutionary 'economic' struggle, the solution that the Italian Left moved to was an absolute subordination of political and economic struggles to a genuinely communist 'political' direction.

The determination to decisively politically break from all reformism developed in the context of Italy's experience of the revolutionary wave - the Biennio Rosso (Red Two Years). This was a period in which workers set up factory councils, poor peasants and demobilised soldiers seized land, and where demonstrations, street actions, rioting, strikes and general strikes were regular occurrences. From the summer of 1919, when the state nearly buckled in the face of near insurrectionary food riots and syndicalist forms of redistribution and counter power, to the Occupations of the Factories in September 1920, revolution seemed almost within their reach. However, instead of taking an active part in this revolutionary wave, the PSI and its linked unions refused to act and at times even actively sabotaged the class struggle. However, where the German Left had reacted to similar occurrences by breaking with the SPD and identifying with the council movement, the reaction within the Italian party was, on the one hand, the Abstentionist Communist Fraction around Bordiga struggling to eliminate the reformists from the party, and on the other hand, the L'Ordine Nuovo (L'ON) centred around Gramsci and orientated to councils, but who saw no need to break from the 'Maximalism' of the PSI.

The adequate basis for the break with 'Maximalism' was finally provided when, in the context of this intense class struggle, the Italian PSI delegates, including Bordiga, went to the 2nd Congress of the Comintern in mid-1920. Key to this Congress was the setting of 21 conditions for membership of affiliating parties. Although Bordiga's group had to renounce their abstentionism, the overall target was the 'centrist' and opportunist tendencies of the PSI. Seeing that the overall tendency within the Comintern was in their favour, Bordiga even managed to beef up the disciplinary measures so that complying with the directives given by the Comintern was a condition for affiliation. Consequently, the Second Congress turned out to be massively helpful to them in their battle with the centre/right, and as such their attempts to forge a genuinely revolutionary communist party in Italy. They came away strengthened in their fight with the PSI by Lenin's authority, and felt that their fight for a revolutionary party was in convergence with the Bolsheviks. Consequently, the ideas beginning to emerge within the German Left - that Bolshevik prescriptions for the Western proletariat were not necessarily appropriate; that there might even be a contradiction between Bolshevism and revolutionary politics; and that the good of the World Revolution was being sacrificed to the national needs of the Russian state - not only failed to resonate with the Italian Left, but quite the opposite seemed to be the case.

With this reinforcement from Moscow the Italian Left finally made their break with the PSI. This was prompted by the movement of factory occupations, that exposed the bankruptcy of the PSI and its CGL unions. As a wage dispute by members of the Metal workers union developed into a massive wave of factory occupations, and everybody could see that the situation was critical and had moved beyond economic demands, the PSI and the unions responded by exposing their absolute inability to act for revolution. Instead of taking any revolutionary initiative, the PSI passed the bug to the CGL, who had a vote on whether to go for revolution or not. The outcome was 409,000 for revolution and 590,000 against. But where the break from social democracy had led the Germans to a full blown councilist approach, in Italy the defeat of the factory occupations also marked the end of the councilist approach of Gramsci's L'ON group. Bordiga's analysis on the need for a principled break with PSI's 'Maximalism' was now accepted by nearly all revolutionaries in the party, and in early 1921 they formed the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) under his leadership.

However, the coming together of the communist elements came too late. Not only was the Bienno Rosso a failed revolution, but a fascist counter-revolution was on the cards. With the tacit support of the democratic state, fascist squadrista moved from their rural strongholds to attack workers neighbourhoods and worker organisations. Although communist and other workers formed armed detachments to fight back, the sort of working class reaction that in Germany defeated the Kapp putsch did not materialise, and by the end of 1922 Mussolini was in power.

Revolutionary setbacks, however, were not just confined to Italy, but was a general international phenomenon. But instead of recognising this as being the result of social democracy (or the failure of these parties to lead the struggles in a revolutionary direction, as the Italian Left saw it), the Comintern responded by imposing its policy of a 'united front'. For Italy the 'united front' line meant demanding the PCI fuse with Serrati's PSI, only asking that it first expel its right wing around Turatti. For Bordiga and the PCI, after their hard fought battle to disentangle themselves from the pseudo revolutionary maximilism of Serrati, the demand they unite with him was anathema.29 They felt that in the turn to these flexible tactics, the communist political programme they had arrived at was in danger of being diluted or lost.

But where this, in Germany, led to the final break with Bolshevism, in Italy it resulted in a total Bolshevisation of the PCI. Ironically it was the Italian Left that had not only fought to make the Italian Party Bolshevik (in terms of their perception of the meaning of that term), but had also insisted on the Comintern's disciplinary role on national sections. But now they were to become one of the main victims of that discipline. Their insistence that socialism was only possible if carried out on a world-scale and led by an international revolutionary party, as well as their failure to see that the Comintern was largely dominated by Russia and used for its own national purposes, meant that they still perceived the Comintern as this international and revolutionary agent. Ultimately, this meant that they were willing to accept the rigors of discipline to policies they totally opposed and indeed felt were betraying the communist programme, in order to hold on for as long as possible. This even to the extent that Bordiga, despite his overall majority in the PCI, conceded leadership to a small faction of the party led by Gramsci, which was willing to obey Moscow and impose 'Bolshevisation' on the party. Later Bordiga and the fraction around him were forced out of the party they had created.30 Still, it would be many years before would fully identify Russia as capitalist.

Bordiga's theory

So where the Germans, in their councilism, had taken an outright anti-Leninist stance, the Italian Left took a much more Leninist approach. Indeed when the Italian Left had finally, in exile, started to question the nature of Russia, it was in a manner that seemed at first closer to that of Trotsky's, rather than the theories coming out of left communists elsewhere. Against the German left communists, they had insisted that the argument that the Russian Revolution had been bourgeois from the start, was a loss of the whole international perspective that had been shared by all the revolutionary fractions at the time. But whilst this point certainly allowed the Italians not to lose the revolutionary significance of October, their logic that if the revolution had been a proletarian revolution, the state was a proletarian state that had degenerated, had the down-side of appearing to be a version of Trotsky's theory of a degenerated workers state.

The 'Leninist' side of the Italian Left became especially clear with Bordiga when, in his attempt to gain an understanding of the nature of Russia, put great emphasis on the very text that Lenin had used to attack the Russian Left Communists, namely the Tax in Kind pamphlet. By returning to the Agrarian Question Bordiga bypassed a lot of state capitalist concerns. Looked at economically, he argues, Russia did not have the prerequisites for socialism or communism, and the tasks that faced it were bourgeois tasks, namely the development of the productive forces for which resolving the Agrarian Question was essential. However, the war that Russia was part of was an imperialist war that expressed that the capitalist world as a whole was ready for socialist revolution and Russia had not only a proletariat who carried out the revolution, but a proletarian party oriented to world revolution had been put in power. Thus on the 'primacy of the political' October was a proletarian revolution. But insofar as Bordiga assumed that, economically speaking, there was no other path to socialism than through the accumulation of capital, the role of the proletarian party was simply to allow but at the same time keep under control the capitalist developments necessary to maintain social life in Russia.

Ironically however, it was exactly in emphasising Lenin's notion that capitalism under workers control of the party was the best Russia could have, that Bordiga could go beyond not only the Trotskyism, that the Italian Left theory of Russia had initially seemed close to, but more importantly maybe, the theory of the German Left. As was shown in the previous article of this series, Trotsky took the nationalisation of land and industry as well as the monopoly on foreign trade, as evidence for Russia in fact having the socio-economic foundations for socialism - hence his notion that the revolution was congealed in 'property forms'. And relying on Preobrazensky's contrast between what he saw as the 'law of planning' of the state sector versus the law of value of the peasant sector, he argued that one of the main obstacles that had to be dealt with before arriving at socialism proper, was the capitalist features of the peasant sector. As such he argued that Russia was a more advanced socialistic transitional economy. The German Left, although differing from Trotsky's view in the sense that they maintained that the revolution had been bourgeois from the start, was in essence very close to it. This was insofar as they, in line with the traditional state capitalist argument, saw Russia as a more advanced, concentrated version of capitalism, leading Mattick virtually to a third system conception.

Bordiga, exactly by returning to Lenin's emphasis on the political, could avoid going down that path. The clashes between the state industrial sector and the peasant sector was not, as Trotsky and Preobrazhensky had argued, the clash between socialism and capitalism. Rather, as Bordiga argued, it was the clash between capitalism and pre-capitalist forms. And here lay the real originality of Bordiga's thought: Russia was indeed a transitional society, but transitional towards capitalism. Far from having gone beyond capitalist laws and categories, as for instance Mattick had argued, the distinctiveness of Russian capitalism lay in its lack of full development.

This was grounded on Russia's peripheral status versus the core capitalist economies. In a period when world capitalism would otherwise have prevented the take off of the capitalist mode of production, preferring to use underdeveloped areas for raw materials, cheap labour and so on, Russia was an example of just such an area, that through extreme methods of state protectionism and intervention secured economical development and as such prevented the fate of being assigned a peripheral status on the world market. It is this role of the Bolsheviks as the enforcer of capitalist development that explains why the USSR became a model for elites in ex-colonial and otherwise less developed countries.

The failure of both Trotsky and the German Left to see this also showed up in their confusion with regard to Stalin's 'left-turn'. Never having accepted the Primitive Socialist Accumulation thesis of Preobrazhensky, Bordiga could make the rather obvious judgement that what Stalin carried out in the thirties - the forced collectivisation of peasants and the 5 year plans - was a savage primitive capitalist accumulation: a 'Russian capitalism Mark 2'. Stalin's 'left turn' was then neither a product of his impulses nor represented him being forced to defend the 'socialist' gains of the economy'. Rather it came from the pressing need for capital accumulation felt by Russia as a competing capitalist state. And the Stalinist excesses of the thirties - "literally a workers' hell, a carnage of human energy."31 - were but a particular expression of the "general universal conditions appropriate to the genesis of all capitalism." For Bordiga once the proletarian political side went, what was striking was the continuity of the problems facing the emerging capitalism in Russia whether its government be Tsarist or Stalinist: that of attempting to develop the capitalist mode of production in a backward country facing world imperialism. In 1953 he states: "The economic process underway in the territories of the Russian union can be defined essentially as the implanting of the capitalist mode of production, in its most modern form and with the latest technical means, in countries that are backward, rural, feudal and asiatic-oriental." [43]

Indeed, as Bordiga recognised, the problems involved with the crash course in capitalist development that the Bolsheviks imposed, also resulted in certain measures that were to obstruct the full expressions of a capitalist development. He centred this on its inadequate resolution of the sin qua non of capitalism: the Agrarian Revolution. Despite its brutality, Bordiga noted that the collectivisation process involved a compromise by which the peasants did not become entirely property-less, but were allowed to retain a plot of land and sell its produce through market mechanisms. This, as Bordiga saw it, re-produced the capitalist form of the small-holder, but without the revolutionary progressive tendency to ruin and expropriate these producers, because 'the little that belongs to him is guaranteed by law. The collective farmer is therefore the incarnation of the compromise between the ex-proletarian state and the small producers past on in perpetuity.'[25-6] While collectivisation did produce the proletarians necessary for state industry, Soviet agriculture remained a hybrid form, an achilles heel of the economy never attaining full subordination to capitalist laws.

This view of the Russian state being in the service of developing capitalism in Russia also allowed Bordiga to go beyond the focus on bureaucracy of Trotsky's theory, and its mirror in most state capitalist theories, such as the Germans, of identifying these new state officials as a new ruling class. Bordiga felt that the obsession with finding individual capitalist or substitutes for capitalists had lost Marx's understanding of capital as above all an impersonal force. As Bordiga said 'determinism without men is meaningless, that is true, but men constitute the instrument and not the motor.'32 Such a point also applies to the state: as Bordiga argued, 'it is not a case of the partial subordination of capital to the state, but of ulterior subordination of the state to capital'[p.7] State despotism in Russia was at the service of the capitalist mode of production pushing its development in areas that resisted it. However, a weakness of Bordiga's analysis was that whereas he looked under the surface of the Soviet claims about agriculture, he tended to base his view that the state sector was governed by the law of value simply on the appearance of forms, like commodities and money, and on Stalin's claims that value exists under socialism. So although the Italian Left seemed at first closer to the Trotsky's notion of a degenerated workers state, it was through Bordiga's literal interpretation of Lenin on the Russian economy, he could go beyond both Trotsky and the German Left.

Conclusion

As stated in the introduction, any analysis of the Russian revolution and the society that emerged from it cannot be separated from a conception of what communism is. Indeed one way in which all the left communists, unlike Trotsky, could go beyond Second International Marxism, was by insisting that neither the transition to communism nor communism itself should in any way be identified with state-control of the means of production. Indeed nothing short of their proper socialisation or communisation would do. It was this perspective that allowed them to distance themselves from, and criticise Russia as being state capitalist or, as Bordiga put it, simply capitalist.

However, with regard to their specific answers to the question of what a genuine communisation process would have consisted in, the situation was slightly more ambiguous. The Germans (and to some extent the Russians), in their focus on the economic sphere, ultimately ended up with a notion of communism consisting in workers' self-management. The important differentiation between capitalism and communism was correctly seen to lie in workers overcoming their separation from the means of production. The idea was that only in the factory, only at the point of production could workers overcome the domination maintained by bourgeois politics, cease to act as isolated bourgeois individuals and act as a socialised force, as a class. This slipped into a factoryism which neglected the fact that the enterprise is a capitalist form par excellence and that if the class is united, there it is united as variable capital. It was this councilist approach that led them to work out rather mathematical accounting schemes33 for how the transition to communism could work and elaborate schemes for how the councils could link up.

The problem with this self-management approach was of course that it seemed to imply that as long as the enterprises were managed by the workers themselves, it did not matter that capitalist social relations continued to exist. It is in this sense that the German Left never managed to make a full break from Second International Marxism's identification with the development of the productive forces and with the working class as working class.

It was in this respect that the importance of the Italian Left came out. In emphasising the 'primacy of the political', they could take a more social and holistic standpoint. Communism was not just about replacing the party with the councils, and state-control with workers control.34 Communism, they argued, was not merely about workers managing their own exploitation, but about the abolition of wage labour, the enterprise form and all capitalist categories. The fundamental question was not so much that of 'who manages?' but about 'what is managed?'

But whilst the German Left's focus on the economic had led them into the self-management trap, one thing it did allow them to do was to emphasise the subjectivity of the working class as an agent of change. This notion of subjectivity was, if not entirely absent in the theory of the Italian Left, then reserved only for the party.

The absurdities involved in rejecting any notion of working class subjectivity became especially clear in the Italian Left's assessment of Russia. There, they argued, communism could be represented in the correct political line of a ruling party managing a system of capitalist social relations - a ridiculously unmaterialist position - arguing that what mattered was not the social relations in a country, but the subjective intentions of those in power (a perfect justification for repression based on the notion that 'it was for their own good they were massacred'). And it was in this respect that the Italian Left had not completely broken from the politicism/partyism of the Second International.

Indeed, it was the blind spots in each theory that led to their mutual incomprehension: whilst the Italian Left saw the Germans as nothing more than a Marxoid form of anarcho-syndicalism, the Germans in turn merely saw the Italians as a bunch of Leninists. But if the dogmatic sides of their respective theories merely served to push them further apart, it was ultimately the one-sidedness of their respective approaches that resulted in them not breaking entirely away from the dogmatism of the Second International. Whilst the Italian Left had arrived at a more adequate notion of the content of communism, it was the German Left that was to provide the form through which emancipation could be reached.

In different ways, both the German and Italian left communist currents managed to maintain a correct political perspective. While the German Left emphasised workers' self-emancipation, the Italian Left provide a better angle on what communism would consist in. Yet, in terms of a 'scientific' account of the kind of society developing in the USSR, both fell down.35

On the one hand, the German Left slipped into a conception of 'state capitalism' that was not grounded in value. Without this essential category they tended, like Tony Cliff and the Trotskyists, to see the USSR as a 'higher', crisis-free type of economy. Bordiga's theory, on the other hand, did not fall into the trap of seeing the USSR as a more advanced form of capitalism. Instead he recognised that Russia was in transition towards capitalism. As we shall see, this is an important insight into understanding the nature of the USSR.

But Bordiga did not really concern himself with value categories. He largely assumed that the obvious signs of capital accumulation must be based on commodities, money and wage-labour, all playing the same role as in the West. It is thus Mattick who exposed the issue more conscientiously. And if we are really to grasp the capitalist nature of the USSR, both before and since the fall of 'communism', we must, on the value question, provide a different answer than his. This will be explored in our final Part of this article in the next issue.

• 1. The German and Dutch Communist Lefts were theoretically and practically intertwined. Two of the most prominent theorists of the German Communist Workers Party - Pannekoek and Gorter - were Dutch. Exiled German Left activists often took refuge in Holland. In what follows we will generally use the term' German Left to indicate the whole political current.
• 2. 'Trotsky's theory of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state',and 'The theory of state capitalism from within Trotskyism' in Aufheben 6,1997,and 'Russia as a non mode of Production' in Aufheben 7,1998.
• 3. Surprisingly perhaps the most interesting and dynamic appropriation of the Communist Left has not been made in Germany or Italy but in France. After '68 in particular a modem 'ultra left' tradition has emerged there in a way unlike other countries. Within this a different less 'partyist' appropriation of the Communist left has been made. The recently republished Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement (Dauve & Martin, Antagonism Press) is an example of this.
• 4. A main way the Communist left is known in Britain is through the publications and activities of groups emerging in the early seventies, which claimed to defend the positions of the Communist Left. These groups on the surface appear to the uninitiated as Party oriented groups not so different from some of the smaller Trotskyist sects. In most other countries where it has a presence the Communist left has a similar type of existence
• 5. The history and positions of Communist lefts that developed in some countries have been effectively destroyed, e.g. those of the Bulgarian left. The British communist left was represented by Sylvia Pankhursts group around the Workers Dreadnought (previously the Woman's Dreadnought) and the Spur group in Glasgow of whom Guy Aldred was the leading spokesman. They largely following the German left on the Russian question so we will not treat them here.There is a good account of them in Mark Shipway's Anti- Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain, 1917-45 (Macmillan, 1988)
• 6. In Leninist mythology the clear sighted Lenin split with the Russian Social Democratic Party on the question of organisation and by so doing created a line of revolutionary Marxism that foresaw and would be immune to the betrayal of revolution that both the Mensheviks and European social democrats would fall prey to. However, as both Debord and Dauve, has pointed out, Lenin was always a loyal Kautskyist - even when he accused his master of betrayal.
• 7. Lenin's clear line on this led to an alliance of the Bolsheviks with European left communist - the Zimmerwald left - this broke down because of Lenin's refusal to work with those who rejected the right
• 8. Bukharin is better known for the right wing positions he took in the twenties. Up to '21 he was however a leading figure of the left of the party, in many ways closer to European Left communists than to Lenin's very Russian perspectives.
• 9. Lenin particularly scorned the position that Pyatakov painted of revolution: "We picture this process [the social revolution] as the united action of the proletarians of all [!] countries, who wipe out the frontiers of the bourgeois [!] state, who tear down the frontier posts [in addition to 'wiping out the frontiers'?], who blow up [!] national unity and establish class unity." {Lenin's 'comments' } To which Lenin replies 'The social revolution cannot be the united action of the proletarians of all countries for the simple reason that most of the countries and the majorities of the world's population have not even reached, or have only just reached, the capitalist stage of development... Only the advanced countries of Western Europe and North America have matured for socialism. The social revolution can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements... in the undeveloped, backward and oppressed nations. "Lenin 'The nascent trend of Imperialist Economism October 1916 p 50-52
• 10. The Left Communists reason for changing their position from one of proposing revolutionary war to that of defensive revolutionary partisan war, in fact resides in the openness for Lenin's arguments, when he pointed out that it would be a rather unrealistic to go for revolutionary in the face of massive war weariness and peasant desertion of the front this was a quite unrealistic position.
• 11. Speech 28/7/18: CW vol.28, p29.
• 12. 60 million people, half the industrial firms, three quarters of the steel mills and nearly all the coal mines were in this area.
• 13. Theses on the Current Situation (1918), Critique, Glasgow,1977. Also in Daniels Documentary History of Communism. References are to these numbers.
• 14. 'On the Building of Socialism' Kommunist no2,April 1918,in Daniels p 85.
• 15. Trotsky's support for militarisation of labour is a classic example. See Terrorism and Communism.
• 16. "The Tax in Kind (NEP)' CW 32 pp.329-369 here he analyses relation of petty producer capitalism to state capitalism in 1921. This text will be key to Bordiga's understanding of the USSR
• 17. In fact at some of the worst times in the civil war the Bolsheviks gave other socialists and anarchists more freedom. The changing relation to Makhno's partisans being a case in point. See Ciliga in his The Russian Enigma p251
• 18. Appeal of the workers truth Group in Daniels Documentary History of Communism p 221
• 19. Luxemburg referring to the German SDP says 'the troops of the old order, instead of intervening in the name of the ruling classes, intervene under the banner of a 'social-democratic party."' The workers group were making the obvious and necessary extension of this critique of the SDP to the more radical Social Democracy that the Bolsheviks were turning out to represent.
• 20. As they so eloquently put it: 'why does Zinoviev offer Scheidman and Noske [social democrats responsible for defeating the German revolution] a ministerial seat instead of a gibbet.'
• 21. Between 1890 and 1899, 450,000 were involved in strikes and lockouts; between 1900-04,475,000. In 1905 alone, 500,000.
• 22. In 8/10/21
• 23. In Workers Dreadnought Feb 24
• 24. From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution,p 7
• 25. This text was written by the GIK in 1934 and published in English by the APCF as the The Bourgeois Role of Bolshevism.References are to these numbers.
• 26. Fundamental principles of Communist Production and Distribution
• 27. Pannekoek's Workers Councils
• 28. See Anti-Bolshevik Communism and Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie
• 29. When a fusion was eventually forced through the PSI demoralized by fascism only comprised 2000 members confirming the Italian left argument that it was an exhausted tradition
• 30. Bordiga,either imprisoned or under surveillance by the fascist police,withdrew from politics at this time. The Banner of the Italian Left was upheld by the fraction in exile in Belgium and France
• 31. Quoted in Camatte's Community and Communism in Russia,p 9-10
• 32. See Fundamentals of Communist Production and Distribution (Apple & Mejer, 1990, Movement for Workers' Councils).
• 33. See Dauve 'Leninism and the Ultra Left' (Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement. Op. Cit.)
• 34. One is not saying that communism can exist in one country or area before world revolution has generalised but that we can only say that revolution has triumphed there if a process of suppression of capitalist relations has begun.
• 35. Camatte has attempted to synthesise the positive sides of both theories. By engaging in a detailed study of what Marx meant by the party', he argued that this should not be identified with the traditional formal party associated with Leninism and social democracy. The 'party' was in no way something external to the working class introducing it to a communist consciousness and organisation it was incapable of generating by itself. Rather, the 'party' should be understood as an expression of the class, its production of a communist consciousness of those people who identified with and tried to act for communism. Rather than in the Leninist vision where spontaneity and organisation/consciousness are rigidly opposed Camatte returned to Marx's understanding that the party is something spontaneously generated out of the class. It was by relativising this Leninist notion of the party-form that Camatte could return to the notions of working class subjectivity of the German Left, whilst as the same time adopting the more holistic standpoint of the Italian Left. That is, he managed to overcome the dichotomy between the economic and the political, which had not only led to their mutual incomprehension, but more importantly in this context, to very different perception of the nature of Russia. It is by taking away the foundations on which the German and Italian Left based their theories of Russia, that Camatte's discussion of the party-form did have an indirect relevance for left communist theories of the Russian Revolution. (Camatte 1961 The Origin and Function of the Party Form).

Aufheben #9 Editorial

At the time of writing, it would seem that we have entered a time warp: a fuel crisis characterised by pickets, blockades and 'panic' buying, topped off with union revolts at the Labour Party Conference. At the same time we have seen street fighting in Prague - the third time in the last 12 months that an international economic summit has been disrupted by the burgeoning world-wide 'anti-capitalist movement'. Following on from the events of Seattle last November, where it appears the critique of capitalism was put back on the agenda, it seems very reminiscent of the 1970s. But are we really seeing the 'green shoots' of a resurgence of class struggle - similar to that of thirty years ago?

The last time lorry drivers seized control of the distribution of vital supplies was in the 'winter of discontent' in 1979. At that time they were part of a nation-wide strike wave of public sector workers who were openly challenging the attempts of the then Old Labour government to impose wage restraint. Since then most of these lorry drivers have become self-employed. Of course the imposition of self-employed status onto lorry drivers amounted to little more than the shifting of economic risks from the employers to the drivers. Capital no longer imposes itself on the driver in the form of the boss but in that of the finance company. In real terms the position of the owner-drivers was little different from what it was when they worked for a wage. So, while many of the participants in the oil blockades were nominally self-employed, they could be considered as little more than proletarians.

However, the movement demanding lower fuel prices was clearly dominated by the large road hauliers and farmers, and this was reflected in the content of their demands. It was a petty-bourgeoisie movement in which lorry drivers clearly identified themselves as small businessmen united in the need to cut costs and taxes.

What was striking about the fuel blockades was the comparatively small number of people involved. How was it that a couple of thousand protesters could bring the entire economy of Britain to a standstill in less than a week? The answer of course is that the protesters enjoyed the barely disguised collusion of the major oil companies and the indifference of the police. Small businessmen felt safe in breaking the law; the oil companies colluded in pickets and blockades; the police put weight on the right to protest; and all this was openly condoned by the tabloids and the Tory Party. All this serves to demonstrate that, at present, there is no working class movement that is capable of posing a serious threat to the established order, and which would force the bourgeoisie to find unity and discipline against such a threat.

Meanwhile, however, thousands have participated in militant mass actions against 'capitalism'. While the shutting down of the WTO, and the premature closure of a meeting of the IMF and World Bank, are no mean achievements, the 'anti-capitalist' movement is ultimately limited by the fact that it is not yet rooted in everyday struggle. While tens of thousands of demonstrators could be mobilised from many different parts of the world to disrupt the deliberations of leading capitalists and politicians, little is done to oppose the daily exploitation and alienation of capitalism.

This weakness is reflected in the dominant ideas within the movement. While many parts of the movement have gone as far as adopting explicit 'anti-capitalist' positions, and while the 'movement' is prepared to directly confront capital and the state, such opposition is still not articulated in class terms. Instead, the 'movement' is dominated by middle-class pluralism (justice, freedom, equality, fairness...) according to which the diverse 'people' of the planet are pitted against 'global capitalism'. The way the more radical elements of the movement distinguish themselves from the more liberal wing is through its forms of action - such as a readiness to attack the cops. But this emphasis on direct action as such only expresses in a more militant form the shared ideological mish-mash. The moralism of the middle class liberal's activism is simply replicated in the extremist violence of the 'autonomen' molotoving the cops on behalf of the 'poor and dispossessed masses of the third world'. For both liberal and militant elements, capitalism is seen as something external to their everyday lives, which they try to do something about. In the same way the foremost organising group, People's Global Action, can declare itself against capital without specifying what capital is nor anything about the class that can abolish it. But capitalism is a mode of production based on the self-expansion of alienated labour through its subsumption as wage labour. Therefore capital is not a thing out there, but a social relation that conditions all of life. While resistance to capital reflects human needs, the essential role of class and of the proletariat cannot be avoided in the movement to overthrow this mode of production.

Following the Zapatistas' land occupations and the subsequent Encuentros, 1994 became 'year zero' for some in the direct action movement. The iconic quality of the Zapatistas for the 'anti capitalist' movement(s) is revealing. The successful presentation of the Zapatista struggle has been as a 'new improved anti capitalism' no longer posing unpleasant issues of class. Indeed, they have opted for a bourgeois language of 'liberty, democracy and justice' - terms which have been in fact also part of traditional leftism since 1789! In our article in this issue on the Zapatistas we demonstrate that while there is indeed novelty to the uprising, it is the class position of the Zapatistas that is central to understanding the strengths and limitations of the struggle.

At the level of ideas, the stuff that Marcos has come out with has hardly had more resonance with proletarians than have the actions of the 'anti-capitalist' movement. However, if at first the incongruence between the present series of 'direct actions' and a proletarian resurgence is striking, it is possible that a more subterranean connection is at work. Just as the upsurge of the late '60s and '70s was prefigured to some extent by movements in intermediate strata, the present 'anti-capitalist' movement could be a reaction, first at the level of middle class subjects that will be followed by a return of the repressed real threat to capital, that is, the proletariat.

A commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista rebellion, 1994-2000

zapatista-women.jpg

Not proletarian, yet not entirely peasant, the Zapatistas' political ideas are riven with contradictions. We reject the academics' argument of Zapatismo's centrality as the new revolutionary subject, just as we reject the assertions of the 'ultra-left' that because the Zapatistas do not have a communist programme they are simply complicit with capital. We see the Zapatistas as a moment in the struggle to replace the reified community of capital with the real human community. Their battle for land against the rancheros and latifundistas reminds us of capital's (permanent) transitions rather than its apparent permanence.

We have not previously felt moved to comment on the Zapatista uprising, not because we have had no interest, but because we distrusted the way in which so many were quick to project their hopes onto this 'exotic' struggle. Everyone from anarchists to Marxist-Leninists, indigenous people's freaks to social democrats, primitivists to 'Third World' developmentalists - all seemed able to see what they wanted in the struggle in Chiapas.

Subcommandante Marcos, the shrewd EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Nacional Liberacion) spokesman, maximised the attractiveness and impact of the Zapatistas on progressive opinion by maintaining a conscious ambiguity around their politics. For us, however, his demagogic appeals to 'liberty! justice! democracy!' were something with which we had little affinity. It was apparent that making sense of the uprising would require an understanding of what the Indians were doing on the ground, distinct both from the way their spokespeople chose to portray the struggle, and from the way in which this representation was taken up to fulfil the needs of political actors in very different situations.

Two currents have attempted to go beyond the cheerleading for the Zapatistas to provide a more theoretical grasp of this movement. 'Autonomist Marxism', now largely based in academia, has embraced the Chiapas revolt, seeing it as central to a new recomposition of the world working class. On the other hand a much more critical response can be found in a number of 'ultra left'[1] inspired articles. As both tendencies favour autonomous class struggle and oppose traditional leftist ideas, why such different conclusions on the rebellion?

On one level we can see it as a matter of a different theoretical approach. While the autonomists focus on the movement of struggle, thinking in terms of a generalisation of Zapatismo, the 'ultra left' look more to the content of Zapatista politics - their programme - the limits of which they identify in the democratic and nationalist framework into which the Indians' struggle has been projected.[2] At the same time, while the autonomists wish to move with the mood of solidarity and inspiration the uprising has created, the 'ultra left' are disturbed by the way that identification with the EZLN is functioning, which has similarities to the role of anti-imperialist and Third Worldist ideology in the past. Support for existing struggle can become an ideological identification which represses criticism. However, criticism of struggle does not have to lead to an ideological turn against it.

Our interest in the struggle in Mexico is how it expresses the universal movement towards the supersession of the capitalist mode of production. One needs to avoid acting as judge of every manifestation of this universal movement, dismissing those manifestations which don't measure up, while at the same time avoiding uncritical prostration before such expressions. The real movement must always be open, self-critical, prepared to identify limits to its present practice, and to overcome them. Here it is understood that communism 'is not an ideal to which reality must accommodate itself.' Our task is to understand, and to be consciously part of something which already truly exists - the real movement that seeks to abolish the existing conditions.

Introduction: The Mexican context
In past issues of Aufheben we have examined the retreat by the international bourgeoisie from the use of social democracy as a form of mediating class struggle, and asked whether it may reappear from future class struggle. So far we have focused our attention on Europe and North America. The retreat from social democracy is not confined to these areas, however. Class struggle in Mexico has been distorted for decades by a particularly durable strain of social democracy, personified by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI).

Social democracy is everywhere in retreat in Mexico. But the recent nine-month strike by students of the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) over tuition fees and the electricity workers' successful campaign against privatisation of the power grid are both indications of a new climate of resistance to the waves of economic rationalisation. Marching together in Mexico City demanding the release of political prisoners, they have formulated the beginnings of an alternative to so-called 'neoliberalism'[3] - an alternative, it must be said, that as yet appears unable to move beyond the crushing weight of social democracy that is the heritage of the Mexican working class.

If anything in the recent history of class struggle in this gigantic country is able to look practically beyond social democracy, to the possibility of the constitution of human community over the reified community of capital, it is the struggle of the Zapatista Indians of Chiapas.

A brief chronology[4]

The Zapatistas first came to the attention of Mexico, and the world, when they occupied the Chiapan towns of San Cristobal de las Casas, Las Margaritas, Altamirano and Ocosingo on January 1st 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was due to begin operation. After destroying civil records and reading out their proclamation of revolt from the balcony of the Town Hall, the EZLN laid siege to the nearby military base of Rancho Nuevo, capturing weapons and releasing prisoners from the region's jails. The Mexican army responded savagely. The Zapatista army was dislodged relatively easily from the towns (although there was quite a fight in Ocosingo) and air force bombers followed the retreating indigenous soldiers back into the highlands, Los Altos. January 10th saw a half-million strong demonstration for peace in Mexico City.

Within days the President, Carlos Salinas, unnerved by the sympathetic attention the Indians were receiving and the jitters of the stock market, which had lost 6.2% of its value since the uprising had begun, called a halt to the bombings and summary executions. February and March saw peace negotiations take place in San Cristobal, at which time the popular image of the rebel Indian dressed in black, wearing a ski-mask and toting a gun became an archetype. This period also saw the beginning of the Mexican media's love affair with Subcommandante Marcos, the apparent spokesman of the EZLN.

Despite visible headway, the differences between the ladino (European blood) politicians and the indigenous peasant were irreconcilable. The PRI wished to limit the negotiations, and therefore the uprising itself, to the status of a 'local difficulty.' The Indians wanted to intervene politically on a much broader scale. Once the negotiations had ended, the EZLN representatives took the proposals back to the village assemblies of the Zapatista heartlands where, after three months of discussion, they were massively rejected. A return to war, however, was little more than suicide.

To overcome this bind, the Zapatistas decided to call a National Democratic Convention (CND) in their jungle base of the Lacandon. Coming weeks before the Presidential election, which is held every six years in Mexico, the CND would be an opportunity to bring all the anti-PRI elements of 'civil society' together to discuss strategy. But if the Convention was a success in terms of the numbers attending, and therefore a timely morale-booster for the besieged Indians, nothing concrete came of it. Defined only by their hatred of the PRI, these disparate groups could agree on nothing: the inspiration they took from the struggle of the Indians did not translate into a common political project.[5] With the routine re-election of the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, later that month, the EZLN went into crisis and stayed quiet at the national level for a number of months.

Throughout 1994-95 though, the Indians of eastern Chiapas were seizing more and more land (over 1,500 properties representing more than 90,000 hectares were taken in the period up to June 1995), evicting landowners and organising their new villages into autonomous municipalities. Protected from the violence of the landowner's private armies, the Guardias Blancas (White Guards) and other assorted goons by the implied threat of EZLN guns, these municipalities, of which there are currently thirty-two, were growing ever larger and threatened to encroach upon the vital oil fields of north-east Chiapas. Meanwhile the army tightened its cordon, building new roads and bases.

December 1994 saw the EZLN break through the blockade and surround the Mexican army, before disappearing into the countryside. In Mexico City, investment flooded out of the stock market after Zedillo was forced to devalue the peso dramatically, an action as traditional for the PRI as their routine polling victories. In February 1995 the army launched a new offensive with much destruction of villages and crops. Demonstrations were immediate in Mexico City. Now the slogan was not 'Peace in Chiapas' but 'We are all Zapatistas'. Once again the army quickly called off their bludgeoning.

Later that year new peace talks began in the Zapatista town of San Andres Larrainzar. The PRI would discuss only indigenous issues, and refused to countenance any Zapatista criticism of Mexico's new neoliberal economics. Although an Accord on Indigenous Rights and Cultures was signed, which the Zapatistas still view as a great victory, the PRI has since refused to implement it anywhere. This Accord was intended to be the first of five, but it was by now clear that the PRI were using the peace talks to buy time in which to further militarise eastern Chiapas. The EZLN cancelled the discussions.

July 1996, with the peace process still ostensibly going forward, saw the 'First Intercontinental Gathering for Humanity and against Neoliberalism' (Encuentro). Four thousand delegates from many different countries attended this inaugural conference in the Lacandon jungle. Two have been held since, in Spain and Brazil. Summer '96 also saw the appearance of a new guerilla group, the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR) which attacked the army in its home state of Guerrero. The EZLN refused to develop links with the EPR, accusing them of reproducing a particular type of vanguard model of armed struggle which is sometimes called foquismo in Latin America. The last couple of years has, however, seen a split in the EPR, from which the EPR-I (EPR-Indigenous) has emerged. This group has based itself on the Zapatista model and some links have been developed with the EZLN. However, recently the structure of the EPR-I has been affected by the capture and imprisonment of some of its leaders by the state.

Unable to reach any accommodation with the PRI yet unable to restart their war, the EZLN continue to find themselves at an impasse. The creation of the FZLN (Frente Zapatista de Nacional Liberacion) during 1996 was an attempt to provide a political forum outside Chiapas for 'civil society'. Set up by the Zapatistas, they themselves have refused to join, claiming that they might dominate proceedings. Subsequently the FZLN has been riven by the ideological ambitions of the Mexico City left, and is commonly considered a failure.

Since then the Zapatistas have fallen back upon nationwide publicity drives. These have the dual role of keeping their struggle and the militarisation of eastern Chiapas in the public eye, while simultaneously building solidarity networks as they reach out across Mexico. September 1997 saw 1,111 Zapatistas, one from each autonomous village, march from Chiapas to Mexico City, picking up supporters along the way. March 1999 saw La Consulta: 5000 male and female Zapatistas visited every municipality in Mexico in order to hold a ballot on indigenous rights and the military build-up in Chiapas.

Despite the blockade, the Mexican army is unable to break the power of the autonomous municipalities. This is partly because the measures needed to achieve this would result in eastern Chiapas becoming a charnel house, and the PRI has been unwilling to court that sort of international attention. The army for their part are reluctant. The generals know their troops come largely from Mexico's urban slums and have no real quarrel with the Zapatistas. A prolonged and vicious attack could quickly bring insubordination and mutiny into the picture. Indeed, according to one officer who has since fled to the US, around a hundred Mexican soldiers deserted in the opening weeks of the Chiapas war. Instead, the army have taken to training paramilitaries, for which they afterwards claim no responsibility. The group Mascara Rojo (Red Mask) carried out the Acteal massacre of December 1997, the single worst atrocity yet in this struggle, in which 45 EZLN sympathisers, including women and children, were gunned down. Naturally the PRI then use such moments to justify sending yet more troops into the area - in order to 'control the paramilitaries'. Even so, the army has occasionally been let off the leash: April to June 1998 saw attacks on the autonomous municipalities of Flores Magon, Tierra y Libertad and San Juan de Libertad. As a result of these and other incursions, the number of refugees in Chiapas is now over 20,000.

1999 saw better prospects. In September hundreds of UNAM strikers travelled to Chiapas for meetings with the EZ. Desperate to stop the two sides meeting, the army and police pulled out all the stops on the dirt roads leading to the autonomous communities, though a few got through. The UNAM occupation in Mexico City was smashed by an enormous dawn raid in February 2000 and hundreds of students incarcerated on ludicrous terrorism charges. The UNAM strike, the largest student movement since 1968, could have all sorts of effects on Mexico's class struggle. No doubt some students will be recuperated by the state but further contestation seems inevitable for many. The independent electricity workers union has also sent delegations to eastern Chiapas. In their fight against privatisation of the electricity grid they have formed a National Forum which has been joined by over two hundred independent union sections and other social organisations. The electristas appear to have won their battle, though the threat has been lifted partly because privatisation remains unpopular and 2000 is an election year. Rationalisation in the electricity industry could easily be resurrected by the bourgeoisie in 2001 or 2002. The soil in which these struggles are rooted is still fertile. As the Zapatista supporters in San Cristobal say 'Nobody in Mexico knows what will happen next.'

The present article is an attempt to analyse the nature of the Zapatista uprising by moving beyond the bluster of the EZLN communiques, on which so many base their analysis of the EZLN. First however, we must examine the roots of the modern state - the Mexican Revolution.
Part 1: The Roots of the Modern State
The Revolution is the touchstone of Mexican politics. The period saw the Mexican state begin its transformation from an oligarchical-landowners' government to the one-party corporatist model which survived for so long. The Revolution is also crucial to understanding the peculiar social base from which the Mexican state is constructed, with its formal recuperation of worker and peasant organisations, and its need to regularly embark upon sprees of revolutionary rhetoric. The revolution was driven forward by the peasants' attack on the latifundias, or large estates, the dominant mode of accumulation in Mexico at the time. Despite subsequent industrialization, the latifundias have persisted - even grown - and have remained a locus of class struggle ever since, most recently in Chiapas. To grasp the importance of land struggles in Mexico we need to understand how the latifundias operate, and how they plug into the cycles of national accumulation.[6]

The latifundias

The Porfiriato, the administration of Porfirio Diaz, ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910. Its social base was the latifundistas, the large landowners, and it was their class interests that were transmitted through the government. The rapid industrialisation that Mexico was undergoing at the turn of the twentieth century was confined to tiny areas of the country, and the industrial bourgeoisie as a class were too weak to make much political headway in the Porfiriato. The large estates originated from the fallout of the Reform War, which had ended in 1867. The victorious Liberal wing of the oligarchy intended to create a limited system of small landholdings that would be constructed mainly from confiscated Church property and the expropriated communal land of Indians. But almost as soon as these smallholdings came into existence they were aggressively acquired by a new breed of landowner (the latifundista), the smallholder generally being unable to exist solely on his land. These smallholders became either poorly-paid day-labourers (i.e. seasonally employed) or debt-peons, little more than slaves. In the southern and central areas of Mexico, the latifundistas further expanded their property by violently evicting peasants (campesinos) from their ejidos (communal production units). This process produced continual class conflict in the countryside. The expansion of the latifundia property-form penetrated the countryside only to the extent that the local populace could be suppressed. Faced with widespread resistance, the landowners organised the Guardias Blancas (White Guards, usually campesinos-turned-bandit, in turn recruited back to the Side of Order). The fact that these brutal paramilitary groups have been a constant part of rural life ever since indicates that the peasants have never admitted defeat in the land war, and the landowners know it.

The latifundias, which were usually centred on a lavish, European-style hacienda, were the wellspring of surplus extraction in the economy. Sugar, coffee, cotton, India rubber: exported abroad, as well as serving the needs of the internal market, these were the sources of wealth for the landowning classes. And if the international trade cycle contracted, the latifundia could easily withdraw into limited, or even subsistence, production. The cost of the reproduction of labour fell always on the villages outside the property and never on the hacienda. While the elasticity of this form of accumulation accounts for its longevity, it was in many ways backward. The commodification of labour-power and money relations had spread to an extent throughout the agricultural sector, but were by no means universal. On many haciendas the landowners paid their workers in produce, or forced them to purchase from an employer's shop. Via this payment in kind campesinos usually ended up in debt, which tended to rise at a greater rate than the peasant was able to pay it off. As a result of this dependency, the campesino became a peon, tied forever to the hacienda. The fact that debts were passed on from father to son only helped to preserve this distorted form of value extraction. If a campesino attempted to escape, the Guardias Blancas would follow.

Zapatismo and the Ayala Plan

By 1911, revolt was breaking out in the north and centre of Mexico, triggered by the corruption of the Porfiriato and the violence of the landowners. In the countryside, the peasant uprising took the form of land seizures. It is the scale of the attack on the latifundias that is the defining characteristic of the Mexican Revolution. With the absence of fully-developed wage-relations, exploitation was more immediate: the campesinos were able to personally identify their class enemies and exact violent revenge. The Zapatista movement was the highpoint of these years. The campesinos of Morelos and Puebla constructed not only a revolutionary army, they also produced, in the Ayala Plan, a coherent political programme that asserted their needs against those of capital. The Ayala Plan spelled out in detail the Zapatista programme of land redistribution: broadly, expropriation of private land for public utility, dispossessed individuals and communities, with a guarantee of protection for small landholdings. The Plan was both a codification of what was already happening and a fillip to further land takeovers. Landlords, Mexican and foreign, were fleeing in their thousands.

With the landowners chased out of Morelos, the Zapatistas attempted to place limits on the future possibility of petty-bourgeois accumulation. One example is the proposal for agricultural banks, a confused attempt, but an attempt nevertheless, to temper the power of money in favour of social needs. Of course, had the land redistribution project been allowed to thrive with the continuation of money relations as a whole, a new generation of landowners would eventually have developed from the ranks of the revolutionary peasants. In the Ayala Plan we find a communist tendency towards communal land; at the same time a very uncommunist tolerance of small farmers, perfectly in keeping with what Teodor Shanin calls the 'different world' of the peasantry,[7] and which we shall examine later.

The end of the Morelos Commune

If the Zapatistas had, at least in the short term, resolved the contradiction of their class position by favouring the communal over the incipient bourgeois, in shared land rather than private property, they were unable to resolve a further contradiction, and one which led ultimately to the smashing of their stronghold, the Morelos Commune, by the reconstituted power of the state. While the revolutionary campesino was (almost literally) everywhere, they were unable as a class to move beyond their localist perspective. The Ayala Plan was the most sophisticated attempt to intervene on a national level - yet it talked about the land and nothing else. Unlike the revolutionary proletariat, separated forever from the means of production, they did not see the need to transcend their class, and with it all classes. The revolutionary working class needs to talk about everything in its attempts to generalise its struggles; the peasantry believes it needs only to talk about the land. The campesinos of this period had struggled around their needs, had largely succeeded, and now found themselves unable to develop further.

The revolutionary peasants who in December 1914 occupied Mexico City were undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of class struggle in the world at that time. The workers of Europe were drowning in their own blood and the Russian Revolution was still three years away. By contrast, the whole of Mexico was at the peasants' feet. The national power of the bourgeoisie was smashed and its survivors had retreated to the eastern port of Veracruz. Yet it was at precisely this moment that the traditional peasant deference, which is rooted in the contradictory nature of peasant existence and the cultural baggage that accompanies it, asserted itself. Refusing a political solution from within themselves, and trusting that military strength alone would prevail, they inadvertently left the door open to a weak but reconstituting state power. This inability to find a wider social perspective is at least something the present day Zapatistas, with all their limitations, have been obliged to overcome, while many of their campesino brothers and sisters in the west of Chiapas are still unable to make the jump from atomised deference to communal organisation.

The preamble to the Ayala Plan had ruled out any compromises with the bourgeois leader Madero and other 'dictatorial associates.' Yet the Zapatistas were chronically unable to see beyond their own backyard. This blindness to the threat of the state was the highest contradiction of the exemplary peasant movement of the Mexican Revolution.

The working class

Individually, many miners, railwaymen and textile workers joined the peasant Northern Division, which had entered into a de facto alliance with the Zapatista Southern Liberation Army. As a class, however, and despite a huge strike wave in 1906 , they remained quiet until 1915.

The peasant armies which had occupied Mexico City had failed to inspire working class support, or indeed relate to them in any way. As a result, in exchange for union concessions from the revolutionary bourgeoisie, the reformist federation of unions, the Casa del Obrera Mundial (COM) agreed to form 'Red Battalions' to fight the Northern Division and the Zapatisatas. Although this decision did not go unopposed - the electricians' union refused to abide by the pact - the Red Battalions fought alongside what were known as the Constitutionalist armies throughout 1915. Yet only a year later the working class was paying the price for this complicity. The new bourgeoisie, having beaten off the threat from the peasants, no longer needed the unions. COM headquarters was stormed by troops and unionists across the country arrested. The following year, 1916 , the first general strike in Mexican history was crushed. Despite this, however, the power of the organised working class remained formidable.

The 1917 Constitution

Just like the Revolution, the 1917 Constitution is a vital touchstone in Mexican life, a document that came into existence as a result of prolonged struggle, and is still held in high regard today by many sections of the working class and peasantry. The bourgeoisie clearly intended the new set of state rules to be a signal that the years of chaos and civil war were over and a new cycle of accumulation could begin.

Knowing the erosion of the gains of the Revolution would only be tolerated to a degree by the peasants and the working class, the new bourgeoisie institutionalised itself as the revolutionary party-state, marginalising competing currents within its own class by mobilising popular opinion. It is the evolution of this party-state that accounts for the lack of parliamentary democracy in Mexico, and explains the concentration of power in the hands of one man, the President. Despite many knocks this specific formation of the bourgeoisie has survived - just - the twentieth century.

In the advanced capitalist countries, the illusion of alternatives through democracy is at the centre of the reproduction and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Democracy mediates between competing interests within the ruling class, while at the same time countering tendencies towards corruption in the relation between state and capital. In Mexico, there is a hole where this mediation might exist - a hole that is instead plugged by the extraordinary way in which workers' and peasants' organisations have been formally co-opted by the state.
Part 2: The Changing Face of the Institutional Revolution
Radical social democracy to the rescue

It was not until 1931 that labour's representatives were fully incorporated into the state. This acceptance of the working class as the working class, as a potentially antagonistic class who must be brought into the fold to neutralise their revolutionary impulses, is the basis of the social democracy the Mexican bourgeoisie utilised for decades. (As late as 1988, President Salinas could still trumpet the 'indestructible pact between the Revolutionary government and the working class.')

With its proximity to, and integration with, US capital, Mexico was profoundly affected by the Wall Street Crash. By 1934 the bourgeoisie had comprehensively failed to restore stable class relations for the accumulation of capital. Exacerbated by the Depression and the militant recomposition of both the peasantry and the proletariat, revolutionary change from below was once more on the agenda. If American capital-in-general was now reluctantly going along with the New Deal, the solution to the crisis in Mexico had to be far more radical. Most individual Mexican capitals recognised the objectively higher level of class struggle. The nightmare of 1914 haunted them more than ever. As such the Mexican ruling class's radical solution to the crisis opened up the possibility of fostering a movement that would not go home when it was told to, that could develop in its own direction and rupture forever the fabric of bourgeois society.

This radicalised form of social democracy came through the conduit of Lazaro Cardenas, President from 1934-40. His first and most important task was to sign a pact with the new CGOCM (Confederation of Workers and Peasants). By 1935 half of all Mexico's organised workers were in CGOCM and strikes were going through the roof. Cardenas immediately recognised the right to strike, poured money into CGOCM patronage and shifted the sympathy of the state's labour relations boards away from the employer and towards the working class as represented by the unions. In 1936 CGOCM was renamed the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers) and recognised as the official national labour movement. The highpoint of the radical social democratic project came in 1938, with Cardenas's nationalisation of the largely US-owned oil industry. Cardenas manipulated the enthusiasm for this measure to generate a spirit of 'national unity', which he then used to crush the insurgent workers' movement.

It was not only the cities the radical party-state had to attend to in order to prevent social revolution breaking out. The countryside had ignited and sustained the Revolution, and could do so again. Cardenas's solution was a massive redistribution of land the like of which social democracy in Mexico has not been compelled to repeat. Naturally only the worst land was parcelled out - the property and interests of the hacendados left intact. While the Cardenas reforms appeared impressive, they not only preserved social relations in the rural areas, they bolstered and expanded commodity relations by creating a new class of small landowners. For the vast majority a small patch was unsustainable and seasonal wage-labour unavoidable. The ultimate result of the land reforms was marginalisation for the many, a new network of small competitive farming for some, and the consolidation of the lumbering latifundias.

In fact Cardenas had mobilised the working class in part to discipline those recalcitrant sections of the bourgeoisie who needed to be saved from themselves. After 1940 the bourgeoisie as a whole accepted the necessity of state intervention. Even more crucially, any revolutionary movement from below could be mediated through the now-reliable CTM or the new CNC (National Campesino Confederation). As part of the party-state, these organisations could deliver certain concessions, defuse proletarian and peasant anger through nationalist channels and turn a blind eye to repression if it was needed. The state had solved the crisis it had been mired in since the fall of the Porfiriato, and it has followed the same model until very recently: one party guaranteeing social democracy (peace between the officially-recognised antagonistic classes). Unlike the west, it has not needed the shield of formal bourgeois democracy to do so.

The Economy after 1940

The American Fordist model of accumulation, whereby increased productivity pays for higher wages, which in turn boosts demand, could not be followed in Mexico. The native bourgeoisie was too weak to innovate and had always relied on America for heavy industrial investment. The agricultural sector still lagged far behind that of America. While US capital may not consciously have wanted to keep Mexico underdeveloped, it saw it generally as fit only for natural resource and labour-power exploitation.

Mexico did, though, industrialise rapidly after 1940. The model was state-led capitalism with its own Mexican peculiarities. Investment in infrastructure was the province of the state. Petroleum, rail and communications sectors were all under state control, and the state generally carried out economic development which the private sector thought too risky. The resources of the state were augmented by huge foreign investment. Mexico has always been a natural first stop for America's foreign-bound surplus value; now it flooded over the border as a result of the post-war boom.

By the 1960s, Mexico had been enjoying its economic 'miracle' for some time. GDP had risen on average 6-7% annually. Profit flowed into state coffers, paying for an unofficial welfare state of sorts. However social inequality was reaching new extremes. By 1969 the proportion of national income going to the poorest half of the population was only 15%. In rural areas, as agricultural mechanisation increased and productive land was concentrated, the number of un- or underemployed was going up. Some, seeking to refuse proletarianisation, moved away from the agricultural heartlands and attempted to chip out a living from barely cultivatable land - this being the option many Chiapan Indians took; many moved to the cities to join the reserve army and effectively kept factory and workshop wages down; some became migrant workers following the harvests through Morelos, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi and Veracruz. Still others crossed the border into the US.[8]

In the towns and cities even the organised industrial proletariat suffered from low wages. While they were relatively well off compared to those in small workshops or the unemployed, struggling to survive in any way that they could, their wages were a fraction of their US counterparts'. Their union organisation militated for higher wages, yet this was offset by the absolute corruption of the charros (union bureaucrats), who would often swipe their members' dues. More than anything being in a strong union meant a guarantee of a job, a buttress against unemployment.

However, for the 'pillars of society', those sections of the population incorporated into the party-state, the costs of the reproduction of labour were paid, after a fashion - by the 'PRI welfare state'. It is difficult to quantify, but the far-reaching web of the PRI guaranteedan existence for those sections of society it needed to perpetuate itself. Whether it be official (wage rises) or unofficial (backhanders, protection or the elimination of a rival), it all had to be paid for. The corruption of the PRI welfare state has certainly retarded the efficiency of Mexican industry, prompting many members of the bourgeoisie to defect to the PAN (National Action Party), the pro-business Catholic party set up in the 1930s to oppose the Cardenist reforms.

The 1959 Movements

1958-59 saw a sustained offensive by the proletariat over both wage levels and the control of union charros.[9] It is difficult to know to what extent working class self-activity was mediated; certainly the railwaymen's, electricians' and teachers' strikes were led by the Communist Party, and all the ideological drag of Stalinism was present. Dissident Marxist leaders were also prominent, but presumably their beliefs were variations on a theme. However, the fact that the Communist Party was proscribed from 1946 to 1977 meant that following them led to an immediate challenge to the law of the land: the 1959 movements led frequently to violent confrontation with the state.

Capital also reacted to 1959. Wary of the working class's proven power over the railways, much investment now shifted into air freight and automobile production to begin a new round of accumulation - and struggle.

Mexico's '68

By the late 60s the inability of the PRI to reform and democratise itself was apparent to many sections of society, and was a major contributing factor to the student revolt of 1968. These students were bent on giving cardiac therapy to the cadaver of the Revolution - determined to rejuvenate the egalitarianism of the 1917 Constitution. The movement, in its concentrated phase of July - October became radicalised through its many violent confrontations with the state. Their numbers were swollen by pissed-off proletarians angry at the spectacle and expenditure of the imminent Olympic Games. Ten days before the Games were due to open, around five hundred students were killed and 2,500 wounded in the Tlatelolco massacre. The army attack, which has been marked every year since by demonstrations, finally blew the lid off the PRI's claims to revolutionary legitimacy. It also damaged the party-state in more concrete ways: traditionally unconcerned about using clubs and bullets against workers and peasants, the PRI now found itself shooting down middle class students - its the natural constituency for reproduction.

Many students, though, were brought back 'within budget' after a time in prison. Those who had moved beyond a critique of the PRI to a wider critique of capitalism were forced out of Mexico City to towns and cities that carried less personal risk. For those being actively pursued by the state, this meant disappearing into Mexico's vast hinterlands. There is a direct lineage from the Tlateloloco massacre to the many guerilla groups that appeared in the rural margins in the early 1970s. Tainted by the militarist ideology of Che or Mao, these were all smashed with the help of the CIA by 1975.

The early 1970s - economic crisis

And there was a new problem. The economic boom stemming from the industrialisation process and the PRI employment protection racket, which had partly offset the traditional role of the reserve army, meant the nationalised industries were severely overmanned and inefficient, and run by an entrenched working class accustomed to relatively high wages.

They say that when America sneezes, Mexico catches a cold. Now mired in its own crisis of accumulation, America in the early 1970s was taking Mexico down with it. As capital increasingly freed itself from national boundaries, transforming itself into highly mobile finance capital, investment flooded away from the industrial heartlands of both North America and Mexico to the Pacific Rim economies.

The recession gave the bourgeoisie less scope for conceding the above-inflation wage rises that had headed off trouble in the past. As a result the negotiating position of the charros was considerably weakened. With the ideals - and repression - of the student movement fresh, the working class, particularly from 1973, began a series of strikes, go-slows and demonstrations. Just like 1959, their demands were over wages and the removal of corrupt union leaders: a struggle for autonomy that raised the possibility of going beyond the trade union form as such. The movement organised new unions outside the CTM and formed currents of resistance within it.[10] The fact that the workers had often to physically fight the charros and their goons, who sometimes used the tools of disappearance and assassination, meant that the CTM could easily and visibly be identified as the enemy. While few workers seem to have used this as an opportunity from which to develop a critique of wage-labour, there can be no doubt that the mid '70s strike movement increased both the self-confidence of the Mexican working class, and the sense of their being an antagonistic class, the opposition to, and negation of, the bourgeoisie.

The movement reached its height in 1976. The radical electricians' union, who had brought together new unions, urban squatter groups, and peasant organisations to form the 'National Front of Labour, Peasant and Popular Insurgency', now called a national strike. The administration responded by sending the army to occupy every electrical installation in Mexico. This was only the most visible of the many acts of repression which pushed the new labour militancy into defeat.

The state also responded with massive social spending. Foreign investment, however, was flooding out of Mexico. Moreover, state expenditure on unproductive industries staffed by rebellious workers was never going to solve the crisis of accumulation. Then an unexpected and propitious discovery gave the bourgeoisie room to manoeuvre - oil.

Oil boom - and bust

As a result of the oil boom, the economy was growing at around 8% by the end of the 1970s. Not only had the discovery of new petroleum deposits pulled Mexico out of the recession that had begun in 1973, the growth and concomitant wage rises had served to head off the snowballing class struggle.

The oil still in the ground off the Yucatan peninsula and in Chiapas was used as collateral for huge loans from abroad. Western banks, stuffed with surplus petrodollars as a result of the OPEC oil price hike eagerly lent out these vast sums to Mexico and many other 'Third World' nations. The loans were used to cover both the trade and the budget deficits.

The bourgeoisie assumed the price of oil would continue to rise, as it had done since 1973: the extent of their loans was predicated on future oil revenue. However, the price of oil dropped sharply after 1979. Coupled with rising interest rates that pushed the external debt ever higher, Mexico in 1982 was unable to keep to its scheduled repayments. By then, the nation owed $92.4 billion, the third largest international debt after the US and Brazil. In August of that year, Mexico triggered the international debt crisis by declaring a moratorium on its repayments. In so doing it brought the international banking system to the edge of collapse. Western banks were soon refusing loans of any kind to the whole of Latin America which was consequently plunged into a decade-long recession.

In a desperate attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of capital, the then-President Lopez Portillo in almost his final act nationalised the banks. In so doing he followed firmly in the tradition of PRI economic nationalists who blame foreign, and especially US, capital of bleeding their country dry. In fact the bank nationalisation was the last time the economic nationalist card was be played with any real content.

The Lost Decade

1982-1992 is sometimes called the Lost Decade in Mexico. The story is a familiar one: having to go to the IMF for money to keep the economy afloat, the PRI found themselves obliged to roll the state back from the arena of capital. This meant bringing the budget deficit under control, removing state subsidies to industry and agriculture, and lowering wages in order to stem the runaway inflation which had been fuelled by the oil mirage. State enterprises were privatised by the fistful, usually offloaded at below market value to PRI cronies. And 1986 saw Mexico finally joining GATT after years of protectionism: many companies went bankrupt as a result.

In December 1987 the Economic Solidarity Pact was signed by representatives of government, the unions and business. (Many of these union leaders had come to prominence through the struggles of the 1970s). Restraint in wage demands and price controls on consumer goods was agreed. The Pact was nothing less than an attempt to preserve the social fabric so that restructuring could go ahead unfettered. But its very existence raised the possibility of its being wrecked by a new proletarian offensive.

Unfortunately the terrain of struggle had changed. While the struggle for autonomy in the 1970s had ended at the time of the oil boom, capital was now in a much less expansive position. If the crisis of accumulation was to be solved restructuring was essential. The offensive anti-charro struggles of the working class now became purely defensive and economic. As plants were closed or privatised, workers made redundant or had their wages lowered, the struggle oriented itself around sectional bread-and-butter issues, which engendered fragmentation. Better-paid CTM workers were still relatively protected, and the 1970s generation of charros were consequently in a much more credible position to mediate struggle. And if the situation became desperate, there was always the allure of the US border for the desperate proletarian.

Two moments from the 1980s indicate, however, that overt class antagonism had not vanished from the Mexican landscape. The first is to be found in the weeks following the devastation caused by the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. With the government paralysed, the residents of Mexico City's barrios formed themselves, initially, into rescue and medical teams, and shortly thereafter into community groups. These groups both rebuilt houses and prevented the incursions of landlords, many of whom wished to use the earthquake as an excuse to evict their tenants and rebuild the neighbourhoods with middle class housing at middle class prices. From these autonomous working class formations came a network of self-help groups, groups that make up part of what the Zapatistas call 'civil society'.[11]

A more dissipated, but nevertheless important response to the austerity programme was the Presidential election of 1988. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a renegade PRI politician, stood against the PRI - and 'won'. Soon afterwards he formed the PRD, now the 'official' left opposition in Mexico. The PRD is very much old school PRI: for state intervention, increased welfare, a measure of land redistribution, against GATT and NAFTA. Prior to 1988, the PRI had only to manage electoral fraud on a gubernatorial level. The Cardenas challenge was so unexpected and so overwhelming that the party-state panicked and fixed the results in the crudest possible manner. Mexico City was immediately alive with anti-PRI demonstrations. The TV screens showing the polling percentages had simply gone blank for hours, and mountains of votes marked for Cardenas were found piled on the Distrito Federal's rubbish tips or floating down Mexico's waterways.

Elections in Mexico often carry such a heavy coercive element that they can be a world away from the pure bourgeois individuality of elections in the West. PRIistas are usually present in gangs around the ballot boxes, and refusal to vote the right way could mean losing a job, having your child barred from school or simply being given a beaten. Thus a refusal to vote PRI is not taken lightly, and is much more likely to occur after discussions and agreement with friends and neighbours. This need to come together collectively immediately and paradoxically raises the possibility of a world beyond democracy.

The Tequila Effect and Beyond

With cheap American commodities just over the border, Mexico is adept at sucking in goods from abroad, leading to periodic crises in the balance of payments which have usually been solved by devaluing the peso. The peso was overvalued in 1994 - but everyone assumed the PRI had sufficient foreign currency reserves to protect it. In fact these reserves had fallen from $33bn in February to only $2.5bn in December, money which had been used to cover the yawning balance of payments deficit. Such a dramatic erosion also shows just how quickly the relatively protected Mexican market was opened up by NAFTA. On the 20th of December, the new Zedillo administration announced a one-off devaluation of 15%. Panicked foreign investors scrambled to get out of both pesos and Mexico. The PRI used the last of its foreign currency reserves to bolster the peso, but two days later it was forced to float the currency on the markets, where it dropped 40% against the dollar.

With the dollar such an important factor in Mexico - companies and the government generally having their loans denominated in dollars - the devaluation now meant the debt burden in the economy had risen massively. International debt default seemed once again to be on the cards. And what was being called the Tequila Effect could spread - for Latin America, only recently recovered from the years of international finance isolation that had resulted from the 1982 default, this would be nothing short of catastrophic. Despite the isolationists in Washington, a $50bn rescue package was put together by the US and IMF, specifically to service short-term debt. In March 1995 the PRI announced an austerity programme that included a 10% cut in government spending, increased VAT, fuel and electricity price rises and imposed credit restraints.

Meanwhile, with interest rates soaring at 120%, many businesses and mortgage-owners were unable to keep up their repayments, despite a new government subsidy for the middle class. Seven banks collapsed and needed rescuing by the government. The true cost of this bailout only became apparent in 1999 - $93bn, nearly 20% of GDP! This debt, which is accruing 18% yearly interest, and which the PRI has hidden from public accounts, falls due in 2003. Unless it is restructured soon, the Mexican capitalist class may find themselves in trouble yet again.

The response of the working class to this austerity package was determined by the depth of the recession that followed. Unlike 1987, the CTM refused to sign an economic pact with the government and business. Consequently there was no official policy of wage restraint during this crucial time. But the refusal to endorse austerity was hardly in response to a militant working class movement within the CTM tent. Rather it was because, their social base undermined by privatisation, the CTM now found itself in much stiffer competition with independent unions and was compelled to posture a little more credibly. Neither, however, were the independent unions arenas of militant anti-austerity. Shocked by the scale of the 1995 recession - one million out of work, another four million working less than fifteen hours a week - the working class was unable to move beyond the fragmentation wrought by the economy and which the trade union form accepts. Furthermore, the PRIs targeted anti-poverty programme PRONASOL, which had come into being as a result of the 1988 election shock, offset some of the very worst effects of the recession.

Some fantasise that the devaluation was a punitive measure directed at the working class lest they become overly-inspired by the Chiapas rebellion; others that Zedillo deliberately elected to expose the economy to crisis and therefore force a period of capitalist restructuring. Neither position is tenable: by December 1994 the Zapatistas' initial impact had evaporated and the uprising was militarily contained - indeed the PRI had secured a new incumbent in the Presidential Palace. And the depth of the recession, which the PRI could not have forseen, is surely proof that they never intended to engineer more than an simple adjustment in the balance of payments. Rather what we see is a crisis of confidence in the Mexican bourgeoisies' ability to manage accumulation on the part of global finance capital.

There is no doubt, however, that the recession has vigorously restructured sectors of the Mexican economy. The competitive edge that the devaluation gave to Mexican exports has been sustained. Oil, once such a key export, now accounts for only 10% of the country's export base. It is this export-led recovery that the capitalist class see as the fruit of the restructuring that has been taking place since the late 1980s, and which superficially appears to be as a result of NAFTA. For the working class, real wages have still not reached their pre-devaluation levels. More wage cuts and job insecurity is on the way as the privatisation bandwagon judders on and the old social contract is further destroyed.

The swift economic recovery from 1995 showed how successfully the PRI had reinvented itself as a party of neoliberal economics. They did not attempted to spend their way out of trouble, as they have done in the past. Instead they inflicted the harshest of free market medicines on the population. By stealing their policies, the PRI seemingly marginalised the PAN. Two related contradictions now beset the PRI however. The first was that with the opening up of Mexico to trade liberalisation, and the subsequent deluge of American commodities, the PRI could no longer bang the ideological drum of economic nationalism with any coherence. This may not have been a problem: the Mexican bourgeoisie have decades of practice at appearing to be masters of their own fate while having huge sections of their economy subordinated to the interests of American capital.

The second contradiction was more serious. By so dramatically reducing the size of the state sector, the party-state inevitably curtailed its own ability to dispense patronage and do favours.[12] The question for the PRI became: how successful could it be at maintaining its traditional network of influence and power, a network born out of a corrupt and state-led economy, in the face of the new competitiveness the free market demanded. With the PRI unable to solve this problem, a problem which undermined their own social base, Mexico could open up to all sorts of possibilities.
Part 3: A Commune in Chiapas?
Traditional accumulation and social structure

With its mountainous highlands and jungles, Chiapas can feel more a part of Central America than Mexico. The Distrito Federal of Mexico City, even San Cristobal, can seem a million miles away: unconnected and unimportant. Until the 1970s capital accumulation followed a stable and relatively backward model, necessitated by the geographical inaccessibility and remoteness of this state, and made viable by the rich lands. The Revolution barely reached Chiapas, and the latifundias were never broken up, although an echo can be heard in the contemporaneous slave revolts in the logging camps of the Lacandon.[13] Similarly the Cardenas reforms had little effect in the 1930s. Some land was redistributed, but it was all of poor quality, 'so steep the campesinos had to tie themselves to trees to plough, while the rancheros continued to hold great swathes in the rolling valleys.' [14]

The pattern of accumulation was, and to a large extent still is, based on expansive land holdings rather than developing the forces of production per se. Coffee, bananas and other tropical fruit are grown for export; cattle-raising is another source of profit for the rural Chiapan bourgeoisie. Crop-growing requires only seasonal labour-power, and cattle-rearing generally requires very little at all. Accumulation in these dominant industries has come not from improving productivity (though agricultural techniques have obviously improved over the years), rather it has come from extending the land available on which to grow or graze cattle. Chiapan landowners have, as a result, a reputation for being among the most violent in Mexico. Their business has literally been that of forcing people off fertile land. Because the landowners are mestizo (mixed blood) or ladino and those they are expropriating are invariably indigenous, the rural bourgeoisie are deeply racist - an important point to bear in mind when discussing the validity of some Zapatista ideas. Through this violent racism, the hacendados and latifundistas have been able to utterly dominate those Indians that have been allowed to remain as wage labourers or debt-peons. Whether this is by forcing employees to buy from the hacienda shop, raping their wives or daughters, or executing natives who try to organise, racism has buttressed the power of the landowner and served to nail the price of labour-power to the floor: it has greased the circuits of accumulation for decades. Backward Chiapan capital does not even have to worry about the costs of the reproduction of labour, as these have always been borne by the family unit in the impoverished local village. Depending on their size (large-scale agribusiness or medium-sized commercial growers) the landowner's capital may flow to the cities to be invested, often in speculative ventures. A large part of their profits also goes on conspicuous consumption, the flaunting of which further reinforces the rural hierarchy.

Their paying off of local caciques is perfectly in character for this underdeveloped form of accumulation. Caciques are rather like charros in that they can deliver some of the basic demands of the campesino and mediate his needs. They are usually older men who are involved in local commercial activities and have a reputation as fixers, usually with some access to local state funds. Many are PRIistas, most are corrupt and violent and all believe they 'serve the people'. In fact they serve to demobilise and suppress rural struggle and are invaluable to the landowners. Caciquismo itself has often been a focus for struggle, with predictably unsuccessful results.

The migratory flow of land refugees in Chiapas has been eastwards, as coffee growers expanded their plantations in the fertile Soconusco region of the state. In 1954 the landless, particularly Chol Indians, began arriving in the Lacandon. The trickle soon became a flood: Indians from Oaxaca made homeless by government dams, from Veracruz, evicted by Guardias Blancas, mestizo farmers from Guerrero and Michoacan. Much like the US border, the Lacandon was becoming a safety valve for the poverty and dispossession agricapitalist expansion was creating. The party-state saw this, recognised its value, and granted a number of land titles through government decree in 1957 and 1961. But the stampede into the Lacandon and consequent deforestation meant there was not enough land to go around, and what there was quickly became sterile. Those who had reckoned on avoiding proletarianisation by refusing to go to the cities now found they had to survive by selling their labour-power wherever they could and eking out some sort of existence on a tiny patch of barren land.

1970s - eviction and resistance in the Lacandon

By the early '70s, with the migration to the Lacandon unstemmed and living conditions becoming unbearable, revolt was in the air. In 1972 President Echeverria sought to ease the pressure cooker by officially redistributing land, believing this would also create a new class of Indian latifundistas. 645,000 hectares were to be given to sixty-six Indian heads-of-family;[15] the rest ordered to leave. There was immediate resistance to the evictions - and an influx of young activists into the region, Los Altos in particular. Many were students who had turned to Guevarist or Maoist ideology after their exile from Mexico City in 1968, now espousing an all-out guerilla war for which they were little prepared. An example was the Maoist group Linea Proletaria who sent brigades from Torreon and Monterrey after being invited to Chiapas by local liberation theology priests such as Bishop Samuel Ruiz.

With this mish-mash of Leninist activity, it is difficult to discover the autonomous content of the struggle against eviction from the Lacandon.[16]To muddy the water still further, it is plain that the vanguardists and the liberation theologists were not in competition for the hearts and minds of the campesinos, as some have suggested. Liberation theology, which we shall look at in more detail below, had a high Marxist component in the mid-1970s: some priests refused sacraments to those who opposed Linea Proletaria; in turn the Maoists raised the banner of the indigenous church. Consequently the self-activity of the campesinos had to pass through two layers of mediation - or one of highly-integrated opposites - before it could assert itself in any way.

The land pressure was increased yet further in 1978 when Lopez Portillo announced the creation of the Montes Azul Biosphere - 38,000 hectares in the heart of the Lacandon. Forty communities and ejidos were removed from this UN-protected ecosystem. The frequent land occupations by campesino groups, sometimes led by the CIOAC (Independent Central of Agricultural Workers and Campesinos, Communist Party dominated and still influential today), were usually met with military expulsion. In 1980 the army massacred fifty Tojolabal Indians who had occupied a finca (large farm) forty miles from Comitan. This was the pattern for the '80s: the army and the police combining with the Guardias Blancas to suppress land takeovers and murder peasant leaders.

New patterns of accumulation

If the 1970s saw an upsurge in class struggle, it also saw the arrival of new national and international patterns of accumulation. The farmers and ranchers nowadays sit more or less uncomfortably with the new industries that wish to exploit Chiapas's abundant natural wealth, and which are often diametrically opposed to their interests. New dams were built in this period to provide electricity for petrochemical plants in Tabasco and Veracruz: Chiapas is Mexico's largest producer of hydroelectricity, though half of its homes have no power. Dam construction has provided sporadic employment for some parts of the indigenous population, while others have had to abandon their villages to rising flood waters. Further dam construction is planned, much of it targeted at the Zapatista stronghold of Las Canadas (the Canyons), a region of Los Altos.

The importance of hydroelectricity pales in comparison with the discovery of oil, however. The deposits in the north-east of the state are part of the Gulf of Mexico field that produces 81% of Mexico's crude export. But new deposits have also been found in the east, just north of the Guatemalan border (the so-called Ocosingo field), bang in the middle of Zapatista territory. Most of this new oil is not yet being pumped, but exploratory wells have been drilled both by PEMEX, the national oil company, and international oil interests. This sort of hit-and-miss drilling requires a lot of land; consequently the latifundistas and rancheros come into conflict with the international capital that views them as backward. A less developed industry, but potentially of great importance to the region, is biotechnology. Chiapas's diverse ecosystems are a paradise for those seeking to launch a new round of accumulation based on patented genetic technology. Already several companies have begun bio-prospecting in the state. But this is an exploitation that will be based on the preservation of the jungles, rather than their destruction.

We can see a new pattern of accumulation developing in Chiapas. Previously a backwater of non-innovatory local capital, the region has now acquired a strategic importance to sections of both national and international capital. However, the contradiction is not so much between new modes of accumulation and old, although tensions certainly exist, as some have argued:[17] a farmer may need to grab more land to keep his agribusiness growing, but he would surely be more than happy to hand over a drilling concession for a generous fee. Rather the contradiction is between a local and international capital that is compelled to make ever more of Chiapas barren in order to accumulate and international capital in the form of biotech multinationals who need to preserve the ecosystem.[18] Oil is predictably winning and the natural resources of Chiapas are being slowly eroded.

What is important is that for the local rancheros and latifundistas (who need only relatively small amounts of labour-power), for the oil companies and biotech corporations, the indigenous population of eastern Chiapas is now, almost absolutely, surplus to requirements. Those who were displaced from the west now discover it would be better not to have existed at all. This absolute neglect is reflected in the levels of alcoholism in many Indian communities, and the malnutrition and high infant mortality in the eastern highlands. The Mexican obsession with death, a cultural inheritance from ancient times and which was given new themes and images by the introduction of grim Catholic culture, has been renewed by the Zapatistas' frequent references to mortality.

The sparks of rebellion

The specific causes of the armed uprising of the Chiapan Indians are easy enough to trace. While the indigenous population had been excluded from the PRI welfare state, aside from a layer of PRIista caciques, they had benefited from the subsidies that had traditionally supported Mexican agriculture. From 1988, these subsidies and protections were reduced, dismantled or abolished by the new neoliberal PRI. So, for example, 1989 saw the abolition of INMECAFE, the state agency designed to purchase and set coffee prices, a crucial crop for the Indian ejidos. Floated on the world market, the price of coffee fell like a stone.[19] Wider structural changes also occurred in the name of opening Mexico up to the free market. 1992 saw the infamous amendment of Article 27 of the Constitution. Previously sacred truths were being questioned by the PRI: the amended Article now permitted the sale of communal lands to anyone who wanted to buy from anyone who could be persuaded (or forced) to sell. The countryside had been opened up to competition, strengthening the hand of the finca-owners and international capital. On top of this, NAFTA, which Salinas saw as his crowning achievement, would soon come into play. How would the Indians' small corn or coffee crops compete with modern US agribusiness? The answer was that they wouldn't.

In tandem with these factors which pointed to further immiseration, the campesinos of eastern Chiapas had not experienced a reduction in the state-sponsored repression that had been directed against them. The sigh of relief that had accompanied the end of General Castellanos's murderous governorship of the state (1982-88) quickly became a groan when his successor, Patrocinio Gonzalez began jailing peasant leaders and bumping off journalists The Guardias Blancas were roaming the countryside with impunity and the new forestry police were shooting at anyone they caught chopping down trees. Under these extreme circumstances, traditional independent peasant organisations such as CIOAC and the Association of Regional Independent Campesinos (ARIC), which had been set up by Maoists in the '70s were unable to hold their members. The stable cyclical world of the Indian village was being consumed by crisis. Colombus Day, October 1992 saw ten thousand indigenous marching through the streets of San Cristobal. Later they tore down the statue of local conquistadore Diego de Mazariegos. Many in the demonstration were already Zapatistas. The Indians of Los Altos, Las Canadas and La Selva were flooding into the ranks of the EZLN. But where had the EZ come from? And who exactly was organising it?

Formation of the EZLN[20]

The egalitarian nature of indigenous communal life has been widely overstated. Desperate to dispel the dead weight of Leninism, many have talked up the importance of Indian tradition. Isolated, impoverished, long distorted by caciques, by corrupt PRIistas, hotbeds of patriarchy and alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, the indigenous communal life is considerably less than perfect. But there is a moment of truth: communal ejidos are the norm, important decisions are chewed over for hours on end by everyone, plays and poetry keep the history of resistance alive. What is new about the Zapatista communities is the energetic manner in which they have become political and overcome some of the worst aspects of village tradition. Importantly this has enabled the Zapatistas to move beyond the crippling localism that has been characteristic of other peasant struggles.

As we have already explained, one mediation the campesinos have gone through (and still go through) enroute to becoming Zapatistas, is the influence of the Catholic church and liberation theology in particular. Whether critical or celebratory, accounts of the Zapatistas have generally neglected this reactionary influence on the development of the class struggle in Chiapas. The extent to which the autonomous communities are infected with religious sentiment is not always appreciated. Every village has a church, usually the most skilfully constructed building in the community, and which is sometimes the only place for miles that has electricity, while the Zapatistas themselves invariably live in ill-lit shacks. There is a high interpenetration of religion and politics: the lay catechist who preaches is often the local EZLN rep, and Masses have a tendency to dissolve into long political meetings - or the other way around. It would be fair to say that while liberation theology has contributed to the combativity of the Chiapan Indians it has also played its part in retarding the theoretical efforts of the Zapatista struggle.

The phenomenon has been present in Chiapas in a concentrated form since at least 1974, when Samuel Ruiz (the 'Red Bishop', a figure much hated by the latifundistas and rancheros) organised a 'Congress of Indian Peoples' in San Cristobal. Shocked into action by the anger displayed at the Congress, Ruiz not only stepped up the church's militant crusading in the villages, he also, as we have seen, invited Maoist cadre into the area. The mid- to late-1970s witnessed a period of co-operation between the party of the church and the church of the party. In fact the 1970s saw the highpoint of Catholicism's flirtation with Marxism. Confronted with military dictatorships across almost the whole of Latin America, many Catholics believed, for example that: 'The class struggle is a fact and neutrality in the question is not possible' or 'To participate in the class struggle...leads to a classless society without owners or dispossessed, without oppressor and oppressed.'[21]Liberation theology even had its own Che - the body of Camillo Torres, Colombian priest-turned-guerilla fighter.

The contradictions abound: believing in a classless society, catechists are unable to break with a church whose very essence is hierarchy and authority. (In its turn Rome is keen to keep them on side - in an excommunicated liberation theology it perceives the possibility of its own dissolution.) By continually encouraging the revolt of 'the poor' in the city and the country, yet unable to break through the miasma of Catholicism, the liberation theologists actively impede the development of the conscious category of proletariat, whose realisation and self-abolition is the only real solution to the impoverishment of their flock.

By the mid-1980s, with swathes of Latin America undergoing a transition to democracy, notably in Brazil, the highpoint of radical liberation theology was over. The Sandinista defeat in 1990 and the end of the civil war in El Salvador further moderated the influence of Marxism. In Chiapas, however, with the situation in the highlands deteriorating, the liberation theologists wielded greater infuence than ever before. As Jacques Camatte says, 'Religion allows a human demonstration against capital because God is a human product (i.e. something that appears to exist outside the prevailing mode of production). Thanks to him, man can still save his being from the evil embrace of capital.'[22] When Marcos says 'We want liberation - but not the theology', we should not be fooled. The Zapatistas are as devout a lot as one is ever likely to meet.

However, it was not just that the Church was acting as a political force - it was also acting as a conduit for Mexican leftists who could not otherwise gain access to the Indians of Chiapas. Ruiz found these leftists useful in the organising work he had committed his diocese to. In the 1970s, the arrangement was that the priests would handle pastoral work while the Maoists handled the political organising. This backfired on him badly in 1980 when Linea Proletaria mounted a coup and replaced the catechist leaders in the key peasant unions.

It took two years for Ruiz and his priests to regain the initiative. He turned to another group of leftists to help him - but unbeknown to him this group was an advance party of the Che Guevara-inspired Fuerzas de Nacional Liberacion (Forces of National Liberation, FLN). By the time Linea Proletaria was leaving Chiapas in 1983, the FLN, taking advantage of its successes in organising with the Church, was upping its activity significantly. The FLN High Command had secretly visited the canyons, with a view to developing an army which they already had a name for - the EZLN. With them came a young captain, Marcos.

From 1991 the FLN made real progress in recruiting beyond its core cadre of Indian militants. While they had may have followed the foco model of the Cuba experience, which emphasises the military struggle over the social, they recognised the need to participate in grassroots organisations - a lesson they may have learnt from the innovative left-Maoist aspects of Linea Proletaria. However, they had avoided falling into a tendency that Linea Proletaria had succumbed to: drifting away from militant land occupations and battles with employers and towards co-operation with PRI agencies over credit lines, marketing facilities and productivity increases. The importance of differentiating between these strategies became more pronounced as the massive anti-poverty programme PRONASOL rolled into Chiapas in the early 1990s. With it rolled some of the old Linea Proletaria cadre, now part of Salinas's retinue. An alliance between the PRONASOL government workers and the Church, now long aware of the FLNs commitment to armed struggle, aimed to divert the Indians' anger into avenues of government recuperation. But with the economic situation for the Indians now so desperate, the FLN was able to outflank this move by creating a new militant body, the ANCIEZ, the Emiliano Zapata Independent National Peasant Alliance, an embryonic Zapatista army under whose banner the militant Indians began the work of reorganising their communities. They even managed to get some PRONASOL funds on the sly for weapons.

All these elements - the FLN, the priests, the communal Indian traditions, each with their own internal contradictions, were lenses through which the coming-into-being of the EZLN was focused. The necessary first step of this militant reorganisation was the suppression within the communities of anti-Zapatista elements, usually caciques out to enrich themselves or PRIistas who could act as levers of coercion or as spies. This process must have developed in quite different ways according to the prevailing conditions. In some places there was a blanket conversion to Zapatismo and the villagers could afford to be relatively open, at least with each other, about their organisation. Individual PRIistas would be easy to isolate and exclude. Other villages might have an even mix of Zapatistas and PRIistas, or complete PRI dominance. In the latter case many rebellious campesinos were simply forced out and constructed a community elsewhere. Even today when large chunks of Chiapas are controlled by the EZLN, one can often find a Zapatista village next to a PRI village, with all the suspicion and antagonism that that implies. The PRI web is torn but far from brushed away: the fear of informers means that on the margins of EZLN territory, clandestinity is still very much the name of the game. The expulsion where possible of PRIistas opened up a space for the Zapatistas, a space where a process of rebuilding could begin. Simultaneous to the clandestine reconstitution of the villages the insurgent army began to coalesce in the highlands around 1992-93.

Until September 1993, Marcos and the Indian cadres were following orders from the High Command of the FLN in Mexico City, though he has since made every effort to hide it. In that month, realizing the FLN units in other Mexican states were barely existent, let alone able to lead an armed revolution, he refused their request to send finances out of Chiapas. It seems to be at this time that the ideological break with the FLN occurred, though it was not fully confirmed until the failure of the January 1994 uprising. The Clandestine Committee for Indigenous Revolution (CCRI) which had been created in January 1993 and which was made up of veteran Indian cadre now pushed for war. However, on this one crucial point, the village assemblies found consensus impossible. According to Womack: '[The] assemblies groaned for consensus for the armed way, but it would not come... In the Zapatista canyons the majority ruled...where communities voted for war, the EZLN tolerated no dissent or pacifism: the minorities had to leave.'[23]

From its FLN origins, then, we know that the army itself could be a sufficient form for the hierarchical organisation of the struggle. A political cadre could operate within the army to transmit the line of the organisation and its leadership to both combatants and non-combatants. Leninism, as a 'hierarchic organisation of ideology' (Debord), does not require an obvious party form; it is enough that a cadre of militants exist with a leadership - perhaps a hidden leadership - giving them political direction. We know that the FLN grew in Chiapas by recruiting and training an Indian cadre who then played a key role in the Zapatista decision to go to war. But this was not a vanguard 'parachuted in from the outside'. Apart from Marcos, and possibly a few others, it was composed of Indians who joined because it seemed to meet their needs. Specifically, it unified Indians of different languages and allowed them to act collectively against their exploiters.

But if the EZLN has at its origin the hierarchy and mediation that is inherent in the Che Guevara version of Leninism, there is no doubt that the political certainties that accompanied this model were destroyed following the failure of January 1994. The rupture that took place between September 1993 and February 1994 meant the EZLN and the cadre form was thrown into crisis. On the one hand the EZLN had clearly failed in their attempt to launch a credible military offensive, and had become besieged and isolated. Yet on the other hand, the outpouring of public support for the Zapatistas must have caused the CCRI-GC (General Command) and the Indian cadres to re-examine their ideas. Out of this crisis came a commitment to a vague form of left reformism, utilising ideas such as civil society. Desperate to survive, the EZLN has usually pitched for the lowest, and least controversial, common denominator in its organising efforts and communiques - anti-PRI. However, the other long-term effect of the uprising and its failure has been a high level of confusion and disorientation. Periodically the organisation has been able to unite around certain initiatives, such as the Encuentros. Yet given the extremely difficult conditions they live under, the Zapatistas have displayed a tremendous level of courage and initiative. It is the self-activity of the Indians, above all else, that defines this struggle.

Zapatista organisation

The scale of the uprising is the first thing that strikes the visitor to eastern Chiapas. There are over 1,100 rebel communities, each with 300-400 people, usually young. These villages, some of which have been built since 1994, are federated into thirty-two autonomous municipalities. The civil decision-making process is fluid: local decisions are made locally, important policy or project decisions made on a wider, but not always municipal, level. Municipally, delegates from each village come together in the assembly halls that are almost as common as churches. These meetings are extremely long-winded by European standards, sometimes going on for two or three days until something like consensus is reached. This ability to reach consensus is aided by the vitality of the traditional decision-making process and which recognises the pressing demands of life under siege. The remoteness of the Indians' lives from regular wage labour, and the communal nature of farming which in any case is labour-intensive only seasonally, enables the Zapatistas to carve out large portions of time for meetings and organising.

The civil level is completed by the five Aguascalientes which are dotted around Zapatista territory. Named after the original Aguascalientes (where the CND was held) which was destroyed by the Mexican army in 1995, in turn named after the Aguascalientes Military Convention of 1914, these cultural centres are a conglomeration of schoolhouses, assembly halls, metalworking shops, sleeping quarters, storage huts, etc. It is to the Aguascalientes that the Zapatistas come for their most important political meetings, dances, and endless basketball tournaments. They have also been used at various times as EZLN barracks.

The EZLN encampments, being obvious targets, are away from the communities, hidden from the constant overflight of army helicopters or air force bombers. The local EZLN detachments send representatives to the various CCRIs, which in turn sends delegates to the CCRI General Command, which consists of around 70-80 members, and is based in the Lacandon area surrounding the Aguascalientes of La Realidad.

The hierarchy that exists in the EZ is almost certainly part of the legacy the FLN has left the Indians. Commandante, Subcommandante, Major, Captain: the chain of command appears to reproduce that of the state's armed wing perfectly. Naturally, there will have been tendencies within the CCRI-GC that both ossify and loosen command, but a relaxation could be more likely in recent years as the EZLN has been militarily quiet since its initial flurry of activity. With the indigenous war on hold, work in the communities has taken precedence, and the damage militarisation can do to a social movement reduced. The EZ, however, is still the arena where the young wish to prove themselves. Since 1994 a new generation of combatientes (EZ soldiers) has come of age, and it would be interesting to know how many have made it into the CCRI-GC - or whether they now dominate it. Unfortunately this information is not available to us.

One further aspect that differentiates the EZ from an army of the state, aside from its relatively informal command structure, is the apparent absence of both punishment and insubordination. Joining up is not compulsory, though all seventeen year-old men and women are encouraged to participate. Many seem to want to join the militias earlier. The Zapatista army has after all come ultimately from the material needs and insurrectionary desire of the Chiapan Indians. As such becoming a combatiente is seen to be not only in an Indian's self interest, it is also an escape from agricultural drudgery and early marriage into a world of excitement and possibility. The EZ may not appear as a burden to the young, rather to join it could be to embark upon a process of individual and communal self-expression. If we wish to believe Marcos, and some may not, it is also a space for limited, but hitherto unthinkable, sexual experimentation, free from the judgmental gaze of the village elders.

The relationship of the EZLN to the autonomous communities after 1994 appears to be characterised by the slogans: 'Commanding obeying' and 'Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves'. The former is really nothing more than an indigenous take on the practice of recallable delegates. As such it follows firmly in the traditions of soviets and workers' councils - though of course it is double-edged: if the commanders obey, they also command. The latter slogan is an assurance that that the EZLN, or the CCRI-GC, will not enrich itself at the expense of the communities, nor will it transform itself into a new layer of caciquismo. The villages are not the bases of support for the guerrilla army, as was the case in neighbouring Guatemala, rather the EZLN appears to be the base of support for the self-organised village. Because there are not nearly enough resources to go around, any material enrichment on the part of the EZ, or sections of the EZ, would instantly raise suspicions of PRI influence. But in fact the Zapatista army is not saying 'we will take only that share to which we are entitled', they are saying 'we will take less than our share.' In impoverished eastern Chiapas this amounts to a little more than posturing. The same obsession with death we noted earlier also leads into a language of sacrifice.

The dialectic of 'commanding obeying' can best be seen at work in the devising and implementation of the various Revolutionary Laws of the EZLN. The Laws themselves are mired in leftist bourgeois language - 'The Rights and Obligations of the Peoples in Struggle', 'The Rights and Obligations of the Revolutionary Armed Forces' - and often in reformist content, such as the Revolutionary Agrarian Law, which we shall look at later. Once again we see the influence of the structures of Marxism-Leninism. But they represent also a sophisticated attempt by the campesinos to begin solving their own problems. The army, being everywhere, was the only body that could implement their new world with any degree of consistency.[24] The Laws, devised after endless debate and discussion, in themselves (i.e. aside from their content) are an attempt by the Indians to endow their struggle with a sense of permanence, a way of saying 'we are not going back.' Naturally they are mediations, but they are at least mediations which have enabled the Zapatista struggle to move beyond visceral class antagonism into self-organisation - a coherence not seen in the Mexican countryside since the days of the Ayala Plan.

Any description of Zapatista organisation must include an account of the effect of the uprising on the status of indigenous women. Before Zapatismo the conditions women lived in were dreadful: sexual abuse was rife through rape or early forced marriage, domestic violence was high, giving birth to large families ruined a woman's body and gave them a heavy responsibility for social reproduction through household chores. Moreover they were expected to reduce their food intake so that the husband and children could eat sufficiently, though even this was unable to staunch the high rates of infant mortality. In short they were virtual slaves in their own villages.

The uprising has not liberated them, as it has not liberated any other Indian, from a world of want. What it has done is given them an opportunity to break beyond the atomisation of the village to form a developing unity based on the rich variety of their needs. The space for women's organisation has not opened up because of the rebellion, instead the women's demands have been imposed on the men in a collective and conscious attempt to expand the sphere of their own autonomy. This has only added to diversity of Zapatismo.

Some have argued that 'women's integration into military structures remains the surest way to defuse the subversive potential of their choice to break with the past.'[25] We would disagree. The women see their subversive potential not as women, but as Zapatista women. That entails expanding their autonomy both within the village (for example, in co-ops of various kinds) and embarking on a project of solidarity with the men in the army. They are both against and with the men; primarily they are for themselves, a project which they see as being realised in the organic and relatively informal structures of the EZLN. And in response to the state's militarisation of Chiapas they have expressed themselves through simultaneously taking up arms and developing their own quasi-military structures. Armed with staffs that are almost as tall as themselves, they have trained themselves to fight police incursions into their municipalities, often with babies on their backs. All this is done with high efficiency and usually masked up, faces covered with the red palliacates that are a Zapatista emblem.

Aside from taking up arms, perhaps the single most subversive act they have undertaken is the banning of alcohol, which is used by the Chiapan landowners and ranchers as an out-and-out weapon of social control. Alcohol sales on tick tend to cause unpayable debt through the employer's shop, and the community in its alienation and powerlessness turns in on itself through domestic violence. The effect in Indian communities has been devastating, similar to that experienced on the reservations of North America. With the landowners gone, the indigenous women immediately enforced a ban that is universal in Zapatista territory. Many villages have a tiny one-person jail or secure hut where the occasional drunkard returning from Ocosingo or Altamirano can be imprisoned for a night or so. The ban, developed from the immediate concerns of the women, also forced the men into a new respect which in turn opened the way for further self-defined projects - for example organising women's marches against state militarisation in the tourist town of San Cristobal.

The women's situation is not developing all one way. Pregnant combatientes must return to their villages where they may be subject to isolation, although the father of the child must accompany her; those who have never left will almost always be illiterate, unable to speak any Spanish, and continue to bear the burden of childcare. In many villages women are still excluded from meetings. Nevertheless the tendency is towards free determination as part of the developing social whole, towards rebelde mujeres (rebel women) rather than subservient ones.

Lastly, the military situation in Chiapas demands a brief mention. The federated Zapatista areas are surrounded and interpenetrated with hundreds of army checkpoints and bases. The militarisation is immense: 70,000 troops, one third of the entire Mexican army, armed with the best weapons American anti-narco money can buy. PRI- and landowner-sponsored paramilitaries, of which there are seven different varieties roam the countryside, ratcheting up the tension. This patchwork of conflict is further confused by the waves of refugees that have occasionally been created by army occupations of Zapatista municipalities, or those with EZ sympathies who have been expelled from PRI villages. In Chiapas the armed wing of capital is everywhere visible.

Having described the basic outline of the Zapatista set-up, we shall now turn to the ideas of the uprising. In attempting to move beyond the cheerleading or the hostility this social movement has prompted, we shall deal with, in turn, the ideas of the 'ultra-left' and the academic autonomists. The 'ultra-left' tend to see the Zapatista as a desperate guerrilla fighter manipulated by hidden leaders; the academics see the Indian reasserting his or her labour against predatory global capital. These views of Zapatismo as a simple, monolithic body can result in the suppression of contradiction. But the uprising is a living, evolving thing, within and against capital, and as such is riven with contradiction. Before we go any further we must examine the specific class character of the rebel Indian, from where some of these contradictions arise.

The class position of the Zapatista Indian

The class position of the Zapatista Indian is, as we shall argue, more peasant than proletarian. Before substantiating this point, we must step back briefly and derive an understanding of the nature and function of the peasantry. Traditional Marxism explains the peasantry with the same analytical tools it uses to explain class polarisation in urban societies. It is perfectly suited to the rapid movement and social change that takes place in cities during industrialisation, but it can lead some to a simplistic idea of class relations in the countryside, where many pre-capitalist forms survive and where stability rather than change can be the defining ethos. Just as capitalism in the cities bases itself on constantly revolutionising the means of production, some orthodox Marxists see in the countryside a mirrored process whereby greater numbers of peasants are excluded from the land, while a much smaller number manage to transform themselves into professional farmers with larger landholdings. With this programmatic approach it is easy to believe in the possibility of stirring up class war within the village itself. Thus for Lenin it was simply a matter of encouraging the poor peasants to rebel against the rich peasants. These poor peasants, increasingly separated from the means of production, would discover their natural allies in the proletariat, while the affluent peasants with access to land and market networks would side with the bourgeoisie. The urban formula of class struggle was simply transposed onto the countryside.

There is, of course, truth in this analysis. Capitalism, to the extent to which it can penetrate, and thereby alter, traditional peasant society, does create class polarisation. But the Soviet experience of War Communism, NEP and particularly collectivisation, shows not an increasingly class-ridden and socially volatile peasant community; instead it shows the high level of internal stability and resistance to outside influence: not so much an example of poor peasant and political commissar vs. rich peasant, as rich and poor peasant vs. political commissar.

The problem with the orthodoxy is that it overestimates the ability of capital to break down traditional peasant structures. The process of agricultural revolution may have happened in western Europe and north America, but in many parts of the world, such as Mexico, the peasant village has remained stubbornly impervious to capitalist development. So while agribusiness is characterised by wage-labour and new farming techniques, peasant production has at its heart unspecialised production for consumption, family labour, an absence of accounting, etc. In place of the relentless drive for profit, peasant life is one of isolation and immutability where births, marriages and the seasons hold more importance than crop yield or rational business planning.

The political implications of this conservative stability are twofold. The first is that peasant uprisings are almost always a reaction to an external crisis which threatens the peace of the village, rather than as a result of internal class antagonisms. The many crises in the history of the Mexican campesino has meant this class has been an especially combative one: the sudden arrival of primitive accumulation (the Conquest), the genocide by sword and disease, the rule from Spain, the violent expansion of the latifundias under the Porfiriato are all examples. The second implication is that within the peasant uprising the binding aspect of tradition enables small private farmers and those with communal landholdings (though the difference is not always clear cut: one can merge into the other at different times of the year or at times of family change) to live happily together in revolt - the Ayala Plan is a case in point. The principal point of attack which the orthodoxy identifies is often the most resistant to change.

What, then, is the nature of the class position of the Zapatista Indian today? We described earlier the uneven development of capitalism in Chiapas. The Indians have experience of wage-labour that might include: working on ranches, seasonal work on a finca (where an employer's shop system might operate, or debt-peonage be dominant), or fully-integrated wage-labour on dam construction, or at the oil operations of the north-east. All this work is either seasonal or temporary - when it is over the campesino must return to the village to scratch out a living from the soil. For men, just about the only form of permanent work is being employed by the repressive arms of the PRI or the landowners. For the women, handicrafts (including Zapatista dolls) to sell in the markets of San Cristobal or outside Mayan ruins is a possible form of income. This is a strictly peasant activity: their stall is a patch of ground and the level of poverty offsets any petty-bourgeois trade content this activity might contain. Overall the Indian women have never been integrated into the wage-labour system, though they may have some contact with the commodity economy, and the men have only been partly and temporarily integrated. They represent a section of the population which capital has not fully proletarianised because it has no need of their labour-power. In fact, as we mentioned earlier, it would be better for capital if these people did not exist at all.

Neither has their limited contact with the wages system been a definitive experience for the Chiapanecos. On the contrary they have retreated further into the margins of Mexican geography in their attempt to preserve their traditional communities. Their productive lives are determined by the land and the consumption needs of their family and village; their social lives by the traditions of the village; their thinking is generally social rather than economic - they are part of the 'different world' of the peasant. They have been unable to avoid wage-labour altogether - its influence has been important to the Zapatistas' ability to look beyond their immediate locality. But the overall class position of the Zapatista, his or her culture and beliefs, is that of the peasant. We could perhaps best define this class location as that of a semi-proletarian peasantry. Indeed one could argue that the uprising itself has, with its obsession for Mayan tradition, reinforced the peasant aspect over the proletarian.

It is only with this category of semi-proletarian peasant that we can understand the contradictions at the heart of the individual Zapatista and the practice of the EZLN itself. Guerrilla fighter or Mayan Indian? Communal farmer or politico? Both and neither. The 'ultra-left' groups, mistaking the Zapatistas for proles, condemn them for falling into the traps of twentieth century working class insurrection. The academics also mistake them for fully-integrated wage-slaves, and therefore representative of a new recomposition of labour against 'neoliberalism'. But the Chiapan Indians are not central to the expansion of capital; they are extremely marginal to it. Consequently they are not in an advantageous position to develop a critique of capital. Their only possibility is to reassert human community over a system that would rather see them dead.

The 'ultra-left'[26]

Mao and Marcos

Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeve's article 'Behind the Balaclavas of south-east Mexico' is without doubt the most hostile reaction to the Indian uprising in Chiapas. Reacting against the romanticisation of the Zapatistas, they wish to assert the proletarian aspects of the struggle over the more important peasant and Indian aspects which we have already examined. They perceive in the rebellion and the forms it has taken nothing more than one further example of deadening Leninism grafting its structures onto autonomous class struggle. Oscillating between contempt for the Indians' traditional subservience and an ungrounded belief in their immanent ability to launch into an unmediated orbit of pure revolution, Deneuve and Reeve give a schematic account of how they believe the class struggle in Chiapas has developed and been derailed. For them, the strong base assemblies of the Zapatista municipalities merely serve to protect those leaders who 'must never be seen': 'the Zapatista army is...only one part of The Organisation - it is its visible part.'

They account for the lack of an obvious Party line and the absence of Marxist vocabulary in general by arguing that, since the collapse of the state capitalist bloc, vanguardist organisations have had to revise their expectations downwards - implying that the forms of Leninism are intact, hidden, waiting for the historic moment. But the problem Deneuve and Reeve have is that they are simply in possession of insufficient information on which to base their analysis. 'Behind the Balaclavas' consequently talks a great deal about the organisation of politics, or the politics of organisation, and very little about actual situations in Chiapas. They themselves admit they have found it difficult to get concrete information.

As a result, we find just about every aspect of the Indians' struggle misrepresented: the land occupations are not about land, only revenge; the womens' struggle is sidelined into the army and has no other expression; the FZLN dominates civil society outside Chiapas; the EZLN is made up of 'young people, marginal, modern, multilingual...their profile has little to do with the isolated Indian that some imagine.' And so on and so forth. Deneuve and Reeve's class analysis is inadequate, and they supplement it with a sketch of the manner in which Leninism has in the past manipulated peasant movements. It is really this refusal to even look for anything new in this struggle that is the most infuriating aspect of 'Behind the Balaclavas'.

'Behind the Balaclavas' does, however, point to an important problem which supporters of the Zapatistas are unable to perceive: the way in which the EZLN commanders, and Marcos in particular, are mediators, specialised leaders and negotiators apart from the mass of the rebel Indians. The question then is: to what extent have these roles been forced on them by material conditions and the necessity of survival, and to what extent have they grown from the hierarchical organisational forms that were imported with the FLN?

Ultimately we cannot give a definitive answer to this. We have already traced the history of the FLN's involvement in the highlands of Chiapas. The role of representation which Leninist formations seek has certainly been one defining factor in the development of the rebellion. However, what is crucial, with the Zapatistas, as with other social movements, is that we cannot simply contrast good movements/class struggles to bad representations/mediations of those struggles - especially when the representative forms are generated from within. Such a move would falsely suggest that the inspiring acts of class struggle - liberation of prisoners from jail, land occupations, etc. - would have happened without the mediating and representative forms of the EZLN.[27] In fact, arguably the Chiapas uprising would not have reached the heights it did without the vanguardist form it took. This is an expression of the limits of their particular situation: a more generalized and proletarian movement, to achieve its goals, could not accept the relations of mediation and representation that the Indian peasants do.

Yet the legacy of the FLN's vanguard model has undoubtedly fused with the rebellious and autonomous energies of the Indians, and this organisational form itself was thrown into crisis, firstly by the break with the national FLN, and shortly afterwards by the failure of the January 1994 uprising. The negative aspects of these forms, for example the hierarchy of the army, have since contributed to the creation of a specialised layer of EZLN negotiators. Equally the military situation in Chiapas has compelled the Indians to talk, not continually, but occasionally, to the structures of power in order to survive. This exercise, which both sides know is a charade, is only one side of the mediation coin: that of simple publicity. In a very real way, the autonomous municipalities are better protected when they have a high public profile. The Zapatistas, playing on the natural drama of their impact and ideas were initially very successful at this. Latterly, and predictably, they have been less so as other events take centre stage for the nation's media. This sort of media use is certainly manipulative but tactically it has achieved a measure of success. One unfortunate result is that the media-friendly members of the EZLN have sometimes had to portray themselves as victims, rather than militants.

The other side of this mediation of the uprising is a genuine need to communicate with other sections of national and international society which are engaging in struggle of one sort or another. Wanting a different society but knowing that they alone cannot create it, the Zapatistas feel the need to reach beyond the blockade, to exchange ideas and construct networks of solidarity. While this sometimes uses media channels, it does not exclude direct communication. That is why we prefer to emphasise the visits of workers' and students' delegations, the solidarity tours of European football teams, and the marches and Consultas which radiate from the autonomous municipalities, over the presentational gloss of Marcos.

As for Marcos himself - one of two or three ladinos amongst tens of thousands of pure blood Indians - he is an expression of the contradictions within Zapatismo. Needing to communicate at the level of media following the January 1994 failure, the movement has found itself the consummate communicator. Possibly Marcos's position has been undermined by the failure and subsequently he has undergone a transformation from FLN political and military leader to EZLN media darling. As such he has filled an immediate need of the struggle. But it is the bourgeois press, needing a handle on the story, which has endowed him with an air of romantic authority. Many anarchists, unthinking as ever, have played along, and the number of intellectuals and activists who visit Chiapas ostensibly to research the living conditions but whose wet dream is to meet Marcos is revealing.

The forces of production

Is the uprising 'the final episode of the slow and peculiar integration of this peripheral region by Mexican capital' as Deneuve and Reeve would have us believe? The Zapatistas are dirt poor farmers with barely any resources. Quite how they could have any effect on the forces of production in Chiapas is difficult to see. In fact, being part of the 'different world' of the peasantry, and by refusing to die, they are obstacles to development, rather than bearers of it. We return to our central argument: capital may have as its essence self-expanding value and the consequent proletarianisation of the population, but the experience of capitalism in the 'Third World' is as uneven development. The idea that capital seeks to develop all areas to a uniform standard is mechanical: some places, for reasons of geography, climate, class and social structure can only be exploited to a degree. Unable to always develop the periphery, capital turns inwards and embarks on a new cycle of intensive accumulation.

Mexican and latterly international capital has already integrated Chiapas as productively as it is able: first through the latifundias and ranches, subsequently through oil. The new irony the 'ultra-left' have neglected is that the specific and important capital of biotechnology wishes to retard the development of productive forces in Chiapas.

There are two ways in which we can make sense of the productive forces argument. The first is that, through the army, the EZ itself has revolutionised social relations in the villages. Breaking down the gender barrier, releasing the energy and confidence of the young; its need for centralised organisation compels previously isolated villages to communicate and work together. Through its need to impose itself on the outside world it is certainly a modernising influence. But the EZ is not connected to land production. The villages and municipalities are left to do what they will with the occupied lands: the EZ has not encouraged new crops for market, new seed varieties or irrigation projects. The ejidos and reclaimed lands are still very much dedicated to subsistence farming.

But despite their inability to produce a meaningful surplus, and coming as they do from the 'different world' of the peasantry, perhaps the Zapatistas are still a proto-embryonic landowning class through their tolerance, in the Revolutionary Agrarian Law, of smallholdings? This Law allows private holdings of up to a hundred hectares of poor quality land, or fifty of good quality land, which is a fair bit of space. It is almost identical to the Ayala Plan which was discussed at the beginning of this article, and many of those same arguments apply.[28] We would of course like to see the elimination of all small property relations. But if we are looking for the seeds of the new world in the old, we must look for the tendencies towards communism. Marx commented on the agrarian commune: 'Its innate dualism allows an alternative: either its property element will prevail over the collective one, or the latter over the former. It all depends on the historical environment.'[29] In the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas private holdings are rare, the collective prevails.

Nationalism

The ultra-leftists' strongest charge against the Zapatistas is that they are nationalists: the Zapatista project is nothing more than a retreat from the rigours of the global market into the old certainties of national social democracy, this time around redeemed by the absence of the PRI. To facilitate this, the 'ultra-leftists' imply, they are seeking alliances with sections of the national political class, manoeuvring themselves into ever more advantageous positions from which to take power.

This is simply not true. The Zapatistas have never entered into any formal alliance with any fraction of Mexico's political class. They flirted briefly with the PRD back in 1994, and, as far as we know, they have not repeated the exercise as a result of their experience. Indeed, one of the EZs revolutionary laws forbids its members from holding any sort of public post. Of course laws can be changed. But if the Zapatistas' aim is to ally themselves with nationalist sections of the bourgeoisie they are being uncharacteristically incompetent about it.

It would, however, be foolish to deny the patriotic elements of the Zapatista struggle. The national anthem is sung in the communities, though not as often as the Zapatista anthem, and the flag is occasionally paraded about, all of which makes any self-respecting revolutionary cringe with embarrassment. The flag is a clue to the quixotic nature of the Zapatista's 'nationalism.' The red, white and green of the Mexican flag are also the colours of the PRI, who have had until recently the exclusive rights to use it politically. Yet the rebel Indians are hardly displaying the flag as a sign of support for the regime that is pointing guns at them. So it must mean something else. The issue is hardly clarified by the EZ's communiques, which are as confusing as ever. There we can find statements that speak both of 'the importance of the patria (homeland)' and of 'a world without frontiers or borders.' As Wildcat say in 'Unmasking the Zapatistas', this is called having your cake and eating it.

The answer lies surely in a closer examination of the material conditions of this struggle. The Zapatistas are, as we noted earlier, to all intents and purposes one hundred per cent indigenous. Tzeltals, Tzotzils, Chols, Mams, Zoques and Tojolabals are the composition of the uprising. Many of the men do not speak Spanish and almost none of the women do. The Mexican state has neglected or murdered them for decades. Yet they are communicating with Mexico, people with whom they do not share a common ancestry.

We need to bear in mind two things. The first is the experience of the Mexican Revolution. If there is one qualitative and positive difference between the Zapatistas of then and the Zapatistas of now, it is that the latter, with their limited experience of wage-labour and the influence of the FLN, have managed to break away from the myopic localism of peasant struggle. Their desire to intervene in national life is preferable to a refusal to look beyond the boundaries of their own home province or state.

Secondly, the 'ultra-left' articles we are examining were all written before the EZLN developed their project of the Encuentro, the international meetings 'for humanity and against neoliberalism.' Essentially we believe the Zapatistas have transcended their localism and have developed important tendencies towards internationalism, though in an important sense, and one which is part of the leftist aspect of their heritage, they are still retarded by a nationalist perspective. There have been three Encuentros so far, in Chiapas, Spain and Brazil, forums where activists and those engaged in struggle gather from around the world to discuss what is on their minds. By all accounts these meetings have been confused and confusing: the focus is on networking and heterogeneity rather than organising and developing a unity-through-difference. Indeed it could be said in some ways that the Encuentros mirror the cross-class nature of civil society, which we deal with below. [30]But the Zapatistas, at first recognising their need for international solidarity, particularly foreign peace observers to mitigate the worst offences of the Mexican army, have given birth to a living, evolving internationalism. This is all the more remarkable given that many of them have a very shaky grasp of world geography. Where the Encuentros will go is anybody's guess. They may easily fall apart, given the diverse nature of the participants and the generally abstract nature of opposition to 'neoliberalism'. But in the future context of an upsurge in class struggle in Latin America they could have something valuable to contribute. One influence they certainly have had is on the 'anti-capitalist' movement.

The Academics[31]

The Zapatistas have certainly been a great inspiration to some - thanks to their struggle a section of academia, at least in Mexico City and the University of Texas, has reproduced and extended itself. Like the 'ultra-left' groups, the academics have failed to ground their analyses adequately in the material conditions of Chiapas. The academics, however, have swung the other way - overpraising the EZLN by seeing in them a microcosm of resistance to international capital. By betting on the centrality of Chiapas, they have constructed a bizarre model which views the Zapatistas as representatives of the international working class. Against the cynicism of the 'ultra-left', they are so overjoyed that something - anything - is happening they have jumped through theoretical hoops to prove Zapatismo the new revolutionary subject par excellence. From this they have then extrapolated various ideas of the EZLN as of potentially universal importance for a twenty-first century recomposition of labour against capital.

The strangest aspect of their ideas is that while the academics wish to hold the Zapatistas up as working class militants, they fight shy of engaging in any analysis of the specific class nature of the uprising. This is bad enough when it leads to the class position of the Indians being identified incorrectly. For example, we find arguments that Zapatismo is 'not a peasant movement ...[but] 'a recomposition of the world of labour...its experience is not that of a relatively isolated and marginal social group, but belongs fully to these processes of recomposition and probably represents their highest form of expression to date.'[32]

Things deteriorate further when John Holloway denies the possibility of identifying the class position of any social group or individual anywhere - class becomes a concept without a definition! His position is that the antagonism between human creativity and alienated work which runs through every individual cannot ultimately be extended into identifiable class formations which struggle with each other: 'Since classes are constituted through the antagonism between work and its alienation, and since this antagonism is constantly changing, it follows that classes cannot be defined.'

Naturally we agree with Holloway on this existence of the internal conflict between human creative activity and alienated exploitation, just as we agree that the reified categories of capital, such as wage-labour, which are constituted from class struggle, are open to constant contestation. On one level, capital is reproduced from our own activity every hour of every day. But at the same time we necessarily confront these reified categories as objective reality. As Wildcat (Germany) say, in a good critique of Holloway's reasoning 'in attempting to oppose the objectivist, definitional and classificatory concept of class, [Holloway has thrown] the baby out with the bathwater. If we reduce the concept of class to a general human contradiction present in every person between alienation and non-alienation, between creativity and its subordination to the markets, between humanity and the negation of humanity, then the class concept loses all meaning.' [33]

Classes do constitute themselves, and the class struggle is fought, not only internally, but in real concrete situations between identifiable social groups in streets, offices, factories, the countryside, all the time. Unfortunately the academics have spent little time examining these very real characteristics (that would for them be mere 'sociology'), and their arguments have a somewhat fantastic feel.

As we have already argued, we do not accept the global centrality of the struggle in Chiapas, although we do not deny the importance of certain industries in that region to international capital. We see the Zapatistas rather as an inspirational moment of class struggle on the peripheries. In fact it is their geographical remoteness which, through the relative impossibility of developing an atomised individuality, has bolstered the communal aspect, and so the revolutionary practice of the campesinos. However, while we do not agree with the central thesis of the academics, it is still worth taking a quick look at their treatment of the most important EZLN ideas.

The refusal to take power and civil society

In rejecting the classical model of guerilla war since the uprising, and through measures such as the ban on members of the EZLN holding public posts, the 'refusal to take power', either through Leninist or reformist means, has been identified as a major contribution to post-cold war revolutionary practice. The academics see it as a final rejection of the state, of an end to the conquering of political power in order to impose one view of the world over all others. But the academics have ignored one thing: the Zapatistas have taken power - in the areas where they have been able to. They have forced landlords to flee - and killed some - torn down their houses, expelled caciques and PRIistas. In the autonomous municipalities, the power of the PRI is smashed, replaced by campesino self-activity, protected by campesino guns. If that is not taking power (or 'reabsorbing state power'), then what is?

It is true however that the EZLN of today does not wish to storm the Presidential Palace in Mexico City (which, given its size, is an impossibility). They do not seek to impose their views on other struggles, as is clear from their refusal to dominate Encuentros or the FZLN. But clearly they have a vision of change beyond their corner of Chiapas. How, then, will this change come about?

The EZLNs answer is through 'civil society', the multitude of small, often middle class and single-issue groups who exist in opposition to, and outside the budget of, the PRI. John Ross in Rebellion from the Roots characterises civil society as 'that unstated coalition of opposition rank-and-file, urban slum-dwellers, independent campesino organisations and disaffected union sections, ultra-left students, liberal intellectuals, peaceniks, beatniks, rockeros, punks, streetgangs and even a few turncoat PRIistas, all of whose red lights go on at once whenever there is serious mischief afoot in the land.' We would also add human rights and environmental groups to the mix.

The point is not that, amongst these groups constantly networking with each other, the working class elements are encouraged to subsume their needs to a middle class agenda - on the contrary, they are encouraged to strengthen their 'autonomy', just as everyone is. Instead it is that with heterogeneity being everything in civil society, the working class organisations are encouraged to view themselves as only one part of the patchwork. They are both relatively important and relatively unimportant. Any attempt to impose their needs as a class, or a fraction of a class, would simply be seen as bad manners and detrimental to the 'common struggle', which until very recently has been ridding Mexico of the PRI. In reality it is only the existence of the PRI that has kept these disparate groups on anything like the same wavelength. And it is the PRI with their hooks so deep into the labour movement that isolates and encourages the breakaway unions to seek these cross-class alliances, which in turn dilute the possibility of real working class autonomisation. The PRI has been both the bulwark of unity and the reason for its weakness.

The Zapatistas have pinned their hopes for change on civil society, though. They talk of opening up democratic spaces for discussion and beg everyone that 'in addition to their own little project they should open their horizon to a national project linked with what is happening.' The 'opening up of space for discussion' is understandable, given the omnipresence of the party-state. But the Zapatistas seem to have spent hardly a thought on what will happen once that space has been opened. What will civil society talk about? How will it act? The bottom line is that these civil society groups have only come into being because of their 'little project', which are expressions of their own varied class interests and locations. To ask these groups to unite is to ask the impossible. There can be no common autonomisation for civil society as a genuinely revolutionary subject. There can only be the burying of working class interests in favour of those of the middle class, or an imposition by the working class of its rich and varied needs - which in effect would mean the destruction of civil society. What is disappointing is that people like John Holloway have supported this idea of civil society as the engine for revolutionary change when all it really is is a popular front, and a weak one at that, as the 1994 National Democratic Convention demonstrated. But then it is easy to see possibility in the EZLN programme.[34] Their remoteness from the towns and cities of Mexico encourages romanticism, and talking with only the vaguest of categories and most evocative of words, they really can be all things to all men. Except of course the men from the PRI.

Dignity

Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico concludes with Holloway's treatment of the Zapatista concept of dignity. Marxism, he argues, has developed a number of terms to describe capital's domination over the producers of wealth, but has not developed a corresponding language to describe the dialectical movement of working class liberation, with the exception of 'self-valorisation' (itself a not unproblematic reversal of a central capitalist category). This lack of a positive pole around which to organise has hampered the development of a conscious movement against the capitalist mode of production. But with their concept of 'dignity' the Zapatistas may have filled a gap in the market. By generalising it, Holloway believes 'dignity' could become a workable idea around which to organise against the daily indignities of life under capital.

The problem he tries hard to avoid is the abstract nature of 'dignity' once it is universalised. By attempting to generalise it, he is rupturing it from the place where it makes sense - rural Chiapas, where it acquires such a powerful resonance. There is no doubt that for the Indians dignidad is a crucial concept - one that has been generated both naturally and consciously from their struggles against the landowners and ranchers. It has been endowed with a radical content that has led the campesinos into becoming Zapatistas, into constructing their autonomous municipalities, in whose self-activity the negation of capital resides. But dignity is only so powerful because of the conditions against which it has rebelled - many of which do not apply to vast swathes of the world's working class.

We would argue that it is impossible to understand the concept of dignity in Chiapas without understanding the racism the Indians have been subjected to for decades. As we have already noted, the Zapatista movement is to all intents and purposes completely indigenous. Non-Indian campesinos in the state, while often political, have been unable to achieve a similar militant unity. Capital has accumulated in eastern Chiapas by exploiting a workforce made docile by venomous racism. The distorted forms of value extraction known as debt-peonage have not disappeared from this backward state, nor has the murder of Indian leaders, the rape of Indian women or the predations of Guardia Blanca scum. It is against this systematic racism as much as the hand-to-mouth existence that the Indians are rebelling. And it is why there is a resonance between the communiques of the EZLN and the literature of the American civil rights movement.

For the worldwide proletariat, though, racism is not a defining characteristic, though it is an important one for millions. The defining condition is rather that of having nothing to sell but one's labour-power. Dignity as the Zapatistas mean it is impossible to translate to all parts of the world, though those sections of the world working class who experience virulent racism may get a lot out of it. If dignity was translated universally, with radical content by a rebellious proletariat, it could be all too easily recuperable by capital. Acquistion of new commodities and rights could be turned into a counterfeit dignity not only negating the impulse to revolt, but turning it to capital's advantage - a similar process to that which has happened in many impoverished black areas in the US.

To be fair to Holloway, he does acknowledge that 'the uprising would be strengthened if it were made explicit that exploitation is systematic to the systematic negation of dignity.' But nothing is made explicit in that part of the Zapatista programme which deals with life beyond the autonomous municipalities. Those academics who intently study the language of the uprising do so only because there is so little consistent content. The amorphous 'programme for Mexico' is either reformist or naively open to reformist manipulation. The real process is the reorganisation of the Indians' lives and communities. It is Zapatismo's revolutionary practice within Chiapas that is the real inspiration for the rebel against capitalism.

Conclusion

The EZLN has at its heart the confrontation between Indian traditions of rebellion and self-organisation, the influence of the militant Church, and the Guevarist-inspired model of guerilla war against the state. This model, in its most successful phase of the early 1990s, fused with, but was not overcome by, the Indian tradition. The failure of the January 1994 uprising forced the EZLN to change its ideas and to an extent challenged its very organisational forms. Out of the crisis came both a commitment to a gradualist democratic change for Mexico and a deep confusion as to the future for the autonomous municipalities. The uprising had however expelled the influence of the PRI and hacendados from many areas of Los Altos, and the Zapatista villages set about reclaiming land and reorganising their communities with enthusiasm. It is likely that a cadre still exists in the highlands, though they are not separate from, but rather a part of, the communities in struggle. The cadre role, however informal, along with that of specialised negotiators and mediators, is part of Zapatismo - roles which would obviously be overcome in a more radical social movement.

The Zapatistas are on the margins of a highly industrialised nation. Not proletarian, yet not entirely peasant, their political ideas are riven with contradictions. We reject the academics' argument of Zapatismo's centrality as the new revolutionary subject, just as we reject the assertions of the 'ultra-left' that because the Zapatistas do not have a communist programme they are simply complicit with capital. However we are keen not to fall into the orthodox Marxist trap of dismissing this struggle as an unimportant peasant uprising. The Zapatistas may be marginal but we cannot deny them their revolutionary subjectivity.

Instead we see the Zapatistas as a moment in the struggle to replace the reified community of capital with the real human community. Their battle for land against the rancheros and latifundistas reminds us of aspects of capital's violent stage of primitive accumulation, which, for billions, still continues - reminds us, in other words, of capital's (permanent) transitions rather than its apparent permanence.

In their exclusion of caciques, PRIistas and alcohol we see a rejection of the state as it affects them, and in the new confidence of the armed Indians we see its replacement with self-organisation. A crucial part of this self-definition is their refusal to lay down their guns, following in the best tradition of the original Zapatistas, and their refusal to allow state forces into their areas. By so doing they have avoided the possibility of recuperation by the PRI - the fate of so many worker, peasant and student struggles in twentieth century Mexico.

Moreover the racism which has done so much to bond this organised expression of class struggle has not been transformed into Indian nationalism, unlike the Black Power movements of 1970s America. Instead we see communication with Mexico and the rest of the world. The visiting delegations of striking UNAM students and electristas, the Consulta and the Encuentros - all are attempts to generalise their experience of struggle. In these moments of generalisation, in the self-activity of the autonomous municipalities, we perceive the beginnings of a new world within the old.

Postscript: September 2000 :

Mexico and the Fall of the PRI

After seventy-one years the PRI has lost the Presidency and with it national power in Mexico. Despite getting up to all their old tricks in the run-up to the July 2nd poll - the Michoacan governor was caught plotting to divert state funds into election bribes, and in the state of Quintana Roo the PRI were even giving away free washing-machines - and despite the fact that the much heralded independent Federal Electoral Institute was controlled by the party-state, Vicente Fox, the leader of the PAN received 43% of the vote. The shock came in the PRI conceding defeat so swiftly. This time around, they lacked the political stomach for arranging the vast fraud needed to switch defeat to victory.

Why did the PRI lose? The simple answer is corruption. After so many years of institutionalised venality the electorate finally found a sturdy enough opposition bandwagon upon which to jump. On a broader level, it is now apparent just how far the PRI's traditional networks of power were undermined by the economic restructuring - and particularly the privatisations - of the 1980s and 90s. Their irony is that, having propelled Mexico out of its old economic protectionism, they themselves have not survived the transition. Just as the Porfiriato was compelled eventually to assault its own social base in the years before the Revolution, so the PRI through its economic reforms has attacked its social base - the peasants and the working class. What future now for the PRI? With command over such large resources they are far from finished. But the splits were evident from the very first morning of defeat. There could now be an official divorce between the dinosaur wing and the technocrats. The dinosaurs, desperate to recapture their traditional constituency may veer headlong back into old-fashioned social democracy - an unpalatable alliance with the PRD could be on the cards. Meanwhile the technocrats, who side naturally with the PAN, will wish to see their party reinvented along Western lines. A split with the social democrats would be in their interests, so long as the left-wing do not take too much of the organisation with them. Alternatively, a clear split could fail to emerge and the whole party could collapse in on itself. Whatever happens, it will be messy and protracted.

In Chiapas, the PRI have also lost their hold on the governorship, and there is a new PRD governor. Will the new PANista President, or the PRDista governor pull the troops out? It seems unlikely, though there may be a minor peace initiative. The fact that there has been the democratic change the EZLN has long called for, but that nothing will change, may now begin to shake the uncritical attitudes of the Zapatistas towards the concept of democracy. At the same time, after nearly seven years of military seige, the communities may wish to grab any olive branch that is offered them. But even in the unlikely event of an accommodation with the state, the Chiapan bourgeoisie will never forgive them.

The PAN victory has set the US bourgeoisie cock-a-hoop, naively believing that Mexico has voted for a unadulterated regime of 'neoliberalism'. For us, the Fox triumph raises several questions. How will the working class, no longer subjected to the ideological weight of The Revolution, react to the next wave of restructuring? Could campaigns such as that waged by the electristas grow in size and dynamism in the future without the hegemonic influence of the PRI? Before the election, the CTM had boasted of its intention to call a general strike should the PANista win - a boast which fell away hours after the result was declared. Already there are signs of a rapprochement with the new regime. Fox, for his part, will need the union bureaucrats if he is to forge ahead with the programme of rationalisation. The flashpoint could well be the energy sector. The international finance markets demand this bastion of union power be privatised - but any move towards it will be hugely divisive. Fox will surely need to set up his own version of PRONASOL to offset the increasing class polarity in Mexican society, and he will need to do something fast about the debt millstone from the 1995 bank bailout.

For the Mexican proletariat, the battle lines are now much more clearly drawn.

Footnotes
1 Here we use the term as a convenient if problematic label for a political area,an area with which we have an affinity.As we sais in Aufheben 6 Fnt.2 .36 those who leftists dismiss as 'ultra-left' would argue that it is simply they are communist and their opponents are not.However as communism is not a particular interpretation of the world held by some people,but a real social movement, we will not go down the path of attaching the approval-label 'communist' or 'revolutionary' to the small set of individuals and groups with whom one considers oneself in close enough theoretical agreement.

2 For an interesting discussion of the difference between autonomist and (left-)communist or situationist approaches,see the Introductions to Technoskeptic and the Bordiga Archive at Antagonism

3 Opponents of 'neo-liberalism' or 'globalisation' all too often identify capitalism with rampant multinationals and US dominated trade organizations.Tending to complain about the subordination of the national economy and the undermining of democratic institutions they end up appealing to the state to tame the economy-failing to recognize those same democratic states consciously participated in the creation of the structures of the global economy.Opposing 'neo-liberalism' can easily lead back to supporting social democracy.Neoliberal ideology itself,as aggressively expounded by the bourgeois of Britain,America and latterly Mexico is an expression of the increased global mobility of finance capital,which was utilized to outflank the class struggles of the 1970's and has been used since in capital's attempts to avoid areas of working class strength.

4 The best source of day-to-day news of the ongoing situation is the Chiapas website,at http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Cleaver/chiapas95.html. The Irish Mexico support group,which has a continuous presence in the Zapatista village of Diez de abril,also has an excellent website.We would encourage any readers who have the time and the money to visit Chiapas themselves.Chiapaslink have made several trips and can give good advice;they can be contacted at PO Box 79,82 Colston street,Bristol BS1 5BB,UK.

5 The many reformist elements of the CND were unable to make even a policy decision to vote for the main left opposition group,the PRD (Partido Revolucionario Democratico),although many groups and individuals who attended inevitably did so.

6 Much of this section has been taken from The Mexican Revolution (London,1983) by the orthodox Marxist Adolpho Gilly.Gilly's line is of course that the working class would have chosen the right side of the revolution if they had been mature enough to develop a Leninist Party in 1915.But the book's strength,apart from its empirical data,is the emphasis on the uncompromising nature of the peasant war.It is influential,having been reprinted twenty-seven times in Latin America since 1971.

7 For our analysis of the peasantry as a class we have primarily used The awkward Class by T.Shanin,Oxford University Press,1972,and Community and Communism in Russia by Jaques Camatte.

8 Until 1964 the bracero programme allowed Mexicans to enter the US for seasonal agriculture work.Once there they were invariably treated as slaves and unwittingly kept the American worker's wages down.The border has long served as a safety valve for the discontent of Mexico's proles and peasants,a valve that both US and Mexican bourgeoisies are more than happy to keep open,whatever their rhetoric.

9 The best account of this we can find in English is in chapter 20 of Mexico,Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze (HarperCollins 1998).

10 For an account of the debateof the 1980s on whether to stay inside the CTM or form a new organization,from the perspective of day-to-day struggle,see 'Las Costurersa' (women textile workers) in Midnight Notes No.9,May 1998.

11 A good example is neighborhood of Tepito ,as described in 'The uses of an Earthquake' by Harry Cleaver,again in Midnight Notes No.9.

12 A good example of the way in which privitisation policies have undermined the PRI's social base is on the railways.Since the selling off of the rail network and subsequent redundancies and pay cuts,the PRI-controlled railworkers's union has lost more than 70% of its members.As a result the Charros have found their funds slashed and their influence eroded.

13 The 'Jungle' novels of B. Traven ,particularly The Rebellion of the Hanged (Allison and Busby) are excellent for an historical understanding of Chiapas in this period.

14 Rebellion from the Roots by John Ross,Common Courage Press,1995,p.70.This book of left journalism is the best narrative account of the opening months of the Zapatista struggle in 1994 and provides a useful background to Mexican politics, especially the corruption of the PRI.

15 Accustomed to production for consumption on small plots, these families suddenly found themselves the legal owners of immense tracts of land.he government fully expected them to transform themselves into professional farmers and bastions of private property.The families however,hitherto members of the 'different world' of the peasntry were completely unable to make this qualitative jump.Instead they sold concessions to logging companies and self-destructed on a diet of TV and alcohol .

16 One action that appears completely unmediated took place in San Andres Larrainzar in 1973,where 22 years later,peace talks between The EZLN and the PRI would be held:Tzotil Indians attacked the homes of landowners, threatening to machete them to death unless they abandoned their farms and ranches-which they did in double quick time.

17 See for example 'Chiapas and the Global Restructuring of capital' by Ana Esther Cecana and Andreas Barreda in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico,eds. John Holloway and Eloina Perez,Pluto Press,1999.

18 Farmers and ranchers are being driven into making the environment relatively barren,in terms of creating a monoculture,oil companies to make the environment absolutely barren in their destructive quest for petroleum.

19 Although not intimately tied-in with the neo-liberal project,1989 also saw the state logging company of COLFALSA impose a total logging ban in Chiapas,so depriving the Indians of a vital source of fuel.Naturally tree-cutting continued illegally,but the creation of a new armed police force to enforce the ban meant another layer of repression for the indigenous people.

20 We have taken the details in this section from Rebellion in Chiapas:An Historical Reader by John Womack jnr (The New Press,New York,1999).Womack is the author of Zapata and the Mexican Revolution which was published in 1969 and which,together with Gilly,is the standard work on that period.He has been very well-informed about the Mexican left for years and the detail he gives in Rebellion in Chiapas is incredible.In particular has has destroyed the image Marcos has tried so hard to portray of indigenous Indians forcing urban leftists to abandon their ideology in the years before the uprising took place.His book should come to be seen as a standard work on the EZLN,and is a must read for all Zapatista supporters.

21 A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Guterriez,1971,is the key text.

22 Communism and Community in Russia by Jacques Camatte.Of course,out of context this quote from Camatte sounds too abstract.Every religon must in fact reflect the material and social relations and thus the prevailing mode of production (religon is not 'God' but what you have to do for God).As such,religions normally discourage opposition to these prevailing social relations.Of course any religious text or tradition born in a past mode of production is at odds with capitalism.In order to remain a religious authority within bourgeoisie society and,in the same time,retain the Bible and its whole tradition,the Catholic Church emptied them of their original content.Of course a 'free' reading or interpretation of its tradition can highlight elements that can be used to justify rebellion-and this reading can have authority above all if this is backed by some priests.But the contradiction inherent in this use religon appears when the supporters of the Theology of Liberation collide with the high authorities within the Church (the main theorist of the Theology of Liberation, L.Boff, was deprived of his official powers-'suspended a divinis').

23 Womack, op cit.,p.43

24 The Ez as a standing army is relatively small-combatientes are sent back home once their training and exercises are over,ready to be mobilized should the need arise.The full fighting strength of the EZ is probably around 17,000

25 Deneuve & Reeve, Behind the Balaclavas of South-East Mexico, discussed in more detail below.

26 Because it takes the most provocative relentlessly unsympathetic stance,we wil deal largely here with Behind the Balaclavas of South-East Mexico by Sylvie Deneuve and Charles Reeve,Ab Irato,Paris 1996 (available from BM Chronos,London WC1N 3XX,£1.50).Two other texts we have in mind are 'Mexico is not Chiapas,Nor is the Revolt in Chiapas Only a Mexican Affair' by Katerina (TPTG) in (Common Sense No.22,Winter 1997);and 'Unmasking the Zapatistas' in Wildcat No.18,Summer 1996.Though we use the term 'ultra-left' the writers differ; TPTG are more situationist-influenced,Deneuve and Reeve more council-communists,while Wildcat (UK - or should it be US - not Wildcat Germany) like to emphasize their'hard' anti-democratic credentials.On the Zapatistas ,Katerina's is by far the most poitive of these three.However,TPTG's position towards the Zapatistas seems to have hardened, judging by their recent review of the book version of the Deneuve and Reeve piece.

27 Antagonism, op. cit.

28 Indeed, when the EZLN entered into peace talks in Febuary 1994 they demanded not the restitution of Article 27,but the nationwide implementation of the Ayala Plan,much to the derision of the PRI

29 Marx cited in Camatte op. cit.

30 The best account is the 'Report from the Second Encounter for Humanity and against Neo-liberalism' by Massimo de Angelis in Capital and Class No.65,though don't bother with the dreadful academic waffle in the introduction.

31 Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution In Mexico, edited by John Holloway and Eloina Perez (Pluto Press, 1998) is the most thoroughgoing attempt to develop ideas about he Chiapas uprising in English and whose arguments we deal chiefly with here.See also Towards the New Commons:Working class strategies and the Zapatistas by Monty Neill, with George Caffentzis and Johhny Machete ( and various articles in recent editions of Capital and Class.In Mexico, the Spanish language journal Chiapas is an ongoing academic project dedicated to exploring various aspects of the rebellion.

32 'Zapatismo: Recomposition of Labour,Radical Democracy and Revolutionary Project' by Luis Lorenzano in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution (op. cit.)

33 Open letter to John Holloway .We would add that it seems that we are not dealing with a merely theoretical issue here,but one related to the position of academic Marxist.They are tempted to use 'operaismo' (Italian autonomists) ideas of the 'social factory' ,in which all areas of life become work for capital,to suppress the contradictions of their middle class role and redefine themselves as working class.But there is a problem here.There is a contradiction in their desire validate themselves as intellectual workers while on the other hand wishing to claim status for the product of this work as a non-alienated contribution to the movement of labour against capital.Indeed, perhaps the attraction of Marcos to many of the academic autonomist Marxists is that he,a fellow left intellectual,seems to be actually doing for the peasants of South-East Mexico, what they,the academics, claim to be able to do for the whole of the world working class, i.e. articulate and communicate the meaning of their struggle.The social division between mental and manual labour is the basis of class society; it must be overcome.The university is the supreme expression of this division; it is the artificial intelligence of the social factory.We are not saying that nothing useful comes from the academic Marxists,but simply that their social position affects what they write.

34 The combination of a pluralist programme which defends diversity,traditional and quasi-mystical Mayan Indians and the image of the masked-up guerillas is the reason the UK direct action scene has found the Zapatista struggle so irresistible.

What was the USSR? Part IV: Towards a theory of the deformation of value

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What was the USSR? Aufheben
- What was the USSR? Part I: Trotsky and state capitalism
- What was the USSR? Part II: Russia as a non-mode of production
- What was the USSR? Part III: Left communism and the Russian revolution
- What was the USSR? Part IV: Towards a theory of the deformation of value

So our saga on the nature of the USSR draws to a close. While some readers have awaited avidly for each exciting instalment, others from the beginning thought we gave disproportionate space to this rather tired old topic.1 Another dissatisfied group may be the partisans of particular theories which were not given the recognition they feel they deserved.2 This was unavoidable considering the sheer number of theories one could have dealt with. The list of political tendencies which have considered that the USSR was a variety of capitalism includes 'anarchism, council communism, "impossibilism", many types of Leninism (including Bordigism, Maoism and a number arising out of Trotskyism), libertarian socialism, Marxist-Humanism, Menshevism, the Situationist International and social democracy.3 Some might also question why, of our previous parts, only one dealt with (state-)capitalist theories outside Trotskyism. Yet what is striking in looking at these alternatives is that none dealt adequately with the 'orthodox Marxist' criticisms coming from Trotskyism. If Trotskyism itself has been politically bankrupt in its relation to both Stalinism and social democracy - and this is not unrelated to its refusal to accept the USSR was capitalist - at a certain theoretical level it still posed a challenge. We restate the issues at stake in the first few pages below. While fragmented ideological conceptions satisfy the needs of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must acquire theory: the practical truth necessary for its universal task of self-abolition which at the same time abolishes class society. Clearing some of the bullshit and clarifying issues around one of the central obstacles to human emancipation that the 20th century has thrown up, namely the complicity of the Left with capital, may help the next century have done with the capitalist mode of production once and for all.

Introduction

The problem of determining the nature of the USSR was that it exhibited two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the USSR appeared to have characteristics that were strikingly similar to those of the actually existing capitalist societies of the West. Thus, for example, the vast majority of the population of the USSR was dependent for their livelihoods on wage-labour. Rapid industrialisation and the forced collectivisation of agriculture under Stalin had led to the break up of traditional communities and the emergence of a mass industrialised society made up of atomised individuals and families. While the overriding aim of the economic system was the maximisation of economic growth.

On the other hand, the USSR diverged markedly from the laissez-faire capitalism that had been analysed by Marx. The economy of the USSR was not made up of competing privately owned enterprises regulated through the 'invisible hand' of the market. On the contrary, all the principal means of production were state owned and the economy was consciously regulated through centralised planning. As a consequence, there were neither the sharp differentiation between the economic nor the political nor was there a distinct civil society that existed between family and state. Finally the economic growth was not driven by the profit motive but directly by the need to expand the mass of use-values to meet the needs of both the state and the population as a whole.

As a consequence, any theory that the USSR was essentially a capitalist form of society must be able to explain this contradictory appearance of the USSR. Firstly, it must show how the dominant social relations that arose in the peculiar historical circumstance of the USSR were essentially capitalist social relations: and to this extent the theory must be grounded in a value-analysis of the Soviet Union. Secondly it must show how these social relations manifested themselves, not only in those features of the USSR that were clearly capitalist, but also in those features of the Soviet Union that appear as distinctly at variance with capitalism.

The capitalist essence of the USSR

As we saw in Part III, there were a number of theories that emerged out of the Communist Left following the Russian Revolution that came to argue that the USSR was essentially a form of capitalism. Most of these early theories, however, had focused on the question of the class nature of the Russian Revolution and had failed to go far in developing a value-analysis of the Soviet System.4 However, following Mattick's attempt to analyse the USSR of value-forms there have been a number of attempts to show that, despite appearances to the contrary, the dominant social relations of the USSR were essentially capitalist in nature.

Of course, any theory that the USSR was in some sense capitalist must reject the vulgar interpretation of orthodox Marxism which simply sees capitalism as a profit driven system based on private property and the 'anarchy of the market'. The essence of capitalism is the dominance of the social relations of capital. But what is capital? From Marx it can be argued that capital was essentially the self-expansion of alienated labour: the creative and productive powers of human activity that becomes an alien force that subsumes human will and needs to its own autonomous expansion.

Yet the alienation of labour presupposes wage-labour which itself presupposes the separation of the direct producers from both the means of production and the means of subsistence. Of course, in the 'classical form' of capitalism private property is the institutional means through which the direct producers are separated from both the means of production and the means of subsistence. The class of capitalists owns both the means of production and the means of subsistence in the form of the private property of each individual capitalist. In confronting the private property of each individual capitalist the worker finds himself excluded from access to the means through he can either directly or indirectly satisfy his needs. As a consequence he is obliged to sell his labour-power to one capitalist so that he can then buy his means of subsistence from another. Yet in selling their labour-power to capitalists the working class produce their future means of subsistence and their future means of production as the private property of the capitalist class. In doing so they end up reproducing the relation of capital and wage-labour.

Yet this social relation is not fundamentally altered with the institution of the state ownership of both the means of production and the means of subsistence. Of course the Stalinist apologists would claim that the state ownership of means of production meant the ownership of by the entire population. But this was quite clearly a legal formality. The Soviet working class no more owned and controlled their factories than British workers owned British Steel, British Coal or British Leyland in the days of the nationalised industries. State ownership, whether in Russia or elsewhere, was merely a specific institutional form through which the working class was excluded from both the means of production and the means of subsistence and therefore obliged to sell their labour-power.

In selling their labour-power to the various state enterprises the Russian workers did not work to produce for their own needs but worked in exchange for wages. Thus in a very real sense they alienated their labour and hence produced capital. Instead of selling their labour-power to capital in the form of a private capitalist enterprise, the Russian working class simply sold their labour-power to capital in the form of the state owned enterprise.

Whereas in the 'classical form' of capitalism the capitalist class is constituted through the private ownership of the means of production, in the USSR the capitalist class was constituted through the state and as such collectively owned and controlled the means of production. Nevertheless, by making the Russian working class work longer than that necessary to produce the equivalent of their labour-power the Russian State enterprises were able to extract surplus-value just as the counterparts in the West would do. Furthermore, while a part of this surplus-value would be used to pay for the privileges of the 'state bourgeoisie', as in the West, the largest part would be reinvested in the expansion of the economy and thus ensuring the self-expansion of state-capital.

Hence by penetrating behind the forms of property we can see that the real social relations within the USSR were essentially those of capital. The USSR can therefore be seen as having been capitalist - although in the specific form of state capitalism. However politically useful and intuitive correct this classification of the USSR may be, the problem is that by itself this approach is unable to explain the apparently non-capitalist aspects of the USSR. As anyone acquainted with Hegel might say 'the essence must appear!'. Capital may be the self-expansion of alienated labour but it is labour in the form of value. How can we speak of value, or indeed surplus-value, when there is no production of commodities, since without markets there was no real production for exchange?

These criticisms of state capitalist theories of the USSR have emerged out of the Trotskyist tradition. It is to this tradition that we must now turn to explore the limits of the state capitalist theories of the USSR.

The Trotskyist approach

The more sophisticated Trotskyist theorists have criticised the method of state capitalist theories of the USSR. They argue it is wrong to seek to identify an abstract and ahistorical essence of capitalism and seek to identify its existence to a concrete historical social formation such as the USSR. For them the apparent contradiction between the non-capitalist and capitalist aspects of the USSR was a real contradiction that can only be understood by grasping the Soviet Union as a transitional social formation.

As we saw in Part I, for Trotskyists, the Russian Revolution marked a decisive break with capitalism. As a consequence, following 1917, Russia had entered a transitional period between capitalism and socialism. As such the USSR was neither capitalist nor socialist but had aspects of the two which arose from the struggle between the law of value and of planning.

As a result Trotskyist never denied the existence of capitalist aspects of the USSR. Indeed they accepted the persistence of capitalist forms such as money, profits, interest and wages. But these were decaying forms - 'empty husks' - that disguised the emerging socialist relations in a period of transition. This becomes clear, they argue if we examine these 'capitalist forms' more closely.

Firstly, it may appear that in the USSR that production took the form of production for exchange and hence products took the form of commodities. After all, different state enterprises traded with each other and sold products to the working class. But for the most part such exchange of products was determined by the central plan not by competitive exchange on the market. As a consequence, while the state enterprises formally sold their outputs and purchased their inputs such 'exchanges' were in content merely transfers that were made in accordance with the central plan. Hence production was not for exchange but for the plan and thus products did not really assume the form of commodities.

Secondly, since there was no real commodity exchange, but simply a planed transfer of products, there could be no real money in USSR. While money certainly existed and was used in transactions it did not by any means have the full functions that money has under capitalism. Money principally functioned as a unit of account. Unlike money under capitalism, which as the universal equivalent, was both necessary and sufficient to buy anything, in the USSR money may have been necessary to buy certain things but was often very far from being sufficient. As the long queues and shortages testified what was needed in USSR to obtain things was not just money but also time or influence.

Thirdly, there were the forms of profits and interest. Under capitalism profit serves as the driving force that propels the expansion of the economic system, while interest ensures the efficient allocation of capital to the most profitable sectors and industries. In the USSR the forms of profit and interest existed but they were for the most part accounting devises. Production was no more production for profit than it was production for exchange. Indeed the expansion of the economic system was driven by the central plan that set specific targets for the production of use-values not values.5

Finally and perhaps most importantly we come to the form of wages. To the extent that Trotskyist theorists reject the Stalinist notion that the Russian working class were co-owners of the state enterprises, they are obliged to accept that the direct producers were separated from both their means of subsistence and the means of production. However, in the absence of general commodity production it is argued that the Russian worker was unable to sell her labour-power as a commodity. Firstly, because the worker was not 'free' to sell her labour power to who ever she chose and secondly because the money wage could not be freely transformed into commodities. As a consequence, although the workers in the USSR were nominally paid wages, in reality such wages were little more than pensions or rations that bore scant relation to the labour performed. The position of the worker was more like that of a serf or slave tied to a specific means of production that a 'free' wage worker.

We shall return to consider this question of 'empty capitalist forms' later. What is important at present is to see how the Trotskyist approach is able to ground the contradictory appearance of the USSR as both capitalist and non-capitalist in terms of the transition from capitalism to socialism. To this extent the Trotskyist approach has the advantage over most state capitalist theories that are unable to adequately account for the non-capitalist aspects of the USSR. This failure to grasp the non-capitalist aspects of the USSR has been exposed in the light of the decay and final collapse of the USSR.

Capitalist crisis and the collapse of the USSR

One of the most striking features of the capitalist mode of production is its crisis ridden mode of development. Capitalism has brought about an unprecedented development of the productive forces, yet such development has been repeatedly punctuated by crises of overproduction.

The sheer waste that such crises could involve had become clearly apparent in the great depression of the 1930s. On the one side millions of workers in the industrialised countries had been plunged into poverty by mass unemployment while on the other side stood idle factories that had previous served as a means to feed and clothe these workers. In contrast, at that time Stalinist Russia was undergoing a process of rapid apparently crisis free industrialisation that was to transform the USSR from a predominantly agrarian economy into a major industrial and military power.6

In the 1930s and the decades that followed, even bourgeois observers had come to accept the view that the Stalinist system of centralised planning had overcome the problem of economic crisis and was at least in economic terms an advance over free market capitalism. The only question that remained for such observers was whether the cost in bourgeois freedom that the Stalinist system seemed to imply was worth the economic gains of a rationally planned economy.

While it became increasingly difficult for Trotskyists to defend the notion that the USSR was a degenerated workers state on the grounds that the working class was in any sense in power, the USSR could still be defended as being progressive in that it was able to develop the forces of production faster than capitalism. To the extent that the rapid development of the forces of production was creating the material conditions for socialism then the USSR could still be seen as being in the long term interests of the working class.

Many of the state capitalist theorists shared this common view that the USSR was an advance over the free market capitalism of the West. While they may have disagreed with the Trotskyist notion that the Russian Revolution had led to a break with capitalism they still accepted that by leading to the eventual introduction of a predominantly state capitalist economy it had marked an advance not only over pre-Revolutionary Russia but also over Western capitalism.

This view seemed to be confirmed by the post Second World War development in Western capitalism. The emergence of Keynesian demand management, widespread nationalisation of key industries, indicative planning7 and the introduction of the welfare state all seemed to indicate an evolution towards the form of state capitalism. For many bourgeois as well as Marxist theorists of the 1950s and 1960s there was developing a convergence between the West and the East as the state increasingly came to regulate the economy. For Socialism or Barbarism there was emerging what they termed a 'bureaucratic capitalism' that had overcome the problems of economic crisis.

As we noted in Part III, Mattick as one of the leading state capitalist theorist of the German left, rejected the claims that Keynesianism had resolved the contradictions of capitalism. Yet nevertheless he took the claims that the USSR had itself resolved the problems of economic crisis through rational planning at face value.

However, as we saw in Part II, by the 1970s it had become increasingly clear that the USSR had entered a period of chronic economic stagnation. By the time of the collapse of the USSR in 1990 only the most hard line Stalinist could deny that the USSR had been a bureaucratic nightmare that involved enormous economic waste and inefficiency.

State capitalist theories have so far proved unable to explain the peculiar nature of the fundamental contradictions of the USSR that led to its chronic stagnation and eventual downfall.8 If the USSR was simply a form of capitalism then the crisis theories of capitalism should be in some way applicable to the crisis in the USSR. But attempts to explain the economic problems of the USSR simply in terms of the falling rate and profit, overproduction and crisis etc. have failed to explain the specific features of the economic problems that beset the USSR. The USSR did not experience acute crisis of overproduction but rather problems of systematic waste and chronic economic stagnation, none of which can be explained by the standard theories of capitalist crisis.

As a consequence of this limitation of state capitalist theories, perhaps rather ironically, the most persuasive explanation of the downfall of the USSR has not arisen from those traditions that had most consistently opposed the Soviet Union, and which had given rise to the theories that Soviet Union was a form of State Capitalism, but from the Trotskyist tradition that had given the USSR its critical support. As we saw in Part II, it has been Ticktin that has given the most plausible explanation and description of the decline and fall of the USSR. Although in developing his theory of the USSR Ticktin was obliged to ditch the notion that the USSR remained a degenerate workers state, he held on to the crucial Trotskyist notion that the Soviet Union was in a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism. For Ticktin, Russia's transition to socialism was part of the global transition from capitalism to socialism. With the failure of the world revolution following the First World War Russia was left in isolation and was unable to complete the transition to socialism. As a consequence, the USSR became stuck in a half-way position between capitalism and socialism. The USSR subsequently degenerated into a 'non-mode of production'. While it ceased to be regulated by the 'law of value' it could not adequately regulated through the law of planning without the participation of the working class.

As we saw in Part II, it is within this theoretical framework that Ticktin argued that the USSR was the first attempt to make the transition from capitalism to socialism within the global epoch of the decline of capitalism that Ticktin was able to develop his analysis of the decline and fall of the USSR. However, as we also saw while his analysis is perhaps the most plausible explanation that has been offered for the decline and fall of the USSR it has important failings. As we have argued, despite twenty years and numerous articles developing his analysis of the USSR, Ticktin has been unable to develop a systematic and coherent methodological exposition of his theory of the Soviet Union as a non-mode production. Instead Ticktin is obliged to take up a number of false starts each of which, while often offering important insights into the nature and functioning of the USSR, runs into problems in its efforts to show that the Soviet Union was in some sense in transition to socialism. Indeed, he is unable to adequately explain the persistence and function of capitalist categories in the USSR.

If we are to develop an alternative to Ticktin theory which is rooted in the tradition that has consistently seen the USSR as being state capitalist9 it is necessary that we are able to explain the non-capitalist aspects of the USSR that previous state capitalist theories have failed to do. To do this we propose to follow Ticktin and consider the USSR as a transitional social formation, but, following the insights of Bordiga and the Italian Left, we do not propose to grasp the USSR as having been in transition from capitalism but as a social formation in transition to capitalism.

But before we can do this we must first consider particular nature of the form of state capitalism.

The historical significance of state capitalism

Within the traditional Marxism of both the Second and Third Internationals state capitalism is viewed as the highest form of capitalism. As Marx argued, the prevalent tendency within the development of capitalism is the both the concentration and centralisation of capital. As capital is accumulated in ever large amounts the weak capitals are driven out by the strong. Capital becomes centralised into fewer and fewer hands as in each industry the competition between many small capitals becomes replaced by the monopoly of a few.

By the end of the nineteenth century the theorists of the Second International had begun to argue that this tendency had gone so far that the competitive laissez-faire capitalism that Marx had analysed in the mid-nineteenth century was giving way to a monopoly capitalism in which the key industries were dominated by national monopolistic corporation or price-fixing cartels. It was argued that the development of such monopolies and cartels meant that the law of value was in decline. Output and prices were now increasingly being planed by the monopolies and cartels rather than emerging spontaneously from the anarchy of a competitive market.

Furthermore it was argued that in order to mobilise the huge amounts of capital now necessary to finance large scale productive investments in leading sectors such those of the steel, coal and rail industries, industrial capital had begun to ally, and then increasingly fuse, with banking capital to form what the leading economic theorist Hilferding termed finance capital. Within finance capital the huge national monopolies in each industry were united with each other forming huge national conglomerates with interests in all the strategic sectors of the economy. The logical outcome of this process was for the centralisation of finance capital to proceed to the point where there was only one conglomerate that owned and controlled all the important industries in the national economy.

However, the growth of finance capital also went hand in hand with the growing economic importance of the state. On an international scale the development of finance capital within each nation state led to international competition increasingly becoming politicised as each state championed the interests of its own national capitals by military force if necessary. Against rival imperial powers each state had begun to carve out empires and spheres of influence across the globe to ensure privileged access to markets and raw materials necessary to its domestic capital. At the same time the development of huge monopolies and finance capital forced the state to take a far more active role in regulating the economy and arbitrating between the conflicting economic interests that could no longer be mediated through the free operation of competitive markets.

As a consequence, the development of finance capital implied not only a fusion between industrial and banking capital but also a fusion between capital and the state. Capitalism was remorselessly developing into a state capitalism in which there would be but one capital that would dominate the entire nation and be run by the state in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. For the theorist of the Second International it was this very tendency towards state capitalism that provided the basis of socialism. With the development of state capitalism all that would be needed was the seizure of the state by the working class. All the mechanisms for running the national economy would then be in the hands of the workers government who could then run the economy in the interests of the working class rather than a small group of capitalists.

But this notion that state capitalism was the culmination of the historical development of capitalism, and hence that it was capitalism's highest stage, arose out of the specific conditions and experience of Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. Germany's rapid industrialisation following its unification in 1866 had meant that by the end of the nineteenth century it was seriously challenging Britain as Europe's foremost economic power. At the same time the rapid emergence of an industrial proletariat had given rise to the German Social Democratic Party which was not only the first but also the largest and most important mass workers party in the world and as such dominated the Second International. It is perhaps no surprise then that the Marxist theorists of the Second International, whether German or not, should look to Germany. But their generalisation of the development of capitalism of Germany to a universal law was to prove an important error.

This error becomes clear if we consider the other two leading capitalist powers at the end of the nineteenth century: Britain that had been the leading capitalist power throughout the century, and the USA, along with Germany were rapidly overtaking Britain in economic development. Of course, in both Britain and the USA capitalist development had seen the prevalence of the tendency of the centralisation and concentration of capital that was to lead to the growth of huge corporations and monopolies. Furthermore, partly as a result of such a concentration and centralisation of capital, and partly as a result of the class conflict that accompanied it, the state was to take on increasing responsibilities in managing the economy in the twentieth century. However, there was no fusion between banking and industrial capital nor was their a fusion between the state and capital on any scale comparable that which could be identified in Germany either at the end of the nineteenth century or subsequently in the twentieth century.

The international orientation of British capital that had become further consolidated with the emergence of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century, meant there was little pressure for the emergence of finance capital in Hilferding's sense. British industrial capital had long established markets across the world and was under little pressure to consolidate national markets through the construction of cartels or national monopolies.

Equally British banking capital was centred on managing international flows of capital and investing abroad and was far from inclined to make the long term commitments necessary for a merger with industrial capital. British industrial capital raised finance principally through the stock market or through retained profits not through the banks as their German counterparts did. While the British state pursued an imperial policy that sought to protect the markets and sources of raw materials for British capital it stop short there. The British State made little effort to promote the development of British capital through direct state intervention since in most sectors British capital still retained a commanding competitive advantage.

In the USA the concentration of banking capital was restricted. As a consequence there could be no fusion between large scale banking capital and large scale industrial capital. As a continental economy there was far more room for expansion in the USA before capitals in particular industries reached a monopolistic stage and when they did reach this stage they often faced anti-trust legislation. Furthermore, the relative geo-economic isolation of the USA meant that protectionist measures were sufficient to promote the development of American industry. There was little need for the US government to go beyond imposing tariffs on foreign imports in order to encourage the development of domestic industry. As a consequence there was not only no basis for the fusion of industrial and banking capital but there was also little basis for the fusion of the state with capital.

In the twentieth century it was the USA, not Germany, that took over from Britain as the hegemonic economic power. While it is true that the tendency towards the concentration and centralisation of capital has continued in the USA, that both state regulation and state spending has steadily increased, and that with the emergence of the industrial-military complex there has grown increasing links between the state and certain sectors of industry, the USA, the most advanced capitalist power, can hardly be designated as having a state capitalist political-economy. Indeed, with the rise of global finance capital and the retreat of the autonomy of the nation state, the notion that state capitalism is the highest stage of capitalism has become increasingly untenable.

If state capitalism is not the highest stage of capitalism as was argued by the theorists of the Second and Third Internationals then what was its historical significance? To answer this we must first of all briefly consider the particular development of industrial capitalism in Germany which were provided the material conditions out of which this notion first arose.

Germany and the conditions of late industrialisation

As Marx recognised, Britain provided the classic case for the development of industrial capitalism. After nearly four centuries of evolution the development of mercantile and agrarian capitalism had created the essential preconditions for the emergence of industrial capitalism in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century. Centuries of enclosures had dispossessed the British peasantry and created a large pool of potential proletarians. At the same time primitive accumulation had concentrated wealth in the hands of an emerging bourgeoisie and embourgeoified gentry who were both willing and able to invest it as capital.

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain. By the mid-nineteenth century Britain had established itself as the 'workshop of the world'. Britain's manufacturers flooded the world markets, particularly those of Europe. The development of the factory system and the subsequent application of steam power meant that the products of British industry were far cheaper than those of European industries that were for the most part still based on handicraft production.

As a consequence much of the proto-industrial craft production that had grown up across Europe during the previous two centuries faced ruin from British industrial production. Whereas in Britain the emergence of industrial capitalism had seen a retreat in the role of the state and the emergence of laissez-faire, on the continent the ruinous competition of British industry forced the European states to take measures to protect and foster domestic industry. Indeed British economic competition meant there was no option for the gradual evolution into capitalism. On the contrary the European ruling classes had to industrialise or be left behind. If the domestic bourgeois proved to weak too carry out industrialisation then the state had to carry out its historical mission for it.

The 1870s marked a crucial turning point in the development of the formation of the world capitalist economy, particularly in Europe. The period 1870-1900 marked a second stage in industrialisation that was to divided the world between a core of advanced industrialised countries and periphery of underdeveloped countries. A division that for the most part still exists today.

The first stage of industrialisation that had begun in Britain in the late eighteenth century, and which had been centred on the textile industries, had arisen out of handicraft and artisanal industry that had grown up in the previous manufacturing period. The machinery that was used to mechanise production was for the most part simply a multiplication and elaboration of the hand tools that had been used in handicraft production and were themselves the product of handicraft production. At the same time the quantum of money-capital necessary to set up in production was relatively small and was well within the compass of middle class family fortunes.

The second stage of industrialisation that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century was centred around large scale steel production, and heavy engineering. Industrial production now presupposed industrial production. Industrial machinery was now no longer the product of handicraft production but was itself the product of industrial production. Industrial production had grown dramatically in scale and in cost. The quantum of capital necessary to set up in production was now often well beyond the pockets of even the richest of individuals. Money-capital had to be concentrated through the development of joint-stock companies and banks.

In Britain, and perhaps to a lesser extent France, the period of early industrialisation had created the presuppositions for the future industrialisation of the second stage. An industrial base had already been established while the accumulation of capital and the development of the financial institutions provide the mass of money capital necessary for further industrialisation. In contrast the division of Germany into petty-statelets that was only finally overcome with its unification in 1866 had retarded the development of industrial capital. As a consequence, Germany had to summon up out of almost nothing the preconditions for the second stage of industrialisation if it was not to fall irrevocably behind. This required a forced concentration of national capital and the active intervention of the state.

This was further compounded by Germany's late entrance into the race to divide up the world. The new industries that began to emerge in the late nineteenth century demanded a wide range of raw materials that could only be obtained outside of Europe. To secure supplies of these raw materials a race developed to divide up the world and this led to the establishment of the vast French and British Empires of the late nineteenth century. Excluded from much of the world, German capital found itself compressed within the narrow national confines of Germany and its immediate eastern European hinterland.

It was this forced concentration and centralisation of German capital and its confinement within the narrow national boundaries of Germany and eastern Europe that can be seen as the basis for the tendencies towards the fusion both between industrial and banking capital and between the state and capital that were peculiar to Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. As such the tendency towards state capitalism that was identified by the theorist of the Second International owed more to Germany's late industrialisation than to any universally applicable tendency towards state capitalism. Indeed, the twentieth century has shown, those economies that have managed to overcome the huge disadvantages of late industrialisation - such as Japan and more recently the 'Newly Industrialising Countries' (NICs) such as South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico - state-led development has played a crucial part in their success.10

However, state capitalism only remained a tendency in Germany. In the USSR the fusion of the state and capital can be seen to have been fully realised. We must therefore turn to consider the case of the late development of Russia.

Russia and late Development

As we saw in Part I, the Russian autocracy had made repeated efforts to 'modernise' and 'industrialise' the Russian economy. With the abolition of serfdom in 1866 and the introduction of the Stolypin agrarian reforms in the early 1900s the Tzarist Governments had sought to foster the growth of capitalist agriculture. At the same time the Tzarist regime encouraged foreign investment in the most modern plant and machinery.

However, the Tzarist efforts to modernise and industrialise the Russian Empire were tempered by the danger that such modernisation and industrialisation would unleash social forces that would undermine the traditional social and political relations upon which the Russian imperial autocracy was founded. Indeed, the prime motive for promoting the industrialisation of the Russian Empire was the need for an industrial basis for the continued military strength of the Russian Empire. As military strength increasingly dependent on industrially produced weapons then it became increasingly important for the Russian State to industrialise.

As a consequence, the industrialisation of pre-Revolutionary Russia was narrowly based on the needs of military accumulation. While Russia came to possess some of the most advanced factories in the world the vast bulk of the Russian population was still employed in subsistence or petty-commodity producing agriculture. It was this economic structure, in which a small islands of large scale capitalist production existed in a sea of a predominantly backward pre-capitalist agriculture, that the Bolsheviks inherited in the wake of the October Revolution.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a dual revolution. On the one hand it was a proletarian revolution. It was the urban working class that brought down the Tzarist regime in February, defeated the Kornilov's counter-revolution in August and then, through the political form of the Bolshevik Party, seized political power in October. Yet although the Russian proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry, succeeded in sweeping away the Tzarist autocracy, and uprooting the semi-feudal aristocratic ruling class on which it rested the proletarian revolution was ultimately defeated.

The Russian proletariat failed to go beyond the situation of dual power in the streets and the factories that had arisen during period between the February and October Revolution. Unable to take over and directly transform the social relations of production the contradictions involved in the situation of dual power were resolved in favour of nationalisation rather than the communisation of the means of production. The consequences of which soon became clear with the re-introduction of Taylorism and the imposition of one man management in the Spring of 1918.

The Bolshevik Party, which had been the political form through which the Russian proletariat had triumphed, then became the form through which it suffered its defeat. The Leninists could only save the revolution by defeating it. The emergency measures employed to defend the gains of the revolution - the crushing of political opposition, the re-employment Tzarist officials, the reimposition of capitalist production methods and incentives etc., only served to break the real power of the Russian working class and open up the gap between the 'workers' Government' and the Workers. This process was to become further consolidated with the decimation of the Revolutionary Russian proletariat during the three years of civil war.

Yet, on the other hand, while the Russian Revolution can be seen as a failed proletarian revolution it can also be seen as a partially successful 'national bourgeois' revolution. A national bourgeois revolution, neither in the sense that it was led by a self-conscious Russian bourgeoisie, nor in the sense that it served to forge a self-conscious Russian bourgeoisie, but in the sense that by sweeping away the Tzarist absolutist state it opened the way for the full development of a Russian capitalism.

In the absence of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Empire would have probably gone the way of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The Russian Empire would have been broken up in the face of international competition. The more advanced parts may have then been reintegrated within the orbit of European capitalism, while the rest would have been dumped in the economically undeveloped world. However, the Russian Revolution had forged a strong state that, unlike the previous Tzarist regime, was able to fully develop the forces of production.

In the backward conditions that prevailed in Russia, capitalist economic development could only have been carried out by through the forced development of the productive forces directed by the concentrated and centralised direction and power of the state. It was only through state-led capitalist development that both the internal and external constraints that blocked the development of Russian capitalism could be overcome.

In Russia, the only way to industrialise - and hence make the transition to a self-sustaining capitalist economy - was through the fusion of state and capital - that is through the full realisation of state capitalism. Yet to understand this we must briefly consider the external and internal constraints that had blocked the capitalist development of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Underdevelopment

In The Communist Manifesto Marx remarks:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication. draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.11

Of course, capital's inherent tendency to reproduce itself on an ever greater scale has led to the relentless geographical expansion of capitalism to the point where its has long since encompassed the entire globe. However, this process has been a highly uneven one. The concentration and centralisation of capital that has led to rapid capitalist development in one region of the world has presupposed the plunder and de-development of other regions of the world.

As we have already noted, in the late nineteenth century the development of industrial capitalism in Western Europe and North America imposed an international division of labour that still divides the world a hundred years later. The economic relations that served to promote the rapid accumulation of capital in the 'core' of world capitalism at the same time served to block the full development of industrial capitalism in the periphery of world capitalism. To this extent world capitalism became polarised.

In this process of polarisation Russia found itself in a peculiar position. On the one hand, as the impact of industrial capitalism spread eastwards across Europe from Britain, Russia was the last European country to confront the need to industrialise. As such it was the last of the late European industrialisers. On the other hand, Russia can be seen as the first of the non-western countries that sought to resist the impact of underdevelopment.

To understand this peculiar position that Russia found itself in at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how it shaped the transition to capitalism in Russia, we must briefly consider the question of underdevelopment.

Mercantile and Industrial capitalism

Capitalism, or more precisely the capitalist mode of production, only becomes established with the emergence of industrial capital. It is only when capital takes full possession of the means of production and transforms them in accordance with its own needs that capitalism becomes a self-sustaining economic system that can dominate society. However, where ever there has been the widespread use of money arising from the exchange of commodities capital has emerged in the distinct form of mercantile capital.

Mercantile capital has had an independent existence since the early period of antiquity. However, in pre-capitalist modes of production it has been ultimately parasitic. Mercantile capitalism is driven by profit. But it is a profit not based on the direct expropriation of surplus-value but on unequal exchange - buying cheap in order to sell dear. Mercantile capital was therefore always ultimately dependent on the predominant means of surplus extraction in any particular society.

Following the crisis in European feudalism in the fourteenth century and the subsequent emergence of the world market in the sixteenth century mercantile capitalism came in to its own and began to rapidly expand it influence. As such it had two contradictory effects. On the one side, mercantile capitalism brought with it an increase in the production and circulation of money and commodities and in doing so served to undermine the traditional pre-capitalist social relations. To this extent it prepared one of the essential preconditions for the development of the capitalist mode of production - the creation of an economy based on generalised commodity exchange. On the other side, insofar mercantile capitalism remained dependent on the traditional structures of society, it became a conservative force that blocked the development of an industrial capitalism.

Mercantile capitalism had grown up hand in hand with the development of the Absolutist State. In order to free itself from the feudal nobility the absolutist state was increasingly dependent on loans and money taxes that had become possible with the monatrisation of the feudal economy that was being brought about by the rise of mercantile capitalism. Yet, while the absolute monarchy was dependent on merchants and their bankers for loans and taxes, they in turn were dependent on the state for the defence of their monopolies and access to foreign markets.

However, although there was a certain symbiosis in the development of the Absolutist State and mercantile capitalism, the absolute state was careful to contain the development of mercantile capitalism. The excessive development of mercantile capitalism always threatened to undermine the existing social order on which the Absolutist State rested as traditional relations of authority were replaced by the cynical and impersonal relations of the market. Thus while the state encouraged merchants to profiteer at the expense of foreigners they were far less inclined to allow such profiteering to cause social discord at home. Hence the Absolutist State was keen to intervene to regulate trade, not only to protect the monopoly positions of the favoured merchants, but also to maintain social peace and stability.

In order to secure its sources of supply mercantile capital had from an early stage involved itself in production. To this extent the development of commerce led to the development of industry and commodity production. However, for the most part mercantile only formally subsumed production. Mercantile capital left unaltered the traditional craft based methods of production.

In the late eighteenth century, however, industrial capital began to in to its own with the rise of factory production and the application of steam powered machinery. Industrial capital directly expropriated surplus-value through its domination of the production process. As such it had no need for the privileges of bestowed by the state on merchant capital in order to make a profit. Indeed such privileges and monopolies became a block to industrial capital's own self-expansion. Under the banners of liberty and laissez-faire the industrial bourgeoisie increasingly came into conflict with the conservatism of mercantile capital and the established ruling classes that it upheld.

In the course of the nineteenth century industrial capital triumphed in Western Europe over mercantile capital and its aristocratic allies. As a consequence, mercantile capital became subordinated to industrial capital. It became merely a distinct moment in the circuit of industrial capital; dealing in the sale and distribution of commodities produced by industrial capital. The profits of mercantile capital no longer came to depend on state privileges but derived from the surplus-value produced by industrial capital in production. However, although mercantile capital became integrated with industrial capital in Western Europe its relation to industrial capital in other parts of the world was different.

From the sixteenth century mercantile capital had come to encompass the entire world. However, while in Europe the corrosive effects of mercantile capitalism on the established social order had been held in check by the state, in much of the rest of the world the impact of mercantile capitalism had been devastating:

In America and Australia whole civilisations where wiped out; West Africa was reduced to a slave market and no society escaped without being reduced to a corrupt parody of its former self.12

The conditions created by mercantile capitalism in these parts of the world were far from being conducive for the development of industrial capital. Industrial capitalism developed in Western Europe, and subsequently North America where capital had already been concentrated and where conditions were more favourable. As a consequence, industrial capital left mercantile capital to its own devises in the rest of the world. However, as Geoffrey Kay argues:

If merchant capital retained its independence in the underdeveloped world, it was no longer allowed to trade solely on its own account but was forced to become the agent of industrial capital. In other words, merchant capital in the underdeveloped countries after the establishment of industrial capitalism in the developed countries in the nineteenth century existed in its two historical forms simultaneously. At one and the same moment it was the only form of capital but not the only form of capital. This apparent paradox is the specifica differentia of underdevelopment, and its emergence as a historical fact in the course of the nineteenth century marks the beginning of underdevelopment as we know it.13

As the agent of industrial capital merchant capital plundered the underdeveloped world for cheap raw materials while providing lucrative outlets for industrial commodities produced in the developed world. To the extent that it retained its independence mercantile capital shored up the conservative elites and blocked the development of industrial capital in the underdeveloped world. Hence:

The consequences were doubly depressing for the underdeveloped world: on the one side the tendency of merchant capital to repress general economic development in proportion to its own independent development; on the other the reorganisation of whole economies to the requirements of external economic interests.14

The emergence of a world polarised between a core of industrially advanced economies and a periphery of underdeveloped economies was further compounded with the rise of international moneyed capital.

As we saw previously, the growth in the sheer scale of industrial production meant that the mass of capital required to set up in production increased beyond the means of most private individuals. Furthermore, the further development of industrial production itself presupposed the existence of industrial production. This had important consequences on the polarisation of the world economy and the process of underdevelopment.

Firstly, whereas in England and Western Europe industrial capital had been able grow up on the basis of the pre-existent craft production. In contrast undeveloped economies, like the late developing economies in Europe itself, could not simply repeat the evolutionary stages through which industry had involved in the core economies since they would be uncompetitive in the world market. Instead they had to make the leap and introduce modern plant and machinery. But such modern plant and machinery was the product of industrial production that for the most part did not exist in the underdeveloped world. It therefore had to be imported from the advanced industrial economies.

Secondly, the underdeveloped economies lacked the concentration and centralisation of capital necessary to finance of the most advanced capitalist enterprises. It therefore not only had to import productive capital in order to industrialise, it had to import moneyed capital either in the form of direct foreign investments by industrial capitals of the core economies or borrow money-capital from the international banks and financial institutions.

To the extent that the underdeveloped economies were able to attract foreign investment or loans it was able develop it industry. But such industrialisation was for the most part limited and orientated towards producing commodities demanded by the needs of capital accumulation in the more advanced industrialised economies. Its serfdom contributed to the creation of an industrial base on which a self-sufficient national accumulation of capital could occur. Furthermore, in the long term the interest or profits on such foreign investments were repatriated to the core economies and did not contribute to the further national accumulation of capital in the underdeveloped economies themselves.

Russia and the problem of underdevelopment

The defeat of the Russian Revolution as a proletarian revolution, and the subsequent failure of the world revolution that followed the First World War, left the Bolsheviks isolated and in charge of a predominantly backward and underdeveloped economy. The very existence of the Russian state, and with it the survival of the 'Soviet Government', now depended on the Bolsheviks carrying through the tasks of the national bourgeois revolution - that is the development of national industrial capital.

Yet in order to carry through such tasks the Bolsheviks had to overcome the formidable problems of underdevelopment that reinforced the internal obstacles to the modernisation and industrialisation of Russia. The two most pressing internal obstacles to the development of a national industrial capital were the problem of finance and the problem of agriculture.

Russian agriculture was predominantly based on small scale subsistence or petty-commodity production. This had two important consequences for industrialisation. Firstly, it blocked the formation of an industrial proletariat since the bulk of the population was still tied to the land. Secondly, the inefficient and backward nature of Russian agriculture prevented it from producing a surplus that could feed an expanding industrial proletariat.

To the extent that the Russian peasants could be encouraged to produce for the world market then there could be expected the gradual development of a capitalist agriculture. As production for profit led to an increasing differentiation in the peasantry some would grow rich while others would become poor and become proletarianised. But this was likely to be a long drawn out process. Profits would be small given the mark ups of the international merchants and the need to compete with more efficient capitalist agriculture on the world market. Furthermore, to the extent that the Russian peasantry produced for the world market, it could not provide cheap food for an expanding Russian proletariat.

The second important obstacle to industrialisation was finance. The backward character of Russian capitalism meant that there was little internal capital that had been accumulated. To the extent that Russia had industrialised it had been promoted by the state and financed through foreign investments. But with the revolution the Bolsheviks had repudiated all the foreign loans taken out under Tzarist regime and had expropriated foreign owned capital in Russia. Once bitten the international financiers were going to be twice shy about financing Russian industrialisation.

If the national development of industrial capital was to be achieved in Russia, if Russia was to make the transition to capitalism, then Bolsheviks had to subordinate the fleeting and transnational forms of capital - money and commodities - to the needs of national productive capital - the real concrete capital of factories, plant, machinery and human labour, rooted in Russian soil. This required that the Russian State take charge of capital accumulation - that is that the transition to a fully developed capitalism had to take the form of state capitalism.

Hence, while at the end of the eighteenth century the French Revolution had opened the way for the development of French capitalism by freeing capital from the embrace of the state, in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century the Revolution opened the way for the development of capitalism by increasing the embrace of the state over capital.

The deformation of Value

The problem of the nature of the USSR restated

As we seen, the traditional Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals saw state capitalism as the highest stage of capitalism. As such state capitalism could be seen as the first step in the transition to socialism. As a consequence, Lenin could consistently argue against the Left Communists - from the imposition of one-man management and the reintroduction of Taylorism to the introduction of the New Economic Policy - that the immediate task of the Revolutionary Government, given the backward conditions in Russia, was first and foremost the development of state capitalism.

Of course, for Lenin the nationalisation of the means of production and the introduction of state planning introduced by the Revolution marked a decisive advance. Under the control of a Workers' State, state capitalism would be superseded by socialism. Subsequently, with the introduction of the five year plans and the collectivisation of agriculture Stalin could announce that the USSR had at last reached the stage of socialism and was on the way to a communist society. Trotsky was more circumspect. While acknowledging the rapid development of the forces of production that was being made under Stalin, he still saw this as a stage of primitive socialist accumulation that, while being an advance over capitalism, had yet to reach socialism.

To the extent that theorist of the capitalist nature of the USSR have accepted this conception of state capitalism they have been obliged to argue either that Russia never went beyond state capitalism in the first place or that at some point their was a counter-revolution that led to the USSR falling back into state capitalism. Yet, either way, by accepting that state capitalism is the highest stage of capitalism such theorists are led to the position of considering the USSR as an advance over western capitalism. This, as we have seen, is a position that was to become increasingly difficult to defend in the light the chronic economic stagnation of the USSR and its eventual decline and collapse. Indeed, such theories have been unable to explain the contradictions within the USSR that finally led to its downfall.

In contrast, we have argued that state capitalism, far from being the highest stage of capitalism, is a specific form for the late development of capitalism. Yet this presupposes that the USSR was indeed such a form of capitalism. To demonstrate this we must develop a value analysis of the USSR.

As we have seen, state capitalist theorists have argued that the USSR was essentially capitalist in that it was based on wage-labour. The workers in the USSR were divorced from both the means of subsistence and the means of production. As a consequence, in order to live, the Soviet workers had to sell their labour-power to the state enterprises. Having sold their labour-power the workers found themselves put to work. They found themselves external to their own subject activity. They did not work to produce their own needs, nor for the needs of their own families or communities, but for some alien other. While the workers worked as a means to obtain a wage through which they could survive, their labour became independent of them, directed towards aims that were not their own. In producing products that were not their own they served to reproduce their position as workers on an ever expanding scale.

Hence, like their counter-parts in the west, the Russian workers were subordinated to a process of production that was designed and developed to maximise production with scant regard to the living experience of the worker in production. As such the worker was reduced to a mere instrument of production. Like their counter-parts in the West, the Russian workers worked longer than that necessary to reproduce the equivalent of their labour-power. Thus, like the their counter-parts in the West, the Russian workers alienated their labour and were exploited.

If the relations of production were those of self-expanding alienated labour then they were the productive relations of capital. As such, in a fundamental sense the USSR was capitalist. But, as we have seen, the more sophisticated Trotskyist object. Capitalism can not be taken to be simply the apparent predominance of wage-labour. Capitalist production presupposes, both historically and logically, generalised commodity production in which labour-power itself has become a commodity. But, the Trotskyists insist, products did not assume the form of commodities in the USSR since there was no market. But if products did not assume the form of commodities then there can have been no real wage-labour since labour-power, as a commodity, can not be exchanged for other commodities. Wages were merely a means of rationing products.

The problem then can be stated as follows. Production in the USSR would seem to have been essentially a form of capitalist production, being based on waged labour; but capitalist production presupposes general commodity exchange. In the absence of the market it would seem that the exchange and circulation of wealth in the USSR did not assume the commodity-form and as such was distinctly non-capitalist. But if commodities did not exist neither could capital.

To resolve this problem we must first look at the unity of production and exchange that we find in fully developed capitalism. To do this we shall examine the Circuits of Industrial Capital that Marx sets out at the beginning of Volume II of Capital.

The circuits of industrial capital

As self-expanding value capital passes successively through three distinct forms: the money-capital, commodity-capital and productive-capital. Depending on which form of capital is taken as the starting point in analysing the overall circulation of capital we can identify three distinct circuits of capital each of which reveals different aspects of the circulation of capital.

The first circuit is that of money-capital (M...M'):

M - Cmop + Clp ...P...C'- M'

Here capital in the form of money (M) is used to buy means of production (Cmop) and labour-power (Clp) necessary to commence production. Hence with the exchange M - C capital is transformed from money into the form of commodities. These commodities (labour-power and the means of production) are then used in the process of production. As such they become productive capital, (P) which produces commodities of a greater value C'. These commodities are then sold for a sum of money M' which is greater than the original capital advanced M.

With this circuit capitalism appears clearly as a system based driven by profit. The circuit begins and ends with capital as money, and since money is homogenous, the only aim of this circuit is the quantitative expansion of capital as money, that is the making of a profit.

But this circuit not only shows how capitalist production is merely a means through which 'money makes more money', it also shows how capitalist production necessarily both presupposes commodity exchange and reproduces commodity-exchange. The circuit begins with the commodity exchange M - C, the purchase of means of production and labour-power (which of course is at the same time the sale of labour-power and means of production by their owners) and ends with a the commodity exchange C' - M', in which the sale of the commodities produced realises the capital's profit.

However, the process of 'money making more money' can only become self-sustaining if it at the same time involves the expansion of real wealth. This becomes apparent if we examine the circulation of capital from the perspective of the circuit of productive-capital (P...P').

P...C' - M' - C' ...P'

Here capital in production produces an expanded value of commodities C' which are then sold for an expand sum of money M' that can then be used to buy more means of production and labour-power in the commodity-form C'. This then allows an expanded productive capital P' to be set in motion in the following period of production From the perspective of productive capital, the circulation of capital appears as the self-expansion of productive capacity of capital - the self-expansion of the productive forces.

Capitalism now appears not so much as 'production of profit' but 'production for production's sake'. Capitalist production is both the beginning and the end of the process whose aim is the reproduction of capitalist production on an expanded scale. The commodity circulation (C' - M' - C') now appears as a mere mediation. A mere means to the end of the relentless expansion capitalist production.

The final circuit that Marx identifies is that of commodity-capital (C'...C').

C' - M' - C ...P ...C'

With this circuit we can see the unity of capital in circulation and capital in production. Capital as the circulation of commodities C' - M' - C appears side by side with the production of 'commodities by means of commodities'. The overall process of capitalist circulation therefore appears as both the production and the circulation of commodities.

An analysis of these three circuits of industrial capital would seem at first to confirm the Trotskyist position that capitalist production necessarily presupposes generalised commodity exchange. However, these circuits describe the fully developed capitalist mode of production not its historical emergence.

As we have argued, the national development of Russian capitalism had been impeded by its subordinate position in the world economic order. The independent development of capital in its cosmopolitan forms of merchant capital and moneyed-capital had acted to block the development of industrial capital. National capitalist development demanded capital in the real productive forms of factories, plant and machinery and the labour of a growing industrial proletariat. As a consequence, if Russia was to break free from its underdeveloped position imposed through the world market, productive-capital had to be developed over and against the independent development of capital-in-circulation i.e. money-capital and commodity-capital. The free exchange of money-capital and commodity-capital through the free operation of the market had to be restricted to allow for the development of productive-capital. Hence the free market was replaced by the central plan.

Hence, in taking up the 'historic tasks of the bourgeoisie' the state-party bureaucracy adopted the perspective of productive-capital. The more productivist elements of the Marxism of the Second International were adapted to the ideology of productive-capital. The imperative for the relentless drive to develop the productive forces over and against the immediate needs of the Russian working class was one that was not merely voiced by Stalin and his followers. Trotsky was even more of a superindustrialiser than Stalin. Indeed he criticised Stalin for not introducing planning and collectivisation of agriculture earlier.

The question that now arises where what were the implications of this subordination of capital-in-circulation to the development of productive-capital? We shall argue that these value-forms existed in the USSR, not as 'husks' as those in the Trotskyist tradition maintain, but rather as repressed and undeveloped forms.

To what extent did the Commodity-form exist in the USSR?

As we have seen, Trotskyist theorists place great importance on property forms when it comes to the question of the nationalisation of the means of production. State ownership of the means of production, and hence the abolition of private property, is seen as constituting the crucial advance over capitalism. However, although the state owned all the principal means of production in the USSR, the actual legal possession and operation of the means of production was left to the state enterprises and trusts, each of which was constituted as a distinct legal entity with its own set of accounts and responsibilities for production.

While Trotskyists have tended to gloss over this, seeing these legal forms of the state enterprises as being merely formal, Bettleheim has argued that the existence of these separate state enterprises, which traded with each other and sold products to the working class, meant that commodity-exchange did exist in the USSR. However, for Bettleheim, this separation of economic activity into a multitude of state enterprises was merely a result of the level of development of the forces and relations of production. The USSR had yet to develop to the point where the entire economy could be run as a giant trust as had been envisaged by Bukharin. It was therefore unable as yet to overcome the commodity-form. In contrast, we shall argue that this division of the economy into distinct state enterprises was an expression of the essentially capitalist relations of production.

What is a commodity? The simplest answer is that a commodity is something that is produced in order that it may be sold. But by itself this simple definition is inadequate for an understanding of the commodity as a distinct social form. It is necessary to probe a little deeper to grasp the implications of the commodity-form.

Any society requires that individuals act on and within the material world in order to appropriate and produce the material conditions necessary for the reproduction of themselves as social individuals. As such social reproduction necessarily entails the constitution and appropriation of material objects of social needs. However, in a society dominated by commodity production this process is carried out in a peculiar manner that gives rise to specific social forms.

Firstly, as commodity producers, individuals do not produce for their own immediate needs but for the needs of others that are both indifferent and separate from themselves. The results of their human activity - their labour - are thereby divorced from their own activity. The results of their labour stand apart from them as commodities that are to be sold. Secondly, as commodity consumers, objects of an individuals need do not emerge out of their own activity as social individuals but as the ready made property of some other - the producer - who is separated from them. As a consequence they find themselves immediately separated from their own social needs through the non-possession of material objects in the form of commodities.

As a consequence labour - the human activity of the producer - is separated from need - the needs of the consumer. Hence, for each particular commodity, producers are separated from consumers and are only subsequently united through the sale or exchange of the commodity. The relation between the consumer and the producer is therefore mediated through the exchange commodities - that is they are mediated through the exchange of things. To the extent that commodity exchange becomes generalised then the relations between people manifests themselves as a multitude of relations between things.

Because the relations of between human beings assume the form of the relations between things then these things assume the particular social form of the commodity. In producing a commodity the producer produces something for sale - that is the producer produces something that can be exchanged. What is important for the producer is that what is produced has the social quality that makes it exchangeable. In other words what is important for the producer is the value of the commodity. In contrast, for the consumer, what is important is that the commodity has a number natural properties that meet his own needs as a social individual but which he is excluded from by the non-possession of the commodity as an object - that is that it confronts him as a use-value. The separation of social needs from social labour is thereby reflected in the commodity-form as the opposition of use-value and value.

The commodity-form is therefore constituted through the opposition of its use-value and value, which manifests in material form the underlying opposition of labour from needs in a society, based on commodity production. However, although objects of need must exist in all societies - that is we must have access to distinct things, such as food, clothes and shelter, in order to live - use-values can only exist in opposition to value. Value and use-value mutually define each other as polar opposites of the commodity-form. A commodity can only have a value if it can be sold, but to sell it must have a use-value that some other needs to buy. But equally a commodity has a use-value only insofar as the qualities that meets the needs of the consumer confront that consumer as the ready made products of another's labour, and hence as natural properties from which they are excluded except though the act of exchange of another commodity with an equivalent value.

With commodity production social relations become reified. Society becomes broken up into atomised individuals. Indeed, as Marx argues, commodity relations begin where human community ends. Historically commodities were exchanged between communities and only occurred when different communities came in to contact. As commodity exchange develops traditional human societies break up, ultimately giving rise to the modern atomised capitalist societies.15

The society of the USSR would have seemed to be no less atomised and reified than those of western capitalism. To what extent was this a result of the prevalence of commodity relations? To answer this we shall first of examine whether there was commodity production in the USSR and then look at the question of the existence of commodity exchange.

To what extent did commodity-production exist in the USSR?

Under capitalism the worker, having sold his labour-power to the capitalist, works for the capitalist. As such the worker does not work for his own immediate needs but for a wage. The labour of the work is therefore external to him. It is alienated labour.

However, unlike the serf, the servant or the domestic slave, the wage-worker does not work for the immediate needs of the capitalist. The capitalist appropriates the labour of the wage-worker to produce something that can be sold at a profit. As such the prime concern of the capitalist is to make his workers produce a mass of commodities that are worth more than the labour-power and raw materials used up in their production. Hence, for both the capitalist and the worker, the product is a non-use-value - it is something that is produced for the use of someone else.

A commodity can only be sold insofar as it is a use-value for some others. Therefore the capitalist is only concerned with the use-value of the commodity that he produces to the extent that is a necessary precondition for its sale. For the capitalist then, use-value is merely the material form within which the value the commodity is embodied.

This twofold nature of the commodity as both a use-value and a value is the result of the twofold nature of commodity production. Commodity production is both a labour process, which serves to produce use-values, and a valorisation process that produces value of then commodity. Through the concrete labour appropriated from the worker the raw materials of production are worked up into the specific form of the product that gives it a socially recognised use-value. Through this concrete labour the value already embodied in the means of production is preserved in the new product. At the same time value is added to the product through the abstract labour of the worker.

In the USSR these relations of production were essentially the same. The workers alienated their labour. As such they did not produce for their own immediate needs but worked for the management of the state enterprise. Equally, the management of the state enterprise no more appropriated the labour from its workers for it own immediate needs any more than the management of a capitalist enterprise in the West. The labour appropriated from the workers was used to produce products that were objects of use for others external to the producers.

Like in any capitalist enterprise, the management of the state enterprises in the USSR, at least collectively, sought to make the workers produce a mass of products that were worth more than the labour-power and means of production used up in their production. As such the labour process was both a process of exploitation and alienation just as it was a two-old process of both abstract and concrete labour that produced products with both a use-value and a value i.e. as commodities.

Production in the USSR can therefore be seen as the capitalist production of commodities. However, while production in the USSR can be seen as a production for some alien other to what extent can it be really be seen as a the production of things for sale? This brings us to the crucial question of the existence of commodity exchange and circulation in the USSR.

To what extent did commodity exchange exist in the USSR?

As we have seen, within the circuit of productive-capital, (P...P'), exchange is primarily confined within the simple circulation of commodities (C - M - C) necessary to bring about the renewal of production on an expanded scale. Commodities are sold (C - M) by those who produce them and are purchased (M - C) by those who need them for the next cycle of production.

From the perspective of productive-capital commodity exchange is therefore a mere technical means that allows for the expansion of productive capital. A necessary means for overcoming the division of producers that arises out of the social division of labour of commodity production. However, the circulation of commodities is more than a mere technical matter. The buying and selling of commodities is the alienated social form through which human labour alienated from human needs is reunited with human needs alienated from human labour.

Under the classical form of capitalism this social form is market constituted through the collision of self-interested competing individuals. As Marx argues:

Circulation as the realisation of exchange-value is implies: (1) that my product is a product only in so far as it is for others; hence suspended singularity, generality; (2) that it is a product for me only in so far as it has been alienated, become for others; (3) that it is for the other only in so far he himself alienates his product; which already implies; (4) that production is not an end in itself for me, but a means. Circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as general appropriation and general appropriation appears as general alienation. As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.16

Through the alien power of the market alienated labour is brought into conformity with alienated human needs. Products that do not meet needs expressed through the market do not sell. Labour embodied in a commodity that is excess of that which is socially necessary is not recognised. At the same time, the imposition of the commodity form on human needs serves to incorporate such needs into the accumulation of capital. New needs that give rise to new forms of commodities expands the range of material forms through which value can be embodied and expanded. To this extent the market brings human needs into conformity with alienate labour within the commodity form.

Yet while the alien power of the market arises out the conflicting social and technical needs of the individuals that make up society the alien power of the state does not. The state plan is necessarily imposed from outside the social-economy. There was thus a fundamental problem with reconciling social needs with alienated labour. This was reflected in the relation of use-value and value and the form and functions of money.

To what extent did Money exist in the USSR?

For Proudhon and his followers, the problems of capitalism arose from the existence of money as an independent form of value. For them, it was through the intermediation of money that capitalists were able to make profits and extract interest. As a consequence, Proudhonists proposed the direct expression of the value of commodities in terms of the labour time required for their production. Money denominated in units of labour time would simply act as a means of circulation that would in effect allow for the direct exchange of commodities in accordance with the labour expended in their production. Money would not be able to develop into a social power independent of the direct producers. However, through his critique of such Proudhonist proposals Marx showed that in a society of independent commodity producers money must necessarily assume an independent form of value distinct from all other commodities.

The labour embodied in a commodity is immediately private labour - or more precisely it is asocial labour. It is only with the sale of the commodity that this labour is recognised as being part of the total abstract social labour of society as a whole. Hence the value of a commodity is only realised or validated as such through the process of exchange. In production the value remains potential value - a potential based on previous cycles of production and exchange. When the commodity reaches the market it has an ideal price based on its potential value but this is not realised until the commodity is actually sold.

If too much of a particular commodity is produced in relation to social demand or if the quality is defective than some commodities are not sold or have to be sold at a discount. In cases such as these the actual labour embodied in commodities is not realised as abstract social labour. Indeed it is through this social mechanism that a commodity economy is regulated. If production of private commodity producers is to be brought into conformity with social demand than money can not be simply the direct expression of the labour embodied in commodities. It must exist as the independent form of value through which the labour embodied in commodities is socially recognised and validated as abstract social labour and hence as value.

As a consequence, Marx concluded that money as an independent form of value could only be abolished if the economy of independent commodity producers gave way to the planned production of freely associated producers. In this way the regulation of production by the market would be replaced by a social plan that would make labour immediately social.

As we have argued, the forced development of productive-capital in the USSR required the suppression of the development of money-capital and this involved the restriction of the development of money itself as an independent form. To this end the regulation of production by the market was replaced by economic planning. But this was not the planning of a classes society of 'freely associated producers' but a plan developed out of a society of atomised individuals based on class exploitation. As such the alien power of the market that stands above society was replaced by the alien power of the state. The imperatives of the state plan confronted the producers as an external force just as the external imperatives of the competitive market. The plan replaced the market as the regulator of commodity production but as such it did not over come the separation of labour from social needs that remained alienated from each other.

Money in the USSR: In so far as simple commodity circulation existed as a part of the circuit of productive capital in the USSR money entered as merely a means of circulation facilitating the exchange of outputs of the previous cycle of production for the inputs necessary for the next cycle of production. But whereas under fully developed capitalism such circulation could break down - a sale without a purchase or a purchase without a sale - in the USSR this was precluded by the state plan.

The state imposed plan that allocated capital to each industry, determined the output and set prices. To this extent the value of the commodities produced by each capital were not validated or realised through the act of their transformation into money but were pre-validated by their recognition as values by the state. Hence commodities had to be bought and money had to buy. The regulation of the commodity producers by the law of value was replaced by the state plan.

Yet while the alien power of the market arises out the conflicting social and technical needs of the individuals that make up society the alien power of the state does not. The state plan is necessarily imposed from outside the social-economy. There was thus a fundamental problem with reconciling social needs with alienated labour. This was reflected in the relation of use-value and value. This had important implications for the form and functions of money as it existed within the circuit of productive capital.

To consider this in a little more detail let us consider the two transactions that make up the simple circulation of commodities - firstly the sale of commodities produced by productive capital (C - M), and then the purchase, (M - C), which ensures the continued reproduction of productive capital. The commodities that have been produced by productive capital enter the market with an expanded value and a given specific use-value. The opposition of value and use-value within the commodity finds it expression in the external relation of money and the commodity. The commodity has a price, which is it express its value in a certain sum of money, and is a certain kind of commodity defined by its use-value. Thus money appears as the independent and external form of the value of the commodity while the commodity itself stands as it own use-value.

For example, let us take an enterprise producing tractors. At the end of the production period the enterprise will have produced say 100 tractors that are priced £10,000 each. The hundred tractors express their value as a price that is in the ideal form of a sum of money - £1million. This ideal money -the price of the tractors - stand opposed to use-value represented by the material form of the tractors themselves.

However, this ideal money, the price of the tractors which serves as the external measure the value of the tractors must be realised. The tractors must be sold. Given that the tractors can be sold then the expanded value of the tractors will now be transformed into the form of real money. The tractors will have been transformed into £1million. As such the abstract labour will find its most adequate and universal form - money.

With money the enterprise can now buy commodities for the next period of production. As the independent and universal form of value, money can buy any other commodity, which is it is immediately exchangeable with any other commodity. Yet our tractor firm only needs those specific commodities necessary for the future production of tractors say 10 tons of steel. Money need therefore only act as a mere means of circulation that allows 100 tractors to be exchanged for 10 tons of steel.

In the USSR money was constrained to the functions necessary for the phase of the simple circulation of commodities within the circuit of productive capital - that is as an ideal measure of value and as a means of circulation - and precluded money emerging fully as an independent form of value. Firstly, as we have seen, the value of commodities was prevalidated. The ideal price of the tractors was immediately realised as the value of the tractors since the sale was already prescribed by the plan. Thus while money acted as an ideal measure of the value of the commodities for sale it had no independence.

Furthermore, the money received from the sale had to be spent on the particular commodities necessary for the reproduction of that particular circuit of productive capital. The £1million brought by the sale of the tractors had to be spent on the 10 tons of steel (or similar inputs). As such money did not function as an independent and universal form of value. It was tied to the specific circuit of productive capital (in our case tractor production). It could not be withdrawn and then thrown into another circuit. It merely served as a means of circulation that facilitated the exchange of one specific set of commodities with another set of commodities.

With the restriction of money to a mere fleeting means of circulation, and with the pre-validation of the value of commodities, money could not function as the independent form of value. The commodity did not express its own value in the external form of money independent of itself but rather its value was expressed in terms of the commodities use-value. As a consequence the expansion of value did not find its most adequate expression in the quantitative expansion of value in the purely quantitative and universal form money but in the quantitative expansion of value in the qualitative and particular forms use-values. Value and use-value were compounded leading to the deformation of both value and use-value.

Indeed, in the USSR accumulation of productive-capital, that is the self-expansion of value, became immediately expressed in terms of the quantities of use-values that were produced (100s of tractors, tons of steel etc.). However, without the full development of money as money - money as the independent form of value - the content of such use-values did not necessarily conform to the needs of social reproduction. Money had to buy; it had to allow the exchange of commodities. It could not therefore refuse to buy sub-standard commodities. The quality of the use-values of commodities was ensured, not by money and hence the purchaser, but by the state plan. But the state plan, as we have argued, stood in an external if not an antagonistic position with regard to the various economic agents whether they were workers or state enterprises.

As a consequence, the use-values prescribed and ratified by the plan did not necessarily conform to social needs.

The consequences of constrained money: As we have seen, the existence of money as the independent and universal form of value ensures that use-values conform to social needs. But furthermore, money as the independent form of value is also a diffused form of social power.

However, as we have argued, in the USSR money was constrained to the functions strictly necessary for the circuit of productive-capital and social needs were prescribed by the state plan. This had two important implications. The persistence of non-capitalist social forms such as blat and endemic defective production.

Insofar as technical and social needs developed outside the framework prescribed by the state plan they had to be articulated by something other than by money. Money could only buy within the limit established by the plan. The purchasing power of money was limited. While everyone needed money, it was insufficient to meet all needs. As a consequence, non-monetary social relations had to be persevered. Influence and favours with those in authority, client relations' etc. - that is the system known as blat - became salient features of the Soviet bureaucracy as means of gaining access to privileged goods or as a means of getting things done.

As such blat emerged because of the restrictions placed on the functions of money due to its subordination to productive capital. As such blat was a distinctly non-capitalist - if not pre-capitalist - social form that involved direct personal and unquantifiable relations between people.17

However, as we noted the inadequacy of money in the USSR - it failure to function as the universal and independent form of value - also led to the endemic production of defective use-values which were to finally bring the demise of the USSR. This, as we shall see, was directly related to the class relations of production that arose from capitalist form of commodity production in the USSR. But before we consider this fatal contradiction of the USSR we must briefly consider the question of wages and the sale of labour-power.

The sale of labour-power

The reproduction of labour-power is of course an essential condition for the reproduction of capital. The reproduction of labour-power can be described as a simple epi-cycle in the circuits of capital as follows:

Lp - W - Cs

The worker sells his labour-power (Lp) for a wage (W), which he then uses to buy the commodities (Cs) necessary to reproduce himself as a worker.18 In essence this epi-cycle is the same as the simple circulation of commodities.

However, as we have seen, one of the most telling criticisms advanced by the Trotskyist critics of state capitalist theories of the USSR has been the argument that workers in the USSR did not sell their labour-power. Firstly, because if labour-power was to be considered a commodity then it must be able to exchange with other commodities but, as we have seen, Trotskyists denied that there were any other commodities in the USSR. Secondly worker was not free to sell his labour-power.

However, as we have argued, there was commodity production in the USSR and there was a restricted form of commodity circulation thus labour-power could be exchanged with other commodities via the wage. Nevertheless it is true that the freedom of workers to sell their labour was restricted. Through various restrictions, such as the internal passport system the movement of workers was restricted. To the extent that these restrictions on the movement of labour tied workers to a particular means of production then they can perhaps be considered more industrial serfs than wage-slaves.

But on closer inspection these legal restrictions on the movement of labour appear more as a response to exiting situation which were honoured more in the breach than in their implementation. With the drive to maximise production in accordance with the logic of the circuit of productive-capital labour-power had to be fully used. Indeed, full employment became an important element in the maintenance the political and social cohesion of the USSR from Stalin onwards. However, the maintenance of full employment led a chronic shortage of labour-power.

The fact that in reality workers were to a limited but crucial extent free to sell their labour-power is shown in the strategy of the managers of state enterprises to hoard labour. Indeed, the managers of state enterprises actively colluded with workers to overcome the restrictions to their mobility in their attempts secure sufficient labour-power to meet their production targets. Hence the legal restrictions to the free movement of labour-power were just that: attempts to restrict workers who were essentially free to sell their labour-power.

Ticktin was well aware of the importance of the chronic shortage of labour-power and consequence practice of labour hoarding by the state enterprises. However, Ticktin persisted in denying that labour-power was sold as a commodity in the USSR on the grounds that the wage was not related to the labour performed. For Ticktin, although workers often worked for piece rates which nominally tied their wages to amount they worked, in reality workers were paid what amounted to a pension that bore little relation to the amount of labour they performed.

As we argued in Part II, this argument overlooks the contradictory aspects of labour-power and its expression in the form of a wage. Labour-power is both a commodity and not a commodity. Although labour-power is sold as if it was a commodity it is neither produced or consumed as a commodity since it is not a thing separable from the person who sells it - but the workers own living activity.

The worker does not produce labour-power as something to sell. On the contrary he reproduces himself as a living subject of whom his living activity is an essential an inseparable aspect. Equally, having bought labour-power, capital can not use it in absence of the worker. The worker remains in the labour process as an alien subject alongside his alienated labour.

It is as a result of this contradictory nature of labour-power that the wage-form emerges. In buying labour-power capital buys the worker's capacity to work. But capital has still to make the worker work both through the sanction of unemployment and through the incentive of wages linked to amount the worker works. However, while the wage may be linked to the amount the labour the worker performs it is essentially the money necessary for the average worker to buy those commodities necessary for the reproduction of their labour-power. The extent to which the capitalist can make individual workers work harder by linking the payment of wages to the labour performed, rather than as a simple payment for the reproduction of labour-power, depends on the relative strengths of labour and capital.

Hence the fact that wages may have appeared like 'pensions' paid regardless of the work performed, rather than as true wages that appear as a payment tied to the work performed, does not mean that labour-power was not sold in the USSR. All that it indicates is the particular power of the working class in the USSR that, as we shall now see, was to have important implications.

Contradictions in the USSR: the production of defective use-values

As we saw in Part II, Ticktin has ably described the distortions in the political economy of the USSR. But rather than seeing such distortions as arising from the degeneration of a society stuck in the transition from capitalism to socialism they can be more adequately seen as distortions arising from an attempt to make a forced transition to capitalism from a position of relative underdevelopment. The drive to towards the development of the productive-capital that led to the fusion of the state and the replacement of the law of value by the law of planning can be seen to have led to the gross distortions and contradictions of the USSR.

Let us consider more explicitly the class basis of such distortions and contradictions.

Firstly, with the suppression of money as an independent form of value that could command any commodity the subjectively determined needs of the workers could not be expressed through the money form. The needs of the workers were instead to a large extent prescribed by the state. Thus as the wage did not act as an adequate form that could provide an incentive. After all why work harder if the extra money you may can not be spent?

Secondly, as we have seen, the forced development of productive-capital that precluded crisis led to the chronic shortage of labour. In conditions of full employment where state enterprises were desperate for labour-power to meet their production targets the sack was an ineffective sanction.

As a consequence, as Ticktin points out, the management of the state enterprises lacked both the carrot and sticks with which control their workforce. Indeed the workers were able to exercise a considerable degree of negative control over the labour process. Confronted by the imperative to appropriate surplus-value in the form of increased production imposed through the central plan on the one hand, and the power of the workers over the labour-process on the other hand, the management of the state enterprises resolved the dilemma by sacrificing quality for quantity. This was possible because the technical and social needs of embodied in the use-values of the commodities they produced were not derived from those who were to use these commodities but were prescribed independently by the central plan.

As a result, the quantitative accumulation of capital in the form of use-values led to the defective production of use-values. As defective use-values of one industry entered into the production of commodities of another, defective production became endemic leading to the chronic production of useless products.

Hence, whereas in a fully developed capitalism the class conflicts at the point of production are resolved through the waste of recurrent economic crises which restore the industrial reserve army and the power of capital over labour, in the USSR these conflict were resolved through the chronic and systematic waste of defective production.

Conclusion

As we pointed out in Part I, the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the first 'workers state' has had a profound impact in shaping our world. At first the apparent success of the Russian Revolution showed that there was a realistic alternative to capitalism. It showed that capitalism could be overthrown by the working classes and that a socialist, if not communist, society could be constructed on its ruins. As such it inspired generations of socialists and workers in their conflicts with the capitalism system, defining both their aims and methods.

However, as the true nature of the USSR began to emerge the perception that it was 'actually exiting socialism' became an increasing barrier to the development of an opposition to capitalism. If the socialist alternative to capitalism was a totalitarian police state in which you still had to work for a boss then most workers concluded that it might be better to merely reform capitalism. At the same time the attempts of the Stalinist Communist Parties across the world to subordinate the worker class movements to the foreign policy needs of the USSR further compounded this problem.

The struggle against both Stalinism and social democracy demanded an understanding of the USSR. The question of what was the USSR therefore became a central one throughout much of the twentieth century. It was a question, which as we have seen, was bound up with the associated questions of what is socialism and communism? What was the Russian Revolution? And indeed what is the essential nature of Capitalism?

Although from a communist perspective that takes as its touchstone the abolition of wage-labour as the defining feature of communism it would seem intuitive that the USSR was a form of capitalism, we have seen that the theories that the USSR was state capitalist have proved inadequate compared with the more sophisticated theories that have developed out of the Trotskyist tradition. To the extent that they have shared the tradition Marxist conception of the Second and Third Internationals that state capitalism is highest form of capitalism, state capitalist theories of the USSR have proved unable to explain either the apparently non-capitalist aspects of the USSR nor its decline and eventual collapse.

Indeed, while the Trotskyist theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state has become untenable given the chronic economic stagnation of USSR that became increasingly apparent after the 1960s, and which culminated in the collapse of the USSR in 1990, it has been Ticktin's radical reconstruction of this theory that has so far provided the most convincing understanding of the Soviet system and its decline and fall.

However, as we showed in Part II, Ticktin's theory still falls short of the mark. Rather than seeing the USSR as being a social system stuck in the transition between capitalism and socialism, we have taken up the point of departure suggested by Bordiga to argue that the USSR was in transition to capitalism.

We have argued that in order to break out of its backwardness and subordinate position within the world division of labour the state bureaucracy, which had formed after the Russian Revolution, sought to make the transition to capitalism through the transitional form of state capitalism. In its efforts to industrialise the Russian state sought the forced development of productive-capital that required the suppression of the more cosmopolitan and crisis ridden forms of money and commodity capital. However, while such forced capitalist development allowed an initial rapid industrialisation the distortions it produced within the political economy of the USSR eventual became a barrier to the complete transition to capitalism in Russia.

As such we have argued that the USSR was essentially based on capitalist commodity-production. However as a consequence of the historical form of forced transition to capitalism there was dislocation between the capitalist nature of production and its appearance as a society based on commodity-exchange. This dislocation led to the deformation of value and the defective content of use-values that both provided the basis for the persistence of the distinctly non-capitalist features of the USSR and led to the ultimate decline and disintegration of the USSR.

As we saw in the last issue in relation to the war in Kosovo the question of Russia remains an important one on the geo-political stage. The economic and political problems of breaking up and reintegrating the Eastern bloc in to the global structure of capitalism is one that has yet to find a solution, and this is particularly true of Russia itself.

The forced development of productive-capital for over half a century has left Russia with an economy based on huge monopolies unable to compete on the world market. At the same time the insistence by the ideologists of Western capitalism that all that Russia needed was deregulation and liberalisation has simply given rise to the emergence of money-capital in its most parasitical and predatory form. As a consequence, Russia re-subordination to the dictates of the international law of value has left it with one part of its economy reverting back to barter while the other is dominated by a mafia-capitalism that is blocking any further economic development. Hence, despite all the efforts of the USA and the IMF Russia still remains mired in its transition to capitalism.

• 1. Our introduction to the second article in Aufheben 7 was a response to the second group.
• 2. The ICC for example, complained that in out treatment of the Italian Left we fail to mention the contribution of the particular branch with which they identify, namely the Left Communists of France who refused to join the International Communist Party formed by 'Bordigists' in Italy in 1943. As it happens we have read the article they refer to - 'The Russian Experience: Private Property and Collective Property' (in Internationlisme, 10, 1946, reprinted in International Review, 61, 1990) and do consider it quite good. Its insight that the form of ownership may change, but the content - past labour dominating living labour - remains is a basic one shared with many other theories of state capitalism. But it is only a starting point. Unfortunately we see no sign that the ICC has managed to advance from this sound beginning. In a way the article in question points back to the theoretical rigour and openness of Bilan (Italian Left group in the '30s) rather than forwards towards the present sclerotic organisation which claims this heritage.
• 3. Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR: A Marxist Theory by Neal Fernandez (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). We have found this book useful for its comprehensive overview of the debate; its treatment of the strengths and weaknesses of the different theories; and its identification of the key problems that must be faced by a theory of the USSR grounded in Marx's critique of political economy. When it comes to the author's own 'new theory of bureaucratic capitalism', however, we are not convinced - we touch on this in footnote 16 below.
• 4. Indeed, when the foremost council-communist theorist, Paul Mattick, looked at the issue of value, his traditional Marxist assumptions along with his theoretical integrity led him actually to undermine the German Left's theory of state capitalism by accepting that value did not really exist in the USSR.
• 5. One state capitalist theory that accepted that 'profit' as it appeared on the surface of Soviet society was not profit in a Marxian sense was that developed by Raya Dunayevskaya. In pioneering work in the late 1930s early '40s, she undertook a functional analysis of the cycle of capital accumulation as it actually took place in the USSR. She saw that the role of the 'turnover tax' on consumer goods gave an entirely 'fictitious profit' to light industries, but this was "merely the medium through which the state, not the industry siphons off anything 'extra' it gave the worker by means of wages." And this is "why this 'profit' attracts neither capital nor the individual agents of capital." However, as she points out, even in classical capitalism, "the individual agent of capital has at no time realised directly the surplus value extracted in his particular factory. He has participated in the distribution of national surplus value, to the extent that his individual capital was able to exert pressure on this aggregate capital. This pressure in Russia is exerted, not through competition, but state planning." (Dunayevskaya, 'The Nature of the Russian Economy' in The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (Chicago: News & Letters, 1992)). However, despite this recognition that in terms of 'profit' one had to see through the discourse of the Russian economists to the reality, she took their admission in 1943 that the 'law of value' did operate in the USSR at face value as, for her, an admission that it was state capitalist. She thus saw no reason to take theoretical analysis of the situation any further.
• 6. Of course, the USSR was having a different kind of crisis based on difficulties, in the absence of unemployment, in imposing labour-discipline which led to more and more use of terror against both the working class and even managers. See the Ticktin-influenced history of this period by D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation: The Formation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations 1928-1941 (London: Pluto, 1986).
• 7. At the height of tripartite corporatism in the 1960s attempts were made by governments in Western Europe to co-ordinate investment plans of the major companies that dominated the national economy along with state investments and wage demands in order to maximise capital accumulation, This was known as indicative planning.
• 8. One possible exception is Chattopadhyay's The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (Westport CT: Praeger, 1994). In his analysis the specific capitalist development in the USSR (which he does not label state capitalist) was unable to effectively make the shift from extensive accumulation based on absolute surplus value to intensive accumulation based on relative surplus value and the real subordination of labour. To expand, it thus relied on drawing ever more workers and raw materials into production on the existing basis; it could not make the shift to the constant revolutionising of the relations and forces of production that intensive accumulation demanded.
• 9. An important issue for previous theories has been whether the USSR should be seen as 'state capitalist' or, as with Bordiga for example, simply as 'capitalist'. We shall argue below for a reconsideration of the meaning of 'state capitalism' that makes this issue redundant.
• 10. In the case of the NICs, this success has been relative. As recently seen with the Asian crisis, their development is still subsidiary to that of the more advanced capitalist countries.
• 11. Penguin edition, p. 84.
• 12. Geoffrey Kay, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 99.
• 13. G. Kay, op. cit., p. 100.
• 14. G. Kay, op. cit., p. 103.
• 15. One of the most striking features of capitalist society is the prevalence of atomization. Of course this atomization of society arises directly from the predominance of the commodity-form and the reification of social relations that this gives rise to. As Ticktin notes, such atomization was characteristic of the USSR. However, because he denies the existence of the commodity-form in the USSR Ticktin has to go through all sorts of contortions to explain it.
• 16. Grundrisse, pp. 196-197, Penguin edition.
• 17. For this reason we cannot agree with Neal Fernandez's assertion that 'blat' was itself a form of capitalist money. While an individual could be said to have 'more' or 'less' 'blat', it is not quantifiable and calculable in the discrete units necessary for it to play the role of money. Other attributes it lacks include universality and transferability. 'Blat' cannot play the impersonal dominating role which money as a 'real abstraction' is able to do. However, Fernandez has drawn attention to the role of this phenomenon, which expressed the constrained role of money in the USSR, part of the deformation of value. Blat played the role it did because proper money did not fully function.
• 18. Of course, such reproduction may involve other social relations like those around gender, age and so on.

Intakes: Back to the Situationist International

debordspectacle200.jpg

In the year 2000, "society of the spectacle" has become a trendy catchphrase, not quite as famous as "class struggle" used to be, but socially more acceptable. Moreover, the SI is now obscured by its main figure, Guy Debord, who is currently portrayed as the last romantic revolutionary. In Berlin as in Athens, one has to go beyond situationist fashion in order to assess the SI's contribution to revolution. In the same way, one has to tear the "marxist" veil to understand what Marx actually said and what he still means to us.

The SI showed that there is no revolution without an immediate generalized communization of the whole life, and that this transformation is one of the conditions of the destruction of state power. Revolution means putting an end to all separations, and first to that separation which reproduces them all: work as cut off from the rest of life. Getting rid of wage-labour implies de-commodifying the way we eat, sleep, learn and forget, move from one place to another, light our bedroom, relate to the oaktree down the road, etc.

Are these banalities? Well, they weren't always, and still aren't for everyone.

We have only to read the Principles of Communist Production & Distribution,1 written in 1935 by the Dutch-German Left, to realize the scope of the evolution. As for Bordiga and his successors, they always regarded communism as a program to be put into practice after the seizure of power. Let's just remember what was talked about in 1960, when radicals debated about "worker power" and defined social change as an essentially political process.

Revolution is communization. This is as important, for example, as was the rejection of the unions after 1918. We're not saying that revolutionary theory ought to change every thirty years, but that a sizable proletarian minority rejected the unions after 1914, and another active minority aimed at a critique of everyday life in the 60s and 70s. The SI superseded the boundaries of economy, production, workshop and workerism because, at the time, from Watts to Turino, proles were actually questioning the work system and extra-work activities. But the two fields rarely came under attack from the same groups: Blacks would riot against the mercantilization of ghetto life, while black and white workers would rebel against being reduced to cogs in the machine, yet the two movements failed to merge. On the shopfloor, workers rejected work on the one hand, and asked for higher wages on the other: wage-labour itself was never done away with. However, there were attempts to question the system as a whole, in Italy for instance, and the SI was one of the ways in which these endeavours found expression.

This is where the situationists still enlighten us. This is also where they are open to criticism.

The limit of the SI lies within its strong point: a critique of the commodity that went back to basics without quite reaching the base. The SI both refused and embraced the councilist left. Like Socialisme ou Barbarie, it regarded capital as a management that deprives proletarians of any control over their lives, and concluded that it was necessary to find a social mechanism enabling everyone to take part in the management of life. Socialisme ou Barbarie's theory of "bureaucratic capitalism" gave more importance to bureaucracy than capital. Likewise, the SI's theory of "spectacular society" deemed spectacle as more important to capitalism than capital itself. Debord's last writings actually redefined capitalism as fully integrated spectacle, but the misapprehension had been there since Society of the Spectacle mistook the part for the whole in 1967.

The spectacle is not its own cause. It is rooted in production relationships, and can only be understood through an understanding of capital, not the other way round. It's the division of labour that transforms the worker into a viewer of his work, of his product, finally of his life. Spectacle is our existence alienated into images which feed on it, the autonomized outcome of our social acts. It starts from us and splits from us via the universal representation of commodities. It becomes exterior to our life because our life constantly reproduces its exteriorization.

The emphasis on spectacle led to a fight for a non-spectacular society: in situationist thinking, workers' democracy functions as an antidote to contemplation, as the best possible situation-creating form. The SI was on the quest for an authentic democracy, a structure where the proles would no longer be spectators. It looked for a means (democracy), a place (the council) and a way of life (generalized self-management) that would empower people to break the fetters of passivity.

There's no contradiction between the Debord and the Vaneigem variants of the SI. Councilism and radical subjectivity both emphasize self-activity, whether it comes from the workers' collective or an individual.

"I think all my friends and I would be content to work anonymously in the Ministry of Leisure, for a government that would at long last care about changing life ( . . . )" (Debord, Potlatch, n.29, 1957).

At the beginning, situationists believed it possible to experiment with new ways of life straight away. Soon they realized that such experiments required a complete collective reappropriation of the conditions of existence. They started with an assault on spectacle as passivity, and got to the affirmation of communism as activity. This is a fundamental point we can't go back on. But throughout the whole process of this (re)discovery, the flaw was assuming there must be a use for life, which logically led to the search for a totally different use.

This quest for a different use of one's life both fueled yet crippled the SI's critique of militantism.2

It was necessary to expose political action as a separate activity where the individual militates for a cause abstracted from his own life, represses his desires and sacrifices himself to a goal foreign to his feelings and needs. We've all seen examples of a dedication to a group and/or world vision that results in the person's becoming unreceptive to actual events, and unable to perform subversive acts when these are possible.

But only the interplay of real relationships can prevent the development of personal weakness and alienated self-denial. On the contrary, the SI called for overall radicality and 24 hour consistency, replacing militant morals with radical morals, which is just as unworkable. The SI's own accounts of its demise after 68 make sad reading: why is it that hardly any member proved equal to the situation? was Guy Debord the only one up to it? Maybe Debord's main fault was to act (and write) as if he could never be at fault.

It had been subversive to mock militant false modesty by naming oneself an International, and to turn the spectacle against itself, as in the Strasburg scandal (1967). But the device backfired when situationists tried to use advertising techniques against the advertising system. Their "Stop the Show!" deteriorated into them making a show of themselves, and, finally, showing off.
It's not accident that the SI enjoyed quoting Machiavelli and Clausewitz. Indeed, situationists believed that, provided it was performed with insight and style, some strategy would enable a group of smart young men to beat the media at their own game and influence public opinion in a revolutionary way. This alone proves a misunderstanding of spectacular society.

Before and in 68, the SI had usually found the right attitude in face of realities which need to be ridiculed before we can revolutionize them: politics, the work ethic, the respect for culture, leftwing good will, and so on. Later, as situationist activity faded, there was not much left but an attitude, and soon not even the right one, as it indulged in self-valorization, council fetishism, a fascination for the hidden side of world affairs, plus mistaken analyses of Italy and Portugal.

The SI heralded the coming of revolution. What came had many of the features announced by the SI. The street slogans of Paris in 68 or Bologna in 77 were echoes of articles previously published in the review with a shiny cover. Still, it was not a revolution. The SI claimed that there had been one.

Generalized democracy (and above all, workers' democracy) had been the subversive dream of the late 60s-early 70s: instead of perceiving this as the limitation of the period, situationists interpreted it as a vindication of the call for councils. They failed to see that autonomous self-management of factory struggles can only be a means, never a goal in itself nor a principle.

Autonomy summed up the spirit of the time: freeing oneself from the systemnot taking it to pieces.
A future revolution will be less the aggregation of the proletariat as a bloc, rather a disintegration of what day after day reproduces proletarians as proletarians. This process means getting together and organizing in the workplace, but also transforming the workplace and getting out of it as much as meeting on the shopfloor. Communization would neither take after San Francisco in 1966, nor re-act former factory sit-downs on a much larger scale.

The SI ended adding councilism to illusions about a revolutionary savoir-vivre, i.e. a subversive lifestyle. It asked for a world where human activity would be tantamount to constant pleasure, and depicted the end of work as the beginning of infinite fun and joy. It never quite got away from the technicist progressivist view of an automation-induced abundance.

Of the very few groups which had a social impact on the subversive wave of the mid-60s, the Situationists International gave the best approximation of communism as it was conceived of at that time. There existed an historically insurmountable incompatibility between

"Down with Work!"
and
"Power to the Workers!"

The SI stood at the crux of this contradiction.

June 2000

• 1. Editors Note: See 'What was the USSR? Towards a theory of the deformation of value: Part III: Left communism and the Russian Revolution' p.37 in Aufheben #8, Autumn 1999.
• 2. Militant has a different meaning in French and English. The word comes from the same origin as "military," and in both languages conveys the idea of fighting for a cause. But in English, it means combative, "aggressively active" (Webster's, 1993). In French, it used to be positive ("militants" were supposed to be dedicated soldiers of the workers' movement), until the SI associated it with self-sacrificing negative devotion to a cause: this is how we use the term here.

Anti-capitalism as an ideology… and as a movement?

Genoa_disobbedienti_full.jpeg

The recent series of international Summit mobilizations have been referred to by some as a 'movement', and have often been treated by the state as a unitary entity. Yet the 'movement' has little existence outside the mobilizations, and is riven with internal contradictions. If anything, it is a political rather than a social movement; as such the question of its ideology needs to be addressed. We analyse the relation to the mobilizations of four ideological tendencies that have become salient from the UK perspective: the progressive liberals, the established left, anarchist/black bloc and Ya Basta! We suggest that for the supposed 'anti-capitalist' mobilizations to become a proletarian movement, connections need to be made with the struggles of the wider proletariat.

Preface: From anti-'globalization' to opposing the war

The events of 11/9/01 occurred as we were preparing this edition of Aufheben for printing. Naturally the development of a class opposition to the 'war' has become a major concern of those who do the magazine. With events changing from day to day, we have decided to limit our comments here to a few updates to the Israel/Palestine article and this preface to our article on the 'anti-capitalist movement'.

Before the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre, a great deal of attention had been focused on the mobilizations against 'globalization'. At the mobilization in Genoa, confrontations between demonstrators and police reached a new peak of ferocity. A lot of eyes turned toward the next big event - the Washington meetings of the World Bank and IMF - to see where it was all going. September the 11th changed everything. A 'war on terrorism' has been declared. What sort of war this will be remains to be seen. (Colin Powell's definition of its aims as a prolonged campaign against those who threaten, 'America, Americans, its allies and American interests throughout the world' actually sounds like a description of aims of standard US foreign policy.)

Reading Indymedia as we write, what actually seems to have happened in Washington appears to be a splitting along some of the lines of tension that we discuss in the article below. Even before the World Bank and IMF meetings were cancelled, the unions and NGOs withdrew support for a demonstration, the radical liberal fraction decided on a series of workshops on the war while only the (largely anarchist) 'anti-capitalist convergence' opted for turning the event into an actual demonstration against the war.

Capitalist civilization versus...

The reinforcement of an nationalist identity, especially in the States, has been a predictable feature of the preparation for war. However the world bourgeoisie has naturally been attempting to justify what it is doing in more noble terms. The Italian PM Berlusconi described the war as one between a superior western civilization which has generated "widespread prosperity" and "brought us democratic institutions, civil, religious and political rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything." Other leaders, aware of its impact on Muslim allies, criticized the statement; but this and other comments on a 'strange unanimity' between the anti-'globalization' protesters and the terrorists expresses a dominant ideological tendency: the equation of capitalism with civilization. With 'the war on terrorism', capitalist society vindicates itself as civilization against a barbaric enemy.

Meaning for 'anti-capitalism'?

Like the wider class struggle, the opposition that has expressed itself at the anti-'globalization' mobilizations has to deal with the changed political climate. An immediate impact of terrorism is to reinforce identification with the state and the existing order. The 'war mentality' involves the strengthening of nationalist identity and the creation of racist divisions within the proletariat. Curtailment of 'civil liberties', such as that involved in the introduction of identity cards which might normally be resisted or refused, is legitimized by the 'terrorist threat'. Whatever the level of actual military action involved, the 'war on terrorism' seems to indicate a permanent shift to a more authoritarian use of state power on the home front (naturally only so as to defend democracy and freedom). In conjuction with these moves, there has also been a co-ordination of state economic measures to soften the impact of the world recession. The idea of 'globalization' as an anonymous 'economic' process in which financial and corporate power threaten democratic 'political' institutions is breaking down before the massive wielding of political-economic power by the hegemonic capitalist state, the USA.

The common theme of 'globalization' and the common practice of Summit mobilizations can no longer unify the way that they did. Those who have identified with these mobilizations need to think more about what capitalism really is. But if some anti-'globalization' misconceptions are left behind, the old dangers of anti-imperialist and anti-American ideology open up. Anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism are idiot forms of 'anti-capitalism' - that is, they are not anti-capitalist at all. Weak states or even non-state forces, like those organized by the multi-millionaire Bin Laden, may be anti-imperialist and anti-American but they are not against capitalism.

As we touch on below, the limitation of even the most radical tendencies in the mobilizations, those who aspire to be 'anti-capitalist', has been their separation from the wider social movement that could make such an aspiration a reality: that is, a class movement to abolish class society. The turn from 'globalization' to the war as focus of opposition will not immediatly overcome this. The separation between an 'anti-war movement' dominated by ideals of peace and justice and the class movements that really end wars (the strikes, mutinies and revolutions that ended WW1 and the insubordination, fraggings and breakdown of the American military machine that ended the Vietnam War), mirrors the gap between the anti-'globalization' mobilizations and a real anti-capitalist movement.

But this adventure launched by the bourgeoisie has dangers for them as well as us. In the first place, there is a danger for the American state of over-commitment and unrealistic expectations for a military machine which may be more effective as a threat than in practice. In the second place, there is a question over the extent to which people accept the propaganda in support of the war. The nature of the so-called 'war on terrorism' forces not only 'anti-capitalists' but also the population as a whole to think about politics and the world. The reality that the 'war on terrorism' is essentially an attack on the world working class threatens to emerge. Within and through the apparent coalition against terrorism the competition between the capitalist powers in the face of economic crisis is intensifying. While at first the war can distract the class from attacks on its living conditions - launched in an attempt to reassert conditions for capital accumulation - the basis for a radicalization within the class is possibly being prepared.

A new international movement emerges?

The recent mass actions in Genoa are the latest in a series of impressive mobilizations against 'globalization'.[1] The most radical elements involved, especially here in Britain, have adopted the definition 'anti-capitalism'. While the use of this term was at first somewhat refreshing, there is no real sign that most participants' perception of what being 'anti-capitalist' means is more radical or coherent than those - indeed the majority - who refer instead to the anti-'globalization' or anti-'corporate' movement.

All the major transnational economic and political institutions - the G8, World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Union - have been targeted by mass protests[2] which have served to undermine their legitimacy. In defining an alternative agenda of anti-'globalization' or 'anti-capitalism', the mass mobilizations have put the institutions on the defensive. The very violence of some of the actions - as well as the violence of the state - has led the mainstream media to focus on what the 'anti-capitalists' have been saying and doing, rather than on the communiqués issued by the summits themselves, a source of considerable irritation for the politicians. There have also been a number of more concrete effects, including the physical prevention of WTO delegates from attending their conference in Seattle (they will now be holding their next meeting in remote Qatar) and the cutting short of the Prague conference of the IMF and World Bank. The World Bank meeting due to take place in Barcelona in 2001 was cancelled; the WTO and IMF have shortened their Washington meeting from two weeks to two days; Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime-minister, has moved a United Nations World Food Summit out of Rome; the next G8 meeting will be in a remote location in the Rockies; and there have even been concerns about whether a NATO defence ministers meeting, due to take place in, should go ahead. And all this apparently because of the protests.

The excitement of some in response to these developments is understandable, especially given the generally weakened level of the class struggle of the last 20 years or so. Although the usual activists and politicoes have been participating, the mobilizations and associated meetings have served to involve and politicize numbers of new people. Moreover, the continuity of these mobilizations - the fact that there have been mass mobilizations in different countries around apparently similar aims and issues - perhaps suggests that what is happening is the emergence of a new internationalism. Is the absence left by the collapse of Stalinism and the retreat of social democracy now being filled by a force which will perhaps find its expression in communism rather than in these historic dead-ends? The self-defined 'anti-capitalist' element that we have witnessed at least suggests this as a possibility.

Yet one of the features of both social democracy and Stalinism which allowed them to be an enduring form through which working class resistance was mobilized (and recuperated) was the way they attached themselves to everyday struggles over 'bread-and-butter' issues. The party and the trade union were organizational forms that didn't simply express themselves on the big occasion, but, through mediating the ongoing pumping-out of surplus-value from the workers, pervaded their mundane existence. Some of the anti-'globalization' commentators identify the lifeblood of the new 'movement' with the various mass movements in the southern hemisphere - most notably the Movimento Sem Terra (the grassroots land redistribution movement) in Brazil, the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Karnataka state farmers association (KRRS) in India. Others have claimed for the 'movement' various struggles around the world against such neo-liberal policies as cuts in social security, harsher labour laws and wage cuts. But while these accounts suggest that the Summit mobilizations are just the most high-profile expression of a worldwide day-to-day movement, in advanced capitalist countries it certainly appears that the 'movement' exists only in and around the mass mobilizations themselves.

Some would also argue that the street protests that characterize the 'movement' against 'globalization' are not on the class-terrain. Certainly, in the UK there have been only a few links with struggles around and against wage labour. Of course, the impulse of many taking part in the mobilizations springs from their everyday disgust at the dull compulsion of a world dominated by capital: a world of work, ecological destruction, poverty etc. But the 'movement' still does not exist as an everyday effort to resist the conditions of life determined by wage labour. In this sense, therefore, it is questionable whether what has been happening can properly be called a movement at all, and certainly not a movement of the class.

Contradictions in the 'movement'

A further reason for denying that what has been happening constitutes a single movement is the fact of multiple and contradictory agendas in and around the mobilizations. Indeed, it might be said that the Summit mobilizations are simply occasions for a number of very different movements and tendencies each to do their own thing.

As mentioned, while many of the militants involved who have long been against capital talk about 'anti-capitalism', for most the 'movement' is just against 'globalization'. The emphasis on 'globalization' versus 'capitalism' typically reflects profound differences of analysis, approach and, at bottom, class position. For example, on the European continent there are organizations like ATTAC[3] which see dialogue with the state as one of the aims of the 'movement'. But there are also a number of anarchist and similar tendencies involved in the mass mobilizations who reject this mainstream; on at least one occasion (notably in Barcelona) they even held a counter-counter-summit to the counter-summit of the 'official movement'!

Yet even among those involved who define what is happening - or what should happen - as 'anti-capitalist' there are acute differences. The lack of a serious attempt to analyse what capital is allows these differences to be glossed.

The state's selective dialogue with some of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) involved in and around the mobilizations appears as an attempt to capitalize on these kind of divisions. For example, Blair held face-to-face meetings with some of the 'drop the debt' campaigners. After Genoa, some of the NGOs reciprocated by coming off the fence to criticize the 'violence' of participants at the protests.

But, of course, the very reason that some of these NGOs - and the term covers a wide variety of organization - have been willing to get involved in such discussions is because they share the same vision of 'development' as the directors of the IMF, World Bank and so on, and differ only over the details. As GegenStandpunkt put it:

they reproach the IMF for having given too much and too little credit for the Third World, for having granted credit under too tough conditions, and for having promoted the wrong projects. They uncritically believe that credit, if only granted in the right amounts and invested in the right projects, could and actually would be a real means of subsistence for the poor of this world - and not what it really is, namely money-capital advanced in order to flow back even bigger to the lender. The right amount that would supposedly transform the curse of indebtedness into the blessing of anticipated growth is of course not calculated by them.[4]

Moreover, it is not simply that many NGOs are campaigning for a more decent capitalism; some of them are actively facilitating actually-existing capitalist relations. NGOs are often financed not only by the state but by the very transnational bodies some of them are protesting against. For example, NGOs are involved in 54% of World Bank projects, mostly in developing countries.[5] Since Seattle, some bourgeois commentators have noted an increased effort on the part of the World Bank to develop dialogue with, and to co-opt, NGOs, efforts which have served to mute NGO criticisms of the World Bank. Such commentators therefore recommend to the WTO the same strategy as a way of splitting the broad alliance that made Seattle possible.[6]

The state grasps the 'movement'

While some of us puzzle over whether or not it is properly a movement, its targets - the G8 politicians and national hosts of the various transnational bodies - have already decided. The generous use of tear-gas at the Seattle anti-WTO mobilization (November 1999) was said by some on the side of the state to be an over-reaction. But, at the Quebec mobilization against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (April 2001), still more gas was employed, as well as reinforced fences to prevent a repeat of the crowd's success at Seattle in disrupting the conference. The idea that these responses could be explained simply in terms of the particularly violent culture of North American cops was dispelled by the experience of the mobilizations against the World Bank and IMF in Prague in September 2000. The Czech state used all manner of forms of violence to those detained, including torture and severe beatings, in order to intimidate participants. Then, at the EU Summit in Gothenburg (June 2001), the Swedish police actually shot people in the crowd using live ammunition. The logic of this escalation was duly followed when the Italian police shot and killed at least one participant at the Genoa G8 summit just a few months later.

After Gothenburg, Blair and other leaders expressed their frustration by suggesting that the 'travelling circus' of protesters should not be allowed to cause such disruption. Hence not only has the state response become increasingly violent, there is also talk of introducing new legal means to prevent 'known troublemakers' travelling abroad, in the same way that legislation has been introduced and used recently to target supposed known football hooligans.[7] There has been increased co-operation and sharing of intelligence among police forces, and even talk among some heads of government of creating a Europe-wide riot police force.

Significantly, then, the state and the supranational organizations all perceive - and are acting upon - an apparent continuity in the mobilizations. In other words, the continuity - indeed the escalation - in the state response to the mobilizations shows that they are treating them as an entity: that is, as a movement which is in some sense a threat.

But how might the mobilizations pose a threat? Most obviously, although less interesting in itself, is the threat posed by the mobilizations to the ability of the world leaders and global economic bodies to hold their meetings how, when and where they choose. But, although there has been disruption, the bourgeoisie have mostly been able to carry on with their business: exclusion zones and mass deployments of police have ensured this. The more interesting threat is that posed by the mobilizations to the general climate of inevitability that Blair and the other Western leaders have sought to cultivate in recent years. The endless stream of 'reforms' which have served to whittle away many of the 'gains' achieved through the post-war social democratic compromise[8] have been premised upon the absence of an effective force of opposition. The visibility and ongoing existence of anti-'globalization' - even 'anti-capitalist' - mass mobilizations could serve as such a force of opposition. This in turn could operate to encourage a wider climate of resistance.[9] In such a climate, resistance in other areas begins to seem possible and may spread. A 'movement' criticized for its confused and often middle class composition and ideology could therefore prefigure and contribute to the development of a wave of struggles posing a genuine threat to capital's reproduction of itself.[10]

As well as treating the mobilizations as a single entity which exists over time - as a movement - the global organizations and their state hosts have often treated each crowd event as a single entity. While participants themselves comment upon the sometimes acute political differences within the physical crowd, the state appears less discriminating. Numerous are the stories of 'peaceful protesters' being attacked by police as if they were the ones causing 'violence'. The brutal police attack on the school accommodating people from Genoa Social Forum and Indymedia, and the subsequent torture of those arrested, has been the most high-profile example of this. However, the reasons behind this particular attack are unclear. The attack was said by some to be police revenge for the actions undertaken by the black bloc.[11] This seems pretty implausible. But the police did in effect treat the different elements at the protest as more or less interchangeable. As such, their action at least appears to be consistent with Berlusconi's statement that "there was no distinction between the two groups", and his claim of "connivance" between liberals and "violent" elements.[12] Attacking such a soft target - the police were aware that the overwhelming majority of people staying at the school were not black bloc - may have therefore been a way of sending a warning to the rest of the protest, from a police force which had been ordered to defend the Summit by any means necessary.

However, the police attack might have reflected more strategic considerations. The liberals might be seen (rightly) by the forces of the state as providing the infrastructure for these kinds of events: they call the demonstrations, organize and advertise them, and provide practical support such as accommodation. Certainly, judging by the selective nature of the searches carried out on particular groups of people entering Italy to take part in the event, the authorities judge some of the liberal organizing groups to be the leaders.[13] The intention behind the attack on the school building may therefore have been to intimidate the liberals from coming to future events, thus undermining the organization on which the less liberal elements rely.

However, in general, when attempting to analyse this kind of incident there is a danger of ascribing an overwhelming coherence and rationality to the actions of the state. We may well be underestimating not only the simple bluntness of repression as a tool, but also possible internal divisions: for example between senior police and those on the ground; between police and government; between elements within the government; and so on.[14] Neither can we simply presume an unproblematic chain of command from the G8 leaders to the Italian police, whose job on such a presumption becomes not only guaranteeing the safety of this Summit but also of future Summits taking place in other countries.

Yet, whatever the intentions and whatever level the decision was made to attack those staying in the school at Genoa, a possible effect is that at least some of those attacked - mostly liberals - will indeed feel that providing infrastructure for Summit protests makes them too vulnerable. The size and actions of future European Summit mobilizations may give some indication of whether or not people have been intimidated by the recent repression.

Some unintended consequences of state actions
Some of the state responses to the events have served to work to the advantage of (tendencies within) the movement. In particular, one unintended effect of the apparent lack of discrimination on the part of the authorities hosting the various Summits has been sometimes to create a greater unity in what have otherwise been extremely diverse and incoherent gatherings.

For example, the enormous mobilization in Seattle was dominated by a liberal-NVDA tendency which attempted actively to exclude more militant actions.[15] The misery of the attempt by this dominant tendency to define a critique of the WTO palatable to what they presumed to be the mainstream was perfectly illustrated by the idiots standing in front of Niketown and other shops trying to prevent black bloc people from smashing the windows.[16] But at Quebec the actions of the police led the non-violent sections of the crowd to see this same 'violent' black bloc as 'one of us'. The latter's retaliation against the police's use of tear gas against the crowd as a whole, their keeping the police at bay from the majority of the crowd and their attempt to breach the fence excluding the whole crowd from the conference served to create an enhanced sense of crowd unity and identity.[17] In this case, 'property damage' (in the form of the state's fences) and fighting the police was widely recognized as necessary. At Genoa, again, the non-violent element constituted the majority. But the police tactic of batoning all and sundry, intended to disperse the crowd, backfired when many more people got stuck in than had originally intended to fight - including some of the liberals and non-violent types.

The 'Summit-hopping' nature of many of the anti-'globalization' events has at times obscured the level of local participation. For example, Seattle, Quebec and Genoa were occasions for locals to act against the cops and property. Genoa, which has a long history of resistance to authority, witnessed various forms of active solidarity between locals those who came just for the protest. This was despite the damage to 'their' city that so upset the leftists. For example, local people on motorbikes sped up and down warning others about where the cops were; some took strangers into their houses to protect them from police baton charges; some threw water from their balconies at the cops and gave water to drink to the protesters; and when one street was destroyed, locals participated in the looting of shops.

Despite these kinds of examples, there has nevertheless often been a division between 'locals' and mobilization participants at a number of the Summit locations, illustrating the point, again, that the events typically express a separation between everyday antagonism and resistance as 'activism'. Perhaps the Prague mobilization exemplifies this separation most poignantly: among the Czechs, participation was limited to the small activist community.

Yet it is police action, again, that has sometimes contributed to the breaking down of this kind of separation. Mayday 2001 in London, which was promoted as an anti-capitalist event, was pre-hyped by the police to such a degree that otherwise 'non-political' working class youth saw it as an opportunity to have a go at property and the hated cops[18] - much more noticeably than at Mayday 2000. At Seattle, the extension of the police offensive beyond the designated protest area and into residential districts brought more residents out fighting the police alongside the protesters.

The role of the ideologues

The possible prospects of this would-be movement - its continuity, international character and, at least for some, avowedly 'anti-capitalist' agenda - has meant that a number of different groups and tendencies have attempted to assume some sort of hegemony. Such attempts have all involved, first, the claim that there is indeed a movement, and second, a particular definition of the identity of that movement which allows those offering this definition to position themselves centrally. This work of movement identity entrepreneurship is a work of ideology, in that it reflects a partial viewpoint connected to their practical experience and social perspective.

If the mobilizations are indeed to become a movement, self-criticism is an important part of that process of becoming. A critique of the ideologues is pressing for the practical reason that their positive definitions of the unity of the 'movement' contain an inevitable negative: the exclusion from their definitions of those they perceive as a threat to this definition. We now examine the approaches to the 'movement' of four tendencies involved in and around the mobilizations who have become salient from a UK perspective: the progressive liberals, anarchists/black bloc, traditional left (in this country the Trotskyists) and Ya Basta! In many cases, there is an attempt by such tendencies to marginalize certain 'others' - often more militant elements. This marginalization, moreover, isn't simply a matter of definitions but may involve concrete exclusion and defeat. For example, both the vagueness and the conflict involved in the mobilizations so far has enabled some otherwise 'non-political' elements to participate, as mentioned previously. Would this wider involvement be possible if the ideologues' definitions of the 'movement' were more fully realized?

We acknowledge that an examination of the ideologues' accounts can't in itself tell us much about the nature and dynamic of the 'movement' (such as it is); such an analysis also risks being limited to the level of ideas. However, we undertake this examination not only because it is necessary to develop some theoretical tools to fight the ideologues and defend the more promising tendencies that they might exclude (as well as to critique some tendencies they might include), but also because criticizing other accounts of the movement is a necessary step in developing our own understanding.[19]

The 'movement' according to the progressive liberals

For progressive liberals involved in and around the mobilizations, the problem is not capital as such, but what they see as the current ('neo-liberal'[20]) organization of capital, glossed by the term 'globalization'. The pre-eminent liberal-progressive interpreter of the movement so far is Naomi Klein, whose book, No Logo, is an international best-seller. The book is promoted as a part of the 'movement' yet which also speaks to - and is a part of - 'mainstream' society. Klein's apparent purchase on what is going on lies in the fact that so many people involved in and around the 'movement' events understand it as she does: in terms of multinational corporations (rather than capital). However, for Klein it is not even 'globalization' as such that is the problem, but a global system "gone awry".[21]

No Logo is a work of largely impressionistic journalism in which Klein identifies and analyses a global movement of opposition. Klein describes the different campaigns, struggles and tendencies which she sees as comprising this movement. These include 'culture jamming',[22] McLibel, Reclaim the Streets (RTS)[23] and student campaigns against 'sweated labour'. What makes these different campaigns and struggles part of a single movement according to Klein is the fact that they are 'anti-corporatist'. For Klein, what the movement is essentially mobilizing around is the threat posed by the power of multinational corporations to state accountability and hence citizenship.[24] Klein argues that the recognition of the global corporate brand logo is itself the basis of this supposed global movement; the global corporations thus create the possibility of global (rather than merely local or national) opposition. Moreover, since these global corporations no longer provide "their traditional role as direct, secure employers",[25] people no longer have a reason to be loyal to them and hence the global opposition becomes legitimized.

For Klein, the form that this 'anti-corporatist' resistance takes is primarily cultural. The 'movement' is essentially just that activity which attempts to 'communicate' (through propaganda etc.) with the forces of 'globalization'. This approach which privileges the 'message' over concrete activity is reflected in Klein's analysis of the political background of the movement. For example, Klein's account of RTS relies heavily on that of John Jordan, whose presentation of RTS as art-cum-politics (and himself as an 'official' spokesperson) have not been widely accepted within RTS itself.

Interlocutors with the state?

The threat posed by progressive-liberal ideologues like Klein lies in their legitimizing of the role of the democratic state through linking the 'movement' to mainstream politics and the state: 'we' (the super-exploited garment workers of Jakarta, 'anti-corporatist' activists, and middle class progressive liberals like Klein) 'demand' the full rights of citizenship which only a properly democratic state can bestow, in order to protect us from the excesses of the global corporations. If this is how 'we' are united, then this must mean the marginalizing of the most militant tendencies.[26]

The role of progressive liberal ideologues taking positions like that of Klein is recuperative in that they present themselves as the voice - the most articulate - of the 'movement', which they can then represent in dialogue with democratic institutions and those corporations that come to the negotiating table. While those tendencies that accept the leadership of liberal ideologues will moderate their actions in the light of any such 'negotiations', others will become a 'hard-line rump' against which further state repression gains greater legitimacy.

This work of exclusion is evident in the sharp distinctions Klein makes between 'protest' and 'riot'. On RTS: "the subtle theory of 'applying radical poetry to radical politics' is getting drowned out by the pounding beat and the mob mentality... Despite the organizers' best efforts, RTS was spiralling into soccer hooliganism".[27] Similar comments are made about the June 18th 'Carnival against Capital' (J18). Klein repeats the oft-heard liberal whine about 'the message being drowned out' in all the violence and damage. What they mean is their message (which respects property as part of democracy). In fact, as even some reformists often recognize, if there is one inevitable effect of rioting it is to get people talking about what the rioting is about: rioting defines agendas.[28]

If Klein engages with the most militant only at the level of their actions (and this only in order to marginalize them) it is because this is less threatening to her overall interpretation than to engage with them at the level of theory. The 'violent' elements she tries to dismiss typically define themselves not as 'anti-corporate' but as 'anti-capitalist', anarchist, or in many cases do not have a political identity at all, except perhaps anti-'system'.[29] To critically confront them would mean dealing with the problem not only of capital itself (not just 'global' capital 'gone awry') but also, crucially, of the state. What is most obviously missing from Klein's analysis of the problem of global corporations and the supposed movement against them is an adequate grasp of the relation between the state and the forces of 'globalization'. Ultimately, this would require a grasp of how the division between 'politics' and 'economics' is a mystified, if real, fragmented appearance of the capital relation. Simply put, it is the very democratic states to which Klein appeals which have participated in the creation of the structures of the global economy and hence the current relative autonomy of global finance capital. The politicians representing these democratic states have done this not because they are corrupt, undemocratic etc., but because they are dependent on and attempt to facilitate capital accumulation in each national territory. To restore greater power to the state and away from global finance capital, as the liberal-progressives wish, is to attempt to force the state to find some other way to guarantee the conditions for the optimum extraction of surplus-value. Free trade and protectionism have historically each been capital's solution to the problems of the other.

We have focused on Naomi Klein, but the other liberals take similar positions in relation to the state and the form of resistance. People like George Monbiot[30] (discredited years ago in the radical ecological movement), Walden Bello and Kevin Danaher[31] all call for smaller scale capitalism (smaller businesses that we can perhaps identify with more and be exploited by with less resistance?) and more tax (e.g. a Tobin tax on the movement of international finance capital). In calling for an 'acceptable' capitalism with the state as the interventionist organ of democratic control, not only do these liberals justify the alienation that is capital, they also grasp the state incorrectly as a neutral tool. Or, perhaps more accurately, they instinctively understand it well - as a structure necessary to guarantee the version of capitalism they support.

The relation of the anarchists and black bloc to the mobilizations

If the progressive liberals have been given quite considerable, favourable coverage, the bourgeois media has also strongly associated 'anarchism' with the mobilizations. Violence at the events, or the threat of it, generally gives a giant dose of publicity to the largely mythical anarchist ringleaders that are deemed to be responsible. The unwillingness of most anarchists to speak to the media only increases the interest (as a theory of recuperation would tell you). But whatever the spectacular dimension, it is true that anarchists of one sort or another, have had a significant role in the genesis and development of the mobilizations.

In Britain, anarchism has been a strong influence on the RTS and direct action scene out of which the street party at the 1998 Birmingham G8 and the 1999 J18 riot in London's financial district emerged. The older class struggle anarchist scene had at first largely been very suspicious of the RTS/direct action scene for its 'middle class/hippie/green' composition, but by J18 had swallowed their objections. Elements from this scene were largely instrumental in the 2000 and 2001 May Day events in London. J18 was then a direct inspiration for the mobilization for Seattle.[32] Though the organizers of Seattle were more liberal/leftist a 'soft' anarchism was present. To an extent its influence was strongest at the level of method and technique. For example the pivotal organizing group, the Direct Action Network (DAN), introduced what was seen as 'forms of anarchist decision making', and had many self-described anarchists in it. A participating group, the Ruckus Society, a mobile direct action training camp which emerged out of Earth First!, has a similar large anarchist involvement. Against this kind of involvement, more hardline ideological anarchists have criticized anarchists in DAN for being mere foot soldiers in a liberal and leftist campaign. One pamphlet[33] testifies that many anarchists were angry at the guidelines imposed by DAN banning violence against persons and property. Such tensions are an understandable expression of American anarchism's development within an individualist and unhistorical political culture. Whereas in the UK, tendencies within anarchism towards lifestylism have been tempered by the experience of the miners' strike, Wapping etc., US anarchism has no such recent history.

However, one section of anarchists found through their practice a way of making an impact on the protest at Seattle which has then become a continuous feature in subsequent mobilizations: the black bloc. It is anarchism's association with this form of militancy that has mainly defined its relation to the mobilizations against 'globalization'.

The riots which tore through Genoa this July engendered a backlash against the black bloc spearheaded by Italian leftist organizations. For its own ideological reasons, and using the death of Carlo Giuliani, the liberal-left parts of the 'movement' demonized the violent protesters at Genoa in a big propaganda offensive within Italy.[34] This uneasily paralleled the anger and frustration felt even by radical sections of the crowd, both inside and outside the black bloc, with its actions. Some of the arguments of the leftists and liberals (for example, the idea of police infiltration of the black bloc), have put those who previously embraced the tactic on to the defensive. It is necessary, then, to examine the way this tactic has developed.

The problem of the black bloc at these events is the contradiction between its existence as a tactic and as an ideological identity; and the way that the form of the anti-'globalization' 'movement' forces these two aspects to coincide. To counter the leftist propaganda, which portrays the black bloc as a homogenous group that can be easily identified and marginalized (young, male, anarchist, fanatical, nihilistic), others have emphasized its heterogeneity, fluidity and the fact that it is first and foremost 'a tactic'. As such, it is claimed, it has no ideological identity and changes for practical reasons as time and place dictate. However, although there is an element of truth in this (and although certain people within the black bloc see it or wish it this way), there is a definite tendency to conflate radicality with a 'hardcore' fetishism of violence. A defining if not exclusive feature of the black bloc that distinguishes it from simply street-fighting at demonstrations is the existence of a set group committed to a form of action, separate from the rest of the crowd. The black bloc seeks to identify itself as a group of black clad militants who work together, look out for each other, take on the cops and attack property, and as such sees itself as the radical, autonomous wing of the protest. In practice, the black bloc tendency does alter significantly according to local conditions, but doesn't escape the bounds of a militant role.

Seattle: anarchist ideology and the black bloc

A main origin of the black bloc tactic is the German autonomen movement of the '70s and '80s, known for its highly organized and widespread squatting scene. The autonomen were split between an anti-imperialist tendency identifying with the Red Army Faction; and a 'social revolutionary' tendency roughly inspired by Italian autonomia. The black bloc tactic was linked more with the anti-imperialist side, so can be connected to its vanguardism and lack of orientation to the (German) working class. There have been black bloc formations inspired by the German blocs in America over the years, but these never really made much impact, given the enormous restrictions on demonstrations in America, and the power of the police. However, in Seattle, the black bloc had visible success by attacking corporate property like Starbucks and Nike. In a communiqué some black bloc members printed to explain the tactic, they write of their sophisticated practice as a group who escaped serious injury by remaining constantly in motion and avoiding engagement with the police, but present their actions against property as symbolic - what matters is the 'shattering of assumptions', the 'number of broken spells'.[35] They also affirm that their actions accord with the wider anti-corporatism of the movement, whilst hinting that they are against all property relations. Given the limited aims of the protest, the pacifists they deride were probably more effective in closing the centre down. It's not enough to make a show of violence against the pacifists, hoping that it'll clear the bad smell of hippie idealism, like an 'exorcism'.[36] To oppose hardcore militancy for its own sake against NVDA (Non Violent Direct Action) betrays just as much ideological obfuscation.

The Seattle black bloc seemed very much defined by its isolation from the rest of the movement. They were few. They had to stick together against the incomprehension of the rest of the crowd, and even to defend themselves from the 'peace cops'. They had to defend their actions in the terms of the liberals. There the black bloc as tactic was inseparable from its exclusive identity. At the same time, the black bloc can point to the huge international impact of Seattle as due partly to their actions.

The Seattle black bloc was later branded as "a bunch of anarchists from Eugene who follow the primitivist John Zerzan".[37] This exaggerates the influence of primitivism on both the black bloc and US anarchism in general. However, the attraction of primitivism, with its anti-technology fetishism and lack of class analysis, is an expression of the broader lifestylist ghettoism of American anarchism. A limitation of the black bloc in America is the extent to which it is trapped in that culture. But of course, in the narrow confines of the anti-'globalization' 'movement', this sort of lifestylist vanguardism may seem like the radicalism as against the liberals. It would be involvement in a class movement that might lead the anarchists to question their separation.

The riots in Washington later that year, though they faced a much higher degree of police repression, marked an advance in that there was a level of collaboration between 'violent' and 'non-violent' protesters. The decision not to be antagonistic amounted to an effective co-ordination and collaboration of their different tactics, neither hindering the other. The ideological positions of both groups thus began to loosen into practical considerations.

Britain

While some British activists are enamoured by the black bloc and its tactics, and have hopped merrily along to many a summit to be part of it, the 'anti- capitalist' protests in Britain - J18, Mayday 2000 and 2001 - did not have black blocs. People may mask up and dress in black to avoid surveillance, but there is not the same segregation of the activist scene into liberals and militants. When fighting does occur those who take part are often not politicos at all. That such a situation could have developed is due to the weakness of an institutional left that could steward and self-police events. The 'each to their own' tolerance of the hippie crowd helps in its way. Nevertheless after the surprise of J18, the limited numbers of participants has allowed the police to swamp the subsequent events.

Prague and Quebec City

The black bloc tactic was used in Prague in September 2000, in a completely different way to Seattle. Aware of the different tendencies that would be present on the day, and the tensions that could arise between them, the organizing group, Inpeg,[38] decided on a separated but concerted effort to close down the conference. Three different routes would be used to approach the excluded zone, each one corresponding to a different political tendency. Everyone could stick to their chosen grouping - 'creatives' in the pink bloc,[39] Ya Basta! stunt-politicos in the yellow bloc, the black bloc as the blue bloc - and yet could help each other to divide police resources in a unified attack on the actual conference, (unlike Seattle or Genoa). Some black bloc people actually made it to the grounds of the conference centre with the pink-and-silver march, helped by the blue bloc's flat out assault of the police line on a different approach. The blue bloc did not budge the line too much, but injured a lot of cops. This was the black bloc's most focused action thus far, but some black bloc types wondered whether it was in a sense too much so - "doesn't targeting the conference centre suggest support for the reformist programme of the liberals?" - as if indirectly targeting the conferences by smashing the host city isn't part of the same thing.

Quebec in April 2001 saw the biggest amount of public support for a black bloc action, as mentioned earlier. It was there that the bloc as tactic, in pulling the widely unpopular fence down, really connected with the feeling of the march, and many in the city as a whole. This initiative of the black bloc proved a pivotal moment (bystanders joined in after the initial attack on the fence). The bloc as an organized, determined force was seen practically to have value even to Gandhian peaceniks, as one testimony on Indymedia demonstrates.[40] Elderly ladies in Quebec City were seen holding up placards saying 'God bless the kids in black!'

Genoa - the black bloc under attack

The June 2001 protests in Gothenburg against the EU summit erupted in widespread militant black bloc rioting and saw the first shooting of a demonstrator at these events. The main victim of the shooting, critically ill for some weeks, was Swedish and it seems that Sweden's anarchist scene contributed a lot of people to the bloc. At one point, the black bloc pushed the cops into retreat (TV images showed what almost looks like a rout), and Gothenburg saw some of the most intense fighting with the police. Unlike with Prague, the black bloc was unpopular with the peaceful types whose sunny party in the park was disrupted by police charging the rioters.

In Genoa the black bloc was split up and spread over a large area, and their dress became increasingly motley and light coloured according to Italian conditions - i.e. heat and little camera surveillance. Participants have argued over the composition of the militant blocs. Some say there were many locals getting involved and that Genoa proved to be the most socially connected of the summit protests. Others argue that although the population was friendly and helpful in general, most locals present at the riots were bemused onlookers who may have helped the black bloc on occasion, but generally saw the event as extraordinary spectacle, which in a way it is.

There were many black bloc people in Genoa from different countries, so there could be many loosely organized blocs, but again the problems of black bloc militancy re-appeared, which resulted in fighting between different militant groups on the Friday. A section of the black bloc at the joint COBAS[41] and black bloc action attacked the cops too early in the march. The cops came in and split the crowd. The COBAS were angry at the premature ejaculation of the black bloc. Later they fought with the black bloc to stop it following them to their base, effectively threatening to throw the bloc into the arms of the pursuing police. The black bloc insisted and was eventually allowed through. It does seem that a certain culture of European anarchism with its obsessive fetishism of street fighting is to be seen at work in these events. Others point out that most anarchists in the bloc were happy to think tactically with the COBAS and that the problems were due to the actions of a few 'stupid' people, and a basic lack of organization.

On Corso Torino (site of the huge march on Saturday, broadly of the institutional left), young anarcho-punks and others in the black bloc that tagged the march were largely content to destroy banks and petrol-stations, and, when this was done, attack insignificant targets like bus shelters and traffic signs. Some started a fire right next to the petrol station that was nestled at the bottom of a block of flats, others saw the stupidity of this, and put the fire out. The whole emphasis with some was to notch up amounts of targets trashed, as opposed to thinking of more concerted efforts against the cops, which others thought more appropriate. However, an effective barricade was built under a railway bridge and set alight, which delayed the police advance. Most of the time though, the police inched up gradually, attacking with tear gas, which repeatedly panicked the crowd into retreat. Eventually the crowd was chased out of Corso Torino with an armoured vehicle. The whole thing was rather ritualized and boring. At the same time, another section of the demonstration was trapped in front of the convergence centre by police action sparked by a black bloc attack. After a bit of fighting with the remaining black bloc types, the police advanced in a vicious attack consisting of vast quantities of tear gas and armoured car charges against the crowd, the effect of which was compounded by the actions of Rifondazione members linking arms to prevent people from escaping. It was a frightening rout and some people were surprised that no one died.

Many were angry and dismayed that no concerted response could be made to answer the death of Giuliani the day before. Without a strong, rooted movement, the rioters were impotent before the state's killing of one of their numbers - most people left Genoa that same evening.

It has to be said that nothing much else could be done. Most of the bloc was not equipped with good gas masks or weapons, and so to retreat and spread out from the police advance causing havoc as it went was its best option. In that sense, Genoa was also the black bloc's greatest success given the enormous amount of property damage done, (over 30 banks destroyed), and the wide spread of the riots over the city. If the authorities manage to defend the conference successfully, as in Genoa, the threat from the casseurs[42] still remains. The spread to other targets in itself can be seen as a positive move away from the movement's identification of capital with a few greedy individuals conspiring behind the fence. But again, it's a generalization severely limited by the form of the movement as it stands "you do useless symbolic street theatre outside the gates of the conference, we do lots and lots of, you know, 'concretely symbolic' smashing of many manifestations of capital" - i.e. praxis is conflated with shattering glass.

But we cannot simply attribute the shortcomings of the events in Genoa to the ideology of the militants. On the one hand, people come in from the outside to each event with their ideological baggage. On the other, it is the limitation of the movement that prevents the moment of truth in this militancy from realizing itself as part of a real movement against capital.

Encouragingly, in post Genoa discussions, we can see that many who identify with the black bloc have come to an understanding of its limitations after its success and failure at Genoa.[43]

To express its militancy and avoid a losing confrontation with the state the black bloc tends to become a sort of roving, footloose band of casseurs (and a large part of its success has been just that). In doing this, though, its actions become isolated from the immediate aims of the mobilization, whilst not connecting with a broader social movement which might make its militancy useful (or irrelevant!). As such its options are to explain militant action in a way that accords with the basic precepts of liberal-leftist anti-'globalization' ideology (lobbying with molotov cocktails), or to trumpet them as practical, autonomous actions against state and capital (a positive dis-alignment with the mainstream of the movement as far as it goes). However, while it helps the individual's sense of identity, this doesn't hold much water practically. In the long run, without a wider social movement to make it meaningful, such practice can only be mere 'symbolism', 'exorcism'.

A further complication in the dynamic of the anti-'globalization' mobilizations is that objectively it is the militancy of the casseurs that have created the real problem for the authorities. The capitalist institutions under attack can quite successfully barricade themselves in, but it is not acceptable to the state that the black bloc reduce the whole city to rubble outside, stealing the agenda in the media as well with its violence.

The 'movement' according to the traditional left[44]

One of the features of the scene out of which the 'anti-capitalist movement' germinated in Britain was the relative absence of the organized left - in particular, the absence of the largest Trotskyist sect in Britain, the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP). If Trotskyist groups can be situated on a spectrum of purism to opportunism, the SWP can clearly be located at the opportunist end. Any hint of a movement or campaign developing in response to a state attack, a rise in racism, a war or whatever, is met by an effort to set up or promote a front by the SWP. However, efforts to relate at a local level to anti-roads and similar campaigns fell flat, and their setting up of a front against the Criminal Justice Bill (CJB) in 1994 also met with little success.[45]

After the CJB, it seems that their high command judged this lumpen scene not to be particularly fertile for them and should be left alone. Perhaps the SWP also felt that there was now a danger that, far from gaining recruits they might actually lose some members to this scene's more enjoyable, less sacrificial, ideas about political activity. When the SWP did later try to connect with the anti-'globalization' activities, it was through a 'drop the debt' campaign, which attempted to appeal to the more liberal and church-linked groups in and around events such as the Birmingham G7 demo in 1998.

The SWP as the radical liberal alternative

However, sometime after J18, when a 'protest' physically attacked the world's third largest financial centre, and at which the SWP were almost completely absent, it appears a shift occurred. It was following the events at Seattle that Trotskyist groups started getting very excited about what they called the 'anti-capitalist movement'. For example, the SWP and Workers' Power (another, smaller, Trot sect) attended the Milan conference of People's Global Action (PGA - see Box) in April, but were denied speeaking rights through the intervention of RTS types who continue to be the basis of PGA in the UK.

The SWP have also been engaging with the leading progressive-liberal entrepreneurs, Monbiot, Susan George, Walden Bello and Naomi Klein. They debate on the same platform with them, invite them to speak at their annual 'Marxism' conference and they publish articles by these people in SWP journals. They have also launched a new front organization, 'Globalise Resistance', perhaps their major recuperative attempt since the CJB. As with any other SWP front, its figureheads number non-SWP people: there is Tony Benn[46] as usual, but also the green media celebrity Monbiot. Globalise Resistance bills itself as one of the major organizing groups of Mayday 2001.[47] (That is, they were the ones making the cops' job easier by encouraging people into the police cordon!)[48]

The SWP have complemented these debates and this organizational activity with considerable ideological work in (re-)writing the history of the 'anti-capitalist movement'. While giving a passing nod to J18 - for most of us the first of the 'anti-capitalist' mass mobilizations[49] - the SWP, like most of the Western left, date the beginning of the movement from the events at Seattle.[50] In a way, this is justified. Seattle targeted an international Summit, while J18 in London targeted City institutions rather than a particular Summit. Moreover, Seattle was not only extremely large (especially for the USA which has seen so little mass action in recent years) but also effective in its aims. But, against this, Seattle had other features which make it controversial as a 'start date' for the 'movement': in particular, as mentioned above, it was dominated by a progressive-liberal tendency, which eschewed violence and which attempted to marginalize the most radical and militant elements.

Debating with the progressive-liberals and neglecting certain features of the history of the 'movement' serves to position the SWP as the radical alternative. The SWP's intellectuals can acknowledge the strength of the critique of 'globalization' offered by Monbiot, George etc. but then go on to demonstrate that these liberals lack both a properly historical understanding of the logic of capitalism and the organizational form supposedly capable of ending the 'iniquities of capitalism'. This places them on the same side as these liberals and yet at the same time apparently more critical and practical.

Of course, people will and do find the liberal approach deeply inadequate; the SWP hope that people's search for a radical alternative within a context they can define will make the SWP attractive. In a context which includes other, more radical, alternatives, however, the SWP's position is jeopardized. While they have given a lot of space and attention to detail to the liberals, they are wilfully vague about and neglectful of the anarchists, black bloc, 'white overalls' and others. After Genoa, they couldn't report on events without confronting these tendencies; but they still managed to do so in a cursory and inadequate manner.[51]

It might be surprising that someone like Monbiot, who denounced RTS after Mayday 2000 for taking the 'wrong path', now links up with old-style Trots. But, in a way, it is not surprising at all. The SWP and Monbiot support each other through their shared activities, giving each other audiences and publicity. Moreover, both are sincere in their support for respectable non-violence. Finally, in fact their programmes are not so different from each other. Those observing the SWP in action today will be aware that they appear to have shifted to the right. Indeed, their practice in Globalise Resistance indicates that they are now trying to position themselves as respectable liberals. Starting perhaps with their 'drop the debt' campaign, there was an increased attempt to recruit those with liberal criticisms of capital.[52] This loosening of the party doctrine overlapped with the agenda of Monbiot and similar non-Marxist liberals. In both cases, there is, implicitly or otherwise, the demand that the state intervene more to limit international finance capital. In theory, as Leninists, the SWP would of course argue that the (bourgeois) state cannot simply be taken over but must be smashed to make way for a 'workers' state'. But, as opportunists, the SWP are virtually like their liberal partners, treating the state as a reformable, neutral organ rather than a historically necessary function of capital accumulation.

More boring 'politics'

On this question of the state, many have seen in the UK 'anti-capitalist' mobilizations and their precursors an alternative to the ballot box: thousands attempting to take some form of direct action because the institutions of democracy are understood as part of the problem. But for the SWP, the mobilizations are an opportunity for giving this alienated means a new-found importance and relevance. Thus they are promoting the Socialist Alliance as a means to achieve the supposed aims of the 'anti-capitalist movement', attempting to drag people back into the dead end of electoral politics.[53]

Another exciting feature of some of the 'anti-capitalist' mobilizations and their RTS precursors, at least in this country, has been the way they have on occasions linked up with workers in struggle. Examples include the 1997 RTS party-protest with sacked dockworkers in Trafalgar Square (the 'March for Social Justice'), the occupation of Merseyside docks, and the rail and office occupations in support of striking tube workers in 1996. In these examples, rather than the passive solidarity and tail-ending of union initiatives usually offered by those outside a group of workers on strike, there was an attempt to intervene through the methods of the direct action movement. In some cases, both workers and activists were inspired by what happened; they came to a different view of each other and of the possibilities of struggle linking 'bread-and-butter' issues (such as wages and conditions) with 'utopian' desires (revolution, ecological resistance).[54] As we suggested at the time, the very weakness of the labour movement - its inability to deliver in its own terms - was part of the reason why the support in the form of RTS occupations became so important to some workers' struggles[55]: as the effectiveness of the mediations of the labour movement has declined, so 'direct action' has become more necessary and relevant.

However, the SWP and other Trotskyists have found other reasons to be excited about the 'movement'. In particular, the convergence on and shut-down of the WTO conference in Seattle involved not just the environmentalist movement and the anti-debt and sweatshop campaigners but a substantial demonstration organized by the AFL-CIO, the US equivalent of the TUC. For the SWP, the 'anti-capitalist movement' is and must be grounded in various trade union struggles around the world. As such it is also a lifeline to the continued meaningfulness of the unions: for the Trots, links between the unions and others in the 'anti-capitalist' movement are essential. What the SWP do not fully acknowledge, however, is the resistance of workers to their unions even within the mobilizations. Thus, for example, although the trade unions organized a traditional march at Seattle, many of the workers on it rejected it and instead joined in the direct action of the more militant elements.[56]

Why are the unions and elections so important? Because the promise and ultimate disillusionment that trade union action and electoral ballots supposedly engender when people use these methods against capitalism is the principal means through which the working class is supposed to be enlightened as to the necessity of the Trotskyist version of revolution. The SWP criticize the liberals' demand for a Tobin tax as a demand which won't work within capitalism.[57] But their own strategy of making social democratic demands (e.g., the 'drop the debt' campaign, re-nationalizations and their other electoral platforms) is different in only one respect: the SWP claim (internally) that they don't believe that such demands are fully tenable within (currently existing) capitalism.

The bad faith of the Trotskyists is of course disgusting; one might wonder how they can respect themselves in setting out to encourage others to be 'disillusioned' - but of course the main people with illusions are the Trots themselves. However, this bad faith is a function not of a moral failing but a theoretical one. Leninism links a conception of capital as essentially the anarchy of the market (and thus a definition of socialism as state management of capital) with a conception of the working class subject as passive and capable of no more than a 'trade union consciousness' without the intervention of enlightened (party) types.[58] The drive for recruitment and building the party organization as something in practice distinct from a wider social movement, and their identification of their particular sect as 'The Party', reflects the view that the Leninist party form is the highest form of consciousness and hence the necessary catalyst for successful struggle. But it is struggle itself which dispels mystification - and the educators themselves must be educated. The fetishism of the party means that the party has its own dynamic - its own needs - and there's no reason to suppose that they correspond with those of the particular struggle or the proletariat in general. Indeed, given that the party endorses the myth of working class passivity, there is every reason to expect a lack of correspondence. Where correspondence does occur it is in spite of not because of the party.[59] This is why those in struggle are so often ahead of the party hacks, despite the latter's 'Marxist' education.

The moment of truth in the SWP's approach is their attempt to relate to working class struggles: that is, their attempt to grasp the recent mobilizations as an issue of class. This makes their analysis superior to that of the progressive liberals. The problem is, first, how the SWP identify the class with its representation (i.e. the labour movement), and, second, the way that they relate to such working class struggles: as hacks rather than as human beings. Given what many of us have experienced of this party 'hack-tivism' over the past 20 years, not just from the SWP but from the other Trots (most notoriously perhaps the example of Militant in the poll tax struggle), it is perhaps understandable that some feel threatened by the interest taken by the Trots in the 'movement' following Seattle. However, we would suggest that the threat of the SWP taking over through one of their fronts is perhaps more apparent than real.[60] The SWP have been in crisis for some time: the death of Tony Cliff, the re-organization of the branch structure and the problem of how to relate to the Socialist Alliance have each undermined the smooth functioning of the party machine.

Moreover, the very amorphousness and lack of structure of the 'anti-capitalist movement' in this country makes it difficult for the SWP to take over in the usual way. Further, the opening up of the party, and its reduced ability to close up again, offers the possibility of many of its members being less hack-like. Their decreased certainty in their specialist role may make them as individuals less of a block on the class struggle.

Perhaps the real threat, if any, of the SWP and their ilk is that, by successfully defining a terrain in which they represent 'radical politics', they actually put people off 'radical politics' in the broader sense. Of course, most people in the UK who have been to the 'anti-capitalist' mobilizations already know of the SWP and their manoeuvres, and are not likely to get involved with them. However, the mass presence of the SWP can still serve to put off those people who hoped that the 'movement' was an alternative to the same old boring 'politics'.[61]

Peoples' Global Action - a new International?

The international network Peoples' Global Action, PGA, was formed in February 1998 as a 'common communication and coordination tool for social movements'. PGA was born out of the Encuentros - the international gatherings 'against neo-liberalism and for humanity' instigated by the Zapatistas.

According to its convenors "PGA has been one of the principal instigators of the new global, radical, anti-capitalist movement which today is challenging the legitimacy of global governance institutions" through global days of action coinciding with summits of the international institutions.

PGA itself has not organized the big actions in London, Seattle, Prague, Quebec, Gothenburg, Genoa etc.; however, they have all been networked through PGA. (In fact, most of the above occasions were intended as 'Global Days of Action', with simultaneous protests all over the world. The first global day of action against free trade took place during the G8 summit in Birmingham and the WTO ministerial conference in Geneva, in May '98).

The 'hallmarks' of PGA are:

1. "A very clear rejection of the WTO and other trade liberalization agreements (like APEC, the EU, NAFTA, etc.) as active promoters of a socially and environmentally destructive globalization;
2. A very clear rejection of all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human beings;
3. A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organizations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker;
4. A call to non-violent civil disobedience and the construction of local alternatives by local people, as answers to the actions of governments and corporations;
5. An organizational philosophy based on decentralization and autonomy."

While it was decided in the second international conference in Bangalore that the PGA was an "anti-capitalist network", this has not been explicitly translated into its hallmarks.

The convenors' statement for third international PGA conference resolves "to fight against oppression, domination and destruction, to unmask and abolish the institutions and companies that regulate the global capitalist regime, to build a broad unity based on the respect to difference and diversity, and to continue defining, practising and spreading local alternatives to take back control over our destiny. This hope, that lives in the irreverent determination of our bodies, minds and feelings, can and must realize our dreams of self-governance, freedom, justice, peace, equity, dignity and diversity". These bourgeois ideals are strikingly similar to those lyricized by Subcomandante Marcos. A critique of the PGA on the level of ideas is insufficient, but is the practice of the social movements (in the industrializing countries) and what some have labelled the 'new social movements' (in the industrialized countries) radically different?

The social basis of the PGA, roughly speaking, is two-fold and apparently contradictory: on the one hand large social movements from 'the South' such as the Brazilian landless movement Movimento Sem Terra or Indian peasant organization KRRS; on the other hand, from 'the North', an assortment of sympathizers of these movements, non-aligned leftists, anarchists, environmentalists etc. who admit with some embarrassment that, at PGA conferences, whereas participants from 'the South' feel they represent tens or hundreds of thousands, they themselves (from 'the North') are quite sure they can only speak for themselves, or at a push, their 'affinity group'. Perhaps the closest thing to a mass movement in the PGA network in 'the North' is the Italian pro-Zapatista network Ya Basta!; though another exception to this rule is the Canadian Union of Postal Workers who have been responsible for the international secretariat of PGA.

Within PGA there is an ideological convergence despite material differences. The peasant and indigenous organizations of the Southern Hemisphere are resisting proletarianization; these real struggles are expressed as a defence of and demand for land as a better form of life than scavenging survival amid the poverty of the shanty towns. This resistance to capitalist development is mirrored ideologically in 'the North' within PGA by liberal anarcho criticisms of "corporate capitalism" and a yearning for "small-scale, local alternatives", "sustainable development" etc. It is redundant to criticize the indigenous peoples and peasants of "the South" for not having a proletarian perspective; in any case their resistance to capitalist development might complement proletarian struggles elsewhere. An example of this could be the land occupations of semi-proletarianized Brazilians who refuse to be incorporated into the industrial reserve army. However, that which is a practical necessity for peasants in 'the South' in the face of capitalist development - the defence of small-scale production - is adopted as a virtue, as a panacea by many activists in the materially different context of 'the North' precisely because of a lack of, or rejection of, class analysis. This is particularly the case within the UK 'direct action scene', which, afflicted by a combination of proudhonism and third worldism, feels the need to pose "positive alternatives to capitalism", such as eco-villages, local exchange trading schemes and worker's co-ops.*

At its third international conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia in September 2001, PGA was due to discuss among other things a draft manifesto (available on the web at http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/en/PGAInfos/manifest.htm), which represents a theoretical development beyond the "hallmarks"; however, its critique of capitalism is partial, with the emphasis on multinational corporations and international institutions, trade liberalization and 'globalization'; not on the system of wage-labour itself.

The manifesto rejects free trade, but also the "right-wing alternative of stronger national capitalism, as well as the fascist alternative of an authoritarian state to take over central control from corporations". But what of the leftist or social democratic alternative of state-run capitalism? "Our struggles aim at taking back the means of production from the hands of both transnational and national capital, in order to create free, sustainable and community-controlled livelihoods, based on solidarity and people's needs and not on exploitation and greed." So not a centralized state-run capitalism, then. Is this 'small is beautiful' style self-management of wage-labour? Or communism? We find the answer later on in the draft: "Direct links between producers and consumers in both rural and urban areas, local currencies, interest-free credit schemes and similar instruments are the building blocks for the creation of local, sustainable, and self-reliant economies based on co-operation and solidarity rather than competition and profit."

Ambivalence towards the state is revealed earlier in the manifesto:

"Economic globalization has given birth to new forms of accumulation and power. The accumulation takes place on a global scale, at increasing speed, controlled by transnational corporations and investors. While capital has gone global, redistribution policies remain the responsibility of national governments, which are unable, and most of the times unwilling, to act against the interests of transnational capital."

The PGA web editors report that there are suggestions for amendments to the PGA manifesto, including "a more critical view of the state in the globalization process".

*Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French socialist often criticised by Marx, who established a People's Bank offering interest-free credit; the bank was soon forced into liquidation. In Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", he describes how in times of defeat the proletariat comes under the influence of "ever more equivocal figures" and "throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers' associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter's own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society's back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck."

The relation of Ya Basta! to the mobilizations

For some people in the UK, the approach of Ya Basta! - the white overalls tactic - has made them appear a refreshing new approach which is militantly 'anti-capitalist' yet which goes beyond both the lack of organization of the black bloc and the crude workerism of the Trots. An indication of the influence of Ya Basta! is the adoption of the white overalls tactic by other groups with semi-humorous names (e.g. Wombles in the UK and Wombats in Australia).[62] The political background of Ya Basta! (in the remnants of the autonomia movement) and their own inspiration (the Zapatistas) also appears to give them some credibility. The ability of Ya Basta! to achieve their aims - hi-jacking trains, running social centres, resisting the violence of the cops - adds further to their appeal: here, it would seem to many, is a tendency powerful enough to make 'anti-capitalist' desires a concrete reality.

Symbols for citizens

However, some have experienced the practice of Ya Basta! on demonstrations as hardly any less alienating than the old style Leninist parties whose 'outdated' approach they have supposedly transcended: they are essentially another hierarchical organization which, to achieve its aims, will effectively stifle other tendencies in the crowd.[63]

And what are those aims anyway? The reasons for dressing up in white padding and fronting a demo include that of supposedly exposing the brutality of the cops[64] and defining a new 'middle way' between violence and non-violence. In an Italian political climate in which violence is almost routine, Ya Basta! have to at least present themselves as confrontational to gain radical credibility.[65] Yet it is a symbolic form of confrontation; and indeed all their public statements stress the importance of 'symbols' and 'communication'. Ya Basta! hotly deny the accusations that their confrontations are pre-arranged with the cops, citing real injuries to their people (e.g. in Milan, January 2000) as evidence.[66] Yet after Genoa, the white overalls leader Luca Casarini, bleated that the police deceived the white overalls by disregarding mutually agreed guidelines![67] Ya Basta! sneer at the notion of the spectacle[68] because they do indeed think that the message counts for more than the practice that carries it. Their activity is oriented essentially towards 'civil society' via the mass media.

But who do they think is witnessing their actions through the media? Who are these poor souls who need Ya Basta!'s symbolic confrontations in order to grasp the nature of the cops? The rejection of a 'blue collar' identity on the part of Ya Basta! and the other white overalls is linked with a 'post-Fordist' despair that the working class itself can be the subject of history.[69] Hence, particularly in northern Italy, the audience to which Ya Basta! is attempting to appeal would appear to be the same middle class student constituency which defines the background of their leadership.

In the south of Italy where conditions are much harsher, more supporters of Ya Basta! are from working class backgrounds. But the involvement of more proletarian elements in Ya Basta! is part of the very recuperation we are describing. The focus on the media and aim of exposing the cops, which would seem superfluous to most working class people, derives from the leadership of the organization as a whole, which is middle class and university-educated.

If the emphasis on the image smacks of post-modernism, then it is consistent with Ya Basta!'s politics. They draw upon the Grundrisse, they say - but in the same way as the late Negri: both abandon the notion of the proletariat as the universal class capable of grasping and transcending capital as a totality. Hence they are certainly not 'communists'.[70] And not revolutionaries either: rather than abolishing the state and capital they are struggling - through such imaginary means as a 'general citizenship strike' - for the full realization of the bourgeois subject in the form of a citizens' income and other universal rights,[71] and with no sense that these are merely 'transitional demands'. The subject of this struggle is the 'multitude' - in particular, the 'invisibles', such as sans papiers, symbolized by the wearing of white overalls.

On the one hand Ya Basta! and the other white overalls take the post-autonomia/post-modernist line that difference and plurality - i.e. fragmentation - is the movement's strength, that all sorts of different tactics are necessary. They even refer to their support for and co-operation with the black bloc at Quebec and Gothenburg.[72] On the other hand, they have also attacked those whose tactics differ from their own. Some of them fought against black bloc types at Genoa, then blamed them for the police violence. Yet while Ya Basta! accuse the black bloc of being infiltrated by the cops, they themselves co-operate with the cops all the time. While a critique of the black bloc approach is necessary, Ya Basta!'s analysis of tactics here is as mistaken as it is disingenuous. The fact is that Ya Basta!'s 'symbolic' approach simply didn't work at Genoa because the cops decided to go in really hard: they were concerned that the crowds at Genoa did not disrupt the conference, as at previous gatherings. Where Ya Basta!'s methods did work it was in spite of the aims of the organizers: their shields, helmets, gas-masks and padding were used by participants not as mere defences but also as real weapons in response to the attacks of the cops.

Ya Basta! have been criticized by the SWP for being post-modern, for being elitist,[73] and for being ineffective.[74] Workers' Power criticize them for acting like cops.[75] Ya Basta! respond by accusing these leftists of being just old-style Leninists stuck in Marxist orthodoxy. All these criticisms are right. The surface differences between Ya Basta! and the Trots belie deeper similarities. Insofar as they are concerned that the struggle should be about such aims as fairer distribution (of alienated labour), rights of citizenship, democratic control of resources etc., then all operate within bourgeois thought. The Trots and the 'post-Leninists' of Ya Basta! are in this sense actually mirror images of each other.

Radicalism as reformism

Ya Basta! emerged from the social centres into which the autonomia movement retreated after the defeats of the late 1970s. In fact, one root of their propensity to negotiate with the cops may be the background of their leading cadre in a '80s Padova autonomia scene which had become so small that the remaining activists and the cops were virtually all on first name terms. Ya Basta!'s particular social and historical background has facilitated the take-up of particular features of autonomia as rationales for a recuperative reformism, a defeatism dressed as the new vision of 'social change'.[76] The most glaring examples of this are the institutional links which they trumpet as a sign of their success. The wider white overalls (Tute Bianche) movement in Italy, of which Ya Basta! are a part, has been flirting with the authorities since the early 1990s. Tute Bianche have strong financial links and arrangements with the authorities. These include their close relationship with and support from sections of the ex-Communist Party Rifondazione Comunista[77] and the state sponsorship of some of the social centres they are involved in. These formal links, as well as their dialogue with the authorities, their standing for local elections[78] and, worse still, their setting up of non-profit-making co-operatives (which have undermined the wages of other workers), the white overalls present as part of the construction of the 'civil society' capable of bringing about the reforms they desire.[79] What greater evidence can there be of the weakness of a movement?!

The threat of Ya Basta! is of recuperating the energy and activities of the more radical people in and around the anti-'globalization' mobilizations into a reformist project. With their manoeuvrings and opportunism, the white overalls may be regarded as just another dishonest racket by many in Italy. But in other countries they appear as the radical alternative that people have been seeking. Through their occupation of a 'symbolic location', a radical vision - embodied in licensed social centres - can apparently develop in partnership with the social relations of capital. Thus 'achievable' reform displaces total revolution as a movement aim.

At some of the 'anti-capitalist' events, the limits of Ya Basta!'s approach have been identified by some of Ya Basta!'s own number; and the leadership, with their post-modern leftist-reformist agenda, have not always been able to keep the rank and file in line. At Genoa, Ya Basta! tried again to enact an alternative to street-fighting with the cops. But on this occasion the notion of 'transcending violence and non-violence' appeared as what it is - empty rhetoric - and some 'white overalls' joined in thhe riot. From 'white overalls', with a history of eschewing missile-throwing, this was indeed 'doing what the other doesn't expect', though not in the way the Ya Basta! leadership would have liked.

From ideology to theory?

In the UK, where the recent mobilizations have often been interpreted more radically, as 'anti-capitalism' rather than anti-'globalization', there is a feeling among some that the high point of the 'movement' has already passed. The RTS street parties, which began in 1995, culminated in the exhilarating J18 'Carnival Against Capital'; but subsequent 'anti-capitalist' events - Euston N30 in 1999, Mayday 2000 and 2001 - have been smaller and less unambiguously successful. All these events differ from those at Seattle, Prague and Genoa, which continue to excite and interest people, in not being Summit-focused. Indeed, maybe the reason that the UK events have been increasingly less well-attended is the lack of a particular focus or target. The perception that the 'movement' is already declining reflects perhaps the same partial UK perspective that inevitably limits the analysis we have presented here.

Nevertheless, the Summit-centred mass mobilizations cannot in themselves constitute a movement, as impressive as they are. The attempt to link these mass mobilizations with particular expressions of resistance to economic rationalization we have seen in various countries - including strikes, land rights movements, student occupations - is clearly necessary. In this sense the ideologues are right. But to observe, correctly, that the various struggles are linked by a common relationship to global capital is not necessarily the same as observing if and how these various struggles are linking up in practice, as a collective subject.

The recognition that various activities and tendencies together comprise a movement is a necessary part of any movement's development. But to posit a unity which does not exist - to gloss over contradictions - cannot in itself serve to create a movement. Yet, for the ideologues, in order to achieve some form of hegemony it is necessary to claim that what has been happening is indeed a movement - and thus to freeze present limitations.

Thus the liberals, leftists and Ya Basta! have made strong claims that there is a single movement. Except perhaps for the black bloc, each of the tendencies we have discussed here have sought to define a particular movement subject which has come about in response to historically specific conditions. Defining those historically specific conditions has therefore been part of attempting to grasp the nature of the 'movement'. For the most part, their definitions of these conditions are ideological: 'globalization', 'neo-liberalism', the emergence of 'civil society' and the 'multitude' as the new subject. The black bloc, by contrast, defines itself simply through a tactic - street-fighting and damage to property - and thus would perhaps claim to be non-ideological. But, as we have seen, the tactic is itself ideological insofar as it is fetishized as a political identity. Each of the four tendencies we have looked at therefore has an ideological - distorted, one-sided - grasp of the supposed 'movement'. Each takes one aspect of the diverse struggles and practices - the (anti)brand, organized workers on strike, the invisible would-be citizen, smashing property and fighting the cops - as the secret of the whole.

But what is the whole - the essence - of the anti-'globalization' phenomenon?

One perspective would look just at the liberal middle class composition of the 'movement' leadership, its support from labour movement representatives, and their shared reformist programme. Based on this, one would be led to dismiss what has been happening as having little positive significance for the class struggle.

A different type of approach to this question would be to ignore the leadership and ideology entirely and focus just on the radical actions of many of the participants and the climate of resistance to the forces of the state they have engendered at the mobilizations. From this perspective, the anti-'globalization' phenomenon is indeed part of the class struggle.

We have argued previously that if there is to be an 'anti-capitalist movement' then it must constitute itself as the proletariat,[80] the determinate negation of capital. This would means not only breaking with the liberal-leftist hegemony, but also - and indeed crucially - connecting practically with other sections of the world proletariat.

In terms of breaking with the liberal-leftist hegemony, the emphasis on ideas and ideologues in the present article in part merely reflects the fact that the anti-'globalization' phenomenon exists day-to-day as a movement only in a political sense. As a cross-class and somewhat amorphous phenomenon, there is a struggle over ideology. Hence even if many of the participants' actions are contributions to the class struggle, the question of ideologies needs to be addressed.

In terms of connecting practically to the wider working class, of course the distinction should not be over-stated: many proletarian elements have been involved in the anti-'globalization' mobilizations. But they cannot connect to the wider working class abstractly - i.e., through the presence at the protests of the trade unions as working class representations. Such connections can only be made through struggle itself. The failure to do so up till now, and hence the limits of the mobilizations themselves, are in large part reflective of the low level of social struggles. This absence, in turn, is a product of the historical defeats in the class struggle that we have witnessed for the past 20 to 30 years. Hence the mobilizations against 'globalization' can become a social movement rather than merely a political phenomenon only to the extent that they become part of a more general resurgence of class struggle.

September 2001

[Aufheben 10]
[Aufheben]

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[1] Our intention here is not to deal with theories of 'globalization' but rather with the contradictions of the mobilizations themselves. While this fashionable term is used by everyone as if they know what it means, if one turns to the academic and journalistic scribblings about it, then one finds no agreement on what exactly it is. The use of 'globalization' as if it is unproblematic and common sense is a sign of the grip of ideology on the mobilizations. The question of whether one should embrace or reject globalization, with its focus on capital as circulation and finance, precisely avoids the real question of how we transcend the capitalist mode of production.

[2] For some, particularly those involved in the UK events coming out of the anti-roads and direct action movement, the emphasis is on 'direct action' rather than the ritualistic banner-waving and speeches normally associated with 'protest'. However, while direct action in the past (e.g. as associated with such groups as the IWW) had the distinct meaning of direct appropriation or blockage of capitalist reproduction, the distinction between protest and direct action today is not always so clear-cut. Moreover, while squatting to prevent road-building, the taking of a street for our parties and the bricking (and bricking up) of City offices - actions associated with the recent (pre-)history of UK 'anti-capitalism' - might be argued to be direct action (in that in each case we take from capital without asking), much of the activity taking place at most of the anti-'globalization' Summit events has taken the form of ritualistic marches, banner-waving and demands.

[3] ATTAC, the Association for a Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Assistance to Citizens, is a French pressure group claiming a number of affiliated organizations and some 35,000 individual members. As the name suggests, it concentrates on lobbying the French government for a tax on the international movement of money (Tobin tax) - something which that government is now considering. ATTAC's leading figures include Susan George (already well-known for her books on the relation between 'First World' corporate wealth and 'Third World' poverty), Christophe Aguiton (leftist trade unionist formerly associated with the Euromarch network) and José Bové (McDonalds-trashing farmer), all of whom have been active in denouncing 'violent' participants at the mobilizations.

[4] 'Seattle, Melbourne, Prague: Global action against the phantom known as "Globalization"', GegenStandpunkt, 2001. This interesting critique is limited by treating the 'movement' as a unity in which the statements of the anti-'globalization' liberals stand for the whole.

[5] 'The Aid Game', The Guardian, 24th July 2001, p. 17.

[6] "Mr Wolfensohn [head of the World Bank] has built alliances with everyone, from religious groups to environmentalists. His efforts have diluted the strength of the 'mobilization networks' and increased the power of the technical NGOs [which specialize in providing information and analysis] (for it is mostly these that the Bank has co-opted). From environmental policy to debt relief, NGOs are at the centre of World Bank policy. Often they determine it... [The WTO does not] disburse money for projects, making it harder to co-opt NGOs. But it could still try to weaken the broad coalition that attacked it in Seattle by reaching out to the mainstream and technical NGOs." ('The Non Governmental Order', The Economist, 9th December 1999).

[7] In fact, the German government has actually used its own football hooligan laws to prevent protesters travelling across international borders.

[8] On the topic of the problematic 'gains' of the post-war social democratic compromise, see our articles: 'Social Democracy: No Future?', Aufheben 7 (Autumn 1998); 'Unemployed Recalcitrance and Welfare Restructuring in the UK Today' in Stop the Clock: Critiques of the New Social Workhouse (Aufheben, Summer 2000); 'Re-Imposition of Work in Britain and the "Social Europe"', Aufheben 8 (Autumn1999).

[9] This was our argument for the radical if not revolutionary potential of the anti-roads movement: "...the key to the political significance of the No M11 campaign lies less in the immediate aims of stopping this one road and in the immediate costs incurred to capital and the state (although these are great achievements and great encouragement to others), and more in our creation of a climate of autonomy, disobedience and resistance." See 'The Politics of Anti-Road Struggle and the Struggles of Anti-Road Politics: The Case of the No M11 Link Road Campaign', in DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain, ed. George McKay (Verso, 1998), p. 107.

[10] See our Editorial in Aufheben 9 (Autumn 2000).

[11] For example in The Guardian, 24th July 2001 and in YearZero 6.

[12] The Guardian, 23rd July 2001.

[13] For example, through their co-operation with the Greek cops, the Italian authorities knew which, among all the Greek coaches and other vehicles entering the country, contained the liberals who had been involved in some of the co-ordinating activities beforehand. They detained, searched and expelled this group while most of the street-fighting anarchists got through.

[14] This acknowledgement of divisions within the state - of internal conflict within and between the political organs of capital - is based on our understanding of capital as a unity based on difference. We do not accept, and nor are we referring here, to the liberal argument in support of the liberal-democratic tendencies in the state and against fascist elements - as in the suggestion that the expunging of the right-wing in the police moves

[15] See We Are Winning! The Battle of Seattle - A Personal Account (Riot Tourists, 2000). There is a parallel with the dominant tendencies in the 1980s anti-nuclear movement; see Strange Victories by Midnight Notes (Elephant Editions, 1985).

[16] As we have witnessed, there is nothing more violent than the non-violent type resisting those who don't share their morality!

[17] See 'The Bonding Properties of Tear Gas' by Naomi Klein and 'A Turning Point for Activists' by Stuart Laidlaw.

[18] This was recognized in distorted form in 'Mayday! Mayday!', the NoLogo-influenced left-liberal documentary shown on Channel 4, which offered the following rhetorical question on one of the Mayday 2001 participants who didn't fit the purely humorous and harmless image of the event being projected by these journalists: "Would a true anti-capitalist turn up for Mayday in a Nike jacket?"

[19] See also our articles on the development and potential of the anti-roads and Criminal Justice Bill (CJB) movements: 'Auto-Struggles: The Developing War Against the Road Monster', Aufheben 3 (Summer 1994); 'Kill or Chill? Analysis of the Opposition to the Criminal Justice Bill', Aufheben 4 (Summer 1995); 'The Politics of Anti-road Struggle and the Struggles of Anti-road Politics: The Case of the No M11 Link Road Campaign', op. cit.

[20] "'Neo-liberal' ideology is an expression of the freedom of global finance capital. In response to the class struggles of the '60s and '70s and the difficulties in maintaining accumulation, states took actions (e.g., by abandoning Bretton Woods) which in effect created the conditions for the development of the relative autonomy of global finance capital. Through taking this more autonomous form, capital could outflank areas of working class strength. A situation was created in which governments of nation states could claim that they had no freedom of manoeuvre but rather had to compete in terms of labour flexibility, social costs etc. to maintain competitiveness and attract investment." See 'Unemployed Recalcitrance and Welfare Restructuring in the UK Today', op. cit., p. 15.

[21] No Logo, p. 441.

[22] This refers to what has also been called 'subvertising': the practice of reworking advertising billboards.

[23] As in the case of a number of other commentators, Klein's account of RTS is littered with errors.

[24] No Logo, p. xxi.

[25] No Logo, p. 441.

[26] But see Klein's interesting article on Quebec, 'The Bonding Properties of Tear Gas', op. cit.

[27] No Logo, p. 318.

[28] Perhaps at least until it becomes ritualized.

[29] The latter's spontaneous 'anti-capitalist' action is, for the middle class ideologues like Klein, no more than 'soccer hooliganism'

[30] This green journalist developed his career on the back of the direct action scene before partially disowning it when it ceased to accept his advice on non-violence and respect for property. The title of his book, The Captive State: The Corporate Take-Over of Britain, perhaps says it all about his nationalist, petty-bourgeois, statist politics.

[31] Walden Bello, director of the organization 'Focus on the Global South', is known for documenting the record of the IMF, World Bank and WTO in deepening poverty and inequality; he argues that they cannot be reformed and calls instead for 'deglobalization'. Kevin Danaher is editor and writer of a number of books on aspects of 'globalization' and the resistance to it in the USA.

[32] Even at the level of direct mimicking of the tone and language of the publicity material ('No issue is single!'). However, Seattle was much broader in its appeal.

[33] We Are Winning! The Battle of Seattle: A Personal Account, op. cit.

[34] The condemnation of the black bloc soon became muted however in the recognition that the behaviour of the police was the real issue.

[35] Seattle N30. Black Bloc Communiqué.

[36] Seattle N30. Black Bloc Communiqué.

[37] Post Seattle, Zerzan exploited the media's interest in him as the leading ideologue of primitivism.

[38] Inpeg primarily consisted of American activists and some Czech anarchists.

[39] On the day the RTS-'creative' types were unhappy with this column because of the assignment of Trots and other leftists to it so they formed a fourth pink-and-silver column of their own.

[40] Check www.vermont.indymedia.org for this and many other reports from Quebec City.

[41] Italian base unions. For an account of their origins see The COBAS by David Brown (Echanges et Mouvement, 1988). The section which had the joint demonstration with the black bloc, prepared as it was to confront the cops and to attack the excluded zone, was apparently the most militant tendency in the COBAS.

[42] The term casseur means literally wrecker, but is better translated as hooligan, and was adopted proudly by violent protesters subverting its pejorative use by the press during the movement of 1994 in France. Some French black bloc autonomists in this movement also use the term to describe their actions, with the same emphasis. See "Nous sommes tous des Casseurs" - Youth Revolt in France, March 1994

[43] See www.italy.indymedia.org for the long discussion list on the main page devoted to the issue of the black bloc.

[44] We apologize to foreign readers for whom Trotskyists are not only boring but also insignificant relative to other leftist groups. But, from the British context with which we are familiar, the established left, apart from the Labour Party, is effectively the Trotskyists.

[45] The SWP were hampered by the fact that their opportunism has always been wedded to a crass workerism. Thus while the CJB was clearly aimed at marginal groups (travellers, hunt sabs, raves, anti-road protesters), the SWP, through their front, the 'Coalition Against the Criminal Justice Act', insisted unconvincingly that its real target was workers' picket lines.

[46] Benn is the former MP and figurehead of the Labour left.

[47] E.g. in the 'Directory of organizations' in Anti-Capitalism: A Guide to the Movement (Bookmarks, 2001). In fact the main organizing group was mostly anarchist.

[48] Credit where it's due, though: the SWP's papers came in very handy as kindling for the fires people lit to keep warm!

[49] Some would argue that the first 'anti-capitalist' mobilizations were neither Seattle nor J18 but the events in May 1998 against the WTO in Geneva and the G7 in Birmingham.

[50] E.g. Chris Harman, 'Anti-capitalism: Theory and Practice' in International Socialism, 88 (Autumn 2000), p. 4. Also the 'Chronology' in Anti-Capitalism: A Guide to the Movement (op. cit.) starts with Seattle.

[51] See the reports in Socialist Worker, No. 1759, (28th July 2001) and the anonymous critique 'The SWP, the Black Block [sic] and Italian Anarchism'.

[52] The SWP haven't yet dropped 'drop the debt', but have been using this liberal demand - e.g., on their Genoa placards and banners - as part of their attempt to link the liberal and 'anti-capitalist' tendencies.

[53] "[connecting the different elements of the 'anti-capitalist movement'] means providing credible and united socialist alternatives to neo-liberalism at the ballot box to prove that there are alternative conceptions of society on offer." Chris Nineham, 'An Idea whose Time has come' in International Socialism, 91 (Summer 2001), p. 30. There seems to be a tension among its members around what the Socialist Alliance should be; while some want it to be the new workers' party, others want it to remain a popular front (in fact it isn't that popular at all since there is hardly anyone else in it beyond the members of the various Leninist sects).

[54] An example of this comes in a quote from a Merseyside dockworker interviewed for Critique, 30-31, 1998:

You say unable to go back to the old compromise, but do we want to go back? I don't think I do! I don't particularly want a politics centred on "the right to work at all costs". I don't want to see my kids struggling for crap jobs. I think we're actually going through a revolutionary period, one where we should be saying "fuck you and your jobs and your slave labour". If wage labour's slave labour, then freedom from wage labour is total freedom... [H]ow many socialists within the political groups that have supported us have or would build a political strategy out of the refusal of wage work? I haven't come across any, but I know that's what Reclaim the Streets activists consistently argue and find that a breath of fresh air... Yer know, when we unite with people like Reclaim the Streets, we have to take on board what they are saying too, which is: "Get a life. Who wants to spend their days working on the production line like that famous poster of Charlie Chaplin depicting modern times?" I think this is a concept the labour movement has got to examine and take on board. (pp. 223-5).

[55] 'Social Democracy: No Future?', Aufheben 7 (Autumn 1998).

[56] There is a useful account of the involvement of workers in the Seattle events in 'Promises and Pitfalls of the "Battle of Seattle"' in Internationalist Perspective 37 (Autumn 2000): "American longshoremen [i.e., dockworkers] all along the West Coast shut down every port in solidarity with the protests on N30... several thousand union members in the union parade saw what was really going on and actively broke through the 'security' goon line to join up in active solidarity with the radicals." (p. 12).

[57] E.g. Chris Harman, 'Anti-Capitalism: Theory and Practice' in International Socialism, 88 (Autumn 2000), p. 40.

[58] See 'The Myth of Working Class Passivity' in Radical Chains, 2 (Winter 1990).

[59] One example - in this case of Militant, another Trotskyist sect, - is the 1990 poll tax riot. While the leadership condemned our side's violence and threatened to 'name names' to the cops, some of the rank and file - even some of the stewards - acted as proles rather than hacks by fighting the cops alongside everyone else.

[60] For one account of the threat of the SWP to the 'movement', see 'Vampire Alert! The Revolution will not be Bolshevised' in Do or Die! 9 (December 2000).

[61] An example of how the SWP can turn our actions into boring politics comes from the first post-Genoa picket of the Italian embassy in London (August 2001). Everyone else in the crowd was standing and moving freely in the area, but when the SWP (Globalise Resistance) arrived instead of joining the crowd they separated themselves from it by going straight behind the crowd barriers erected by the police!

[62] Wombles = 'White Overall Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggles'; Wombats = 'White Overall Mobile Buffer Against Truncheon Strikes'.

[63] See 'Ya Basta(rds)!', a report from the Yellow Route at Prague, in Do or Die, 9 (December 2000).

[64] See 'Basta la Vista' by Arthur Neslen in Now magazine.

[65] Politically in Italy, Ya Basta!'s supposed 'middle way' means suspicion from both the right (for their association with autonomia, linked by the right with 'terrorism') and the left (for their institutional links - discussed below).

[66] For the accusations, see 'Unmask Simulations in White Overalls' (in the Italian anarchist publication Umanita Nova and also at http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos07022.html). For Ya Basta!'s response, see 'Who are the White Overalls? And Why are They Slandered by People who Call Themselves "Anarchists"?'

[67] 'In Genoa we expected that more or less the same thing as usual would happen. They deceived us. Try and remember the meetings of the Genoa Social Forum with Scajola and Ruggiero: none of the guidelines agreed upon were respected by them. The police forces used firearms, even though they had assured us that they would not be. The right to demonstrate which Ruggiero agreed was an inalienable right which was run over under the wheels of the armoured police cars.' ('No More White Overalls Anymore', Interview with Luca Casarini, in Il Manifesto).

[68] See 'Who are the White Overalls?', op. cit.

[69] 'We are not the traditional blue-overall working class, but a new post-fordist productive subject. We are the faceless or invisible of the society and the white overalls give us visibility in the spectacular mediatic space.' Finnish white overall introductory statement, PGA European meeting, Milan 2000.

[70] See 'Who are the White Overalls?', op. cit.

[71] See, for example, 'Basta la Vista' by Arthur Neslen, op. cit.

[72] 'Who are the White Overalls?', op. cit.

[73] Alex Callinicos, 'The Future', In Anti-Capitalism: A Guide to the Movement, op. cit., p. 396.

[74] Socialist Worker, No. 1759, (28th July 2001).

[75] [Anti]Capitalism: From Resistance to Revolution, p. 16.

[76] The point is well expressed by Neil Fernandez, drawing on arguments made by the group Insurrezione: Autonomia's "theoretical understanding of the fact that the working class necessarily holds power which is tendentially disruptive of the realisation of capitalist imperatives, so long as it remains untied to a full understanding of the means of integration, can quite feasibly allow a movement from the original 'workerism' (operaismo) of the 1960s towards a positive appraisal of various kinds of accommodation, or at least to an abdication from the need to criticise them wholesale. The idea of global communist revolution can then be shifted towards a concept of the 'permanent' contestational occupation of a militant or sub-cultural 'area of autonomy', corresponding in effect to a form of self-management."

Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR: A Marxist Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), p. 41.

[77] Not only links with the Stalinists but also, to some extent, with that other great Italian institution, the Catholic Church: one of the leading white overalls is a priest!

[78] Ya Basta! deny the widely-stated claim that Luca Casarini (spokesperson for a number of social centres and figurehead for Tute Bianche) ran for parliament (as a Rifondazione candidate) in last year's national elections. Farina (from the Leoncavallo social centre), another leading member of Ya Basta!, ran as a local councillor. On this, Ya Basta! deny only that Farina was a Rifondazione candidate, stating instead that he and "many other comrades entered as independent candidates" ('Who are the White Overalls?', op. cit.).

[79] 'Who are the White Overalls?', op. cit.

[80] Editorial in Aufheben 8 (Autumn, 1999).

Behind the 21st century intifada

intifada1[2].jpg

Introduction
As we go to press, the USA is making a serious effort to salvage the Oslo 'peace process', as a central part of their strategy to mobilize and impose a unity on the world bourgeoisie behind 'the war on terrorism'. This follows a year in which it allowed Israel and the Palestinians to sink into a one-sided, depressing and bloody conflict. The perception of America's sponsorship of Israeli state terrorism against Palestinians is an important factor in the ambivalent or even supportive response by many in the Middle East and elsewhere to the terrorism directed at the heart of American military and financial power. This has thrown the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into sharp relief, making an analysis of the forces which drive the new Intifada more urgent than ever.

When the World Trade Centre and Pentagon were attacked, the so-called 'Al Aqsa Intifada' had been raging for about a year and appeared to have effectively sabotaged the attempt at bourgeois peace represented by the Oslo accords. This has come about at a massive cost to the Palestinian proletariat, which has suffered many more deaths and injuries than in the 1987-93 Intifada. In particular the large number of fatalities among the Palestinian population inside 'Israel proper' has brought the Intifada home in a way not seen before, with places like Jaffa and Nazareth erupting in general strikes and riots, and the main road through the northern Galilee strewn with burning tyres in the first days of the uprising. On the other side of the Green Line, the Israeli policy of assassination has steadily increased the death toll, with each day providing ever more desensitizing details of the horrors of nationalism and repression.

What has really distinguished the recent Intifada from the previous one however, is the existence of a Palestinian statelet, whose policing role and client status have been thrown into relief by the uprising. The Israeli state began reoccupying the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) controlled areas, apparently temporarily. Whatever the ultimate intentions of the Israeli state, these incursions served as a brutal reminder to the PNA that it is Israel's creation, and what they create they can also destroy.

The purpose of this article is not to predict future developments in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but to put the recent Intifada in historical context, and to understand it from the perspective of class struggle. The response of many to the Palestinian problem tends to take the form of an abstract call for solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers. At the same time, the Leninist left legitimizes the nationalist ideology that divides the working class, by affirming the 'right of national self determination' and offering 'critical support' for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).[1] At the time of writing, the Intifada shows little sign of superseding this nationalist ideology. The Arab and Jewish workers are 'uniting and fighting' - apparently with their bourgeoisies and against each other.

This article will outline some of the material reasons why concrete examples of Jewish-Arab proletarian solidarity are few and far between. Working class Jews have benefited materially from the occupation, and from the inferior labour market position of Palestinians, both in Israel and in the occupied territories. Since the mid 1970s this settlement (which we will call Labour Zionism) has been in retreat and, increasingly, Jewish workers have faced economic insecurity. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was necessary in order to accommodate the Jewish working class in Israel. The settlements in the occupied territories have played the role of social housing to compensate for the increasing economic insecurity of Jewish workers, and this has become an intractable problem facing the architects of bourgeois peace.

A typical leftist position is to call for a "democratic, socialist state in Palestine in which Arabs and Jews can live in peace".[2] This might appear relatively reformist to us, but a similar call for a "secular, democratic, bi-national state" is regarded as a wildly revolutionary demand in Israel - even by relatively radical activists. Since the start of the century the struggles of both groups of workers have more and more come to be refracted through the prism of nationalism. Nevertheless the dismal spectacle of proletarian killing proletarian is not predestined; nationalism in the Middle East emerged and is maintained in response to the militancy of the working class. For us, the ideology of nationalism, as it has manifested itself in the Middle East, can only be understood in relation to the emergence of the oil proletariat, and the US ascendancy in the region. For example, the forms taken by Palestinian nationalism - notably the PLO - were a practical response by the exiled Palestinian bourgeoisie to an openly rebellious Palestinian proletariat. The US-brokered 'peace process' developed in recognition of the PLO's recuperative role in the Intifada, while the collapse of Oslo, and the apparent dramatic resurgence of Islamist antagonism towards the USA, is linked to the PLO's failure to deliver even the basic demands of Palestinian nationalism.

Therefore, first, we need to understand something of the international context in the Middle East, in particular the hegemonic role of the USA in the region.

The 1914-18 World War first showed the military value of oil. In its aftermath, Germany's influence in the Middle East was drastically reduced, and it became apparent to all the major powers that the Ottoman Empire could no longer sustain itself (due in part to an Arab revolt which had been aided by the British in 1917). Britain and France agreed to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence, with Britain controlling Palestine. While this was ostensibly to prevent Russia entering the region, Britain also meant to keep French ambitions in Syria and Lebanon contained, guarantee access to the Suez Canal and the keep the flow of oil from Iraq unchallenged.

By 1947 the British position in Palestine was no longer tenable, given its decline as an imperial power. Exhausted by the Second World War, attacked by militant Jewish settlers and, more and more, undermined in the foreign policy by the United States, the UK staggered on until its engineered 'withdrawal' in 1948, when the Israeli state was created.

That year saw the expansion and consolidation of the Israeli state through war on its Arab neighbours, and the ascendancy of the US as the dominant foreign power in the region. The USA's strategic interests were threefold: to halt the spread of the USSR into the Mediterranean, to protect the now-identified oilfields of the Arabian peninsula, and lastly to stymie any continuation of British or French influence in the Middle East.

In the immediate post-war years, the US saw the old European powers as its main rivals in the Middle East, rather than the USSR. The 1953 CIA-backed Palavi coup in Iran - a response to Iran's nationalisation of British-owned oilfields - had the effect of transferring 40% of Britain's oil to the USA. The coup turned Iran into a US client state in the 'soft underbelly' of the USSR's southern border, a bastion of 'western culture' in the Middle East. Similarly, in the 1956 Suez crisis, the USA prevented Britain and France from reasserting their national interests in Egypt, leaving these old imperial powers to play second fiddle to America in the Middle East.

However, with Egypt brought into the Soviet orbit, following the Free Officers' coup in 1952, and the signing of an arms deal with Czechoslovakia in 1955, the US realized the Soviet Union was attempting to flex its muscles in the region. Containment of the USSR now became the official watchword of US foreign policy, which meant creating obstacles to Soviet influence in the Middle East. The underlying policy was protection at all costs of US economic interests.

America's economic interests in the Middle East
America's primary interest in the region is of course oil. As well as placing the USA at the top of the imperialist pecking order, the Second World War confirmed the Middle East's strategic centrality as a key source of oil. A 1945 State Department report called Saudi Arabia "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history." Little has changed since, except that, as America underwent its dynamic Fordist expansion in the two decades after World War Two, the oil acquired even greater value.

As car production and the petrochemical industry replaced railway construction as a key locus of expansion, capital shifted from coal to oil, as the key raw material. Sources of oil, especially the Middle East with its vast reserves, became crucial. Its value thrown into relief by the energy crisis in the 1970s, the US has stopped at nothing to secure the region's oil before and above anybody else. A secondary, but not unimportant, source of profit for the US is realized through the flow of Arab petrodollars to North America in the form of military purchases, construction projects, bank deposits and other investments, a phenomena which dates from the early 1970s.

Pan-Arab nationalism and the oil producing proletariat
At first, the newborn state of Israel played little part in the USA's considerations. Indeed, during the Suez crisis, America had sided with Egypt against Israel's expansionism. It was not until the rise of a more assertive Arab nationalism in the 1950s that the US began to see the potential of a developed strategic partnership with 'the Zionist entity.'

The growth of oil production in the Middle East had led to a rapid modernization of previously traditional societies. A surrogate bourgeoisie emerged from the military and the bureaucracy, committed to national accumulation and oriented towards the USSR's model of capitalist development and opposed to 'imperialism'.

The most coherent form of anti-imperialism was 'Pan-Arab' nationalism. Pan-Arabism's origins lay in the Ottoman Empire, which had united Arabs under Turkish rule, but which collapsed in the aftermath of the First World War. The Middle East was then carved up by imperialist powers intent on the conquest and control of new markets and strategically important raw materials. However the new borders went against the grain of the 'common language, customs and traditions' maintained by the inhabitants of the former Ottoman Empire. In the Pan-Arabist ideology, a 'natural community', based on the idealization of pre-capitalist social relations, serves to neutralize class antagonisms. Though a modernist political movement, Pan-Arabism was able to use this imagined 'natural community' to further its modernising project, and to recuperate class struggle.

As a nationalist movement Pan-Arabism served to divide and to co-opt the region's working class, thus helping to promote capitalist development. Despite this, its orientation towards the USSR and its state capitalist tendencies threatened the particular interests of Western capital.[3] Although these interests were by no means one and the same for different Western capitals, in the long run Arab nationalism's state capitalist tendencies threatened to deny western capital unhindered access to the Middle Eastern oil fields.

But Arab nationalism, in the moments where it has coalesced into a combative Pan-Arabism has been beaten into the dust by Israel. And economically, the bourgeoisies of the various Arab states have, sooner or later, found it difficult to resist the huge economic support a realignment with America would mean.[4] The difficulty for the Arab bourgeoisie (and the PLO is no exception), overtly Pan-Arabist or not, if they wish to avoid domestic challenges has been how to credibly align itself with America while appearing to keep alive the dream of Arab independence and the destruction of Israel.

An expression of this tension was the OPEC oil price hike in 1973, which was seen as a response to the October War between Israel and the Arab states. However the demands of the oil-producing proletariat meant that in some countries, a disproportionate amount of the higher oil prices imposed by OPEC were being spent on working class needs, rather than on the high levels of technology needed for industrial development.[5]

America's strategic imperatives hardened around two perspectives: first, containing the perceived threat of the Soviet Union, and second, crushing or, where possible, co-opting the various expressions of Arab nationalism which swept the region.

In addition to its customary method of foreign intervention - support enthusiastically the most credible pro-western faction of the bourgeoisie, co-opt as much of any popular movement as it was possible to do, and have the unrepentant troublemakers eliminated - the US devised a sophisticated way of portraying the Middle East as a part of the world that was in permanent crisis and which, in any case, was impossible to understand. US policy then became one of 'crisis management' and 'bringing peace to the world's number one trouble spot.' Whatever the specific crisis, the oil and the petrodollars kept flowing from east to west, and the United States has not been compelled to strive for lasting bourgeois peace in the region.[6]

Palestinian Nationalism as the bastard offspring of Labour Zionism
Although, Israel is near the Middle Eastern oil fields, it has no oil fields of its own, which has added to its strategic vulnerability in relation to its neighbours. However, its image, as 'a bastion of Western culture in a sea of backwardness ruled by petty despots',[7] has been used by the USA to maintain control over the oil fields.

From the late 1950s onwards, dramatically rising amounts of financial and military aid made it plain that the US saw Israel as a strategic asset which counterbalanced, and indeed was capable of overwhelming the Soviet client states of Egypt and Syria. The wars of 1967 and 1973 demonstrated to the Arab world exactly how powerful Israel had become. It was now the region's superpower. The Israeli airforce, especially, could completely subjugate the eastern Mediterranean area.

Israel also had a second use for US policymakers. Stung by its Vietnam experience, and often prevented from intervening in the political hotspots of the world as it would like by domestic opinion or concerns over its international standing, the US frequently used Israel, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s as a conduit through which it could supply, or could entice Israel to supply, money and arms to various counterinsurgency movements. The ruling classes of Zaire, South Africa, Angola, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Indonesia were some of those who benefited from timely Israeli aid in their attempts to remain safe from challenge.

While the US bourgeoisie has tended to be pro-Zionist, Israel has 'never been enough' to guarantee the security of their interests. They have had to engage directly with the Arab states, and this has sometimes proved to be a high risk strategy, which has not always gone the United States' way. While the Gulf states and Turkey have been consistently unquestioning about their role as clients, Arab nationalism, 'socialism', and Islamism have each caused various Arab nations to take an intransigent position in their relations with the US. Egypt under Nasser, Syria under Hafez al-Asad, and Iran under the mullahs are some of the examples.

Currently two areas are still giving US policymakers sleepless nights. The first is the rise of Islamism, which was initially promoted by the USA as a counterweight to the USSR, but has become almost impossible - or at least very difficult - for the US and its client states to recuperate. From Syria to Jordan to Egypt, the jails of the Middle East are stuffed with radical, anti-American Islamists.

The second problem is the recurring question of the Palestinians. Israel's creation of a large Palestinian diaspora throughout the Middle Eastern oil-producing proletariat led sections of the Arab bourgeoisie to take a radical anti-US stance. As the 'guard-dog' of US imperialism, Israel provided the external threat, which unified the emergent Arab bourgeoisies and mobilized Arab workers. Whenever the Arab bourgeoisie has faced the threat of proletarian antagonism, it has been able to deflect the anger of the proletariat against 'the real enemy', Israel. After 1967, the PLO became the main political expression of Pan-Arabism.

In the face of Pan-Arab hostility, the Israeli bourgeoisie has sought military alliances with non-Arab Islamic countries. However, Israel's association with Iran was cut short by the overthrow of the Palavi dynasty in 1979. The new Shi'ite regime was, if anything, more vehemently anti-western than the Arab nationalists.[8] More recently Israel has found in Turkey a new non-Arab ally in the region.

So the form of Pan-Arab nationalism, which was the ideological basis for Palestinian nationalism, has been bound up with and maintained by Zionism.[9] Like its nemesis, Zionism was also a nationalist political movement based on the idealized 'natural community', in this case of Jews.[10] It is impossible to understand the present uprising, and the nationalist ideology which pervades it, without understanding the nationalism it sought to has oppose: Zionism. Until relatively recently its dominant form could be called Labour Zionism, to which we now turn.

Labour Zionism and the militancy of the European Jewish working class
Labour Zionism has traditionally been based around various big institutional structures, mainly the Histadrut and the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The Histadrut is a state run 'trade union', which has always also been a major employer. Even before the creation of Israel it was an embryonic department of labour that also fulfilled the functions of a trade union for some sectors of Jewish workers. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established in 1903 as a fund for collecting donations from Zionists. Its main function has been as the national land administrating body. It bought large amounts of land in the name of 'all Jews' and controlled much of the land gained in the '48 land grab. JNF land could only be let to Jews and worked on by Jews and became state owned in '48. Eighty per cent of Israelis live on land that was initially JNF owned, much of which is still controlled by the JNF.

The early Zionists were a bourgeois pressure group, who spent their time lobbying various European leaders (including Mussolini). Unlike most European Jews, these Zionists identified themselves as anti communists. They saw their allies in 'honest anti semites' who would give them land to rid themselves of the Jewish 'revolutionary menace'. They also courted western European Jewish capitalists who wanted to avoid the continued immigration of militant Eastern European Jews into their countries (which they saw as compromising assimilation and encouraging anti semitism) and colonial states who could give or sell them land (which didn't necessarily have to be Palestine at this point). However, Zionism always needed to be a mass movement and the early Zionists were happy to be flexible with their political allegiances to facilitate this.

In its early days, Zionism was irrelevant to most working class European Jews, whose allegiance tended to be to the revolutionary workers' movement sweeping the continent.[11] As well as the militant Jewish proletariat many middle class Eastern European Jews found that, when faced with right wing anti-semitism, the only place for them was the left.

In order to appeal to this constituency, Zionists groups were forced to emphasize their more 'socialist' aspects.[12] These aspects converged with the desire, expressed in Zionism, to return to the pre-capitalist communal ties, which formed the very basis of 'Jewish identity'. The more 'social democratic' elements of Zionist thought became prominent and prevailed as the dominant form of Zionism, and this is what allowed Zionist groups to gain a foothold in the Jewish workers' movement.

Advent of Labour Zionism in Palestine
The early Jewish settlements were more or less commercial ventures, which tended to end up employing Arab workers (often newly proletarianized due to Zionist land purchases).[13] New Jewish immigrants looking for work sometimes even found themselves looking for casual work on the same basis as the Arabs.[14]

The institutions of Labour Zionism began to become ascendant in the Palestinian Jewish community around the 1920's. There had been an ongoing struggle since around 1905 when, after the failure of the 1905 revolution, many leftist Russian Jews turned to Zionism. The second wave of Zionist immigration consisted mainly of young, educated, middle class, leftist Jews who wanted to return to the land and work as pioneers. They became disillusioned with Zionist colonization, which they saw as too capitalist to live up to their hopes. In opposition to the Jewish capitalists, who were happy to employ Arab labour power in so far as it was cheaper, they introduced the idea that Jewish land and business should be worked exclusively by Jewish labour. If a part of modern anti-semitism is a pseudo-anti-capitalism, in which the Jew is equated with the abstract side of the commodity form - abstract labour not concrete labour, 'rootless and cosmopolitan' finance and circulation, rather than grounded, nationally based production[15] - at one level Zionism, with emphasis on productive labour and going back to the land, is a response. It was thought that, in an exclusively Jewish state, Jews would not be concentrated in certain trades and professions, but play a full part in the capitalist division of labour. Hence their slogans were: 'the conquest of land' and 'the conquest of labour'.

This led to a conflict between the older settlers and the new immigrants.[16] Jewish bosses who carried on employing Arab labour were picketed by the Zionist trade unions.[17] The conflict was muted by the Zionist organisation, which used the large part of its funds to subsidize Jewish wages so that employers could use Jews as cheaply as Arabs. However there were still strikes. In response to this, the right wing opposition organised scab labour into a 'national trade union' with the help of Polish petit bourgeois immigrants, rich farmers and factory owners. They also carried out attacks on working class organisations.[18] However, the left wing 'conquest of labour' Zionists got a big boost from the Palestinian general strikes of 1936, when Jewish workers scabbed on striking Palestinians.

By the 1920s the Histadrut organised more than three quarters of Jewish workers and was the main employer after the British government. It also ran the labour exchanges, and was very closely linked to the sales and production co-operatives. With all this structure the Histadrut was a vital basis of the Zionist organisations 'quasi government' which organised education, immigration, economic and cultural affairs. So, even before 1948, the Zionist state was becoming rooted in corporatist social democratic forms.[19]

Zionist ethnic stratification
After the massive land grab in 1948, the perennial problem of a Jewish labour shortage emerged for the first time. European bourgeois Jews presented Zionism to their funders and supporters as the solution to the militancy of Jewish workers. However, most Jews, it turned out, didn't want to go to Israel, and were more tempted by America or Western Europe. European Jews were put off by the tiny state's territorial disadvantage in relation to its hostile Arab neighbours, which in turn fed the imperative to expand: unlike Egypt to the West and Syria to the North East, Israel could not afford to lose a single acre of land. The consequent militarization of Israeli society was a further disincentive to potential immigrants.

This problem was partially solved by the immigration of Middle Eastern and North African Jews. However, many oriental Jews had no desire to move to Israel, and were even opposed to Zionism, because it made their situation more precarious, especially in Arab countries. Much of the Arab bourgeoisie was attempting to promote pan Arabism as an opposition to Zionism, although the oriental Jews were not subjected to anything like systematic genocide on the level of the holocaust, there were pogroms in some Middle Eastern countries. The establishment of Israel, the 1948 war and the subsequent increase in Arab nationalism further destabilized the position of the oriental Jews, and many of them emigrated to Israel.[20]

The oriental Jews were often proletarianized in the process of their dislocation. Those who had professional qualifications found that these were not recognized in Israel and assets were often taken on arrival. In stark contrast, the occidental Jews received preferential treatment in housing and employment, and some were able to use individual war reparations from Germany as money capital. Frequently oriental Jews were also placed in the transit camps and development towns which were closest to the borders, and which were overcrowded as well as dangerous. In the case of the mainly North African Jews dumped in border towns like Musrara, the state turned a blind eye when they squatted in the houses of Arabs displaced by the expropriatory war of 1948. So in practice the oriental Jews ended up guarding the borders against the Arabs. So the application of labour Zionism in Israel was based on ethnic stratification of the working class, not just between Jews and Arabs, but also between occidental and oriental Jews. It was the labour of the oriental Jews, as well as the few Palestinians who remained, that became the driving force to 'make the desert bloom' into a modern capitalist state.

However Israel has never had a 'normal' capitalist economy, due to the disproportionate role played by overseas financial support. From the 1950s, about a billion marks was contributed annually by West Germany as collective reparations for the Nazi holocaust. More significant has been the contribution from the USA. 'In 1983, Israel with only 3 million inhabitants received 20% of all-American aid. In other words, each Israeli family received the equivalent of 2,400 dollars from the US government. However as the most developed capitalist state in the region, the Israeli bourgeoisie had accumulated its own potential gravediggers, in the form of a combative working class.

Jewish working class resistance and the imperative to expand
Unlike many other countries in the Middle East, Israel has always had a relatively large working class concentrated in a small area. Ethnic stratification has safeguarded against the emergence of a homogenous proletariat confronting Israeli capital. However, in spite of this, the Israeli working class showed itself to be combative. The major feature of class struggle in this period was oriental Jews contesting their subordinate position in Israeli society. Throughout the 1950s there were riots in the overwhelmingly oriental transit camps about 'bread and work', which frequently turned against the police. In 1959 the 'Wadi Salib Riots' started in a slum of Haifa and immediately spread to other places with a large Moroccan Jewish population.

As in Western European states, class conflicts in Israel were mediated through social democratic institutions. However many of the militant oriental Jews saw the Histadrut and the Labour Party as the enemy, and so these institutions were often under attack. On one occasion, in 1953 the Histadrut office in Haifa was subject to an arson attack by oriental Jewish demonstrators, who saw its naked corporatism as one of the embodiments of their subordination to the occidental Jews.

In the early 1960s, the Israeli economy was in a slump, partly due to the drying up of the German war reparations, which had provided Israeli capital with its initial kick-start. Many of the immigrants, who had moved to Israel expecting a better life, now faced growing unemployment. Jewish workers continued to make life difficult for the Israeli bourgeoisie, with 277 strikes in 1966 alone.[21] With the burning of the red flag (which symbolized the hegemony of the Labour Party) becoming a routine feature at dockers' demonstrations, it was clear that the social democratic forms of Labour Zionism were failing to recuperate the struggles of Jewish workers.

The post-1967 boom
After the 1967 war the Israeli State not only still found itself surrounded by hostile Arab states, but also ruling over the Palestinian population of the occupied territories. A third of the population ruled by Israeli State was now Palestinian. In the face of these internal and external threats the continued survival of the Zionist State demanded unity of all Israeli Jews - both occidental and oriental. But to unite all Jews behind the Israeli State required that the previously excluded oriental Jews were integrated within an extended labour Zionist settlement. Conveniently, the very same circumstances that demanded the expansion of the labour Zionist settlement also provided the conditions necessary to carry out such a major social restructuring.

Firstly, the 1967 war had forced the USA to commit itself to Israel as a counterweight to the growing pan-Arab nationalism that was aligning itself to the USSR. Secondly, the occupation of the West Bank provided Israel with a large pool of highly exploitable Palestinian labour-power. It was this cheap Palestinian labour-power, combined with growing infusion of US aid that provided the vital preconditions for the rapid expansion of the Israeli economy over the next ten years.

After 1967 the Israeli state was able to follow a policy of military Keynesianism that was to see military expenditure rise to 30% of GDP by the 1970s. Rising levels of public expenditure financed by a growing Government budget deficits fuelled the economic boom. In doing so the government was able to create a plentiful supply of job opportunities not only directly through the expansion of public sector employment, but also indirectly as the private sector expanded to meet the growing demands of the army. The growing demands of the Israeli military for high tech weaponry provided reliable profits for the five major conglomerates that had dominated Israel's economy since the 1950s, and which were dominated by the occidental Jewish bourgeoisie. However, the Israeli military also demanded the construction of military bases, barracks and installations that provided business opportunities for an emerging oriental Jewish petty-bourgeoisie that could make large profits by employing cheap Palestinian labour-power.

In addition to meeting the needs of the domestic market, armaments became Israel's most important export. With much of the public sector now turned over to military accumulation, only those eligible for military service could work in these industries. Even Israeli Arab 'citizens' were excluded from this dubious privilege, let alone the Palestinians in the territories, and so the 'strategic' (better paid) industries were by definition available only to Jews (often oriental).

While the militarization of the economy helped to integrate the oriental Jews, it reinforced the subordination of non-Jewish workers. In practice Israel now had a two-tier labour market: Jewish and Palestinian. It is notable that Israel's occupation of these territories had stopped short of outright de jure annexation. This would have implied granting the same limited citizenship rights to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as had been granted to the Palestinians who had managed to stay within the 1948 borders until 1966. The occupation allowed Israeli capital, particularly in agriculture and construction, to pump surplus labour from Palestinian workers without compromising the Jewishness of the state. The Palestinians were not integrated into Israeli society: they worked in Israel by day, then were supposed to return to their dormitories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by night. While the cheap labour power of the Palestinians fuelled a construction boom on both sides of the Green Line, the Israeli economy was further boosted by the territories' subordination as a captive market for Israeli consumer commodities.

Furthermore, through the control of government contracts, and through the imperatives of national security, as well as military and construction development, the Israeli State was able to pursue a policy of rapid industrialisation and import substitution. Sheltered from foreign competition by high import tariffs and generous export subsidies, investment was channelled into the development of modern manufacturing industry. This allowed Israel to replace imports of foreign manufactures by domestically produced manufactures - a policy that was to establish Israel as a relatively advanced industrialized economy by the late 1970s.

The policies of military Keynesianism and rapid industrialisation led to a huge balance of payments deficit as the demand of both the consumers and industry ran ahead of supply. The balance of payments deficit was to rise to a 15% of GDP. This deficit could only be financed with the help of the generous stream of American aid.

So the rapid economic expansion and development of Israel in the ten years after the Six Days War provided the material conditions necessary for the expansion of the labour Zionist settlement. Whereas in 1966 unemployment in Israel had stood at 11%, the economy could now be run at more or less full employment. The Zionist state could now offer a job and rising living standards in a modern westernized economy for all Jews who chose to live there.

Settlements and the Labour Zionist settlement
Ever since the end of the Six Days War the policy of establishing Jewish settlements in the occupied territories has been an important part of the expansion of the Labour Zionist settlement to include the previously excluded oriental Jews. Of course, the immediate aim of establishing settlements was to consolidate Israel's control over the occupied territories. However, the settlement policy also offered the poor sections of the Jewish working class housing and job opportunities that allowed them to escape their subordinate position in Israel itself. This was especially important in the 1970s, when the lack of decent accommodation was leading to some homeless oriental Jews to squatting empty buildings in rich occidental Jewish suburbs.

The settlements offered an alternative to this antagonistic direct appropriation, by directing the antagonism elsewhere. They placed the Jewish working class in the front line - in a direct and antagonistic relation to the potentially insurrectional Palestinian proletariat. As such it bound them to the Zionist State, which protected their newly gained privileges against the claims of the Palestinians. By 1971, there were already 52 settlements.

The Israeli Black Panthers
However, not everyone was integrated into the Labour Zionist settlement, and class struggles continued. Many young oriental Jews were excluded from the 'benefits' of the occupation, because they had criminal records and so were unable to get the good jobs and housing, which were supposed to be the birthright if Jews in Israel. The post-1967 boom led to gentrification in what had been border towns like Musrara, which squeezed out the poor North African Jews. This was the basis of a new movement, the Israeli Black Panthers.

Their social base was arguably more marginal than the movements of the 1960s. However, their 1971 demonstration against police repression attracted tens of thousands of people, and led to 171 arrests and 35 people hospitalized during clashes with the police. They also flirted with left wing anti-Zionists, and some even considered conducting talks with the PLO. Some leaflets were written by members or sympathizers of Matzpen (small but well known anti-Zionist group) and there were alliances at some points. Comments by Black Panthers show a class position beginning to emerge: 'they need us whenever they have a war', 'I don't want to think what will happen when there will be peace', 'If the Arabs had any sense they'd leave the Jews alone to finish with each other'.

However their critique of Israeli society was undermined by elements who sought accommodation within Labour Zionism, and therefore argued against making links with the anti Zionist left or, worse still, with those social pariahs, the Palestinians. Various prominent members of the Black Panthers were given better housing and jobs and left the group, which became increasingly preoccupied with internal splits.

However, oriental Jewish dissatisfaction with the Labour Zionist establishment remained strong, and co-opting Jewish radicals like the leading figures of the Black Panthers were part of a climate where Jewish workers in general expected a better standard of living than their parents. The need to guarantee full employment for all Jews strengthened the negotiating position of Jewish workers in wage bargaining, which was leading to problems of inflation for the Israeli economy.

These problems were not unique to Israel - Western Europe and America also faced a proletariat, which, rather than being content with the 'gains' of the post-war settlement, were using it to impose more restrictions on capital accumulation. In Israel, these problems were compounded by the restrictions of intensive accumulation and by the imperatives of security.

Given this entrenchment of the Jewish working class, the policy of intensive economic expansion based on import substitution had begun to reach the limits of the narrow confines of the Israeli economy, by the late 1970s. Economic growth of more than 10% a year achieved in the early 1970s subsided to a modest a modest 3%. This slow down was to prompt an inflationary crisis that was to see prices rise by 100,000% in just seven years. This crisis could only be resolved by seriously undermining the labour Zionist settlement, with its relatively generous social wage.

The inflationary crisis of 1978-1985
Full employment in an economy dominated by a few large conglomerates, sheltered from foreign competition by high tariff barriers, is a classical recipe for inflation. The indexation of 85% of wage contracts to price inflation, along with other welfare payments and other forms of income, meant that any rises in prices were soon translated into rising wages, which in turn led to rising prices, as higher wage costs were passed on to the consumer. As a result the Israeli economy was highly prone to a vicious wage-price spiral.

Military Keynesianism had led to an inflation rate of between 30%-40% through most of the 1970s. However, by maintaining the fixed exchange rate of the Israeli pound with the US dollar (despite the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1973), the Israeli government was able to hold inflation in check. Rising domestic prices were offset by the fact that at a fixed exchange rate imports remained cheaper than they would have been, which served to hold down the price index on which wage rises were based. Of course, rising domestic prices under a fixed exchange rate regime made Israeli industry uncompetitive, but this could be offset by raising tariffs, increasing export subsidies and by the occasional controlled devaluation of the Israeli pound.

However, the slow down of the economy combined with the changing political situation in the Middle East brought about a decisive shift in economic policy that was to unleash an economic crisis in the 1980s. This shift in policy was brought about through the election of the Likud Government in 1978, which brought to an end thirty years of Labour Party rule. The realignment of the Right, together with splits in the Labour Party, enabled Likud to benefit electorally from the continuing disenchantment of oriental Jews with Labour. However, Likud's deflationary policies could only be implemented by confronting the Jewish working class, whose entrenchment had contributed to the inflationary crisis and the decline in profits for sections of the Israeli bourgeoisie. Likud also faced a rearguard action against some of its policies, from the 'Labour Establishment' of the Occidental bourgeoisie, as the Histadrut endeavoured to keep the lid on the struggles of the Israeli working class, such as the road-menders' violent pickets.

Arab states, expansion and the USA
Israel's decisive victory in the 1973 war had finally shattered the unity of the Arab states. Israel's position in the Middle East was now secured from the external threat of a hostile Arab alliance. However, the subsequent realignment of Egypt with the USA cast some doubt on the long-term commitment of the USA to financing Israel. If Arab states aligned with the USA, why should the USA continue to pump billions of dollars into Israel? Furthermore, with Egypt neutralized in the south the way was open for Israeli expansion in the North and East. The annexation of the occupied territories of the West Bank and the economic subordination of Jordan and Lebanon offered a way out of the increasing restrictions of intensive accumulation.

But these policies ran against the interests of the USA. While the USA wanted Israel as its imperialist guard dog in the Middle East, it did not want this guard dog destabilising the region and upsetting America's oil rich allies - such as Saudi Arabia. Likud's policy of creating a greater Israel therefore required a loosening of the golden chains of US aid.

The flight of capital from the western economies in the late 1970s, and the consequent growth of global finance capital, created the prospect of reducing Israel's reliance on US aid. By following a policy of economic liberalization and deregulation it was hoped that Israel could tap into the flows of international capital and thereby reduce its dependence on the USA. This policy of liberalisation advocated by the Likud Party also accorded with many amongst the Israeli bourgeoisie who, facing declining profits, wanted greater freedoms to find profitable areas of investment.

As a consequence, within weeks of coming to office, Milton Friedman - one of the pioneers of what has now become known as 'neo-liberalism' - was summoned to advise on a programme of liberalisation. As a result of Friedman's advice the new Israeli government cut import tariffs and export subsidies, relaxed controls on the transfer of currency in and out of the country, and abandoned the fixed exchange rate of the Israeli pound with the US dollar.

Within weeks of its link with the US dollar being severed the Israeli pound had lost 1/3 of its value. The price of imported goods rocketed raising the price index. Within a few months the indexation of wages had led to the inflation rate rising to over 100%. Following this acceleration in inflation the Israeli pound was replaced by the Shekel as Israel's currency, at a rate of ten pounds to the Shekel.

However, the liberalisation policy combined with the sharp cut in real wages, caused by wage indexation lagging behind the acceleration in price inflation, boosted profits and led to a renewed spurt of growth.[22] As a result, 1981 saw the Israeli economy regain the growth rates of the early 1970s. Indeed at the time, with the world crisis still not over, it was argued that Israel's high inflation rates did not matter. With the external value of the shekel measured in dollars falling at the same rate as inflation was eroding its internal value, it was argued that in dollar terms inflation was more or less zero. Indeed, a zero rate of inflation rate in dollar terms, compared with the much higher inflation rates in the USA and elsewhere, implied a growing international competitiveness of Israeli industry.

Such optimism did not last long. As economic growth began to falter and the public deficit began to grow as a result of invasion of Lebanon, fears grew that the high inflation rates could easily tip over in to an uncontrollable hyperinflation. As a consequence, the Begin government introduced a new set of economic policies aimed at gradually reducing the rate of inflation. Cuts in public spending were combined with a policy of limiting the decline in the exchange rate of the Shekel to the US dollar to 5% a month. Meanwhile attempts were made to limit indexation of incomes.

The policy of limiting the decline of the Shekel had the immediate bonus for the government's popularity by cheapening the imports of consumer goods. But at the same time it also made Israeli exports uncompetitive. Increasingly unable to compete Israeli firms began to go bankrupt and unemployment began to rise. At the same time attempts to hold wages down led to growing industrial unrest.

Following Begin's resignation in the Autumn of 1983, fears that the government would be unable to prevent a sharp fall in the value of the shekel led to a run on the banks as savers sought to change their shekels into dollars. The Government was forced to nationalize the leading banks and allow the shekel to fall against the dollar. In order to reassure the financial markets the Israeli government was obliged to announce major cuts in public spending and tight monetary policies.

These new policies were met with resolute opposition from both the Histadrut and leading capitalists within the 'Labour Establishment'. The Histadrut called a series of strikes that paralysed the country. Unable to hold wages down, the twist to the wage-price spiral caused by the sharp fall in the shekel led to an acceleration in the inflation of prices. On the eve of the election in July 1983 the rate of inflation was approaching 400%. With wages rises lagging behind prices rises, this acceleration in inflation had brought about a 30% cut in real wages.

Both Labour and Likud lost support at the election and were obliged to join together to form a government of 'national unity', with Peres, the Labour leader, as Prime Minister. Using his influence with the Labour establishment Peres proposed a programme of emergency measures. A 10%s levy was imposed on wages, indexation was to be suspended and a three-month wage-price freeze was to be imposed. This was to be backed up by an unprecedented programme of cuts to the budget deficit aimed at halving the budget deficit from 20% of GDP. By the time this programme was introduced in the autumn of 1983, after lengthy negotiations over the summer, the inflation rate had reached 1000%.

Peres' programme proved to be a partial success. In the face of strong opposition of the Histadrut, the Likud government had backed off tampering with the indexation of wages and other incomes. However, interfering with wage indexation seemed more legitimate in the eyes of the 'Labour Establishment', when proposed by a leading Labour figurehead. By May 1985 the rate of inflation had been brought back to 400% while, despite increasing opposition, the budget deficit had been cut to 15% of GDP. Peres now announced another round of measures. A further three month wage and price freeze was to be accompanied by another round of public spending cuts designed yet again to halve the government's budget deficit. At the same time the Shekel was devalued by 19% and then a fixed exchange rate was to be maintained with the US Dollar.

However, while it might have been possible to get the 'Labour Establishment' behind these austerity measures, the antagonism of Jewish workers to another round of belt-tightening threatened to break out of the constraints of Histadrut recuperation. In the face of mounting wildcat strikes, the Histadrut called a general strike that forced the government to allow a limited wage 'catch up' before the wage-price freeze, but this did little to mitigate the 20% cut in real wages and the sharp rise in unemployment that had resulted from Peres' first round of austerity measures. The draconian policies of the Likud-Labour government eventually saved Israel from hyperinflation. By 1986 the inflation rate had fallen to a respectable 20%. However, in resolving the inflationary crisis Peres had seriously undermined the Labour Zionist settlement. While real wages slowly began to recover after 1986, unemployment had soared to levels that had not been seen since the slump of the early 1960s and remained high throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Continued austerity measures through the 1980s saw further cuts in the welfare budget and the erosion of social guarantees. These were imposed on the Jewish working class, with the help of the Histadrut. Politicians from both main parties now began to embrace 'neo-liberal' policies, although actual progress towards deregulation and the privatization of national industries was slow at first, due in part to the resistance of the Histadrut, which owned many of the main state conglomerates. However, unemployment, casualization, and flexible working practices were to become a reality for increasing sections of the Israeli working class.

With the dismantling of the more social aspects of Labour Zionism following the inflationary crisis of early 1980s, the policy of establishing settlements in the occupied territories has become an increasingly important element in binding the Jewish working class to the Zionist state. Indeed, as Likud has recognized, the settlers have provided popular support for the long term strategy of establishing a greater Israel which sections of the Israeli bourgeoisie see as the means of breaking out of the chronic stagnation of the Israeli economy since the late 1970s. To a certain extent the settlements have shifted the political burden of the occupation away from the government, particularly if it is Labour. Israel's reluctance to make concessions to the Palestinians could be blamed on the intransigence and 'extremism' of the settlers, who were compelled to identify with the imperatives of security far more than the most 'hawkish' government.

On the other hand, the acceleration of settlement building represents a minor compromise with the sections of the Israeli bourgeoisie, who advocated de jure annexation of the occupied territories. Because the crisis could only be resolved by dismantling the social wage aspects of the Labour Zionist settlement, the settlements became both a form of social compensation for poor Jews, and a form of de facto annexation, to realize the dream of a greater Israel by other means. However, Israel is still not free of its dependence on US aid, and so must curb its expansionist excesses.

Settlements and contradictions
The opposition to settlement building by many of the Israeli middle classes who supported Peace Now compounded the problems of the Israeli bourgeoisie.[23] The occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has had a vital role in the class compromise in Israel since 1967. Through the subordination of Palestinian workers, combined with the benefits of US aid, working class Jews were able to command higher wages than their Palestinian neighbours, and to avoid the most menial jobs. Because of the occupation of the land, working class Jews, who could not afford to live in urban areas, were able to get subsidized housing (built by cheap Palestinian labour). So working class Jews were dumped in what was in effect a security buffer zone in the occupied territories.

These measures were vital in reducing Jewish proletarian militancy, but they led directly to resistance by the liberal middle classes and, more significantly, by the Palestinians. The ongoing problem for the Israeli bourgeoisie was how to maintain their compromise with the Jewish working class without provoking the Palestinians too far. With the dense Palestinian population crammed into an ever more cramped space by the encroachment of settlements on which many of them were compelled to work, the early 1970s had seen rebellions in the refugee camps of Gaza, which had been crushed (literally) by Sharon's tanks. Since then, Gaza had been relatively quiet. But for how long? The Israeli bourgeoisie was able to grant concessions to Jewish workers, but it only had recourse to repression as a means of pacifying the Palestinians. Any concessions to the Palestinians were likely to undermine the Labour Zionist settlement.

In 1985 the occupied territories bore the brunt of the crisis. Rescuing Israeli capital involved reinforcing the subordination of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, by denying permits 'for expanding agriculture or industry that may compete with the state of Israel'.[24] With increasing unemployment in the territories, Palestinian workers were further compelled to find work inside the Green Line or in the construction of Jewish settlements, which were expanding to compensate Jewish workers for the lack of affordable housing in the urban areas of 'Israel proper'. While the settlement construction provided Palestinian workers with revenue, it was also a source of resentment, and the resistance this provoked provided the rationale for intensified repression by the military government.

1985's 'Iron Fist', to contain resistance in the Occupied Territories, went hand in hand with austerity measures, to contain the crisis at home. The 'Iron Fist' intensified repressive measures, such as 'administrative detentions' of Palestinian militants and collective punishments of the population as a whole. This provides the background to the 1987-93 Intifada. Before we move on to this, we need to look at the class composition of the Palestinians ...

The making of the Palestinian working class

A land without a people?
The myth of Zionist pioneers landing up in unpopulated desert and transforming it into lush vineyards conceals a more commonplace transformation - of Palestinians from peasants into proletarians:

The 'paradise' in the Negev desert, the flourishing cultivation of citrus fruits and avocados on the coastal plain as well as the industrial boom (even on the scale of a very small country) presuppose the complete despoliation of the Palestinian peasants.[25]

This process was already underway when the first Jewish colonists arrived, and is still not complete. Capitalist development penetrated the Middle East for the first time in the years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The Ottoman Empire which dominated the region had already been in decline for a century, though it would last a century more, and the readjustment of the balance of power following France and Napoleon's defeat, formalized in the years after the Congress of Vienna, opened the way for a new exploitation of the region, just as the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum in Britain.

Britain and Austria, though rivals in other areas, agreed upon the need to prop up the Ottoman Empire as a barrier to Russian expansionism into the east of Europe. Later Germany became the Ottoman Empire's main backer. In this period, parts of the Middle East found themselves invaded by the new capitalist mode of production. The indigenous textile industry of the area, particularly in Egypt was destroyed by cheap English textiles in the 1830s, and by the 1860s British manufacturers had begun to grow cotton along the Nile. In 1869 the Suez Canal was opened, its purpose to facilitate British and French trade. In line with this modernization, the origins of primitive accumulation in Palestine can be dated back to the Ottoman Empire's 1858 law on landed property, replacing collective ownership with individual land ownership. Village tribal chiefs were transformed into a class of landlords, who sold their titles to Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian and Iranian merchants. The pattern throughout the whole period was very much one of uneven development, with a foreign bourgeoisie taking the initiative and the indigenous bourgeoisie, such as it was, remaining weak and politically ineffective. At the same time, vast areas of the Middle East where there was no perceived economic benefit were left alone, and there the traditions of subsistence farming and nomadism continued.

Under the British Mandate, many absentee landlords were bought out by the Jewish Colonisation Association, leading to the eviction of Palestinian sharecroppers and farmers. Given that the "dispossessed fellah had to become an agricultural labourer on his own land", a decisive transformation of the relations of production had begun to take place, leading to the first signs of a Palestinian proletariat.[26]

This process took place in the teeth of violent opposition by Palestinians. The watershed in the succession of revolts was the 1936-9 uprising. Its importance lay in the fact that "the motive force of this uprising was no longer the peasantry or the bourgeoisie, but for the first time an agricultural proletariat deprived of means of labour and subsistence, along with an embryo of a working class concentrated essentially in the ports and in the oil refinery at Haifa."[27] It involved attacks on Palestinian landowners as well as the English and Zionist colonists, and forced Britain to limit Jewish migration to Palestine for some years. Although it was the British army who did the shooting, with a little help from the Haganah, the left-wing Zionist militia, the local tribal chiefs also played a key role in breaking the rebellion.

The 'nakba' (catastrophe) of 1948 - the creation of Israel - can be seen as the legacy of this defeat. Although the 1936-39 uprising showed that a proletariat was beginning to emerge in Palestine, the Palestinian population in Israel was still largely peasant at that time. The new state used the legal apparatus of the British mandate to continue the dispossession of the Palestinians. Under this law, peasants who fled only a few hundred metres to escape a massacre were considered 'absentees' and had their land confiscated. However the few who managed to remain inside the 1948 borders were compensated with citizenship rights for their forcible separation from the means of production.

The proletarianization of the Palestinian peasantry was extended in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. This fresh wave of primitive accumulation not only took the form of land grabbing. It also involved Israeli capital asserting control of the West Bank's water supply, by digging deeper wells than those of the Palestinians. As a result, the Palestinian refugee population outside Israeli jurisdiction was severed from its ties to the land, while only a minority of those inside Israeli jurisdiction still possessed land. In both areas, the Palestinian population has largely become proletarianized.

The suppression of the local Palestinian bourgeoisie
While the expropriation of the Palestinian peasantry brought about the formation of a proletariat, the emergence of an indigenous industrial bourgeoisie was suppressed. Where one existed, it was hopelessly weak and unable to compete with Israeli capital, despite the fact that "The wages paid by the Arab bosses are even more miserable than those paid by their Zionist masters". Palestinians from the territories occupied the lowest position in the Israeli labour market, lower down than even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, Palestinians who worked in Israel were considered collaborators by Palestinian nationalists.[28] However Israel's laws forbade Palestinian businesses which might compete with Israeli ones, so it was eventually recognized by even the most hardened nationalists that working in Israel was the only source of revenue for many Palestinians.

The Palestinian bourgeoisie decomposed into three fractions.[29] Some of the richer refugees formed a mercantile and financial bourgeoisie in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and other Arab countries. The local bourgeoisie, such as it was, consisted of small entrepreneurs, craft workshop owners and farmers. The suppression of productive capital by Israel made it impossible for the local bourgeoisie to develop the productive forces. Those who tried formed a miserable petit bourgeoisie, sharing many of the same day-to-day privations and humiliations as their proletarian neighbours in the occupied territories, although not the basic one: separation from the means of production.[30] Others have become a 'lumpen-bourgeoisie', who became rich from the PLO pumping half a billion dollars of aid money into the territories between 1977 and 1985. Their money was spent exclusively on their own individual consumption, and they have therefore attracted the resentment of the Palestinian proletariat and petit bourgeoisie.

It was the displaced bourgeoisie in the diaspora, which formed the class basis for the PLO and the Palestinian 'state in exile'.

'The sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people'
Even as Pan-Arabism lay defeated in the aftermath of the 1967 war, the seeds of its renewal (in admittedly a less virulent strain) germinated in the new coherence and organisation of Palestinian nationalism and the PLO specifically. This situation, and the first Intifada (1987 - 1993) have kept alive the flames of anti-Americanism in the middle East and challenged the legitimacy of the pro-western bourgeoisie's across the region. However, the actions of the PLO, representing the exiled Palestinian bourgeoisie, were unsurprisingly often at odds with the needs of the proletarians whose struggles were shaking the oil-producing countries.

The PLO vs. the self-activity of the proletariat
Sixty per cent of the Palestinian population ended up in refugee camps outside Israel and the occupied territories. The process that had transformed most of them into proletarians also dispersed them throughout Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait and Syria. Those who migrated to wealthy Gulf States like Kuwait were able to command high wages, even relative to those of Israeli Jewish workers. Most were less fortunate, and became a catalyst for class conflicts throughout the region.

It was the Arab leaders (together with the mercantile and financial Palestinian bourgeoisie) who helped to set up the PLO in 1964, as a means of controlling this diaspora. Due to their failure to prevent the nakba of 1948 and their impotence in the face of Israeli military might in 1967, the Arab bourgeoisie faced revolts in their own countries.

Jordan
In Jordan, the Palestinian refugees were now armed due to the war, and outnumbered the sparse Jordanian population. Although the PLO was seen to constitute, a state within a state, the Palestinian refugee population was ungovernable even by them. In the late '60s and early '70s the refugee camps were armed and autonomous from the PLO, and they didn't allow the police in. In addition to this the PLO was using Jordan as a base for attacks on Israel and so the Jordanian state was exposed to reprisals from Israel.

The Palestinian proletariat's struggles in Jordan were extinguished by the 'Black September' massacre of 30,000 Palestinians by the Jordanian army in Amman, 1970. This was facilitated by the PLO's agreement with the Hashemite regime: in accordance with the conditions negotiated with the Jordanian state, the PLO withdrew from Amman, thus allowing the massacre of the proletarians who remained in the city.

Lebanon
Many of those who survived fled to Lebanon and the Arab bourgeoisie was now faced with a combative proletariat concentrated in over-crowded refugee camps. 14,000 ended up in Tel-Al-Zatar in the Lebanon by 1972, an industrial area containing 29% of Lebanese industry. In 1969 the refugees and other proletarians seized weapons, occupied the factories and tried to transform Tel-Al-Zatar into 'a no-go zone safe from the Lebanese army and the state'.[31] As the Lebanese state, such as it was, tried throughout the 1970s to break the power of the working class, the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese proletarians participated in kalashnikov battles with the Lebanese police.

The presence of arms allowed for strikes which brought about the destruction of Lebanese industrial life.[32]

There was also a limited workers' council movement. Given the weakness and division of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, a major strike of workers in the fishing industry culminated in a drawn-out civil war, which became the battleground for the competing strategic ambitions of the USA and the USSR, via their respective intermediaries, Israel and Syria. Flushed out of Jordan, the PLO were now seeking to create another 'state within a state' in the Lebanon. However, they had little interest in the autonomous struggles of the Palestinian refugees to emancipate themselves from the hell of their proletarian existence. Instead, they wanted to keep in with the Lebanese and Syrian bourgeoisie. The general instability and weakness of the Lebanese state meant that the strength of the proletariat had to be crushed by Syrian and Phalangist troops, with the help of the Israeli navy.[33] Still hanging on to desperate illusions in nationalism, the Palestinians called on the PLO for help.

Unsurprisingly, the PLO had no interest in helping this struggle, deeming it a diversion from 'fighting the real enemy, Israel'.

When the strugglers asked for military aid for the struggle in Tel-Al-Zatar the leadership of Fatah answered - "Al Naba'a and Salaf and Harash are not similar to Aga, Haifa, and Jerusalem which are occupied."[34]

In exercising its 'right to non-interference', the PLO helped to ensure that the revolt was crushed and the 'no-go zone' turned into a graveyard for proletarians. Despite their role in the counter-insurgency at Tel-Al-Zatar, the last thing Israel wanted was a stronger Lebanese state. On the contrary, both Israel and Syria sought to encourage the 'balkanisation' of the country so as to better their strategic position. The fragmentation of the Lebanese bourgeoisie into warring factions provided the pretext for the intervention of these neighbouring powers in the civil war. In Israel's case, there was an added motive for engagement in Lebanon: the presence of the PLO.

The PLO's pursuit of a 'state within a state' could not co-exist with Israel's imperatives in Lebanon. The mass presence of Palestinians got in the way of their strategic interests, and Israel's wish to drive out the PLO, led to the 1982 invasion of Beirut. The basis of the PLO's nationalist appeal had been their willingness to engage in armed struggle against the Israeli state. However their expulsion from both Jordan and Lebanon showed their weakness in the face of Israeli military might. Their humiliating evacuation from Beirut confirmed that they had failed to deliver on their strategy of armed struggle. A similar pattern to Jordan then ensued, with the expulsion of the PLO clearing the way for Phalangist massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, with the help of the Israeli army.

The Israeli invasion of Beirut was also humiliating for the 'anti-imperialist camp'. With Egypt now in the US orbit, Syria was the main pro-USSR power in the region. However, not only was the PLO brought to heel by the Israeli invasion, but the Syrian army was forced to withdraw.

It was increasingly clear with every confrontation that the Palestinians could expect little help from the Arab states. The 1967 and 1973 wars had effectively undermined Pan Arabism, and confirmed Israel as a military superpower in the region. The Arab states had little political will to attack Israel. Despite its rapprochement with Israel, Egypt was made more welcome than the PLO at the 1987 Amman summit, indicating the increasing orientation of the Arab states towards the USA. Arafat was snubbed by King Hussein, and it was clear that the Iran-Iraq war was more of a priority for the delegates than the Palestinians. This confirmed the widespread perception among residents of the occupied territories that no one but themselves could overcome Israeli domination.

The initiative for the Intifada came from the inhabitants of the Jabalya refugee camp, in Gaza, not the PLO, who were based in Tunisia and were completely caught by surprise. It was a spontaneous mass reaction by the Jabalya residents, to the killing of Palestinian workers by an Israeli vehicle, which quickly spread to the West Bank and the rest of the Gaza Strip.

In the long term, the Intifada helped to bring about the diplomatic rehabilitation of the PLO.[35] After all, the PLO might prove to be a lesser evil than the self-activity of the proletariat. However, the strength of the PLO's negotiating hand depended on its ability, as the 'sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people', to control its constituency, something which could never be taken for granted, especially now that its strategy of armed struggle had proved fruitless. This made it difficult for them to recuperate an uprising initiated by proletarians, who had little interest in nationalism, and who hated the Palestinian 'lumpen-bourgeoisie' almost as much as the Israeli state.

A 'national liberation' struggle?
The 1992 bulletin Worldwide Intifada #1 attempts to counter the conventional leftist perspective on the Intifada, by emphasising the contradictions between different classes of Palestinians.[36] While the perspective of Worldwide Intifada #1 is obviously superior to support for 'national liberation', their argument has certain weaknesses. Although Worldwide Intifada #1 correctly identifies nationalism as containing the 'seeds of defeat' for the 1987 Intifada, they discuss nationalism in the abstract, as if it is some kind of psychological trick played on the Palestinian working class by the Palestinian bourgeoisie.[37] True, nationalism is an ideology. However this ideology is more than a mere deception: it has power because it has a material basis in everyday life.

However it is clear that many elements of this Intifada went way beyond nationalism. While many commentators take it for granted that, right from the start, the Intifada was a campaign to set up a Palestinian state, the early days of the uprising suggest otherwise. When the IDF interrogated the first hundred rioters they arrested, they found that these proletarians were "unable to repeat the most common slogans used in the PLO's routine propaganda, and even the central concept of the Palestinian struggle - the right to self determination - was completely alien to them".[38] What a scandal!

The Intifada as class struggle, and class struggles within the Intifada
The subordination of the Palestinian bourgeoisie took the form of the suppression of Palestinian capital accumulation by the Israeli state, so that the Palestinian bourgeoisie were unable to develop the productive forces adequately. Although some Palestinians were employed in Palestinian workshops, farms and small factories, these were confined to sectors that did not compete with Israeli capital. Therefore an excessive portion of the Palestinian bourgeoisie's money was spent as revenue on personal consumption, rather than as money capital on productive consumption. The fact of mass unemployment and poverty for proletarians, existing alongside the conspicuous wealth of the 'lumpen-bourgeoisie', sharpened class antagonisms, which came to the fore in the first days of the 1987 uprising.

The first few days of the uprising in Gaza saw thousands of proletarians looting the crops of neighbouring landlords. Many landlords were forced to publish drastic rent reductions. Rich locals appealed to the IDF to protect their property. The battle cry of the rioters was, "first the army, then Rimal!"[39] Rimal was a rich Palestinian suburb of Gaza City. When the Israeli authorities issued new identity cards, in order to clamp down on the uprising, this was the area they chose as a soft touch to pilot the scheme. Fortunately for the PLO, it was sufficiently unified to gain a toehold in the uprising, via the emergence of the United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). This was based in the Territories and so had more credibility as a means of recuperating local militants, than the Tunisian based 'five star PLO'. Therefore it was best placed to try to turn the uprising from an attack on all forms of bourgeois authority, into a concerted 'national' effort to set up a Palestinian state in embryo. However, given the intransigence of the Israeli state, this presupposed making the territories ungovernable, a situation that could easily get out of hand.

A month after the first day of the uprising, the UNLU issued its first communiqué, addressing first "the brave Palestinian working class", then the "brave, militant shopkeepers", and hailing the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people".[40] A year later, the proletariat and the petit bourgeoisie were all lumped together as the "heroic masses of our people", but throughout the communiqués, the PLO remain the "sole legitimate representative".[41]

Despite the supposed cross-class unity promoted by the UNLU, the petit bourgeoisie often had to be intimidated into closing their shops on strike days. Sometimes, a child standing outside a shop holding a lit match could be enough to remind them that their shops could be targeted for reprisals. There was also pressure from the militant proletarians in the front-line, who argued, "we are prepared to give up our lives for the struggle, is it too much to ask you to give up some of your profits?"[42] However, it would be a mistake to assume that the petit bourgeoisie were simply dragged kicking and screaming into the Intifada, although there was an element of this. Shop and workshop owners had their property confiscated for refusing to pay taxes to the military government, and shopkeepers in Beit Sahour launched a three month 'commercial strike' in protest at these measures. In order to develop as a proper bourgeoisie, they needed their own state, with a decent amount of land. In practice, instead of assisting their development into a fully-fledged bourgeoisie, the property confiscations for tax refusal accelerated their proletarianization. 'Commercial strikes' often had the effect of simply driving Palestinian merchants to bankruptcy.

Although to a certain extent, all classes could play their part in the disruption of the Israeli economy, by denying the military government its tax revenue or by boycotting its commodities, the most visible disruption of the Israeli economy came from the working class. In the wildcat general strike of December 1987, 120,000 workers failed to turn up to their jobs in Israel. This coincided with the citrus harvest, for which Palestinians constitute one third of the workforce. This cost the Israeli agricultural marketing board $500,000 in the first two months of the uprising, due to lost orders for the British market. Many Palestinians also worked as day labourers in another key sector, the construction industry on both sides of the green line. They were capable of achieving what both the PLO and the peace movement could only dream of: bringing settlement construction to a grinding halt.

The 'rebellion of stones'
There is a story of an argument during the Intifada. When someone tried to assert their authority by claiming to be one of the leaders of the Intifada, a 14-year old held up a stone and said 'this is the leader of the Intifada'. So much for the UNLU! So called 'leaders' got attacked by Palestinians at demonstrations where they became too moderate.[43] The PNA's current attempts to militarize the present Intifada have been a tactic to try to avoid this 'anarchy' occurring again.

The widespread use of stones as a weapon against the Israeli military amounted to recognition of the failure of the Arab states to overcome Israel by conventional warfare, let alone by the PLO's 'armed struggle'. 'Unarmed' civil disorder necessarily discarded 'the warfare logic of the state'[44] (although it should also be seen as a response to a situation of desperation, where death as a 'martyr' could seem preferable to the living hell of their current situation). To some extent, the stone-throwing outflanked the armed might of the Israeli state. In order to maintain the funding and support of the US, Israel had to keep up appearances as an embattled democracy besieged by barbarian hordes, and killing too many unarmed civilians could damage this, at a time when Egypt's pro-US position was threatening to undermine Israel's role as a strategic asset.

This is not to say they refrained altogether: by mid-June 1988, 300 Palestinians had already been killed by the IDF. However the personal dilemmas of the experience of confronting unarmed civilians with lethal force added to the pressures on the morale of Israeli soldiers. They were supposed to be part of this mighty army, which had defeated Egypt and Syria, and here they were being ordered to fire live ammunition at kids armed with stones! This contributed to a revival in the 'conscientious objection' movement.[45]

The stones were also a great leveller, as they are a weapon everyone has access to. The Palestinian proletariat were quite literally taking the struggle into their own hands, after years of unsuccessfully appealing to the Arab bourgeoisie. At the forefront of the struggle was a new generation of young proletarians, who had grown up under occupation. However, as it developed from a spontaneous proletarian uprising into a national movement under the auspices of the UNLU, the Intifada came to express an uneasy alliance between the proletariat and the petit bourgeoisie.

The response of the Israeli bourgeoisie
In the 1970s/1980s, the Israeli government was adamant that it would have nothing to do with the PLO. This political consensus included the 'left' of Peace Now. However, the blatantly puppet 'village leagues' represented a total failure to set up an alternative Palestinian leadership that they could do business with.

The Intifada pushed Peace Now in a more radical direction, because smaller peace groups were already making links with the Palestinians, which generally took the form of 'humanitarian' support. The peace camp's long-term strategy required a 'partner for peace', and the failure of the 'village leagues' made the PLO the only show in town.

Furthermore, the Israeli bourgeoisie was running out of options, due to the unfeasibility of the idea toyed with since the mid 1980s of transferring Palestinians en masse to Jordan. Jordan already had its own Palestinian problem, and by the late 1980s the last thing King Hussein wanted was more of them to deal with. Palestinian bureaucrats in the occupied territories, whether appointed by Jordan or Israel, had been forced to resign, or face revolutionary justice. If this was an example of how much the Jordanian regime was preferred to Israel by his future subjects, King Hussein was only too happy to ditch his claim to the West Bank.

In spite of these factors the Likud wing of the unity government was intransigent, but the USA was under increasing international pressure to end its diplomatic boycott of the PLO. While Likud's instincts tended towards outright repression, there was a limit to what could be achieved by brute force and terror, given the growing pressure from the USA and the Israeli conscripts' lack of stomach for an orgy of killing. Besides, it had been the 'Iron Fist' which had helped to create the conditions for the revolt in the first place.

When the USA agreed to recognize the PLO if there was a de-escalation of the conflict, which entailed the PLO recognizing Israel, Israeli PM Shamir was forced into granting concessions. His offer of 'free and democratic elections' for Palestinian delegates who would 'negotiate an interim period of self governing administration' was also made conditional on the de-escalation of unrest.

Although the PLO had formally recognized Israel's 'right to exist' as early as December 1988, the process of Israel recognizing the PLO was far from complete. The process of getting PLO and Israel to the table became a stalemate, never getting beyond talks about talks, and the Israeli tactic of political stalling (while steadily murdering Palestinians) seemed to be paying off. The Israeli economy, cushioned by US aid, could absorb the initial shock of the economic disruption; but the longer it went on, the more the Intifada was exhausting itself. As time went on what little Palestinian economy existed was being destroyed. Meanwhile Israeli capital could cast about for alternative sources of cheap labour power, to outflank the Palestinians and squeeze them out of the Israeli labour market.

The Islamists
There also began to be a bitter turf war over who was to become the top guard dog on the Palestinian streets. The nationalist gangs were already in rehearsal for their future role as guardians of bourgeois law and order and private property relations. With the uprising exhausting itself, the proletariat in the occupied territories was being decimated by faction fighting and 'collaborator killings', with more Palestinians being killed by other Palestinians than by Israeli forces in Spring 1990. Many of these 'collaborators' were looters or class struggle militants.

Others involved were part of fairly new groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In its attempt to create an authentically Palestinian counterweight to the PLO, Israel had encouraged the growth of the Muslim brotherhood in the early 1980s. After the Brotherhood had proved its anti-working class credentials by burning down a library for being a 'hotbed of communism', Israel started supplying them with arms.[46] Because they believed Israeli domination could only be overcome once the Palestinians were all true-believing Muslims, it seemed that their growth might dampen resistance to the occupation. However, the Intifada saw the politicisation of the Islamists, as Islamic Jihad and Hamas. In their attempts make an impact and challenge the PLO, the Islamists organized strike days contrary to the UNLU calendar. These "strikes against the peace process" confirmed them to be "an authentic, indigenous and mass opposition" to the PLO.[47]

However, although Hamas wished to undermine the PLO, they didn't want to replace them. Their more-militant-than-thou competition with Fatah (the military wing of the PLO) was rather aimed at guaranteeing themselves a role in the character of the future Palestinian state. Not only did they reject the 'peace process' and its accommodation with Israel, they also rejected the very idea of a secular bourgeois state. Despite its 'rejectionist' stance, Hamas ultimately sought accommodation with the PLO, because it wanted to influence the form of the Palestinian state.

The initial stages of the Intifada had included an element of revolt against the institution of the patriarchal family. Palestinian women had refused social invisibility, and had confronted the military. In Ramallah, a group of girls stoned their parents, when they tried to stop them from rioting! For Hamas, a Palestinian state by definition had to be a Muslim state, implying the imposition of Sharia law to restore the very forms of 'low intensity social control' which the Intifada had called into question.

The Gulf War
The 'peace process' was further dragged out by the Gulf crisis, which called Arafat's divided loyalties into question. While much of the Arab bourgeoisie sided with the USA, Arafat could not afford to do this because of Iraq's pro-Palestinian stance and mass Palestinian support for its confrontation with the USA. The Gulf War finally undermined illusions in a 'progressive nationalism', backed by the now-defunct USSR. At the same time, the Scud attacks on Israel bolstered its public image in the west as a bastion of democracy in the midst of aggressive 'rogue states'.

Despite the new global reality following the collapse of the USSR, Israel has continued to remain a vital strategic asset for US capital. Those few Arab states which had oriented themselves towards Moscow meanwhile had to begin the tentative realignment towards the west for a new sponsor. Almost immediately the recalcitrant Arab bourgeoisies were presented with an opportunity to demonstrate their grasp of the 'New World Order' by siding with the coalition against Iraq. Almost all the significant Arab capitals took this step. More and more the Gulf War appears as a case of America, cut suddenly loose from the constraints of the Cold War, simply demonstrating in the most brutal and arbitrary terms how complete was its domination of the oilfields of the Middle East. And the moment the 'rogue client state' was truly threatened by a Kurdish uprising in the north and a Shi'ite rebellion in the south, the US let it off the hook, preferring an Arab regime it could demonize and punish periodically to the possibility of having itself to crush a social revolution which would have risked the further intensification of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East.

The Gulf War was part of a general recomposition of the region's working class. The mass expulsion of Palestinian workers in Kuwait contributed to the general impoverishment of the Palestinian proletariat, some of whom had enjoyed living standards even exceeding those of their Jewish neighbours from the wages being sent by relatives in Kuwait.

The blanket curfew imposed by Israel during the war increased economic hardship in the territories. It gave Israeli bosses the chance to sack many Palestinian workers on the basis that they had obeyed the curfew, or that they hadn't obeyed the curfew, or they should obey the curfew in the future. This in turn sharpened class antagonisms in the territories, leading to theft and general lawlessness. During the curfew, shops that were seen as overcharging were attacked and forced to lower their prices.

The road to Oslo
With the US in a position of unrivalled hegemony over the Middle East in the aftermath of the Gulf War, and the threat of Islamist militancy largely contained for the time being by the indigenous bourgeoisies, notably in Egypt and Syria, the only problem which remained for the US was that of the Palestinians. Popular support for the first Intifada was undoubtedly a threat to US interests, and the Oslo 'peace process', on a rhetorical level, was nothing less than an end to the years of conflict and the crisis management that successive US administrations had been compelled to undertake.

Given that America's Arab allies had passed the crucial loyalty test of the Gulf War, the 'New World Order' opened the possibility of Israel's redundancy as the USA's main strategic asset in the region, when much of the Arab bourgeoisie was acquiescent, and Israel's failure to resolve the Palestinian problem was threatening this much-trumpeted new era of bourgeois peace.

For the Israeli state, making concessions to the Palestinians meant the possibility of having to confront their own working class. However, with the Israeli economy still reeling from the crisis and the Intifada, they still needed US aid, which could be used to pressure the Israeli state into a settlement with the Palestinians.

By 1989, the US had become increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress in resolving the Intifada. Israel was supposed to be one of its regional policemen. Instead, it had a domestic uprising on its hands, which was threatening to destabilize the region, because of the Palestinian diaspora. Shamir was in no position to resolve the situation - especially now that the unity government had collapsed and he was under pressure from right-wing coalition partners.

With the election of a Labour government committed to accelerating the 'peace process', Hamas wanted to consolidate their base as the main 'rejectionist' alternative to the PLO. The killing of six Israeli soldiers in December 1992 by Hamas guerrillas was proof that Israel's cultivation of political Islam as a counterweight to the PLO had paid off, though not in the way that they had hoped. If the rise of Hamas had lethal side effects, it also provided a pretext for the IDF to go in hard in Spring 1993. Gaza bore the brunt of this, because of its perceived role as 'base for Hamas'.

As part of this general wave of repression, Israel also imposed 'indefinite' closure on the territories, using the pretext of 'anti-terrorism'. This meant that 189,000 Palestinians were unable to get to work in Israel. The policy of closure has been used on and off throughout the 1990s, as 'collective punishment' for suicide bombings and other attacks. After the closure of the Occupied Territories in March 1993, which created labour shortages in construction and agriculture, the government gave the green light to the employment of guest workers.

The Intifada thus forced the Israeli bourgeoisie to end the Palestinians' exclusive monopoly of the bottom end of the labour market, and find a less volatile source of cheap labour power. Given their entrenched position, it would be problematic to force Jewish workers into this role. At the beginning of the Intifada, construction sites in Jerusalem had unsuccessfully tried to recruit Jewish labour for the double the normal Palestinian wage. Obviously Jewish workers tend to be more loyal to the state, and would tend to identify with its security imperatives. However, pushing them to the bottom end of the labour market would involve a renegotiation of the post-1967 class compromise, and there was a shortage of Jewish labour as it was. In the 1980s, more Jews were leaving Israel than were coming in.

The collapse of the USSR seemed to provide the solution, in the form of a new wave of potential immigrants. This was not without its problems, because the new immigrants had wanted to go to America and to make up for being stuck in Israel demanded their share of the Zionist cake. The bottom end of the labour market was a far cry from the professional careers many of them had previously occupied in the USSR.

Furthermore, Israel needed US aid to absorb the new immigrants, and because of the frustration of the US bourgeoisie over Israel's stalling over settlements, Bush Snr had threatened to refuse loans in 1991, and made it clear that Israel could not absorb the new immigrants without some substantial progress on resolving the Intifada. The Russian immigrants have become a bone of contention in Israeli society, because of the widespread perception that they have been accommodated at other Jewish workers' expense. The need to accommodate the influx of Russian immigrants is linked to rent increases in 'desirable areas' - pushing out poorer Jews and increasing the demand for settlement expansion. This resentment, combined with a generalized anxiety about the erosion of the exclusively Jewish character of the state, has fuelled rumours about the lack of authenticity of the new immigrants' 'Jewish identity'.

These anxieties have been further fuelled by the increasingly widespread use of non-Jewish guest workers from Eastern Europe and the Pacific. Mainly from Romania and the Philippines, although some of them are from Jordan and Egypt, the guest workers are generally employed through agencies like Manpower. They endure very bad working conditions, very poor housing, and there are frequent cases of physical assault by employers.[48] Workers' passports are kept by the agency as a matter of course and so they are tied to their job if they want to stay in the country. Many employers withhold pay, and have their staff deported if they try to demand their wages. Recently workers have been made to pay agencies a deposit that they only get back if they complete their contract. With these conditions it's not surprising that many migrant workers decide they'd rather work illegally.[49] Most male migrant workers work in construction and agriculture, but particularly construction. The construction industry is constantly wanting to employ more migrant workers and the government is always putting limits on the number of visas they'll issue, creating a market for the illegal workers. Migrant workers work for less than Palestinians in Israel and from the territories, and in one case this has led to a pogrom in a Palestinian town in the Galilee against Jordanian and Egyptian squatter workers.

Massive Palestinian unemployment, a leadership challenge from Hamas and Arafat's isolation over his support for Iraq in the Gulf War all contributed to the weakening of the PLO's negotiating position. While the rise of Hamas represented the more rejectionist politics of the local petit bourgeoisie, the mercantile and financial capitalists of the diaspora were more willing to accept the impoverished Palestinian statelet on offer. After all, they did not need land in order to realize their profits, and unlike the local petit bourgeoisie, were not confronted by the daily realities of Israeli rule. On the other hand, the relative security of their position might be put at risk of they stuck their necks out too much against the 'New World Order'.

Known early on as the Gaza Jericho accords, the Oslo accords were a rehash of deals that the PLO had been rejecting for years. The PLO were offered Gaza and Jericho to administer, as a first step. Even though more land was grudgingly given, Israel still controls the borders, foreign policy, etc. However, the deal was so humiliating for the PLO that even Israel was concerned that they'd stuck the boot in too much.

In Cairo, Israel's environment minister warned that a 'defeated' PLO was no more in Israel's interests than a victorious one. 'When you twist Arafat's arm in the name of security, you have to be careful not to break it. With a broken arm, Arafat won't be able to maintain control in Gaza and Jericho.'[50]

The agreement has often been compared to the system of 'bantustans' which existed in South Africa. The continuation of the settlements and the construction of settler-only roads have reinforced this similarity.

Most Palestinian nationalist groups opposed the Oslo Accords from the outset but decided to stick to their role of 'loyal opposition'. Hamas has continued its attacks on Israelis but not on the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). At the beginning of PNA rule Hamas said "We welcome the Palestinian Security forces as brothers", and pledged "the cutting back of separately called strike days to lighten the economic burden of our people". Leninist groups, mainly the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and the PFLP (People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine) have less support than Hamas and appear to be ineffectual, they oppose Oslo but didn't advocate active struggle against the PNA or even against Israel, at least until the commencement of the Intifada.

The policing role of the PLO
In spite of the role of the 'loyal opposition', the resistance in the West Bank and Gaza didn't just fade away when the PNA came into force. Arafat's arrival in Gaza on July 1st 1994 was not the triumphant hero's welcome he had hoped for, and the PNA ran about desperately trying to whip up mass popular excitement about his return from exile. The proletarians of Gaza were more interested in the prices of basic commodities. The price of vegetables were pushed up 250%, by the relatively free export conditions given to the Palestinian agricultural produce in the Israeli market under the 1994 Paris Protocol. Israel helped to wind up the situation by immediately putting a closure on the Gaza Strip and killing Palestinians in the resulting riots.[51] Hamas killed Israelis in retaliation and the new PNA denounced attacks on Israel and pledged to co-operate with Israel against any future attacks. This led almost immediately to big rallies protesting against the PNA's stance.

For Israel, Palestinian autonomy in the most populated areas meant shifting the political burden of public order onto the shoulders of a Palestinian bourgeoisie, unfettered by the checks and balances of Israel's Western European-style democratic forms. The PNA spend the majority of their budget on security (most of the money earmarked for economic change has been 'lost' by the infamously corrupt PNA), with one policeman for every thirty Palestinians.[52] They have brought back the death penalty, which has been used to stage public executions of 'collaborators' during the new Intifada, and imprisoned countless people without trial - generally their political opponents.

Despite all this repression within the PNA areas there have been protests and general strikes against the PNA treatment of Hamas militants. In the refugee camps in Gaza, which Arafat has always been notoriously reluctant to visit, there were gun battles between PNA security and camp residents several times during the summer of 2000; with opponents being arrested and held without trial. 200 teachers ditched their union for being too close to the PNA, set up an independent union and closed the schools and began a long running strike.[53] Many of them have been imprisoned. Also recently, 20 academics and professionals living in the PNA areas published and distributed a manifesto criticising the PNA.

The peace process and Israeli capital restructuring
For the section of the Israeli bourgeoisie, who sought accommodation with the Palestinians, Oslo represented a third way, between the intensive accumulation of the 1970s, and the expansionist dreams of a greater Israel. If not by conquest, then by greater integration into the economy of the region, would Israeli capital seek out new areas of investment. Import controls were to be abandoned, to increase competition, and the big state- owned conglomerates were to be privatized, with an expansion of the role of private sub-contractors and employment agencies. For the Israeli state, this meant disciplining the Israeli working class, at the same time as shifting the political burden for social control of the Palestinian working class onto the shoulders of the new Palestinian statelet.

However the panacea of Oslo faced opposition from proletarians, both Israeli and Palestinian. In 1996, three years after Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin had shaken hands on the White House lawn, the Likud government's attempts to introduce privatisation led to a wave of industrial unrest, while the construction of a tunnel in Jerusalem sparked riots, which caused the highest number of Palestinian fatalities in twenty years of occupation. Nevertheless, these struggles had no connection, and the attempts at economic rationalization represented by Oslo continued largely unhindered.

The Palestinian working class
Oslo has bought the Israeli bourgeoisie time to replace the cheap but disruptive Palestinians with cheaper and less volatile labour. Thousands of Palestinians were sacked during the Gulf War. This was possible because they could be replaced by guest workers, as discussed above. The use of migrant labour has allowed Israel to put a far more effective blockade on the territories than they ever could in the last Intifada. The blockades, which were imposed when the PNA came to power, made it difficult or impossible for Palestinians to get to work in Israel. This helped to create the conditions for massive unemployment in Gaza, with workers having to get through the blockade somehow to assemble at road junction 'slave markets' in Jaffa, instead of employers going to pick workers up from the 'slave markets' in the territories.[54] However, as Peres put it in November 1994, three months after riots at the Erez checkpoint, "if Palestinians can no longer work in Israel, we must create the conditions that will bring the jobs to the workers."[55]

This is being done in two main ways. Some Palestinians work in the new industrial parks, more of which are planned for just inside the Jordanian and Lebanese borders.[56] Many other Palestinians work for Palestinian sub-contractors. The sub-contractors import Israeli raw materials and pay very low wages. The resulting commodities are retailed by Israeli companies, enabling the Israeli bosses to increase their profits because of the Palestinian wage levels. This new co-operation between the Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies has not only worsened the labour conditions for the Palestinian proletariat, it has also has extended the proletarianization of the Palestinian petit bourgeoisie. For example Israeli and Palestinian Investors are currently setting up a large industrial park to produce dairy products just on the PNA side of the border, with Tnuva, one of the largest Israeli food companies. This will undermine and probably bankrupt most of the Palestinian milk farmers who currently employ 13% of the Palestinian workers in the territories.

The Palestinian bourgeoisie have accepted their subordination to Israeli capital, firstly because it profited them, and secondly because a complete disengagement from the Israeli economy might expose them to the competition from neighbouring capitals with access to cheaper labour power. This would involve further confrontation with the working class. However, the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisie (as well as the Jordanian) all share a common interest in preserving the territories vast pool of cheap labour, to attract Israeli, Palestinian and international investment.

Jewish working class
Although Palestinians are being progressively squeezed out of the Israeli labour market, the guest workers are not the ideal solution. Ideally, Israeli capital needs to impose worse conditions on the Jewish working class. However, when Likud tried to introduce more privatization in 1996, there was an upsurge in Jewish working class unrest. Oslo represents a further attempt to continue splitting the Israeli economy into high wage jobs and casual badly paid jobs, and to renegotiate the post 1967 class compromise. Oslo's attempt to 'normalize' trade relations with the Arab world can only mean that the working class in Israel will be exposed to the competition of the lower paid workers in neighbouring states. This is very profitable as their wages are even lower than those of the Israeli Palestinians. The peace deal with Jordan included arrangements providing for the free movement of capital so Israeli businesses immediately moved to Jordan to use the cheaper labour force. This increased unemployment of working class Jews in areas like Dimona, and female Arab textile workers in the north, leading to an unemployment rate of 8% and rising.

As well as leading to lay-offs in the private sector, the Oslo settlement involves increasing the economic insecurity for public sector workers. Loads of public sector Jewish workers are now on temporary contracts, especially women, young people and new immigrants, and there is also the use of subcontracting in the public sector so the working conditions are worse. Jews on the dole are now being forced to take any job, an experience familiar to us. The Histadrut is covering less workers all the time, naming itself the 'new Histadrut' and carrying out surveys on why people don't trust it. Recently there was a big strike by an independent railway union demanding that the Histadrut recognize it. There has also been an attempt to set up a union for temporary workers.[57]

In an attempt to keep the Jewish working class quiet, these measures have been accompanied by an increase in the pace of settlement building in the occupied territories.

Although each new agreement brokered by America includes an Israeli promise to stop building settlements, the Israeli bourgeoisie has no choice but to ignore these promises in order to accommodate the needs of Jewish workers. Currently Israel has been trying to avoid this problem by 'judaizing' Arab areas within the green line, a policy which led directly to Israeli Arab involvement in this Intifada.

Known as the Al Aqsa Intifada because of its connection to Sharon's provocative visit to the Al Asqa mosque in September 2000, it was, at least at first, like the 1987 Intifada, spontaneous, "driven more by the enormous frustration of the Palestinians than by any strategic decision by the Palestinian leadership".[58] The spark for the explosion of proletarian anger was the killing of seven Palestinians by Israeli by 'riot control' police at the Al Asqa mosque the day after Sharon's visit - and the much publicized killing of a 12-year old at Gaza's Netzarim junction. As discussed above there have been almost continuous struggles in the Gaza strip and the West Bank. However, as the most sustained revolt since the last Intifada, this has earned the monika of 'Intifada'.

As already discussed, this struggle follows a period of conflict between the Palestinian proletariat and bourgeoisie. There were clashes between demonstrators and Palestinian police in Ramallah in September 2000, the month before the beginning of the Intifada. It is then timely for the Palestinian bourgeoisie to have mass proletarian anger turned away from them and towards 'the real enemy', as they would put it. Furthermore, in the recent uprising, Hamas have helped to restore the PLO-PNA's legitimacy with its constituency, by joining the NIF, the new umbrella body of all the nationalist bodies to control the uprising. The Fatah-based Palestinian police also help ensure that the uprising follows 'the war logic of the state', by militarising the struggle.

Nevertheless, like the previous Intifada, the fresh uprising is not entirely chained by the logic of nationalism, or support for the Arab bourgeoisies. There have been mass protests throughout the Arab world, and not just among the Palestinian diaspora. In Jordan, there were clashes with the Jordanian army by 25,000 Palestinians, leading to a ban on anti-Israeli demos in Jordan, and Egypt has seen the largest and fiercest student protests since the 1970s.

Israeli Arabs[59]
Furthermore there has been a blurring of the green line with the greater involvement of the Israeli Arabs being a distinctive element of this Intifada. Israeli Arabs were involved in the 1987 Intifada, but they played mainly a supporting role to the Palestinians in the territories. Despite their supposed 'democratic' privileges, they have never been fully integrated into the Israeli state. This was emphasized in 1976, when several Israeli Palestinian farmers were shot dead while protesting against land confiscation. This massacre came to be commemorated in annual general strikes on this day, 'Land Day'. On Land Day in 1989, young Israeli Palestinians blocked roads, threw petrol bombs at police cars and cut water pipes to Jewish settlements. Because of such incidents during the 1987 Intifada, elements in the Israeli bourgeoisie began to see them as a Fifth Column within the Green Line, and to demand that compulsory military service be extended to them, so as to guarantee their loyalty to the state. In the 1987 Intifada, Israeli Palestinians only faced plastic bullets. This time the stakes have been upped for them because of the killing of 12 Israeli Arabs by the security forces in the first few days of the Intifada.

In fact one of the main build ups to this Intifada has been the struggle of Israeli Arabs being evicted as a result of the government's policy of 'judaizing' the Galilee.[60] Almost every week over summer 2000 there was at least one house demolition in the villages in the Galilee and whole villages were coming out in support, bringing them into more or less constant conflict with the police. This policy of 'judaizing' the Galilee has included the harassment of Israeli Arabs who are on the dole. In Nazareth the office was moved further away, people's paperwork was constantly lost or manipulated - in one case a whole village was cut off for refusing work that they hadn't been offered! This has led to big demos and fighting with cops. In one case, a crowd of Nazarene women smashed their way into a benefit office.

In the first days of the uprising, whole villages in the Galilee were on strike and the main road through that area was strewn with burning tyres. Israeli Arabs have also shown themselves to be increasingly disillusioned with the electoral process. Ninety per cent of Israeli Arabs voted for Barak at the previous general election, which is generally thought to be why he won. At the 2001 election there was a concerted campaign by Arab 'community leaders' to persuade Israeli Arabs to vote for Barak - anything to avoid Sharon - the response was an almost total election boycott. Indeed some Israeli Palestinian workers' response to 'their' Arab MKs (Members of the Knesset - the Israeli parliament) was to chase them out of villages when they came to canvass.[61]

Further discrediting of the PA and militarization of the struggle
The PNA's role in the present struggle must be seen as an attempt by the PNA to control and profit from the mass resistance. There is still a strong mass element to this Intifada and the PNA is trying to use it to consolidate - or gain - their control over the 'Palestinian 'street'. The PNA also need to make sure that they retain the loyalty of their own police force. Many of the Palestinian police are Fatah militants. While they do not have any compunction about attacking demos against the PA, they can be reluctant to fire when Palestinians attack the Israeli state. Besides, they would rather the anger of the Palestinian proletariat was turned against the Israeli cops and soldiers than against them. As discussed above the summer of 2000 was characterized by violent battles between PNA police and the 'street', after the lack of progress in the Camp David agreements between Arafat and Barak. The struggles took off when the state armed police force took the side of demonstrations and fired on the IDF. This, in turn provided a pretext for the IDF to shoot to kill and for the full weight of Israeli military power, including helicopter gunships, to be brought down on the heads of the Palestinian population.

Due to the role of the PNA, this Intifada, especially when compared to 1987s 'rebellion of stones' is a highly militarized affair. While the stone throwers of 1987 might have discarded 'the warfare logic of the state', the same cannot be said of the paramilitary Palestinian police force. One consequence of this is the involvement of a far narrower cross section of the Palestinian population - with the protagonists being mainly male and between 17 and 25 years old. Another is a far higher level of Palestinian fatalities than in the last Intifada, allowing the PLO to scrape back some credibility and to get rid of some unruly poor people into the bargain. To a limited extent, the transformation of a spontaneous popular uprising into a quasi-military conflict bolsters the PNA's 'state in embryo'. After all, a state presupposes the ability to defend your borders. On the other hand, Israel's crushing military superiority has led elements within the PLO to attempt to try to de-escalate the conflict. These elements have sought to reassert the mass civilian character of the uprising.

The impact of the new Intifada
Despite the Israeli state's attempts at the substitution of guest workers for Palestinians, one of the main effects of the new Intifada has again been a slump in the construction industry, due to the cutting-off of cheap Palestinian labour power. Israel's economic growth was expected to drop to 2% in 2001, from 6% in 2000. House prices in Jerusalem have already fallen 20%, since last year. While many of these figures have been put down to the world pressures of economic slowdown, it is clear that the Intifada is aggravating global pressures, when you consider the halving of Israel's $2 billion-per-year trade with the territories. Although world market conditions are given as the official reason for this year's 50% decline in foreign investment, the Intifada is hardly going to attract foreign investment to Israel. On the other hand, the Tel Aviv start-up industry is still booming, indicating the relative strength of capital accumulation in Israel, cushioned from many of capital's normal economic imperatives by US aid of over $4 billion per year. However, this aid is a double-edged sword, because its dependence on US goodwill thus limits the freedom of action Israel has in its efforts to crush the revolt.

Even before their crushing election defeat, the Intifada had thrown the Labour Party into crisis, partly because of the intractable problems with settlements discussed above. Despite Sharon's role in fuelling it, the bourgeoisie politically rehabilitated him. While his reputation as a 'hard man' made him the natural choice for the right, more liberal voters were not put off by his bogeyman status in the prevailing climate of national emergency. The new uprising has also led to major shifts in foreign policy among the Arab states. Gone is the conciliatory tone towards Israel; more importantly, gone too is the consensus over Iraq that America and Britain had kept in place since 1991. As one of the few perceived leaders of pan-Arabism and an enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinians, Saddam Hussein has been undergoing rehabilitation in the Middle East, and the sanctions regime is near to collapse. At least until recently, Bush's partial disengagement from the peace process - in reality, unequivocal support for Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip - meant that it was hard to see how the current Intifada could be ended quickly. Popular Arab opinion was hardening against the United States.

With the Intifada, increasing unrest within the Arab states, such as Egypt and Jordan, the Arab bourgeoisie were forced to convene the first Arab summit for four years, and to allow Iraq to the table. Egypt recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv for the first time in 18 years, and four Arab states terminated diplomatic relations. However, it is important not to overemphasize this shift - Lebanon and Jordan are still keen to build the jointly funded industrial parks to get the most out of the peace dividend - if it comes. Jordan and Egypt have also banned anti-Israeli demonstrations.

As for the Western bourgeoisie, it is divided over its relationship to the Middle East generally. This was demonstrated by the isolation of the USA and Britain when they resumed bombing Iraq shortly after George W. Bush became president. Palestinian diplomats are looking for European allies - most likely France.

For the time being, the Israeli bourgeoisie has had to subordinate its long-term ambition to 'normalize' its trade relations with the rest of the Middle East. With the election of Sharon, this has been struck of the agenda. However, now that the Israeli bourgeoisie has abandoned the 'peace process',[62] it is more dependent than ever on the goodwill of the West, in particular the financial support of the USA, which has to balance its support for Israel, with consideration of its other interests in the region. This makes Israeli policy very confusing: sending the tanks into Gaza one minute, withdrawing them the next after a ticking off by the USA. A main tactic of the Israeli state has been the assassination of Palestinian, often Hamas, leaders. The mass public anger among Palestinians whenever this occurs only shows the extent of the popular appeal of Hamas. However it is easier for the Israeli bourgeoisie to present this kind of state violence as legitimate than the indiscriminate killing of children (although they seem to be unable to 'take out the terrorists' without killing other people in the process).

Despite the limitations imposed on its actions by the USA, the Israeli state has been able to get away with a great deal of slaughter, thanks to the lack of any real working class response. While the Intifada has triggered rebellions by Arabs, both inside the Green Line and in other parts of the Middle East, Jewish workers appear to be identifying with the imperatives of security, although there is also evidence of disaffected conscripts smuggling weapons 'to the other side' - which has been blamed on drug abuse in the army. Obviously, suicide bombings of buses, discos, shops and other busy areas reinforce divisions between Jewish and Palestinian workers. Other Jewish workers are residents of the settlements, which have come to be regarded as legitimate targets for Palestinian guerrilla attacks. In addition to the unleashing of all of the Israeli military's firepower against the proletarians of the occupied territories, the arming of the settlers has further set proletarian against proletarian.

The 'peace process' signalled the Israeli bourgeoisie's acknowledgement that they needed the PLO to police the Palestinian proletariat. The PLO were then caught between the rewards for doing the dirty work, and the need not to lose their ideological capacity to recuperate proletarian struggles. The outbreak of the new Intifada indicated their failure on both counts.

In Israel manifestations of working class resistance to economic rationalization in the 1990s were more muted than in other places, such as Egypt and Tunisia. However compensating Jewish workers for their increased insecurity required the acceleration of settlement construction, and therefore an intransigent negotiating stance for the Israeli state in relation to the Palestinians. The settlement construction on the West Bank was paralleled by the 'judaization' of the Galilee in Israel proper. This meant intensification of dole harassment and house demolitions against the Israeli Palestinians in the period leading up the fresh outbreak of the Intifada in 2000.

The signs of an escalation of the Intifada into a full-scale military conflict have not led to the total suppression of the civilian uprising. Certain sections of the Palestinian bourgeoisie have wanted to reassert the mass civilian forms of struggle to attempt to de-escalate the Intifada. However, so far they have not been capable of de-escalating it. The Intifada led to the abandonment of the 'peace process' by the Israeli bourgeoisie; but their dependence on the USA, which has other considerations in the Middle East, limited the pace at which they can they could intensify the repression of the uprising.

So how much is the Intifada a mediated expression of class war, and how much a national liberation struggle? And if the workers have no country, why do workers continue to support nationalism? It is only part of the answer to point to the recent attack by Palestinians on established forms of political representation, because this has often been expressed in terms of the representatives not being nationalist enough. In this scenario, the PLO's crisis of legitimacy does not imply the rejection of all forms of representation, but rather leads to mass support for a more militant nationalist form of representation, e.g. Hamas.

Given the subordination of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, many Palestinians were compelled to work for Israeli capital, whether inside the Green Line, or in settlement construction. For them, the Israeli military government is the face of the boss. It would therefore be possible for them to identify as Palestinians rather than as proletarians, with petit bourgeois shop keepers, who experienced many similar day to day humiliations and privations of Israeli rule. In the absence of revolution, their everyday lives as workers might improve if there was a properly functioning Palestinian bourgeoisie, which could invest in industries to employ them, thus providing revenue for both classes.

In conclusion, the ritual calls for abstract solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian workers ignore the very real divisions both experience in their day to day life. The 'peace process' looked set to partially erode these divisions, by integrating the Israeli state into the rest of the Middle East. Implicit in this process was an attack on the entrenchment of Jewish workers, which would compel them to join the rest of the region's working class, albeit in a relatively privileged position. This has encountered working class resistance, such as a strike at Tempo Beers by Israeli Jews and Arabs, which has been hailed by the Israeli Left as a rare example of Jewish and Palestinian class solidarity.

As we pointed out in Aufheben 2, mass support for nationalism expresses a 'superficial identity' of contradictory class interests.[63] In the case of Jewish workers in Israel, the privileged position they occupy in relation to Palestinians has come about because of the combativity of these workers. The accommodation of Jewish workers requires the supremacy of Israeli capital in relation to the occupied territories. The subordination of the Palestinian bourgeoisie sharpened class antagonisms in the territories, which require that the bourgeoisie turns proletarian anger exclusively against Israel. Given cross-class experiences shared by Palestinians of repression by the Israeli authorities, it seems that the nationalist alliance between proletarians and the petit bourgeoisie is stronger than bonds of class solidarity between Palestinian and Jewish workers. Palestinian nationalist attacks increasingly target all manifestations of Israeli domination, notably the settlers themselves, and even civilians in Israel. The physical danger this creates for Jewish workers pushes them to support the Israeli state's security imperatives.

There have been tendencies among both Palestinians and Israelis to resist their incorporation in the opposing state machines and their war logic. But ultimately the development of such tendencies into a social movement that is capable of breaking out of the deadlock of mutually reinforcing nationalisms cannot be found within the bounds of this conflict in isolation. Rather, such a development is bound up with the generalization of proletarian struggles in the Middle East, and crucially, in the West. Depending on the extent of the class resistance it generates, particularly at a time of world recession, 'the war on terrorism' opens up at least the possibility of such a generalization.

[1] It tends also to deny Zionism the status of a 'proper' nationalism, focusing on its exclusionary racism. While this is true of Zionism, it forgets that nationalism is always based on exclusion, and so has nothing to do with communism.

[2] The New Intifada: Israel, Imperialism and Palestinian Resistance (Socialist Worker pamphlet, January 2001).

[3] 'Somalia and the "Islamic Threat" to Global Capital', Aufheben 2 (Summer 1993).

[4] By contrast the USSR in this period had very little to offer potential clients. The immense financial incentives of the Americans were impossible to deliver, and in place of the thousand-and-one ways in which capital could help an Arab state, the Soviet union could offer only military and limited technical aid. By contrast with the US, Russian policy in the Middle East was crude - capable of providing only the most limited of protection even to its closest ally, Syria.

[5] See 'Somalia and the "Islamic Threat" to Global Capital', Aufheben 2 (Summer 1993). See also Midnight Notes, 'When Crusaders and Assassins Unite, Let the People Beware' (Midnight Notes, 1990).

[6] The 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty only showed just how completely Egypt had fallen into the American orbit since the death of Nasser.

[7] See 'Capitalist Carnage in the Middle East', Wildcat, 6, 1983.

[8] So much so that the Pan-Arabist, but anti-Shiite Ba'athist regime in Iraq, had to be used as a counterweight to Iran in the 1980s.

[9] Of course, this is a reciprocal arrangement: Israeli nationalism is reinforced by the perception that 'the Arabs want to throw us into the sea'.

[10] "Zionism's fundamental contradiction was trying to save the Jew as Jew, namely the communal links which long predate modern capitalism, by integrating him into the most modern world of capital." 'The Future of a Rebellion', Le Brise-Glace (The Ice-Breaker, 1988), translated in Fifth Estate, Winter 1988/9. As we shall see, the contradictory logic of this ideology in practice takes the form of tendencies which undermine this very identity - that is, if Israel becomes more integrated with the Middle East.

[11] One of the biggest and best-known Jewish organisations was the BUND (general union of Jewish workers of Lithuania, Poland and Russia) which was set up in 1898 to connect various groups of Jewish workers in the Tsarist empire. It was briefly part of the SDLP, the Russian social democratic party, which later split into the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. In 1903 the BUND's membership was 40,000 and it had a "pioneering role in the Russian workers' movement" and more "genuine working class support" than any other workers' group in Eastern Europe. See Nathan Weinstock, Zionism: False Messiah (Paris, 1969). Although it was fiercely opposed to organized Zionism, there was always an argument within the BUND about to what extent it should support or promote Jewish nationalism. Debates centred around whether demands for a Jewish state would break up working class solidarity and divert attention away from the class struggle, and whether Jewish workers should organize separately from other workers. As well as traditional workers' struggles, the BUND managed to organize self defence against pogroms in co-operation with non Jewish socialists. But after the membership of the BUND plummeted from 40,000 to 500, it became increasingly nationalist.

[12] There is even a story that David Ben Gurion (the first Prime Minister of Israel) kept a bust of Lenin on his desk, pointing to the influence of Bolshevism on the European Jewish working class.

[13] Baron Rothschild, who felt that Jewish settlement was a good way to serve French interests, sponsored the first Zionist immigration to Palestine at the end of 19th century. He had his own administration which could "subdue insubordination by force", all settlers had to sign a contract promising not to "belong to any organisation which is not authorized" and recognize that they were only 'day labourers' on the Baron's lands - mainly producing wine. It was a very expensive project, costing several thousand pounds to install each settler family. Nathan Weinstock, Zionism: False Messiah (Paris, 1969).

[14] "Hundreds of Arabs are gathering in the market square, near the workers hostel, they have been waiting here since dawn. They are the seasonal workers...there are about 1500 of them altogether every day, and we, a few dozen Jewish workers, often remain jobless. We too come to the market to look out for the offer of a days work." Op. cit., p. 68.

[15] See Moshe Postone, Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.

[16] "This issue was the main conflict within the settlers' community during the first three decades of the century." Op. cit., p. 71.

[17] This type of picketing was common amongst leftist Zionists, e.g. those working at the British-owned railway companies in mandatory Palestine (one of the largest industries in Palestine at the time). There was some talk among these Jewish leftists of working class solidarity and trying to set up joint Jewish and Arab trade unions. However at the same time they were taking part in pickets and lobbying British employers to use exclusively Jewish labour.

[18] The Irgun Zvai Leumi was created in 1931 to be the militia of the right as the left increasingly controlled the Haganah (the main militia).

[19] Our use of the word 'corporatist' here is not the sense in which it used by the anti-'globalization' of 'corporate rule', etc. (see '"Anti-capitalism" as Ideology… and as Movement?' in this issue) We refer to such social democratic practices as tripartite agreements between the state, unions and employers. Of course, with Labour Zionism, the Histadrut fulfilled many of the functions of all three.

[20] Where this didn't happen the Israeli state helped in various ways, including arranging for a synagogue to be bombed in Iraq, and paying the Iraqi government for each Jew who went to Israel.

[21] See 'Two Local Wars', Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981).

[22] Most wages were up rated every six months. An increase in the rate of inflation meant a loss in real wages until wages were uprated to account for higher. This lag in the uprating of wages therefore tended to transfer income from wages into profits.

[23] In 1978 settlement building became a focus for opposition by the labour Zionist middle classes against Likud. The 'officers' letter' opposed this expansion on the grounds that they threatened the 'Jewish democratic character of the state'. This 'growing gap between western democratic practices and Israeli ones' was the ideological basis of the Peace Movement. They conveniently forgot that the settlements had been initiated when Labour was in power. The disparity, which had been easy for them to ignore prior to 1967, had become increasingly visible with the occupation. The more radical elements in the Peace Movement contemplated something that was almost unthinkable in Israeli society: the open refusal of military service. Because of the centrality of compulsory military service to the reproduction of Israeli society, this created major divisions in the movement. Its mainstream body Peace Now denounced a letter from reserve soldiers to the Minister of Defence, in which they threatened to refuse to defend the settlements. 'Conscientious objection' gained more legitimacy in 1982, because the invasion of Lebanon threatened what many Labour Zionists saw as the exclusively defensive role of the IDF. 160 soldiers were tried and sentenced for refusing to take part in the invasion. However smoking pot in the army and the economic crisis represented a greater threat to the Israeli war effort in Lebanon, than 'conscientious objection'. The latter could be accommodated to a certain extent, by allowing the relatively small number of refuseniks to plead insanity and transferring them away from the frontline. The 400,000 strong demonstration against the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 has widely been seen as the high watermark of the Israeli anti-war movement. The war in Lebanon had not been the quick victory that had been expected, and many parents faced the prospect of their children returning home in body bags.

[24] Israeli defence minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1985.

[25] 'The Agonising Transformation of the Palestinian Peasants into Proletarians', p.1 (International Library of the Communist Left)

[26] Op. cit., p.3. 'fellah' means peasant.

[27] Op. cit., p.3.

[28] In 1973, 52% worked in construction and 19% in agriculture, the lowest paid sectors.

[29] See 'The Palestine Proletariat is Spilling its Blood for a Bourgeois State', Revolutionary Perspectives, 20, Winter 2001 (magazine of the Communist Workers' Organization).

[30] Op. cit.

[31] 'In Memory of the Proletarian Uprising in Tel-Al-Zatar', Worldwide Intifada #1, Summer 1992.

[32] Op. cit.

[33] Phalangists were Christian militias, backed by Israel.

[34] 'In Memory of the Proletarian Uprising in Tel-Al-Zatar', op. cit.

[35] Around this time the different nationalist factions had become unified, with the help of USSR mediators, and the PCP (Palestinian Communist Party) given full membership of the PLO. It should be noted at this point that this reconciliation came about under pressure from the Palestinians in the territories, who were increasingly under siege from the new settlements.

[36] See 'Palestinian Autonomy? Or the Autonomy of our Class Struggle?', Worldwide Intifada #1, Summer 1992.

[37] See 'Intifada: Uprising for Nation or Class?', op. cit.

[38] IDF report quoted in op. cit.

[39] Op. cit.

[40] From 'Call no.2 - The United National Leadership for Escalating the Uprising in the Occupied Territories, January 10, 1988' (No Voice is Louder than the Voice of the Uprising, Ibal Publishing Ltd., 1989).

[41] From 'Call No.32 - the Call of Revolution and Continuation, January 8, 1989', op. cit.

[42] Quoted in Andrew Rigby, Living the Intifada (1991, Zed Books).

[43] For instance, sharing a platform with Meretz (a centre left Israeli Party).

[44] See 'Future of a Rebellion' (Le Brise-Glace, 1988).

[45] The importance or size of this movement can be, and often is, over rated. It has always been fairly small.

[46] See Andrew Rigby, op. cit. Islamism is a modernist political movement, which however harks back to pre-capitalist forms. Thus, like fascism, it is able to position itself against both communism and capitalism (its political opposition to capitalism is in reality a moral opposition to 'usury' - interest). Like forms of anti-semitism and anti-Americanism, it is a pseudo anti-capitalism.

[47] From Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis: the Struggle for Peace and Political Independence after Oslo (Pluto Press, 1995).

[48] Documented by Kav la Oved (Workers' Hotline).

[49] There are roughly 100,000 foreign workers in Israel. More than 66,000 work in construction (out of a total construction workforce of 160,000). In construction, about 51,000 of the foreign workers are registered and another 15,000 illegal.

[50] Graham Usher, op. cit.

[51] There have been many riots, particularly at the Erez crossing, by the thousands of Palestinians unable to get to their jobs in the Erez Industrial Park on the other side of the crossing. In one of these riots, a petrol station was set on fire, buses on a parking lot were torched, 65 Palestinian labourers were injured and two were killed. The new Palestinian police exchanged fire with the Israeli army and 25 of them were injured. The same month, Gazan workers clashed with the IDF in bread riots.

[52] One of the reasons for the emphasis on security has been to accommodate Fatah's cadre, by giving them a job to do.

[53] Teachers in the PNA areas are more proletarianized than in most of the West, since their teacher's wage is not sufficient to sustain their existence, and they have to work as agricultural labourers, etc. when schools are on holiday.

[54] In the first few days of PNA rule, unemployment rate in Gaza had reached 60 per cent and only 21,000 of the 60,000 Palestinians working in Israel were allowed to enter Israel. After riots Israel closed the Gaza Strip indefinitely. The unemployment rates have been aggravated by Quadaffi expelling all Palestinians from Libya as a gesture of solidarity with the PLO!

[55] Quoted in Graham Usher, op. cit. These measures are particularly useful as they allow Israeli businesses to sell products through Arab sub-contractors to the Arab states who don't want to admit to trading with Israel.

[56] Even since the start of this Intifada the Jordanian Government has unofficially requested that the Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry establish two more industrial zones in Jordan.

[57] This is to do with Kav La Oved (Workers' Hotline), one of the many groups to come out of the splintering of Matzpen, they support vulnerable workers in court, they basically do politico industrial tribunals. They also publicize things like deportations of migrant workers and illegal sacking of Palestinian workers in the press.

[58] Graham Usher, 'Palestine: The Intifada this Time', Race & Class, Vol. 42, No. 4.

[59] The involvement of Arabs within Israel has not been limited to Palestinian Israeli Arabs There have also been mass resignations of Druze (Arabic sect, who are supposed to serve in the Israeli army) soldiers from the IDF. The village of one Druze soldier refused to bury him when he was killed in confrontations with Palestinians.

[60] These are the areas where the new Ethiopian Jewish immigrants generally get dumped.

[61] And in the summer of 2000, an Arab MK was greeted with a hail of stones when he came to speak at the Al Baqaa Refugee Camp (Jordan).

[62] And the majority of the peace movement have given up the ghost, because they are "without a partner for peace".

[63] 'Yugoslavia Unravelled: Class Decomposition in the "New World Order"', Aufheben 2 (Summer 1993):

Nationalism reflects the superficial identity of interests that exists between a particular national bourgeoisie and the proletariat of that country for so long as capitalist social relations persist. An identity of interests because the valorization and realization of capital provides both capitalists and workers with a source of revenue with which, as independent subjects in the market legally separated from means, commodities can be purchased to satisfy needs (albeit in an alienated form). Superficial because, whilst it does not immediately present itself as such, this process is one of class exploitation and hence antagonism. To the extent that the bourgeoisie organizes itself on a national level, and it remains meaningful to talk of national economies, the proletariat finds itself a universal class divided upon national lines. For so long as we remain defeated, i.e., so long as the value form exists, then nationalism may feed upon this division. Capital may be a unity, but it is a differentiated one whose unity is constituted through competition on an international level. With competition on the world market based on cheapening commodities, acceptance of a 'national interest' and making sacrifices to the national bourgeoisie may mean increased exploitation for the working class, resignation to a living death or a real one as cannon fodder, but it also increases the competitiveness of the national capital on the world market, making its realisation more possible, and thus helps to secure future revenue for both classes.

Review of Change the World Without taking Power

Introduction

Since the events of Seattle in Autumn 1999, there have been numerous books and articles that have either purported to define or explain the anti-globalization/anti-capitalist movement, or else have sought to give this rather amorphous 'movement' some theoretical expression. At first sight Change the World Without Taking Power seems just another book jumping on this post-Seattle bandwagon. Indeed, with its cover image of a badly drawn balaclavered 'activist' abseiling down a wall, paint-brush in hand, it is clear that the publishers hope to tap into the growing market for anti-globalization books. However, on closer inspection, Change the World Without Taking Power is not just another such book.

In his previous work, John Holloway has made important theoretical contributions, particularly with his contributions to the debate of the 1970s and 1980s over the nature of the state.[1] In Change the World Without Taking Power Holloway attempts to radically revise the notion of revolutionary change in the light of both the failure of the revolutionary project in the twentieth century and emergence of the anti-globalization/anti-capitalist movement of recent years.

However, as he himself admits, much of his previous work was written in an often obscure and difficult style that made few concessions to the non-academic reader. Furthermore, in developing what were often highly abstract theoretical formulations Holloway rarely drew out their political implications. In contrast, in Change the World Without Taking Power, Holloway goes to great lengths to make what he says accessible. But in doing so Holloway does his best not to sacrifice his theoretical rigour.

Basing himself on Marx's theories of alienation and fetishism, Holloway mounts a formidable attack on the objectivism of traditional Marxism, and shows how such objectivism leads to a state-centred view of revolutionary transformation. Yet in attacking the objectivism of traditional Marxism in this way Holloway avoids the trap of falling into the pessimism and defeatism of post-modernism and 'post-Marxism'. Of course, such a critique of the objectivism of traditional Marxism, and its significance for contemporary social movements, is far from being new. Indeed, it is a project that has been regularly taken up in the pages of Aufheben. However, what is important about this book is that Holloway makes a serious attempt to set out this critique in a clear and succinct manner.

There is much in Change the World Without Taking Power that we would agree with, and we would hope that it finds a wide readership particularly amongst activists in the anti-capitalist movement, however, as we shall see, we can only recommended it with certain reservations.

The scream

Holloway takes as his starting point what he terms the 'scream': that is the immediate subjective refusal of life under capitalism. In taking up this starting point Holloway can be seen to place himself unequivocally on the side of the anti-globalization/anti-capitalist activist. After all, what is that unites the diverse individuals that make up the black blocs, the social forums, the Zapatistas and Indian farmers but a refusal of the horrors and banalities of capitalism rooted in their direct or indirect experience?

For Holloway, it is by basing itself on the immediacy of the 'scream' that the anti-capitalist/anti-globalization movement offers the hope of breaking free from the failed politics of social change that has been dominant through much of the twentieth century. Yet in embracing the 'new politics' of anti-capitalist/anti-globalization movement Holloway is concerned not to succumb to the gut reaction of many within the movement that leads to rejection of both theory in general and the ideas of Marx in particular. Indeed one of first tasks of Holloway's book is to show how this very gut reaction to theory, and the politics of traditional Marxism, can itself be grounded in the ideas of Marx.

For Holloway the problem of most social theory that has come to inform the politics of social change is that it has become dominated by the positivism that has become the orthodox approach in most of the social sciences in the twentieth century. The study of society has taken as its model the scientific method of the natural sciences in which the theorist is an objective and detached observer who seeks to analyse what is immediately apparent and measurable. This point of departure and method leads to a 'logic of identity' that reduces social relations to a mechanical and objective relation between things.

This 'logic of identity' tends to preclude the possibility of social transformation internal to social relations themselves. Of course, for bourgeois social theory, this preclusion of internal change serves well as an ideological defence of the status quo. However, for more critical social theory this positivistic approach requires that hopes for social change have to be imported from the outside (e.g. in the form of the autonomous development of technology or in the form of the revolutionary party bringing consciousness to proletariat etc.). Against this Holloway argues:

The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason, not from the reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of existence that is the conventional image of the 'thinker'. We start from negation, from dissonance. The dissonance can take many shapes. An inarticulate mumble of discontent, tears of frustration, a scream of rage, a confident roar. An unease, a confusion, a longing, a critical vibration. (p.1).

The problem is that the most radical and developed social theory that emerged from the nineteenth century, and which was to dominate the politics of social change in twentieth century, has itself come under the spell of positivism. For the Marxist theorists of the Second International at the end of the nineteenth century Marxism was above all a science and as such they came to interpret Marx's ideas in positivistic terms. For Holloway this became evident in the politics of state-led social change that the Second International bequeathed to the twentieth century.

Although the Second International split between reformists and revolutionists, for both sides of this split the state was seen as an essential tool for bringing about socialism. For the reformists who came to dominate social democratic parties across the world, the state was something that was essentially class-neutral and as such could be captured as it was and used to further interests of the working class and the cause of socialism. In contrast the revolutionists recognized that the state, as presently constituted, was a bourgeois state; it was therefore necessary to reconstruct the state so that it could be used by the working class.

For both the reformists and the revolutionists, the state was seen as a thing that was more or less suitable to be used as a principal tool to bring about social transformation. Indeed, as Holloway points out, this conception of the state was also shared by traditional anarchism. The only difference being that for the anarchists the state was a tool that could only be used by the ruling class, and which could not be reconstructed.

Drawing on his contributions to the state debate, Holloway criticizes such instrumentalist conceptions of the state which fetishize the state as a thing. Instead Holloway argues that the state must be seen as a distinct social form that arises from the social relations of capitalism. The state is not essentially some thing that is externally imposed on us, but is a form that arises from the practical activity between people in a society based on generalized commodity exchange.

In presenting his critique of the instrumentalist conceptions of the state that underpin the state-orientated politics of social change of the twentieth century, Holloway is led to set out Marx's theory of fetishism and alienation on which this critique is based: how the relations between people that arise out of their practical activity appears under capitalism as a relation between things and consequently how the movement of things, the products of their practical activity, come to dominate people. However, Holloway does not develop this theory of fetishism and alienation in the familiar terms of Marx. Instead of talking in terms of capital and labour, Holloway talks in the more general terms of the 'power over' and the 'power to' and in terms of the dominance of the 'done' over the 'doing'.

It must be admitted that avoiding the more familiar terms associated with Marx has certain advantages for Holloway. First, it allows Holloway, at an early stage in the book, to avoid introducing Marx's 'jargon', which may well put off all those anarchos and others that are in some way allergic to Marx. Second, it allows Holloway to avoid an economistic interpretation which may arise if terms such as labour, labour-power and capital were to be used. Indeed, Holloway's terms serve to emphasize the essential unity of the political and the economic, which is a point that he is keen to make. Thirdly, in using these new terms Holloway is able to reinvigorate Marx's theory of fetishism and go beyond the old formulations for a new generation of revolutionaries.

However, in talking in terms of 'doing' and 'done', 'power over' and 'power to', Holloway is not merely substituting synonyms into Marx's theory but in an important way is generalizing these concepts. As we shall see later, when we come to consider our reservations concerning Change the World Without Taking Power, such a generalization is problematic.

Avoiding the deep blue sea

Of course, the critique of the positivism of traditional Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals is nothing new. It is a critique that has its origins in the 1920s with the writings of Lukacs and Korsch and became prominent in the development of what became known as Western Marxism - a development that was to take a decidedly pessimistic turn.

The defeat of the classical workers' movement after the first world war brought with it a critical reappraisal of traditional Marxism. The Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals acted as if the working class was a positive category that subsisted prior to its subsumption to capital. As such, the relation of the working class to capital was essentially an external one. As a consequence, bourgeois ideology was merely a mystification that was imposed on the working class from the outside and was opposed to the proletariat's own objective class interests. From this it followed that the task of Marxists was simply to counter the mystifications of bourgeois propaganda and teach the working class the objective truth revealed by the doctrines of scientific socialism. Socialist transformation, whether by reform or revolution, merely depended on bringing the subjective consciousness of the working class into accord with its objective class situation.

However, with the failure of the workers' revolutions that followed the first world war, and with the increasingly evident degeneration of the Russian Revolution, this conception of the working class was put into question. If capital and labour were seen as mutually determining categories then bourgeois ideology could not be seen as simply being imposed on the working class. Instead it had to be admitted that bourgeois ideology adopted by the working class was rooted in its own practical and material experience. The fetishism of social relations, which in making relations between people appear as a natural and eternally ordained relation between things, was a real illusion.

For Lukacs the way out of such fetishism was through the Party which overcame the limited fetishistic view-point of each individual proletarian by providing a view of the totality. However, for those of the Frankfurt School, writing during the rise of both Stalinism and Fascism little comfort could be gained from invoking the totalitarianism of the Party. In their hands the theory of fetishism became a doctrine of despair. For them socialist intellectuals were doomed to labour endlessly at making criticisms of capitalist society that would inevitably be ignored by those who alone could put such criticisms into practice - the working class.

In recent decades the positivism not only of traditional Marxism but also most mainstream social sciences has come under attack from Post-Structuralist and Post-Modernist writers. Armed with anti-essentialism, relativism and the rejection of 'grand narratives', Post-Modernists have questioned both the supposed objectivity of positivist science and the idea of the rational bourgeois subject. As such they have in effect developed a theory of fetishism. However, like the Frankfurt School before them, the Post-Modernist theory of fetishism has ended up even more as a counsel of despair. Sweeping away everything apart from the fetishism of appearances, there is no hope of escape. The conclusion is either an endless struggle against some amorphous power, as with Foucault, or else the struggle is given up and the estranged world of capitalism is embraced and celebrated.

So as Holloway is keenly aware, in fleeing from the devil of positivism, the theory of fetishism has all too easily fallen into the deep blue sea of despair. Holloway is keenly aware of such danger, having no doubt seen many erstwhile comrades passing from Marxism to Blairism via Post-Modernism. Yet it is a danger not confined to academic fashions. In the current period of working class retreat, the notion that the working class has been unredeemably integrated into the bourgeois society is a common one and appears in various guises of greater or lesser sophistication. It appears, for example, in the despair of primitivism, whether of the green anarchos or of Camatte.

However, Holloway argues - and this is perhaps the most important argument of the entire book - that such theories of fetishism are themselves fetishistic. They take fetishism as a once and for all imposed state of being rather than as a process that has to be continually renewed and which involves its antithesis - defetishism. As such the working class is only ever provisionally integrated within bourgeois society and the process is always liable to rupture sooner or later.

For Holloway both the state and capital are not things; they do not exist independently of each other or from us. The state and capital are two sides of a social relation that is constituted through a constantly renewed process. This process is nothing other than that of class struggle.

Throwing out the baby

As we have seen, Holloway sets out to place himself on the side of the anti-globalization movement. In doing so, Holloway sets out a clear and accessible critique of the positivistic and objectivist conceptions of traditional Marxism without falling foul of the pessimism of the critical theory of the likes of the Frankfurt School or of Post-Modernism. However, in taking the side of the anti-globalization movement, no doubt in the face of the cynicism of his former comrades and colleagues, Holloway ends up merely cheering from the sidelines. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about Change the World Without Taking Power is its completely uncritical attitude towards anti-globalization movement and, in particular, the Zapatistas.

This result is no accident. Holloway's uncritical attitude can be seen to arise from the development of his critique of traditional Marxism. This becomes evident if we consider Holloway's theory concerning class.

Holloway quite correctly attacks the sociological approach to the question of class. This approach first of all seeks to define class by a certain set of fixed characteristics. Then once class is defined in such a manner it is then asked how this class acts in relation to other classes. Against this approach Holloway argues that class defines and constitutes itself through class struggle. As such class is not a fixed identity but a process.

As Holloway points out, this conception that the working class is constituted through class struggle was recognized and developed by the Italian Autonomists in the 1960s and early 1970s.[2] For the Italian autonomists the history of capitalism was a history of class struggle. The working class repeatedly composes itself as a class against capital and consequently capital is obliged to react by reorganizing production in order to decompose the working class. Thus the history of capitalism is a continuous spiral of class composition and decomposition centred around the process of the production of surplus value. Thus whereas traditional Marxism saw capital as the active subject which imposed itself on the working class, the autonomists saw the working class as an active subject that drove the development of capitalism forward.

However, despite its merits in grasping class as an historical process that constitutes itself through the process of class struggle, Holloway identifies two interrelated problems in the approach of the Italian autonomists. Firstly, to the extent that they simply reversed the roles of capital and labour so that the working class became the active subject, the autonomists were in danger of returning to a positivistic conception of the working class. The working class could easily be seen as constituting itself as a self-subsistent class autonomous from capital. As such the autonomists had merely changed the signs of the equation of traditional Marxism. Whereas traditional Marxists had seen capital as imposing itself on a pre-existent working class, the autonomists saw the working class imposing itself on capital. But both like traditional Marxism this relation could be seen as an external one.[3]

To the extent that the autonomists saw the relation between capital and the working class as an external relation they tended to develop the notion of two independent subjects - capital and labour - and hence of the confrontation of two strategies. Class conflict was seen as essentially political and the theory of value, that shows the interdependence of capital and labour, tended to be abandoned. For Holloway, by denying the mutual dependence of capital and the working class, by seeing them as self-subsistent positive categories, the autonomists tended to over estimate the power of both.[4]

The second problem of Italian autonomism was that the historical accounts of the development of capitalism held the danger of projecting particular social subjects that emerged from the struggles at the point of production as the exclusive or most important for the entire epoch. Struggles that did not arise at the point of production, and those that did arise from the point of production but which were not considered typical or dominant, were necessarily overlooked and considered unimportant. As such, the early autonomist theories were distinctly workerist, in the English sense of the term, and denied the validity of struggles that emerged outside of the work-place.

Against these dangers inherent within autonomist Marxism, Holloway insists on both the plurality and negativity of the scream. For Holloway, the working class constitutes itself as a radical subject through its refusal to be reduced to being the working class. On this basis Holloway seeks to embrace the multiplicity of refusal - 'the politics of diversity' - that is so evident and so celebrated in the anti-globalization movement.

However, the later Italian autonomists also sought to embrace the growing multiplicity of struggles outside the work-place in the late 1970s by developing the concept of the social factory. In doing so, the autonomists announced the new social subject - the socialized worker - in which all activity from housework to studying to taking holidays was reduced to work. The problem with this, of course, is that all differences are abolished every activity is labour - everything is the same. With everything flattened out, there is no room for critical analysis.[5]

Holloway effectively does the same but from the opposite perspective. By generalizing labour and capital to the dominance of 'done' over 'doing' Holloway dissolves work into general human activity. Of course it is true that all human activity within capitalist society is in some way subordinated and shaped by capital. But activity that directly produces capital and that which does not - labour and non-labour is an important difference. This might not mean that one form is inherently more important than another in terms of social change but that the differences must be recognized and their relative importance will be different in different historical circumstances.

This blurring of differences in relation to work underpins a broader blurring of differences within and between classes that leads Holloway, like many autonomist Marxists, into an uncritical acceptance of all forms of refusal. Holloway comes dangerously close to a position of liberal humanism. After all, under capitalism, everyone's activity - the capitalist's included - is alienated. Hence, underneath 'we are all human'. Class becomes so fluid that it is dissolved into a general humanism. For Holloway there is 'no them and us' only us! But there is a 'them': there are those who are well content in the roles as personifications of capital and are quite prepared to destroy any who would threaten capital's dominance!

\"I scream therefore I am working class\"

Yet it is perhaps Holloway's very starting point that is most problematic. The scream is only an abstract moment in our being. If we are to be in this world we must comply in some way or another. However much we may scream, we have no option but to make our own way in this world. To survive we must as individuals subordinate ourselves to the process of capital's own expanded reproduction. The scream comes out of this forced compliance.

In a very real sense capital is nothing other than our separation brought about by our compliance. It is nothing more than the reproduction of the reified and alienated relations that bind us together through our very separation. Indeed the power of capital is our separation. Capital is never more powerful than when we exist as merely isolated individuals, however much we may scream as a result.

As such, revolution is nothing other than the overcoming of this separation in which we seek to reconstitute human relations unmediated by things and their price. But in overcoming our separations we have to recognize the existing objective differences that separate us in order to overcome them. Revolution involves a process of totalization - indeed a process of recomposition - in which we find unity in our diversity against capital and all those who seek to defend it. In this sense, we have to find our unity as a class against capital; however, this does not mean that class is grasped as a positive thing separate from capital but as a process that has the potential to go beyond itself - as well as the danger of dissolving into atomized individuals or sectional interest that are recuperated and reintegrated into capital.

The scream is necessary not sufficient. The scream may be the seed of revolution, as Holloway contends, but unless it develops, unless it links up and makes common cause with other screams, then it can all too easily become another brick in the wall. All struggles that are brought to a halt become recuperated and reintegrated into the world as it is.

The failure to recognize both the objective conditions that separate us and give rise to different screams from different circumstances, and the ever present danger of recuperation in which the scream is absorbed and becomes a form of compliance is the Achilles heel of Holloway's book. Holloway all too easily falls into a cheer-leading of any form of resistance - a cheer-leading that is often little more than a celebration of our defeats and atomization in the name of the 'wonderful diversity of struggles'. With such an uncritical and complacent attitude the danger is that we are unable to find ways to move forward and are unable to recognize the danger of the recuperation our struggles.

Holloway tells the story of a peasant who farts as a sign of defiance every time he saw his landlord. This 'scream', Holloway tells us is the seed that may lead to revolution. This may be so; but if the peasant continues to merely fart every time he sees his landlord, then this gesture becomes merely a compensation for his continued subjection. If the peasant remains content not go beyond farting, then this fart becomes merely a sign of resentful acquiescence.

Holloway argues that the Italian autonomists' viewpoint was that of the factory militant who sought to develop the autonomous power of the working class at the point of production. Holloway's position can all too easily be seen as that of the humble professor who is no longer confident enough to tell oppressed masses what to do but instead uncritically cheers from the side lines, comforting himself with the notion that 'I scream therefore I am working class!'

Conclusion

As Holloway points out, Change the World Without Taking Power is a product of the uncertainty following the fall of the USSR and the general disillusionment with the old politics of the left that throughout the twentieth century had concentrated on the conquest of state power. To be fair to Holloway, unlike many in his position he has not succumbed to the cynicism of Post-Modernism, nor has he sold his soul to Blairism. Instead Holloway has made a brave attempt to develop a new politics for the twenty-first century. In doing so he readily admits that he does not have all the answers. He even admits that he might have thrown the baby out with the bath water - and we think he may well have done so. Nevertheless, despite our reservations, Change the World Without Taking Power is an interesting book and one that should be widely read.

Footnotes

[1] See our review of 'The State Derivation Debate', Aufheben 2 (Summer 1993).

[2] In our review article of' Cleaver's Reading 'Capital' Politically and of Steve Wright's Storming Heaven (see 'From Operaismo to "Autonomist Marxism"' in this issue) we have sought to make a clear distinction between the three terms operaismo, autonomia and 'autonomist Marxism'. Operaismo refers to the theories developed in the 1960s and early 1970s within the Italian movement of that name which focused on the work-place and the mass worker. Autonomia refers to the theories developed in the late 1970s that saw the mass worker being replaced by the 'socialized worker' as the revolutionary subject. 'Autonomist Marxism' is the term for that school of Marxism based largely in the USA that has sought to defend and propagate the theories of Italian autonomism since the end of the 1980s. Holloway does not make such distinctions and uses the term autonomism to apply to all. We shall follow Holloway's usage in this review.

[3] Holloway accepts that such a positive conception of class does not necessarily follow from the Italian autonomist theory. However, this positivistic conception of class was most fully developed by Toni Negri; and, as Holloway points out, is still evident in his most recent writings including Empire in which the 'multitude' stands externally opposed to the 'empire'. See 'From Operaismo to "Autonomist Marxism"' in this issue.

[4] This is a point that is made in our critique of the autonomist analysis of the oil crisis and the Middle East put forward by Midnight Notes in their book Midnight Oil. See 'Review: Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-92' Aufheben 3 (Summer 1994) and 'Escape from the Law of Value?', Aufheben 5 (Autumn 1996).

[5] For our criticisms of the tendency of autonomia to make all the working class the same in their theory of the socialised worker see 'From Operaismo to "Autonomist Marxism"' in this issue.

Picket and Pot Banger Together - Class recomposition in Argentina?

argentina[1].jpg

Reports on the Argentine movements over the last 12 months have been scattered between the issue of the national debt and the IMF, the struggles of the middle classes, the 'piqueteros' unemployed movement, and the generalised 'rejection of politics'. How do all these aspects fit together - do the various struggles ion Argentina constitute a proletarian attack against capital? Is the 'rejection of 'politics' a radical advance for the movement, or an expression of sectional fragmentation? We suggest that the 'neo-liberal' attack has resulted in a massification of the class in which the middle classes are being absorbed into the proletariat. This is happening in specific conditions of a country on the periphery of capital, where an immediately social mobilization around the neighbourhood is possible. We examine the history of Argentina to explain the origin of the current situation.

A nation implodes...
Following years of 'neo-liberal' restructuring in Argentina, and with thousands of private and state workers not having been paid in the last half of 2001, by the end of that year the social situation was deteriorating fast. The collapse of a heavily indebted economy threatened ever wider social sectors with the loss of their livelihoods. This situation was not going uncontested, however. There were twelve general strikes in 2001 alone. On just one day in August of that year, a huge piquetero 1 action involved over 100,000 people and blocked 300 roads.

On the 17th of December the government of De La Rua announced further cuts. The state budget was to take a further 20% reduction. This meant more cuts in services, wages and pensions. Unemployment already stood at 20% and the corralito (banking restrictions) had been put in place on December 3rd to prevent people withdrawing their savings. A generalized insurrection gripped the country. And on the 19th, huge sections of Argentine society mobilised not only against De La Rua but against the whole Argentine political class. On the 15th, organised lootings spread through Argentina's provincial cities; on the 16th and 17th they hit Buenos Aires, where thousands attacked supermarkets, warehouses and shops, as well as official buildings. In Quilmes, in greater Buenos Aires, 2000 people besieged a supermarket and refused to leave until they were given 3000 twenty-kilo bags of food. The movement spread spontaneously. Many banks in the heart of Buenos Aires were burned on the 19th.

De La Rua denounced this 'anarchy' and instituted a state of emergency. This threat of state repression, a very tangible threat to Argentines with their memories of the terror of the dictatorship, instead of demobilising people became the spark for an even wider mobilisation. More than a million people filled the centre of Buenos Aires and headed for the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in the Plaza de Mayo. There were also hundreds of thousands on the streets of most of the other cities: Cordoba, La Plata, Rosario. The impoverished middle classes came out into the streets, in a mass cacerolazo, a symbolic protest involving the beating of pots and pans. At exactly the moment when the state attempted to intimidate and create division, with a call to order against the looters, people filled the streets chanting "the state of emergency - they can stick it up their arse." This crucial moment became effectively an endorsement of the insurgency of the previous days. More than 30 people died on the 18th and 19th, shot by shopkeepers and cops at lootings around the country, and in the streets around the Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires during riots; but the 'party of order' was decisively pushed back. The massive defiance of the state of emergency appeared to lay to rest the ghost of fear and intimidation from the years of the dictatorship; the phrase "No te metes" ("Don't get involved") was no longer heard.

All the main protagonists of this story were involved on the 19th. There were the unemployed, who participated in both the piquetes and the lootings all over the country. The 'middle classes' were also there; in the following few days, they would set up popular assemblies in their neighbourhoods. Prefiguring this, people met and discussed on street corners, where many stayed until late into the night, lighting fires in the middle of the roads at the intersections of wide avenues - reminiscent of piquetero tactics of the last few years. The workers from the Brukman factory, occupied on the 18th, were there too.

As the 19th turned into the 20th, the cacerolazo protest escalated into open confrontation with the state and there was massive street-fighting in the centre of Buenos Aires.2 At the Obelisk, in the centre of Buenos Aires, hundreds engaged in running street-battles with police - including the motoqueros, the motorbike couriers, who gave aid to the fighters from the back of their bikes, charging the police, rescuing those overcome by tear-gas and bringing loads of stones for others fighting. People celebrated, as De la Rua fled the Casa Rosada by helicopter, with music, champagne and bonbons looted from nearby shops. The banks burned in the centre of Buenos Aires on the 19th and 20th, an expression of anger at the corralito; the bank freezes affected not only the middle classes but also many workers with small savings and those who depended on cash by working in the black economy. The demos, riots and lootings took place throughout Buenos Aires province and in more than 12 cities around the country. Barricades were erected in some areas of the capital and massive riots ensued. Many joined the weekly vigil of the mothers of the disappeared in the Plaza de Mayo; some tried to storm the Casa Rosada; the Ministry of the Economy was set alight; and people besieged the home of the hated minister of finance, Cavallo. In Cordoba, the second city, site of Argentina's declining car industry, the breakdown of negotiations over the payment of wages between municipal workers and the council led to an occupation of the council offices, where a popular assembly was held. Thrown out by the police, they tried to burn the building down and build barricades in the street, helped by workers from various factories that had just gone on strike. As in Buenos Aires, lootings occurred involving different sectors of workers and the unemployed. A new slogan against the political class resounded in the streets all over the country, one taken up and much-debated ever since: "Que se vayan todos" (Out with them all). 3

The new mood appeared to be summed up in a statement by one of the piqueteros involved in the MTD Solano (Movement of Unemployed Workers): "We heard rumours of deaths [from repression] but we knew we were participating in something historical and you could feel the solidarity there. We weren't piqueteros or middle class; we all felt the sensation of being 'one'". But this provokes the question: What was the nature of this feeling of 'being one'? A problematic cross-class solidarity in which the proletariat were in danger of losing sight of their class needs by joining with other classes affected by the Argentine crisis? The present article seeks to answer this fundamental question of the composition - or re-composition - of the movements which have been threatening the social order in Argentina over the last 12 months.

In order to gain an understanding of the nature of the current struggles, we need first to place them in their historical context, beginning with Argentina's 'golden era', when the economy revolved around the agro-export business. The rise of Peronism heralded a new 'settlement' with the working class which helps explain some of the peculiarities of the present-day struggles. In this context, we trace the origins and outline the trajectories of the different sections making up today's movement: the unemployed and piqueteros, the situation in the factories, and the impoverished middle classes and the neighbourhood assemblies. While there appears to be a generalized 'rejection of politics', there remains the question of how all these aspects fit together - do the various struggles in Argentina constitute a proletarian attack against capital? Is the 'rejection of politics' a radical advance for the movement, or an expression of sectional fragmentation? We suggest that the 'neo-liberal' attack has resulted in a massification of the class in which the middle classes are being absorbed into the proletariat. This is happening in specific conditions of a country on the periphery of capital, where an immediately social mobilization around the neighbourhood is possible.

1. The contradictions of the 'golden era' of the agro-export business 4
As thousands of Argentines loot stores for food and goods while grain and meat is shipped away to the western markets, the 'iron' laws of economy are exposed as reified expressions of the class war. Indeed, the whole history of modern Argentina, of its changes in economic strategies and its various crises, is the history of the Argentine bourgeoisie's battle to reimpose, again and again, capital's control on a fierce, riotous proletariat.

In 1914, Argentina's economy was based on agricultural exports, mainly of grain and beef. The Argentine bourgeoisie was composed of landowners, who had control of large latifundias, and export businessmen, and confronted a huge number of discontented agricultural workers whose pay and conditions were appalling but whose dispersion in a large backward countryside was a great obstacle in their attempts to organize. In the rural region of Patagonia the meat-processing, service and transport workers of the small towns of Rio Gallegos and Puerto Deseado were already developing organizations based on small federations. Patagonia's largest union organization, the Sociedad Obrera de Rio Gallegos, was centred in the small capital Rio Gallegos and had been active since 1911.

While Argentina's rural hinterland was left underdeveloped, the agro-business trade had necessitated the development of some subsidiary industries and services, such as meat-processing plants, cargo transport, railways, docks, triggering the expansion of a few coastal cities and a growing urban proletariat. The urban workers could organize more easily and by 1914 they were already a combative force and a challenge to the status quo.

The urbanization of the coast, functional to the export-oriented economy, involved the growth of an urban middle class and petit bourgeoisie composed of shop-keepers, petty businessmen, professionals, and civil servants. The development of the urban middle classes and the threat of the proletariat 5 gradually started undermining the power of the agrarian oligarchy. By 1911, the conservative government had to concede to the struggles of the middle classes and the petit bourgeoisie and extended the electoral franchize to include middle classes and to the bulk of the working class with the law Saenz Pe-a (1912). In 1916, Hipolito Yrigoyen, candidate for the Radical Party, which represented the middle classes, was elected President of Argentina. Yrigoyen's populist government would combine repression with attempts to recuperate urban and rural working class struggles.

The dominant agrarian and mercantile bourgeoisie had little interest in promoting industrial production or the development of the countryside. However, the viability of Argentina's agrarian export economy depended on the ability of the Argentine exporters to realize profits by selling on the world market. The vulnerability of this economy, and of the class settlement which it expressed, was exposed by the First World War. Causing disruption to international trade, the war stirred up in Argentina a wave of strikes and insurrections which seriously threatened the bourgeois order. This was the beginning of the end of the era of an economy which was golden only to the extent of the Argentine agrarian oligarchy's pockets. As we will see later, the world crisis of 1929 was to give it the final blow.

Already before the First World War, Argentina's extensive but backward agriculture had begun to reach the limits of cultivable lands, and a change in economic strategy would sooner or later appear necessary to the bourgeoisie. However, with the First World War, the demand for agricultural export goods from the belligerent countries temporarily increased, pushing prices up and rewarding the agro-businessmen with huge profits. But, at the same time, the war caused a shortage in the import of raw material and capital goods, and led to a crisis in many industrial sectors. As unemployment rose and pay and working conditions worsened, waves of strikes affected transport and urban service sectors, as well as the mostly British or foreign, meat-processing plants, in the towns along the coast.

Meanwhile, there was also a change in the representation of the working class. By 1914 the largest union federation in Argentina was the Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA), which in its fifth congress in 1905 had adopted an anarcho-communist position. In September 1914 the syndicalist Confederacion Obrera Regional Argentina (CORA) dissolved themselves to join FORA. The syndicalists opposed FORA's anarcho-communist position and their entry to the federation was conditioned by a promise from the anarchist unions to discuss the problem of common objectives and principles in the forthcoming ninth congress of FORA. During this congress, in 1915, FORA's revolutionary positions were discarded in favour of a position of neutrality towards different political currents within the labour movement - this included the Socialist Party and other parliamentary and moderate currents, but, as we will see, it also gave freedom to the union leaders of FORA to accept any compromise with whoever was in power. 6 Also the revolutionary positions which had up until then characterized the syndicalists were toned down. In fact, while up until then revolutionary syndicalism had encouraged the use of the general strike as a tool to overthrow capitalism, the general strike was now accepted 'only when it is exercized with intelligence and energy to repulse the aggression of capitalism and the State'. 7 While moderation took root in the mainstream FORA, the now minority unions who were still faithful to revolutionary principles left FORA to create the 'FORA of the fifth congress' (FORA V). The syndicalist FORA was then known as the 'FORA of the ninth congress' (FORA IX).

With his election in 1916, the Radical President Yrigoyen sought a conciliatory approach with the working class and started a 'special relationship' with the unions of FORA IX. The Radical government took steps towards introducing labour reforms and intervened in industrial disputes through a representative of the President (the governor), sometimes on the side of the workers. On the other hand, Yrigoyen's government severely repressed strikes when no political gain or conciliatory agreements could be obtained or when important interests of capital were at stake.

FORA IX found it difficult to bridle the proletariat into submission and compromise. After 1918 news of the Russian Revolution added to the material conditions of crisis by encouraging the Argentine proletariat towards a uncompromising confrontation with the system. It was the revolutionary FORA V which took the lead of the new offensive. In January 1919 a major insurrection, which would be known as the Tragic Week, exploded in Buenos Aires, provoked by the death of workers during armed confrontations between the police and strikers in the occupied metallurgical plant Pedro Vasena & Hijos. FORA V called for a general strike and the on the 9th of January a march of 200,000 people led by about a hundred armed workers turned to a victorious battle with the police, while looters raided the city. FORA IX was obliged to join FORA V in calling a general strike for the 10th, whilst at the same time opening negotiations with the government. The struggle continued for the next four days and strikes paralysed the city, while FORA IX, who were able to negotiate and obtain petty concessions limited to the dispute within Vasena, tried to discourage the workers from carrying on and appealed for a return to work - but in vain. The insurrection was not really about one isolated dispute in an isolated factory, but about the general discontent shared by everyone, and the workers felt strong enough to prosecute the strikes while FORA V was pushing for the extension of the strikes to the revolution. Only the intervention of the army was able to reimpose social peace.

After the end of the First World War, a fall of international wool and meat prices affected the rural region of Patagonia. 8 Unemployment and the general worsening of the conditions of rural workers caused by the crisis encouraged the Sociedad Obrera de Rio Gallegos, affiliated to FORA IX, to call for a regional strike of ports and hotels in July 1920. The repressive response of the State triggered an escalation of the struggle, which extended among the rural workers in the hinterland. Armed nuclei composed of rural workers raided the countryside, spreading terror among the landowners and the bosses, recruiting, and propagating the struggle from hacienda to hacienda. Presidential appeals for reconciliation to the 'genuine-and-peaceful' workers were answered with armed defiance both in the coastal towns and in the countryside, and scabs sent from Buenos Aires were shot at by the workers of Rio Gallegos. Patagonia did not want a compromise, they wanted to go further: "This is not a working-class movement" said the governor Correo Falcon "but something much worse". The strike ceased first in the capital Rio Gallegos and later in the countryside in front of a total lack of support from the central FORA IX and of the promises of generous concessions by the new governor, Varela, who presented himself as a defender of workers' rights and was able to obtain an agreement with the rural workers. The promises were not met; but another attempt to organize strikes and armed struggles in 1921 was murderously repressed by the governor Varela. 9 The upsurge was over, to the relief not only of the Argentine bourgeoisie but also of the English and the German bourgeoisie, who had appealed to the Argentine chancery to protect their property in Patagonia.

Between 1919 and 1929 Argentina's economy recovered, real wages rose, unemployment decreased. This gave the government the economic basis for a renewed compromise with the working class. New laws to regulate the labour market were introduced (e.g. a legislation which made payment in cash obligatory came in 1925, the restriction of the working day to 8 hours, except for rural and domestic workers, came in 1929). The working class were demobilized and most of the unions merged to form the reformist confederation Central General de Trabajadores (CGT, 1930). Only FORA V and a few communist unions stayed out.

2. Import-substitution production and Peronism 10
The fall of world trade that followed the end of the First World War prompted some within the Argentine bourgeoisie to disengage with the world markets and look towards industrialization based on import substitution. 11 However, a concerted attempt at national industrialization required a break with the established class settlement. The emerging industrial bourgeoisie, in whose interests it was to was to really push for this new economic policy, was in fact weak and squeezed between the agro-trade oligarchy on the one hand, entrenched in their conservative free-trade oriented interests, and a militant and restless working class on the other. It was only with the economic crisis that followed Wall Street crash in 1929, which saw a collapse in world trade, that became possible to break the existing class settlement and pursue a policy of import substitution led industrialization. Even then the Argentine industrial bourgeoisie was too weak and the army had to step in.

The army overthrew the Radical government in 1930, installing a military presidency. In order to regulate overproduction caused by the international crisis, the military government placed agricultural trade under State control, against the entrenched interests of the agrarian and mercantile bourgeoisie. The monopoly of the agro-trade profits allowed the State to channel capitals into the development of a modern army, and a State apparatus which favoured industrial development; and (above all later with Peron) to channel profits into productive and industrial development.

At the same time the military government acted against the working class so as to increase the profitability of industrial capital. As soon as it took power, the new governments started repression of both militant and conciliatory unions. Despite the fact that the moderate CGT did not even condemn the military coup, declaring themselves 'politically neutral', the new government took repressive steps against the unions. The industrial bourgeoisie regained the ground previously lost to the working class. The labour laws conceded after the insurrection of 1919 were repealed; regulations were neglected by the bosses with the approval of state authorities and during the next ten years the average wage decreased. In the same period industrial production expanded and overtook agricultural production. This was accompanied by a recomposition of the Argentine working class: made redundant by the economic restructuring, masses of rural workers moved to the urban areas and provided the labour force for the new industries.

However, unable to find a stable form to mediate class conflict and to integrate the working class with some form of corporative compromise, the military government found itself caught between the interests of the old ruling oligarchy and rising popular discontent, and they were obliged to progressively concede power to bourgeois politicians.

In June 1943, during the Second World War, in the face of a bourgeoisie split by conflicting interests, the army, led by Generals Rawson and Rami­rez, took power a second time in order to ensure Argentina maintained a neutral position in the Second World War. There was an ideological motive in the coup, since the right-wing army was inclined to maintain a friendly relationship with the fascist side and many among them, Peron included, openly expressed their admiration of Mussolini. In fact the military was looking at fascism and corporatism as an answer to growing working class militancy. In 1942 the number of working days lost to strikes in Argentina was three times higher than in the past two years.

Indeed, in 1943, the new Labour and Social Security Secretary, Juan Domingo Peron, started a coherent economic and political policy based on the introduction of protective tariffs to support national accumulation and industrial development and on a corporatist compromise with the industrial working class. By 1944 he had become Vice President of Argentina. His popularity with the working class became so high that when the army tried to remove him from his post and send him into internal exile in 1945, a wave of grass-root struggles spread through the country obtained his return. In 1946, he was elected President with the support of the urban working class. 12 In 1946 Peron initiated an industrialization plan, based on the income from the State monopoly of the agro-export, which would be reinvested in new industries through State-owned banks.

The introduction of protectionism and the State control of industrial development provided the material means to integrate the working class through economic concessions. And at the same time the real improvement in working class conditions, particularly higher wages, was functional to the expansion of Argentina's internal market, and to the development of the import substitution economy. Indeed, the ideology of Peronism, based on the idea of a State 'above all particular class interests', was an ideology that the Radical government of Yrigoyen (and General Uriburu, with his corporatist commitment) had tried to propose in vain because it was challenged both by the old oligarchy and the working class, and as a result was contradicted by its actual economic policies. Only with the Peronist compromise this nationalistic 'third way' was grounded in the actual role taken by the State in the control of the economy. And by allowing for a real change in the conditions of the working class it was able to secure the material basis for its credibility.

The gains of the working class were to some extent comparable to those of workers in European social-democratic countries. A bureaucratic union apparatus would represent the workers and guarantee their 'interests' within a system of collective bargaining with the state as interlocutor (the unions received the status of persona juridica in 1945).The centralization of wage negotiations became a feature of most trades (already in 1945 there were 142 collective bargains signed at the National Department of Labour for Buenos Aires and 279 for the rest of the country). Legislation which benefited the workers was passed, including a steady rise of wages, the introduction of an extra month bonus at Christmas (the Aguinaldo, suspended only in August 2001), the implementation of health and safety regulations, free health care and new guarantees for rural workers.

These 'generous' concessions were offered in exchange for the workers' submission to the State and the social order. For Peron the good worker had to go 'de casa al trabajo y del trabajo a la casa': from home to work and from work to home - and give up class struggle. Peron's nationalistic ideology condemned communism and capitalism as 'foreign' and spurious ideologies, in the name of the 'third way' of justice and welfare provided by the Argentine State. The Peronist party was called 'Justicialist'. The other side of this 'third way' was of course military repression, which was turned against those unions and militants who opposed the regime (the socialist splinter of the unions' federation CGT was suspended).

Instead, the more moderate unions were encouraged and integrated into the State structure. The union's complicity with the corporatist state and their moderation was guaranteed in concrete by a redefinition of their role within the system of wealth distribution. The unions were in fact put in charge of benefit provision and they would run the health service and even holiday resorts for the workers. This control on resources was an element of real power and control on the individual workers based on relations of patronage.

However, the union representation found itself in a contradiction. In order to maintain their privileges which were the token for their submission to the State apparatus, the unions had to strive not to lose their control of the workers' movement; but on the other hand they had also to strive to maintain their legitimacy in face of the workers, whose militancy was growing. Indeed, contradictorily, in their efforts at recuperating the proletariat through representation, Peronism encouraged the workers to meet and participate in union activities, and to organize. Unionization was made obligatory for the state sector, and new unions promoted. The same fact that unionization was encouraged meant that while between 1940 and 1944 there were 332 strikes with a loss of one million working days, between 1945 and 1949 392 strikes soared to a record of nine million working days. In fact, while the main union federation CGT had become a bureaucratized mechanism at the service of the government, struggles proliferated around the shop stewards and the official representatives in the factories (comisiones internas), escaping the control of the leaders.

With its nationalistic and militaristic ideology, and with its attempt to suppress class conflict through a state-imposed corporatism, Peronism appears strikingly similar to European fascism. However, although Peron openly sought to emulate Mussolini, and although many commentators have seen Peronism as merely a form of fascism, there were vital differences. First, Peronism did not arise out of a mass movement rooted in the despair following a decisive working class defeat. Second, in his efforts to modernize Argentina through a policy of rapid industrialization, Peron was unable to rely on the backing of a relatively strong industrial bourgeoisie in order to overcome entrenched conservative agrarian interests. Instead, as we have seen, Peron came to power with the support of the working class. Far from smashing already demoralized working class organizations, Peron was obliged to establish a modus vivendi with such organizations.

The fact that Peron was obliged to establish an alliance with the working class has led some commentators to suggest that Peronism was essentially a form of social democracy, or at least a cross between social democracy and fascism. However, to the extent that social democracy becomes the representation of the working class within the state and capital, it represents the working class as individual commodity-owner/citizens. As such, social democracy tends to lead to the demobilization of the working class and the atrophy of its self-organization.

In contrast, although Peron could maintain an iron grip at the national level, at the grass-roots level both formal and informal working class organizations and networks were not only preserved but left with a large degree of autonomy. At a national level, Peron tied the working class as a whole to Peronism through substantial material concessions, while at a local level the various local grass-roots organizations were tied to the state through a system of patronage.

This co-option and preservation of the pre-existing forms of working class self-organization was further consolidated with Peron's move towards democratization. In doing so, Peron established a system of clientelist relationships which guaranteed political and financial autonomy to the electoral base. Peronist local organizations were left totally or almost totally free from any political control on their activities. They would support their politicians at electoral times, receiving in exchange financial help and jobs. This encouraged identification with, and support for, Peronism, since such support actually meant welfare, state-guaranteed rights against the employers, and also space for militant actions and self-organization.

It is worth noticing that the Peronist structure of power, by giving a limited autonomy to its electoral base, encouraged and reproduced a traditional practice of self-help and solidarity at neighbourhood level. This tradition was rooted in the life of the pre-1920s conventillos, large buildings where working class families used to, and indeed some still do live (they have the structure of convents, with shared kitchens, and central patios). Workers' cultural associations, popular libraries and anarchist schools proliferated around the conventillos' patios, as well as instances of organized neighbourhood-based struggles. When, by the end of the 1920s, the workers were rehoused in individual houses in the suburbs of the cities, they tried to overcome their isolation by organizing themselves in the neighbourhood (barrio) through social and sport clubs and cultural associations - however, as Ronaldo Munck stresses, the new social heterogeneity in the suburbs would 'tend to dilute the harsh proletarian experience of the pre-1930 period. 13 This base activity was encouraged by Peronism, when welfare was provided by the union structures through a network of associations (such as recreational groups, co-ops, etc.); this situation probably reflected the weakness of a bourgeoisie which could not afford to provide the working class with a modern welfare system. The 'mafia'-like structure of Argentine power was one side of the coin of this weakness; the failure of the Peronist 'welfare system' to fragment and individualize the working class (as was achieved instead by the western welfare state) was the other side of this same coin.

This had allowed the Argentine working class to experience communal self-organization as a central part of its reproduction and survival, balancing the obvious pressure of capitalism towards bourgeois individualism. 14 This tradition of solidarity in the neighbourhood and at street level, which Argentine capitalism could not afford to dismantle, was an important element in Argentina's historical insurrections. One tradition which has reoccurred from pre-Peronist times up until today is the organization of ollas populares, community kitchens during episodes of strikes. But above all this experience is important for its revolutionary potential - the fact that struggles which start from certain categories of workers can actually involve other proletarians and expand to whole towns.

3. The end of the import-substitution economy 15
By the end of the 1940s, import substitution-led industrialization was reaching its limits. Concessions for the working class and the its institutionalized strength restricted the rate of exploitation and hinder profits. The State apparatus necessary to Peronist patronage, with its army of white collar workers employed in the unions, hospitals, schools, etc., was a growing burden on the realization of surplus value at national level. Argentina's archaic agricultural trade, whose profits still constituted the main source of finance for the State, and which were challenged by competition from more advanced western countries, began to impose increasingly pressing limits on the Peronist system. As a consequence, inflation began to rise and real wages declined. A mounting petty bourgeois, middle-class and bourgeois opposition to Peronism emerged, politically articulated by the Catholic Church and by increasingly nervous associations of industry bosses.

It was increasingly apparent that Peronist power could survive only by changing the terms of its 'compromise': In order to deal with the increasing State deficit, Peron had to seek foreign investments, and in order to contain inflation had to discipline the working class. Already by 1948, the government responded to strikes with repression more frequently than by making concessions. In 1953 Peron had to abandon his commitment to his flagship policy of protectionism: causing outrage in public opinion, he allowed the USA to invest in a new a steel plant, and started negotiations with the California-based Standard Oil Company for the exploitation of oil sources in Patagonia. All this weakened both the ideological and the material basis of the Peronist class compromise.

In fact a change at international level in the post-war settlement presented Argentina with the opportunity to shift towards export-led industrialization. The Bretton Woods agreement, together with multilateral agreements promoting free trade, established the dollar as world currency and stimulated a sustained recovery in world trade. Argentina's bourgeoisie could now in principle take advantage of an opening up of foreign markets, particularly in the USA and in Europe, to sell the products it could now manufacture. The governments which succeeded Peron's would make increasing efforts towards liberalization. But there was a fundamental problem confronting the attempts to pursue export-led growth. The industry developed under the Peronist compromise was backward and inefficient by world standards. Argentine industry needed massive investment to be able to compete on the world market, and this could only come from abroad. But Western Banks were not prepared to make large the large scale and long term investments in Argentina necessary to modernize its plant and machinery while the post-war boom was generating high profits in the Western countries.

However, the need to attract foreign investment and to discipline the working class into better standards of efficiency, faster work pace, higher intensity of work, meant that the bourgeoisie had to get rid of Peron and attack the privileges of a 'spoiled' working class. In September 1955 a military coup replaced Peron, populistically playing also on the disappointment of the public opinion about the deals with Standard Oil. The aim of the new military government was first of all to redefine the balance of power between employers and workers, since, according to the employers' federation of the metallurgical industry, workplaces were 'like an army in which the troops give the orders and not the generals'. 16 In the years following the coup, anti-labour laws were passed; the base structure of the Peronist union, the comisiones internas, were subjected to State intervention or forced into clandestinity. In 1958 the Radical government led by Frondizi implemented a series of privatizations and rationalizations, to patch up the State finances and encourage foreign investment. After 1958 production was restructured sometimes with the introduction of new technology; but often the effort of increasing productivity just meant imposing a faster work pace and discipline on the workers.

There was a strong grass-root workers' response to the new economic measures. Between 1955 and 1959 about four million working days were lost every year to strikes. In 1959 the days lost to strikes soared to ten million. The workers did not hesitate to consider occupations, sabotages and the use of explosives. Despite this resistance, the bourgeoisie recovered ground. Wage concessions were related to productivity; piece-work was introduced; speed-ups were imposed. It was a period of defeat for the class, paradoxically amidst a level of struggles which we may only envy today in the UK.

At the end of the 50s, however, a peak in militant factory occupations and strikes encouraged the CGT to get involved, both to control this militancy and to use it for achieving more political and negotiation power. With Augusto Vandor as leader, the CGT made every effort to minimize grass-root influence on the assemblies with the use of intimidation by stewards and impose a total control of the struggles from the top. The workers' energies were channelled into 'controlled struggles', controlled in every detail by the union leaders, which were aimed to gain concessions for the union's power and for the workers, but also to weaken the Radical government and pave the way for a return of Peron. In particular, in 1964 a 'controlled' series of factory occupations involved eleven thousand factories and four million workers. 17

Amidst growing social tension, a students' struggle swept the country in 1966. A new military regime took power the same year and smashed the movement, but it could not stop the process of politicization in universities which had started with it. The student's radicalization and their involvement with the workers' struggles would in fact be an important element in the later insurrectional events of 1969.

The new military government, led by General Ongani­a, initially presented itself as ideologically corporatist and its coup was welcomed by most of the unions. But in 1967 the government's economic policies shifted towards liberalization and rationalization, adopting anti-inflationary policies which led to the collapse of uncompetitive businesses, reducing barriers for the entry of foreign capitals, and cutting the powers and the resources of the CGT. However, a general strike called by the CGT for March 1967 met a cold response from many unions. In 1968 the CGT regrouped in a moderate CGT Azopardo and a more militant, and only initially large, CGTA ('of the Argentines'), created by base militants, and involving stalinists, left-wing Peronists, left-wing Catholics, and groups of the far left.

From 1968 however the workers rose up again in a crescendo of strikes which culminated with major insurrectional events in 1969, the Cordobazo. Tension in the industrial town of Cordoba built up mainly around the issues of the abolition of the five-day working week and the establishment of quitas zonales, regions where the bosses were allowed pay less than the wage nationally agreed, which included the region of Cordoba. The metal mechanical workers, the bus drivers and the car mechanics, and their respective unions UOM, UTA and SMATA were mainly at the centre of these struggles. The immediate trigger for the insurrection was a series of protests after murderous police repression of student struggles. The 29th May in Cordoba a march organized by SMATA, Luz y Fuerza (the local power workers union), UOM and UTA, joined by white collar workers and by students, soon transformed itself into a battle on the barricades. The whole town was on the streets and the centre was seized for many hours. But the day after the army counterattacked, numerous arrests were made, and militants were killed. In September a new insurrection exploded in the town of Rosario, in the Cordoba region; the town was seized and defended on the barricades against the police. Police headquarters, banks, shops and hotels of the city centre were raided.

The insurrections were heavily repressed, but the State had to restore collective bargaining with the unions and moderate their new economic policies. The participation of white-collar workers in the Cordobazo was the first major instance of participation of this sectors on the barricades. With the cuts on the state services, the participation of dissatisfied white-collar workers in the proletariat struggle was to become increasingly frequent: the piquetero movement of 1995 emerged precisely from a combative struggle of teachers. The Cordobazo is also another example, rooted in the Argentine tradition, of a struggle which does not stop at the factory gate but spreads throughout the town - a tradition which has become very important in today's movement.

During the Peronist period, the unions' 'corruption' had been for the workers a comfortable means of obtaining benefits within a clientelist relation while as a by-product part of the State finances were redirected to the pockets of union bureaucrats. But with the political and economic reorientation of the ruling class, the bureaucratic union 'corruption' and their collaboration with a system, which was no longer generous, became a reason for resentment on the part of the working class. That the union was part of the bourgeois system was indeed apparent in the fact that the union bureaucrats were even owners of industries and businesses. 18 The movement of clasismo which started in 1970 with the rank-and-file struggles in the Fiat factory in Cordoba expressed this resentment. The unions of SITRAC and SIMAC were seized by the workers, who imposed rank-and-file leaders (mainly Maoist or independent Peronists), against the resistance of the union bureaucrats and of the State. A new insurrection in Cordoba, called the Viborazo, exploded in 1971 precisely around the new rank-and-file movements and in particular around a struggle in the FIAT car factory.

This hot climate, which also included raids by Peronist and Trotskyist terrorist groups ('guerrillas'), could not be defeated with the army or with the help of right-wing paramilitary groups. The return of Peron, who could still be seen by many as 'above the parties', was then accepted by the bourgeoisie: the Peronist Campora was elected in March 1973, and Peron was president later the same year. During this period strikes broke out everywhere in the country, with occupations, clashes with the police, raids on bosses' homes. 'Guerrilla' actions also multiplied.

While allowing a rise of wages, and making an attempt to control import prices, Peron carried on a policy in the three years of his power which was systematically and mercilessly repressive; he criticized Campora for his 'excessive concessions' to the workers. A redundancy law allowed the State to get rid of militant employees and a new 'Law of Professional Associations' allowed the trade union leaders to overthrow decisions made by the committees and increased the bureaucrat's control over the shop floor. Isabelita Peron came to power after her husband's death, and prosecuted his repressive policy. The repression had the consequence of isolating and radicalizing small vanguard groups - armed 'guerrilla' groups, in particular the Montoneros, got stronger and their kidnappings and murders of trade union bureaucrats and other members of the bourgeoisie earned general public support and sympathy. 19

4. Petrodollars and the restructuring of the working class 20
The quadrupling of the price of oil in 1973 precipitated a severe financial crisis in Argentina. The sharp rise in the price of oil triggered an inflationary spiral that soon led to hyper-inflation. At the same time the Central Bank sank deeper into the red. Yet this oil crisis not only brought the dangers of debt and hyper-inflation, it also offered the Argentine bourgeoisie new opportunities. The oil price rise of 1973 led to a huge increase in the revenues of the oil producing States. Unable to spend or invest more than a small fraction of these revenues at home, the oil producing States deposited their 'petro-dollars' in Western banks. As a result Western bankers found themselves awash with money-capital to invest. Faced with rising working class militancy and declining profits in Western Europe and the USA in the 1970s, the Western banks were prepared to channel a large part of their petro-dollar funds into the more developed parts of the periphery of the world economy, such as Latin America. As a consequence, the oil crisis gave Argentina's economy the opportunity to present itself as a profitable place for the Western banks to invest their petrodollars. Foreign investments could then ideally be used to modernize Argentina's industry and economic infrastructure so that it could compete in the world market. But such a strategy required a further concerted attack on the working class to guarantee the potential profitability of investments in Argentina.

Similar calculations were made in neighbouring Chile, when in 1973 a military coup d'état opened their doors to the 'monetarism' of the new bourgeois economists, educated in the 'Chicago school' of Milton Friedman. The prescription of the American 'monetarist' economists was to fight inflation by cutting state spending and privatize state enterprises; and abolish protectionist policies and subsidies for state industries, forcing the 'inefficient' industries to close down in the face of international competition. In 1974 the average Chilean wage fell by one half and unemployment exploded, while the welfare system, which was based on the profits of the national industries, collapsed. At the same time massive military repression hit Chilean workers and their organizations. In a word, the restructuring devised by the Chicago School was a class counterattack, whose rationale was founded in the imposition of the 'hard laws' of international competition.

In 1976, using the justification of the need to fight the 'guerrillas', the army took power in Argentina in a coup. The concept of 'guerrilla' was extended to that of 'industrial guerrilla' to launch a massive attack against workers' organizations. Indeed it was clear to the military that the main obstacle to restructuring was the proletariat. A wave of arrests and murders of militant workers and union leaders was carried out with the collaboration of paramilitary groups. A period of terror started. Militant workers would be sacked or resign for fear of arrest, torture and death, with a total of 30,000 dead or 'disappeared'. Laws were passed to attack the militancy of the rank-and-file (reduction of the number of shop stewards to half; limitations to the access to the role of shop steward in the unions, the obligation of a pre-approved agenda at union meetings).

The CGT was dissolved by the military regime, and legislation was passed to 'democratize' the unions. The right of collective bargaining was restricted to weaken the power and legitimacy of the unions. Their control on welfare and resources was withdrawn. The interest of the military to 'democratize' the unions was one with the attempt to break down their power based on patronage, and in the same time to make the workers look at the State as individuals for their benefits rather than seeking to belong to a group. But this attack on the unions had contradictory consequences. First, by losing the concrete basis for their power over people, the unions would cease to be an efficient form of social control of the proletariat. And, second, losing their privileges, which were the reason of their complicity with the government, many union leaders did not have any choice but to be drawn into the struggle and radicalized their position in an attempt at maintaining control of the situation.

However, this restructuring and liberalization of the economy had to be gradual, because of the backwardness of Argentina's industries in terms of technology and organization of work, which was the other side of the coin of the strength of a working class which had not allowed capitalism completely to follow its laws of free competition. Indeed when the State spoke about efficiency, it was the strength of the working class that was under discussion. The industries doomed by the neoliberal policies would be precisely those where the workers were stronger and had been able to gain and maintain high wages and comfortable working conditions. The restructuring meant dismantling those industrial sectors which, not uncoincidentally, were the strongholds of workers' militancy. The industries which would survive had to be competitive to face foreign competition, and the workers had to be efficient to face the pressure of a rising unemployment - this meant imposing labour discipline and speed ups on the workers, the reimposition of capital's control on labour. The introduction of wage differentials was a way of encouraging efficiency and competitiveness in the workers, and at the same time a way of trying to break class solidarity in the workplace.

As in Chile, while productivity increased, wages were halved in the first year of the coup. Unemployment rose and the gap between rich and poor increased. In the years following the coup a third of Argentina's industrial capacity was closed down in the face of foreign competition. A large part of the redundant workforce was absorbed by self-employment in the tertiary sector, but in 1981 the government was obliged to admit that forty per cent of the working population was under-employed, and in 1982 they had to introduce unemployment benefit. With the restriction of the state sector, between 1976 and 1980 half a million white collar workers employed in the state sector were also made redundant, contributing to a split in the middle class support for the state.

But Argentines were not willing to accept their fate of starvation and submission. Even in a situation of repression which obliged the leaders not to come out openly, even if repression and economic blackmail would tend to fragment them, Argentines continued their struggles. From 1976 there were hundreds of thousand of workers on strike every year and a general strike in 1979. After 1979 struggles intensified while the unions were unable to contain the grass-root activity. In 1980 the government and bosses of Argentina faced street protests and a solid general strike in Buenos Aires.

The middle class support for the military regime was severely undermined by the beginning of the 80s, with a new economic crisis provoked by the second oil prices surge in 1979 and the subsequent recession in the developed economies, which caused a widespread debt crisis (Mexico defaulted in 1982). Facing workers' resistance to their best efforts towards 'efficiency', and facing falling demand for its exports in the West, Argentina's economy confronted a growing balance of trade deficit and a mounting foreign debt to finance it. Foreign debt rocketed from about $8bn in the mid-seventies to $45bn in the mid-eighties. Unrest spread, as far as the army and even in the police, which came out on strike for wages in 1982. The government, seeking a desperate way to regain their support, invaded the British colony of the Falklands/Malvinas to inflame Argentine nationalistic hearts and obtain the support of left-wing workers' organizations (which they obtained, in the name of the leftist ideology of 'anti-imperialism'!). Unfortunately for them, they lost the war.

5. Democracy 21
For the middle classes the fact that there was a problem in Argentina was undeniable. But this was not seen to be due to capitalism, but to moral issues which were superimposed on it - like the brutality of the military regime. Furthermore the crisis was not seen as a question of class struggle, but as the problem of the corrupt 'trade union barons' who were asking too much. In fact, this perception became the bourgeoisie's pretext for its need to carry on and intensify its attack against a working class reluctant to be sacked and sacrificed at the altar of the new monetarist and neo-liberal policies - as was expressed in the Radical Alfonsin's electoral pledge to 'clip the wings of the trade union barons', and to deal with the problem of 'uncontrolled union demands'. Alfonsi­n triumphantly won the elections in 1983 with the support of the middle classes and the petit bourgeoisie but soon faced the problems of recession and inflation by prosecuting the neoliberal policies of his predecessors. In 1987 the Radical government restricted the wages to fight inflation and it introduced a second currency, the austral, a move which did not solve the inflationary crisis. Between 1983 and 1989 the wages of State employees were substantially reduced, while discontent and strikes grew. Unable to stop inflation, Alfonsin resigned in 1990.

In the same year the Peronist Menem was elected as president of Argentina in the midst of the economic crisis, with the electoral promise to stabilize the economy, devalue the peso, increase wages, and provide 'social justice' (words which appealed to the memory of the old Peronist times). On the other hand, he assured the USA of his commitment to neo-liberal policies: With this commitment, the magic word 'justice', key word of the old Peronist class compromise, was deprived of any chance of a concrete backup.

In fact there was no choice for Menem. 22 During the 1990s the International Monetary Fund intervened in Argentina in order to bail the country out of the debts that it had been piled up since the dismantling of the import-substitution economy. The enormous loans that were conceded to Argentina were conditional on the adoption of concrete steps ('Structural Adjustment Programmes') whose stated aim was to guarantee the influx of foreign capital to enable Argentina to pay back its international creditors. In order to make Argentina attractive to investors, the IMF recommended the stabilization of the Argentine currency with respect to the dollar, a rise in interest rates and continuation of the process of privatization of state companies (water, gas, airports...) - together with further cuts in State spending. Whatever the Peronist promises might have meant to the electors, Menem had to be subservient to the IMF's requirements. Under Menem the austral, which was then worth one ten-thousandth of a peso, was suppressed, and a different monetary strategy was taken. In 1991, the government passed the 'Convertibility Law', which fixed the ratio between peso and dollar to 1:1. New laws on state reform sanctioned more deregulation of the economy, the privatization of gas, water, telecommunications and the postal service. The government also removed all restrictions on the transfer of foreign capital in or out of the country.

Menem dealt with economic 'inefficiency' with a reformulation of labour laws, which allowed the extension of the working day to 12 hours with no overtime paid, the possibility for employers to postpone weekend and rest days at will, deprived women and young people of labour rights (e.g. protection against dismissal), took away the right to paid days off and to strike and gave the employers the right to define job description to allow for introduction of multiple tasks. This practice heavily restricted those collective negotiations which still survived and rendered the workers more atomized and weaker in their bargaining with the employers. Industries, above all textiles, were allowed to relocate from the coastal towns to inland, where there was a 'more tranquil labour environment'', and where labour regulations were less restrictive, with the conscious intent of making the country more attractive for investment.

Under this neo-Peronist government the exposure of Argentina to international competition was speeded up. In 1990 the government signed bilateral agreements (the Act of Buenos Aires) with Brazil that aimed to establish a new trade bloc modelled on the European Union. The following year Uruguay and Paraguay joined this agreement with the treaty of Asuncion which established the Mercado Comun del Cono Sur (MERCOSUR). Under these agreements it was decided to establish a custom union between the four countries by January 1995. All tariff barriers were to be dismantled between the four countries exposing Argentina's industry to the full competition of Brazil. 23 However, Menem's policy of a highly restrictive monetary policy to counter inflation meant that capital was unavailable for the medium and small companies to prepare themselves for liberalization. The weakest industries were closing while capitals were concentrated into large Transnational Corporations and domestic 'Great Economic Groups'.

By 1993 Menem's neo-liberal policies had begun to bear fruit. This dismantling of financial regulations, along with tough anti-labour laws, wholesale privatization and the pegging of the peso to the dollar, had transformed Argentina into an enticing prospect for foreign investors. With diminished investment opportunities due to the recession in the USA and Europe, international capital flooded into Argentina, preying on the national services, land, natural resources (oil) sold off by the government. The government of Argentina was duly praised by the IMF and the USA.

In contrast to the period under Alfonsi­n, in which the incomes of all but the very rich failed to keep pace with hyper-inflation, Menem's rule was a time of relative prosperity for the majority of the Argentine population. With the stabilization of the peso the middle class no longer had to fear inflation eating into their savings and financial deregulation opened up opportunities for profitable investment for even small or moderate savers. For the part of the working class which was still in secure jobs, wages began to rise faster than prices.

However, a large part of the wave of foreign capital encouraged by Menem's neoliberal policies did not go into productive investments. Foreign capital was more interested in buying up industries if they could quickly make profits by running them more efficiently - i.e. by sacking half the work force and making the other half work harder and more flexibly - rather than in building new factories and equipping them with up to date machinery. As a consequence, the inflow of foreign capital tended to increase, rather than decrease, unemployment at the same time as depressing wages for those at the bottom of the labour market. Between 1991 and 1999 both unemployment and underemployment more than doubled according to official figures.

As a result, the burst in economic prosperity of the early to mid 1990s was far from being evenly spread. Those amongst the Argentine bourgeoisie and middle classes who were in a position to become local agents for international capital - bankers, lawyers, consultants, accountts, managers and politicians - were able to make a fortune. At the same time those who lost their jobs through downsizing and public spending cuts found themselves swelling the ranks of the poor. Inequality rose sharply between the richest and the poorest. In 1990 the richest ten per cent of the population had an income fifteen times greater than the poorest ten per cent. By 1999 the richest ten per cent had increased their income to twenty three times that of the poorest tenth of the population.

With many of its more militant sections 'downsized', the bulk of the Argentine working class faced the prospect of steadily rising wages if they kept their heads down or the poverty of unemployment if they did not. As a consequence, militancy declined in the workplace and, as we shall see, the site of struggles shifted to the poor and the unemployed.

Yet this burst of prosperity under Menem was to be short lived. The flood of international capital into Argentina had allowed Menem to adopt more expansionary monetary and fiscal policies. Although a large part of the money pumped into the economy by higher public spending or through tax cuts would end up being spent on imports, thereby increasing the demand for dollars, this would be offset by foreign investors wanting to sell dollars for pesos in order to invest in Argentina. Such expansionary fiscal and monetary policies then gave a further boost to Argentina's economic prosperity which in turn attracted foreign investors anxious not to miss out on the profits to be made from this 'newly emerging market economy'. However, in the mid-1990s the dollar began to rise against the other main world currencies dragging the peso up with it. As a consequence, Argentina's exports lost their competitiveness leading to a strong deterioration in its balance of trade.

The rise in the dollar had caused similar problems for the 'newly emergent market economies' in Asia and in 1997-8 led to financial crises in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea. After the crisis reached Russia in 1999 fears spread that next in line would be Argentina. As a result the financial flows into Argentina went sharply into reverse as foreign investors sought to get their money out of the country before the peso collapsed. The IMF stepped in with a $40bn loan to defend the peso and settle the nerves of international financiers. But in return the IMF insisted on major cuts in public spending, further privatization and more liberalization. As a consequence, Argentina went into recession. The 'virtuous circle' of high levels of foreign investment, expansionary policies leading to economic growth and more foreign investment went into reverse.

The IMF-inspired austerity measures deepened the recession, discouraging foreign investment that then led to the IMF demanding even more austerity measures before it would roll over its loans. Tension increased between the Argentine government, increasingly unable and unwilling to make further cuts to appease the IMF, and the IMF, increasingly reluctant to bail out recalcitrant governments.

In 1999 the Radical de la Rua became President, after Menem was involved in a corruption scandal. In his electoral campaign, de la Rua promised 'order and honesty' in Argentina's political affairs. However, the scandals which were going on discouraged investors and undermined Argentina's economic credibility. By November 2001, with the government unable to impose further cuts without causing public outcry and fearing that the IMF would carry out its threat of not renewing its loans, (leading to the collapse of the peso), the well-off started converting their credits from peso to dollars or other reliable currencies and withdrawing money from the banks. In order to prevent a collapse of the banking system, de la Rua imposed the corralito, restrictions on the money that could be withdrawn from the banks ($1,000/month). 24

The middle classes, who had supported policies of successive governments since the 1970s, and who had prospered quietly during the 1990s, were now hit with the full brunt of the crisis, losing not only their savings but often also their jobs. Swathes of the Argentine middle class were proletarianized almost overnight! Driven in to the street, the middle class now joined the protests of the working class (the piqueteros) that had been going on since 1997.

6. The Piqueteros
The new forms of organisation which emerged drew some of their very strength from the drastic nature of this 'neo-liberal' restructuring. Whilst the economic experts were accusing Argentina's political class of implementing the changes too slowly, the bourgeoisie in fact created a new problem for itself by having implementing them too quickly. When a large number of closures and redundancies hit almost overnight, the workers laid off en mass found themselves with common needs in a new situation where their social ties and continuing links of solidarity could be turned into new form of organisation. The mass worker becomes the mass unemployed worker. The first visible expression of these proletarians against their growing immiseration were sporadic street riots. In 1989 the province of Chubut in Patagonia exploded in a week of struggle, which ended with the resignation of the governor. The same year riots started in Rosario and Buenos Aires, where supermarkets and grocery stores were looted. From then on riots occurred throughout the country. However, the growing number and worsening situation of unemployed workers deprived of their means of survival necessitated more concerted action.

Whilst the tactic had been used from about 1993 onwards, the co-ordinated piquetero movement was born in Cutral Co and Plaza Huincul, two towns of Patagonia created around the State oil company, Yacimientos Petroli­feros Fiscales. It was privatised by Menem in 1994-5, and as a result 80% of its workers were suddenly laid off. Privatisation means more efficiency: whilst in the past it was the only major oil company in the world to report losses, due to the high wages and benefits conceded to its workers, after privatisation its profits rocketed while the living standard of the populations of the oil towns declined. By 1996 the two towns had an unemployment rate of 37.7%. The first riots exploded in June 1996 when the local government failed to reach an agreement with a Canadian corporation to set up a fertiliser plant in the area. The rioters were placated by promises made by the authorities. In March 1997, a teachers' strike against layoffs and wage reductions evolved into the first of the now famous road blockages. When the police attacked the blockade, the towns of Cutral Co and Plaza Huincul mobilised in support. The popular assembly set up to negotiate with the authorities demanded jobs, tax moratoria and investments in the oil company. They decided to demobilise when some promises were made, including the creation of 500, (badly paid) jobs. The moderation of the assembly was due to the fact that people could see no good, in the situation, in an escalation of the protest. By the same token, the intervention in the assembly by local politicians was accepted.

The piquetero tactic of blocking roads was soon being taken up in other towns. It was used in Jujuy and Salta the following year, provinces in the north of the country. In Jujuy on May 7th 1997, piqueteros blockaded the Horacio Guzman Bridge, Argentina's main link to Bolivia. Over the following four days, protests and blockades spread through the province, amongst both employed and unemployed. The movement was attacked by troops, (tear gas and rubber bullets were used), but provincial officials eventually capitulated and promised to create 12,500 jobs and increase welfare. 25 The spread of piquetero tactics and their forms of organisation moved first through the provinces, but then came closer to the capital when they reached La Matanza, in Greater Buenos Aires. This sprawling industrial suburb, with a population of two million, had been badly affected by unemployment. Here piquetero numbers grew substantially to 4,000-6,000 people. This new area of piquetero activity was also important because piquetero actions could now strangle the capital by blocking its major arteries, all within easy reach. We should also mention at this point events in Tartagal and Mosconi, both towns were occupied and held for a few days from the police in winter 1999/spring 2000, by forces including piqueteros. After the death of a demonstrator in November 2000, Tartagal was again rocked by riots - government buildings were set alight and cops taken hostage.

Typically, a piquetero highway blockage would have demands such as the withdrawal of police, the repudiation of state repression, the release of jailed comrades, unemployment benefits, food, health facilities, and demands for both 'genuine' jobs and Planes Trabajar or Work Plans - the later being effectively small unemployment subsidies (120-150 pesos a month per family, only available to those with families, and paid in 'Lecops', a national parallel currency or 'bond'). 26 The state would give out these work plans to defuse situations. Over the years, piquetero actions for Work Plans have often met with success. The subsidies are given to heads of families - say, 100 out of 800 piqueteros - rather than forming the basis of a universally-shared benefit, minuscule though it would be. Work Plans are normally intended to be taken in exchange for light public works, like municipal gardening or the upkeep of roads. They amount to a pittance, representing in their value about an eighth of the material needs of a family of four. Echanges et Mouvement 27 however, also mention 'organised looting' by piqueteros in 1999, and an escalation of violent, direct appropriation of goods in 2000, especially around the December events of 2001. Goods vehicles trapped in pickets were looted, warehouses and supermarkets attacked in a concerted way, and anger expressed in attacks on government buildings. Already in June 2000, a violent riot in General Mosconi which left 2 dead, led to a country-wide response with 300 road-blocks. We must not forget these more violent and direct expressions of piquetero organisation, some of which may be more hidden. 28

Small groups of piqueteros, organising locally in their neighbourhoods in the first instance (e.g. MTD Lanus - MTD stands for Movement of Unemployed Workers), are often affiliated to a larger 'Coordinator' group, which is in turn affiliated to one of the four major piquetero confederations. These are the CCC (Class Combative Current) group and the FTV (Federation for Land and Housing) 29, the Bloque Piquetero, and the Coordinadora Anibal Veron, which once formed part of the Bloque Piquetero but which has increasingly distanced itself from it, insisting on its total independence from parties and unions.

The FTV has a large membership and wide support in La Matanza, in the west of Buenos Aires province. It also includes groups under the banner 'Barrios de Pie' - neighbourhoods on their feet. The CCC is the (relatively autonomous) organised piquetero union arm of the (Maoist) Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR). 30 It too has a strong base in La Matanza, and also in the northern provinces of Argentina. The Bloque Piquetero gathers together dozens of piquetero groups including the Polo Obrero, (linked to leftist parties such as the trotskyist Partido Obrero -Workers' Party), and a handful of other leftist groups. 31

The CCC and FTV-CTA group are considered the most reformist elements of the piquetero movement, with a tendency to negotiate with the government. Divisions within the movement over this led to the suspension of the third National Assembly of piqueteros planned for December 2001. A report from the Coordinadora Anibal Veron describes Anibal Veron's eight-hour picket of seven bridges and access routes to Buenos Aires city on the 21st November 2001, contrasting it with another action, by the FTV grouping, which had started a few days before. The FTV piquete had in fact allowed transport to circulate on one side of the street from 5am to 10am and again from 5pm to 9pm, so as not to cause too much disruption in La Matanza. But, as they say, "While in La Matanza the third day of roadblocks with alternative routes... passed without a response...the firmness and organization of each of our bridge-blocks meant that, in spite of public declarations by the Ministry of Work that they would not receive the unemployed because we were 'blocking roads', in a few hours the same Ministry was sat in front of us at a negotiating table, publicly ratifying the commitment we sought." 32 The statement goes on to criticise the FTV picket: "That which is generated by a road-block - born as a tool of the unemployed with which they can interrupt the movement of goods via national highways, to generate economic problems which, from a position of intransigence, forces the government to make concessions to the demonstrators - in the hands of these sectors ends up being a blocking ... of the pavement, by the side of the road, while transport freely circulates!"

Importantly, Anibal Veron, (and perhaps other piquetero groups), eschew mediation, literally refusing to meet the state on its own terrain, forcing government negotiators to come to the pickets. This helps to ensure that negotiations over limited aims take place on the piqueteros' terrain politically. 'Work Plans' and the rest are given out to families, rather than individuals, everyone can take part in the negotiations, the work plans are given out in a transparent manner, and everyone can decide on when to clear the road etc. 33 Limited aims, which from the outside look to be merely within the reformist dynamic of capital, are achieved with an understanding of the needs of proletarian struggles (such as refusal of mediation), which point to the importance of the process of struggle - social recomposition against the atomisation of capitalist social relations - as the real subversive current.

Groups like Anibal Veron criticise the CTA and CCC piquetero groupings for sending delegations to put their case to both government and employers (for example, in January 2002 CCC-organised piqueteros sent delegates to the oil company YPF-Repsol to demand 40,000 "genuine jobs", and that working hours should be shared between those working and those who had been sacked; and another delegation was received by the Casa Rosada to demand Work Plans and food and the release of political prisoners). More generally, we can also see the incursions of the official unions into the piquetero movement as just an attempt at recuperation, or as an opportunity for cross-sector solidarity, maybe partly initiated by the base, which could eventually break free from its present limits. The bureaucracy may well have a need to increase its membership and leverage on the class by recruiting piqueteros under the banner of coordination and organisation, but piqueteros have their own reasons to understand the need for this coordination, one which, in a generalised proletarian offensive, could contradict the mediation of unions.

In February 2002 Duhalde, perhaps trying to regain some of the ground lost to mediating channels, declared that there would be a universal dole of 150 Lecops per family (piqueteros have demanded 380 - both at pickets and in the assemblies). The contemptuous response to this measly benefit was clear in the two huge piquetero mobilisations of May 2002 when hundreds of roads were blocked. The governments' inability to implement a meaningful, universal level of unemployment benefit and its insistence on Work Plans has caused it endless problems. During De La Rua's presidency, the Ministry of Social Development removed the administration of Work Plans from the local authorities in favour of their distribution by NGOs, partly to curb municipal clientelism in the province of Buenos Aires, and to limit the growth of small piquetero groups in the city. The policy backfired when unemployed organisations created their own NGOs to administer the plans and to set up their own social projects using the funds from them. This was a factor in the growth of the large and increasingly powerful coordinations of groups of unemployed activists in the poorest neighbourhoods, which form one aspect of the assemblies movement that we will discuss later. 34

Today, many of the grassroots MTDs (Unemployed Workers Movements) such as the MTD Solano, part of the Coordinadora Anibal Veron, are making use of the work plans to set up projects in their own barrios, such as bakeries, metal and wood workshops, schools and vegetable plots, as well as running workshops to discuss political questions. The projects are staffed by piqueteros in receipt of work plans (direct to their bank accounts) who put the four hours a day they are supposed to do in exchange for the money to the service of their immediate communities. The northern town of General Mosconi is perhaps the most advanced in the use of work plans, with piquetero groups setting up around 300 projects.

Here we can see that the organisation of the piqueteros is not demobilised by government concessions; the state does not have strong enough mediating structures to individualise people and recuperate them in a settlement. Whilst the moneys are given to heads of families or other individuals and go to their bank accounts, they effectively end up becoming funds for further collective, autonomous organisation. With the withering of mediating structures, the piqueteros, forced to meet their everyday needs autonomously, experience an almost constant state of mobilisation - with the heightened level of communication between social subjects that this entails - in which the existence of the 'political' as a separate sphere is increasingly challenged. Ironically, the very practical nature of official piquetero demands, (jobs, food parcels), are an expression of this, and are in fact the other side of the coin to the much publicised 'rejection of politics', which seems to contradict them. Even though it forms part of the attack against the living standards of the working class - is capital shooting itself in the foot by reducing the mediating structures of its state?

One problem with 'work plans' on the other hand is that they sometimes help to further undermine the salaries and security of waged workers. One kind of Work Plan for women called Madres Cuidadores (caring mothers) is little more than a way to replace teachers on the cheap, and has been denounced as such by teachers' unions. We must also recall at this point that a neo-Peronist liberaliser like Menem was able to on the semi-autonomous, tentacular Peronist neighbourhood organisations when he was attacking state provision, channelling funds through this network to cushion the effect. De La Rua, as we have just seen, had similar policies. Other bourgeoisies across the region have also opened the doors to NGOs, charities and aided the informal, grassroots sector as part of the same process of economic liberalisation. In this maybe the executives of capital lean too much on forms of organisation which they will find difficult to control in the long run.

However, we must not fall into the trap of simply cheerleading this process as the rediscovery of grass roots autonomy and empowerment - the type of facile endorsements we criticise elsewhere in this issue. The problem is maybe precisely there - 'autonomy'. There is a tendency for this class experience to become merely the management of survival within capitalism, tied loosely into the system through aid, charity and clientelism, but understanding itself to be autonomous from capitalist social relations. Identifying capital narrowly with international capitalism, (multinationals, financial institutions, the US and EU bourgeoisie) and the comprador 35 bourgeoisie which manage their operations within the country, 'grassroots' experience may be 'naturalised', seen as a given 'thing'. Capitalism is not seen as a social relation which includes all social interaction including those within the barrio, but a rapacious, exploitative class outside the barrio. To put it another way, the relationship of exploitation within self-exploitation is externalised. If the class can externalise this relationship it will always end up preserving capitalism, in preserving its life and rebelling against the 'capitalist class'.

Another important feature of the piquetero movement is the fact that it has become a node of struggle for different sectors of the class. People in work, especially those whose jobs are threatened, have participated extensively in piquetero actions, (as we noted, the first pickets were initiated by teachers). This is a critical point to keep in mind if we want to evaluate the long-term possibilities of the Argentinean movement. Although the work plans meted out to the unemployed may sometimes lower the wages of other workers, more importantly maybe different sectors of the class are recognising their needs in each other's struggles. The bourgeoisie is finding it very difficult to decompose the class into antagonistic sectors fighting over jobs. The reserve army of labour is not performing its designated duty! As an example of this solidarity, on the 4th of April 2002 a Bloque Piquetero march, in the coastal town of La Plata, passed by the provincial government building before heading for the Family Office, to offer its support to state workers on strike there. Protesting at cuts in overtime, wages and other benefits, the workers had taken over various buildings and were in permanent assembly. When the piqueteros arrived, the gendarmeri­a were inside and the assembly had been suspended. But when the workers saw the size of the crowd which had come to support them, they shouted at the gendarmerie to leave and continued with their assembly. 36 Piqueteros have also defended the occupied factories from eviction, pushing back police attacks on numerous occasions, as have members of local assemblies and other neighbours.

Although in the early years of the movement the state and the bourgeois press could manipulate broad middle class opinion against what was painted as a dangerous, lumpen-proletarian threat, the increased immiseration of the middle classes has narrowed the gap between the two sectors. The new possibility of this situation was evident in the practical solidarity of the events of December 2001on the streets. It emerged in the days following the national cacerolazo of the 25th of January, that the police had blocked Pueyrredon Bridge, the gateway to Buenos Aires, to stop hundreds of piqueteros crossing to join the cacerolazo in the Plaza de Mayo. Furthermore, on the 28th of January 2002, a march of piqueteros from La Matanza to the Plaza de Mayo was greeted and given food by the neighbourhood assemblies who accompanied them the rest of the way. The slogan "Piquete y cacerola, la lucha es una sola" ("Picket and 'pot-banger', the struggle is the same") was heard that day and soon became popular. In February 2002, after the announcement of the abandonment of the dollar-peso parity, a piquetero march coming into Buenos Aires from the poor suburbs, was again greeted by the 'middle classes' of the centre of Buenos Aires with food and drinks. It was of course understood that the inflation that would result from the devaluation, (together with the effect on savings), would affect everyone. Whether these expressions of solidarity can be further concretised remains to be seen.

In order to discredit the piqueteros in public opinion and possibly to prepare the terrain for repression, the State has attempted to smear the movement. In March, in a calculatingly menacing tone, Duhalde stated that: "in the piqueteros movement we believe that there is a part of authentic protest which is becoming smaller....and another part financed by extremist groups. We have been told that the finances [for the piqueteros in Salta, north of Argentina] may come from the FARC of Colombia, or in other words, from narco-trafficking." 37 It is important to note that a US military base is planned for the area of Salta that Duhalde is referring to; the same place where, last year, US marines carried out joint exercises with Argentinean troops. This rhetoric also serves to separate the 'good' piqueteros from the 'bad'. The looting panic whipped up by the media following the December events (when rumours, intended to keep people off the city centre streets, flew around the poor Buenos Aires suburbs that 'looters' were attacking people's home and were on their way; fires were lit on many residential street corners and people prepared to defend their blocks against attacks which never came) was another attempt by the state to split the piqueteros from the 'middle classes'. As we have seen from the links formed in January, the attempt failed.

On the 30th May, the piqueteros blocked 1,000 highways, bridges and roads throughout Argentina, as well as railway lines. Their mass mobilisation was accompanied on the same day by strike action by airport workers that brought Ezeiza, Buenos Aires' airport, to a standstill. President Duhalde indicated his impatience with piquetero tactics, saying that road-blockings could be tolerated no longer. In light of this, it is clear that the police attack on the piquetero action of the 26th of June, in Avellaneda, that left the young piqueteros Dario Santillan and Maximiliano Kosteki dead and some 40 injured, were not simply the work of 'maverick cops'. Importantly, thousands immediately descended on the Plaza De Mayo in response to the murders, growing to some 50,000 people two days later. The alert response to state repression reduces the options for the bourgeoisie.

7. The factories
Whilst the most striking and original feature of the Argentine movement is the piqueteros, our interest in this highly organised and radical movement, based on disrupting the sphere of circulation of capital, should not blind us to the question of what the class as a whole in Argentina is doing. The aspects of radical practice in the movement which go so far as heralding new social relations should not make us forget to look at the totality. The question that has come up in recent months for observers of the events is - what are the workers in the sphere of production doing? It is a fact that the radical organisations in the factories which we have discussed above in the context of the struggles of the 1970s, were severely repressed during the years of the military regime. Almost all the authors we have come across who spoke of the situation in Argentina today complain of a lack of militancy in the workplace. The complaint is that the unions are completely tied into the system, and so are cowardly and given to manipulating workers in tokenistic strikes, demos or days of action in order to both safely channel worker discontent and to increase their bureaucratic power. The reasons given for this situation in the work place range from the somewhat vague contention that the workers are simply sold into this official union structures (this, understandably, from a member of the independent motoqueros base union), to the belief that the workers in work are just too scared to lose their jobs; whilst Mouvement Communiste sketch an effective class compromise recently patched up between Duhalde and workers in key sectors. They think that with the possible rejection of electoral politics 'the support of the CGT, the only mass organisation capable of ensuring social peace...is essential. Its inclusion into the government...is a possible hypothesis given the independent progress of the class struggle. This is why Duhalde is trying to make the middle classes, the petit-bourgeoisie and the workers of the state sector [organised by the CTA] pay for the State's fiscal crisis. He traces out a new 'alliance of the producers' composed of the bosses of heavy industry, the workers in these industries organised by the CGT and some unemployed workers bought off by some precarious jobs within the state administration. To fly the flag of this new Peronist settlement [Duhalde] didn't hesitate to promise the general secretary of the CGT, Rudolpho Daer, to withdraw the restrictions on bank accounts as far as they concerned salaries.' 38 We cannot at this point comment much more on this, although it is an important point to keep in mind. Some of the moneys saved in the huge cuts of the past two decades could well be used to try and buy off the diminished number of workers in key strategic industries like oil production. It also gels with the political events in Argentina since December 2001 - the rejection of the Radical De La Rua, opening the way for the Peronist Duhalde to try and limit the damage of the uprising by re-opening the clientelist Peronist channels still connected to the workers, through the medium of the CGT.

We have mentioned the frequency of general strikes in recent years. Although union led and of course limited by the union's own agenda, we must not assume that the workers simply march in step behind their mediators. We note that railway workers have been on strike more than once over the last year, and in September 2002 the transport workers of Metrovia mobilised to demand a reduction of their working day to six hours, a concession they held until only a few years ago. There are also numerous, 'hidden' strikes in small factories over closures, non-payment of wages etc.

We must not forget the instances of common piquetero struggles by (mostly) state workers and the unemployed in the provinces from the mid-'90s onwards. Workers in state industries threatened with privatisation have also used road blocking tactics on numerous occasions, for example at Cutral-Co and Plaza Huincul, when the petrol company YPF was sold to Repsol. 36.8% of all road pickets between December 1993 and December 1999 were made by waged workers! The struggles of the state workers has been a major feature of the Argentine movement and is still very much a live issue. It is a question intimately involved with state clientelism. As we have already noted, with the expansion of the state, the clientelist structure Peron tried to incorporate into his Justicialist settlement was partly achieved with the explosion of 'phoney' jobs in the central state and local administration. More recently, Menem, no doubt to placate the IMF which was making business with the central state and so complaining about its spending, sacked 110,000 federal state workers (as well as 107,000 provincial state workers). He also transferred 200,000 teachers from the federal budget to local government budgets. In Buenos Aires province for example (where Duhalde was governor), the number of state workers rises substantially from 280,000 in 1991 to 400,000 in 1999, no doubt soaking up the 110,000 workers sacked from the central state in Buenos Aires. The need for the Peronist governors (and at one remove, the Peronist president) to keep their huge electoral clientele is the reason for these machinations. This reluctance to attack state jobs decisively show how deep the Peronist class settlement was rooted, even in the ultra-liberal Menem years. As we have seen however, the attack did start in the late '90s, but is still contentious - recent negotiations with the IMF have revolved around the issue of the provincial budgets, the IMF asking for 60% cuts. One would think that more massive redundancies might ensue, but the game is not so simple for the bourgeoisie, with an insurrectionary movement in near permanent mobilisation. Duhalde's administration is squeezed between the IMF and the movements - during a bout of negotiation with the IMF, one government negotiator complained that the IMF didn't understand that the administration is constrained by the fact that there are at least 30 actions a day in Argentina!

Most workers may now be keeping their heads down at work but what has emerged is that many of them are involved through the neighbourhood assemblies. They take part simply as neighbours and also report on the workplace organising that does go on. For example, at one neighbourhood assembly meeting, 39 a worker from the nearby Buquebus ferry service across the River Plate to Uruguay, described the actions that were being taken against redundancies and asked for support, to the assembly's great approval, as did another who worked at the Clari­n newspaper. Many other workers take part in the cacerolazos as well, a form of protest usually associated with the 'middle class'. It is vital to keep these things in mind. Workers not actively in struggle at work may be in touch with the needs and actions of other sectors in struggle through neighbourhood organisations. Furthermore they take part in decision making, in demos and other organisations, as neighbours in concert with other neighbours, through these organisations. The positive thing in this is that a directly social dimension of struggle is available to many workers, one which looks beyond their specific, sectoral interests in particular industries. But the limitation may be that workers separate their everyday needs (which they see as belonging to their experience as neighbours), from their role as producers of surplus value at work. The later would have to be socialised too, and this understanding turned practically against capitalist social relations, to really paralyse the system.

The other form of worker organisation to discuss are the much publicised factory occupations. We must not forget that these occupations, and the startling expressions of solidarity that they have engendered, are few, but at the same time they do come out of a material situation now nearly universal for the Argentine proletariat, hence their radical potential and their maybe inflated fame.

The most widely reported factory occupations are those of Zanon ceramics factory in the province of Neuquén, and Buenos Aires' Brukman textiles. The Zanon occupation started when the 400 workers were threatened with losing their jobs as the bosses of the factory stopped paying them and effectively started winding down the business. The workers responded by occupying the factory, setting it in motion using the materials still inside. Within two days they had produced enough ceramics to pay all their wages for a month. They sell their products at 60% of their previous price through a network of young supporters who take them from door to door. Organised through their trade union, SOECN, though with no support from the national ceramic-workers' union FOCRA (part of the CGT), the workers have refused the owners' attempts to negotiate the fate of the factory. They have totally rejected the ridiculous terms of a possible return of the bosses - wage-cuts, laying off 360 of the 400 workers. Instead they demand "the immediate opening of the plant under workers' control, with no redundancies and no wage cuts, and with full payment of all outstanding salaries. If the bosses refuse to do this we will demand the nationalisation of the factory under workers' control, as part of a scheme to provide public works to build houses, schools and hospitals, all which are much needed in our province. In this way, we can help provide an answer to the problem of unemployment by creating real jobs." 40 They propose to share the jobs amongst as many unemployed as possible. In the 2002 National Assembly of Piqueteros, a motion was passed that abandoned factories, or those that made many redundant, should be expropriated from the owners and self-managed by the workers. This has also been voted for on numerous occasions at the Interbarrial, the weekly general assembly of the neighbourhood assemblies. Zanon workers have, from the start, forged fruitful links with other groups and won great respect for their resistance and level of activism. In the first month of their occupation, October 2001, they joined piquetero and other groups to blockade bridges and highways in Neuquén, and they have visited Buenos Aires and other cities to take part in assemblies and demonstrations. In return, as we have already noted, they have been successfully assisted by piqueteros and others in attempted evictions.

The Brukman workers in Buenos Aires, capital, decided to occupy on the 18th of December 2001 after a collapse in wages in the autumn months, (they were being paid in 'vouchers' of dubious value), and general contempt from the bosses. One 28 year old worker died after they refused to pay for vital medicines. They had not originally planned to set the plant in motion, but when an order of textiles became due in January, they decided to sell it to pay their wages. They have since taken responsibility for the plant - paying bills, fixing a boiler, and reorganised the factory floor to save on energy costs. "We maintain our struggle not through stubbornness but through principles and logic. The owners have demonstrated that they are incapable of running this factory - all they know is how to exploit us, steal our money and invest in non-existent companies. If we could get the company on its feet, why couldn't they? ... Brukman has a total debt of 8 million dollars, and its major creditor is the State, with more than 2.5 million owed to the National Bank. So the demand we make is that the company be municipalized ... under workers' control." 41 Like Zanon, as we have seen, they are not waiting for the state's endorsement, but are running the plant with the assistance of neighbours and others. They also offer to turn the plant's production to providing for the needs of the 'community' - especially for hospitals, schools and the unemployed.

In La Mantanza, the closed Panificadora Cinco bakery was occupied by its workers with the support of the whole neighbourhood and put back to work to provide bread at reduced prices for the locals. There also, the piqueteros defended the occupation against a police intervention.

The workers' own statements and some of the information above point to the limits of self-management. Their belief that they can run the firm better than the bosses may originally come from their antagonistic relationship to the capitalist imposition of work on the shop floor. Running it better may mean making it easier for the workers to work there, contradicting the valorisation needs of the bosses. The fixing of the boiler may be one such example - workers may experience this both as an everyday nuisance as well as recognising its need in the smooth running of the factory, whilst the bosses for their part want to cut costs. The boss is then both a problem because he doesn't recognise the workers needs, but at the same time, he is seen as a sort of philistine of production, who ignores the qualitative aspects of production. As the workers occupy their work place and put it into motion under their own control however, this once antagonist relationship based on their immediate and intimate experience of the production process becomes a necessary identification with the business in itself - paying bills etc.

At this point the understanding of exploitation fixes narrowly on the incompetence of their particular bosses, as the workers, now in charge, need to prove to themselves and others that there's a better way of doing things. In other words, it is forgotten that the bosses are themselves constrained by capitalism to fuck their workers over. And when the workers forget this, they gloss over their own link, as 'self-managers', to this constraining social relation. Isolated in this situation where an inward looking, voluntaristic mindset is required, the burden of exploitation may end up being doubly hard, and splits may emerge, with the most committed and militant driving the others and effectively becoming the new capitalist bosses as they try to make the (once collective) project work. Or the hard won collective control of the production process may not be relinquished resulting in the workers not having the necessary capitalist discipline required to make their enterprise survive in the unforgiving capitalist market. One way or another, the law of value will re-impose itself on the activity of the workers.

We must be careful not to simply dismiss these occupations however. These struggles are a process which form part of an extensive class mobilisation. Some of their radical tendencies, such as the proposal to produce for local need, (Brukman proposed to cover the textile requirements of public hospitals, Panificadora Cinco provision of bread) - even if they do not prove possible or ultimately stay within the frame of exchange relations - move to concretise the demand that immediate needs be met, facing up to the mediation of exchange value. This is the social possibility of struggles, which can challenge the fetishism of commodities. This process of collectivisation of proletarian needs is produced through a heightened level of communication on the ground in Argentina. These workers are experiencing every day the solidarity of other proletarians in different sectors, and so materially feel the need and possibility to reciprocate. Their reformist demands such as nationalisation could, in a more generalised class offensive, be subverted by these very social links. The everyday experience of decision making and power on the shop floor is another important aspect of their experience. Whether the Argentinean movement can or will extend enough to give them the opportunity to realise the radical moments of their struggles is a different matter. For its part, as we have seen, the state seems to be aware of the radical potential of the occupations, using force to try and retake the factories on a number of occasions and in fact, in some cases, ending up participating in their expropriation by the workers.

There are said to be 100 companies involving some 10,000 workers under some form of worker's control in Argentina. Brukman and Zanon, along with the Clinica Junin of Cordoba, form the small, politicised wing, presenting themselves as an independent movement concerned with much more than just putting their factories back into production, and with an awareness of the pitfalls of self-management. As a Brukman worker said, "we don't want to set up a cooperative ....where we would have to submit ourselves to 11 people who would boss everyone else around." 42 Brukman continues to be a focal point for struggles, being a site for assemblies, workshops, exhibitions and organising. It is difficult to get a clear picture from the scant information we have available, but in general the others seem to have a different political orientation, calling themselves 'co-operatives', and constitute themselves in official structures involving state and unions. The two structures regrouping these companies are the MNER (National Movement of Recuperated Companies) comprising of 3600 workers, and FENCOOTER (National Federation of Co-operatives and Re-Converted Companies) with 1447 workers. In 'co-operatives' such as Ghelco SA., a producer of ingredients for frozen desserts, or the publishers Chilavert, the workers set up co-ops to restart production after the companies began bankruptcy proceedings. On the 12th September, the Buenos Aires legislature voted unanimously to permit the 'recuperation' by law of these two factories - the deal is that the government of Buenos Aires will pay the rent of the building for two years, while the equipment is ceded to the workers. After two years, the co-ops will apparently have first refusal on buying the plant.

A comrade from the German group Wildcat recently visited one of these co-operatives: "I visited an occupied metallurgical factory, La Baskonia, in La Matanza. There we met an advisor from the CGT. We soon realised that they'd opted for the legal route, for founding a cooperative before setting the factory to work. They are not interested in joining together with the other factories in struggle, nor in workers' control, nor even in nationalisation. 'It's a Peronist occupation', commented my comrades." Another example is IMPA, an aluminium factory which has been functioning in the form of a co-op for some time. The good thing is that they lend out one of the factory floors for solidarity parties - a fantastic place for parties! - but I never saw the workers from IMPA at any demonstrations or assemblies." 43 The last we have heard of the occupied factories at the time of writing is that Zanon and Brukman called a meeting on the 7th of September which attracted around 500 people, including leftist parties, where it was agreed to set up a national strike fund. On the same day at La Baskonia, the MNER also called a meeting attracting the same sort of numbers, but amongst the workers attending were members of Congress, senators and the vice-president of the cabinet.

8. The 'middle classes' and the neighbourhood assemblies
The French group Mouvement Communiste warn of the dangers of the alliance between proletariat and the middle classes in Argentina: "History shows the exploited have little to expect from these sectors of society, always ready, in the last instance, to save their own skins by allying themselves with the dominant class to the detriment of the working class." 44 Time will tell if this turns out, again, to be the case. But this view ignores the rapid and drastic proletarisation of the majority of the middle classes. 45 Of course, the warnings of Mouvement Communist have a basis in reality, which proletarians involved in struggle recognise. Working class cynicism about the new 'middle class' movements in Argentina - 'they're only on the streets now because their pockets have been touched' - neatly testify to this truth while simultaneously confirming the reality of the middle class' changed situation. Some proletarians are reluctant to tie their fate too closely to that of the middle class assemblies movement for fear that they will eventually be betrayed. Considering the state's near bankruptcy however, it is difficult to see how it will have the means to buy off the middle class. Even a patched up settlement involving new IMF money can only be a short-term solution for the bourgeoisie.

One of the biggest difficulties for us has been to try to understand the composition of this newly vocal and troublesome middle class. What does 'middle class' mean in Argentina? Some comment that, for an Argentine, 'middle class' can mean what we in the West would recognise as a secure proletarian job, even a factory job. This entails a problem of class categories being mixed up in translation, but the issue does not end there. It seems clear that a large number of people that we would recognise as middle class have plummeted into a life of bare survival. The papers are full of stories of academics and other professionals being reduced to selling candles in public parks, or well dressed Buenos Aires families exchanging their extensive wardrobes in the barter clubs, or even forced to collect rubbish on the streets. Echanges state that some 500,000 people have fallen into social immiseration to populate the villas miserias where banners ironically proclaim: "Welcome to the middle classes!" One Argentine economist states that "the middle classes understand that they've reached the end of the road. It's now a whole new situation". 46 But what of the teachers and other government workers which have been such a strong feature of this cycle of struggle from its beginnings in the mid-'90s? Would their traditional status and pay mark them out as middle class professionals? What about the petit-bourgeoisie? Are many of them losing their property in this economic climate? Are they involved in popular assemblies and in attacks against the corralito? What is the relation of the assemblies to the barter clubs and who is involved in these? All of these questions go to explaining the difficulty of understanding the phenomenon of the popular assemblies.

It is often stated that the neighbourhood assemblies - one of the forms associated with middle class organisation in Argentina - are so heterogeneous that it is almost impossible to study them. The fact that there seems to be neighbourhood assemblies in all areas of Buenos Aires involving proletarians in different situations as well can lead to lazy affirmations of diversity and openness for post modernist ideologues intent on shedding class as a social category. Echanges et Mouvement, dispel some of the fog by distinguishing between two broad tendencies of neighbourhood assemblies. 47 One as a phenomenon coming from a long tradition of neighbourhood organisation in working class areas and shanty towns, merging with the new assemblies of the piqueteros in the new situation of mass unemployment of the '90s; and the other as a result of the sudden and more recent impoverishment of the middle classes. In recent months of course, with different sectors recognising each other's needs in struggles, these two tendencies may have increasingly coordinated their actions and demands, (and certainly have talked to each other at the Interbarrial), further complicating the situation. But if the 'middle class' assemblies are dismissed, it is usually by identifying them with the merely middle class problem of the corralito, (in Argentina certainly, they are not understood in this limited way any longer). This identification is then useful to denounce the so-called middle class struggle and their supposed hegemony in the movement. Although it is true that these assemblies were formed around the time of the implementation of the bank freezes and that this problem mobilises a part of their energies, it is a mistake to limit them to this.

Twenty assemblies sprang up in Buenos Aires in the two weeks following the 19th and 20th, and there are now estimated to be 140 across the country, with some 8,000 regular participants. It's sometimes said or assumed that the first cacerolazo, on the19th of December, was a protest about the corralito. Certainly there was widespread anger and despair over what many suspected was the permanent disappearance of their life savings. But it was De La Rua's announcement of the state of emergency which mobilised people in an immediate, spontaneous reaction. Whilst of course the 'middle class' experience of the corralito was one of the reasons for their presence on the streets on the 19th, the radical meaning of the events that ensued is that everyone was on the streets refusing with disgust the state of emergency, (and the memories of dictatorship that it awoke), and in that could recognise each other as subjects in struggle, ultimately on the basis of a real, material rapprochement in their experience of exploitation. After that day, in the many cacerolazos that followed, placards saying anything about the lost savings were in a tiny minority. By the same token then, it would be wrong to characterise the assemblies as populated solely by disgruntled savers, who, presumably, would turn their back on the movement once their savings were returned to them. The problem of bank freezes takes up a relatively small part of the discussions of the assemblies and the Interbarrial. Though their appearance was sudden, the assemblies did not materialise out of a vacuum, but out of a developing situation of material impoverishment and the attendant disillusionment with politics, (in the general elections of October 2001, 22% of the (compulsory) ballot was blank or spoiled, whilst 26% of voters stayed at home). At the beginning it seems, the new assemblies, based on their middle class constituency, (apart from passing numerous resolutions on political subjects such as the national debt), were concentrating on organising new cacerolazos, the 'symbolic' form of protest associated with the middle classes. The cacerolazos had a life of their own anyway, attracting many more people than regularly attended the assemblies. They took place every Friday in the weeks after the 19th, in almost ritual fashion.

Violence was a feature of savers' actions from the 19th onwards. Since then, savers' protests inside banks have also been attacked by the police. This does not, of course, suffice as proof of the revolutionary intent of the middle classes. We note some of the statements that accompany middle class corralito protests - "we are the middle class, we send our children to school, we pay our taxes, and now we have been robbed", "we never break the law, we are not criminals", "without savers no credit, without credit no production - without production, no nation." These slogans display classic middle class subjectivity of course - the implicitly anti-working class, self- righteous sense of betrayal of those that ordinarily play by the rules and do well by them, which is also a general identification with a properly functioning system of capitalist wealth production. But we are almost tempted to say 'so what?' The subjectivity of the newly proletarianised middle classes is going to lag behind their practice in a situation of impoverishment. It is not what this or that skint 'middle class' individual thinks about his situation at a particular moment which is important, but what they will be forced to do as a proletarianised class. Not all of them will be completely skint - and the slogans quoted above may sometimes come from the less badly off parts of the middle class - but it looks like their lot can only worsen and a large proportion of these people are having to come to terms with a situation where their traditional demands for a renewal of the political system, based on moans about corruption and the failure of mediators, is failing to meet their immediate needs.

Neither should we assume that the savers involved in actions against the corralito are only 'middle class', as it has also affected workers with relatively small saving, pensioners, and indirectly but very tangibly, as we have already noted, workers dependent on the black economy. Indeed, Echanges claim that the unofficial sector makes up 50% of the real economy! 48 On the 15th May 2002, an elderly couple in their eighties who had got a court order to force their bank, Banco de la Nacion, to release their life savings, found that the bank still refused, claiming that the law had changed since the order was signed. The couple, living on a pension of 150 pesos a month (£30), decided to remain in the bank until they got their money (US $38,000), and sat themselves in the window, refusing to leave. As night fell, two local assemblies arrived to support them, joining the crowd that had already gathered, until there were around three hundred people, banging pots and chanting "Give them their money back!" Having entered the bank that morning, the exhausted couple finally left at 9pm, with the bank's promise of half their money the next day. 49 This example, we feel, ably demonstrates the possibilities of different needs, in a situation of class mobilisation, to be immediately recognised by others and their meaning transformed in this socialisation process.

Leaving aside the cacerolazos and protests against the corralito, what is perhaps more important is that, like the piqueteros, the assemblies are being pushed by immediate, everyday needs to develop radical practices which come into confrontation with the essence of capitalist social relations - the commodity form - all the while developing debates on the national debt and petitioning the state on certain issues. Many assemblies have set up communal soup kitchens, organised collective, self-reduction actions to reduce food prices; organised to defend impoverished tenants from evictions and set up groups (sometimes with workers from utility companies) to illegally re-connect people cut off for non-payment of bills to public water and electricity supplies. Assemblies have also negotiated with (or rather pressured) utilities companies for reductions in prices. There is strong support within assemblies for local facilities and schools in crisis - some school canteens, unable to function for lack of funds, are being run by assemblies. This is already an impressive list of steps of direct appropriation of use values by people for whom 'paying for things' - exchange value - must become a ridiculous notion, if they are to meet their human needs.

The other important mobilisation has been around the problems of health provision - hospitals and clinics being in absolute crisis due to the collapse of PAMI, the state medical service. In response to price inflation and shortages of drugs, (many drugs were withdrawn from the shelves at the start of the crisis in order to protect their prices), one group, including medical workers, set up a table in the centre of Buenos Aires where people could bring their unwanted drugs and perhaps find something they or a family member needed; a long and desperate queue quickly formed. At the same time the health committees of some 36 assemblies had made a written request to the government of Buenos Aires proposing that the committees participate or take over the running of faltering hospitals. The health department exhausted their patience with diversionary tactics, meagre concessions to the plan etc. A turning point was reached - "In the face of their failure to address our concerns in writing, we resolve to suspend meetings with these bureaucrats. And we propose to take control ourselves, forming Popular Health Committees in each hospital, following the example of the Belgrano-Nu-ez assembly, which got medicines and supplies for their hospitals through their mobilisation." 50 The assembly of Belgrano-Nu-ez, a prosperous barrio of Buenos Aires, had joined with other local assemblies in April 2002 to assist the stricken local hospital, whose workers had informed them that drugs were being withheld by pharmaceutical companies, leading to price increases of 300% and 400%. The hospital workers and asamblei­stas produced a list of the drugs most sorely needed, and went en masse to the laboratories of Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, to demand the drugs. Within days, Novartis was forced to provide 25,000 doses of 1,129 different medicines. 51 In September 2002, the assembly of Flores in Buenos Aires occupied a clinic that had been disused for 6 years with the aim of opening it to workers from occupied factories who have been cut out of union managed health provision, and also for the use of the neighbours. The assemblies have moved also in the winter to occupy disused buildings to use for meetings and organising. The assembly of Parque Lezama Sur, occupying a disused bank building to which they invite piqueteros and other groups, describe this initiative encouragingly as "not about simply replacing the state in the functions in which it has absented itself [health, education], neither is it about simple humanitarianism, nor nostalgic actions destined to uphold the old national-state promises of integration and progress. Instead it is about taking responsibility/control of our actual conditions... proposing the establishment of social links where capitalism acts as a force of separation, of sadness and the formation of isolated individuals." 52

As we have seen, there is a growing tendency within assemblies such as these to fill the gaps where the state has become unable or unwilling to act. As is clear from the health issue, the assemblies move, according to the urgency of their need, from discussing the national debt and making demands of the state to taking direct action. Assemblies have also been attacked by plain-clothes police and other armed gangs. Members have been followed, threatened and beaten. Goons gathered together by municipal Peronist leaders have attacked assemblies, such as the assembly of Merlo in Buenos Aires. These attacks are a seal of approval of the radical political significance of the assemblies which its members presumably cannot ignore.

Another issue we should consider is the ever present and contested attempts by leftist groups to bring their politics to bear on the assemblies. Initial press coverage of the Argentine movement was full of reports of participants rejecting leftist organisations from assemblies and demos. At first glance this may of course look like a radical rejection of politics, but more needs to be said and understood. The obvious thing to say is that if the assemblies were largely 'middle class', then the rejection of leftist politics could be seen as a rejection on the basis of middle class experience of class politics in general, in favour of a politics based of citizenry etc. On the other hand, as we have discussed, the 'middle class' cannot really afford this sort of politics any more, and their initial knee-jerk reaction against class politics, could well have quite naturally mutated into a more radical rejection based on their immediate needs and the autonomous forms of struggles they have developed to meet them. If a 'middle class' assembly is trying to organise school meals and stealing electricity and saving neighbours from eviction for non payment of rent, and discovering new forms of social cooperation in the process, the intrusion of leftists with their programmes and insistence on leadership would naturally be unwelcome! As one asambleista put it - "the assemblies belong to us, not to militants who look upon us with contempt and try to impose on us an experience that we do not need." 53

Again we must advise caution in attempts at interpretation because of the opaqueness of this complex situation. We are not easily going to be able to know the class composition and histories of the different assemblies, and so examples of leftist involvement when they come up are going to be difficult to interpret. More generally, we must warn against generalising from isolated examples. Some assemblies will be successfully controlled by this or that leftist party; the general trend, however, has been for the rejection of trotskyist and other groups, although some attempts to manipulate assemblies, by trotskyist groups such as the Partido Obrero and MAS (Argentine Socialist Movement), have resulted in the collapse of assemblies.

Overtures by mainstream politicians have so far been rejected. And a transparent attempt by the CTA union confederation to co-opt the assemblies movement earlier this year ended in failure. A proposal had been voted through at the fifth Interbarrial to march around the National Congress on the 13th of February - "when the assembly members reached Congress, they saw that a stage had been put up, from which leaders of the CTA were already speaking." 54 They were later vilified for this manoeuvring at the Interbarrial. Because of suspicion or outright rejection from the assemblies, the leftist parties have gravitated to the Interbarrial in an attempt to bring their influence to bear on proceedings. This has led to a reaction from the assemblies and wearying debates about representation and process. The weekly Interbarrial is supposed to be a coordination of autonomous assemblies, not a decision making body in its own right. It soon became clear to the assemblies however, that large numbers of militants and others, (cops and state agents have been mentioned too 55), came to the Interbarrial to vote on issues proposed in the assemblies without being delegated. A debate on representation began, in which concerned asambleistas pushed for a one assembly, one vote system with revocable and rotating delegates. There were protests from leftist militants who feared they were being outflanked, knowing they would have little chance of becoming assembly representatives. 56 Many boycotted the debate, and a growing frustration and disillusionment with the Interbarrial, because of these problems, was reflected in a sharp fall in attendance, with some assemblies opting to liaise with others on a more informal basis.

However, limiting the Interbarrial to coordination only could in itself constrain the possibilities of the movement and, in any case, is difficult to keep in practice. To on assembly 'autonomy' and the repudiation of collective decisions to protect the movement from outside incursion could be formalised into the atomisation and isolation of (direct) democracy. Collective discussion and concerted action is needed for particular events and is essential for the long-term prospects of the assemblies - especially in the case of state repression. 57 The 'moment of truth' of Leninist politics is to recognise this need, and that is why they 'lie in ambush' at the Interbarrial to influence events. 58 A PO member told the newspaper Pagina 12, "If the assemblies limit themselves to running organic allotments and other neighbourhood questions, that for us is a step backwards." 59 Apart from testifying to the condescending attitude of the trotskyist groups, this warning has some sense to it. What he cannot see is the relationship between neighbourhood questions and a wider struggle. He doesn't recognise that the 'political' is the activity of the class, organic allotments and all. The revolution can only be the process of struggle of the autoconvocados, the 'self convened', (as the asambleistas call themselves). It is also too easy to blame the stagnation of the assemblies movement on the leftists - these problems may arise when the movement as a whole doesn't know where to go and has lost the initiative.

The assemblies are also involved in the organisation of escraches, a practice inherited from the aftermath of the dictatorship. Escraches, meaning an 'outing' or 'exposure' in Argentine slang, were developed by the group H.I.J.O.S. - children of the disappeared - in the years after the dictatorship in order to break the conspiracy of silence shielding the murderers of the dictatorship. They can be explained as a reaction of individuals against the policy of impunity guaranteed by Menem in 1995 to the Generals. They take place at particular locations, often private houses intending to involve the local community to 'out' individuals. They boast an impressive amount of organisation and creativity and attempt to involve locals etc. Their glaring limit is the fact that, with their language of 'justice', they can identify the inequities they've suffered with particular individuals and not the social system as a whole. It is particularly in this that they seem open to be recuperated as merely the radical part of the normalisation process after the dictatorship. On the other hand however, they are also by their very nature a confrontation with the fact that democracy has itself normalised the era of dictatorship, and this could lead to a more far-reaching understanding of the interdependence of periods of democracy and dictatorship in a country like Argentina, especially in the present climate, when the weight of more immediate needs is pressing on its actors.

However, some members of the original escrache group, H.I.J.O.S., have expressed reservations about the new informal escrache practices, which target present members of the bourgeoisie. In this more generalised phenomenon, instances of corruption and other misdeeds of particular individuals are published on the net, in the streets, and even on a TV programme, with addresses and other necessary information. Once outed, judges, politicians, businessmen are then insulted, jostled, and sometimes attacked around their homes, to and from work etc. These attacks are also reported to happen spontaneously, on the hoof, when someone is recognised by chance in the street. Even members of the media have been targeted, the much-disliked Canal 13 TV station coming in for a lot of stick in particular. Whilst this could be an expression of a standard middle class rejection of a comprador bourgeoisie, the fact that the media is also being attacked is testament to the marginalisation of the middle classes. These actions may also be part of a generalised hatred of the representatives of capital which expresses itself spontaneously.

Another feature of the Argentine situation associated with the assemblies and the 'middle class' is the barter clubs. As the Wildcat comrade commented, "there are a huge number of people participating, but I don't see it as a 'movement', instead as a method of survival, as a way of getting things that people are now unable to buy. But the rules are the same as in the wider capitalist economy: whoever has money can make a profit and can make others do something for him. For example, there are people who go to the supermarket to buy goods to take to the trueque, and exchange for other things or services that are worth more than they paid. And anyone who has no money or goods has no choice but to offer services, or in other words: sell their labour power -a well known model...I have even heard that capitalist frauds have reached the clubes del trueque, that there are forgeries of the credits which are the currency. And in the relation between people, there is little difference from the capitalist model. Each person appears as an individual to sell/ exchange their things or services." We can compare this form of relation based on survival needs to the more interesting actions of assemblies and piqueteros described above which organise survival in a way which relies on collectivity and solidarity. The barter clubs are a largely 'middle class' phenomenon, but the quote above also suggests the subtle stratifications within the 'middle class' - with some impoverished and trying to converge their stock of belongings into cash to survive, and others maybe on the skids but being able to turn a profit because of greater liquidity. As a corrective to this view, Echanges feel we must keep in mind that this form of exchange may also take a more spontaneous, un-commodified form as the neighbourly exchange of needs based practically on skill, time etc. without these necessarily being measured and equalised. 60 A - 'would you look after my kids tomorrow if I fix your sink on Tuesday' - can be proposed spontaneously and goes on the one hand towards creating social links between neighbours, but on the other will have a tendency to formalise. In a situation like Argentina there is going to be both the pressure on this sort of relation to formalise and to de-formalise. It might be difficult to trace a dividing line between the two practices.

Conclusion
The events of last December hit the headlines across the world. What struck the bourgeois press was the mass protests which resulted from the banking restrictions that threatened the wholesale impoverishment of the Argentine middle class. However, as we have seen, there is more to the Argentine movement than the banging of pots and pans. We have shown how there has been a long tradition of working class struggles based on self-organization, of which the present piqueteros actions are a recent example. Also, at the current moment in Argentine history, the material conditions of the middle classes have shifted downwards, and this forms the basis for solidarity with proletarian movements based on shared experiences.

As we have seen, the movements in Argentina must be understood in the context of the effects of 'neo-liberal' restructuring in a country on the periphery of capital, where social ties in proletarian areas still form the basis of the organization of life. Whilst in the west, 'neo-liberal' policies led to the decomposition of the organized working class and a slide towards the 'war of all against all', in the periphery a different trend is noticeable. Neo-liberal policies, in attacking working class standards of living and its official form of organization and representation within capital, also halt the incomplete process of subsumption of labour to capital, a process which was intrinsically involved with the state and national development programmes. We have sketched the specific features of Peronist integration which has been one of the central dynamics of struggles in Argentina.

It is important not to be blind to the particularities of Peronism when we enumerate its similarities with European fascism (integration of class through trade union into corporatist system, nationalism etc.). Capitalism on the periphery could not complete the post-war integration into state-led capitalism in the same way as in Europe. Some level of class autonomy, of community co-operation survived where, from their daily experiences in meeting their needs, people recognized that it was as acting as a class for itself that produced results. Here, for example, we see the impact of the semi-autonomous base of Peronism, with its blurred edges (blurred precisely because it shades into un-institutionalised immediate community organization), which eventually became troublesome for Peron and was also an intractable problem for the dictatorship which followed (and which actually demanded Peron's return). Later we see Peronist base organizations re-asserting themselves by default under Menem as an unofficial sector which would cushion the effects of reform. At this point, these networks actually assisted in the dismantling the very clientelist network that connected them to the state and under the period of industrial development were in a sense the guarantee of their survival. The loose associations now in place around piquetero groups and assemblies have a less mediated relationship to the state than they had with Peronist clientelism. In attacking clientelist waste in the state, De La Rua, for example, attempts to outflank the Peronist clientelist channels in local government by giving out 'work plans' to the unemployed through NGOs. Now these have effectively merged with piquetero organizing. This means that the informal channels of co-operation and neighbourhood provision are now freed of clientelist mediation and its distortions. Autonomous groups like Anibal Veron can work collectively in a way impossible before. They face a weak state directly and try to get what money they can out of it, disrupting the accumulation of capital without recuperating counterweights.

However, we must be careful not to fetishize the high points of the Argentine movement to the detriment of a more sober, wider perspective. Although the struggles have involved hundreds of thousands of people, there are millions who are not involved. How are we to consider this 'silent majority'? No doubt many of them are sympathetic with much of the mobilizations, and may be involved, at one remove; some may have fallen into despair and the atomization of a war of all against all of survival on the streets; whilst others, maybe partly as a reaction to the threat they feel from this group, are fearful of the chaos that surrounds them. On the one hand, it's the inertia of this silent majority which is the ultimate limit of the movement; but, on the other, their indecision is a block to the bourgeoisie resolving the crisis in their favour.

One way of looking at the development of the current situation in Argentina is to consider the events that led up to the calling of elections. There were two huge, country-wide piquetero days of action in May, with hundreds of roads blocked. Duhalde, trying to convince the IMF that he could keep his house in order, announced that the piquetero blockages could be tolerated no longer. Soon after, and presumably not by chance, the police attacked a piquetero action on the outskirts of Buenos Aires with live ammunition, injuring 30 and killing two. But the response was immediate, the Plaza de Mayo filled up in protest; 50,000 were there by the third day. Duhalde had no credibility in general and could not impose the violent will of the state because of the alertness of the mobilization. He then called the elections. This might be a dubious strategy for the bourgeoisie, as it might put the seal on the rejection of politics that has been such a strong feature of the movements, expressed as a massive abstention rate and/or spoilt vote. According to a poll in Pagina 12 newspaper, 71% of people thought that, whoever wins the elections, little or nothing would change.

If these democratic channels fail, the apparently obvious option for the bourgeoisie is the return of military dictatorship and terror. However, terror is never so simple as it might appear. Proletarians are not always the mere victims of it. The army in a country like Argentina was one of the essential linchpins of the state development programmes which now belong to the past. Soldiers are closer to the working class than the cops; they have to be convinced that they are fighting for the people, not simply coerced into killing, otherwise the weapons put in their hands could suddenly turn into the weapons of the revolution. The army comes in with a new social settlement. If it can't, it may not be able to guarantee the loyalty of its soldiers. The problem with the restructuring is that it attacks unproductive capital and the state - in other words, sectors like the army; the Argentine army is now much reduced in size. One officer was quoted as not being certain enough of the loyalty of his troops to consider an intervention. We must remember at this point that Argentines feel that the events of the 19th of December - the most generalized and spontaneous mobilization - was a repudiation of this very possibility, burying once and for all the fear and silence of the years of the dictatorship in this huge collective affirmation.

Unable to impose the policies deemed necessary for the resolution of the crisis, the Argentine bourgeoisie face an implacable international capital organized through the IMF. The crisis in Argentina has demonstrated the limits of the neo-liberal policies imposed through the IMF over the past two decades. By making a few rich while impoverishing ever greater numbers, these policies have undermined the social conditions necessary for economic and political stability. Neo-liberal policies are pushing more and more countries in the periphery into the same predicament, particularly in South America. However, with the world economy entering into recession, the IMF cannot afford to back down. If the Argentine bourgeoisie is let off the hook then Brazil, Turkey, Nigeria and many others will be next. It will be the end of neo-liberalism. However, if Argentina explodes in a revolution - one which could be contagious given the rise in struggles in Latin America - America may have to intervene. But, given the fact that America is having to defend the neo-liberal world order in the Middle East at the moment, will it be stretched by its over-commitment on the world stage?

• 1. The piqueteros being the movement based around the unemployed which uses road blocking pickets as their tactic of struggle.
• 2. For one account of the uprising, and other reports and information, see SchNews, No. 350.
• 3. The slogan is still regularly heard on the streets of the cities; rarely chanted, it is almost always sung, over and over - "Ohhh, que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo, que se vayan todos...." ("out with them all, every single one of them").
• 4. Sources for this section: Ronaldo Munck, Ricardo Falcon and Bernardo Galitelli, Argentina, From Anarchism to Peronism, (London: Zed Books Ltd 1987), pp. 24-105; Confederation Nationale du Travail - Association Internationales des Travailleurs, 'La Fora dans le Mouvement Syndical Argentin', Marseille, 2002; pp. 25-30; pp. 17-20; 'Working Class Report 1917-1921: Generalised Revolutionary Struggle in Patagonia', Communism, 4. A good source which was considered throughout the article is Mouvement Communiste, 'Argentine: La Cohesion Sociale Vole en Eclats', No. 1, Février 2002, B.O. 1666, Centre Monnaie, Bruxelles; http://argentinanow.tripod.com.ar/ news.html
• 5. The strength of the proletariat was an important element for the power balance of the ruling class. In fact Ronaldo Munck (op. cit., p. 57) stresses the importance of the general strike of 1910 for this political change, which happened two years later.
• 6. Notice that the decision of bending towards the moderate socialists did not make FORA admittedly 'socialist'. In fact, due to radically divergent questions of principles, the socialist unions were united in a different federation, the UGT (Union General de Trabajadores, founded in 1906), and did not join FORA. All the moderate unions joined together only in 1930 to form the CGT, as we will see later.
• 7. As quoted by Munck, op. cit., p. 67.
• 8. It is worth saying that the struggles of 1919-1920 in Patagonia involved also Chilean Patagonia, where for example the Chilean workers were able to seize the town of Puerto Natale for more than a year. The efforts of FORA V to link the workers in struggle across the boundary were boycotted by FORA IX.
• 9. The repression led by Varela was a real massacre, where more than 1,500 workers were killed.
• 10. Sources for this section: Ronaldo Munck, op. cit., pp. 106-146. Confederation National du Travail, op. cit., pp. 29-30.
• 11. That is, substituting the import of goods with national production oriented to sell on the internal market. This implied a major restructuring of the Argentinean economy.
• 12. Ronaldo Munck argues that the 'orthodox' interpretation of Peronism as based on a new working class who had recently moved from the countryside, and who was less class conscious, more traditionalist and were thus prone to accept an authoritarian State. According to studies quoted by Munck, 'the organizations and leaders of the 'old' working class participated intensely in the rise of Peronism' and, contrary to the theories of the separation between new and old workers, Argentinean working class was 'remarkably homogeneous'. See discussion in Ronaldo Munck, pp. 121-123. If the 'orthodox' theory on Peronism might make sense at the ideological level, it is difficult to explain the strength of the Argentinean working class under Peronism without taking into account the existence of a 'remarkable unity' of the working class.
• 13. Op. cit., p. 231.
• 14. Individualism is a one-sided ideological viewpoint within capitalist social relations, where social interaction among producers takes the form of the social relationship of their commodities on the market. The viewpoint of our society as a civil society based on free individuals is of course ideological, being one-sided, because it hides the fact that the real personal freedom and happiness of the producers is denied by alienation and exploitation inherent in wage labour and in market relationships. Obviously, the other side of the same ideology is the integration of the fragmented individuals within the system through identification with abstract communities centred around unifying issues such as nationalism, the bourgeois party, etc. The fact that individualism and collectivism are contradictory may tempt us to oppose the first by appealing to the second one or vice versa. But this approach would fail to grasp the problem dialectically and see the common root of both ideological standpoints in the concrete bourgeois relationships within capitalism. Only with the concrete challenge to commodity relations in the practice of class struggle both individualism (the denial of real happiness and freedom) and abstract collectivism (the denial of real collective management of our lives) will lose their compensatory attractions and their reason of being.
• 15. Sources for this section: Munck, op. cit., pp. 127-228.
• 16. Ronaldo Munck, op. cit., p. 150.
• 17. As accounted by Ronaldo Munck, op. cit., p. 158.
• 18. Mouvement Communiste gives us a list of names of union bureaucrats and their businesses in the 70s. Some of them are: Marcelino Mansilla, general secretary of UOCRA of Mar de Plata, who owned night- clubs, a textile factory and a restaurant. The brothers Elorza, secretaries of the union of hoteliers, had a restaurant. Triacca, bureaucrat in the plastics union owned a pig farm and a transport company. Lorenzo Miguel, secretary of UOM, was co- director of another transport company. Armando March, secretary of the union of the commercial employees was a director of a 'union' bank. Regelio Coria, leader of UOCRA, co-owned the building materials factory TUCON and had a huge farm in Paraguay...
• 19. As Mouvement Communiste explain, the 'guerrilla' movement started in Argentina in 1955, with the Movimiento Revolucionario Peronist (MRP), which split into a right- wing and a left-wing faction. After the student struggles of 1966, and the struggles against the military regime of Ongania, encouraged also by 'theology of liberation', more numerous groups appeared in the '70s (there were Peronist, Catholic, Guevarist, Trotskyist, Maoist factions). The Montoneros came out in 1970, with a mixture of Peronism, nationalism and third -worldism ideology. In 1974 they had 100,000 members, with 3,500-5,000 cadres.
• 20. Sources for this section: Ronaldo Munck, 'Argentina', Capital & Class, 22, Spring 1984, p. 15; Martha Roldán, 'Continuities and Discontinuities in the Regulation and Hierarchization of the World Automotive Industry'; Andy Beckett, 'Blueprint for Britain', The Guardian Weekend, May 4 2002, p. 17; Arthur P. Whitaker, Argentina Upheaval (London: Atlantic Press), p. 97; p. 100; p. 109.
• 21. Sources for this section: Donald G. Richard, 'Regional Integration and Class Conflict: MERCOSUR and the Argentine Labour Movement', Capital & Class, 57, Autumn 1995, p. 55; Martha Roldán, op. cit.; Hernán Camarero, Pablo Pozzi, Alejandro Schneider, 'Unrest and Repression in Argentina', New Politics, Vol. 7, No. 1 (new series), Summer 1998; Gerard Baker, 'US Defends its Stance on Argentina' and Thomas Catán, 'European Countries Protest at Argentina Recovery Plan', Financial Times, 7/1/02; articles in Financial Times, 22/12/01; Institudo de Estudio y Formacion, Highlights of Labour Market Conditions in Argentina, Global Policy Network.
• 22. After the Second World War the USA had emerged as the unrivalled economic super- power. Since the US could out-compete all its potential competitors in all the most important industries it was in the interests of American capital to promote free trade and liberalization. However, although the USA sought to promote the free movement of capital and commodities, and endeavoured to break up the old European empires and their associated special trading relationships, such policies were always tempered by the need to contain the Eastern Bloc. As a result the USA was prepared to tolerate allied countries imposing policies of national development, even though such policies may have inhibited the profitability of US capital, insofar as such policies prevented the spread of 'Communism'. With the fall of the USSR such a constraint on the USA's insistence on liberalization was lifted.
• 23. Between 1991 and 1998 the trade between the four countries making up MERCOSUR quadrupled. However, with the crisis of 1998-9, which saw Brazil devalue the Real by 40%, MERCOSUR began to unravel. Between 1999 and 2001 the trade between the four countries fell. As Argentina's trade deficit continued to rise, exacerbated by a further 30% devaluation of the Real, it was agreed to temporarily suspend the MERCOSUR customs union in March 2001.
• 24. The role of the IMF in this desperate situation, again, was primarily that of defending the interests of the creditors. One of the main policies imposed by the IMF on the developing countries was that of financial liberalization, the removal of restrictions on the movement of capitals in and out of the countries. In the latest hectic years, when it was clear that the peso would collapse, financial companies (for example Citibank) and individual creditors rushed to take dollars out of the country. In order to stop this movement, Argentina's authorities employed then a 'Law of Economic Subversion', previously designed to track financial movements related to terrorism; but the IMF put pressure on the government to cancel this law.
• 25. James Petras, 'The Unemployed Workers Movement in Argentina', The Monthly Review, January 27th 2002, Vol. 53, No. 8.
• 26. Since devaluation from one to one with the dollar, the peso has fallen to around 3 .6 to the dollar, but 'bonds', or parallel currencies, are more and more replacing the peso - the peso is becoming scarce - with around 6 billion Lecops in circulation.
• 27. 'L'Argentine de la Pauperisation - la Revolte. Une Avancée vers l'Autonomie', Echanges et Mouvement, June 2002.
• 28. Echanges, pp. 13-14.
• 29. Which is part of the Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA, Argentinean Workers' Central), a large union confederation.
• 30. 'Movilizacion Popular, Silencio Sindical', Daniel Campione, 19.4.02, on Rebelion.org.
• 31. These are: Movimiento Sin Trabajo Teresa Vive, linked to the trotskyist MST (Movement of Socialist Workers); the MIJP (Independent Movement of Pensioners and Retired people) - ex-CCC and now with links to various trotskyist parties; the MTL (Territorial Liberation Movement), a small group linked to the Communist Party; Agrupacion Tendencia Clasista 29 de Mayo (29th May Classist Tendency Grouping), of the Liberation Party.
• 32. MTD Anibal Veron, 'Blocking of Access to the Federal Capital', 22nd November 2001.
• 33. James Petras, 'The Unemployed Workers Movement in Argentina'.
• 34. Julio Burdman, 'Origen y Evolucion de los "Piqueteros"'.
• 35. A bourgeoisie in the periphery of capital which makes its money by hanging around with western capitalist interests, taking a cut from the deals made to exploit the country's resources, and therefore having no interest in national development.
• 36. 'El Bloque Piquetero Marcho en La Plata', Argentina Arde, No. 8, 11th April 2002, p. 3.
• 37. 'Ni un peso, ni un Soldado', Argentina Arde, No. 7, 22nd March 2002, p. 3.
• 38. Mouvement Communiste, pp. 17-18.
• 39. Asamblea Parque Lezama Sur, 5.2.02.
• 40. Letter from Raul Godoy, General Secretary of the Union of Ceramist Workers and Employees of Neuquén (SOECN), Neuquén, Argentina, November 16th 2001, published on Indymedia.
• 41. 'Trabaja y Vende', Argentina Arde, No. 8, 11th April 2002, p. 5.
• 42. Echanges, p. 45.
• 43. Email to Aufheben, 9.9.02.
• 44. Mouvement Communiste, 'Letter' No. 1, Feb. 2002, p. 6.
• 45. After the devaluation of the peso, average middle class incomes amounted to just 75% of former working class salaries. The income of bank employees in the capital has fallen by 60%, from US$1081 to US$432 a month, without allowing for the rapidly rising prices of everything.
• 46. Echanges, p. 14.
• 47. See pp. 26-32.
• 48. Ibid., p. 13.
• 49. Full story on the Argentina Now website.
• 50. 'A Otro Perro con ese Hueso', Argentina Arde, No. 8, 11th April 2002, p. 8.
• 51. 'Los Remedios en su Lugar', Argentina Arde, No. 8, 11th April 2002, p. 8.
• 52. Colectivo Situaciones, 'Apuntes para un Nuevo Protagonismo Social' (April 2002, published by 'de mano en mano'), p. 126.
• 53. Echanges, p. 33.
• 54. 'Seeds of Revolution' in Freedom, 23.3.02, Vol. 63, No.6, p. 3.
• 55. Argentina Arde, No. 8, 11th April 2002, p. 8.
• 56. The debate was also connected to the problems in many neighbourhood assemblies that the participation of left party activists were causing - although in the first cacerolazos and demonstrations organised by the assemblies, party banners were so frowned upon as to be absent, over time, more and more party banners began to appear.
• 57. One of the big splits occurred over proposals for Mayday demonstrations. One proposal, at the Interbarrial, was to join the mass demo, the other being for a separate, mass meeting at the obelisk. Partido Obrero and MST militants actually had a punch-up over the issue, whilst 24 of the 57 assemblies attending that day abstained from voting over the issue. At the following Interbarrial of the 28th April, the assembly of Liniers denounced the crisis of the Interbarrial, "provoked by a process of demobilisation of the neighbourhood assemblies and because of the partisan practices of two organisations in particular, who have brought their partisan struggles to the heart of this incipient organism which the neighbours, with much effort, are constructing." They proposed that each assembly should, finally, have one speaker and one vote, although as many asambleístas as possible should continue to attend to, amongst other things, monitor their delegates. The vote was passed with only one dissension.
• 58. Although it is perhaps in part thanks to parties such as the PO that the links between 'piquete and cacerola' were made so early - at the piquetero march from La Matanza on the 28th January 2002, when the slogan 'piquete and pot banger, the struggle is the same' was born, the assembly which first greeted the piqueteros and gave them breakfast was that of Villa Urquiza, which has a large PO participation.
• 59. This and previous from Raul Zibechi, 'La Izquierda Argentina y las Asambleas Barriales, Divididas', 6 de Mayo del 2002.
• 60. Echanges, p. 39.

From operaismo to autonomist Marxism

Italy's 'Hot Autumn' of 1969 and 'Movement of 1977' were two of the high points of late 20th century revolutionary struggle. The recent publication of two books on workerism and autonomia testify to the continued interest in the theoretical development surrounding these events. Steve Wright's Storming Heaven presents a critical history of Italian workerism; and Harry Cleaver's Reading 'Capital' Politically has been influential as an account of the 'autonomist' tradition. The review of these two books gives us the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the contributions of workerism. We suggest that Cleaver reproduces some of autonomia's problems as well as its useful theoretical tools. These problems include the inadequacy of the concept of autonomy for a class analysis; the absence of a critique of leftism; ambiguity over the 'law of value'; and an inability or unwillingness to theorize retreat. We also argue that Cleaver's 'political' reading of Capital lacks the analytical rigour needed to make the connections between the categories of Capital and the class struggle.

From Operaismo to 'Autonomist Marxism'

Review Article:
Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright (London: Pluto Press, 2002)

Reading 'Capital' Politically (2nd edn.) by Harry Cleaver (Leeds: AK/Anti-thesis, 2000)

Harry Cleaver's reply is located here: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/AufhebenResponse2.pdf

The Italian 'Hot Autumn' of 1969 was one of the high points of late 20th century revolutionary struggle, and is associated with operaismo ('workerism'), a Marxian approach that focused on rank-and-file struggles in contrast to what was seen as the politics and opportunism of the dominant (Stalinist) left. The wave of social struggles of that year was echoed, although with important differences, in the tumultuous 'Movement of 1977'. Under the banner of autonomia, the workerists' analysis of class struggle was extended through the actions of groups outside the workplace. Intense street-fighting, self-reduction or outright refusal of bills and fares, the explicit raising of radical demands such as the abolition of wage-labour: all this hinted at a movement for which what counts as 'political' had been seriously questioned by struggles around wider desires and needs. Readers will be aware of workerism and autonomia today through the works of its most well-known theorists, such as Negri, through the US journal Midnight Notes, and perhaps through the aut-op-sy website and discussion list.[1] For many of those dissatisfied with the versions of Marxism and anarchism available to them in the UK, the notions of 'autonomy' and 'autonomist' have positive associations. For example, the recent 'anti-capitalist' mobilizations of J18 and Seattle both drew on themes and language associated with autonomia, such as autonomous struggles and diversity.[2] However, the history and theory surrounding workerism and autonomia are not always well known. The recent publication of two books on operaismo and autonomia and their theoretical heritage testify to the continued interest in this current. Harry Cleaver's Reading 'Capital' Politically was originally published in 1979, and has now been republished, with a new preface. Cleaver's Introduction, in particular, has been a point of reference to many in grasping the significance of post-war developments, including struggles that don't necessarily express themselves in traditional forms. Steve Wright's Storming heaven presents a critical history of the Italian movement's political and theoretical development in relation to the struggles of the 1950s, '60s and '70s - a history which, we argue, now supersedes the Cleaver presentation.

The publication of these two books gives us the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the contributions of operaismo and autonomia, and Cleaver's attempt to keep them alive. In particular, we will examine five issues. First, there is the question of whether the concept of 'autonomy' is adequate as a basis for a class analysis. Second, we argue that the workerists and hence those who have followed them suffered from a lack of an adequate critique of leftism and nationalism. Third, there is the issue of the ambiguity of those influenced by workerism in their account of the status of the 'law of value'. Fourth, the failure of workerism and of autonomia to theorize retreat in the class struggle can be linked to an implicit (or even explicit) satisfaction among some theorists in this tradition with the current limits of the class struggle. Finally, there is the question of whether the political reading of Marx's Capital offered by Cleaver actually works. We conclude that the defeat of the movements that sustained the development of workerism has led both to the abandonment of the project of world revolution and the ideologization of theory among theorists in this tradition.

1. Promise and limits of
an 'autonomist' class analysis

To understand the workerist and the subsequent 'autonomist Marxist' take on class we need to go back to the emergence of the current's key theoretical concepts.

1.1 Classical Workerism
The origins of operaismo lie in research carried out on workers' behaviour in the 1950s. The concern of the research was with workers' own needs and perceptions: their definitions of their problems on the shopfloor, and the nature of their struggles. Wright (p. 63) cites the following as the core features of the workerist perspective emerging from this research: the identification of the working class with the labour subsumed to the immediate process of production; an emphasis on the wage struggle as a key terrain of political conflict; and the insistence that the working class was the driving force within capitalist society.[3] All these features were a reaction against, and the basis for a developed alternative to, the productivist reformism and (bourgeois) politics of the traditional (Stalinist) left, i.e. the PCI (the Italian Communist Party, by far the largest Communist Party in Western Europe). For the PCI, 'politics' was conducted primarily through parliament (and the union bureaucracy). By contrast, in stressing the significance of workers' own struggles within industries, the workerists rejected the classical Leninist distinction between 'political' and 'economic' struggles.

Through relating workerist theory to the context of the struggles through which it emerged, Storming Heaven examines workerism's most well-known category - that of class composition, which Wright (p. 49) defines as the various behaviours which arise when particular forms of labour-power are inserted in specific processes of production. operaismo also introduced the concept of the mass worker, which describes the subject identified through the research on the FIAT and Olivetti factories. What characterizes the mass worker is its relatively simple labour; its place at heart of immediate process of production; and its lack of the bonds which had tied skilled workers to production (Wright, p. 107).

1.2. Workerism beyond workers
As Cleaver points out, the traditional Marxian analysis, and political practice, understands production and work itself as neutral. The aim is to take over the means of production, and run them 'in the interests of the workers', to the ends of a fairer distribution. However, the research on FIAT and Olivetti had shown that the division of labour, and the definition of skills, operated as a process of domination rather than being a technical matter. The workerists therefore proposed concepts intended to grasp this non-neutrality of factory organization and machinery. Particularly important here is the work of Panzieri, who had argued that, unlike the reformist Stalinists, the working class recognized the unity of the 'technical' and 'despotic' moments of the organization of production.[4] Such concepts pointed to the limitations of workers' self-management which could be seen to be merely the self-management of one's own domination.

Tronti developed this line of analysis with the notion of the social factory. The idea of the factory as locus of power was extended to the wider society as a whole which was seen to be organized around the same principles of domination and value (re)production.[5] The implication of this was that, since social organization in society is not neutral, then resistance outside the factory could be a valid moment of the class struggle.

Yet the emphasis on those (factory) workers in the immediate process of production meant that operaismo was caught in a tension if not a contradiction. Tronti and others were unable to reconcile their notion of the social factory with the emphasis they wanted to place on what happened in large factories: even as they pointed beyond the mass worker, workerists continued to privilege the role of the factory proletariat.

Autonomia (the 'area of autonomy'), a loose network of groupings including and influenced by radical workerists, emerged in the 1970s, following the collapse of some of the workerist groups. This new movement also saw the influx of a lot of younger people; they were often university educated or working in small manufacturing or the service sector. They characteristically emphasized the localized and personal over class-wide struggle, need over duty, and difference over homogeneity (Wright, p. 197). They thus sought to stretch the concept of class composition beyond the immediate labour-process in the factories. They were also less committed to totalizing concepts of class and to their workplace identities; and they had less time for the PCI and the unions. Some of these tendencies found theoretical expression in Bologna's seminal 'The Tribe of Moles'.[6]

The most controversial theoretical development in this period was Toni Negri's argument that the mass worker had been replaced by what he called the socialized worker (operaio sociale). Negri's thesis was that capital, while maintaining the firm as the heart of its valorization process, drives toward a greater socialization of labour, going beyond the simple extension of the immediate process of production towards a complete redefinition of the category of productive labour. The extent of this category, according to Negri, was now "relative to the level of the advancement of the process of subsumption of labour to capital... [W]e can now say that the concept of wage labourer and the concept of productive labourer tend towards homogeneity", with the resulting constitution of "the new social figure of a unified proletariat".[7] In short, all moments of the circulation process, and even reproduction, were seen to be productive of value; the distinction between productive and non-productive labour was obliterated. While Capital, volume 1, assumes the reproduction of labour-power in the form of the family and education, Negri's theoretical innovation was to focus on this as a locus of struggle. Negri suggested that, historically, there had been a shift in emphasis after the end of the 1960s whereby capital adopted a strategy to avoid exclusive dependence on the traditional working class and to rely more heavily on the labour-power of social groups who were, at that time, marginal and less organized.[8] Thus he and his followers looked to the organized unemployed, the women's movement, the practice of self-reduction and the increasing instances of organized looting that characterised the Movement of 1977 as valid moments of anti-capitalist practice; the revolutionary process was understood as a pluralism of organs of proletarian self-rule (Wright, p. 173). As Wright discusses, Negri's account was criticized as ultimately too abstract because it identified power as the dimension linking all the social groups and practices referred to as constituting the socialized worker; this emphasis had the effect of flattening out differences between the different groups and practices. The redefinition of the category of productive labour is problematic for the same reason. Moreover, it led Negri to draw over-optimistic conclusions as to the class composition resulting from the real subsumption of labour to capital. The 'socialized worker' also seemed to change over time. At first, the socialized worker characteristically referred to precarious workers; later, as Negri's perspective wavered with his disconnection from the movement, it was embodied in the 'immaterial worker', as exemplified by the computer programmer.[9]

The area of autonomy reached its zenith with the Movement of 1977. However, it wasn't just the well-documented massive state repression, in the form of violence and imprisonment, that led to the breaking of autonomia and the collapse of workerism. The development of autonomia and the emphasis on extra-workplace struggles went hand in hand with the isolation of the radical workerists from the wider working class. It was this isolation and hence pessimism in the possibility of a wider movement that led many ultimately to end up back in the PCI - or to join the armed groups.

1.3 Cleaver's account of the working class
One problem often raised against the communist project is that of the supposed disappearance of its agent - the working class. Marx's conception of revolution is said to be linked with a class structure that was disappearing. This was a particularly pressing issue at the time Cleaver originally wrote Reading 'Capital' Politically, with Gorz's Farewell to the Working Class and similar sociological analyses becoming fashionable. Cleaver offers a response to this by suggesting that the working class is just changing shape and is in fact everywhere.[10] For many of us, the most influential aspect of Harry Cleaver's Reading 'Capital' Politically is less his 'political' account of the relation between value and struggles (which we discuss below) than his Introduction, in which a history of movements and ideas is used to develop an 'autonomist' conceptualization of the working class in opposition to that of traditional Marxism as well as to those who wanted to argue that the working class was disappearing. (In fact, while Cleaver's book was photocopied and passed around by loads of people, most people we know only read the Introduction!)

Cleaver's class analysis can be seen to follow on from Tronti's concept of the social factory and Bologna's 'The Tribe of Moles'. Thus, in his account of developments in Italy, he suggests that the struggles of non-factory workers - predominantly women in this case - both embodied and clarified the new class composition (p. 71). 'Community' struggles around the self-reduction of rents and food and utility prices, he suggests, enabled these women participants to become more conscious of their own role in value-production. Hence their own autonomous activity could be grasped as an essential part of the class struggle, rather than being limited to the auxiliary role of supporting the wage-based struggles of their menfolk. Cleaver takes the Wages for Housework campaign as the highest expression of this development.

In the new preface to Reading 'Capital' Politically, Cleaver (pp. 16-17) elaborates on this account of the nature of class. Descriptively, an essential point here is the extension of the category of the working class to cover not only the waged but also the unwaged. Cleaver claims that this expanded definition is justified by historical research (e.g. Linebaugh's The London Hanged[11]) which, it is suggested, shows in the political culture of artisans and others that the working class predates the predominance of the wage. Conceptually, the crux of Cleaver's argument is in terms of a social group's exploitation by, and hence struggles against, capital. Moreover, the struggles of the social group as such, rather than their subsumption within a general working class struggle, are taken to be significant for their self-transformative potential. For Cleaver, the ability of such social groups to re-create themselves in struggle points to a problem with traditional (narrow) definitions of the working class, which said nothing about this self-re-creation.[12] In line with the tradition of autonomia, Cleaver's account recognizes resistance to capital as an inherent feature of the majority of humanity, rather than - as in sociological and some Marxist accounts of Western class structure - limited to the industrial proletariat.

Cleaver's account of an 'autonomist' tradition of struggles and theories was important for us, as for many people seeking an adequate account of class struggle in the 1980s and '90s. But, re-reading Cleaver's definition of the working class now, and in particular the social groups he seeks to include (as social groups) within this definition, leads us to argue that his account is not sufficient as a class analysis. The question is whether exploitation is a feature of the social group he refers to as such, and therefore whether resistance is inherent for the group as such. Our argument is that there are differences and distinctions that matter within and between the social categories that Cleaver identifies as part of the working class. Wright argues that operaismo and autonomia employ concepts which serve to flatten out and lose important differences and distinctions in class analysis. Our point is that Cleaver is heir to this tendency.

To flesh this argument out, let us consider each of the social categories that Cleaver wants to (re-)define as part of the working class.

Before doing so, however, we need to stress here the inadequacy of playing the game of treating classes as categories into which we place people. For us, class is not a form of stratification but a social relation; rather than attempting to classify people we need to understand how class is formed, as a process, within a relationship of antagonism.[13] It is true that individuals are situated differently with regards the fundamental social relation of how labour is pumped out of the direct producers (and that identities and perceptions of interests linked with these identities can form around these situations). But our argument with Cleaver's (re)classifications is inadequate in its own right, and needs to be read within a broader argument about class as a relation not (just) a stratum.

Cleaver states (p. 73):

The identification of the leading role of the unwaged in the struggles of the 1960s in Italy, and the extension of the concept [of working class political recomposition] to the peasantry, provided a theoretical framework within which the struggles of American and European students and housewives, the unemployed, ethnic and racial minorities, and Third World [sic] peasants could all be grasped as moments of an international cycle of working class struggle.

The unemployed
Organized unemployed struggles played a significant role in the Italian experience of the '70s - the Neapolitan movement for example was able to mobilize thousands of unemployed workers, becoming the region's central reference point for militant activity (Wright, p. 165). In these pages and in other publications, we have given much attention to such struggles, which for us are often over benefits, for the very simple reason that benefits are the other side of the coin of the working wage[14] (and because we ourselves have relied on benefits so much!). The unemployed are the lowest stratum of the proletariat - the most dispossessed - and are likely to have a background in the working class as such. In Capital, volume 1, Marx demonstrates that the unemployed are necessary to value-production. Since they are defined as a category by their relationship to the wage, the unemployed are obviously part of the working class. But Marx also makes clear how the unemployed function to instil discipline in those in work and hence put "a curb on their pretensions".[15] For traditional Marxism, the unemployed as such cannot play the same role as the industrial working class; they lack both the leverage and the potential for revolutionary class consciousness of those in work. In this perspective, unemployed struggles must necessarily be reduced to the role of tail-ending workers' strikes; any unemployed 'autonomy' could too easily take the form of scabbing.[16]

However, the functions of a social stratum for capital do not necessarily define the limits of the subjectivity associated with it. Historically, it has often been the least self-organized, or the least autonomous, among the unemployed who have scabbed. The unemployed are, among those Cleaver cites, the social group which can least controversially be defined as part of the working class.

'Race'
In the case of 'race' and ethnicity, what is being referred to here by Cleaver is the construction by capital of divisions within the working class in order to create and justify competition amongst workers. To the extent that 'racial' and ethnic identities are constructed, working class organization itself is 'racialized' or 'ethnicized'. In other words, it is because racialization and ethnicity is part of way that class division is constructed and the working class decomposed that people might use 'racial' and ethnic identities as a basis for organizing against capital. Blacks and those other ethnic minorities who organize and resist autonomously do so because they, as a social stratum, experience class more harshly, and are more often located at the proletarian pole of the class relation; and this is because of the way 'blackness' and 'whiteness' have been socially constructed (in the USA). Those ethnic minorities which do not engage in such autonomous action tend to be those that are more socially mobile; i.e. in US terms they become 'white'.

Particularly in the USA,[17] blacks are atypical of ethnic and 'racial' groups: always at the bottom of the pile, even in relation to other ethnic minorities. Blacks are the prototype of the working class; and the black middle class is the exception that proves the rule.

Women
The emergence of women as collective subjects of social change contributed to a reassessment of operaismo's class analysis (Wright, p. 133). In particular, women's demands for a universal social wage were seen to point to a solution to the limits of the over-emphasis on the working wage (Wright, pp. 123, 135). Some in autonomia, such as the Rosso group, began to talk of the emergence of a 'new female proletariat'; for them, along with the unemployed, feminists were seen as integral components of the new social subject - the 'socialized worker'.

Likewise, for Cleaver, women are a key example of a social category that, through their struggles, should be grasped as part of the working class - in particular 'housewives' demanding wages for their work of reproducing labour-power.[18] From our perspective, it is clear that it is working class women - defined here in terms of the class position of their family - who are more likely to be involved in such struggles. Better-off women are less likely to need and want the 'transitional demand' of a wage, and can achieve 'autonomy' individually (through pursuing a career) rather than needing to organize collectively. Moreover, the form through which women have challenged exploitative gender relations has varied historically. The identification and questioning of women's roles that emerged in the 1960s was part of a theorization and challenge to the reproduction of capitalist society more broadly, and hence tended to be expressed as a movement of social change. But, particularly since the retreat of the wider class struggle, feminism has instead tended to be an ideology justifying either a reduction of the political to the personal (with no link to social transformation) or a vehicle for middle class women's careerism. Without being grounded in - rather than trying to form the basis of - a class analysis, the emphasis of the struggles of women as women inevitably risks this dead-end.

Peasants
Cleaver's inclusion of peasant struggles as part of the working class differentiates him from statements in classical workerism. Although the early workerists recognised that peasant struggles could contribute to working class internationalism, they also suggested that the two should not be confused, and that the 'salvation' of peasants ultimately lay with their counterparts in the more developed parts of the world (Wright, p. 66).

To state that peasant struggles are in effect working class struggles at least serves to convey something about the social location of the peasant in a capitalist world and the consequences of their actions for the broader class struggle. Despite not depending exclusively upon a wage, peasants' work is often commodified; the way they produce goods is subject to the demands of the world market. Hence some peasants' attempts in some sense to act like 'the working class' - i.e., collectively to resist capital's requirements.

But Cleaver's redefinition of 'peasants' as part of the wider working class glosses significant differences within this heterogeneous social category. The term 'peasant' covers a multitude of economic positions: there are varying degrees of communal relations, varying degrees of production for the market (versus for subsistence), varying extents to which some are moving towards the capitalist class, and varying degrees to which peasants engage in wage labour. It is for this reason that 'peasants' as such do not act like and therefore cannot simply be lumped in with a broad working class.

Even if we take it that Cleaver simply means the majority of peasants who have no chance of becoming capitalist farmers, there is nevertheless a logic to their struggles which characteristically prevents them from constituting themselves as the negation of capital. The peasant is defined by a relationship to the land, and land is characteristically the issue over which peasants struggle. Given this, the successes of peasant struggles are also their limits. In the case of the wage, a quantitative success (more money) preserves the qualitative relationship of alienation but can point to its supersession: victory is still unsatisfactory but any setback for the capitalist class may suggest the vulnerability of the capital relation itself. But a victory in a struggle over land is an end in itself which thereby impels no higher level of struggle. There is no essential imperative in land struggles to abolish land ownership itself. As we argued in a previous issue of Aufheben, while we might acknowledge the revolutionary subjectivity of peasant-based struggles such as that of the Chiapas Indians, the peasant condition entails a conservative stability in social relations. Peasant resistance tends to reflect external threat rather than internal class antagonism. Consequently, the form of that resistance may often entail alliances between small private farmers and those who depend on communal landholdings - or even between a peasant mass and a leftist-nationalist and urban-based leadership.[19] Thus, we do not see the resolution of 'the agrarian (i.e., peasant) problem' simply in 'autonomous' peasant struggles, nor, obviously, in the proletarianization of the peasantry; rather, with Marx[20] (and Camatte),[21] we might look to a revolution in which peasant communal possibilities are aided by a wider proletarian uprising at the heart of capitalist power.

Students
For workerist groups such as Potere Operaio (Workers' Power), student struggles had to be subordinated to those of factory workers. But student movements were a part of both the Hot Autumn of 1969 and the Movement of 1977, and were important for workerism's attempt to theorize the proletarianization of intellectual labour.[22] One of the interesting developments of the Hot Autumn was the appropriation of a faculty building at the Turin Medical College for the purpose of a permanent general assembly.[23] The 1977 Movement involved practical attempts to link workers and students both organizationally and in terms of demands such as the generalized wage, which was seen as a way of enabling more working class young people access to university.

Cleaver's categorization of students as part of the working class might be seen as somewhat prescient since the gulf between university students and others in the labour market has narrowed in recent years. As more students gain degrees, so the value of the degree decreases and the jobs that graduates go into may often be no more privileged or well-paid than those of their more basically-educated counterparts. Graduate unemployment is higher now than ever.

However, these are only tendencies. Students are overwhelmingly middle class in terms of their family background (income, values and expectations) and their destinations. In line with the notion of the social factory, Cleaver deals with such considerations by defining students' education as work to reproduce the commodity of labour-power.[24] But their work as students is more than, and different from, the simple reproduction of just any labour-power. In the first place, the end product of the work of the university student isn't necessarily skills at all but rather a qualification, the point of which is just to provide access to more privileged occupations. What is being reproduced, therefore, is hierarchy within the workforce - a division of labour to enhance competition. This process is also ideological to the extent that its beneficiaries internalize and identify with the resultant hierarchical division - believing that they deserve their privilege, and that only a talented and hard-working minority can achieve their kind of status. Second, the 'skills' that are reproduced through university education are not only those of supervision and management, but also (for those graduating in the humanities and social sciences) those of classifying, bullshitting and playing a role - all of which don't make sense outside of alienated social relations.

In focusing on autonomy and its possible consequences for capital, Cleaver's redefinition of student struggles as working class therefore loses some important features of this social category.[25] It is an overly cynical point of view, perhaps, to state that 'student radicals' mostly end up pursuing the same well-paid establishment careers as their parents; but the moment of truth in such a claim lies in the fact that there is no equivalent expectation for young working class radicals mostly to end up becoming managers! Unlike students, the young working class (in working class jobs) don't usually have the same choice.

Whatever happened to the middle class?
The 'middle class' is a label largely absent from Reading 'Capital' Politically, which is because for Cleaver it largely doesn't exist, except perhaps sociologically. The 'autonomist Marxist' argument seems to be that, in conditions of the 'social factory', the middle classes are just a sector of the working class.

On the one hand, Cleaver's analysis again reflects real tendencies. In a number of domains, middle class work has been de-skilled and proletarianized. Casualization, once limited only to working class jobs, has now come to many in the middle classes. Moreover, many salaries, particularly in the public sector, have increasingly lost value over the past 20 years or so. At the same time, the salaries of those at the top end of the middle classes, and particularly in the private sector (e.g., accountants, lawyers and the various types of 'consultant'), have continued to rise. Hence, as a shared identity assumed by people whose conditions vary widely - from white-collar workers in insecure jobs with salaries lower than their blue-collar counterparts, to executives and senior managers - the 'middle class' as a whole is to say the least a problematic category if not a mystification. In the USA, Cleaver's home country, the term is even more problematic due to the (self)description of large sections of the (white) working class as 'middle class'.

On the other hand, to take these disjunctions, anomalies and tendencies to mean that the category 'middle class' can be dispensed with is one-sided. The analytic subsumption of most of the middle classes within the working class is one-sided because it loses the explanatory power of the middle class as a category.

Here again, we would argue, Cleaver's analysis reflects the limits of the approach he is heir to. As Wright argues, for all its vital contributions to our understanding of struggle, one of the problems with autonomia and operaismo more broadly is the way it misrepresents one tendency as standing for the totality. In the same way, Cleaver misrepresents a particular tendency as a characteristic of the class situation as a whole.

While tendencies to proletarianization might push many of the middle classes toward throwing in their lot with the working class, there are other features of the middle class condition as such which operate in the other direction. What is absent from Cleaver's class analysis is an acknowledgement of the ties that bind the middle class individual to his role or class position and hence to the alienated world that gives rise to that role and class position.

One feature which distinguishes the middle class from the working class, and which has consequences for the possibility of revolutionary practice and subjectivity, is the presence or absence of a career structure. While wages in working class occupations typically rise to a relatively early peak and then plateau off, middle class salaries more typically develop in continual increments within which the middle class individual can foresee a future of continually rising income and enhanced status. In effect, the longer she carries on and sticks to the job, the relatively less interest the middle class individual has in escaping since the greater comfort the job provides him or her. Because the working class job typically provides no such prospect, the imperative to escape remains a lifespan constant.

Second, while pride in one's role can arise in many types of occupation, middle class jobs often engender an identification of a type which is characteristically absent in the case of working class jobs. Such middle class identification has consequences for the form taken by resistance - and for whether resistance takes place at all. The academic, social worker, lawyer etc. may wish to attack capital but they characteristically do so by premising their resistance on the continued existence of their own role in a way unthinkable to the working class individual. Thus there are radical psychologists, radical philosophers, radical lawyers and so on,[26] but not radical bricklayers or radical roadsweepers! The latter are simply radical people who wish to escape their condition. By contrast, the former wish to engage in the struggle while at the same time retaining their middle class identities, including their specialized skills and roles. As such, their participation presupposes rather than fundamentally challenges the institutions and social relations that provide the basis of these identities.[27] It is no coincidence, it seems to us, that the leading figures of a post-autonomia scene which rejects (or at least neglects) the situationists' critique of roles and academia, and which redefines all areas of life - including academia - as working class, are themselves academics.[28]

Some groups, such as the professionals - doctors, lawyers, academics - who retain control of entry into their profession, should obviously be defined as middle class. But there are other groups for which the situation is less clear-cut. For the most part dealing with the thorny issue of class, and in particular the status of the middle classes, is inevitable messy. This is because class is a process not a box into which we can simply categorize people, as in sociology.[29] In Argentina, for example, we are seeing a process where middle class identity breaks down; but to understand this it is necessary to recognise that such an identity exists and has a material basis. As we see it, the problem with the way Cleaver flattens out everything into the working class is precisely the absence of class composition and decomposition as a process. Class (composition) involves a constant dynamic of proletarianization and 'embourgeoisment'. But if these poles are not recognized - and if the middle classes are understood as already working class - class composition appears only as a static given.

1.4 Autonomy as basis or function of working class composition?
As we have seen, Cleaver's fundamental point is that the unwaged, and hence the other social categories he refers to, are part of the working class only insofar as capital has sought to exploit and alienate their unwaged labour or particular condition, and since these unwaged and other categories are now fighting back against capital. It is their struggle not their social category membership as such that makes them part of the working class. Thus the key for Cleaver is autonomous action against capital.

As such, Cleaver is again consistent with the tradition that has come out of workerism, which sought to distinguish itself and go beyond the poverty of traditional Marxism through focusing on precisely the independent or autonomous activity of workers in struggle; their collective activity and organization of resistance was shown to occur without the mediation of the party or union - or even in opposition to them. Antagonism itself, in the form of autonomy, was thus the basis of class analysis.

In the sixties, the workerists subsumed the specificity of different working class locations and experiences to those of the mass worker. In the seventies, Negri's work threatened to dissolve even this partially concrete understanding of class into a generic proletariat, the 'socialized worker'. Bologna in 'The tribe of moles' identified new subjective determinations of class: "Classes have tended to lose their 'objective' characteristics and become defined in terms of political subjectivity".[30] For Bologna, questions of social and cultural identity, of acceptance or refusal to accept the norms of social behaviour required by the state, now played a role in the reproduction of classes. These new determinants were said to be evidenced in "the continuous reproduction and invention of systems of counter-culture and struggle in the sphere of everyday living, which has become ever more illegal".

In fact, Negri and others abandoned the central investigative approach of the workerists - that of examining the relationship between 'material conditions of exploitation' and 'political behaviours'. As Wright discusses, the radical workerists overemphasized the subjective, the "will of destruction" (Potere Operaio, 1972, cited in Wright, p. 138), as judged, post festum, from an analysis of the struggle rather than location in the labour process. The abandonment of the material determinants of class composition leaves unresolved the question of how the different subjects, or strata of the class, recognize themselves and each other as proletariat, the universal revolutionary class.

For us, the reason why different groups organize autonomously against capital is because they are already proletarian (or, at least, being proletarianized). Antagonism arises because of class. It is implicit in our arguments above in relation to the different social categories referred to by Cleaver that the possibility of 'autonomy' may be necessary but it is not sufficient for a class analysis. 'Autonomy' requires, and therefore cannot be the basis of, a proper class analysis: the subjective requires the objective.

2. Beyond leftism?[31]

It was a vital insight of workerism to see workers' refusal to participate in union-sponsored token strikes not as the absence of class conflict but as evidence of their autonomy. In debates today about the state of the class struggle, the danger is to take such 'passivity' as just a refusal of representation when it might in fact be doubled-edged: at the same time as being an expression of hostility to capital it might also entail a paralysing fatalism. However, a weakness of workerism was not an exaggerated sense of the significance of workers' autonomous antagonism not only to capital but to the institutional left; rather it was an unwillingness or inability to reconcile their insights with their conceptions of organization. Time and again, the same theorists who provided us with the theoretical tools for a new approach caution us to be modest in our understandings of workers' struggles. For example, Panzieri stressed that sabotage merely expressed workers' political defeat (Wright, p. 61); and Classe Operaia ('Working Class') suggested that spontaneous struggles were not enough (Wright, p. 69). While we agree that different particular struggles need to be linked up if they are to go beyond themselves, there is a crucial question of the nature of this organization and how it may arise. For the most part, the workerists tended to fetishize formal organizational structure in a way which reflected their Leninist origins.

In the first place, there was for a long time an unwillingness to cut the ties to the PCI. Thus, Tronti continued to argue for the necessity of working within the PCI in order to 'save' it from reformism. Tronti was not typical and ultimately abandoned workerism; but Potere Operaio too maintained links with the PCI until the events of France 1968, and even then still saw itself as Leninist. And Negri, despite having written about the contradiction within autonomia between those who privileged 'the movement' and the champions of a 'Leninist' conception of organization, affirmed his commitment to the necessity of the Leninist Party even during the events of 1977 (Wright, p. 214).

In part, autonomia emerged as a grouping of militants who felt the need to criticize Leninist forms of organization and practice (including the formal party structure), placing emphasis instead on class needs: "To articulate such needs, organization was to be rooted directly in factories and neighbourhoods, in bodies capable both of promoting struggles managed directly by the class itself, and of restoring to the latter that 'awareness of proletarian power which the traditional organisations have destroyed'" (Comitati Autonomi Operai, 1976, cited in Wright p. 153). Ultimately, however, as Bologna argued, autonomia failed in this regard, reverting to a vanguardism which forgot that "organisation is obliged to measure itself day by day against the new composition of the class; and must find its political programme only in the behaviour of the class and not in some set of statutes."[32]

Despite their attempt to escape the 'political', the workerists themselves were in fact caught up in a politicism, in that they both constantly tried to express the social movement's needs in terms of unifying political demands and were forever trying to reinvent the party. Although they innovated in some ways, with ideas like the armed party, their conception of organization remained Leninist in its fetishism of formal organizational structure, and showed little sense of Marx's quite different conception of the (historical) party.[33] As such, a proper critique of the left and of leftism was still not developed. This problem is reproduced in current versions of the workerist approach.

Our argument is that, if the concept of autonomy is insufficient for a class analysis, it is also inadequate - in the sense of being too open or ambiguous - for a critique of leftism. Whose 'autonomous struggle' is it? The emphasis on autonomy itself, and the consequent absence of an adequate critique of the left, has meant that some of the inheritors of the tradition are uncritical of nationalism.[34]

Cleaver (p. 25) states "The [Vietnam] antiwar movement joined many of these diverse struggles, and its linkage with the peasants of Southeast Asia became complete with the slogan of 'Victory to the NLF [National Liberation Front]' and with the flying of Vietcong flags from occupied campus buildings." In relation to this, the idea of 'circulation of struggles', which refers to how struggle in one area inspires that in another, certainly described something of the social movements of the '60s and '70s (though we'd also have to acknowledge the reverse process whereby defeat of one section after another discouraged the rest). But such a concept is inadequate in itself if it means, for example, that the struggles of the Vietnamese peasants are considered without referring to the nationalist and Stalinist frame in which they took place, and if it means treating uncritically the way that an anti-imperialist ideology dominated the minds of the students (i.e. they tended to see the western proletariat as irretrievably 'bought off' and themselves as a front for the 'Third World').[35] Harry Cleaver's 'autonomist Marxist' treatment of leftists and nationalists is reflected currently in his uncritical attitude to the Zapatistas.[36] In Cleaver's texts there isn't a proper critique of the role of leftism and nationalism in struggles because such expressions are considered - equally with the struggles of 'housewives', students, the unemployed and the industrial proletariat - moments of autonomy to the extent that they appear to challenge the capitalist strategy of imposing work within particular national and international frameworks. Any criticism of nationalism in struggles, as in the case of Zapatistas, is dismissed by him as ideological or dogmatic.

Given their necessary antipathy to the project of the negation of capital, the 'autonomy' of leftist and nationalist tendencies must mean their subsumption and indeed crushing of proletarian autonomy! This analytic gap, through which the forces inherently opposed to working class self-organization can emerge as equivalents to that working class self-organization, appears to be a function of the failure of the autonomia tendency to make quite the radical break from Leninism which is sometimes claimed for it, and which Cleaver has inherited (despite the fact that, unlike Negri, he has never endorsed any party). At its worst, far from being an alternative to a leftism in which political representation and nationalism are supported as vehicles of 'revolution', 'autonomist Marxism' can end up being just another variety of such uncritical leftism. While they may reject the idea of the formal party, the 'autonomists' still seek to formulate political demands for autonomous struggles in a similar way to the leftists.

3. Negotiating the 'law of value'

A further workerist tension reproduced in Cleaver's book is that surrounding the status of the 'law of value'. On the one hand, the very emphasis on workers at the sharp end of the immediate process of production appears to speak of a commitment to the centrality of value-production in the explanation of the dynamic of class struggle. On the other hand, the seeds of a revisionist approach were sewn as early as 1970, when Potere Operaio argued that class struggle had broken free of the bounds of accumulation; the mass worker was said to have disrupted the functioning of the law of value, forcing capital to rely more and more on the state (p. 137). Potere Operaio cited the Hot Autumn as the turning point, but their analysis was prompted by a revolt in the second half of 1970 among the population of Reggio Calabria against proposed changes to the city's regional status which seemed to speak of a widespread violent rejection of the institutions. This line of reasoning was developed by Negri, who was led by his understanding of the crisis as a product of class antagonism to argue that the law of value was being superseded by relations of direct political confrontation between classes,[37] and that money now needed to be understood in terms of its function as 'command'.[38] Subsequent to this, a distinctive feature of those influenced by the autonomia tradition is the stress on the class struggle as a struggle not in relation to value but for control over work: imposing it or resisting it.

A major thrust of the whole American 'autonomist' scene has been to argue not to follow Negri too far. But it seems to us that Cleaver's attempt to both embrace certain post-autonomia and 'heretical' ideas that go 'beyond Marx' while at the same time claiming fidelity to Capital gives rise to ambiguities in relation to this question of value.

Thus, on the one hand, Reading 'Capital' Politically suggests, at least in a footnote, that control is always tied to value; and in the second edition of the book, against those ('autonomists') who forget, Cleaver re-iterates that the labour theory of value is the "indispensible core" of Marx's theory (p. 11). On the other hand, throughout Reading 'Capital' Politically, food and energy (Cleaver's main examples) appear essentially as means to struggle for control itself rather than value-producing sectors; and work appears as a means of control in its own right:

the ultimate use-value of the work, which is the use-value of labour-power, is its role as the fundamental means of capitalist social control. For the capitalist to be able to impose work is to retain social control. But the use-value of labour-power for capital is also its ability to produce value and surplus-value. (p. 100)

The use of the word 'also' seems indicative of the relative weighting given to control over value as an explanation for the dynamics of class struggle.

We accept that, although capital essentially treats all use-values as arbitrary sources for valorization, capital cannot be unconcerned with the particularities of use-values. Thus Cleaver is right, for example, to point back to the moment of primitive accumulation where capital creates the working class by driving peasants off the land and thus their source of food. Moreover, with contemporary features like the Common Agricultural Policy and similar measures in other countries, it is true that the special use-value of food (and the political significance of classes engaged in food production) has led to it being perhaps more subject to strategic planning measures by capital-in-general in the form of the state and supranational bodies.

Retrospectively, however, it now appears to us that the politicization of the prices of food and energy - their appearance as manipulated instruments of struggle between self-conscious capitalist and working class subjects - was a particular feature of the crisis conditions of the 1970s (e.g. the energy crisis and the focus on inflation state intervention in bargaining between the working class and capital). Cleaver, like others in the post-autonomia tradition, uses these historically specific moments in the class struggle to make generic points. In the present period, there has been a 'depoliticization' of these price issues in conditions of low inflation; and the ideological model has been that 'there is no alternative' to the 'globalized' market.

As we have argued in these pages before, there is a problem with the abandonment of the law of value by theorists identifying with autonomia.[39] On our reading of Marx, and our understanding of capital, capital as a whole comes to constitute itself as such out of disparate and indeed conflicting elements. The conceptualization of capital as a subject in conflict with the working class subject, each with their distinctive strategies ('imposition of work' versus 'refusal of work'), which Cleaver ultimately shares with Negri,[40] if taken as more than a shorthand or metaphor, suggests an already-unified capital. Capital as a subject can have a strategy only to the extent that there is a (price-fixing) conspiracy among the different capitals or that one particular capital (who? US capital? The World Bank?) agrees to act as capital-in-general in the same way that a national government acts for the national capitalist interest. Capital as a totality of course has its interests; but these - all founded on the need to exploit the working class as hard as possible - arise from and operate precisely through its conflicting elements: the competition between individual capitals. Capital may attain more consciousness at times of heightened class conflict, and this consciousness may become institutionalized. But capital is not essentially a conscious subject.

4. Grasping retreat

Tronti famously argued that each successful capitalist attack upon labour only displaces class antagonism to a higher, more socialized level (Wright, p. 37). Following this, Negri, Cleaver and others in and influenced by the autonomia current stress the role of working class struggle in driving capital forward. Working class activity is seen not (just) as a response to the initiatives of capital but as the very motor of capitalist development - the prime mover.[41] In this account, capitalist crisis - the shutting down of industries, mass unemployment and austerity - means that working class struggle simply changes form rather than retreats. Class struggle is argued to be ubiquitous and manifold in form.

This perspective therefore offers a valuable corrective to traditional Marxism's objectivist account of the workings of capital. Traditional Marxism's frozen and fetishized conceptions of class struggle could lead one to wonder where resistance has gone and whether it will ever reappear. By contrast, 'autonomist Marxism' finds it everywhere.

However, we would suggest that workerism in general and Cleaver in particular perhaps bend the stick too far the other way. In arguing that class struggle is 'everywhere' and 'always', there is the explanatory problem of the evidence of historical retreats in class struggle, as well as the 'political' problem of responding to this retreat in practice. These problems are linked.

4.1 Confronting the evidence of decomposition
In positing the 'unity of abstract labour' as the basis for the recomposition of the class, Negri almost welcomed the 'disappearance' of the mass worker and believed the defining moment of confrontation was approaching: "At the very moment when 'the old contradiction' seemed to have subsided, and living labour subsumed to capital, the entire force of insubordination coagulates in that final front which is the antagonistic and general permanence of social labour".[42] At a time which could arguably be characterized as the beginning of capital's counter-offensive of restructuring which resulted in a decomposition of the class, he gave an account of a massive process of recomposition - a qualitative leap in class unity. Wright (p. 167) concludes that this account did not match up to Italian experience of the time. There appears little evidence of the concrete unification between sectors upon which Negri's whole argument rested; the fierce industrial struggles in the small factories of the North were cut off from other sectors of the class. Wright suggests that, in 1975-6, it was proletarian youth circles rather than the factory struggles that were making links across the wider working class. The workers of the large factories were in a state of 'productive truce' at best, rampant defeat at worst - and subordinate to the official labour movement, which had regained control in the factories after the explosion of autonomous struggles in 1969 and the years after. The unions' commitment to tailor labour's demands to the requirements of accumulation was mirrored in the political sphere by the PCI's 'historic compromise' with the ruling Christian Democrats. The historic left, PCI and CGIL were committed to the 'management' of the nation's economic difficulties.

Bologna (1976, cited in Wright, pp. 170-1) accused Negri and autonomia of "washing their hands of the mass worker's recent difficulties". He argued that there had been a "reassertion of reformist hegemony over the factories, one that is brutal and relentless in its efforts to dismember the class left". Negri had failed to come to terms with the disarray and defeat of the mass worker and preferred instead to "ply the traditional trade of the theorist in possession of some grand synthesis". The Comitati Autonomi Operai, the Roman wing of autonomia, also rejected Negri's optimistic vision, and criticized his lack of an empirical basis for his abstractions, something which had been so important to the earlier workerists.[43]

In the intervening quarter of a century, little has happened, it seems to us, to bear out Negri's optimistic prognosis. The mass worker has been decomposed through the flexibilization of labour, territorial disarticulation of production, capital mobility in the world market, the rationalization of production, decentralization; but the 'socialized worker' that has supposedly emerged from the ashes of the mass worker has not been visible as a new universal proletariat capable of fundamentally challenging the capital relation. Decomposition just is decomposition sometimes, rather than necessarily being itself a recomposition.

The 'autonomist Marxism' of Cleaver and those close to his perspective argues that we need to acknowledge the validity of diverse and 'hidden' struggles (absenteeism, theft at work, various forms of work to rule etc.) which are alive and well, despite the decline of the older forms of overt collective resistance.[44] There is, of course, always resistance to the specific way in which surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers. However, the fact that the working class currently tends to resist in a mostly fragmented and individualized form - the fact that resistance is so fragmented or hidden - reflects the historic weakness of the class as a whole. The significance of this is that it is not clear how such hidden and individualized forms of resistance can in themselves necessarily take us to the point of no return. Unless they become overtly collective, they operate merely as a form of antagonism that capital can cope with if not recuperate. This is the moment of truth in Tronti and Panzieri's warnings about the limits of autonomous struggle.

4.2 Escaping the harness?
Linked to this issue of retreat is the question of whether the working class will be driving capital forward forever. Do the 'autonomists' argue too successfully that class struggle is the motor? If working class struggle is always harnessed by capital, how does it escape the harness?

The argument that class struggle is alive and well in manifold forms is empowering; but it risks ending up as a satisfaction with the current limits of the class struggle. The focus on the validity and importance of the (plurality of) autonomous struggles themselves can mean the abandonment of revolution as a totality. And as the possibility and necessity of total revolution fades, so reformist campaigns, premised upon the continued existence of the capital relation, become the focus. A symptom of this worst side of post-autonomia is illustrated in demands for a guaranteed income, which have allowed those influenced by autonomia to link up with other reformists in campaigns which have dovetailed with capital's current needs for welfare restructuring.[45] Although not all the major figures of autonomia or the 'autonomist Marxist' scene would endorse this ultimately conservative view of the adequacy of fragmentation, it is not inconsistent with an understanding of class struggle based around the concept of autonomy.

5. A political reading of Capital:
From 20 yards of linen to the
self-reduction of prices in one easy step

In his attempt to render a political reading of Marx's critique of political economy, Harry Cleaver is again following in the workerist tradition: Negri's 'Marx on cycle and crisis', which was written in 1968, is an earlier example of the attempt to connect Marx's categories with notions of strategy and struggle. However, a sub-text of Cleaver's book is his defence of the importance of Capital against the arguments made by (the later) Negri that, for the revolutionary project of our time, Capital is superseded by the Grundrisse. In Marx beyond Marx,[46] Negri argues that Capital has served to reduce critique to economic theory, that the objectification of the categories in Capital functions to block action by revolutionary subjectivity and to subject the subversive capacity of the proletariat to the reorganizing and repressive intelligence of capitalist power. The point of Marx's critique as whole is not 'intellectual' but revolutionary; hence the Grundrisse, which is traversed throughout by an absolutely insurmountable antagonism, is, according to Negri, the key text and can even serve as a critique of the limits of Capital.

Cleaver's Reading 'Capital' Politically argues that the right way to read Capital and its fundamental categories such as value is 'strategically', from the perspective of the working class. Cleaver therefore contends that any 'blockage' is due only to the inadequate ways in which Capital has been read, and that the solution is to read it politically.

We can agree with Cleaver that, despite the power of the Grundrisse and its crucial indications that Marx's theoretical project was wider than the material which appears in Capital,[47] Capital is nevertheless the better presentation of the critique of political economy (as Marx himself clearly thought). But this is not the same as arguing that a 'political' reading of Capital is useful or even tenable. Our argument is that Cleaver's 'political' reading ultimately fails.

5.1 Aims of Reading 'Capital' Politically
The focus of Reading 'Capital' Politically is the first three parts of Chapter 1 of Capital, volume 1. Here, Marx shows how the commodity has two aspects - use-value (a product of the concrete useful labour that creates that particular commodity) and value (a representation of that labour considered as general abstract labour); he shows how value must take different forms; and from this he derives the logical necessity of money as the universal equivalent form of value. Along with the chapter on money, these are undeniably some of the most difficult parts of Capital. While a lot of the rest of the book is fairly straightforward, this beginning is often enough to make the reader turn away in frustration. Thus it is worth acknowledging the merit of Cleaver's attempt at an accessible commentary.

The central thesis of Cleaver's reading is that the category of value, in its various forms (and aspects), needs to be related to class struggles around human needs - to the subjective - rather than (simply) to the objective workings of capital as a 'system'. In Cleaver's words, to read Capital politically is "to show how each category and relationship relates to and clarifies the nature of the class struggle and to show what that means for the political strategy of the working class" (p. 76). Cleaver's attempt to render the subjective in Marx's account of value operates by short-circuiting most of Marx's mediations, leaping directly from the commodity-form to particular struggles. He relates the material in Capital, Chapter 1, partly to later material in the same volume over the struggle for the working day and primitive accumulation, but most of all to more contemporary struggles - around energy and food prices - in a way clearly distinct from Marx's own method.[48] He justifies this by saying "to the extent then that I bring to bear on the interpretation of certain passages material from other parts of Capital, or from other works, I do so with the aim of grasping Chapter One within the larger analysis rather than reconstructing the evolution of what Marx wrote and thought" (p. 94, second edition).

5.2 Aims of Capital
A question Cleaver does not address is why is was that Marx said very little about struggles in Volume 1, Chapter 1. If it is so necessary to read Capital politically in the way that Cleaver does, then why didn't Marx save us the trouble and simply write Capital politically? In promoting Capital as a weapon for our struggles, Cleaver wants to stress the moments of de-reification and de-fetishization in relation to Marx's categories. Indeed he claims that this project of a political reading "is exactly the project called for in Marx's discussion of fetishism" (p. 76). Thus for Cleaver there is no need for a "separate analysis of Section 4 of Chapter One which deals with fetishism, simply because ... this whole essay involves going behind the appearances of the commodity-form to get at the social relations" (p. 80). Cleaver is right that the section on fetishism is crucial for "getting at the social relations"; but why did Marx insist on the type of presentation he does despite the possible difficulty it entailed for his intended audience, the working class? Moreover is Cleaver's kind of political reading really the way to understand what Marx deals with as commodity fetishism?

An interesting comparison is Isaak Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value,[49] which Cleaver mentions only briefly and dismissively, in a footnote.[50] While Cleaver does not comment directly on the section in Capital, Chapter 1, on fetishism, the whole first part of Rubin's book is on this subject. Rubin's book was seminal precisely for systematically grasping the inseparability of commodity fetishism and Marx's theory of value: "The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx's entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value" (Rubin, 1973, p. 5). Thus the value categories are expressions of a topsy-turvy world in which people's products dominate the producers, where people are related through things, and where objects behave as subjects and subjects as objects. Since Rubin's book became available in the English-speaking world through Fredy Perlman's translation, a whole school of Marxism has developed, insisting like Rubin does that Marx's is not a neo-Ricardian embodied labour theory of value but an abstract social labour theory of value;[51] such an analysis brings fetishism to the fore and emphasises Marx's work as a critique of political economy rather than Marxist political economy.

Thus Rubin can be seen to make similar points to Cleaver but to do so by explaining and illustrating value-categories in terms of such basic mediations as social relations, labour and commodity fetishism, rather than through the directly political reading favoured by Cleaver.

Moreover, the case of Rubin questions the schema Cleaver develops in his Introduction, summarized in the following table:

Ideological Readings Strategic readings
Political economy readings From capital's perspective From capital's perspective
Philosophical readings From capital's perspective Empty set
Political readings Empty set From a working class perspective

Approaches to the reading of Marx (Cleaver, p. 31)

Cleaver (p. 30) defines the bottom right box of this table as:

that strategic reading of Marx which is done from the point of view of the working class. It is a reading that self-consciously and unilaterally structures its approach to determine the meaning and relevance of every concept to the immediate development of working-class struggle. It is a reading which eschews all detached interpretation and abstract theorising in favour of grasping concepts only within that concrete totality of struggle whose determinations they designate. This I would argue is the only kind of reading of Marx which can properly be said to be from a working-class perspective because it is the only one which speaks directly to the class's needs for clarifying the scope and structure of its own power and strategy.

Though the Stalinist state recognized the political significance of Rubin's 'abstract reasoning',[52] Rubin's book does not meet Cleaver's 'political' criteria. But neither does Rubin's book seem to be obviously a political economic or a philosophical reading. We'd contend that one of the reasons that Rubin's is a seminal work is precisely because it transcends such a distinction. Prompted by the revolutionary wave of the 1910s and 1920s, Rubin, like writers of the same period such as Lukács and Korsch, was able to go beyond Second International Marxism and to understand Capital as a critique of political economy - but without, like the Frankfurt School, retreating into mere philosophy.

The fourth part of Capital, Chapter 1, 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret', is crucial because in it Marx shows how the forms of value are an expression of reification, and hence fetishized in our experience. Rubin's approach is key for drawing one's attention to the inseparability of fetishism and the theory of value. By trying to short-circuit the process, by immediately moving to the de-fetishising aspect of class struggle, Cleaver jumps levels of abstraction. Our argument would be that, analytically, it is necessary to explain reification before examining its reversal. In other words, in order to relate value to the kind of struggles Cleaver refers to, a whole series of mediations must be developed,[53] not least the categories of absolute and relative surplus-value, constant and variable capital, and the relation between price and value (which Marx introduces later in Volume 1), circulation (which Marx introduces in Volume 2) and the distributional forms of surplus value - profit, rent and wages (which don't come until Volume 3). Volume 1 concerns capital-in-general, presented as particular examples of capitalist enterprises as an analytic device to derive the later, more developed, categories.

For us it seems essential to grasp what Marx was trying to do in Capital. If Marx's overall project was 'capitalism and its overthrow' it was nevertheless necessary for him first to show what the capitalist mode of production was, how it was possible; this led him methodologically to make a provisional closure of class subjectivity in order to grasp the logic of capital as an objective and positive system of economic 'laws' which is apparently independent of human will and purpose.[54] Objectivist Marxism takes this provisional closure as complete. What Cleaver is doing could be seen to be an attempt at opening up the provisional closure by bringing in the subjectivity of class struggle; but because he does not properly explain the marginalization of the class struggle in the pages of Capital, what he does comes across as bald assertion at variance with the flow of Marx's argument.

In short, in his understandable quest for the concrete and immediate, Cleaver abandons the analytic rigour needed to make the connections between Capital and the class struggle. While we may agree that Capital needs to be understood as a weapon in the class war, it does not need to be the crudely instrumental reading offered by Cleaver.

6. Whither autonomia?

6.1 Negri and the retreat from the universal revolutionary subject
The continuing influence of operaismo and autonomia is evident today in a number of recent movements, most notably perhaps Ya Basta! in Italy, who draw upon some of the ideas of Negri. Negri himself has lately caused interest in some circles. Empire, the book he has co-authored with Michael Hardt,[55] has struck a chord with the concerns of some 'anti-capitalist'/'globalization' activists, academics and even a New Labour policy adviser.[56] While Negri's ideas were sometimes controversial when he was part of the area of autonomy, after losing his connections to the movement he ceased to produce worthwhile stuff, and instead slipped into an academic quagmire whose reformist political implications are all too clear.[57] The disconnection of ideas from the movement, following the repression which culminated in the mass arrests of 1979, has also meant that there has been to some extent a battle for the heritage of the movement. Through journals like Zerowork and Midnight Notes, Anglo-American theorists have kept 'autonomist Marxism' going. Through emphasizing the continuing importance of value (albeit ambiguously, as we have seen), these and Harry Cleaver among others have distinguished themselves from the late Negri with his embrace of both post-structuralism and the ideas of the (pre-Hegelian) philosopher Spinoza.

But - and despite his innumerable self-contradictions - a continuity can be traced from the early Negri, through autonomia to the late Negri. For example, his recent arguments, along with other reformists, for a guaranteed income can be traced back to the demand for a 'political wage' made by the radical Negri of Potere Operaio. It would seem to be significant that, despite his earlier valuable insights, his relatively recent theoretical work can be seen as at one with the arguments of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari justifying fragmented forms of resistance and denying the need to confront the state.

Empire contains any number of arguments we see as problematic if not counter-revolutionary and recuperative, including the abandonment of value, the centrality of immaterial labour, the call for 'real democracy' and political proposals for 'global citizenship'. What stirred people's interest, it seemed, was the thesis of 'empire' itself - that of the emergence of a single unified global political-economic capitalist entity - which seemed to offer an alternative to unsatisfactory orthodox theories of imperialism. With the US war on Afghanistan, however, the notion of imperialism has returned to the forefront of political discourse.[58] What we are left with, then, as Negri's take on autonomia, is a celebration of fragmentation. The abandonment of the concept of the proletariat (now replaced by 'the multitude'), the universal revolutionary subject, is the abandonment of world revolution. Negri's work might therefore be said to express the profound sense of defeat and disillusion that followed the failure of the Movement of 1977.

6.2 History as ideology
Two different ways of writing history are evident in the books by Steve Wright and Harry Cleaver. Wright's is a history of the politics of a movement. But it is also critical, from a communist perspective. We therefore thoroughly recommend it as an invaluable resource in helping our understanding of the development, contributions and tensions of workerism and autonomia in their historical context of Italy in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

By contrast, for us, Cleaver's account of the tradition of autonomia is far more tendentious. Rather than focusing, as Wright does, on what is clearly a single historical episode, Cleaver selects a number of different movements and theorists, going back as far as C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, which he then designates as representatives of what he calls "autonomist Marxism". Again, here Cleaver is consistent with the tradition of workerist historiography which, looking back, found the mass worker and hence a commonality with its own perspective in earlier struggles, such as the Wobblies and the working class movement in Germany in the 1920s.

In one sense it might seem there's nothing wrong with Cleaver's attempt simply to identify what he sees as the revolutionary use of Marx as a particular tradition. And if we look at the groups and theorists that he refers to (both in Reading 'Capital' Politically and also in his university course on 'autonomist Marxism'[59]) a very great deal of it corresponds with our own assessment of the most valuable contributions.

However, there are two, related, problems. First, in grouping the various movements and theorists together in the way that he does there is an element of the same homogenizing or flattening out - a neglect of differences - that we saw in Cleaver's 'autonomist' class analysis, as well as in the workerist concepts of mass worker and so on.

Second, it is revealing to consider which tendencies are excluded from Cleaver's canon, or at least addressed in only a cursory way. How might these neglected tendencies be in tension with the rest of the material? What contradictions might the formulation 'autonomist Marxism' suppress?

For us, as an account of developments in theory over the past century, the most notable absences from Reading 'Capital' Politically are the Situationist International[60] and the Italian left and those influenced by it, such as Barrot/Dauvé and Camatte. We can go so far as to say that the attempt to specify such a thing as 'autonomist Marxism' is ideological, with its emphasis on 'similar' ideas and its concealments (the glossing of the limits of the 'good' theorists and movements, the silence on those that don't fit). This is not unusual or strange. The capitalist counter-offensive which culminated in the defeat of the Movement of 1977 saw a disillusionment with the possibility of mass revolutionary change that was expressed in the destinations of those coming out of the area of autonomy: most went into the PCI or the armed groups. Likewise, the turning of the general insights of the operaismo and autonomia theorists into 'autonomist Marxism' can be seen as a reflection of the retreat of the movement giving rise to the ideas. Ideology is the freezing of theory; theory freezes when the practice on which it is based is halted. 'Autonomism' seems to be non-dogmatic and dynamic because of the emphasis on particular needs and diverse struggles etc.; but the very principle of openness to new struggles has itself become ideological as the wave of struggles has ebbed.

Thus the glossing of the limitations of those currents that Cleaver gives approval to, and even cites as exemplifying autonomous struggle (e.g. Wages for Housework),[61] goes hand in hand with the exclusion of those that would contribute to the critique of those same currents. Any radical current needs to critique itself in order transcend itself, as in the proletariat's self-liberation through self-abolition. Cleaver's identification of a thing with the label 'autonomist Marxism' is ideological in that it is partial and attempts to close off rather than open up a pathway to its own self-critique.

6.3 Towards a critical appraisal and appropriation of the contributions of the workerists
While Cleaver's book, and particularly his Introduction, has been important to many of us in the past, we would suggest now that Wright's book is more helpful than Reading 'Capital' Politically in allowing us to appropriate the best contributions of the workerist tradition. Wright ends his book with the sentence "Having helped to force the lock ... obstructing the understanding of working-class behaviour in and against capital, only to disintegrate in the process, the workerist tradition has bequeathed to others the task of making sense of those treasures which lie within." In many ways Italian workerist analyses of class struggle promised much, but delivered little. The whole tendency, increasingly divided into separate camps, collapsed at the end of the '70s. Whereas one camp favoured libertarian themes of autonomy, personal development and the subjective determinations of class identity; the other instead turned to debates over the 'armed party' and the feasibility of civil war. Both camps abandoned the traditional workerist focus on the relationship between technical and political class composition - that is, between the class's material structure in the labour process and its behaviour as a subject autonomous from dictates of both the labour movement and capital.

But what can we take from the whole experience? The "complex dialectic of decomposition and recomposition" of class forces, first elaborated by Tronti and others, was a significant departure from traditional leftist understanding of class struggle; the right questions were being asked: what material determinants are there in understanding the behaviour of the working class as (revolutionary) subject? But if the right questions were being asked, the answers the workerists provided were not always satisfactory; and tendency was often confused with totality. The early workerists were rightly criticized for their unwillingness to theorise moments of class struggle outside the large factories, and perhaps also for seeing the wage as the privileged locus of struggle; however their autonomia successors could be equally criticized for their problematic abandonment of the 'mass worker'.

Wright's book focuses on the concept of class composition, workerism's most distinctive contribution. Class composition was important as an attempt to express how the working class is an active subject, and thus takes us beyond the poverty of objectivist Marxism which portrayed the working class as passive and dependent. The concept grew from the experience of autonomous struggle when the working class was on the offensive, but is has come to seem less adequate when relied upon in periods of crisis and retreat. To what extent was there a political recomposition of the class with the decline of the mass worker? Was the 'socialized worker' made concrete by the self-reduction struggles of the 1970s and the student and unemployed movements of 1977? Certainly a multiplicity of struggles erupted on the social level. But did the struggles merge, did the new subjectivities forged in struggle coalesce? Class recomposition would entail the formation of an increasingly self-conscious proletarian movement. The dispersal of workers (operaio disseminato), and the displacement of struggle to the wider social terrain, because of the fluidity of situations and multiplicity of moments of struggle, make it harder for a self-conscious movement to emerge. But some in the area of autonomy point to the very same factors as having the potential for rapid transmission of struggles to all sectors of the class. But, while the refusal of work and the liberation of needs manifested themselves in many different ways in the struggles of the '70s (proletarian youth circles, riots, 'free shopping' or reappropriations, squatting, organized 'self-reduction' of rent, utility bills and transport fares etc.), they did not develop into the political movement around the wage (redefined as a guaranteed social income) that Negri theorized - let alone into any coherent class movement capable of overturning capitalist social relations.

If this review article has devoted so much space to the problems of workerism and autonomia it is only because of the historic importance of this current. Today, ideas such as the non-neutrality of machinery and factory organization, the focus on immediate struggles and needs (rather than a separate 'politics'), and the anti-capitalist nature of struggles outside (as well as within) the workplace are characteristic of many radical circles, not all of which would call themselves Marxist. The workerists were among the first to theorize these issues. The extent to which their arguments have been echoed by radicals down the years (as well as co-opted and distorted by recuperators) is an index of their articulation of the negation of the capital relation.

[Aufheben 11]
[Aufheben]

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[1] http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html

[2] The J18 mobilization sought to link up the autonomous struggles of "environmentalists, workers, the unemployed, indigenous peoples, trade unionists, peasant groups, women's networks, the landless, students, peace activists and many more". See http://bak.spc.org/j18/site/english.html

[3] In political discourse in the UK, 'workerism' is usually a derogatory term for approaches we disagree with for fetishizing the significance of workplace struggles (and dismissing those outside the workplace). Italian operaismo, on the other hand, refers to the inversion of perspective from that of the operation of capital to that of the working class: "We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned." (M. Tronti, 1964, 'Lenin in England', in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (London: Red Notes/Conference of Socialist Economists, 1979). While the Italian usage is clearly positive rather than negative, as we shall see, one of the eventual limits of (versions of) Italian workerism was precisely the fetishizing of struggles on the factory floor.

[4] "The new 'technical bases' progressively attained in production provide capitalism with new possibilities for the consolidation of its power... But for this very reason, working-class overthrow of the system is a negation of the entire organization in which capitalist development is expressed - and first and foremost of technology as it is linked to productivity." R. Panzieri, 'The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx versus the Objectivists' in P. Slater ed., Outlines of a Critique of Technology (London: Ink Links), pp. 49-60.

[5] "At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production; in other words, the whole of society exists as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over the whole of society. It is on this basis that the machine of the political state tends ever-increasingly to become one with the figure of the collective capitalist." M. Tronti, Operai e Capitale (Turin: Einaudi 1971).

[6] S. Bologna (1977),'The Tribe of Moles', in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (op. cit.).

[7] A. Negri (1973). 'Partito Operaio Contro il Lavoro', in S. Bologna et al., eds., Crisi e Organnizzazione Operaia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974)

[8] See Negri's (1982) 'Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker', in Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis & New Social Subjects 1967-83. (London: Red Notes, 1988).

[9] See 'Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part II', footnote 83, Aufheben 3 (Summer 1994).

[10] An opposite Marxian response to the 'problem' of the class basis of revolution, as provided by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor and Social Domination and the Krisis group, is to retain Marx's work as a critique of commodity society and value but disconnect this from class.

[11] P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).

[12] Negri introduced the term 'self-valorization' for this process of autonomous self-development. See Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the 'Grundrisse' (New York/London: Autonomedia/Pluto, 1991). The attraction of the concept lies in its implication that the working class is an active subject, not just a function of capital's valorization needs, and whose strategy is to take what it needs. However, in Marx, the concept of 'valorization' refers to capital's own operation - specifically, its use of our activity to expand value, that is, our alienated labour. It therefore seems extremely odd to employ it to refer to our activity against capital - unless that activity too is itself alienated in some way. In the preface to the second edition of Reading 'Capital' Politically, Cleaver acknowledges that the concept is problematic (as he does in his interview with Massimo de Angelis in Vis-Ã -Vis , 1993). However, he still uses it to explain that, in being against capital, autonomous struggles are also for 'a diverse variety of new ways of being'. See also his 'The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorization to Self-valorization' in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn & K. Psychopedis eds., Open Marxism: Volume II: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto).

[13] The point is well put in 'Marianne Duchamp talks to Tursan Polat about Class': "First, there are differences, and not mere differences but oppositions of the first order, between the sociologic conception of socio-economic categories on the one hand and the hegelo-communist conception of social-class on the other. In the sociological conception, socio-economic categories, including 'class' and an inexhaustible number of constituent sub-strata, are defined: (a) beginning with the particular i.e. the individual, i.e. analytically/inductively; (b) as transtemporal aggregates of individuals who share commonalities of occupation, income, and even culture; (c) as static and normal presence within any society, i.e. biologically. In the hegelo-communist conception, social classes are defined: (a) beginning from the whole i.e. the social form i.e. synthetically/deductively; (b) as active bearers of the mutually opposed historical interests inherent within the social form; (c) with a view toward the abolition of state and economy; i.e. necrologically."

[14] See Dole Autonomy versus the Re-imposition of Work: Analysis of the Current Tendency to Workfare in the UK (now only available on our website), 'Unemployed Recalcitrance and Welfare Restructuring in the UK Today' in Stop the Clock! Critiques of the New Social Workhouse and 'Re-imposition of Work in Britain and the "Social Europe"', Aufheben 8 (Autumn 1999).

[15] Penguin edition, p. 792.

[16] For example, in the 1930s, the Communist Party, which nominally controlled the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM), saw the NUWM's role as limited to tail-ending existing industrial strikes. The NUWM leaders, despite their membership of the CPGB, asserted the role of the unemployed movement to act in its own right. See Wal Hannington, Unemployed Struggles 1919-1936: My Life and Struggles Amongst the Unemployed (Wakefield: EP Publishing 1936).

[17] American black struggles inspired the Italian workerists: "American Blacks do not simply represent, but rather are, the proletariat of the Third World within the very heart of the capitalist system... Black Power means therefore the autonomous revolutionary organisation of Blacks" (Potere Operaio Veneto-Emilano, 1967, cited in Wright, p. 132).

[18] An examination (and critique) of the issues around the Dalla Costa & Selma James pamphlet The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, the 'Wages for Housework' demand and more recent discussions (e.g. Fortunadi's The Arcane of Reproduction) would be useful, but is beyond the scope of the present article.

[19] See 'A Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista Rebellion', Aufheben 9 (2000), especially pp. 20-22. While we took Holloway as the academic Marxist overestimating the working class and revolutionary significance of the Zapatista rebellion, Cleaver represents this tendency even more clearly. His refusal to consider criticisms of the Zapatistas and Marcos come across as just as ideological as previous Marxist defences of 'actually existing socialism'. For example: "a woman said of the '96 encuentros: 'the women [were] doing all the cooking and cleaning, including of toilets, invariably without any footwear (the men had the boots), even after the heavy rainfall... Harry Cleaver said 'Well, maybe they like it'...'" (cited in You Make Plans - We Make History, 2001).

[20] See T. Shanin ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road (London: Routledge, 1983); and T. Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

[21] J. Camatte (1972) Community and Communism in Russia.

[22] "The student was already a proletarian by virtue of a subordinate location within the university division of labour. To the extent that existing stipends became a fully-fledged wage, she would be transformed from an 'impure social figure on the margins of the valorisation process' into a fully-fledged 'wage worker producing surplus value'" (Cazzaniga et al., 1968, cited in Wright, p. 95).

[23] See 'The Worker-Student Assemblies in Turin, 1969' in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (op. cit.).

[24] An irony of such an approach is that it implies that the right thing for them to do is be bad students, yet Cleaver himself has been a good student and gathers other such good students around him.

[25] In fact, a focus on the side of struggle today might lead Cleaver to re-re-define students as middle class after all. With the wider retreat of collective proletarian resistance, and even as more people have entered university from working class backgrounds, so the incidence of overt struggles in the universities has declined.

[26] In fact, for many Marxist academics, the prefix 'radical' has now been replaced by 'critical', reflecting the general retreat of the class struggle which for the intelligentsia takes the form of a (still further) retreat into the realm of ideas and arguments.

[27] This point was ably made in Refuse (BM Combustion 1978): "The 'opposition' by counter-specialists to the authoritarian expertise of the authoritarian experts offers yet another false choice to the political consumer. These 'radical' specialists (radical lawyers, radical architects, radical philosophers, radical psychologists, radical social workers - everything but radical people) attempt to use their expertise to de-mystify expertise. The contradiction was best illustrated by a Case Con 'revolutionary' social worker, who cynically declared to a public meeting, 'The difference between us and a straight social worker is that we know we're oppressing our clients'. Case Con is the spirit of a spiritless situation, the sigh of the oppressed oppressor, it's the 'socialist' conscience of the guilt ridden social worker, ensuring that vaguely conscious social workers remain in their job while feeling they are rejecting their role... The academic counter-specialists attempt to attack (purely bourgeois) ideology at the point of production: the university. Unwilling to attack the institution, the academic milieu, the very concept of education as a separate activity from which ideas of separate power arise, they remain trapped in the fragmented categories they attempt to criticise... In saying social workers are just like any other worker, he [the Case Con social worker] conveniently ignores the authority role that social workers intrinsically have, plus the fact that when they participate in the class struggle they don't do so by 'radicalizing' their specific place in the division of labour (e.g. radical dockers, radical mechanics) but be revolting against it." (pp. 10-11, 23).

[28] See 'A Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista Rebellion', footnote 33, Aufheben 9 (2000).

[29] "we cannot understand class unless we see it as a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period." E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1963).

[30] Op. cit.

[31] 'Leftism' is a concept we find useful but is perhaps tricky to define. It can be thought of in terms of those practices which echo some of the language of communism but which in fact represent the movement of the left-wing of capital. However, for us an important point is to get away from the picture in which there is a pure class struggle only interfered with and prevented from generating communism by the interference of an exterior force (from the bourgeoisie) of leftism. A question arises of why the class struggle allows itself to be so diverted. It is important to recognize that, though some leftists are clearly part of the bourgeoisie or at least of the state, the power of leftism/trade unionism etc. comes from the fact that the working class generates leftism from within itself as an expression of its own current limits.

[32] 'The Tribe of Moles', op cit., p. 89.

[33] For Marx formal organizations were only episodes in "the history of the party which is growing spontaneously everywhere from the soil of modern society." Quoted in J. Camatte, Origin and Function of the Party Form. Camatte's discussion there in a sense takes the discourse on the party to the extreme where it dissolves, allowing his later perspectives of this in On Organization.

[34] Wright (p. 66) suggests that the earlier workerists had no time for the left's Third Worldism and support for nationalist struggles. However, a front cover of Potere Operaio magazine from the 1970s called for victory to the PLO-ETA-IRA.

[35] This (moralistic) attitude of cheer-leading 'Third World' (national liberation) struggles and contempt for the Western working class was an expression of the middle class social relations characteristic of these students.

[36] See, for example, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/INTRO.TXT

[37] See 'Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organization' (1971) in Revolution Retrieved (op. cit.).

[38] Though we like his phrase "money is the face of the boss".

[39] See 'Review: Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-92', Aufheben 3 (Summer 1994) and 'Escape from the Law of Value?', Aufheben 5 (Autumn 1996).

[40] See Cleaver's useful summary of Negri's position in his Introduction to Negri's Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York/London: Autonomedia/Pluto Press, 1991).

[41] See, for example, Toni Negri, 'Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State post-1929' in Revolution Retrieved (op. cit.).

[42] Negri Proletari e Stato (2nd edn., Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).

[43] "Your interest for the 'emergent strata' (proletarian youth, feminists, homosexuals) and for new, and reconceptualised, political subjects (the 'operaio sociale') has always been and is still shared by us. But precisely the undeniable political importance of these phenomena demands extreme analytical rigour, great investigative caution, a strongly empirical approach (facts, data, observations and still more observations, data, facts)." (Rivolta di classe, 1976, cited in Wright, p. 171).

[44] For a good account of the extent of recent 'hidden' struggles in the US today, see Curtis Price's 'Fragile Prosperity? Fragile Social Peace: Notes on the US'.

[45] See the Wildcat article 'Reforming the Welfare State in Order to Save Capitalism' in Stop the Clock! Critiques of the New Social Workhouse (Aufheben, 2000).

[46] Op. cit.

[47] See F.C. Shortall, The Incomplete Marx (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994).

[48] On the other hand, Cleaver also contends that what he is doing is not so different from Marx: "Marx illustrates these relations [of use-value and exchange-value] with a variety of apparently innocuous commodities: linen, iron, watches, and corn (wheat). I say apparently because most of these commodities played a key role in the period of capitalist development which Marx analysed: linen in the textile industry, iron in the production of machinery and cannon, watches in the timing of work, wheat as the basic means of subsistence of the working class. To be just as careful in this exposition, I suggest that we focus on the key commodities of the current period: labour power, food and energy". (p. 98). However, while Cleaver is probably right that Marx did not make an arbitrary choice of which commodities to mention in Chapter 1, their function in Marx's presentation is arbitrary. Unlike the political economists, Marx does give attention to the use-value side of the economy; but here in his opening chapter he makes no mention of the concreteness of these use-values in the class struggle. At this point of Marx's presentation of the capitalist mode of production, the precise use-values are irrelevant. Marx's reference to linen, corn etc. is a part of a logical presentation, not a reference to concrete struggles.

[49] I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (New York/Montreal: Black Rose Books 1973).

[50] Cleaver's claim (p. 138) that while Marxists have examined the question of the content of value at length almost no work has been done on the issue of the form of value (and hence the necessity for Cleaver's own analysis) includes reference to Rubin. But this in itself suggests that Cleaver hasn't understood (and perhaps hasn't even read) Rubin's book, the whole of which is concerned precisely with the social form of value.

[51] Up until the 1970s, at least in the English speaking world, Marx was seen as having simply developed and refined Ricardo's labour theory of value. In this traditional interpretation, Marx, like Ricardo, was seen to adhere to an embodied labour conception of value. What was common to all commodities, and hence what it was that made them commensurate with each other as manifestations of this common factor, was that they were all products of the "expenditure of human brains, nerves and muscles", that is of human labour in general. Consequently, the value of a commodity was seen to be determined by the labour embodied in it during its production.

With this physiological, or quasi-physicalist, conception of labour, the Ricardian labour theory of value conceived value as merely a technical relation: the value of a commodity was simply determined by the amount of labour-energy necessary for its production. As such the Ricardian labour theory of value could in principle be applied to any form of society.

For Rubin, what was specific about the capitalist mode of production was that producers did not produce products for their own immediate needs but rather produced commodities for sale. The labour allocated to the production of any particular commodity was not determined prior to production by custom or by a social plan and therefore it was not immediately social labour. Labour only became social labour, a recognised part of the social division of labour, through sale of the commodity it produced. Furthermore, the exchange of commodities was a process of real abstraction through which the various types of concrete labour were reduced to a common substance - abstract social labour. This abstract social labour was the social substance of value. Rubin's abstract social labour theory of value necessarily entailed an account of commodity fetishism since it was concerned with how labour as a social relation must manifest itself in the form of value in a society in which relations between people manifest themselves as relations between things.

In the mid-1970s the labour theory of value came under attack from the neo-Ricardian school which argued that it was both redundant and inconsistent. Rubin's abstract social labour theory of value was then rediscovered as a response to such criticisms in the late 1970s. Although Cleaver dismisses Rubin there have been attempts to address his abstract social labour theory of value from the tradition of autonomia - see for example the article by Massimo De Angelis in Capital & Class, 57 (Autumn 1995).

[52] "An official Soviet philosopher wrote that 'The followers of Rubin and the Menshevizing Idealists ... treated Marx's revolutionary method in the spirit of Hegelianism... The Communist Party has smashed these trends alien to Marxism.' ... Rubin was imprisoned, accused of belonging to an organization that never existed, forced to 'confess' to events that never took place, and finally removed from among the living." (Fredy Perlman, About the Author, in Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (op. cit.)

[53] We made this same point in our reply to Cleaver's associate George Caffentzis of Midnight Oil/Midnight Notes. See 'Escape from the Law of Value?', Aufheben 5 (Autumn 1996), p. 41.

[54] See F.C. Shortall, The Incomplete Marx (Aldershot: Avebury 1994).

[55] Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000.

[56] Mark Leonard, 'The Left Should Love Globalization', New Statesman, 28th May 2001. Leonard is director of the Foreign Policy Centre think-tank and apparently a Blairite.

[57] This break was, as for a lot of militants of that period, quite physical. Arrested in 1979, Negri went into exile in 1983. However, his particular form of escape (getting elected as a MP) and the warm welcome and relatively cushy position that awaited him in France were based on the different status he held (as a professor) compared with other militants; thus sections of the movement saw him somewhat as a traitor. His return to Italy has not succeeded in redeeming him; nor has his credibility been restored by recent pronouncements, such as his advice to the anti-globalization movement that the '20% of voters' alienated from the political system need to be won back to electoral politics. (See 'Social Struggles in Italy: Creating a New Left in Italy')

[58] Of course, it is possible to reject the leftist inanities of 'anti-imperialism' while recognizing the realities of imperialist rivalries.

[59] http://www.eco.texas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver

[60] The Society of the Spectacle, at least, appears in Cleaver's bibliographical history of the 'autonomist Marxist' tradition, appended to Negri's Marx Beyond Marx, op. cit.

[61] While Cleaver's decision to leave Reading 'Capital' Politically as it was rather than re-write it is understandable, what is perhaps less understandable - unless one wants to suggest that he is simply dogmatic - is his failure to use the new Preface to acknowledge the weaknesses in his analysis that have emerged with hindsight. The continued uncritical lauding of 'Wages for Housework' is one example; another is the claims made about the role of inflation made in the 1970s.

Intakes: Communist Theory - Beyond the Ultra-left

Last century (a few years ago), the French group Théorie Communiste (TC) translated and published our articles on 'decadence' (Aufheben issues 2 - 4), accompanied by a critique. We publish that critique here, plus a short presentation by TC on their theoretical positions. TC write in quite a difficult style but they deal with important issues. While we are not in full agreement with either TC's overall perspective or all their criticisms of our text, we find what they are saying challenging. If they are on the right track then they have moved beyond the impasse of revolutionary theory as represented by the 'ultra-left'. We are working on a response to be published in the next issue of Aufheben, but have found we need to translate more of their texts to understand their perspective more clearly. As some of the political tendencies that TC allude to will be quite obscure to many non-French readers, for this issue we have written an introduction to their introduction of themselves, with some thoughts about the relation between communism, the workers movement and the ultra-left, and the French debates on this from which TC emerge.

Introduction: The workers' movement, communism and the ultra-left

At the beginning of the '70s it appeared to a whole tendency already critical of the historic ultra-left that the ultra-left's calling into question all the political and union mediations which give form to the proletariat's belonging, as a class, to the capitalist mode of production is far from being enough...

The central theoretical question thus becomes: how can the proletariat, acting strictly as a class of this mode of production, in its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production, abolish classes, and therefore itself, that is to say: produce communism?

-Théorie Communiste

Communism

Communism is the self-abolition of the proletariat, which is to say, of the capitalist mode of production, because capital is a social relation with the proletariat as one of its poles. This was fundamental to Marx's contribution to communist theory, something he expresses rather well in the following passage of The Holy Family:

Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.

Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property.

The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.

Within this antithesis, the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.

Indeed, private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanisation which is conscious of its dehumanisation, and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.

When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all... because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguiseable, absolutely imperative need -- the practical expression of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.[1]

While, in his later writings, Marx would generally use the word 'capital' (or 'the commodity') instead of 'private property', there is for us a fundamental continuity between what is expressed here and his later work.[2] However, notwithstanding Marx's optimism that a large part of the proletariat in 1845 was developing a consciousness of its historic task - that is, of self abolition - the ideology of the workers' movement quickly became an ideology of work, the dignity of labour, glorification of industry, progress, etc. If one looks at the trajectory of the historical workers' movement, one might easily conclude that, far from trying to abolish the proletariat and the conditions which give rise to it, it has - at least as represented by its dominant traditions - acted to affirm (even generalize) the proletarian condition and to attain recognition for the working class as workers, that is, as subjects within bourgeois society. Instead of the revolutionary watchword, "Abolish the wages system!", which Marx suggested,[3] the workers' movement inscribed on its banner the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!"

This assessment of the outcome as opposed to the stated intentions of the workers' movement can be applied to all its dominant traditions, both 'Marxist' (social democracy and Stalinism) and non-Marxist (labourism, syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism). The most extreme example, is of course, the large parts of the workers' movement that have supported the USSR, where the identification of socialism with modernization of the 'national economy', the proletarianization of the peasantry, the building of huge factories and exhortations to labour-discipline and productivity - in short, with capitalism - reached its apogee and became a model for 'third world' modernization across the world. Yet we also see it outside those who identify directly with Stalinism: in the embrace by syndicalists of productivist ideologies[4] (even allowing a significant number to pass over to fascism), in the social democrat Noske's definition of socialism as 'working a lot', in Lenin's embrace of Taylorism and iron labour discipline, in Trotsky's arguments for the militarization of labour and his critically expressed admiration for Stalin's industrial achievements,[5] in the anarcho-syndicalist militants flinging themselves into organizing production against the resistance of Spanish workers.[6] A further indication of the bankruptcy of the official workers' movement was the way in which the aspects of it which the fascist and Nazi movements[7] did not need to destroy could be integrated quite smoothly into the regimes they established.[8]

Of course, it could all be summed up in terms of betrayals: the betrayal of the social democratic parties and the trade unions, mobilizing workers for slaughter in the first world war and acting to save capitalism against workers insurrection afterwards; the betrayal of Stalin (or earlier, Bolshevik leaders, depending on one's politics), turning the Soviet Union from a vision of hope for workers throughout the world into a workhouse; the betrayal of the anarchist leaders[9] in Spain for joining the government and demobilizing workers' resistance to Stalinist repression.[10] In this view, these tendencies were at one moment on the workers' side, but at crucial moments go over to the side of capital and do so through the failings of their leadership. The point is to defend a pure tradition of - depending on one's ideological perspective - classical Marxism or true anarchism - a red or a black line - from how such traditions expressed themselves historically. Hidden in such assumptions is generally the idea that, with the right leaders or organization, those historical movements would have succeeded and communism would have 'won'; thus the task becomes to rebuild (or maintain or create) organizations that next time won't betray us.

But it must be asked, how did these ideologies become possible; how did the working class end up expressing itself in these ways? How did each of these organizational expressions of the proletariat - social democracy, Third International Communism, revolutionary syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism - all end up supporting capitalism? One can use the term leftism[11] to get a handle on this phenomena but it remains true that leftism does not explain things, leftism needs to be explained.

Now, as Debord emphasized,[12] the movement of workers cannot simply be reduced to its ideological representations. Historically, the class struggle, including that waged by workers identifying with the movements described, has not always stayed within the limits their ideologies prescribe. On an everyday level, the behaviour of workers often runs counter to their political allegiances, the positions adopted by trade unions they might be members of, and even from their own previously expressed opinions. Organizationally (even before WW1), workers in the heartlands of the Second International expressed themselves in mass political strikes that went against the separation of political and economic action agreed by the social democrat parties and the unions.[13] Representing a more fundamental break, workers responded to the Second International parties and the unions' support for the first world war by leaving these organizations and setting up alternative organizations - factory struggle groups, breakaway parties, etc. Later, opposition to the way the Russian Revolution was developing emerged continuously, within and outside the party, in Russia and beyond. Large numbers of anarchist workers opposed the CNT's line both in terms of economic sacrifices for the war and later over the Maydays.[14] In another example, during WW2 American auto workers responded affirmatively to the combined efforts of employers, state and Stalinists to make them sign a no strike pledge... but then struck anyway![15]

Thus, as well as signs of workers accepting their role, there is both an everyday contradiction between workers and 'their' organizations' efforts to integrate them into capitalist society, and moments in which the working class has moved to rupture with its representatives. Whether conceiving of themselves as a fundamental break from the mainstream traditions of the workers' movement, or more often as in some way upholding the revolutionary kernel those traditions were abandoning, political/theoretical currents have regularly emerged from this contradiction.[16]

Ultra-leftism

The 'historic ultra-left' refers to a number of such currents which emerged out of one of the most significant moments in the struggle against capitalism - the revolutionary wave that ended the First World War. Ultra-leftism offers an explanation of why the workers' movement failed to get rid of capitalism, and why in particular the Russian Revolution failed to deliver. Whatever its subsequent history, the ultra-left did not emerge as tiny sects or groups of dissidents but as a part of a mass social movement when the dominant tradition of social democracy was thoroughly discredited and it seemed as though the meaning of the workers' movement and communism was up for grabs. In Western Europe, large numbers of workers made a break with social democratic politics and gravitated to the Third International set up by the Bolshevik Party. However, in the crucial formative years after 1917, many sections of the world communist movement, including a majority of those in Italy and Germany (the areas of Western Europe which seemed closest to revolution), had or would develop a different understanding of what a communist break from social democracy amounted to, than that displayed by the leadership of the Bolsheviks. These differences would lead to splits. In 1920, in the build-up to the first proper[17] congress of the Third International, Lenin laid out what he considered the difference between 'Bolshevism' and these other tendencies in his (in)famous pamphlet - Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

The two ultra-lefts

One of the two main wings of the historic ultra-left, the Dutch/German Left, parted from the Third International on the basis of the debate opened by Lenin's polemic, on issues like what sort of party communists should form, the attitude to take towards parliament and trade unions, etc. The other main wing - Bordiga's Italian Left - essentially sided with Lenin at this point and only opposed Moscow's dominance of the world communist movement later, around issues like the United Front and Stalin's embrace of 'Socialism in one Country'. Thus, on the grounds around which it split from Moscow, and on issues like nationalism, trade unions[18] and the role of 'the party',[19] the Italian Left appears far from the Dutch/German Left. However, while there is no space in this text to go into the detailed histories of these currents[20] and how their positions evolved, there are good reasons to connect the two traditions. Despite the apparently fundamental difference over the role of the party that leads to mutual incomprehension between partisans of each tradition, their political analysis of certain crucial issues, such as grasping the counter-revolutionary nature of the USSR and its CPs, opposing united and popular fronts and maintaining a revolutionary opposition to capitalist wars, identified them together as the ultra-left as against Trotskyism, which defended the USSR, joined social democratic parties, etc. In perhaps the most significant historic example - a test by fire - while 'the left', including most Trotskyists, generally supported democracy and/or the USSR against fascism in the Spanish Civil War and in WW2, both 'wings' of the ultra-left agitated against support for the democratic bourgeoisie against the fascist variety, and against participation in all capitalist conflicts. In all these areas a clear line emerged between adherents of the ultra-left and Trotskyism. However, today the term 'ultra-leftism' is not used simply to describe the hard adherents of these historical traditions of the communist left; we can see it as an area defined by certain political positions and attitudes, which may or may not be taken from the historic ultra-left.

A war of positions?

Ultra-leftism presents itself as having a set of political positions distinct from or even opposed to standard 'leftist' positions. While leftists for a long time considered the USSR and similar regimes to be in some way socialist or at least post-capitalist, ultra-leftism very quickly saw them as capitalist; while leftists generally support trade unions as at the very least defensive working class organizations (while criticising their bureaucracy), ultra-leftists typically reject unions for incorporating the working class into capital and instead emphasize the workers' need to break from them and act independently; while leftism generally calls for participation in parliamentary elections in the form of 'critical support' for reformist working class parties or perhaps to support a strategy of so called 'revolutionary parliamentarianism',[21] ultra-leftism rejects such methods as a promotion of illusions; while leftism supports national liberation struggles, ultra-leftism expresses hostility to all nationalism; while leftism for the purposes of 'winning over workers' generally adopts 'united front' or even 'popular front' strategies of uniting with social democrats and even liberals, ultra-leftism sees this as failing to separate revolutionary communist politics from bourgeois politics; while leftists are often led by some of these positions to take sides in capitalist wars, ultra-leftists tend to take an internationalist stance of opposition to all sides. The differences here are so profound that one can see why the ultra-left see themselves as communist and sees leftists as the left wing of capital.

However, immediately after one sets out ultra-leftism as a set of positions or 'class lines', problems become evident. There is a tendency for many who identify with the ultra-left to define themselves negatively in relation to the left. There is the class struggle, the left relates to it one way, the ultra-left denounces this. The ultra-left becomes a negative impression of the left.[22] When an organization, or for that matter an individual, appears to adopt some 'ultra-left' positions while retaining other 'leftist' ones,[23] those identifying with the true, i.e. ultra-left, communist tradition are led into acts of demarcation and denunciation which appear as a defence of purity. Upsetting such an ideological operation is the fact that, as we have suggested, the groups that are clearly of the ultra-left do not even agree on all these positions themselves. In the face of this contradiction, it is possible to become partisan of one or other of these traditions[24] to the exclusion of the other or to adopt a bit of a pick-and-mix approach. But whatever the (not irrelevant) fine points in the disputes between the wings of the historic ultra-lefts, which can't be explored here, there is for us a more profound issue.

If, to repeat a formulation we are fond of, communism is the real movement, it is not fundamentally about the adoption of a set of principles, lines and positions.[25] Of course, the positions of the ultra-left emerged out of the class struggle, but such positions were only more or less right when they were made - they are approximations, an expression of 'as revolutionaries best saw it' - and thus something more needs to be done than just agree with them and proselytize. The class struggle can be seen as a wave that advanced to a high point around 1919 and as it receded left ideas around like flotsam in its wake. What these traditions represent is an attempt to maintain the historic lessons of this high point in the class struggle, despite the retreat of that movement. Moreover, the limits of that wave of class struggle - its inability to generalize as world revolution - led to varying revolutionary experiences in different countries expressing themselves in different lessons being drawn... and it is these that lie at the root of the historical spilt between the Lefts. Part of the price that these tendencies paid for maintaining the more or less revolutionary ideas in the circumstances of the more or less complete capitulation of the workers' movement to Stalinism, anti-fascism and the mobilization for another slaughter was that the ideas became somewhat frozen and ideological. When theory becomes an 'ism' - a specific set of positions separate from the class struggle - it is a sign of the retreat of the movement. There is a stiffness in the way many groups and individuals identifying with the 'ultra-left' express themselves. For many, the adoption, reproduction and assertion of these positions mechanically in the face of the class struggle acts to reinforce their own identity as 'revolutionary', while reducing their ability to recognize and relate to the contradictions of real social movements. To think that the positions are simply revolutionary, or that adopting them makes one revolutionary, reifies what being revolutionary is. Communism is the attempt to express the real movement; but the real movement is not fully present until it is successful; thus communist theory is only partial - an aspiration - and the theoretical work is never quite finished. It is taken forward by advances in the class struggle and the reflection on this. Put another way, theory does not take the point of view of the totality but of the aspiration to the totality.[26] It is inadequate and unhistorical to assume that the ultra-left had the right ideas but that they simply lost out to the wrong ones, and on this basis to assert its critique of trade unions and leftist political parties when the opportunity occurs.

As we said in our first editorial,[27] the '60s and '70s saw a re-emergence of a whole series of theoretical currents, which included the ultra-left. But while a number of groups that sprung up regurgitated as ideology the theories they were discovering, others worked to actually develop theory adequate to the new conditions. The task before the new generation was to take up ideas, such as those of the historic ultra-left, in a non-ideological way. An irony was that the place where their legacy has been taken up in a dynamic and original way has not been Germany, Holland or Italy, but France. There is a real sense in which the 'modern' ultra-left has largely been a French phenomenon.

Ultra-leftism as a French tradition[28]

The May '68 movement, or at least its most advanced elements, gravitated towards a 'councilist' perspective: derived from the Dutch/German Left, councilism rejected Leninism and the party and put its faith in the 'workers councils'.[29] A total surprise to the left, the character of this movement had best been prefigured in the analyses of non-orthodox ultra-left influenced groups[30] like the Situationist International (SI) and Socialism or Barbarism (S ou B), and its successor organizations such as ICO.[31]

In the wake of '68, there was a surge of interest in the ultra-left. With the SI not taking new members, and busy expelling the ones they had,[32] it was ICO that attracted a large part of the new influx. It expanded massively to become the largest ultra-left group in France, with a few hundred members. It had links with many local 'councilist' groups that emerged across France, one of the more significant of which was the one TC emerged from - the Marseilles-based Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils (Notebooks on Council Communism).

However, the adequacy of the council communist perspective was increasingly questioned by individuals and groups[33] appropriating ideas coming from the Italian Left and in particular its critique of self-management.[34] An important part of the dynamism of the French ultra-left lies in the fact that one of the main ways Bordiga and the Italian Left's ideas were introduced to France[35] in this period was not by traditional Left Communists but by less orthodox figures like Camatte and others around the journal Invariance, and by Gilles Dauvé and the group Mouvement Communiste. In a text that has been translated as part of Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement, Dauvé argues correctly that a problem with the (councilist) ultra-left is that it opposed the bureaucracy, state control and the Leninist party with another set of organizational forms - workers' democracy, self-management and the councils - missing the issue of the content of communism. If the defining politics of '68 - the social content was something else - had been 'self managementist', then the critique was a significant one.[36]

Another group TC mention, Révolution International/ICC,[37] are also connected to the dissatisfaction with 'councilism'. However, it has largely rejected any new thinking as 'modernism' in favour of a more fundamentalist -'the correct positions have already been arrived at' - Left Communism based on a select appropriation of the Dutch/German and Italian Left heritages. It managed to recruit many of the councilist groups and individuals that had sprung up in France and elsewhere on the basis of the line that revolution was imminent and it was necessary to get organized and build a left communist organization/party.

It is the less organizationally fixated and more theoretically questioning currents, of which TC are part, that are more interesting for us. As Loren Goldner puts it, debates in the French ultra-left in 1968-73 reapproached the issue of capitalism in terms of value "in order to insist, rightly, that communism was neither 'nationalised property' or 'workers' control of production' but the positive supersession of commodity production and all its categories: value, wage labour, capital, the proletariat as a social relationship, all grasped as an integral whole."[38] Informing the debates, and allowing them to transcend an ultra-left version of Second International Marxism, were the newly available texts by Marx, the Grundrisse and the 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' (the 'Missing Sixth Chapter' of Capital). Bordiga and the circle around him, including Camatte, had been amongst the first to recognize the significance of these texts. Whatever their problems,[39] the strength of Camatte and others was that they did not take the theoretical ideas of either the Dutch/German and/or Italian Lefts, or even of Marx, as complete and finished doctrines simply needing to be propagated, but attempted to approach reality in a non-ideological way.

One example of the usefulness of a non-dogmatic taking up of the ideas of the Italian left was that the German/Dutch Left factoryist and economistic vision of self-management could be subjected to the critique of the Italian Left, but at the same time the Italian Left's conception that revolution is first of all a political act could be overturned with an idea of revolution as fundamentally neither political nor economic but social: communization - the direct negation of capitalist social relations, and in particular the enterprise form, and their replacement by human ones. If in the period up to and including May '68 the SI had been the most dynamic revolutionary tendency, an argument can be made that, in the years following, it was other tendencies more open (critically) to the Italian Left and to the newly-published texts of Marx's Critique of Political Economy that were at the cutting edge of theory and critique. Part of the SI's power was that they had not simply adopted council communism, but with their critique of culture and of everyday life, their practices of drift and diversion etc. had pushed and deepened the meaning of revolution. Similarly, the best French 'ultra-left' groups of the '70s, by not simply adopting a left communist ideology but using the newly available Marx to rethink what the overcoming of capitalism was, went further in a revolutionary grasping of what had been novel in the '68 events and in the new developments in the class struggle continuing to occur across the advanced capitalist world. Without agreeing with every innovation of these currents, it seems clear to us that communist theory was being advanced in the French ultra-left scene not least through a questioning of the limits of 'ultra-leftism'. It is out of this milieu that TC emerge.

Théorie Communiste on objectivism

TC place objectivism and the other issues raised by our 'Decadence' articles within a historical schema based on Marx's concepts of formal and real subsumption of labour,[40] and a whole set of categories which they have developed over the last thirty years. The criticisms TC make of particular sections of the 'Decadence' articles are in many cases valid - for example, our discussion of the Russian revolution and our treatment of autonomist Marxism - are intertwined with this overall perspective. Our impression is that TC are certainly asking some of the right questions.

A difficulty the reader (and those we have asked to translate for us) find is that TC express themselves in a difficult and sometimes obscure manner. They seem to insist on and repeat a number of rather abstract formulations - for example, the ideas of the mutual involvement of capital and proletariat, and of the self-presupposition of capital - in order to grasp capital and the class struggle. TC feel the idea of "mutual involvement of proletariat and capital" is missing from our articles. However while at some points the articles do not escape a separation of capital(ism) and class struggle, what certainly seems misplaced to us is TC's thinking that the weaknesses in the articles are founded on Aufheben's "preference for the concept of alienation to that of exploitation." On the contrary, we'd say that the place in the articles where the conception of 'mutual involvement' is most present is actually in our use of the category of alienation. This is something we will return to in our response to their critique.

The more we read TC, the more it is evident that their categories are based on a close reading of Marx's Critique of Political Economy, and in particular of the Grundrisse and the 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production'. Part of the difficulty of TC's writing is that they move between the abstract level of the theory in the Grundrisse and a more concrete examination of the class struggle. This is not necessarily a criticism - we get much from the Grundrisse and there is nothing wrong with someone writing at that level now (even if it is likely to restrict their readership). One possibility to consider is that TC's constant return to certain abstract formulations, even at the price of their writing becoming repetitious and difficult to read, may have advantages in resisting the path of least resistance of bourgeois thought, stopping oneself slipping into the type of thought which accepts and reproduces fetishized appearances and separations.[41] So while TC's abstract theory is undoubtedly difficult, one might say any attempt to understand the complex processes of history will be difficult, as is Marx's. One must deal with problems at the level of difficulty which they demand. However, a merit of Marx's abstractions is that they move, they allow a grasp of reality and open it up - do TC's? Marx's abstract level of theorizing was usually accompanied by texts in which he made every effort to be comprehensible, to present the practical implications, as he saw it, of his more theoretical work back to the real movement, which he, like TC, would see as the actual origin of his theory. Likewise, TC have interesting things to say about the class struggle, both in the past and with recent developments, which they describe as 'radical democratism' and the 'direct action movement'.

Below we present TC's account of their history and perspective, followed by our own summary of the main thrust of the 'Decadence' articles, which serves as a preface to TC's critique.

Théorie Communiste: Background and Perspective

The first issue of the review Théorie Communiste (TC) came out in 1977. The original group involved had got together in 1975. Previously some of the members of this group had published the review Intervention Communiste (two issues appeared in '72 and '73) and had participated in the publication Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils - Notebooks on Council Communism. Edited in Marseilles between '68 and '73, this publication was very much linked to ICO (Informations et Correspondance Ouvriére - Workers' News and Correspondence, which has since become Echanges et Mouvement - Exchanges and Movement). The group separated from Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils as soon as it started to fuse with Révolution Internationale (the International Communist Current). The brief history which follows allows us, in part, to get to grips with the problems and questions which existed at the origin of TC.

At the beginning of the '70s a whole tendency already critical of the historic ultra-left began to find aspects of the ultra-left's analysis inadequate, in particular their critique of all the political and union mediations which give form to the proletariat's belonging, as a class, to the capitalist mode of production. In the balance sheet that we can draw up of the wave of class struggle at the end of the '60s, the call for class action in itself masks the essential problem: it is not a question of rediscovering a pure assertion of the proletariat. The revolution, the abolition of capital, will be the immediate negation of all classes, including the proletariat. Yet we didn't want to adopt the approach of Invariance who, from this observation, ended up rejecting any classist perspective on the contradictions of existing society and the revolution, nor that of Mouvement Communiste, led by Jean Barrot, who, by an injection of Bordigism, sought to radicalize the ultra-left problematic.

At first the theoretical work of TC (in cooperation with the group who published Négation) consisted of elaborating the concept of programmatism. The crisis at the end of the '60s/beginning of the '70s was the first crisis of capital during the real subsumption of labour under capital. It marked the end of all the previous cycles which, since the beginning of the 19th Century, had for their immediate content and for their objective the increase in strength of the class within the capitalist mode of production and its affirmation as the class of productive work, through the taking of power and the putting in place of a period of transition. Practically and theoretically, programmatism designates the whole of that period of the class struggle of the proletariat. Despite having renewed this problematic out of necessity, Echanges (published in English and French) remains on the same general basis, namely that in each struggle the proletariat must rediscover itself; revolution becomes the process of struggles, the process of this conquest of itself.

The central theoretical question thus becomes: how can the proletariat, acting strictly as a class of this mode of production, in its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production, abolish classes, and therefore itself, that is to say: produce communism? A response to this question which refers to some kind of humanity underneath the proletarian or to human activity underneath work, not only traps itself in a philosophical quagmire, but always returns to the consideration that the class struggle of the proletariat can only go beyond itself in so far as it already expresses something which exceeds and affirms itself (we can find this even in the present theoretical formalisations of the 'direct action movement'). The sweaty labourer has been replaced by Man, but the problem has not changed, which remains that of 'Aufhebung'.

Starting from this basis, we have undertaken a work of theoretical redefinition of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital. In the first place it was necessary to redefine the contradiction as being simultaneously the contradiction bearing communism as its resolution and the reproductive and dynamic contradiction of capital. It was necessary to produce the identity of the proletariat as a class of the capitalist mode of production and as a revolutionary class, which implies that we no longer conceive this 'revolutionariness' as a class nature which adjusts itself, disappears, is reborn, according to circumstances and conditions. This contradiction is exploitation. With exploitation as a contradiction between the classes we grasped their characterisation as the characterisation of the community, therefore as being simultaneously their reciprocal involvement. This meant that we were able to grasp: the impossibility of the affirmation of the proletariat; the contradiction between the proletariat and capital as history; the critique of any revolutionary nature of the proletariat as a defining essence buried or masked by the reproduction of the whole (the self-presupposition of capital). We had historicized the contradiction and therefore the revolution and communism, and not only their circumstances. The revolution and communism are what is produced historically through the cycles of struggles which accentuate the development of the contradiction. The contradiction between the proletariat and capital was really disobjectified, without taking the economy to be an illusion. The tendential fall in the rate of profit became immediately a contradiction between classes and not that which triggers it, as always remained the case with Mattick, even though his theory of crises opens the way to the supersession of objectivism.

In addition to the deepening of these theoretical presuppositions, the work of TC consists of defining the structure and content of the contradiction between classes at work since the end of the '70s, and consolidated in the '80s. There was a restructuring of the relations of exploitation, that is to say of the contradiction between classes, which was the second phase of real subsumption.

The extraction of relative surplus has become a process of reproduction of the interface between capital and labour which is adequate to it in that it contains no element, no point of crystallisation, no sticking point which can be a hindrance to the necessary fluidity and constant overturning which it needs. Against the previous cycle of struggles, restructuring has abolished all specificity, guarantees, 'welfare', 'Fordian compromise', division of the global cycle into national areas of accumulation, into fixed relations between the centre and the periphery, into internal zones of accumulation (East/West). The extraction of surplus value in its relative mode demands constant upheaval and the abolition of all restrictions to the immediate process of production, the reproduction of labour power and the relations of capitals with each other.

The restructuring of the capitalist mode of production cannot exist without a workers' defeat. This defeat was that of the worker's identity, of the Communist parties, of 'actually existing socialism', of trade unionism, of self-management, of self-organisation. It is a whole cycle of struggles in its diversity and its contradictions which was defeated in the '70s and early '80s. Restructuring is essentially counter-revolution. Its essential result, since the beginning of the '80s, is the disappearance of any productive worker's identity reproduced and confirmed within the capitalist mode of production.

When the contradictory relation between the proletariat and capital is no longer defined in the fluidity of capitalist reproduction, the proletariat can only oppose itself to capital by calling into question the movement in which it is itself reproduced as a class. The proletariat no longer carries a project of social reorganisation as an affirmation of what it is. In contradiction with capital, it is, in the dynamic of the class struggle, in contradiction with its own existence as a class. This is now the content of, and what is at stake in, the class struggle. It is the basis of our present work through analyses not only of the course of capital but also, indissociably, of struggles such as that of December '95 in France, of the movement of the unemployed or the sans-papiers,[42] as well as everyday struggles which are less spectacular but, even so, indicative of this new cycle.

That which is fundamentally radical about the cycle of struggles is simultaneously its limit: the existence of the class in the reproduction of capital. This limit which is specific to the new cycle of struggles is the foundation and the historically specific content of what from 1995 we have called 'radical democratism'. It is the expression and the formalisation of the limits of this cycle of struggles. It sets up in political practice or in an alternativist perspective the disappearance of any worker's identity so as to ratify the existence of the class within capital as a collection of citizens and/or producers, an existence to which it asks capital to conform. In opposition to this, but on the same basis, the 'direct action movement' thinks of itself as already being new 'disalienated' social relations opposed to capital.

Starting out from this cycle of struggles, revolution is a supersession produced by it. There cannot be an extension of present struggles as they are in themselves to revolution for the simple reason that revolution is the abolition of classes. This supersession is the moment when, in the class struggle, class belonging itself becomes an exterior constraint imposed by capital. It is a contradictory process internal to the capitalist mode of production. In the meantime, neither orphans of the labour movement, nor prophets of the communism to come, we participate in the class struggle as it is on a daily basis and as it produces theory.

Decadence: The theory of decline or the decline of theory (reprise)

The main TC text which follows below is, as its title suggests, critical comments which they made to accompany their translation of the decadence articles from Aufheben issues 2-4.[43] For readers who have not seen the texts or perhaps wish to be reminded we will give a summary here.

In order to deal with the theory of decadence or decline it was necessary to consider a great deal of material - conceptions of capitalist crisis and collapse, the evolution of transitory forms, the necessity or otherwise of socialism - which have dominated attempts at the revolutionary analysis of twentieth-century capitalism. The underlying theme we identified (and one that attracted TC's interest) was the issue of objectivism. Under this term, we analysed a prevalent form of understanding dominated by the separation of the objective and the subjective - capitalist development and the class struggle - the posing of capitalism as, so to speak, a machine with an inexorable objective (mechanical?) logic heading towards its collapse, generating a subjective response in the necessity of the class struggle moving towards socialist revolution. In this conception, the driving force towards communism, its material basis, was seen as the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production understood as a fundamental underlying objective reality to which socialist revolution would be an inevitable consequence (with a collapse into barbarism sometimes suggested as the only other possibility). Based on such a conception, the central problem of revolution tended to be reduced to one way or other of having consciousness and subjectivity catch up with the objective situation, with the crisis playing a key role. Objectivism could be expressed politically in opposite ways; as Trotsky's reduction of everything to the crisis of leadership, with the revolutionary task reduced to tactical questions of organizing the vanguard or party to take advantage of the crisis that would surely come; or, as with Mattick and 'councilism', be seen in a totally non-vanguardist way with revolution a spontaneous working class reaction to the crisis. We traced the origin of such theorizing to the 'classical Marxism' developed by Engels and the Second International of which Trotskyism and 'left-communism' or the 'ultra-left' claimed to be the true continuations. We saw how these theories seemed to be undermined by the failure of capitalism to collapse or produce a revolution after WW2. In the second article in the series, we then addressed the heterodox currents; like Socialism or Barbarism, the Situationists and the autonomist Marxists, which emerged at this point and who questioned the objectivist decline problematic and asserted the crucial importance of the revolutionary subject in the overthrow of capitalism. But we also noted how the return of crisis itself in the '70s seemed to renew the necessity of understanding crisis - objectivistically or otherwise. We finished with a consideration of the approach adopted by the Radical Chains magazine which focused on the role of state interventions like welfare as the 'prevention of communism', and we ended with (a rather too brief) suggestion of an alternative perspective.

We now turn, then, to TC's response to our 'Decadence' articles.

Aufheben's 'Decadence': A response[44]

It goes without saying that for us to undertake what represented a considerable task for us, a translation intended for publication of the three-part Aufheben article on objectivism and the 'theories of decadence', we consider this text of great interest. Beyond the listing of a huge mass of documentation and the construction of a history of the concept of objectivism, this interest lies in the underlying critical point of view on this history and the perspectives it opens for a current theoretical production.

This point-of-view can be summed up in four quotations:

"For us, the market or law of value is not the essence of capital; its essence is rather the self-expansion of value: that is, of alienated labour."

"Autonomist theory in general and the theory of crisis as class struggle in particular did essential work on the critique of the reified categories of objectivist Marxism. It allows us to see them 'as modes of existence of the class struggle' [TC emphasis]. If at times they overstate this, failing to see the real extent to which the categories have an objective life as aspects of capital, it remains necessary to maintain the importance of the inversion."

"The object of the law of value is not products but the working class (…) its existence outside it."[45]

"Marx established how the predominant class system and the class struggle act through the commodity, wage labour, etc." [Editors' note: Our actual words were: "Marx analysed how the system of class rule and class struggle operates through the commodity, wage labour etc."]

These formulations could very well be ours.

It is rare that theoretical works attend to this essential problem of objectivism without descending into the worst deranged subjectivist imaginings or without simply abandoning a theory of classes, of their contradiction and of communism as the supersession of this contradiction. However (fortunately there are always 'howevers'), we have a series of critical comments to formulate on this text, comments which we are ready to discuss.

The basis of these comments is the absence, despite the quotations above, of the conception of a mutual involvement between proletariat and capital as defining their contradiction. As we show in the piece on objectivism (TC 15), the question here is of determining the concept of exploitation, to which Aufheben seems to prefer that of alienation, which upholds the exteriority between the 'alienated subject' and its 'essence' outside itself. The absence of this conception of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital as mutual involvement, the preference for the concept of alienation, leads to affirmations which we absolutely cannot share, such as the following: "for us, the revolution is the return of the subject to herself...". Without the production of the contradiction between classes as mutual involvement, we necessarily remain within the perspective of the revolution as affirmation, as the triumph of the proletariat; to this perspective we counterpose the revolution as the abolition of the proletariat in the abolition of capital, within the movement where "the defence of its interests" leads the proletariat to consider its definition as a class to be an external constraint. "The return of the subject to herself/itself" doesn't really transcend the contradiction, or its terms, but it simply represents the return of the subject to itself (this smacks of teleology). Even the title of the journal 'Aufheben' raises this whole question.

From then on, one has the tendency when reading the text to understand the supersession of the capitalist mode of production as something rather formal. For example, the Bolsheviks are 'reproached' for planning 'from above'. According to this view the Bolsheviks developed capitalism because of the forms they decided to adopt for the labour process: one-man management, bourgeois specialists, Taylorism; but didn't they rather 'develop' because wage labour remained? Must we deduce that communism is planning 'from below'? Can we now maintain the Marxian vision of communism as the "free association of the producers", in the real subsumption of labour to capital (assuming that the passage of Capital on the commodity deals with communist society). This would mean that we limit ourselves to the forms of organization of production, which the article denounces with a concise and effective formula: "Communism is a content - the abolition of wage labour - not a form."

The critique of the Bolshevik counter-revolution remains formal, in the sense that it is not related to the content of the revolution in this historic phase of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, a phase in which the revolution could only lead to the rising strength of the class within capital and its affirmation as a dominant pole of society. The Bolshevik counter-revolution then necessarily articulates itself with the revolution. The Lefts, even the Dutch/German Left, never grasped the true nature of the Russian Revolution: a revolution whose content was the autonomous affirmation of the class and which found, in labour's claim to be able to manage society, that is, in labour's very strength within capital in the transition to real subsumption, the revolution's own limitation turned against itself. The parties of the Second International were in a position to take charge of and formalize this counter-revolution to differing degrees according to their specific situations. The revolution as affirmation of the class transforms itself relentlessly into the management of capital, turning into counter-revolution; revolution provides counter-revolution with its own content. In 'The Unknown Revolution', Voline relates a 'little scene' he witnessed. In a factory, the workers had started to organize their transactions with other firms themselves. A representative of Bolshevik authority arrives, and, using threats, orders the end of this type of activity, because the state is undertaking it. Of course, this did not go without confrontation, without opposition, but is it possible to imagine an exchange which would not take a form alienated from the exchangers connected by it?

The absence of the mutual involvement between proletariat and capital in their contradiction, in our reading of this article, very often gives us the impression that we are dealing with a communist project that is unvarying, but subject to the objective conditions which, after having as it were been chased out through the front door, have the tendency to return through the back door. Hence the presentation of objectivism or of economic determinism as 'errors', as 'deviations', and the incapacity of the article really to go beyond a history of ideas. There is the proletariat, there is capital. The latter evolved, the former experiencing this evolution as 'class composition'. But the evolution of these terms isn't understood as the history of their relationship. They are in contradiction, but this contradiction is only a mutual, reflexive relation and not a self-differentiating totality. Thus history is understood as the history of capital, subject to the constraint of working class struggle, but not as that of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital. Therefore the revolution and communism cannot really be historicized. It's no use adding on a subjective approach from the working class viewpoint. The point of view has changed, but the problematic of objectivity has not been superseded. This is what the article glimpses when the subject is workerism, of which it doesn't manage to formulate a critique other than economic.

If one considers the central problem of objectivism, its critique begins with the production of a theory in which we grasp exploitation and the falling rate of profit as the contradiction between proletariat and capital, and not merely as the development of capital; the central concepts are those of exploitation and accumulation. As long as the revolution could only present itself as the affirmation of the proletariat (formal subsumption, first phase of real subsumption), the contradiction of the capitalist mode of production as dependent on the mutual involvement between proletariat and capital was unimaginable, because then the negation of capital could only be, ipso facto, the negation of the proletariat. And so the revolution as formal subsumption of labour to capital and in the first phase of its real subsumption, as affirmation of the proletariat, becomes inevitably an economism. If the revolution is the affirmation of the class, in making revolution, the proletariat must necessarily resolve a contradiction of capitalism of which it is not one of the limits but simply the best placed executant, so that the supersession of this contradiction, far from being the proletariat's own disappearance, becomes its triumph. The strategy based on 'proletarian subjectivity' doesn't go beyond this problematic.

As a pole in the contradiction within the capitalist mode of production, the proletariat's existence and practice can only match the historical course of its contradiction with capital as exploitation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is the whole importance of the crisis theory of Mattick, which in its objectivism, can't be used as it is, and must be criticized from our point of view. It is fundamental to keep an analysis of the crisis on the basis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The law of the falling rate of profit only needs to be deobjectified, "dereified" as the article says. When we read in the article: "it (capital) creates a limit to its accumulation in the fact that it can only produce for the market.", even if it goes on to say: "capital constantly revolutionizes relations of production in order to permit their continual expansion. This need constantly to transform social relations means that capital is constantly driven to confront the working class", and the matter is ended with: "it is possible that the crisis creates the conditions in which the proletariat begins to oppose its interests to those of capital.", we are led to believe that:

1) The crisis is situated at the level of the market,
2) The strategy of capital is the development of the productive forces,
3) The revolutionary driving force of the proletariat is the defence of its interests.

On one side the crisis, on the other the class struggle; a meeting of divergent interests shaping capital's path, but the development of capital and the crisis are not understood in themselves as class struggle.

As the article fully shows in its key developments, the theoretical bedrock of objectivism lies in the separation between the class struggle and the development of the capitalist mode of production. But the basis of this theoretical separation is the impossibility of the proletariat itself, in this whole formal subsumption period of class struggle, and even under certain current forms, of being an element of the contradiction to be overturned. It is only the contradiction's downtrodden extremity and only has the role of gravedigger. Capitalism is only understood as a set of conditions, evolving towards an optimal situation with regard to an essential and immutable revolutionary nature of the proletariat, even if historically this nature fails to manifest itself. The critique of objectivism cannot only be the critique of the separation between class struggle and capitalist development, it can only be achieved in the critique of the concept of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, as determined once and for all, and adjusting itself according to conditions. The proletariat is only revolutionary in the contradiction which opposes it to capital. In that case, it is not a nature which is determined, but a relation and a history. As long a revolutionary being of the proletariat is presupposed, against this being conditions are necessary, which are necessarily objective conditions. As long as there is no critique of this conception of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, there is no way out of the objectivist problematic. As long as this critique has not been made, it is impossible to go beyond the point of view governed by a dichotomy between class struggles and economic contradictions, which are only connected by relations of mutual determination.

It is in realizing the limits of workerism and in distancing themselves from it, that there is a sense that Aufheben are confronted by this problem. The article expresses well that there's a limit in considering the class struggle as the clash of two strategies in the workerist conception, but without explicitly putting forward the mutual involvement between the classes as defining their contradiction. Workerism only makes an inversion of objectivism, without going beyond it, it only adds a subjective aspect such as Negri's working class 'self-valorisation' which tags on an additional determination in the relation between proletariat and capital, but one that doesn't change the conception of this relation. Having a sum of determinations, it is thought that the totality of this relation has been reached, but the relation has not been deobjectified, a subjective determination has just been added in opposition to the objective. Aufheben reproaches the workerists for not doing enough to preserve the objectivity of the reproduction of capital and for merely declaring that "everything is class struggle". Not managing to grasp objectivity and economy as a necessary moment in the reproduction of the contradiction between capital and the proletariat, Aufheben ends up with a sort of position of mitigation: you must deobjectify the contradiction between capital and the proletariat, but keep aside a little objectivity, above all for periods of counter-revolution. Objectivism has only been surpassed from the point of view of the proletariat and preserved as the reality of capitalism. The critique was not a deconstruction of objectivity and its reconstruction as economy, as necessary moment of relation between classes, it was only the same thing seen from another viewpoint. On this subject, the question of the 'incompleteness' of Capital is particularly futile. What can be deemed Marx's opinion on the wage as class struggle in Wages, Price and Profit or in 'Speech on Free Trade', allows no doubt to hang over the fact that the struggle 'for' (and even 'over': Negri) the wage, will never result in anything but the wage. As for 'small circulation' as a space for workers' control, this is a product of that 'optimism' among the workerists, as evoked by the article, which is now foundering even in the reformist political arena.

Paradoxically, the addition of a subjective side, a 'working class point of view', only serves to confirm, to reinforce, the objectivism which has been renounced as something that is to be dismantled. It merely adds an 'active' supplement to it.

In the same manner, from the side of the understanding of the actions of the capitalist class, the idea still lingers that the maintenance and the reproduction of the social relation of exploitation depends on other types of relations from those that it brings into play to reproduce itself and which presuppose itself. While criticising Radical Chains, the article presents the following analysis: "the idea of a perfect regulation of needs under the law of value is a myth. The law of value and capital have always been constrained first by forms of landed property and of community which preceded it, and then by the class struggle growing up within it. Capital is compelled to relate to the working class by other means than the wage, and the state is its necessary way of doing this. The Poor Law expressed one strategy for controlling the working class: administration expresses a different one. Once we consider the law of value as always constrained, then the idea of its partial suspension loses its resonance." And we would be tempted to add: it is the very idea that capital relates to the working class by other means than the value, the wage etc., which loses all resonance.

If indeed it is accurate that being "always constrained" forms part of the definition, then the state, its civil services, its army and police, are attributes of value, of wages and exploitation. As the article says, it is not enough merely to remain with the most abstract presentation of value at the beginning of Capital, it is necessary to consider value in its application. Through the state, capital does not relate to the working class through other means than wages.

If the self-presupposition [l'autoprésupposition] of capital-in-general is considered, the transformation of surplus product into surplus value then into additional capital can never taken for granted because of the very laws of capital (that is falling rate of profit, and constraint on the exploitation of labour power). In this moment of self-presupposition, the activity of the capitalist class always consists of throwing the proletariat back into a situation of exploitation (through political action, violence, bankruptcies, lay-offs, etc.). We have not got out of an analysis of the self-presupposition of capital and we have the relation between the proletariat and the capitalist class as specific and contradictory activities. The danger would lie in the autonomisation of the poles of the contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, the proletariat and capital, into two strategies.

For us, objectivism is linked to two sets of causes: the first lie in an epoch of class struggle which poses revolution and communism as affirmation of the proletariat and therefore excludes the latter from the field of contradictions of the mode of production. Secondly, the proletariat only takes advantage of 'economic' contradictions of which it is supposedly not one of the components.

A constant of the reproduction of capital that we call its self-presupposition is the very basis of economic reality: all the terms of the reproduction of society reappear as 'objectivized' conditions of reproduction on the side of capital at the end of each cycle.

The result of this is that the concept and critique of objectivism cannot serve as a conductor for an analysis of the problems of developing 'theory'. The decisive break in 'theory' cuts through both objectivism and the theories taking its critique on board. The line of fracture and discrimination in the development of theory is located between the class struggle bringing the abolition of capital as affirmation of the proletariat and the class struggle bringing the proletariat's own abolition in the abolition of capital, that is the very content of the transition from formal subsumption to real subsumption and of the latter's history. If we do not start from this basis, then one has the impression that 'theory' has a history. In the absence of this historical critique which says why the revolution is at a particular moment in time determinist, economist, objectivist, the internal critique of which the article has so much trouble getting rid, suffers from only considering objectivism as a theoretical 'error' or 'deviation', or even as determined by 'objective' conditions.

"As Pannekoek pointed out, the real decline of capitalism is the self-emancipation of the working class". This is the conclusion of the affected critical brushing aside realised in the text, but here one is at the beginning of the essential problem: what is the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, as epoch of the capitalist mode of production, which brings about communism? As the article states well, it is not a question of defining "the level of development of the productive forces incompatible with capitalist relations of production", but rather of historically defining the content and the structure of a contradiction between classes. It is true that this was not the subject of the article, but reading it makes us wish that this were the subject of its conclusion. We remain a little dissatisfied to read: "from time to time, the relation between capitalist development and the class reaches a point of possible rupture. Revolutionaries and the class take their chance; if the wave fails to go beyond capital, capital continues to a higher level."

The whole history of this mode of production is yet to be written as history of the contradiction between classes. Can we remain with the vision presented in the article of a succession of revolutionary onslaughts never victorious so far, always defeated, and understand their defeat as being down either to exterior (objective) conditions, or the force of counter-revolution, unrelated to the historical nature of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital, which is revealed as much in the revolution as in the counter-revolution? This is a vision which returns inexorably to a revolutionary essence of the proletariat, identical in each successive onslaught. The "organic relation between class struggle and capitalist development", which forms the very bedrock of this whole article, is not the relation of reciprocal determinations of two elements defined a priori in themselves. It is really an organic relation and in that the particularisation of a concrete totality which only exists in the parties and their mutual demands. The contradiction between the proletariat and capital is the development of capital.

Footnotes

[1] TC themselves would probably not agree with the way Marx approaches the issues here. In their critique of our articles they question our use of the concept of alienation. For TC, Marx's thematic of alienation and aufheben in the Economic Manuscripts and The Holy Family is not continued in his later work. This is one of the points we have been trying to make sense of by looking at some other of TC's writings - for example: "Let us not confuse 'alienated labour' as it functions in the Manuscripts and the alienation of labour that we will find in the Grundrisse or in Capital. In the first case, alienated labour is the self-movement of the human essence as generic being; in the second, it is no longer a question of human essence, but of historically determined social relations, in which the worker is separated in part or in whole from the conditions of his labour, of his product and of his activity itself" ('Pour en Finire avec la Critique du Travail', TC, No. 17). We argue that, though Marx's treatment gets steadily more historical and more concrete, the thematic of alienation is essentially the same. This is something we will deal with in our response to their critique.

[2] In Capital Marx does not talk about private property because he subsumes it in the commodity (a society of generalized commodity production is one of absolute private property.) In his earlier writings, when he did talk of the system of private property, Marx's attention was already on the capital-labour relation. In the previous year to The Holy Family, Marx had written: "the antithesis between propertylessness and property is still an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, its inner relation, not yet grasped as contradiction, as long as it is not understood as the antithesis between labour and capital. ... labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitutes private property in its developed relation of contradiction: a vigorous relation, driving towards resolution" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 345, section on Private Property and Communism). Marx does not change his object of study when he focuses on the relation between labour and capital rather than between alienated labour and private property because the latter is just a more developed and concrete expression of the former. In the form of wage labour and capital, 'private property', which existed before capital, is brought to its highest point of contradiction and antagonism.

[3] Marx, at the end of 'Wages, Price and Profit', advised trade unions that instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!".

[4] Even the outstanding example of revolutionary syndicalism - the IWW of the first decades of the twentieth century, which really emphasized the 'abolition of the wage system' - was not immune. The trajectory of many of its militants towards the American Communist Party even as it Stalinized did not come from nowhere. As Wright notes, "the sympathy within certain Wobbly circles for technicians and Taylorist principles betrayed a growing detachment from the IWW's initial rejection of the capitalist organisation of labour." (Steve Wright, Storming Heaven (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p 195, citing La Formazione dell'Operaio Massa negli USA 1898/1922, pp 179-187).

[5] "With the bourgeois economists we have no longer anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth's surface-not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity." (Revolution Betrayed, Ch. 1.) Even his criticisms of the USSR are often for not being productive and efficient enough, which is not surprising coming from the man who, when he was in charge, advocated military discipline for the workforce.

[6] See M. Seidman, Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts (UCLA Press, 1993).

[7] Of course, the Nazis were not the first to put the national in socialism: the social democrats supported the First World War, a great deal of the way Stalin sold 'Socialism in One Country' was by appealing to the patriotism of the population, and we see later examples in Labour Zionism and various 'third world' socialisms from Tanzania to Cambodia.

[8] Just as Nazism and Italian fascism incorporated large parts of social democracy into their regimes, after WW2, social democracy incorporated a great deal of fascism into the post-war order or, as Bordigists provocatively put it, "while the fascist nations lost WW2, fascism won".

[9] Of course, by concentrating on the leaders there is an avoidance of the role of CNT rank and file militants in disciplining the Spanish working class and mobilizing for the war effort.

[10] See Paul Mattick, 'The Barricades Must be Torn Down'.

[11] Leftism, as a descriptive and derogatory term for ideological positions and practices that present themselves as oppositional but are actually within bourgeois politics, is a useful shorthand. However, its use as an explanation for the failure of movements tends to the dogmatic assumption that somebody/we already possess the correct 'non-leftist politics' and the problem is simply getting them across. (See also footnote 30 in the review article, 'From Operaismo to "Autonomist Marxism"', in this issue.)

[12] See 'The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation' in The Society of the Spectacle. Also making the point that one must "distinguish between workers' practice and workers ideology" and relating directly to TC's arguments is the Troploin text 'To Work or not to Work: Is that the Question?'

[13] See the account of the significance of the mass strike in Philippe Bourrinet's article 'The Workers' Councils in the Theory of the Dutch-German Communist Left'.

[14] The most significant tendency were the Friends of Durruti - see The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939 by Agustin Guillamon (AK Press 1996).

[15] See Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1980).

[16] The ultra-left is certainly not the only point of break. Well before the first world war, social democracy had already produced groups like the 'Young People' in Germany and the SPGB in Britain; later, anarcho-syndicalism produced the Friends of Durruti Group. Trotskyism has produced numerous breakaways, such as the followers of Munis, Socialism or Barbarism, the Johnson-Forrest tendency; Italian Marxist-Leninism produced operaismo/autonomist Marxism and so on. However, while many of these are often also linked with upsurges in the class struggle, none were connected to something as international, deep and obviously threatening to capitalism as that wave of struggle which perhaps peaked in 1919 and which is irretrievably associated with the 1917 Russian Revolution. Also, it is no accident that many of the tendencies emerging later in the twentieth century find themselves moving towards, and labelled by their previous comrades, as ultra-leftism.

[17] The first congress had not really included any foreign communists.

[18] The most orthodox followers of Bordiga supported participation in trade unions and saw a progressive - if bourgeois - role for third-world nationalism. Interestingly, many of those coming from the Italian Left have tended towards the German/Dutch ultra-left positions on these issues. Bilan, the Italian Left grouping in exile in France in the thirties, started questioning involvement in unions and the idea of any progressive role for nationalism. Two main offshoots of the Italian Left - the ICC (which claims the Bilan tradition) and the IBRP (whose main member is Battaglia Comunista, a group formed in a significant split from orthodox Bordigism in 1953), while maintaining a strong 'Italian Left' belief in the party have moved to anti-union and anti-national liberation positions historically closer to the German/Dutch Left.

[19] See the Antagonism pamphlet Bordiga versus Pannekoek. It is important to see that, on inspection, there are elements in the Italian Left conception of the party that differ from that of Lenin and 'Leninists'. Also, as we see with anarchist and council communist groups, the rejection of the term 'party' does not mean that a group or tendency escapes its problems. For a discussion; again see the Antagonism pamphlet and also Camatte's Origin and Function of the Party Form.

[20] The main place we have dealt with this history was in Part III of our Russia article, Aufheben 8 (1999). For excellent accounts of these two wings of the historic ultra-left see The Italian Left and The Dutch German Left, published by the ICC. The books were both written by Philippe Bourrinet who has since left the organization we imagine for good reasons. His own revised editions can be found at http://www.left-dis.nl.

[21] That is, a policy of using parliament as a revolutionary tribunal to denounce parliament and the capitalist system.

[22] This is perhaps compounded in Britain and America where many moving towards ultra-left politics do so via anarchism which has always had a great tendency to define itself against the 'trots' or the 'marxists'.

[23] To pick an example from the British context, the largest leftist group, the SWP, early on distinguished itself from mainstream Trotskyism by adopting a state capitalist line on the USSR. However, on just about every other issue, and in how it relates itself to the 'labour movement', it has conducted itself in exceptionally moderate and even centrist ways. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Maoist and Third Worldist leftist groups will support Stalinist and bureaucratic regimes elsewhere, while opposing the official labour movement - Labour party and Trade Unions. Individuals can be just as contradictory.

[24] One can, for example, identify with the Dutch-German Left and dismiss Bordiga as a rigid, or at best principled, Leninist; or identify with Bordiga, and see the council communist ultra-left as syndicalist.

[25] To do something we don't often do - quote Engels - "Communism is not a doctrine but a movement springing from facts rather than principles. Communists presuppose not such and such a philosophy but all past history and, above all, its actual and effective results in the civilized countries.... In so far as communism is a theory, it is the theoretical expression of the situation of the proletariat in its struggle and the theoretical summary of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat." ('The Communists and Karl Heinzen', cited in 'On Organisation' in J. Camatte, This World we Must Leave).

[26] See John Holloway's take of this undeveloped point in Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 80-88.

[27] See Aufheben 1 (Autumn 1992).

[28] We are largely writing this from what has been translated by them; TC and others could tell the story more fully, though probably in a more partisan way - for example, their remark that Dauvé was "trying to spice up the ultra-left with an injection of Bordigism".

[29] See R. Gregoire & F. Perlman's (1969) Worker-Student Action Committees France May '68.

[30] That such modern ultra-left currents existed in France was partly a product of the fact that exiles from both wings had taken up residence there in the '20s and '30s. Indeed, the Italian left exiles group Bilan had done considerable theoretical work. See Bourrinet's The Italian Left and The Dutch-German Left, op. cit.

[31] Informations et Correspondence Ouvrières (Workers' News and Correspondence) developed from Informations Liasons Ouvrières (ILO) which parted from S ou B in 1958 when Castoriadis/Chalieu took the latter in a more 'Leninist' direction. (ICO, un Point de Vue). There is a pamphlet on it by a leading participant Henri Simon whose group Echanges continues the tradition. He provides a short account in Red and Black Notes, 5.

[32] See The Veritable Split in the Situationist International and late documents in Ken Knabb's Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public Secrets).

[33] Some examples are Camatte and Invariance, Dauvé and Mouvement Communiste, and other groups that "of which," as Bordiga would say, "- with great pleasure - we do not know the names and personalities", such as Négation and the Organization des Jeunes Travailleurs Révolutionnaires, Communism: a World without Money.

[34] These developments are described nicely in the American translator's introduction to the 'Barrot' text 'Critique of the Situationist International' in What is Situationism?, ed. S. Home (AK Press, 1996), pp. 53-60.

[35] The collections 'Bordiga and the Passion for Communism' and 'Espece Humaine et Crout Terrestre et autres Articles' give a more interesting picture than the selection one encounters through the orthodox left communist press.

[36] Another text that expresses the critique of self-management is Négation's Lip and the Self-Managed Counter Revolution (Detroit: Black and Red).

[37] The International Communist Current, known in the UK through their organ World Revolution.

[38] Goldner's 'Remaking of the American Working Class', while suggesting interesting perspectives on many issues, the economic analysis Goldner attempts to ground them in is based on a fatally flawed misreading of Marx.

[39] For example we can agree with TC that one would not want to follow Camatte in rejecting class. As the English publisher of the Invariance texts, Capital and Community: The Results of the Immediate Process of Production and the Economic Work of Marx writes: "it is important to understand how class has been transformed, rather than to abandon class analysis."

[40] For the distinction, see Marx's 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', Appendix to the Penguin edition of Capital, vol. 1, p. 1019.

[41] Bourgeois thought is not just the thought of the bourgeoisie or other supporters of capitalism; rather it is the categories of thought which express correctly the real appearances of capitalist social forms but do not grasp them as appearances, instead taking these categories positively, affirmatively. Just as the appearance of capital as things (money, machines etc.) and us as separate bourgeois individuals is a real moment produced through capitalist social relations but covering the real flow of life captured as the process of value - alienated labour - our attempts to grasp this world generally reproduce rigid categories of separate subject and object and do not get behind the appearances. The difficulty of TC's writing may we think be a consequence their attempt to resist slipping into fetishized forms of thought which Marxism, as an positivistic ideology based on Marx's insights but distorted back into bourgeois limits, has so often fallen into.

[42] (Translators' note:) Immigrants without legal documentation.

[43] The issues in which these articles were originally published are now out of print but are available on the Aufheben website.

[44] (Translator's note:) 'A propos du texte 'Sur la décadence de Aufheben' appeared (in French) in Théorie Communiste, 15.

[45] To be fair, this point is from a place in the text where we are explaining and acknowledging good points in Radical Chains' perspective.

Oil wars and world orders - old and new

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While the American-led interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s were presented as ‘humanitarian wars’, it was hard to disguise the fact that the invasion of Iraq was primarily motivated by a drive to reassert American power, and in particular its control over the world’s oil supplies. However, in reasserting its power, America has exposed serious fault lines within the 'international (bourgeois) community'. Indeed, in finishing off the job that his father had left done Bush Jnr ended up undermining the New World Order that Bush Snr had proclaimed with his war on Iraq. In this article we seek to place the recent Gulf War in the context of the evolving geo-political-economy that has shaped American foreign policy since the Iran-Iraq conflict.

Introduction

The American-led interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s were presented as 'humanitarian wars'. With the widespread, if not always universal, support of the 'international (bourgeois) community', the liberal apologists for such wars were able to claim that they were being waged to uphold the universal norms of the 'civilised world' that now overrode the old principles of national sovereignty. The conflicting material interests underlying these military adventures were far from apparent.

In stark contrast, it was hard to disguise the fact that the invasion of Iraq was primarily motivated by a drive to reassert American power, and in particular its control over the world's oil supplies. In the face of naked American imperialism, which was determined to take Iraqi oil by force, the 'international (bourgeois) community' was openly split between those who sought to oppose the US and those who favoured a policy of appeasement.

As a consequence, the fashionable talk about 'globalisation', of the emergence of a unified 'transnational bourgeoisie', of an all embracing yet amorphous 'Empire', and of the terminal decline of the nation state has been shoved to one side. The need to understand the geo-politics of the current epoch of capitalism in terms of imperialism and the relation between nation states and 'national capitals' has reasserted itself.

We do not propose to enter into a detailed discussion here concerning theories of globalisation and imperialism. However, it is necessary to make a few preliminary points and observations.

Recognising the continuing importance of imperialism and the nation state does not mean that we return to the classical theories of capitalist imperialism associated with Lenin, Bukharin and Luxemburg. Neither does it mean that we accept the anti-imperialist conclusions that have often been drawn from these classical theories of imperialism, which would lead us to 'critically defend' the 'weaker' capitalist states against the 'stronger'. Whatever their merits, and whatever their errors, these theories belong to a past era of capitalism. However, rejecting 'globalisation' theories does not mean that we deny that there has in recent decades been, in some sense, a tendency towards the 'globalisation' of capitalism that has redefined and reformed the relation of the state to capital.

Of course, it is true that since the second world war the growth in international trade has consistently outpaced the growth in world production. As a consequence, international trade has become increasingly important. However, after the collapse in world trade that came with the break down in the gold-standard in the 1920s and the world slump in the 1930s, the level of world trade was at a low point. Indeed, it has only been in the last few years that world trade as a proportion of the total world production has reached the levels that had existed on the eve of the first world war.

Of course, it is also true that the scale of production in many industries has gone beyond the limits of European sized national economies. Production of many complex manufactured commodities (e.g. cars) are spread across national frontiers and such commodities are produced for more than one national market. But it is only in a relatively few industries that the production and realisation of surplus-value has reached a global scale. At most the 'industrial circuits of capital' are confined to distinct continental blocs. Even in a relatively open economy such as the UK more than two thirds of output is for the domestic market and more than half of what is exported remains within the European Union.

Since the 1970s the development of world money-markets has given rise to what we have termed global finance capital. Vast flows of largely fictitious capital, which dwarf the value of international trade, now swoosh around the world. This growth of global finance capital undoubtedly has led to growing interconnections amongst the world's bourgeoisie and ruling classes as the ownership of surplus value and the direction of its capitalisation have become increasingly internationalised. Nevertheless the ownership and control of most major transnational corporations are concentrated in one country. Furthermore, despite the emergence of supra-national organisations of 'global governance', the nation state remains the principal centre for the political organisation of capital necessary for the mediation of class conflict and for the securing the social and economic conditions for capital accumulation. Thus, despite the 'globalisation of capital', we can still talk about various national bourgeoises, organised around particular nation states, with their own distinctive interests and policies.

Any understanding of the current geo-politics of world capitalism must therefore be in terms of the relations between nation states determined by the underlying tension between the globalisation of finance capital and the far more limited internationalisation of the production and realisation of surplus-value.

The fall of the Eastern Bloc and the 'New World Order'

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 opened up the prospect of a unified global capitalism. The capitalist counter offensive, which had sought to outflank and break up the entrenched positions of the working class in the core western capitalist economies, now found itself with far more room for manoeuvre. With the end of the cold war there was no longer any overriding military or ideological constraints to the full implementation of the neo-liberal policies that had been pioneered by Thatcher and Reagan. With the 'end of history' and the triumph of liberalism and 'free market' capitalism, all national economies had no option but to compete in the new 'global markets'.

In the core capitalist countries of the West, particularly in Western Europe, the 'modernising' factions of the bourgeoisie, armed with the 'free market' triumphalism that accompanied the break up of the Eastern Bloc and the demise of 'actually existing socialism, could now press with fresh vigour for the rolling back of the social democratic post-war settlements and the rigidities and restrictions these placed on the competitiveness and profitability of capital.

In the periphery, the end of the cold war meant that there was no longer any need, on the part of western capitalism, to tolerate the various forms of state-led 'national economic development' that had served to bolster 'third world' states against the 'threat of Communism'. No longer able to play the two superpowers off against each other, the ruling classes of the periphery had little option but to allow themselves become mere local agents of international capital - opening up their nations assets to the plunder of transnational corporations and predations of the western bankers in return for a share in the spoils.

However, the prospect of a unified global capitalist utopia, in which an increasingly transnational bourgeoisie would be free to make a profit how and where it liked, assisted by compliant nation states eager to attract capital investment, was tempered by the very real danger of the disintegration of global capitalism. From the end of the Second World War the common and overriding 'threat of Communism' had served to contain rivalries amongst the western imperialist powers. During the long cold war each nation state in the West had been prepared to compromise their immediate interests in order to maintain western unity. With the fall of the eastern Bloc this was no longer the case.

Following the German and Japanese economic miracles of the 1960s there had been a distinct tendency for the break up of western capitalism into three distinct economic blocs centred around the USA, Germany and Japan. However, despite the economic integration of Western Europe within the European Union, this tendency had always been held in check by the common military threat posed by the USSR. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, the way was open for Eastern Europe to be integrated into a German centred European Union, which would displace the US as the world's largest market and which would also provide German industry with a cheap but highly trained workforce. In Asia the increasing volumes of Japanese foreign investment, which had greatly increased since the rise of the Yen in second half of the 1980s, could be seen as further evidence of the consolidation of an Asian Bloc around Japan.

However, the only state power with the global reach capable of securing a new global order against 'rogue states' and popular resistance to the destabilising effects of an unrestrained 'global capitalism' was that of the USA. Yet, with the fall of the USSR, there re-emerged powerful isolationist tendencies within the US bourgeoisie that were reluctant for the USA to take up the burden of 'world policeman'.

The re-emergence of isolationism and the end of the cold war

The USA's rapid industrialisation in the late nineteenth century had been made possible by the insularity of its economy from the dominance of British manufacturing in the world market. Sheltered by its distance from Britain and protected by high tariff barriers, America's continental-wide economy had provided ample room, and a plentiful supply of raw materials, necessary for the development of the modern large scale capitalist industry of the age.

Against the calls for free trade, and the gold standard, and hence integration into the world market, advocated by the political establishment and bankers of the East Coast then represented by the Democratic Party, large sections of the American industrial bourgeoisie had allied themselves with petit-bourgeois producers and small farmers of the West to form a strong tradition of Populist isolationism in US politics. Even in the 1920s and 30s, when the US had become the most advanced capitalist economy in the world, and had little to fear from free trade and foreign competition, isolationism remained a potent political force. Isolationism was able to overcome the attempts to develop the more liberal and active foreign policy pursued by President Woodrow Wilson, which had led to the USA's intervention in World War I and which had culminated in America's leading role in the formation of the League of Nations.

It was only after World War II that this isolationist tradition was submerged as the American bourgeoisie were mobilised against the 'world-wide threat of Communism'. Even then isolationist tendencies were not entirely eliminated. During the period of detente in the 1970s many European leaders had feared isolationist tendencies in America would lead to the US disengagement from Europe. With the decline and fall of the USSR the way was open for a resurgence of US isolationism.

Of course, the economy of the USA in the late 1980s was very different from what it had been 50 years earlier. The growth of world trade and international capital flows, dominated by mostly American banks and multinationals, in the decades following the World War II had meant that the accumulation of American capital was far more interdependent with capital accumulation elsewhere in the world than it had been during the inter-war years. With investments of American capital across the western world, the US state could not so easily disentangle itself from its commitments as the sole world super-power. Nevertheless, faced with the huge costs of maintaining the global reach of US military and geo-political dominance, a substantial coalition could be built around the demand for the minimization of the US foreign policy involvement beyond North and South America.[1]

The arguments of this isolationist tendency within the American bourgeoisie were fortified by the perilous state of the US economy at the end of the 1980s. Although Reagan's acceleration of the arms race can be seen to have played an important part in the downfall of the 'Evil Empire', it had also placed the USA in severe economic difficulties. The huge growth in military expenditure, coupled with Reagan's policy of tax cuts for the rich, had opened up a big hole in the Government finances. To finance its growing budget deficits the Reagan government had borrowed vast sums on the financial markets pushing up American interest rates. This had led to a substantial rise in the exchange rate of the Dollar. Faced with both rising interests rates and a highly overvalued Dollar, large swathes of American industry found itself unable to compete with the flood of imports from the 'newly industrialising economies' of East Asia. As a consequence of this flood of imports, America's trade deficit with the rest of the world soared.

It is true that by the end 1980s concerted efforts by the world's leading central banks and strenuous efforts on the part of the US administration had gone some way towards unwinding the gross imbalances generated by the Reaganomics of the early 1980s. But with the financial crisis of 1987 and the subsequent slide into recession there appeared little prospect that such attempts to substantially reduce the huge trade and budget deficits could be sustained.

For many bourgeois commentators, America's economic problems were symptoms of its underlying economic decline that had become apparent since the late 1960s. Far from reversing America's relative decline as a world power, as they had originally been intended to do, Reagan's economic policies had appeared to have greatly accelerated it. Whereas at the beginning of the 1980s the US had still remained the world's largest net creditor, by the end of the decade it had become the world's largest net debtor. It seemed that American manufacturing industry was increasingly unable to compete with 'lean production' methods of Japan, and the cheap and compliant labour of East Asia. Furthermore, America's attempt to follow the historical example of Britain, by prolonging its economic hegemony by shifting away from the production of surplus-value in industrial production to the interception of the surplus-value produced elsewhere by means of its dominance of international finance, looked like being short lived. The Japanese banks and financial institutions, bloated as it subsequently turned out by the unsustainable asset bubble of the late 1980s, now loomed large and threatened to invade American capital's last place of refuge.

Hence, for the pessimists amongst the American bourgeoisie, it seemed that at the very moment of its triumph over its great adversary, the USSR, America had entered the beginning of its demise as the world's economic super-power. America, like all previous empires, it seemed, was destined to decline, weighed down by the sheer military cost of maintaining its imperialist ambitions. At the end of the 1980s, it did not seem to many that the 21st century would be a 'new American century'. The future seemed to belong to the land of the rising Sun.

Multilateralism and the New World Order

At first sight it might seem that the fall of the USSR should have allowed the American state to assume the role of the sole global super-power at the same time as gaining a huge peace dividend. With the fall of the USSR, America's military might dwarfed that of all the other major military powers put together. There would seemed to have been plenty of scope for cutting military expenditure without impairing America's ability to 'police' any new world order. Of course, there were powerful interests amongst the American military-industrial complex opposed to large scale cuts in weapon spending, but perhaps a more important obstacle to such cuts was the remaining legacy of the working class offensive of the 1960s and 1970s - the 'Vietnam syndrome'.

The American bourgeoisie has long been reluctant to send their sons (and now their daughters) to war. They have preferred to leave not only the rank and file but also much of the officer corps of the American armed forces to be drawn predominantly from the working class - and in doing so had provided an important escape route and career path out of the urban ghettos. This has been possible because American imperialism was not built on colonialism or prolonged military occupation of foreign lands. Indeed, through much of the century America had sought to break up the old colonial empires of the European imperial powers. Instead, the US has depended on its economic supremacy, covert operations and proxy forces to maintain its on hold its 'empire' and advance its foreign interests.

As a consequence, the American army, in contrast to that of Britain and France, has not been used to export social relations into its dependencies. Nor has the American Army had much practice dealing with the problem of maintaining morale of soldiers stationed in far away places fighting people for interests very remote from their own.

However, the problems for the American military of being involved in a prolonged conflict in adverse conditions in foreign lands during a period of heighten class conflict at home, became all too clear with the Vietnam War. For the American bourgeoisie the defeat in Vietnam, which was to a significant extent caused by the insubordination of the American armed forces, was a humiliation. For the front line junior office who experienced the fragging, mutiny and collapse in morale at first hand, it was traumatic. By the late 1980s this generation of junior officers were graduating into positions of high command giving rise to a general aversion amongst the American military to risky or prolonged military engagements.[2]

The overriding concern of the American military in their strategic and tactical planning, which emerged at the end of the Cold War, has been to avoid both large numbers of casualties and long term military commitments by ensuring the use of overwhelming force.[3] To achieve this objective, military planning has depended on increasing massively the firepower available to each soldier, a preference for air war over ground war and the automation of weapons of war in order to keep military personnel out of the firing range. Yet increasing the 'organic composition of destruction' in this way has meant ever more sophisticated and thus costly weaponry. To avoid the risk of casualties, the reliance on the soldier and his rifle has been replaced by aircraft and 'smart bombs'. As a consequence, the costs of maintaining US military supremacy have escalated.

If the US was to act as global policeman in the post-cold war era, it seemed necessary that the American armed forces would require the capability of intervening anywhere in the world against 'failed' or 'rogue states'. But this meant that the high costs of matching the Russians in conventional and nuclear forces would now be replaced by the huge costs of the rapid deployment of overwhelming force anywhere in the world.

Thus, although there were many amongst the American bourgeoisie whose mouths watered at the prospect of a new unified global capitalism under the aegis of an all powerful American state, there were many who feared that an interventionalist foreign policy would be far too expensive. For the industrial capitalist with large amounts of capital sunk in plant and equipment in America, or with a largely American market; or for those in the ruling and middle classes fearful that the cuts in social provision of the Reagan years would lead to increasing social discontent, a more isolationist foreign policy seemed a more preferable option.

However, there was one trump card that could be used against proponents of isolationism - that card was the American economy's dependence on oil. With the depletion of oil reserves in the Americas, the US faced the prospect of increasing reliance on the one of the most volatile and militarised regions of the world - the Middle East. It was around this issue of oil that Bush Snr sought to resolve the dilemma between an expensive interventionism and a cheap isolationism by adopting a policy of multilateralism with his 'New World Order'. And it is therefore no surprise that Bush Snr's 'New World Order' was both proclaimed and consummated with the Second Gulf War of 1991 - a war fought by American, British and French forces, but paid for by Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia.

From the First to the Second Gulf War

The Iranian Counter-Revolution in the early 1980s had dramatically altered the situation in the Middle East and particularly the all important oil rich gulf states for America and the West. The long established pro-western Shah had been replaced by a pan-Islamic theocracy committed to spreading its version of anti-western Islamism across the middle east and beyond. The rift between the USA and Saudi Arabia, which had arisen over Israel and the oil blockade of 1973, had largely been overcome by 1979 and the internal conflicts between the traditionalist and the modernising middle classes had been mitigated by the greatly enhanced oil revenues. However, despite being well equipped, Saudi Arabia's army was generally regarded as being ineffective, leaving the country vulnerable to hostile neighbours. Furthermore, while the internal tensions were to some extent contained by the growth in oil revenues, they remained a threat to the long term stability of the Saudi regime.

The third major power in the Gulf was Iraq. The US had backed the Ba'athists in the 1960s in order to prevent the Iraqi Communist Party from taking power. However, once the Ba'athists had consolidated power, they began to adopt a policy of state-led national development that followed the nationalisation of the oil industry in 1971. As a result the Ba'ath government in the 1970s gained the support of the Iraqi Communist Party, which still remained the largest party in the country, and increasingly became aligned with the USSR. Hence, following the Iranian Revolution, of the three major powers in the Gulf, two were avowedly hostile to the West and one, Saudi Arabia, while pro-western, was potentially unstable.

However, there was little to unite the pan-Islamic regime of Iran with the pan-Arab modernising regime in Iraq. On coming to power Saddam Hussein took the opportunity of Iran's disarray following its revolution to launch an attack ostensibly in order to regain territory that had been lost earlier in the decade to the Shah. This was to lead to the first Gulf War of 1981-88, which was to last for eight years and leave an estimated one million dead.

The US took the opportunity of backing the 'lesser evil' of Saddam Hussein in a war that served to contain both Iran and Iraq. Crucially it also served to reduce the supply of both Iraqi and Iranian oil on to the world market at a time when the oil shortage of the 1970s had given way to the oil glut of the 1980s, which threatened to lead to a collapse in the price that would wipe out the American high cost oil industry. Indeed, for the US it became advantageous to prolong the war, and as the Iran-contra scandal revealed, the Americans were quite prepared to supply arms to both sides.

For Saddam Hussein the war provided a perfect means to consolidate his newly established position as leader both within the potentially factious Ba'athist party and within the country as a whole. The imperatives of war allowed Saddam Hussein to ruthlessly crush both opposition within his own Ba'athist Party and to destroy the organisation of the Communist Party that had by now become completely compromised by its support for the regime and its commitment to nationalism. With the mobilisation for war Saddam Hussein was able to militarise society by bringing a vast proportion of the working class under direct military discipline. Trade Unions and other organisations of 'civil society', which had been dominated by the Iraqi Communist Party, were integrated within the party-state.

However, after Iraq's early successes, the war became bogged down. Opposition to the regime manifested itself in the form of mass desertions, particularly in those areas like Kurdistan that were distant from Baghdad. With falling army morale the tide of war began to turn against Iraq and Saddam Hussein became increasingly reliant on the support of the US. In order to repulse repeated offensives by the Iranian army Saddam Hussein resorted to chemical and biological weapons, importing the necessary materials from the West, and the US had no objections, not only against Iranian forces but also against Iraq's own deserters.

In the face of mass desertions and mutinies within the Iraqi army it was clear that even with the use of chemical and biological weapons and US military intelligence Iraq could not withstand Iranian assaults in the long term. In 1988 the US intervened by bring warships into the Gulf in order to 'protect international shipping' and effectively destroyed the Iranian navy. This was sufficient to bring an exhausted Iran to the negotiating table.

After eight years of war both Iran and Iraq were left economically exhausted. Both countries were weighed down with debts and were left with a largely dilapidated oil industry. The situation was particularly acute for Iraq, which had run up vast debts with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which had been more than willing to lend money to Iraq as a means to prevent the spread of the Iranian Revolution to their own populations.

The state-party patronage system, which served to keep Saddam Hussein in power, had come to depend on the nationalised oil industry and the state control over its revenues. Therefore there was little scope for cutting a deal with the western oil companies, which would have involved relinquishing a certain amount of ownership and control in return for foreign investment to finance the reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry. Yet, saddled with debts and impoverished after eight years of war, the Iraqi state lacked the capital necessary for the reconstruction of its oil industry. Unable to expand production, its only hope to increase its oil revenue was for a rise in the price of oil. However, by 1988 the problem of the oil glut had become particularly acute.

The OPEC countries, led by Saudi Arabia, had sought to shore up the oil price by establishing production quotas for each member state. Yet, while it was in the interest of each state that all the other states abided by their quotas, there was always the temptation for each state to claim exceptional circumstances and produce more than their prescribed quota. Saudi Arabia as the largest producer, and in its role as the leader of the Arab world, had taken on the burden of compensating for the excess production of oil by other OPEC countries by restricting its own production. However, by the late 1980s its own pressing social and economic crisis was making the Saudi Arabian Government increasingly reluctant to sacrifice its own oil revenues for the sake of maintaining high oil prices on behalf of the rest of OPEC. Instead Saudi Arabia adopted a policy of allowing the oil price to fall sharply as a means of forcing the rest of OPEC to comply with agreed oil production quotas or face the consequence of a complete collapse in the price of oil. As a result the price of oil at one point dropped below $10 a barrel - a fall in part due to the increased production of oil from Iraq and Iran following the end of the war.

In such circumstance a confrontation with Kuwait offered an enticing prospect for the Iraqi regime. Within the Arab world Kuwait was widely blamed for undermining OPEC. Here was a country with a small population, which was cheating on its oil quotas, not in order to deal with serious social and economic problems, but merely to enrich an already bloated and decadent ruling elite. A confrontation with Kuwait could be presented as a blow struck for the Arab world as a whole, enhancing Saddam Hussein's prestige both at home and throughout the 'Arab nation'.

Furthermore, important oil fields straddled the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. By increasing production from these oil fields, while Iraq was still recovering from the war and unable to expand its own production, Kuwait was in effect pumping out, and thereby stealing, 'Iraqi oil'. A diplomatic confrontation with Kuwait, backed up the willingness to use Iraq's overwhelming military force, would at the very least force Kuwait restrict its oil production and even allow Iraq to redraw its borders around these disputed oil fields.

Kuwait was militarily weak and diplomatically isolated in the Arab world. The only constraint on Iraq was the likely reaction of the US. However, Saddam Hussein had good reasons to expect the USA to keep out of any confrontation with Kuwait. Firstly, the US could be expected to be not too pleased with Kuwait for undermining OPEC's efforts to shore up the price of oil, which after all threatened economic viability of America's own oil industry. Secondly, Iraq had proved itself a useful ally in containing Iran and could at least expect the US to allow it some 'reward' for the sacrifices it had made during eight years of war.

As a consequence, in the Spring of 1990 Iraq re-opened long standing border disputes with Kuwait, and backed up this up by amassing troops on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. Indeed, the US did seem to turn a blind eye to Iraq belligerent attitude to Kuwait. In a meeting with Saddam Hussein the US ambassador, April Glaspie, was later reported as indicating that the US had no interest in border disputes between Iraq and Kuwait and as late as July Bush Snr. opposed moves by the US congress to take action against Iraq for its aggressive attitude towards Kuwait.[4]

Emboldened by the American's relaxed attitude Saddam Hussein made what seems to be a last minute decision to go for the complete annexation of Kuwait. On the 3rd of August 1990 the world woke up to find Saddam Hussein in control of 20% of the world's oil reserves and with little to stop him from attacking Saudi Arabia and taking another 20%. While the US, and indeed the rest of the Arab world, had been prepared to turn a blind eye to Saddam Hussein sabre rattling against Kuwait and would have even countenanced a limited military incursion to impose a de facto redrawing of the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, a full-scale invasion was another matter.

No doubt Saddam Hussein had banked on the fact that the US would be reluctant to carry out the huge and unprecedented military operation that would be necessary to evict Iraqi forces already established in Kuwait. However, in doing so Saddam Hussein had failed to take account of the impact on US foreign policy of the rapidly changing situation at a global level. By the Summer of 1990 it had become clear that the USSR was rapidly disintegrating and could no longer act as a world power. As we have already pointed out, the alarm over Iraq's invasion provided the perfect opportunity to mobilise the American and Western bourgeoisie around a multilateralist interventionalist policy that was to be enshrined in Bush Snr's New World Order.

The Second Gulf War (1991) and its aftermath

After months of preparations the coalition forces took no chances in operation 'Desert Storm'. With total air supremacy the coalition forces began with a six weeks bombing campaign. The Iraqi army positions were carpet-bombed while the country's infrastructure - roads, sewage plants, electricity power stations etc. - was systematically destroyed. An estimated 100,000-200,000 Iraqi troops were slaughtered and tens of thousands of civilians died either directly in the bombing or through the spread of diseases due to lack of clean water.

With morale destroyed by six weeks of incessant bombing the advance of coalition ground forces met with little resistance. Iraqi army conscripts deserted en masse at the first opportunity and uprisings broke out in the Kurdish north and in the south of Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime was on the point of collapse.

However, facing the prospect of either allowing the disintegration of Iraq, which could only be to Iran's advantage, or else committing itself to a full scale occupation of Iraq, which would involve putting down the uprisings, the US decided to pull back. The invasion of Iraq was halted and every effort was made to shore up the Iraqi regime. Fearing that deserting Iraqi conscripts would join up with the uprisings in the South the USAF and RAF directed to bomb them as they fled the front-lines, leading to the infamous 'massacre on the road to Basra'. In terms of the cease fire agreed with Saddam Hussein, all Iraqi aircraft were grounded except the helicopters necessary to put down insurgents. The coalition forces then stood by while Saddam Hussein loyal republican guards ruthlessly crushed the uprisings. As the recent uncovering of mass graves testify, thousands of insurgents in the south were executed, while in the North thousands more died of cold and hunger after fleeing into the mountains on the Turkish border.

It was only in May, weeks after the end of the war, that the 'no fly zones' were introduced to protect the 'Kurds in the North and Shiites in the South'. By then the insurrections, which had taken on a distinctly proletarian character, had been crushed, allowing the US and Britain to promote a nationalist and religious opposition the Saddam Hussein.[5]

For the Western powers as a whole, it was now clear that Saddam Hussein had proved to be an unpredictable leader who, if left unchecked, could act to destabilise the middle east and threaten the security of the world's oil supplies. Having kept Saddam Hussein in power the question arose as to how to contain him without impairing his ability to act as a counter-weight to neighbouring Iran.

The answer offered by the US, backed by Britain, was to impose economic sanctions on the pretext that Iraq possessed unauthorised weapons of mass destruction. Iraq would still be able to maintain its army and conventional weapons but punitive sanctions would be imposed until it could be verified by UN inspectors that all 'weapons of mass destruction' were destroyed. It was argued that under such pressure either Saddam Hussein would be brought to heel or else he would be eventually replaced by a more amenable leader of Iraq. Hence eventually Iraq could be 'readmitted into the international (bourgeois) community'.

Of course, for the US and Britain sanctions had the additional advantage of keeping Iraqi oil off the world market. Not only was Iraq forbidden to export oil without UN authorisation, it was unable to import the spare parts necessary to maintain oil production.

By repeatedly insisting on moving the goal posts concerning the weapons inspections the US was able to prolong sanctions throughout most of the 1990s. However, the policy of using sanctions to contain Iraq depended on support of the other great powers and a commitment on the part of the US to multilateralism. By the end of the 1990s this was coming into question.

The limits of multilateralism

Fears that the fall of the USSR would lead both to the break up of the western world into competing trade blocs and to the decline of the USA were to prove a little premature. In Japan the financial bubble of the 1980s burst, exposing the underlying weakness of Japanese capital. Weighed down by enormous 'non-performing' debts the Japanese economy entered a prolonged period of stagnation from which it has yet to recover. In Europe the brief boom that followed German re-unification in the early 1990s was to be followed by nearly a decade of slow growth. In contrast, the US in the 1990s was able to reassert itself as the central pole of global capital accumulation.

By the mid-1990s it had become clear that the Reaganomics of the early 1980s had assisted a major restructuring of the American economy. The over-valued dollar and high interest rates had hastened the shift away from the long established manufacturing industries of the North and East, as these industries were forced either to rationalise or relocate outside the US. At the same time the huge military expenditure acted as substantial subsidy for the research and development necessary to establish the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) that were to become decisive in 1990s.

This restructuring of US capital necessarily involved a decisive defeat of the American working class. The highly paid and organised car workers of Detroit faced compliance with the new 'flexible' working practices demanded by 'lean production', or the relocation of their jobs to Mexico or South Korea. The 'new economy' required highly skilled and educated computer programmers and software engineers - although often on short term contracts - but it also could depend on cheap, often illegal, immigrant labour from across the Mexican border to undertake the growing profusion of McJobs. Cuts in welfare, continued well into the 1990s under Clinton, increased the competition on those in work from the industrial reserve army of unemployed. As a result, American capital was able to hold down wages and ensure that it had a flexible and compliant workforce.

With greater 'labour flexibility' American capital could take full advantage of the 'just in time' production, computerised stock control and total quality control methods, which had been made possible by the new information technologies, and that served to raise the rate of profit by speeding up the turnover of capital. At the same time, American capital succeeded in making American workers work more hours for the same pay increasing absolute production of surplus value, and with this the rate of profit As a result, after nearly twenty years of decline, the profitability of US capital had begun to steadily increase from the mid-1980s.

This revival of the profitability of American capital served to sustain the large inflows of money-capital into the U.S. that had originally arisen to finance the huge budget deficits of the Reagan years. But increasingly these inflows were not so much concerned with appropriating the interest payments made on government debt issued to bridge the Federal Government's budget deficit, but to buy a share in the rising profitability of American capital. By the late 1990s the inflows of money-capital were more than enough to finance the chronic trade deficit that had arisen from the decimation of US manufacturing industry under Reagan, leaving a substantial 'investment surplus'. This 'investment surplus' was channelled through the sophisticated and well-connected American financial system to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the newly emerging market economies of Asia, Eastern Europe and South America.

As a result, the strong revival of the profitability of American capital, particularly relative to its main competitors, served to reassert the USA's position as the central pole of world capital accumulation. For the newly 'unified bourgeoisie' across the globe, the US was were the money was to be made. Its expanding domestic markets provided opportunities for manufacturers across the world to sell their products. Its sophisticated and well-connected financial system, protected by the US state, offered good returns for the world's investors and speculators. The control, if not the ownership, of the capital of the world was being increasingly concentrated in the USA and Wall Street.

The emergence of a unified global capitalism centred on the USA provided the basis that was necessary to sustain New World Order, which had been proclaimed by Bush Snr at the onset of the Second Gulf War of 1991. In this new order, the old multilateral organisations of the Cold War - the United Nations, NATO, The World Bank, IMF - had been revamped, and together with newly established ones such as the World Trade Organisation, were to act as nodes in a new rules based system of global governance. This new rules-based system served to contain the imperialist rivalries of the great powers and ensure 'a level playing field' for competing capitals of different national affiliations. The various multilateral organisations served both to enforce these rules and to act as forums through which global policies could be formulated and implemented to address common economic and political problems that faced the world's bourgeoisie as a whole.

The US was to play the leading role in the New World Order. As the first among equals, and the main source of funds for these multilateral organisations of global governance, the US had a determining influence in the drawing up of the international rules. The US, of course, was obliged to abide by these rules, and often was obliged pursue its foreign policy objectives through lengthy diplomacy and negotiations with the multilateral organisations. However, in return the other great powers were obliged to share the military and economic burdens required in defending and extending global capitalism, particularly against those 'rogue states' that still refused to accept the wonders of neo-liberalism.

However, by the late 1990s the New World Order and the US's multilateral foreign policy began to reach its limits.

The crisis of multilateralism

For Bush Snr, the New World Order had emerged as a means to resolve the central dilemma of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. How was the USA to police the world without incurring unsustainable military costs? The answer, as we have seen, was that in return for consultation and a commitment to commonly agreed rules the other great economic and military powers would share the burden of maintaining the conditions necessary for capital accumulation across the world.

At first the reassertion of the US as the central pole of global capital accumulation had served to sustain the New World Order. The recovery of the American economy from the recession of the early 1990s dragged the rest of the world developed economies behind it. As the US became the main centre for investment and speculative opportunities large swathes of the bourgeoisie in both Europe and in the periphery developed interests in the US economy and sought to emulate its success by advocating neo-liberal policies at home. This pro-American orientation of large parts of the bourgeoisie outside the USA meant that the US state could act, in concert with the international organisations of 'global governance, as the prime representative of the interests of the newly emerging 'global bourgeoisie'.

However, this very economic resurgence of the US also served to give added weight to the disadvantages of a multilateralist foreign policy for the American bourgeoisie.

Firstly, by the end of the 1990s there were growing concerns among sections of the American bourgeoisie that the Europeans were becoming increasingly adept at tying America down through a series of international treaties that threatened to seriously damage US economic superiority. From the Kyoto agreement on global warming, which required large cuts in carbon emissions from the USA, through the restrictions Europe imposed on bio-technology with its opposition to GM foods, to various trade disputes, European capital could seen to be taking advantage of America's compliance with the rules of international diplomacy.

Secondly, while America delivered its side of the bargain, the other great powers, particularly those in Europe, were failing to deliver their side. Europe proved both unable to develop a common and coherent foreign policy, and unwilling to increase its spending on defence. As a result, Europe as a whole was unable to take up its full share of the military and diplomatic burden of policing the world.

At first, the failure of the European Union to formulate a common foreign policy had its advantages for the US. It meant that the European Union was unable to influence the transition of the former Eastern bloc from state capitalism. Proposals that the transition of former Eastern bloc countries should be towards some model of 'social market capitalism' did not last much beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead the policies of 'short sharp shock', of rapid deregulation and privatisation, much favoured by US and global financial capital, were placed at the top of the agenda. The only question allowed was how short and how sharp these shock policies should be in the varying economies concerned. Of course, these 'shock therapies' tended to last much longer than expected and led to disastrous results for the majority of people in the former Eastern bloc. However, they also created a new pro-American and neo-liberal orientated bourgeoisie in these countries, as wealth became concentrated in the hands of a few - forming the basis of what was to become the 'new Europe' of Rumsfeld.

But the European Union's failure to develop a common European foreign policy, due to the continued rivalries between its great powers, also meant that it was unable to take up it role in defending the New World Order. This became evident in the case of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. It was rivalries between the European powers that had precipitated the war between Croatia and Serbia and then to the Bosnian war in the first place; and it was these rivalries that blocked the European Union's attempts to intervene and impose a solution. As a result, the US had been obliged, rather reluctantly, to intervene and commit its own troops to impose its peace. For many in the American bourgeoisie, the example of Yugoslavia showed all too well that their fractious and gutless European brothers were incapable of even policing their own back-yard let alone aiding America in its global responsibilities.

The financial crisis the broke out in Asia in 1987-8 punctured the appetite of American capital for investments in 'newly emerging market economies'. Japan remained locked in chronic stagnation and the European bourgeoisie had made little headway in pushing back its entrenched working class. The 'investment surplus' that had flooded into the 'newly emerging economies' now turned to the US itself, creating the beginnings of what was to become the Dot.Com boom. Amidst the euphoria that surround the so-called new weightless economy that could defy all the previously known economic laws of gravity, it could appear that the US had little need of the rest of the world. America was were the profits and action was and the rest of the world would either have to keep up or go the wall.

The general tenor of the growing criticisms of the established multilateralist American foreign policy, with its now almost regular commitment to Clintonite 'humanitarian wars', was decidedly isolationist. However, amongst the growing opposition to the orthodox American foreign policy, there emerged a distinct strand of more far sighted and outward looking strategic thinkers who were to become known as the neo-conservatives.

For the neo-conservatives, America could not ignore the rest of the world - it had to dominate the rest of the world or else be eventually dominated by some other power in the world. But if the USA was to maintain its global hegemony in the long term it could not simply rely on its current economic superiority. On the contrary, it had to assert its political and military power in order to shape the world in its own interests. America needed to secure the supply of strategic commodities into the future, it needed to prise open the economies of central Asia that still remained impervious to American capital, and it had to nip potential military and economic rivals in the bud.[6]

However, to pursue such an aggressive foreign policy had two important implications, as the neo-conservatives were well aware. Firstly, on a diplomatic level, an aggressive pursuit of American interests across the globe would inevitably come into conflict with the interests of its 'allies'. The US would therefore have to throw off the encumbrances and entanglements of the multilateralism that had evolved out of the Cold War under Bush Snr and Bill Clinton.

Secondly, the neo-conservatives recognised that there had to be a major re-think of military strategy. Against the orthodox military thinking of the generals, which stressed the need for overwhelming force, the neo-conservatives called for the deployment of smaller more flexible forces using more selective 'smart' weapons. Not only would the deployment of smaller forces be far more rapid, but they would be far cheaper. As a result the costs of 'policing of the world' could be substantially reduced.

However, as the neo-conservatives were well aware, the deployment of smaller forces would also carry far more risk of high casualties if things went wrong. If their new military strategy was to work the ghost of Vietnam that still haunted the American bourgeoisie and the American high command had to be exorcised. After all, insubordination verging on mutiny against the Vietnam war had come at a high point in working class struggles in the US - now that the American working class had been more or less pacified fears that military involvement would lead to 'another Vietnam' remained little more than a spectre.

Although the neo-conservatives that were to rally around the Plan for A New American Century were well organised and held influential positions, they remained a largely marginal position. With the election of Bush Jnr the neo-conservatives captured important positions. However, in the first few months US policy appeared to be taking a more isolationist direction, rather than that of an aggressive unilateralism advocated by the neo-conservatives. But once again it was oil that trumped the isolationist case. With the explosion of the Twin Towers impressed once again the importance of the Middle East to the US economy and 'way of life'. And the neo-conservative agenda became the order of the day.

The Third Gulf War (2003) and the New World Order of Bush Jnr.

The immediate fundamental problem facing the oil industry in the 1980s and 1990s was that the world's capacity to produce oil was growing faster than the world's consumption of oil. Whereas the 1970s had been an era of oil shortage the following decades were to be an era of an oil glut. But by the mid-1990s the more strategic thinkers of the bourgeoisie, particularly those within the oil industry, were becoming concerned that in the not too distant future the world could once again find itself facing an acute oil shortage and find itself increasingly dependent on anti-western governments in the Gulf.

Firstly, by the 1990s it was becoming clear that the rate of discovery of new potential oil fields was falling rapidly. Chronically low oil prices meant that there was little incentive to find new sources of oil. Also most of the most likely areas for the discovery of oil had already been searched. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the non-OPEC fields that had come on tap after the 'oil price shocks' of the 1970s, most notably those in the North Sea and Alaska, were reaching the end of their peak of production and were about to enter a period of decline. As a consequence, with continued economic growth increasing the demand for oil it was predicted that the West would become increasingly dependent on oil from the middle east and could face an oil crisis as soon as the year 2010.[7]

These fears that the current oil glut would give way to an oil shortage in perhaps little more than a decade had a decided influence on the evolution of US foreign policy towards the Gulf states and brought about a two-pronged approach. Firstly, it became clear that the policy of containment towards both Iraq and Iran would have to be brought to a conclusion in the medium term by bringing them back into the fold of the 'international (bourgeois) community'. Secondly, it was hoped that this policy of rehabilitation of these oil rich 'rogue Gulf states' could be complemented by developing the oil fields in Africa and the former USSR and by developing alternatives to oil such as natural gas and the 'hydrogen economy'.

However, there were major problems facing such a response to the future threat of a new oil crisis. Although all the main capitalist powers had an interest in maintaining a secure and reliable source of oil and, as a consequence, had fully supported the policy of containment of both Iraq and Iran, there was a distinct division of interests concerning how such containment should be brought to an end, particularly as regards Iraq. For the high-cost oil producers, the UK and the US, it had been important to keep as much Iraqi oil off the world market as possible in the short term in order to shore up the oil price. Not only had the US and the UK led the war on Iraq in the first place but had also been the prime advocates of maintaining punitive sanctions in the decade after the Second Gulf War of 1991. However, the mainly oil-consuming nations, such France and Germany, were far less concerned with falling oil prices in the short term. Indeed, much to the chagrin of the Americans, the French and Germans, joined also by the Russians, increasingly began to exploit the resolute adherence of British and American firms to maintaining sanctions on Iraq to steal a march on their competitors by doing back door deals with the Iraqi regime in the hope of gaining privileged access to the development of Iraqi oil in the future when sanctions were lifted.

By 1998, after seven years of UN inspections, it was becoming clear that Iraq had been disarmed of its so-called 'weapons of mass destruction'. Facing the end of its sole justification of sanctions that kept Iraqi oil off the world market, the US, on the pretext of a dispute concerning the numbers of inspectors allowed into the so-called Presidential Palaces, ordered the withdrawal of all UN weapons inspectors and launched a four day bombing campaign of Iraq. Then, backed by its faithful ally Britain, the US repeatedly blocked any attempt to allow the return of the UN weapon inspectors. There then emerged a stalemate over Iraq. By stalling the return of weapons inspectors the US and Britain were able to prevent the lifting of sanctions against Iraq and prevent the French, Germans and Russians gaining a head start in the race for Iraqi oil. But at the same time attempts to shore up sanctions against Iraq, which were becoming increasingly ignored, only served to lock out British and American firms.

The main hope for reducing reliance on the Gulf states was the development of the vast oil and natural gas fields surrounding the Caspian Sea. But most of these fields belonged to the former USSR. This meant that not only did they fall under the sphere of influence of the Russian state but also only existing ways of piping the oil to the west lay through Russia. Following the privatisation of the Russian oil and gas industries under Yeltsin the ownership had become concentrated into the hands of a few very power 'oligarchs'. With the strengthening of the Russian state with Putin, it became clear that the both the oligarchs and the Russian state would insist on driving a hard bargain with West for the extraction of oil and gas from central Asia.

Of course, it was feasible to pipe oil and gas from Caspian Sea via routes that did not go through Russia. Geographically Iran was the obvious way of piping Caspian oil out but this was not on, for obvious political reasons. The other alternatives were: through the Caucuses and then via Turkey or the Balkans, or through Afghanistan. However, all these routes involved very long pipelines running through potentially unstable countries and involved high development costs. As a consequence, such plans were to remain largely speculative, being used mainly as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from the Russians.

However, even if the Western oil companies were able to gain access to Caspian oil and gas on reasonable terms from the Russians the problem remained that the costs of developing these relatively untapped fields would be very high and eventually operating costs would be far higher than those of the Gulf states. As a consequence, there were considerable doubts as to whether Caspian oil fields could replace Saudi Arabia, or the other Gulf states, as the 'swing producer' that could regulate the price of oil by increasing or decreasing its scale of production.

For the neo-conservative critics of the multilateral foreign policies of the Clinton era, the two-pronged strategy of dealing with the problem of a future oil shortage and America's increasing reliance on the Gulf states had become bogged down. At best they would require time to work but for the neo-conservatives time was running out. Pointing to the instability of Saudi Arabia the neo-conservatives warned that the US may well wake up to find that all the states on the Gulf would have become anti-American and, with the onset of an oil shortage, these states would be able to hold the US, and indeed the entire West, to ransom!

For the neo-conservatives it was necessary to cut through all the diplomatic niceties of multilateralism and directly intervene in the Middle East in order to reshape it in America's interests while it was still possible to do so. For the neo-conservatives the fall of the USSR had opened up the possibility for the US to restructure the Middle East and the Gulf states with the Second Gulf War of 1991 but Bush Snr had lost his nerve and had bottled out. As such Iraq was unfinished business.

An invasion of Iraq would not only allow the US to appropriate the second largest proven oil reserves in the world, it would also show in no uncertain terms that the USA was willing and able to impose a 'regime change' anywhere in the world. American troops could be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia but, with bases in Iraq, America could intervene in when ever necessary.

At the same time, America would be in a better position to put pressure on Iran. Iran is the great prize for the neo-conservative project. Not only has it been a great thorn in the side of US foreign policy since the since the overthrow of the Shah, it also has undeveloped oil reserves almost equal to those of Iraq. Iran is also well placed geographically. Not only does it command the Persian Gulf but also borders the Caspian Sea. Iran is perfectly placed to provide an outlet for the vast oil and natural gas fields of central Asia that would otherwise have to pass through Russia.

Towards war

During their years in the political wilderness the neo-conservatives could only despair at the continued complacency and inertia of US foreign. As the neo-conservatives admitted, it was felt that only a event on the scale of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour in 1942 would be sufficient to mobilise the American bourgeoisie around the neo-conservative agenda. As we have already noted, although the neo-conservatives were able to capture key positions in Bush Jnr's new administration, and although they had the backing of influential interests both in the military-industrial complex and oil industry, the neo-conservatives remained a minor voice in the formation of US foreign policy. Faced with what they saw as the 'liberal pessimism' of the state department, and an overcautious and conservative military high command on one-side, and the head-in-the sand isolationist tendencies within the Republican Party on the other, it seemed in the first few months of Bush Jnr's Presidency that the neo-conservatives would remain as prisoners within the Bush administration and the political establishment.

However, the events of September 11th 2001 came to the rescue. In the midst of the hysteria that was whipped up following the attack on the Twin Towers the analogy with Pearl Harbour was firmly established. The USA was at war with an enemy all the more fearsome by the fact of it being amorphous and invisible. Petty particular interests had now to put to one side, so that the nation, indeed all the 'free world', could unite in the 'War on Terrorism'.[8] With the US bourgeoisie, and indeed much of the population, shocked out of their complacency, the Bush administration was able to seize the political initiative by adopting the neo-conservative agenda.

Within days of September 11th the more eager neo-conservatives were already pressing for a war on Iraq. However, it was soon accepted that an immediate attack on Afghanistan would be a useful detour and prelude to the remaking of the middle east with a war on Iraq. After all a war against Afghanistan could be far more easily sold to American public opinion than an immediate war on Iraq. There was not a shred evidence that linked the secularist Iraqi regime with Al Qaida, indeed it was well recognised that Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were bitter enemies. In contrast, Afghanistan was sheltering the very master-mind of the attack on the Twin Towers.

In addition an invasion of a 'failed state' such as Afghanistan, which lacked even the semblance of a conventional army, could be launched in a matter of weeks, thereby maintaining the political momentum of the 'War on Terrorism'. In contrast, an invasion of Iraq could take months to prepare, allowing plenty of time for the effect of hyperbole surrounding September 11th to dissipate. For the neo-conservatives an invasion of Afghanistan would also have the advantage of allowing the US to gain both a toe-hold in Central Asia and to secure the eastern flank of Iran.

The easy victory in Afghanistan appeared to vindicate the neo-conservatives. Despite the dire warnings from the liberal faint-hearts that the US would follow both Britain and Russia in becoming mired in a prolonged guerrilla war in the mountains of Afghanistan, the invasion succeeded with few American casualties. Although thousands of Afghans died and millions were forced to flee their homes, the swift end to the war meant that humanitarian disaster of mass starvation over the winter, predicted by the UN and many NGOs and charities, failed to occur.

With America triumphant at the end of the war, Bush confirmed his administrations commitment to the neo-conservative agenda with his 'axis of evil' speech in January 2002. By the late Spring it was clear that the Bush administration had made the decision that US should invade Iraq. The only questions that remained amongst the competing factions within the Bush administration were how the war on Iraq should be fought and how it should be sold.

Over the Summer reports emerged concerning the various military plans for the invasion of Iraq as a compromise was hammered out between the neo-conservatives and the military high command of the American armed forces. Although they had been obliged to accept that war against Iraq was government policy, the American generals were concerned to squash the high risk plans of Rumsfeld's protégées and whizz kids for a rapid precision attack, using elite and special forces, that would aim to decapitate the Iraqi regime and paralyse its armed forces. They insisted on the use of overwhelming force using substantial ground forces backed massive air support that would take months to assemble. However, while they succeeded in scuppering the more radical military plans put forward by the neo-conservatives, the American generals were obliged to make substantial revisions to established military doctrines.

On the diplomatic front the question was what should be the pretext of war and under what banner should it be fought. For the neo-conservatives the war on Iraq should be presented as simply the extension of the 'War on Terrorism'. The USA should cut through all the encumbrances of multilateralism and lead a coalition of the willing to overthrow the Iraqi regime.[9] For the opponents of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who recognised the propaganda difficulties in linking Iraq with Al Qaida and who feared the consequences of such reckless action that might well destabilise the Middle East and cause a serious split amongst the great powers, the pretext for war should be the long standing issue of Iraq's alleged possession of 'weapons of mass destruction'. This pretext would inevitably reactivate the UN process of weapons inspections and draw the US into a multilateralist approach by involving the other great powers through the UN. In this way any negative consequences of an invasion of Iraq could be minimised.

With the generals insisting on a major build up of forces that could take months, the arguments for at least giving diplomacy a chance were able to gain ground. With a war pencilled in for Winter there was more than six months to bring the great powers on board for a UN sanctioned operation. However, perhaps the decisive consideration that tipped the balance against the neo-conservatives favoured option for unilateral action and for going down the UN route was the approach of the mid-term congressional elections.

There is perhaps little doubt that there was large swathes of the American bourgeoisie, together with much of the foreign policy establishment, that were concerned with Bush Jnr's adoption of the neo-conservative agenda. However, the obvious vehicle for their opposition to the governments new foreign policy was the Democratic Party. But, after September 11th, the Democrats were afraid to put their heads above the parapet for fear of being accused of being unpatriotic. Instead they maintained an uncritical bipartisan approach on foreign policy and, from an early date, had decided to fight the mid-term elections on the 'perilous state of the economy'.

Given the collapse of the Dot.com boom and rapidly rising unemployment the Republican's best bet was to try and keep the debate on foreign policy and the threat of 'international terrorism'. Yet if they succeeded in making foreign policy the central issue of the campaign they risked the Democrats taking up a position of 'loyal opposition' by accepting the aims but criticising the way the Bush administration was going about achieving them. By adopting the UN route, under the pretext of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Republican's could capture the centre ground and prevent the Democrats from accusing the Bush administration of being reckless and putting the USA out on a limb in the 'international community'. In addition it allowed Bush to present himself as a World Statesmen, as CNN showed almost nightly footage of the President meeting the world's leaders over matters of war and peace.

However, the adoption of the UN route the US had to bring the other great powers on board, particularly those that had veto powers on the Security Council. Of course, the US had a willing ally in Tony Blair.

In the build up to the war on Iraq Tony Blair was aptly caricatured as Bush's poodle. However, in aligning himself so closely with the US, Tony Blair was only taking a long standing feature of British foreign policy to its logical conclusion. Ever since the end of the Second World War Britain has sought to act as the junior partner to the US and as its bridge to Europe. With respect to the Middle East, ever since the Suez debacle in 1956 Britain has not attempted to develop a policy that was at variance with that of the USA. But this commitment and faith in the 'special relationship' with the USA has not been the result of some failings of successive British governments but an expression of common and convergent interest between British and American capital.

Like the US, Britain is not only a major consumer of oil it is also one of the main producers of oil outside OPEC. It is the domicile of two of the oil majors, BP and Shell, that have global interests in the production of oil and have maintained close contacts with both Conservative and Labour Governments. Also, like America, Britain is a major arms producer. Over 10% of Britain's remaining manufacturing output is defence related and the military continues to gobble up half of Britain's research and development funding.

However, more generally, the major restructuring of British capitalism, which began under Thatcher, has left Britain crucially dependent on the earnings of the City of London and the financial sector. With the decline of her manufacturing, Britain has found a unique niche for itself with the emergence of global financial capital as a conduit channelling money-capital from across the world into the US financial system. However, British capital's ability to cream off surplus-value from the huge capital flows that pass through London depends crucially on the continuation of the tendency for the free movement of capital and the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies across the world. It also depends, as Tony Blair is no doubt painfully aware, on the continuation the multilateral system of rule based global governance that is necessary to manage, defend and indeed extend this world economic system based around global finance capital.

Therefore the prime imperative British foreign policy, particularly in the last decade, has been to uphold the New World Order of multilateral world governance and to support America insofar as it is the only power capable of maintaining this New World Order. This has given rise to a close adherence to the doctrines of Cosmopolitan Liberalism and 'Liberal humanitarian imperialism' that have become the hall-marks of new Labour's foreign policy, leading Blair to fight five 'humanitarian wars' in less than six years in office!

Bush Jnr's election on a decidedly isolationist platform posed a serious threat to British foreign policy. Blair decided early on to make a special effort to develop a strong relation with the Bush administration in an effort to bolster its more cautious and multilateralist factions perhaps most clearly represented by Colin Powell. This policy proved so successful that Blairites were able to boast during the run up to the war that the British government was a distinct voice within the policy making process of the Bush administration.

However, by the Summer of 2002 being on the inside of the policy making process of the American government meant, at least tacitly, accepting the inevitability of war. Colin Powell may have been far less hawkish than the super-hawks like Rumsfeld but he was nevertheless still a hawk. Further, if his advice of taking the UN route was to be listened to, Blair had to put his political reputation on the line and bring on board the other main players in the United Nations. As a consequence, Blair became Bush's travelling salesman selling the prospects of war on Iraq across the capitals of Europe and the middle east.

The main obstacles facing Blair's efforts to secure a UN resolution giving authorisation for a war on Iraq were France and Russia, who, as permanent members of the Security Council, could veto any such resolution. The American policy of forcing a regime change in Iraq threatened to reduce to zero France's efforts to steal a march on the American's in gaining access to Iraqi oil. However, the French government was reluctant to directly oppose the US on this issue. Instead they hoped that through prolonged negotiations over the UN resolution and the shape and remit of the subsequent weapons inspections to mire the Americans in endless process of diplomacy. With sufficient procrastination the window of opportunity for launching an attack on Iraq would be passed and it could be hope that the Americans' enthusiasm for war might begin to wane. Failing this, negotiations over the UN resolution could be used as a means to extract compensation for any losses they might incur following an American led invasion of Iraq and the establishment of a pro-American Iraqi government.

Russia was in a far weaker position than France, being dependent to a large degree on American good-will to finance its huge debts, particularly with the IMF. However, it also had much more to lose than France. With its largely decrepit and uncompetitive industry, oil and gas are amongst Russia's few commodities that rest of the world is eager to buy. As we have seen, so long as Iran and Iraq remained as 'rogue states', the vast but undeveloped oil and gas fields of Central Asia were an attractive alternative to the continued reliance on a potentially unstable Saudi Arabia. In order to hedge against the possibility of Iraq and Iran being re-admitted to the 'international (bourgeoisie) community', Russia had developed close contacts with the current regimes and had followed France in making back-door deals that would aid their future access to their oil fields. However, a US invasion of Iraq, particularly if followed by the overthrow of regime in Iran, threatened to seriously undermine Russia's bargaining position with the western oil companies over the access, extraction and development of the oil and gas fields in Central Asia. It also threatened to undo the deals done with the current Iraqi and Iranian governments. As a consequence, Russia hid behind France's position towards the UN resolution.

Following the mid-term Congressional elections the hawks position was strengthened. It soon became clear that any further procrastination on the part of the French would only serve to further strengthen the arguments of the neo-conservatives for the US to give up the UN route and lead a coalition of the willing. Hence, weeks of protracted negotiations were brought to a close by France making crucial concessions. Firstly, France all but accepted that a 'serious breach' of what was to become Resolution 1441 would be sufficient cause for the US to lead a military invasion of Iraq without the authorisation of a second resolution. Secondly, France conceded that strict provisions would be included in the resolution. The weapons inspections would be given a strict dead-line to make its first report. The Iraqi regime was to make a final and complete declaration concerning its possession of 'weapons of mass destruction' so that any proscribed weapons, or weapons production capacity, found after the declaration would count as a 'serious breach' of the resolution. Furthermore, the Iraqi government was under an obligation to fully co-operate with the UN weapons inspectors.

However, while France concede that a 'serious breach' of Resolution 1441 would warrant military action, France secured crucial concessions in return concerning how it was to be decided that such a 'serious breach' had occurred. Firstly, France was able to secure that the UN weapons inspections would be based on the rules, procedures and personnel already established by the UN. Secondly, France was able to ensure that the weapons inspectors should be led by Hans Blix, whose previous record with the International Atomic Energy Authority had led many in the US administration to regard him as a soft touch for the Iraqis. Thirdly, France secured America's agreement that the weapons inspectors should report back directly to the Security Council. This implied that any decision to go to war had to be taken in consultation within the UN. If the US insisted on going to war it would have to present its case openly to whole world.

At this point, France could still hope, if not to dissipate the drive to war, still sell its veto for a slice of the spoils of war, particularly if the US was unable to come up with a convincing breach of Resolution 1441. Indeed, as late as January Chirac was still preparing to send French troops to fight in the American led coalition against Iraq.

However, once the military build up in the Middle East began to gather momentum after Christmas, the neo-conservatives could count on the support of the Army high command to argue that diplomacy should be subordinated to military imperatives. Once the huge logistical exercise in transporting 150,000 troops to the Gulf, together with all their supplies and equipment, had been completed there was to be little time for delay. The military high command did not want to deal with the problems of both morale and logistics of maintaining such a large military force poised on the borders of Iraq waiting for action while diplomats and weapons inspectors wrangled over the meaning of certain words and evidence. But more importantly the US military were anxious to invade before the onset of the Iraq Summer. The war had to be begun before the end of March.

Although the neo-conservatives had been obliged to play along with the diplomacy of the UN they were able to insist that once the troops were ready the war must begin, and that there would be no material concessions to the Europeans over the spoils of war.

Faced with the intransigence of the US on the one side, and the unprecedented world-wide opposition to war on the other, European leaders had little to lose and much to gain politically, both amongst their own electorate and in the Arab world, by opposing the march to war. In January Germany took up its turn as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. With both Britain's and the USA's pathetic attempts to find evidence of Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction', and bolstered by Germany's presence on the Security Council, both France and Russia moved towards open opposition to American war plans. By the time the coalition troops were ready there was not even a majority on UN Security Council prepared to support a 'Second Resolution' sanctioning war.

Although the neo-conservatives within the Bush administration had been obliged to swallow the UN route to war it had in the end made little difference. The first item on their agenda - the invasion of Iraq - had been achieved. For the multilateralist in the Bush administration it could be claimed that the war had been sanctioned by Resolution 1441 and the New World Order had remained intact. For the European powers opposed to war had at least shown they were no poodles of US imperialism and had improved their standing both at home and in the Arab world. The main loser, apart of course for the thousands who were going to be killed and maimed in the war, was Tony Blair.

Blair had staked his political reputation, both at home and abroad, on securing a Second a UN resolution. For Blair a second resolution would cement the unity of the 'international (bourgeois) community' behind American leadership and convince the Bush administration of the efficacy of staying within multilateralism of the New World Order. At home, the prospect of a Second Resolution provided a rallying point against the mass popular opposition to the war.

Blair's eventual complete failure to obtain a Second Resolution, despite being given more time by the delays in the military build up, meant Blair's entire policy had backfired. The rifts in the 'international (bourgeois) community' were exposed and exacerbated. In his desperation to outflank the Germans and French, Blair was obliged to open up divisions between what Rumsfeld was to describe the New and Old Europe. And at home Blair had to lie and dissemble in the face an unprecedented revolt within his own Party.

The war and its aftermath

As with the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq ended with the apparent vindication of the neo-conservatives' unilateralist policies.

The military critics of the war against Iraq had warned of the dangers of the coalition forces being dragged into a long conflict that would mean fighting during the heat of the Iraqi Summer. They had warned of the untested mettle of the Saddam Hussein's elite forces - the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard - and they had warned that the coalition's technological supremacy would count for little if it came to capturing Baghdad street by street. For the war's humanitarian critics, it was feared that the war would be like that of 1991: tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians would be killed and many more would be forced to flee their homes. The infrastructure of Iraq would be further destroyed creating the conditions for another 'humanitarian disaster'. For the war's geo-political critics, the war on Iraq would inflame the 'Arab world', which would threaten the stability of the Middle East.

However, despite a few wobbles, exaggerated out of all proportion by the 'embedded media', the war went more or less according to plan. The war was over in less than three weeks. Uncertain of the loyalty of much of his elite forces Saddam Hussein had been obliged to deploy them outside Baghdad where they had been little more than sitting ducks for the American air force. While the resistance to the American advances in to Baghdad soon crumbled. The targeted and precision attacks of the coalition forces minimised both civilian casualties and damage to Iraq's infrastructure.[10] There was neither a mass exodus of refugees nor was there a humanitarian disaster on the scale of 1991.

While there were major demonstrations through out the Middle East and Middle Eastern governments were obliged to tread very warily in giving any support to the US war effort, no government came close to being overthrown. Indeed, to the extent that the it allowed Arab governments to take up an anti-American posture and divert attention away from their own social problems, it could be argued that the war aided in the maintaining the stability of the Middle East region.

However, while the war went according to plan the same can not be said for the 'peace' that followed. Perhaps in order to minimise dissensions both within the Bush administration and between America and its allies, the main focus of planning for the invasion of Iraq concentrated on the one set of objectives around which all could agree - the need to ensure a swift and decisive victory with the minimum of coalition causalities. Far less effort appears to have been spent by war-mongers in Washington in drawing up a plan for post-war Iraq. Indeed, what planning there was seems to have been based more on wishful thinking and propaganda than any serious analysis.[11]

Of course, it was no doubt argued within the counsels for war that a swift and decisive victory, which minimised the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and avoided a 'humanitarian disaster', would greatly ease task of stabilising Iraq. Once it was stabilised it was assumed that the enormous potential wealth of Iraq would be sufficient to entice American capital into the reconstruction of Iraq in the 'free market' mould. There would therefore be little call for the American state to pay up-front for the costs of reconstruction.

For the naive ideologues amongst the neoconservatives, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to a democratic bourgeois revolution. With their 'natural' aspirations towards 'freedom, democracy and the American way' repressed for decades under the despotism of the Ba'athist regime, the Iraqi people were expected to welcome American troops as liberators, and to embrace the American educated Iraqi exiles that accompanied them as the prophets of a 'new free Iraq'. A new 'free enterprise Iraq' could then be constructed that would stand as a model for the rest of the middle east. The democratic revolution in Iraq could then serve as the start of a sequence of democratic revolutions that would transform the region in America's image.

The 'old-hands' and 'realists' amongst the neoconservatives and within the Bush administration as a whole were less hopeful of a democratic revolution. For them the fall of Saddam Hussein was more likely to lead to the disintegration of Iraq. However, they hoped to be able to 'decapitate' the regime without destroying the state apparatus. By maintaining the former state apparatus, minus its upper echelons, it would be possible to sustain a strong and unified Iraq that would now be pro-American and provide a bases to further isolate Iran.[12]

The different policy conclusions that could be drawn from these two alternative scenarios for the immediate post-war period were potentially in conflict. For example, should the occupying forces intervene against the 'Iraqi people' in order to shore up the state apparatus? Or should they stand back and let the 'Iraqi people' take their revenge? However, such conflicts never arose since neither scenario arose!

For the coalition forces to be welcomed as liberators would have required mass collective amnesia on the part of the Iraqi population. They would have had to forget the British occupation of the 1920s, the support of Saddam Hussein by successive US governments, the hundreds of thousands killed in the second Gulf war of 1991, the subsequent decade long punitive sanctions imposed by Britain and America and the casualties inflicted in the recent war. Indeed, the middle classes, who would have been most likely to have supported any democratic revolution, were the very classes that had lost most due to war and the economic sanctions of the last twelve years and look like continuing to lose as the last vestiges of the modernisation regime are destroyed.

However, the 'realists' hopes of utilising the state apparatus in the immediate aftermath of the war was dashed with its almost complete disintegration following the flight of Saddam Hussein and his entourage.

The problems of the immediate post-war period of social and economic stabilisation, which were glossed over in the pre-war planning, have now emerged to haunt the Bush administration. At the time of writing the occupying powers have dismally failed to restore Iraq's economy even to its rather dilapidated pre-war condition. Whereas the old regime had been able to restore at least intermittent electricity and water supplies to most of Iraq in less than three months in the far worse circumstances that had followed the second gulf war of 1991, the coalition has abysmally failed to do so. With mounting resentment turning into active opposition the coalition forces face the dilemma of taking a hard-line responses to impose 'law and order' at the risk of inflaming the situation or else sitting back and letting things take their course. Yet if order and security is not imposed soon it seems unlikely that American capital will be enticed to invest in the reconstruction of Iraq.

At the end of the war it had been confidently announced that the stabilisation of Iraq would take only a matter of weeks. A new governing council could then appointed that would have the authority to sanction the selling off of Iraq and allow American capital to begin the 'reconstruction' of Iraq. This would then be ratified with an election within little more than a year. However, this timetable is now in tatters and the occupation of Iraq is descending in a shambles.

Unless the situation in Iraq can be turned around soon, the neoconservative project faces being run into the sands of Iraq. If the cost of the occupation continue to mount at the present rate (presently estimated at over a $1 billion a week swelling an already ballooning US government budget deficit) and if the body count of American soldiers continues to rise, it will not be long before calls to bring troops home will become irresistible - particularly in the run up to the Presidential elections next year.

The Bush Jnr administration faces the nightmare prospects of being forced in an humiliating withdrawal, which would expose the US as little more than a paper tiger and lead to the dismemberment of Iraq between Turkey and Iran. This would create the very opposite outcome to what the neo-conservatives had wanted. As a consequence, the Bush administration has been forced to go back to the UN to ask for help in the costs of occupying Iraq. But this will mean allowing France, Germany and Russia to get their 'snouts into trough' - amounting to a relapse into the restrictions of multilateralism.

Time would seem to be running out for the neoconservatives. If they are to maintain their political momentum they will have to speed up the progress of their project. However, given the unravelling fiasco in Iraq, any attempt to escape their predicament faces formidable obstacles.

Where next?

One of the obvious next steps for the neoconservatives to take in order to maintain their political momentum would be to pursue regime change in Iran - which as we have argued is the next vital piece in the jigsaw of the Middle East.[13] As soon as the invasion of Iraq was over the Bush administration began stepping up the pressure on Iran over its alleged development of nuclear weapons. Both Iran's nuclear weapons programme and its sponsorship of various 'terrorist' organisations could provide perfect pretexts for the US to go to war with Iran and would probably stand up to much closer scrutiny than the pretexts used to attack Iraq.

However, an invasion of Iran presents serious problems for the Bush administration. Firstly, it would be more difficult than Iraq to build a coalition of the willing for an invasion of Iran. For one, Tony Blair would find it far more difficult to deliver British support for such a project. After Iraq Blair has exhausted his credibility in such affairs. Furthermore, in contrast to Iraq, Britain's policy has been far more closer to that of the rest of Europe with regard to Iran. In the hope of gaining a head start over the US once Iran has been reintegrated into the 'international (bourgeois) community' Britain, like the other major European powers, has consistently advocated a policy of 'constructive engagement', placing its hopes in the reformist policies of Khatami. This has allowed British capital to develop economic interests in Iran unhindered by sanctions.

Secondly, a war against Iran would be far more risky. It is true that the US would have supremacy both at sea and in the air. It would have the options to invade Iran from the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and from Iraq. It is also true that the huge debts and worsening economic situation resulting from the First Gulf war of 1981-88 has meant the Iranian armed forces remain badly equipped and under resourced, and the fervour that led to thousands of young soldiers to make suicidal charges against Iraqi machine gunners is likely to have dissipated. However, in contrast with Iraq, an invasion of Iran would not be simply finishing off a job already half done. The Iranian armed forces remain undefeated and could well inflict heavy casualties on an American invasion force. Furthermore, once Iran was invaded the USA would then face the prospect of having to occupy indefinitely not only Iraq but also the much larger Iran. Being drawn into a prolonged low intensity conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran would certainly be a nightmare for the US.

Another option for the neo-conservatives would be to try to promote the overthrow of the Iranian theocracy. There is certainly growing discontent within Iran at the authoritarianism of the regime and growing discontent at the failure of the reforms promised by Khatami. The Bush administration has already begun to encourage anti-regime protests. However, open American support for the opposition in Iran only serves to discredit it, particularly if at the same time the Americans threaten to use force. Indeed, it seems unlikely that an uprising against the regime will come soon enough to rescue the neoconservatives in the Bush administration.

The third option would be to use the pretext of Iran's sponsorship of 'terrorism' or its nuclear weapons programme to impose punitive sanctions that might eventually destabilise the regime. However, the imposition of punitive sanctions, comparable with those imposed on Iraq, would not only take time to work but would require the support of UN and the other great powers. The US would be obliged to adopt a more multilateralist approach.

It would seem then, that at least in the short to medium term, US foreign policy is likely to be drawn back towards multilateralism. The New World Order of Bush Snr will have to been modified but will be reconstituted. But what of the longer term? This depends on the world economic situation.

Conclusion

Economic situation of US in the world

For many amongst the anti-war movement it would seem that the US government has been taken over by a neo-conservative cabal that has turned the USA into a rogue state that is intent in ripping up 'international law' and wreaking havoc across the world. However, as we have argued the neo-conservative project is already in danger of running out of steam. As the US economy teeters on the edge of 'deflation', which has only so far been averted by the large scale tax cuts and by cutting interest rates perilously close to zero, the sheer expense of an aggressive unilateral foreign policy is going to appear increasingly unaffordable. The pressure to rein in the aspirations of the neo-conservatives can only grow.

This would seem to lend support to those who have suggested that the adoption of neo-conservative foreign policy is a last desperate attempt by America to use its military power to offset its long term economic decline. However, although the US economy has suffered since the collapse of the dot.com boom and faces an uncertain future it has perhaps fared better than its main rivals. Japan remains mired in more than a decade of economic stagnation, while Europe is slipping into recession. None of its great economic rivals would seem to be in any position to put up a serious challenge to the USA's economic dominance in the short term to medium term.

It is perhaps not so much the relative economic decline of the US that is the problem, but the crisis in the current phase of American-led world accumulation of capital. During the American-led phase of capital accumulation that followed the Second World War, which led to the long-post war boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the US had exported industrial capital to the rest of the western world. American production, and production techniques such as Fordism, was replicated across the western world creating new industries and transforming old ones so as to expand the avenues for the production of value and surplus-value. As a result, capital accumulation in the US served as the locomotive for capital accumulation across the industrial world.

In contrast, the current phase of American-led world accumulation has been far more predatory. Taking advantage of the results of state-led capital accumulation, particularly in certain parts of the periphery, American moneyed-capital has simply bought up existing sources of the production of value and rationalised them to squeeze out more surplus-value. At the same time the emergence of global finance capital has meant that the higher profitability of US controlled capital has become a powerful magnet for money-capital looking for investment opportunities. As a result surplus-value produced in Japan and Europe is invested in the US, or by US controlled financial capitals. As a consequence, the rate of capital accumulation in Japan and Europe has declined. Hence, the accumulation of American capital has been at the expense of the accumulation of capital in the rest of the world, and increasingly so in Europe and Japan.

However, up until recently the potential tensions and conflicts that have emerged due to the predatory nature of the current phase of American-led world accumulation have been containable within the institutions of global governance. This is true of both the relation between the US and the rest of the more advanced economies and between 'developed North' and the 'undeveloped South'.

For much of the 1990s the ruling classes of the 'emerging market economies' were well rewarded for abandoning any aspirations towards independent national accumulation and instead acting as mere agents for international capital. Although for large sections of the population in these 'emerging market economies' the adoption of neo-liberal policies led to increased job insecurity, cuts in public provision of health, education and welfare, and sharp falls in real wages; for the ruling classes, and for many of their middle class allies, the influx of foreign capital, which such policies attracted, provided ample opportunities to make substantial material gains. For the ruling classes of the rest of the 'developing world' the aim was to get in on the act by positioning themselves to be the next country to be recognised by global capital as an 'emerging market economy'.

As a result, most of the ruling classes of the periphery fully embraced the neo-liberal 'Washington Consensus' and were anxious to be integrated into the 'international (bourgeois) community'. They queued up to join the World Trade Organisation and uncritically accepted the one-sided agenda of 'free trade' dictated by the US and Europe.

However, the pickings to be had from the carcass of failed national accumulation was strictly limited. Once its industries had been 'rationalised' and its public utilities privatised the profits that could be made out of an 'emerging market economy' began to dry up. Even in East Asia, where there had been substantial investment in productive capital, the advantages of having a cheap and compliant labour force was soon undercut by the next wave of newly 'emerging market economies' and by an increasingly oversupplied world market for manufactured commodities.

As a result of past inflows of international capital the 'emerging market economies' faced a remorselessly growing outflow of profits, interest and debt repayments to the US and its confederates in the West, which could only be covered by an increasingly speculative and short term inflows of money-capital, which was now pursuing diminishing returns. In 1997 the crunch came with financial crisis of East Asia, which soon spread across the world's 'emerging market economies'. The ruling classes of these economies now found themselves castigated for corruption and cronyism by their brethren in the West and faced with the task of imposing severe austerity measures in the face of growing social discontent while the Western bankers and speculators were bailed out of their difficulties by the IMF.

As a result, the ruling classes of the periphery have become far more circumspect about the advantages of neo-liberalism and free trade preached by the US and Europe. A growing division has emerged within the 'international (bourgeois) community' between the 'rich North' and the 'poor South', which, has markedly slowed down the attempts to advance 'free trade and neo-liberalism through the multilateral institutions such as the WTO. Following the breakdown of the Seattle meeting of the WTO, the US was been obliged to shift towards advancing its agenda for 'free trade' and liberalisation through bilateral agreements in attempt to divide and rule an increasingly recalcitrant bourgeoisie in the peripheries.

These bilateral agreements were presented as 'paving the way' for more comprehensive multilateral agreements to be negotiated in future WTO meetings. However, following the recent collapse of the Cancun meeting of the WTO these bilateral agreements are likely to become more of an alternative than a complement to multilateralism of US trade policy.

However, perhaps more importantly than this 'North-South' divide is the relation between the US and Europe. As we have pointed out, the free movement of capital has meant that large sections of the European bourgeoisie have been able to buy into the success of American capital. At the same time the strong dollar since the mid-1990s has allowed European exporters to share in the expansion of the American economy. As a result there has been a strong commitment on the part of the European bourgeoisie to maintaining the regime of American-led global accumulation. Indeed, the need to compete with America has provided a powerful argument for many within the European bourgeoisie for the adoption of neo-liberal policies and for attacking the entrenched positions of the European working class.

However, the end of the dot.com boom has led to a sharp slow down in the US economy. Although expansionary fiscal and monetary policies have allowed the US to avoid an economic slump, the American economy is presently teetering on verge of a prolonged period of economic stagnation. The slow down in the US economy, together with a weakening dollar, has already lead to stagnation in many of the major European economies. It is possible that the destruction of capital in the recent slow down of the US economy may be sufficient to allow it a further brief economic surge. However, if the US enters a period of economic stagnation then fate of much of Europe is likely to be worse. As competition for stagnant or even shrinking world markets intensifies, calls for protectionism will mount on both sides of the Atlantic, placing great strains on the world economic order. Indeed it could be well be that just as America's aggressively unilateralist military interventionism is running into an impasse, the multilateral system of 'globalised economy' could begin to break up if the US fails to escape being dragged down into chronic deflation.

[Aufheben 12]
[Aufheben]

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[1] Despite the opening up the US economy since the Second World War, the continued insularity of the American population, and indeed large parts of the bourgeoisie, has a firm economic foundation. The USA is a huge continental-wide economy, which, with Central and South America, has a well established hinterland that has ample reserves of raw materials and cheap labour. While the scale of production of many manufacturing industries has outgrown the confines of the European size nation state, only the largest industrial capitals produce and sell on a truly global scale. The horizons of most American industries are amply circumscribed by the New World of the Americas - which constitutes by far the largest market in the world.

US exports of goods account for only 8% of its GDP (OECD Survey 2000). The USA's main trading partners are Canada and Mexico. Trade with these two countries combined is greater than that with the entire European Union. Indeed, more than 95% of 'goods and services' produced in the USA are sold within the Americas.

Moreover, whereas the total value of international trade in the entire world was $6.5 trillion in the year 2000 (OECD Monthly Statistics of International Trade, June 2003) the US GDP stood at $9.8 trillion (OECD Survey of USA 2003). In other words the US domestic market is nearly one and half times bigger than the world market represented by international trade! Hence, for large swathes of the American bourgeoisie, the US market, for all intents and purposes, is the world market.

However, a fully fledged isolationist foreign policy would seem an unviable option. Firstly, so long as the US enjoys economic supremacy any retreat from an active foreign policy, which is necessary to maintain the drive towards 'free trade' and ensures America's dominance of the world's financial system, would be detrimental to the interests of the US bourgeoisie as a whole. Furthermore, those with most to gain from an interventionalist foreign policy - the financial institutions of Wall Street, the major multinationals, the oil majors and the military-industrial complex, are the most powerful and influential sections of the American bourgeoisie. As consequence, an active interventionist foreign policy has traditionally been the orthodoxy of the policy making establishment and has been adopted sooner or later by most mainstream politicians. However, isolationism has been a central issue uniting various anti-establishment and populist political campaigns rooted in particularistic interests. As an amalgam of often contradictory interests the isolationist tendency is often incoherent and diffuse. It has been led by maverick politicians of both the Right - e.g. Ross Perot and Buchanan - and the Left - e.g. Dick Gephard. Nevertheless, there is a widespread isolationist sentiment in the American Congress that in the right circumstances can be mobilised to constrain foreign policy and is a political force that can not be ignored.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, much to alarm of some commentators, isolationist sentiments began to penetrate the foreign policy establishment. Even the editors of the main house journals of the foreign policy establishment began to argue for a gradual disengagement from world affairs in the face of the perceived decline of the US economic power. (see J. Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism (AEI Press, 1996).

[2] Indeed, as we have seen in the run up to the war in Iraq, the American generals have proved far more reluctant to invade Iraq than the civilian military strategists that surround Rumsfeld.

[3] This doctrine of using overwhelming force in order to minimise US casualties has been named after its principal advocate, Colin Powell, who is now secretary of state in the Bush administration.

[4] It has often been argued that April Glaspie's remarks to Saddam Hussein gave the green light to Iraq's annexation of Kuwait. As such they were part of a well prepared trap that gave the US an excuse for war. However, we do not accept such a 'conspiracy theory'. It seems that the decision to annex Kuwait was taken at the last minute. Even the Iraq generals expected military action to take the form of minor border incursions until just hours before the invasion. What April Glaspie seems to have given the green light to was a minor border incursion not a wholesale annexation of Kuwait, with all the destabilising effect that could have had on the balance of power in the middle east.

[5] See Ten Days That Shook Iraq by Wildcat (London) and texts at www.geocities.com/nowar_buttheclasswar.

[6] In the long term it is China that it is seen as the main potential rival to US hegemony. Combining the advantages of the command economy with those of the 'free market', the past decade has seen rapid export-led economic growth based on low labour costs, which is transforming China into the new 'workshop' of the world.

[7] Of course, predictions for the depletion of oil and other natural raw materials are notoriously unreliable. They depend on a number of assumptions concerning the rate of economic growth and the consequent demand for oil as well as the investment decisions of the oil companies. The prediction of an oil crisis in 2010 is a worst case scenario that was based on the assumption that the 'New Economy' had abolished recessions. Other more realistic predictions put the oil crunch in the 2020s. However, it must also be remembered that it can take up to a decade to develop a new oil field so that it can supply the world market, and up to two or three decades before such new fields reach peak production levels. Thus, both the oil companies and governments have to take such predictions seriously.

[8] Of course, September 11th came in the wake of the collapse of the dot.com boom. An amorphous external threat was a timely distraction for Bush Jnr and the Republican Party machine in the face of growing economic problems at home.

[9] Of course, under both Bush Snr and Clinton America's commitment to multilateralism was never absolute. The US had always reserved the right to take action on in its own interest. As Madeline Albright has put it, the principle was 'multilateralism if possible; unilateralism if necessary'. For example, the war in Kosovo was carried out under the auspices of NATO and was only retrospectively sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

[10] Of course several thousand civilians and unknown numbers of Iraqi soldiers were killed in the war but far less than some had predicted.

[11] Of course, it was concerns for the problems that might arise after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein that had led to Bush Snr to cut short the war in 1991. The neo-conservatives were no doubt concerned that such fears should get in the way of finishing the job in Iraq this time.

[12] Indeed, in the run up to the war there were renewed attempts by the Americans to encourage a coup from within Ba'athist Party in order to oust Saddam Hussein. During the war itself there were several well publicised efforts to kill leading members of the Iraq regime. But all these efforts to 'decapitate' the regime so as to leave the state apparatus in tact failed.

[13] Of course the alternative move would be a confrontation with North Korea, which can be seen as part of the neoconservatives long term plan to pre-empt the rise of China as a long term rival to the USA.

A phenomenal anti-war movement? - Aufheben

feb15-03-crowd[2].jpg

We argue that the feeling that what happened was challenging lay not so much in the nature of the actions, but rather in the number and variety of people brought into the movement and in the failure of the liberal peace movement to exercise the usual control.

The demonstration on February 15th 2002 against the threatened war on Iraq was the biggest protest march in British history. Almost unique in recent history, it was promoted beforehand by sections of the UK national media. The following day, the newspaper front pages were dominated by pictures of all the thousands in the streets, such images being treated as far more eloquent than the accompanying hacks' commentary.

What are we to make of this phenomenon? On the one hand, it seemed to be an expression of a movement with a lot of potential and energy - as witnessed in the many actions which disrupted daily life in various towns and cities around the world in the period leading up to and including the day war on Iraq was officially declared. On the other hand, the obvious involvement of sections of the ruling class in promoting the national demonstration, the traditional form of many of the protests, and their predominantly humanist (rather than class) rationale could lead us to conclude that all this energy was ultimately going up a blind alley.

One particular question that arises is that of why (so many) people got involved in the protest in comparison to the movements against the war in Iraq (1991), Kosovo and in Afghanistan. Given what happened (or rather what didn't happen) in response to these previous wars, the scale of the recent movement took many of us by surprise. Even in the USA, where the attacks of September 11th had seemed to close down the space for displays of opposition, there were demos across the country (and even by government scientists at a US base on the South Pole). In San Francisco, the city was virtually brought to a halt for two days when the war started; and in New York, despite a ban and a fairly heavy police attempts to enforce a ban, 200,000 took to the streets. As elsewhere, the UK national demonstrations, while of the plodding variety, were phenomenally large.

The recent protests not only had a political impact, they also appeared to affect the subjectivity of many of those who took part in them. Many for the first time became interested in 'politics', and demanded to know more and to understand the wider world. This politicization seems to have been developing before the demonstrations themselves and was reflected in a general thirst for information.

This desire to grasp what was happening would appear to be one of a number of differences between reactions to this Gulf War and that in 1991. While in 1991, there were objections to the way the war was presented in the media - i.e. as akin to a video game - bourgeois journalists remained relatively uncritical of the justifications for the war itself. This time round, however, the size of the movement of opposition to the war, and the fact that the world bourgeoisie was not united behind it, encouraged a much more critical tone in much of the media. The lack of a decisive conclusion to the war, with no arsenal of 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD) being found, and the quick victory turning into a bloody messy occupation, has led to a questioning of the motives behind and reasoning for the war. This questioning has continued, even if in part the government has managed to deal with the situation with an overload of tedious information around side issues like its argument with the BBC over its dossier on Iraq's WMD and the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly that resulted from it.

The contrast with reactions to the Kosovo war is starker. On that occasion, the 'humanitarian' gloss on the war served to wrong-foot the liberals in the peace movement as well as others who might have got involved, such as the direct activists. Even the traditional left could not decide whether they should defend Serbia against imperialist NATO or the oppressed Kosovars against 'fascist' Serbia. With the recent Gulf War, however, the pretext for war was so painfully thin that most liberals and leftists could easily reject it.[1]

The recent movement in the UK has a continuity with the movement against the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001,when there was again a network of local groups and a series of national demonstrations, which became smaller and more resigned over time as the activists eventually dropped out. In effect, the movement collapsed, having built up nothing like the momentum of the most recent movement.

This article seeks to address this question of how and why this anti-war movement was different. The movement was a worldwide phenomenon, and many of the features discussed here occurred in countries around the world. The present article is not a comprehensive overview but focuses simply on the organization and character of the movement in the UK, however, because that is where we, as the writers of this article, were involved. In particular, we describe how some of the dynamics of the movement as a whole were played out in one UK town, where most of us were involved. We conclude with some thoughts on the potential and limits of the movement.

Necessity and opportunity of resistance to the war
As we discuss elsewhere in this issue, the attack on Iraq needs to be understood as part of an attempt by sections of the (US) bourgeoisie to use its military superiority pro-actively to reorder the strategically and economically vital area of the Middle East in its interests and to demonstrate to the rest of the world that it could do this.

The struggle against the war therefore seemed necessary in order to defend the lives of the human beings - most of course fellow proletarians - who would lose out to the potentially unending series of pre-emptive conflicts that the USA was preparing for.[2]

However, for us, the key reason for opposition to the war was not some kind of liberal humanitarianism, but proletarian self-interest. A failure for this war to produce opposition would have a very negative impact on the subsequent development of the class struggle - in particular in the US and UK. The kind of attacks that took place on US longshoremen (dockers) during the war would only increase and be generalized in the absence of any kind of collective opposition to the war.

Yet the question of involvement has appeared as a dilemma for some of us. While opposition was necessary, the movement was clearly not going to express itself in class terms, and as such opportunities for effective action would be resisted. For example, no practical links were made with the UK fire-fighters' dispute. The best that could be hoped for, perhaps, was a more militant movement rather than a radical one. Thus, as has been the usual situation in response to capitalist war since 1990, some ultra-left and anarchist types have argued that we should not get involved in the movement, since such involvement would mean support for the left-wing (and even the liberal wing) of capital.[3] And some direct activists didn't want to get involved in what they saw as no more than a liberal- and Socialist Workers Party (SWP)-dominated pacifist popular front.

But this (ultra-left) critique of participation in the anti-war movement while essentially correct is also one-sided. Our instinctive reaction to arguments that we go to the march but not be 'on' the march is that they display a 'purism' whereby the political subject takes refusing to march behind the banners of the left as a positive step. For us, when it comes down to it, it makes little difference whether you go on the march or not. Like those who stand on the sidelines, we largely go on such demos out of a desire to get a feel of the mood of where people are at. Whether you do that by going on the march or by standing by the sides makes little difference. However, when it comes to local activity, we feel able to get involved in movements even if they are contradictory, since we may have an impact.

Moreover, for us, involvement in this movement was not only an imperative, but also an opportunity. The involvement of sections of the ruling class in the building-up of the national anti-war demonstrations was an indication not of an organized plot to divert proletarian energy, but rather a manifestation of disarray and a reduced ability to mobilize their forces on the part of the bourgeoisie, that has served to create a possible space for other needs to be expressed.

Sections of the ruling class were taken back by the scale of the opposition, and the willingness of so many people to be on the streets. This was most evident in the fact of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, publicly acknowledging the size of the February demo even before it happened. Whereas the government normally ignore demonstrations unless there is a riot, this time the prime minister tried to get in a pre-emptive strike by anticipating the numbers and suggesting that it would still be a minority. Anti-war elements of the ruling class became further encouraged by the obvious strength of popular feeling. The result was that the government was split and on the verge of crisis, and reluctantly agreed to a parliamentary vote on the war. While such a procedure was of course a way of politically managing the potential crisis, it was a procedure forced upon the government in order to keep the movement within democratic bounds.

On the one hand this public disagreement merely reflects that function of democracy which is to contain and accommodate conflict and thereby legitimize capitalist relations in which 'everyone has a voice'. However, there was at least some potential that the 'democratic disagreements' over the war might escalate into something more.

Content and form of the movement

One particular feature stands out, at least in the recent anti-war movement's immediate appearance. The anti-war movement was distinctly middle class[4] in character. Of course, the composition was in large part working class; but the hegemonic mood, values and tone were middle class. Even the large amount of
Muslims on the marches who in Britain are a group overwhelmingly at the bottom of the wage hierarchy, was largely organized through the mosques dominated by the middle class and petit bourgeoisie. Further, while those at the universities were struck by the level of activity around the war (and to a lesser extent this also occurred in 'white collar' workplaces like the local councils), in the post office - still a site of traditional working class militancy - one of our friends was not aware of even one of his work-mates going on the national demonstrations.

What explains the level of white collar and middle class involvement in the anti-war movement? An answer to this question lies perhaps in the nature of 'New Labour' Project, the thrust of which was to build an electoral coalition for New Labour around the 'middle classes' - not only professionals, the petit bourgeoisie etc., but also those who orient to and think of themselves as middle class, such as those who have mortgages and private pensions etc. They supported New Labour because it promised no tax rises and to continue to support (but also to 'modernize') the National Health Service; they were the kind of people who could not necessarily afford a private health plan, but wanted and expected more 'customer choice' in the provision of such services. While the New Labour Project has involved courting such people, many of them - particularly those within jobs in and around the local and national state - have suffered from the failure of the New Labour Project to meet their expectations. The threat of restructuring and insecurity to white collar jobs (e.g. in education, local government and health), the various public sector targets, and the removal of occupational pensions have together served to create a climate of anxiety, uncertainty and unease amongst people who might have expected the government to look after their interests rather better. Thus many of those participating in the national demonstrations were students and ex-students, clerical staff, local government employees and so on: the would-be middle class who are in fact now the new working class. They did so because the war has served to unite 'everyone' against the government - to displace myriad individual problems onto a clear collective target: the government and its overall project.

Moving from the content to the form of the movement, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) was undoubtedly the major organization, and the public face of the movement. It was the Coalition that called the national demonstrations. The StWC was dominated by the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), but also included representatives from other leftist groups and Muslim organizations. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) pacifists stepped back from the Coalition relatively early on. The SWP sought to steer the coalition towards building a 'the largest movement possible', which meant around the lowest common denominator politically, at the same time embracing Muslim organizations and the Free Palestine campaign (which dove-tailed anyway with SWP's anti-imperialism). In terms of numbers, it can be said to have succeeded.

StWC 'national meetings' were rallies rather than debates. Motions were token. The first meeting (due to take place before Xmas 2002) was cancelled anyway because of the fire-fighters' strike. But most people attending the meetings, although they complained, in effect went along with the stitch-ups; there was little in way of initiatives for alternatives.[5]

The fact that, without Coalition support - and indeed despite Coalition attempts to undermine them - protests at Fairford Airbase in Gloucestershire became a potential alternative focus for the protests shows that other organizational forces carried at least some weight. The Fairford protests remained a potential rather than an actual locus of national organization, however. The CND-types in the Bristol group who called the Fairford protests were overwhelmingly localist in outlook. For example, they supported the call for a demo at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire, on the same day as one of the Fairford protests! There was in other words no proper attempt to develop an alternative national focus - even though Fairford organizers were hostile to the StWC.

Movement dynamics in one town
Some of the dynamics described above can be illustrated through the experience in one town, although it should be conceded that what happened here may not have been typical.[6] This account at least conveys some of the excitement and issues that confronted some of us, and we hope it is not too parochial.

In Brighton, in response to the war on Afghanistan, a number of different (relatively small) protest groups were formed, reflecting different political tendencies. The most radical anti-war group (comprising anarchists, communists etc.) became a constipated direct-action group, in large part because of internal political differences. By contrast, in response to the threat of war on Iraq, a larger more inclusive group emerged despite such differences - a group which was also more lively and effective than the earlier groups.

At first, there was the same split between the political factions. The pacifists and Trots organized meetings in the name of Sussex Action for Peace (SAfP), to which a small number of the direct-action types attended as delegates. But when, as in the case of the Afghan war, the separate direct action group itself petered out, the 'delegates' continued to attend SAfP, as we did. Within this umbrella group, factional identities were at first maintained: the Trots advocated marches; direct activists argued for small scale direct actions (and against marches etc.); and the pacifist liberals argued that the cops had to be told about any actions the group planned.
The national Coalition called for actions on Halloween (October 31st 2002), but local groups decided what form these might take. The Brighton group proposed a 'Stop the City, Stop the War' action, which was originally intended as a small group direct action. However, it subsequently became a mass tactic, endorsed by the Brighton group as a whole. In effect, the
Halloween action served to resolve all the factional differences, and pleased everyone. It defined the identity of the group as whole.

The expectation among many of the direct-action types was that 'the general public' would (a) not turn out in large numbers (b) not have the bottle for the planned street sit-down occupation, and that such actions would be left to the minority of activists who would therefore have to have just a token occupation for fear of getting nicked. In other words, militant mass action was not expected. However, a bold tone was set by a successful Critical Mass cycle protest which took place that afternoon. Critical Masses had been extinguished by the police in Brighton some years before. But a small group of cyclists setting off from Sussex University became a larger group which was then able to block off all of the southbound lanes of the trunk road into the town centre for more than an hour, despite the frantic and increasingly desperate efforts of the cops, who had not been consulted.

Come the evening of the main gathering, dozens of cop vans lined the streets. Despite the cops' show of strength there was still not enough of them to deal adequately with the protest, which numbered at least 500 people. Being unable to physically to surround the crowd which had moved onto one of the main road junctions, blocking traffic in four directions, the panicky cops resorted to the use of batons and pepper spray.

The failure of the cops to anticipate numbers and to successfully intimidate the crowd at this early stage only encouraged people to go further. Also, given that many people involved in the demo saw what they were doing as 'legitimate protest', suddenly being squirted with pepper spray and threatened with extendable batons served to reveal the partisan nature of the state the cops were defending. The rest of the evening then became a game of cat-and-mouse in which the crowd moved quickly and unpredictably to block various roads around the town, with the cops trying and mostly failing to keep up, and being further exposed as ineffective and buffoonish.
One of the interesting features about what happened was that the majority of people involved were not politically experienced; both young and middle aged, many were people for whom the movement against the war was the first time they had been on a demonstration. They had relatively little sense therefore how seriously the cops took a mass obstruction of the highway - they either didn't know the law or simply had that liberal sense of moral righteousness - and were therefore unprepared for the cops' reaction.

The sense of excitement and unpredictability - the feeling that anything might happen, that we had the initiative rather than the cops - marked the demo out as one of the best in Brighton for years. Many of us who were present were on a real high. Even at the end, when the cops finally managed to halt the progress of the crowd towards the shopping mall, and when they did a Section 60[7] around the rump, there was still a sense of triumph, which gave us some encouragement in the future of the movement, at least locally. While it must be acknowledged that what happened felt so good because expectations were so low, it was also qualitatively different than recent protests in terms of its autonomy, collective coherence and involvement of so many political neophytes.

The events of Halloween had further consequences. When a more traditional march was held a month later, the cops policed it to saturation point, even though it had little potential to become a direct action event. The cops had spent a lot of money in their attempt to stamp out the 'Stop the City, Stop the War' actions at this early stage, which led to budget problems for them later on. Hence, they could not afford to police subsequent street demonstrations except in the form of 'traffic control', escorting rather than trying to suppress the protest. They tried to ban a demonstration in January, but were relatively helpless to prevent a 'Valentine's Day' protest in the main shopping centre. This protest was another moving 'Stop the City' action, which became the template for actions on the day war broke out (March 22nd) and in the weeks subsequently.

The actions on the day the war broke out went on all day, led in the day-time by a school students march, and culminating with a partial attack on the town hall. Again there was at times a sense of power and unpredictability, as roads were blocked at will, with no agreed route. Versions of this protest became a weekly event.

The attack on the town hall, in which in fact only a small minority of the crowd took part, and the occupation of various petrol stations in the subsequent protests might perhaps have appeared radical but in fact hardly went beyond the tokenism and symbolism of the liberals' marches. When we protested against the Gulf War in 1991, we didn't go to petrol stations to make some point about oil profits, we went to the army barracks and tried to stop them doing their daily business! The feeling that what happened was challenging and threatening lay not so much in the nature of the actions, which for the most part were nothing special, but rather in the number and variety of people brought into the movement and in the failure of the liberal peace movement to exercise control - as evidenced in the lack of the usual agreements with the cops on the routes and times of the demonstrations.

The school-students phenomenon