28 May 2007
Let us give continuity and strength to the struggle against globalised capitalism
and the “permanent war” against the peoples of the South and East of the world.
For this week of mobilisation, we are here in Rostock to protest against the G-8 and repeat that “another world is possible”.
We are here to denounce a series of devastating social processes: the indebtedness and impoverishment of almost all of the countries in the Southern world; the fact that millions of working men and women are forced to emigrate from the South and East in the search for better living conditions here in the West, only to find themselves brutally blackmailed by racist laws and practices; the continuous and increasingly violent attacks on the wages, working hours and hard-won “social guarantees” of the workers in rich countries; the continuing violence and discrimination suffered by women; the ongoing destruction of the environment; and the ceaseless wars promoted by the leaders of the G-8.
All of these processes are becoming more wide-ranging and striking more deeply. The ordinary “peaceful” means of foreign debts, the WTO and new liberal policies are no longer sufficient to allow the governments of the G-8 to confront the resolve the intricacies of the problems they now have to face. In order to ensure that it can fully restore its accumulation of wealth and demolish each and every barrier to its own development, Western capital is finding it increasingly necessary to have recourse to “exceptional” and openly aggressive methods in what is nothing less than the war of global capital against the world of globalised labour.
Even though Bush and his Yankee administration are currently in difficulties – above all because of the magnificent resistance of the Iraqis, Palestinians and Afghans (and let us never forget it!) – it is for all these reasons that the “infinite war” they have put on the agenda for the next 30 years with the support of the governing powers of Europe (from Blair to Berlusconi, and from Merkel to Prodi, for all of their delicate “distinctions”) must be taken very seriously. As has been further confirmed by the recent victory of Sarkozy in France, the country that has been one of the centres of the “other world” movement.
How can we react to this aggression?
The platform that has called this demonstration says: by means of democratic globalisation “from below” capable of globalising “social justice” and “social security”. If this means that it is only and exclusively “below” among the exploited masses and the people who live by working (and certainly not in the “upper spheres” of constituted powers) that there can be the interest and strength to oppose the current headlong slide into the abyss, we would wholeheartedly agree. However, all too often over the last few years, such formulas have expressed the illusion of being able to resolve our existing dramas by means of a constructive – albeit conflictual – relationship with some of the forces present in our bourgeois parliaments. So far, the prevailing conviction among the various “no global” and “no war” movements has been that the roots of all of the social contradictions strangling us do not lie lie within the capitalist system as a whole (as we believe) but only within that certain form of capitalism that expresses “ultra-liberal” policies. And, consequently, this has led to the prevalence of a view that it is enough to reform capitalism in such a way as to give it a “human face” or at least make it a little less “unjust”.
And the results?
In Europe, some representatives of the movements have managed to enter public institutions and there have even been some changes in governments (as in Italy). But the music of markets, states, governments and parliaments has remained the same: precarious employment, super-exploitation, sacrifices, anti-immigrant laws, ecological crises, and wars and preparations for wars. And in the face of this obvious refractoriness of capitalist institutions to listening to the petitions of the movements, in front of the repeated denials and diktats of increasingly anti-proletarian democracies, we have seen the movements’ ex-representatives and their “allied” political parties adjusting themselves to begging cap in hand for alms and nothing but alms – and often failing to get even that! And as they wend their ways along such fruitless paths, the movements have become increasingly weaker and lost their hold on much of their potential.
Many contradictions but only one root and one alternative!
And so, yes to the globalisation and strengthening of the struggles – but only in a way that is extra- and anti-institutional! In addition to institutionalism, their extraordinary potential strength has also been mortified by the separation of claims that could and should be made to converge. The “simple” fact that so many different subjects with so many “different” causes are here in Rostock to protest together against the single target of the G-8 is a clear sign of their underlying and vital need to unite. None of the “individual questions” that have brought us here can be solved in isolation, but all of them call upon all of us to fight on an international scale against the ultimate cause of the processes that have led us to enter the lists, and against the underlying interests that are being duly executed by the G-8 countries. They call upon us to unite in a single front whose strength and conscious organisation will enable us to reach the one – unreformable – root of all contemporary social ills: the capitalist sytem. And extirpate it.
Take the question of the environment: there is nothing that renewable forms of energy, juridical protocols and formal ceilings aimed at reducing pollution can do unless we also change a social system that considers the environment (like everything else) simply as a means of producing as much profit as possible in the shortest possible time. And the same goes for the question of women’s rights and the antagonism between this social system and human reproduction needs: despite the incessant official demagogy (especially here in Europe) about “making way for women” and equally demagogic plans for the “empowerment” and (bomb-happy) “liberation” of “coloured” women, they remain increasing threatened by pollution, poverty (both material and relational), precarious employment, working stress, and wars. And then there is the question of work, with its precariousness, even greater exploitation, and the downward spiral that is everywhere worsening the working and living conditions of workers. What is the origin of all these things? Are they the result of the provisions of individual governments and individual employers – or do they go back beyond these to the laws of international competition between companies and between workers? And what lies behind these laws other than a singlem, unified and systemic mechanism?
In reality, the questions underlying today’s demonstration all go back to one and the same source: the antagonism between the social nature and private appropriation of production. In the capitalist market economy that dominates the world, the enormous productive energy unleashed by social labour is exclusively directed towards producing profits and thus crushing the workers underfoot. This social order, whose decadence is increasingly based on war and exploitation, must be overturned by an epoch-making battle that will open up the pathway to the only possible alternative: international socialism. It is a battle that can and must be centred on the class of wage labour, the proletariat, whose radical nature can and must act as a catalyst of the expectations of all of the oppressed, including the members of the marginalised social sectors who are currently attracted by the sirens of resurgent national socialism – and may still be attracted tomorrow.
The central role of the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle against capitalism is not only demonstrated by more than 100 years of history – the Workers’ Internationals, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, the participation of the coloured proletariat in all of the great anti-colonial movements – but is also fully acknowledged today by the G-8 functionaries who, once again on the occasion of this demonstration, have done their best to criminalise the movement in the eyes of the workers and “common people” in order to keep them away from it.
Let us globalise the struggle and its class organisation!
It is for this reason that the presence of the workers of the IGM and DGB is very important, as was that of the American workers at Seattle, and as is every attempt to create real international ties of solidarity among the workers. However, we are well aware that many of the agrreements signed by the German trade unions with the aim of preventing delocalisations to the East and South of the world go in the opposite direction. An effective defense against the attack of multinational capitalism and its governments certainly cannot be constructed by setting workers of different nationalities against each other, but requires the globalisation of the struggles and class organisation of the trade unions – as can also be seen by the resumption of industrial strikes in Poland the Czech Republic, Russia, and the Ukraine… In fact, it is now urgent to address the workers of the East, who are experiencing at first hand the reality of the “liberation” offered by the false “socialism” that governed and dominated them for decades: a very strange type of “liberation” that has made them a reservoir of manual labour for Western (and particularly European) capital, which milks them there by way of its delocalisations and puts the screws on them here as immigrant workers. And we must do it by rejecting and denouncing every type of social chauvinist policy affecting whether it comes from the xenophobic and racist right or “social” leftists such as the Linkspartei.
In the same way, and without any hesitation or misgivings, we must give our unconditional solidarity to the struggles of immigrant workers, who are not only victims of the global market, but have also shown and still show us – with their enormous mobilisations for Mayday 2006 in the United States, their uprisings in the banlieues of Paris, and their demonstrations in Italy – their great dignity and willingness to struggle.
And if the war against the “rogue peoples” of the world’s South is (and it is) nothing more than a permanent means of guaranteeing the world dominion of capital by pitting the exploited against each other, our initiatives against the G-8 must place first and foremost – and without any kind of ambiguity – the struggle for the withdrawal of all of the West’s occupying forces from the battlefronts and actively support the peoples who are currently resisting imperialism, starting with the Arabo-islamic peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. These are the people whose resistance is obstructing imperialism’s world order of exploitation and pillage, and these are our real comrades in arms. They must no longer be left alone and exposed to the divisive manoeuvres of our governments against which their own national leaders are impotent and unwilling to respond. On the contrary, they must be sustained with decision and, in thus way, helped to slough off their current Islamic leadership, just as their resistance is helping us to see through the milk-and-honeyed lies of our governments concerning their “humanitarian missions” and the wars that the West is so “generously” fighting to export our “democracy” and our “freedom”.
What is needed to finalise the process of unifying all of our struggles and resistance against global capitalism is concerted action aimed at developing a political body capable of carrying out a planned campaign in this direction. However distant it may be, we must start working now on reconstituting the international communist party by exchanging experiences, creating international coordination, discussing the successes and failures of the historical experience of the workers’ movement, openly confronting the central issues of the class struggle of today and the circulòation of militants, etc. This is an intrinsic need of our current movements: the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements, the strikes and struggles of peasants and manual labourers, the fight against the intensification of work and precariousness of employment, and the battles against ecological disaster.
Given our catastrophic past experiences of reformist parties and opportunists, we realise that our appeal will arouse (highly understandable and even partially justified) reservations. But it is a fact that, however essential, spontaneous struggles are not enough to defeat such a well-organised class enemy so knowingly practised in techniques of division and repression. And this is all the more true if the exaltation of spontaneity is combined with an implicit or explicit mandate in favour of European parliamentary leftists because, as has happened in the past, this will drive the movement into a free fall inspired by the claim that “another world”, “another Europe”, “another Italy, France, …” are possible (possible?) electorally – to the point that they stop even speaking about any alternative.
On the contrary, it is precisely now, as never before, that a real alternative social system – socialism - is actually possible and necessary but, in order to obtain it, we need the strength of a global proletarian movement encompassing the multiplicity of all anti-capitalist drives and a new World Communist Party. There is no conflict between the idea of a movement and the existence of a party because they are mutually complementary – provided that the workers’ self-organisation is truly created and constructed by the masses in favour of their own interests, and provided that the organisation calling itself communist is truly such, a part of the movement of the exploited and oppressed and distinct from it solely insofar as it represents the general interest of the class in particular struggles, and the future of the movement in the conflicts of the moment.
28 May 2007
Internationalist Communist Organization
