- All articles

All articles

- Solidarity 228

- Pensions fight: plan now for the New Year

- Having chemo? Get to work says the government

- London Overground Olympics win

- Unilever strike over pensions

- Aspire: “Bosses are charming, polite, and utterly ruthless”

- Should faith keep its fortresses?

- For a united Europe!

- For a democratic Europe!

- The suppression of Kronstadt: Bolsheviks had no choice

- Social democracy: the rift widens

- Life on Labour?

- Protests shake Putin

- Narrow win for New Zealand Tories

- Islamists gain in Egypt's poll

- Syrian state lashes out as sanctions bite

- Climate change: their solutions and ours

- US withdraws from Iraq

- What the Greek left is saying

- Euro-leaders set course for worse crisis

- East London teachers' fight against union busting continues

- Sparks defy bosses and anti-union laws

- Ireland's Austerity Budget - Labour TD expelled over rebellion

Solidarity 228

We welcome debate and encourage free discussion. Log in with a user name, and you can add comments to the debates on this site. We operate no political censorship, but we reserve the usual editorial right to delete or cut comments which are racist or sexist; advertising; abusive; excessive in volume; or otherwise inappropriate.

Pensions fight: plan now for the New Year

The government has dramatically raised the stakes in its class war assault against public sector trade unions.

George Osborne wants to see national pay rates for public sector workers abolished, and has written to the heads of pay review boards for teachers, nurses, civil servants and prison officers giving them until April 2013 to find ways of cutting workers’ pay.

The government claims it will achieve the cuts by slowing down pay increases rather than directly cutting wages, but the plans amount to a massive attack on workers in poorer areas as Osborne wants localised pay reviews to be tied to the cost of living. Workers in areas where the cost of living is lower could see their pay reduced by up to 10%.

It confirms what we already know government plans have nothing to do with cutting costs or getting Britain out of its deficit, and everything to do with their ideological project to smash the last significant bastion of organised labour in Britain.

The government has raised its game. We need to raise ours in response.

Some national figures are making very militant noises indeed.

In a speech at the 1 December Equalities Conference of the Southern region of his union, GMB leader Paul Kenny told delegates he was committed to a strategy of rolling, selective and escalating action that took out key groups of workers and levied strike funds to keep them out for as long as possible. He said that defending the existing pension schemes was an absolute bottom line and that he would fight for whatever strategy was necessary to win.

But he was clear that these were his personal views. The GMB’s right wing national secretary for public services, Brian Strutton, who is leading the negotiations for the union, has privately expressed his eagerness to secure a deal as soon as possible.

The University and College Union (UCU) has passed policy saying “the next day of nationally coordinated action [should] be called as early as possible in the spring term” and should be “immediately followed by coordinated regional action” with “a Mexican wave effect acting as a bridge to the next day of nationally coordinated strike action.” UCU’s commitment is positive; rolling action is more likely to apply consistent pressure to government than one-day “spectaculars”.

But there is no fixed timetable for UCU’s plan, nor indeed for Paul Kenny’s militant posturing.

A National Union of Teachers (NUT) Executive decision of Thursday 8 December also wants another national day of action “early in the new year”, and proposes to survey its members to assess their preparedness to take rolling and selective action as well as action short of a strike.

Importantly, the NUT will also investigating levying a national strike fund to help finance sustained action.

Iy will approach other unions and the National Pensioners’ Convention to turn the “Fair Pensions for All” campaign (which currently exists only on paper) into a high-profile national campaign with a public face. This would give the dispute a real political dimension.

The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) wants action in January. Interestingly, a motion to the conference of the Left Unity grouping (which effectively runs the union in a permanent alliance with the soft-right) advocates selective action, and is backed by the Socialist Party (dominant in LU), making it likely to pass.

That would be a minor step forwards in terms of leverage to win wider support for such action.

The Executive of public sector union Unison also met on Thursday 8 December and discussed the prospects for rolling and selective action, which some activists — particularly in the NHS — feel may be difficult to organise. Again, its pace is slow; it is unlikely to make any firm decision about the way forward until the 11 January 2012 meeting of its Service Group Liaison Committee.

The different union positions indicate a clear consensus for another national action in early 2012.

But the line to union members is still: well done on 30 November, now wait for a new plan for one-off action will descend from on high.

As most union leaders want to postpone a firm decision to meetings in early 2012 it could be February or March before we have any further movement.

Individual unions should pass policy that allows them to coordinate locally with any other unions that are prepared to take action immediately. This is essential if the dispute is not to be shackled to the pace of the slowest.

There is also an ongoing debate about what form the next national action should take. Some, including the UCU , believe it should be a 48-hour strike. It is certainly true that an indefinite series of one-day actions will have increasingly diminishing returns and ultimately a demoralising effect. But a 48-hour national strike costs members twice as much as a 24-hour one, yet fails to have twice the impact. Action should escalate, but there’s no principle that states this escalation must take place on a mechanical basis. Those who propose 48 hours do not really have an ongoing plan to for escalation beyond that.

A two-day, three-day, or four-day strike by school caretakers, or by key revenue staff in the civil service, would probably have more impact and exert more pressure than a 48-hour national strike. The guiding principle should be to create the strongest self-controlling momentum and apply the greatest pressure.

Workers’ Liberty has produced a model motion for trade unionists to submit to their branches and Trades Councils setting out what we think the next steps need to involve. In summary, these are:

• local cross-union strike committees to discuss and plan action

• nationally-levied strike funds to finance sustained action

• rolling and selective action coordinated with any and all unions ready to take part, to start as soon as possible

• escalating action in the new year, with groups of workers capable of applying the most pressure taking sustained action

• a high-profile, cross-union and community political campaign for decent pension provision for all

A strategy based on these ideas was proposed at the 8 December NUT Executive by AWL member Patrick Murphy, and some of the idea were incorporated into the NUT’s policy.

With the government on a renewed offensive, there is no time to lose in developing the labour-movement counter-offensive. We must enter 2012 on a war footing.

• Model motion

Having chemo? Get to work says the government

By Jo Maxwell

In November, Macmillan Cancer Support launched a petition against a government proposal to axe benefits for chemotherapy patients who cannot prove they are unfit to work.

Existing legislation protects patients receiving intravenous chemotherapy from any such burden — the assumption being that the drugs render a person unable to function well enough to continue working through their treatment. There has until now been a fight to extend this protection to patients receiving oral chemotherapy and radiotherapy, as both treatments can also have a disabling

affect on the recipient, often as serious an effect as the intravenous alternative.

The effects of chemotherapy on the human body are horrific: hair loss, anaemia, an increased openness to infection, breathlessness, bruising and bleeding more easily, risk of blood clots, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and constipation, mouth ulcers… the list goes on.

I had a three month course of oral chemotherapy and had to continue working to keep my flat. I wasn’t entitled to any help because I chose to continue working, and as I didn’t get sick pay I made a financial sacrifice every time I had a particularly bad day and had to take annual leave to have the surgery I needed.

I came off quite lightly with regards to the side effects, mainly suffering from intense nausea and back and muscle pain; but some days it would have been impossible for me to go to work.

The fight to extend the cover of (albeit meagre) benefit payouts to people like me is a more than worthy one, and a call for a “levelling up” of the system.

As usual, the Tory government chooses to level things out in their own way by saying that if some people can’t have something, then nobody should. Removing the financial safety net of many chemotherapy patients leaves them even more reliant on rare and

“needs-based” charity handouts and loans to make ends meet when in many cases these people are fighting for their lives.

Being asked to face a back-to-work type interview when already battling against your own body will have devastating effects on the lives of these patients and their families. Where stress and illness already threaten lives, people are to be asked to compete against poverty and work literally until they drop.

There are no words for the personal anger I feel about this proposal. But this is not a personal issue, this is class war; a complete and utter disregard for those of us who must work for a living and do not have the luxury of being ill without risking losing everything for ourselves and our families.

This is a blatant attack and repeal of the rights we have fought hard to win as a class, and goes hand-in-hand with their plans to make us work harder for longer and with less reward.

London Overground Olympics win

Workers on the London Overground, connected to the Tube network but operated separately, have secured a 25% pay increase for shifts worked during the Olympic and Paralympic games in summer 2012.

This means that all workers will be guaranteed an additional payment of at least £650 for Olympic and Paralympic working.

Bob Crow, general secretary of the Tube union RMT which represents the workers, said: “This deal recognises the value placed on transport workers in delivering an effective Olympics and is a good deal for RMT members, the travelling public and Olympic visitors alike. It’s a common sense approach in planning ahead for the Games”.

The deal is particularly significant because of the precedent it sets.

Workers employed elsewhere in the London transport network will feel more confident to fight for better Olympics working deals after the London Overground workers’ success.

Unilever strike over pensions

Unilever workers struck for a day on Friday 9 December as part of their battle to defend their pensions.

Members of the Unite, GMB and USDAW unions took action, with the strike being reported solid in most Unilever facilities.

Unite said that no engineer had gone to work at Unilever’s Burton site, and USDAW reported the strike 100% solid at the Port Sunlight research and development facility.

According to workers, management had been bullying and intimidating people into going to work, including by holding meetings threatening people with losing their jobs, particularly construction workers with contracts agreed through the Manpower employment agency. Unions have filed a grievance over intimidation.

USDAW national officer Davy Johnson said that company had not approached unions for further negotiations, and that more action was planned for the new year.

Workers are fighting management attempts to transfer their pensions to a career-average scheme rather than existing final salary arrangement, a measure Unilever bosses claim they need to take to cut costs despite making over €5 billion profits last year. The pension reforms would only save €200 million.

John Storey from Unite said that these figures showed that Unilever's motivation was not cost-cutting, but smashing collective agreements and breaking union strength.

Aspire: “Bosses are charming, polite, and utterly ruthless”

Michael Given is a support worker for homeless people in Glasgow.

Tell us a little bit about the work you do.

I am a homeless support worker based in the community in the East End of Glasgow.

I support people classed as “Homeless” to move on from Temporary Furnished Flats (TFF'S) to Permanent Tenancies. The work involves a package of support — assistance with obtaining Community Care Grants, accessing second hand furniture, state benefit checks and advice, referring and accompanying people to addiction services etc.

Do you and your workmates get the pay and conditions you deserve?

Absolutely not! The Council tenders the work out to a private company called Aspire.

Support workers have been on £13,750 per annum for the last 5 years. Pay is indefinitely frozen.

The starting salary is £13,000 for the first nine months, but often the pay increment of £750 is delayed months, sometimes years. Some workers are now borrowing money for food from relatives. Most have to do second jobs, or have other sources of income such as tax credits.

Last winter, workers across the company in Resettlement, Emergency and Community services were made redundant following a cut by the Labour-controlled Council in funding. Letters we received on Christmas Eve emphasised that no managers would have to re-apply for their own jobs — only workers.

What are the attitudes to the pensions dispute in your workplace?

We don't have a pension and could not afford one on the wages we are on in any case.

Some have been sucked in by the divide and rule propaganda of the Coalition and the press. However I also think people are hopeful that it will lead to change for the better for all workers. The strike ought to be seen as an opportunity to achieve our own goals and turn the balance of power around in the workplace.

What do people talk about in your workplace? How easy is it to “talk politics on the job”?

Being kicked out of our old office into the Scottish weather, false promises about sickness bonuses, non-payment of increments, mobile phones that are blocked and so are virtually useless, ongoing casualisation, constant negative changes, poverty pay and getting out. Recent years have looked like a sequel to “The Great Escape”. It has got harder to talk about politics or workplace grievances recently as a result of more pressure to come back to a recently re-designed open plan office. Workers can't speak in confidence there and this is a problem we really need to address.

What are your bosses like? Is there are problem with bullying and harassment by bosses?

The senior bosses are based in the old head office and remote. They are charming, polite and utterly ruthless. Most managers at service or team-leader level are pushed out the door every couple of years. No ideas from workers are ever accepted. High turnover of both workers and middle-management suits the bosses as it means they retain control.

Is there a union in your workplace, and does it do a good job?

No . But some workers have joined Unison and there have been some meetings with Unison reps in attendance. The redundancies last Christmas and a period of relative calm afterwards saw momentum lost. But union recognition is the only way forward in circumstances where there are fewer and fewer jobs and greater attacks on every workplace.

If you could change one thing about your work, what would it be?

That an important service that does good work begins to be run in-house by the Council and a democratically-elected Management Committee operates the day to day running of it.

Should faith keep its fortresses?

By Molly Thomas

While I am an atheist, I still respect people with faith (or superstition, as it is sometimes called). But should we respect faith itself? Is there a real difference between faith and superstition, or are they just different words that people use for the same thing, depending on whether they want to refer to it warmly (faith) or coldly (superstition)?

Some people who are atheists themselves argue that faith should be respected as a valid way of knowing on questions which science cannot reach.

Stephen Jay Gould, a widely-read and left-wing science writer, claims that faith is a strong way of knowing in religion and morals. “The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria [science and religion] do not overlap... I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears... But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science...”

Faith gets a good deal in Gould’s proposal. It has to hand over to science the grunt work, like working out how the planets move, or what causes epilepsy and how it can be fixed. In return it gets dominion over what is right or wrong, good or evil.

Others have granted faith a fortress in another way: by conceding that faith is not a way of knowing, but in fact a way of believing where knowledge is impossible.

Immanuel Kant, in the 1780s, demolished the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and formulated a comprehensive account of how the phenomenal world could be known by reason and evidence. He “made room” for faith as a mode of belief (not knowing) for things outside the phenomenal world: “I cannot even make the assumption... of God, freedom, and immortality, if I do not deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insight.... I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief”.

Faith is seen as a way of knowing because it appears to provide people with answers and comfort. More than 95% of Americans profess belief in “God or a Universal Spirit”.

After the Queensland floods, church attendance increased as “people sought more comfort in their faith”. This faith is emotionally rational for the person suffering. Ostensibly, this outpouring of support shows the strength of faith as a way of knowing. However, these people are not seeking knowledge, like how to stop floods in future, but are rather seeking emotional support which has nothing to do with knowledge.

Karl Marx argues: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature...It is the opium of the people. To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness.” Faith here is strong, but not as a way of knowing.

When people go to their church (or to their synagogue, temple, mosque or shrine), when they read their religious text, and when they pray, they feel the influence or presence of a religious figure. Feeling is where their faith lies, not in any reason or evidence. Two friends of my family attended the same Catholic school. One has rejected the church while one has stayed loyal. For one, the covering up of sex scandals and standing in the progress of science has destroyed her religious belief. The other sees her knowledge of the actions of the Church as having no effect on her belief because it is between her and God.

This personal aspect of faith makes it impossible to disprove as a way of feeling that one knows. As the Battle Hymn of the Republic says: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”. This perception is no more questionable than me feeling a pain in my leg. No doctor can prove or disprove that I feel pain. I can know that God exists in the same way I know that I feel a pain in my leg.

However, people can feel pain in their leg even after it has been amputated. It is perfectly admissible to experience pain that cannot be corroborated and indeed may not be rational (as with the amputated leg). However, with faith, many try to redefine their personal feelings as social knowledge. The only way they can do that is by forcing everyone to accept their way of feeling and persecuting those who reject it. The weakness of faith as a way of knowing is that either it is imposed or that it will become solely personal feelings.

Many people find the absence of a god in their life “intellectually demanding and emotionally unsatisfying”. Lewis Wolpert argues that evolution has hard-wired the human brain to want to believe that everything happens for a purpose, though we now know that evolution, for example, does not happen through purpose-seeking processes. That explains the hard-wired bias towards feeling that faith gives knowledge, regardless of whether it is a way of knowing at all.

Wolpert says: “[M]any people would find it very hard to live without religion. But there is no meaning [of life]... [W]hy should there be a meaning? ... [W]e want a cause as to why we’re here, but...there isn’t one...”

I understand why it may be depressing to contemplate the meaninglessness of processes like evolution, but I do not think that embracing an idea to make myself feel better is a valid way of knowing.

As Hegel puts it: the person who “appeals to his feeling, to an oracle within his breast [as the way of knowing]... is done with anyone who does not agree.

“He has just to explain that he has no more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same as himself... [H]umanity ..lies simply in the explicit realisation of a community of conscious life. What is anti-human, the condition of mere animals, consists in keeping within the sphere of feeling pure and simple, and in being able to communicate only by way of feeling-states”. Hegel himself was religious and attempted a scientific proof of the truth of (Lutheran) religion, a heroic but unsuccessful effort.

In a valid way of knowing, every truth is open to revision. Newton’s laws of physics had been corroborated thousands of times, but then Einstein showed that they must be revised.

Faith is invalid as a way of knowing not despite its certainty, but because of its certainty; not despite the fact that some of its tenets cannot be disproved, but because it relies on vague assertions which cannot be tested or disproved.

Science brings progress in knowledge from its proviso that tests must be repeated and authenticated. That may make it less emotionally appealing than faith. But as Hegel put it: “ The man who only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this vague and indeterminate Divinity — he may look where he likes to find this: he will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying”.

There are no laboratory experiments that we can do to separate good from evil as we might separate the hydrogen and oxygen contained in water. It does not follow that morals, ethics, and politics are beyond science.

Medicine is not an exact science, either; but we take it forward by reason and evidence, not by faith. Since Socrates and Aristotle at least there have been investigations of ethics and politics by way of reason and evidence, not faith; in fact, all investigations of ethics, rather than sets of arbitrary commandments, moral tales, and aphorisms, have been by reason and evidence, not faith.

Knowledge is antagonistic to faith. Suppose I experienced a convincing miracle; that I was ill and cured by holy water at Lourdes. The response of others would be to demand evidence. If the miracle were really established, then Lourdes holy water would become a prescription drug, and not a miracle.

Suppose we came to know (by research) that some superhuman being (or god) existed elsewhere in the universe. Then people would defer to that god because of the evidence, not because of faith.

Suppose we found that the Bible was all literally true. Instead of exploring the allegorical power of the Biblical stories, we would accept them as history. The Bible would no longer be a guide for people to follow but rather the anecdotes of people who lived thousands of years ago. Religion would cease to be the mystical construct it is today and would become a subsection of science, The personal element of faith, its true strength, would be degraded. People would believe in the god’s existence in the same manner that they believe in germs, vitamins, and DNA.

Ludwig Wittgenstein came to a similar conclusion. He was not religious, but had sympathy for religious feeling. He argued that: “These controversies [about religion] look quite different from any normal controversies. Reasons look entirely different from normal reasons. They are, in a way, quite inconclusive. The point is that if there were evidence, this would in fact destroy the whole business. Anything that I normally call evidence wouldn’t in the slightest influence me...” “A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. If there is no opinion, there there is no false opinion”. Equally, there is no true opinion; therefore no knowledge.

Some tenets of religious faith cannot be disproved. But doubt is essential in gaining knowledge. Wittgenstein showed that, because of the lack of doubt, faith may be a way to belief, but it is not a way of knowing.

Faith is invalid as a way of knowing, and unsound as a basis for belief, because of its desire for exclusivity. In history, people have been forced to accept a specific religion or face incredible attacks. Even today the Pope declares: “if the certainty of faith were dependent upon scientific-historical verification alone, it would always remain open to revision”.

He is conceding to the “two magisteria” view in a way previous Popes would not have done, but for religion he wants faith to establish truths closed to revision, which cannot be questioned. Such “truths” are not knowledge, even in religion, and even less so in science.

For a united Europe!

The Morning Star, the paper associated with the Communist Party of Britain, carried a naively self-revealing editorial on 9 December: “There’s a huge feeling of guilt and confusion when a leader writer in the Morning Star feels even a momentary twinge of fellow feeling with chief speculators’ stooge David Cameron...”

Hadn’t Cameron done at least something good? He “refused to allow Britain to be sucked further into what amounted to a further consolidation of a European superstate...”

The Star escaped its embarrassing alliance by reflecting that “Cameron remains wedded to Britain’s place in Europe” — as if Cameron would be progressive if only he went the full way with the old-fashioned Tory right, and insisted that Britain keep aloof from Europe — and anyway Cameron had vetoed only “to protect the privileged position of the City of London’s speculators”.

But the instinctive fellow-feeling with Cameron was so strong it could not be denied.

For decades now the Morning Star and others have campaigned against “Europe” and “Brussels” as if they were the cause of all capitalist evils, and national capitalist leaders their helpless victims. As if democracy can exist only in walled-off nation-states, and democratic control over the necessarily international mechanisms of today’s economic life is both impossible and unnecessary.

Capitalism operating with high barriers between countries in Europe is not better than a united capitalist Europe. It is worse. The bringing-down of barriers is good, although under capitalism, of course, it comes together with many things we oppose.

Agitation and argument like the Star’s leave the working class and the labour movement wide open to the demagogy of the Tory right. David Cameron’s veto at the European summit on 9 December set off a surge of that demagogy.

Right-wing Tory MPs described the veto as “incredibly, incredibly exciting”, and called for a referendum on British withdrawal from the European Union.

The Mail’s front-page headlines for the three days after 9 December were: “The day he [Cameron] put Britain first”; “Tory fury at Clegg’s ‘pygmy’ insult to Britain”; “Yes, Cameron got it right”.

The Express: “Britain close to EU exit”; “End of EU is unstoppable”.

The Sun was more nuanced in the small print, but headlined: “Up Eurs: bulldog PM sticks up for Britain”.

If today’s crisis leads to a break-up or loosening of the European Union, and a rebuilding of barriers between countries as different capitalist centres scramble to win out in sharpened competition, then that will be regression, not advance.

It will lead to fiercer cuts and privatisation, helped through by the claim that they are necessary to help “the nation” compete.

It is the Tory right which rightfully owns the anti-EU cause, and the “No2EU” left which has erred onto Tory ground, not vice versa.

The leaders of the rail union RMT, left-wing on other issues, have backed the “People’s Pledge” campaign, which demands a referendum to get out Britain out of the EU, highlights on its website a Daily Express front page boosting the Pledge — “New hope to get out of EU” — and calls on people to vote only for parliamentary candidates who support a referendum.

The Pledge campaign itself, founded by former Tory students’ chair Marc-Henri Glendenning and “pro-car” campaigner Stuart Coster, is fronted by Labour Party leftist Mark Seddon.

The Socialist Party ran a joint campaign with the RMT leadership in the 2009 Euro-elections under the slogan “No2EU”.

If the Morning Star can find itself shocked into “guilt and confusion” by the Cameron veto, then those groups should too.

Supporting a united Europe does not mean supporting Merkel and Sarkozy, or Nick Clegg, any more than welcoming modern communications means endorsing Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

It is an essential reference point for the united labour-movement action, across the continent, which we need to resist the new waves of cuts and point the way to an alternative.

For a democratic Europe!

Europe is in crisis. And all the decisions about the crisis are being taken not by the people tormented, baffled, and troubled by it, but by a tiny elite of government leaders.

Both the majority decision of the 9 December Euro-summit, and the veto stance of David Cameron, were irrelevant or harmful for the crisis. The leaders saw no way of dealing with the crisis other than to make the people pay, by cuts, or, for Cameron, cuts plus special protection for the bankers of the City of London.

And no-one got a vote, except in the very indirect way of having voted in national elections from which, in one way or another, the government leaders who met in Brussels on 8-9 December emerged at the top.

No-one was consulted, not even Britain’s deputy prime minister. Nobody gets a say now, except maybe a “take it or leave it” vote on a new treaty, if that emerges.

In Italy and Greece, Monti and Papademos have been installed as heads of government explicitly on the grounds that they are immune to democratic pressure: they are not elected and will not seek re-election.

In December 2010, the elected European Parliament called for a “system of eurobonds” to ease the euro debt crisis — in other words, for the EU’s richer states to provide credit guarantees which will enable troubled governments to borrow in financial markets at affordable rates.

It insisted that eurobonds “should serve to restore sustainable growth and not be achieved at the expense of the most vulnerable and therefore should not equate to lowering minimum incomes and aggravating poverty and inequalities”.

Looking at the EU’s actions a year later, in November 2011, elected Members of the European Parliament protested at the “lack of democratic legitimacy as a result of the Commission’s insistence on the need for stronger budgetary discipline and surveillance“.

These were weak decisions, by a weak parliament that has made no effort to assert itself. We could get stronger decisions if the peoples of Europe knew about these decisions by their elected representatives at a European level, and expected the elected representatives to control what happens.

In Germany, the liberal (once Marxist) philosopher Jürgen Habermas has created a major public debate with a pamphlet protesting at the way European undemocracy has mushroomed in the crisis as fast as debt overhangs and cuts budgets. “All signs indicate that they [Merkel, Sarkozy, and the rest] would both like to transform the executive federalism enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty into an intergovernmental supremacy of the European Council [the cabal of heads of government]... We are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy”.

In Britain, the public debate is poorer. It is dominated by the nonsensical nationalist bluster of the Tories and papers like the Daily Mail.

They talk and write as if the last sixty, or even the last hundred, years never happened. Mentally, they still live in the days of the British Empire and of only-loosely-connected national economies.

In real life, national economies in Europe are closely interwoven, and could be disentangled and separated out only at the cost of huge economic regression (and, probably, military conflict).

“Little England” (or little Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland...) is a myth. An attempt at it would be a step backwards. Either we fight for and win cross-border democratic control over those economic interweavings; or they mechanically dominate us, through the brutal arbitration of market forces; or, as now, we are subjected to inept attempts to tackle those interweavings by government leaders acting without control or mandate.

The leaders act on the principle that important economic matters are too vital and too complex to be put under democratic control; and, themselves, as slaves to neoliberal superstition.

The crisis calls for a Constituent Assembly of Europe — a renewed European Parliament, elected democratically, and with rights to reshape the whole construction, rather than feebly advising the government leaders.

It calls for a labour movement united across Europe, with a programme of thoroughgoing democratic and economic reconstruction in the interests of the working classes.

It calls for resistance, now, to the cuts enforced across the continent, and the building of links and cross-border unity through solidarity in the struggle.

The suppression of Kronstadt: Bolsheviks had no choice

Kronstadt: last upsurge of the Soviets

"... this luxury was really absolutely impermissible. By permitting (sic!) such a discussion (on the trade unions) we undoubtedly made a mistake and failed to see that in this discussion a question came to the forefront which, because of the objective conditions, should not have been in the forefront . . ."

Lenin. Report to 10th Party Congress, March 8, 1921. Selected Works, Vol. IX, p. 90.

"What the rebels of Kronstadt demanded was only what Trotsky had promised their elder brothers and what he and the Party had been unable to give. Once again a bitter and hostile echo of his own voice came back to him from the lips of other people, and once again he had to suppressed it."

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, p. 512-3

Trotsky's Accusations

Taking everything into account, what was the Kronstadt uprising? Was it a counter-revolutionary insurrection? Was it a revolt without conscious counter-revolutionary objectives, but which was bound to open the doors to the counter-revolution? Or was it simply an attempt by the working masses to materialise some of the promise of October? Was the revolt inevitable? And was the bloody end to which it came also inevitable? We will conclude by trying to answer these questions.

The accusations made against Kronstadt by the Bolsheviks in 1921 are exactly the same as those mentioned later by the Stalinist historian Poukhov, in his book published in 1931. Trotsky repeated them. The trotskyists still repeat them today.

Trotsky's attitude on this question was however always somewhat embarrassed and awkward. He would issue his accusations by the dropper instead of proclaiming them once and for all. In 1937, when he discussed Kronstadt for the first time in writing (in his books on the Russian Revolution he hardly ever dealt with the subject) he starts by saying that "The country was hungry, and the Kronstadt sailors were demanding privileges. The mutiny was motivated by their wish for privileged rations." (11) Such a demand was never put forward by the men of Kronstadt. In his later writings Trotsky, having doubtless taken care to read more on the matter, was to abandon this particular accusation. What remains, however, is that he started his public accusations with a lie.

In an article in the Belgian paper Lutte Ouvriere (February 26, 1938) Trotsky wrote:

"From a class point of view, which--no offence to the eclectics--remains the fundamental criterion both in politics and in history, it is extremely important to compare the conduct of Kronstadt with that of Petrograd during these critical days. In Petrograd too the whole leading stratum of the working class had been skimmed off. Famine and cold reigned in the abandoned capital, even more cruelly than in Moscow... The paper of the Kronstadt rebels spoke of barricades in Petrograd, of thousands of people killed.(2) The Press of the whole world was announcing the same thing. In fact the exact opposite took place. The Kronstadt uprising did not attract the workers of Petrograd. It repelled them. The demarcation took place along class lines. The workers immediately felt that the Kronstadt rebels were on the other side of the barricade and they gave their support to the Government."

Here again Trotsky is saying things which are quite untrue. Earlier on we showed how the wave of strikes had started in Petrograd and how Kronstadt had followed suit. It was against the strikers of Petrograd that the Government had to organise a special General Staff: the Committee of Defence. The repression was first directed against the Petrograd workers and against their demonstrations, by the despatch of armed detachments of Koursantys. (3)

But the workers of Petrograd had no weapons. They could not defend themselves as could the Kronstadt sailors. The military repression directed against Kronstadt certainly intimidated the Petrograd workers. The demarcation did not take place "along class lines" but according to the respective strengths of the organs of repression. The fact that the workers of Petrograd did not follow those of Kronstadt does not prove that they did not sympathise with them. Nor, at a later date, when the Russian proletariat failed to follow the various "oppositions" did this prove that they were in agreement with Stalin! In such instances it was a question of the respective strengths of the forces confronting one another.

In the same article Trotsky repeats his points concerning the exhaustion of Kronstadt, from the revolutionary point of view. He claims that, whereas the Kronstadt sailors of 1917 and 1918 were ideologically at a much higher level than the Red Army, the contrary was the case by 1921. This argument is refuted by official Red Army documents. These admit that the frame of mind of Kronstadt had infected large layers of the army.

Trotsky denounces those who attack him over Kronstadt over the belatedness of their strictures. "The campaign around Kronstadt" he says "is conducted, in certain places, with unrelenting energy. One might imagine that events took place yesterday and not seventeen years ago" But seventeen years is a very short period, on any historical scale. We don't accept that to speak of Kronstadt is to "evoke the days of the Egyptian Pharaohs". Moreover it appears logical to us to seek some of the roots of the great Russian catastrophe in this striking and symptomatic episode. After all it took place at a time when the repression of the Russian workers was not being perpetrated by some Stalin or other but by the flower of Bolshevism, by Lenin and Trotsky themselves. Seriously to discuss the Kronstadt revolt is therefore not, as Trotsky claims, "to be interested in discrediting the only genuinely revolutionary tendency, the only tendency never to have reneged its flag, never to have compromised with the enemy, the only tendency to represent the future".

During the subsequent seventeen years Trotsky shed none of his hostility towards the rebels. Lacking arguments he resorts to gossip. He tells us that "at Kronstadt, where the garrison was doing nothing and only living on its past, demoralisation had reached important proportions. When the situation became particularly difficult in famished Petrograd, the Political Bureau discussed several times whether to raise an internal loan in Kronstadt, where there still remained old stores of all sorts. But the Petrograd delegates would answer: 'They will give us nothing of their own free will. They speculate on cloth, coal, bread, for in Kronstadt all the old scum has raised its head again!".

This argument concerning "old stores of all sorts" is in bad faith. One need only recall the ultimatum to the Kronstadters issued by the Petrograd Defence Committee on March 5th (referred to elsewhere): "You will be obliged to surrender. Kronstadt has neither bread nor fuel". What had happened in the meantime to the said old stories

Further information on this topic comes from the Kronstadt Ivestia. It describes the distribution to children of one pound of dried potatoes on presentation of ration vouchers 5 and 6. On March 8th, four litres of oats were distributed to last four days--and on March 9th a quarter of a pound of black biscuit made of flour and dried potato powder. On March 10th the Regional Committee of Metalworkers decided to place at the disposal of the community the horse meat to which its members were entitled. During the insurrection there was also distributed a tin of condensed milk per person, on one occasion some meat preserves, and finally (to children only), half a pound of butter.

That no doubt is what Trotsky refers to as "old stores of all sorts"! According to him these might have been borrowed to alleviate the great Russian famine. We should add that before the insurrection these "stores" were in the hands of communist functionaries and that it was upon these people alone that consent to the proposed "loan" depended. The rank and file sailor, who took part in the insurrection, had no means open to him whereby he could have opposed the loan, even if he had wanted to. So much for the question of "stores"--which in passing shows the worth of some of the accusations used against Kronstadt.

To resort to such arguments in the course of a serious discussion (and consciously to substitute for such a discussion a polemic about the Spanish Revolution) shows up a serious flaw: the absence of valid arguments on the matter among the Bolsheviks (for Trotsky isn't the central figure in the repression of Kronstadt. Lenin and the Politbureau directed the whole operation. The Workers' Opposition must also shoulder its share of responsibility. According to the personal testimony of foreign Communists residing in Russia at the time, the Workers' Opposition didn't agree with the measures being taken against the rebels. But neither did it dare open its mouth for the defence of Kronstadt. At the 10th Party Congress no one protested at the butchery of the rebels. The worker Lutovinov, a well known member of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets and one of the leaders of the Workers Opposition, was sent to Berlin in March 1921 on a diplomatic mission (in reality this was a form of political exile). He declared that: 'The news published abroad concerning the Kronstadt events was greatly exaggerated. The Soviet Government is strong enough to finish off the rebels. The slowness of the operation is to be explained by the fact that we wish to spare the population of Kronstadt". ('L'Humanite'. March 18, 1921) (4)

Trotsky uses yet another argument against the rebels: he accuses them of seeking to take advantage of their revolutionary past. This is a most dangerous argument for anyone in opposition. Stalin was to use it against Trotsky and the old Bolshevik. It was only later that Stalin accused them of having been, from the very beginning of the Revolution, the agents of the international bourgeoisie. During the first years of the struggle he conceded that Trotsky had rendered great services to the Revolution but he would add that Trotsky had subsequently passed into the ranks of the counter-revolution. One had to judge a man on what he did now. The example of Mussolini was constantly mentioned.

However, there are many things that Trotsky is unable to explain. He cannot explain how Kronstadt and the whole Red Fleet came to renounce their ideological support for the Government. He cannot explain the frame of mind of the communist elements in the Fleet during the discussions on the Trade Union question. He cannot explain their attitude during the 8th All-Russian Soviet Congress elections or during the Second Communist Conference of the Baltic Fleet, which took place on the eve of the insurrection. These are, however, key points around which the discussion should centre. When Trotsky asserts that all those supporting the government were genuinely proletarian and progressive, whereas all others represented the peasant counterrevolution, we have a right to ask of him that he present us with a serious factual analysis in support of his contention. The unfurling of subsequent events showed that the Revolution was being shunted onto a disastrously wrong track. This was first to compromise then to destroy all its social, political, and moral conquests. Did the Kronstadt revolt really represent an attempt to guide the Revolution along new lines? That is the crucial question one has to ask. Other problems should be seen as of secondary importance and flowing from this serious concern.

It is certainly not the smashing of the Kronstadt revolt that put a brake to the course of the Revolution. On the contrary, in our opinion, it was the political methods used against Kronstadt and widely practised throughout Russia which contributed to the setting up, on the ruins of the Social Revolution, of an oligarchic regime which had nothing in common with the original ideas of the Revolution. (5)

The Bolshevik interpretations

In 1921 the Bolshevik Government claimed that Kronstadt had rebelled according to a preconceived plan. This particular interpretation was based on a note published in certain French newspapers (Le Matin, L'Echo de Paris) on February 15th. This note announced the uprising and led to the claim that the uprising was led by the Entente.

This was the argument which enabled Lenin to claim, at the 10th Party Congress:

"The transfer of political power from the hands of the Bolsheviks to a vague conglomeration or alliance of heterogeneous elements who seem to be only a little to the Right of the Bolsheviks, and perhaps even to the 'Left' of the Bolsheviks--so indefinite is the sum of political groupings which tried to seize power in Kronstadt. Undoubtedly, at the same time, White generals--you all know it--played a great part in this. This is fully proved. The Paris newspapers reported a mutiny in Kronstadt two weeks before the events in Kronstadt took place.(6)

The publication of false news about Russia was nothing exceptional. Such news was published before, during, and after the Kronstadt events. It is undeniable that the bourgeoisie throughout the world was hostile to the Russian Revolution and would exaggerate any bad news emanating from that country. The Second Communist Conference of the Baltic Fleet had just voted a resounding resolution, critical of the political leadership of the Fleet. This fact could easily have been exaggerated by the bourgeois press, once again confusing the wishes with reality. To base an accusation on a 'proof' of this kind is inadmissible and immoral.

In 1938 Trotsky himself was to drop this accusation. But in the article we have already mentioned he refers his readers to a study of the Kronstadt rebellion undertaken by an American trotskyst John G Wright. In an article published in the New International (in February 1938) Mr Wright takes up once again the claim that the revolt must have been planned before-hand. In view of the fact the press had announced it on February 15th. He says: "the connection between Kronstadt and the counterrevolution can be established not only out of the mouths of the enemies of Bolshevism but also on the basis of irrefutable facts". What irrefutable facts? Again .. quotations from the bourgeois press (Le Matin, Vossische Zeitung, The Times) giving false news before and during the insurrection.

It is interesting that these arguments were not much used at the time, durinq the battle itself, but only years later. If, at the time the Bolshevik Government had proofs of these alleged contacts between Kronstadt and the counter-revolutionaries why did it not try the rebels publicly? Why did it not show the working masses of Russia the 'real' reasons for the uprising? If this wasn't done it was because no such proofs existed.

We are also told that if the New Economic policy had been introduced in time the insurrection would have been avoided. But as we have just shown the uprising did not take place according to a preconceived plan. No one knew that it was necessarily going to take place. We have no theory as to the exact timing and development of popular movements and it is quite possible that under economic and political conditions different from those prevailing in the spring of 1921 the insurrection might never have taken place. On the other hand the uprising might have occurred in a different form, or in a different place, for instance in Nijni Novgorod where an important strike movement took place, coinciding with the great strike wave in Petrograd. The particular conditions relating to the Fleet and to Kronstadt's revolutionary past certainly had an effect, but one can't be certain just exactly how significant this effect was. Much the same applies to the statement that "if the N.E.P. had been introduced a few months earlier there would have been no Kronstadt revolt".

The N.E P. was admittedly proclaimed at the same time as the rebels were being massacred. But it doesn't follow in any way that the N.E.P. corresponded to the demands put forward by the sailors. In the Kronstadt Isvestia of March 14th we find a characteristic passage on this subject. The rebels proclaimed that "Kronstadt is not asking for freedom of trade but for genuine power to the Soviets". The Petrograd strikers were also demanding the reopening of the markets and the abolition of the road blocks set up by the militia. But they too were stating that freedom of trade by itself would not solve their problems.

Insofar as the N.E.P. replaced the forced requisition of foodstuffs by the tax in kind and insofar as it re-established internal trade it certainly satisfied some of the demands of the men of Kronstadt and of the striking Petrograd workers. With the N.E.P. rationing and arbitrary seizures ceased. Petty owners were able to sell their goods on the open markets, lessening the effects on the great famine. The N.E.P. appeared to be first and foremost a safety measure.

But the N.E.P. unleashed the capitalist elements in the country just at a time when the one party dictatorship was leaving the proletariat and working peasants without means of defence against these capitalist forces. "The class exerting the dictatorship is in fact deprived of the most elementary political rights" proclaimed the Worker's Truth, an oppositional communist group in 1922. The Worker's Group. another oppositlonal tendency, characterised the situation as follows: "The working class is totally deprived of rights, the trade unions being a blind instrument in the hands of the functionaries".

This was certainly not what the Kronstadt rebels were asking for! On the contrary. They were proposing measures which would have restored to the working class and working peasantry their true place in the new regime. The Bolsheviks only implemented the least important demands of the Kronstadt programme (those coming in eleventh place in the resolution of the rebels !). They totally ignored the basic demand, the demand for workers' democracy!

This demand, put forward in the Petropavlovsky resolution was neither utopian nor dangerous. We here take issue with Victor Serge. In Revolution Proletarienne (of September 10th, 1937) Serge stated that "while the sailors were engaged in mortal combat, they put forward a demand which, at that particular moment, was extremely dangerous--although quite genuine and sincerely revolutionary: the demand for freely elected soviets... they wished to unleash a cleansing tornado but in practice they could only have opened the doors to the peasant counterrevolution, of which the Whites and foreign intervention would have taken advantage... Insurgent Kronstadt was not counterrevolutionary, but its victory would inevitably have led to the counterrevolution." Contrary to Serge's assertion we believe that the political demands of the sailors were full of a deep political wisdom. They were not derived from any abstract theory but from a profound awareness of the conditions of Russian life. They were in no way counterrevolutionary.

Rosa Luxembourg's view's

It is worth recalling what Rosa Luxemburg, a political personality respected throughout the world as a great socialist militant, had written about the lack of democracy in the leadership of the Russian Revolution, as early as 1918.

"It is an incontestable fact", she wrote, "that the rule of the broad, popular masses is inconceivable without unlimited freedom of the press, without absolute freedom of meeting and of association... the gigantic tasks which the Bolsheviks have tackled with courage and resolution require the most intensive political education of the masses and accumulation of experience which is impossible without political freedom. Freedom restricted to those who support the Government or to Party members only, however numerous they may be, is not real freedom. Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently. This is not because of fanaticism for abstract justice but because everything that is instructive, healthy and cleansing in political liberty hinges on this and because political liberty loses its value when freedom becomes a privilege."

"We have never worshipped at the altar of formal democracy," she continued. "We have always distinguished between the social content end the political form of bourgeois democracy. The historical task facing the proletariat after its accession to power is to replace bourgeois democracy by proletarian democracy, not to abolish all democracy... The dictatorship (of the proletariat) consists in the way democracy is applied, not in its abolition. It must be the action of the class and not of a small minority, managing things in the name of the class.... If political life throughout the country is stifled it must fatally follow that life in the soviets themselves will be paralysed. Without general elections, without unlimited freedom of the press and of assembly, without free confrontation of opinions, life will dry up in all public institutions--or it will be only a sham life, where the bureaucracy is the only active element."

We have dwelt on these quotations to show that Rosa Luxembourg, in her statements about the need for democracy, went much further than the Kronstadt rebels. They restricted their comments about democracy to matters of interest to the proletariat and to the working peasantry. Moreover Rosa Luxemburg formulated her criticisms of the Russian Revolution in 1918, in a period of full civil war, whereas the Petropavlovsk resolution was voted at a time when the armed struggle had virtually come to an end.

Would anyone dare accuse Rosa, on the basis of her criticisms, of having been in collusion with the international bourgeoisie? Why then are the demands of the Kronstadt sailors denounced as 'dangerous' and as inevitably leading to the counterrevolution? Has not the subsequent evolution of events amply vindicated both the Kronstadt rebels and Rosa Luxemburg? Was Rosa Luxemburg not right when she asserted that the task of the working class was to exercise working class power and not the dictatorship of a party or of a clique? For Rosa Luxemburg working class power was defined as "the achievement in a contest of the widest discussion, of the most active and unlimited participation of the popular masses in an unrestricted democracy."

A third Soviet Revolution

When putting forward their democratic demands, the Kronstadt rebels had probably never heard of the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. What they had heard of, however, was the first Constitution of the Soviet Republic, voted on July 10, 1918, by the 5th All Russian Congress of Soviets. Article 13, 14, 15 and 16 of the Constitution assured all workers of certain democratic rights (freedom of worship, freedom of assembly, freedom of union, freedom of the press). These articles sought to prevent the allocation of special privileges to any specific group or Party (articles 22 and 23).

The same Constitution proclaimed that no worker could be deprived of the right to vote or of the right to stand as a candidate, provided he satisfied the conditions stipulated in articles 64 and 65, that is to say provided he did not exploit the labour of others or live off income other than that which he had earned.

The central demand of the Kronstadt insurrection--all power to the Soviets and not to the Party)--was in fact based on an article of the Constitution. This proclaimed that all central and local power would henceforth be precisely in the hands of the soviets!

From the very beginning this Constitution was violated by the Bolsheviks--or rather its provisions were never put into effect. It is worth recalling that Rosa Luxemburg's criticisms were formulated a few months after the vote of this new constitution charter. When in 1921 the sailors were to insist on a genuine application of the rights they had acquired in 1918 they were called 'counterrevolutionaries' and denounced as 'agents of the international bourgeoisie'. Sixteen years later Victor Serge was to say that the demands of the rebels would necessarily have led to the counterrevolution. This shows how deep-going were Bolshevik attitudes concerning the dangers of democracy.

The basic laws of the Soviet Republic constitute a juridical summary of the ideology of the October Revolution. By the end of the Civil War these ideas had been pushed so far back that a third revolution would have been necessary to reinstate them and have them applied in everyday life. This is what the Kronstadt rebels meant when they spoke of the Third Revolution. In the Kronstadt Isvestia of March 8 they wrote: "At Kronstadt the foundation stone has been laid of the Third Revolution. This wall break the final chains which still bind the working masses and wall open up new paths of socialist creation".

We do not know if it would have been possible to save the conquests of October by democratic methods. We do not know if the economic situation of the country and its markedly peasant character were really suitable for the first attempt at building socialism. These problems should be discussed. But the task of those seeking truth is to proclaim the facts without embellishments. It is not good enough to take a superciliously scientific air to explain away historical phenomena.

When Trotsky sought to explain the development of the bureaucracy which had strangled all real life in the institutions of the Soviet State he found no difficulty in outlining his conception. In The Revolution Betrayed he states that one of the important causes was the fact that demobilised Red Army officers had come to occupy leading positions in the local soviets and had introduced military methods into them--at a time when the proletariat was exhausted following the prolonged revolutionary upheaval. This apperarently led to the birth of the bureaucracy. Trotsky omits to recall how he himself sought to introduce precisely these methods into the trade unions. Was it to save the proletariat further fatigue? And if the proletariat was that exhausted how come it was still capable of waging virtually total general strikes in the largest and most heavily industrialised cities? And if the Party was still really the driving force of the social revolution how come it did not help the proletariat in the struggle against the nascent, but already powerful, bureaucracy--instead of shooting the workers down, at a time when their energy had been sapped by three years of imperialist war followed by three years of civil war.

Why did the Communist Party identify itself with the authoritarian state? The answer is that the Party was no longer revolutionary. It was no longer proletarian. And this is precisely what the men of Kronstadt were blaming the Party for. Their merit is to have said all this in 1921--when it might still have been possible to change the situation--and not to have waited 15 years, by which time the defeat had become irrevocable.

Bureaucracy is almost an hereditary hallmark in Russia. It is as old as the Russian state itself. The Bolsheviks in power not only inherited the Tsarist bureaucracy itself, but its very spirit. Its very atmosphere. They should have realised that as the state enlarged its functions to encompass economic affairs, as it became the owner of all natural wealth and of industry, an immediate danger would arise of the rebirth and rapid development of the bureaucratic frame of mind.

A doctor treating a patient with a bad heredity takes this into account and advises certain precautions. What precautions did the Bolsheviks take to combat the bureaucratic tendencies which were obvious, in the very first years of the Revolution? What methods could they have used other than to allow a powerful democratic draught to blow through the whole atmosphere, and to encourage a rigorous and effective control to be exerted by the working masses?

True enough, some form of control was envisaged. The trouble was that the Commissariat of the Workers and Peasants inspection was to entrust this control to the very same type of bureaucrat whose power it was seeking to thwart. One need not seek far to find the causes of the bureaucratisation. Its roots lay deeply in the Bolshevik concept of the State commanded and controlled by a single Party, itself organised along absolutist and bureaucratic lines. These causes were of course aggravated by Russia's own bureaucratic traditions.

It is wrong to blame the peasantry for the defeat of the Revolution and for its degeneration into a bureaucratic regime. It would be too easy to explain all Russia's difficulties by the agrarian character of her economy. Some people seem to say at one and the same time that the Kronstadt revolt against the bureaucracy was a peasant revolt and that the bureaucracy itself was of peasant origin. With such a concept of the role of the peasantry one may ask how the Bolsheviks dared advocate the idea of the socialist revolution? How did they dare struggle for it in an agrarian country?

Some claim that the Bolsheviks allowed themselves such actions (as the suppression of Kronstadt) in the hope of a forthcoming world revolution, of which they considered themselves the vanguard. But would not a revolution in another country have been influenced by the spirit of the Russian Revolution? When one considers the enormous moral authority of the Russian Revolution throughout the world one may ask oneself whether the deviations of this Revolution would not eventually have left an imprint on other countries. Many historical facts allow such a judgement. One may recognise the impossibility of genuine socialist construction in a single country, yet have doubts as to whether the bureaucratic deformations of the Bolshevik regime would have been straightened out by the winds coming from revolutions in other countries.

The fascist experience in countries like Germany shows that an advanced stage of capitalist development is an insufficient guarantee against the growth of absolutist and autocratic tendencies. Although this is not the place to explain the phenomenon, we must note the powerful wave of authoritarianism coming from economically advanced countries and threatening to engulf old ideas and traditions. It is incontestable that Bolshevism is morally related to this absolutist frame of mind. It had in fact set a precedent for subsequent tendencies. No one can be sure that had another revolution occurred elsewhere following the one in Russia, Bolshevism would have democratised itself. It might again have revealed its absolutist features.

Were there not real dangers in the democratic way? Was there no reason to fear reformist influences in the soviets, if democracy had been given free rein? We accept that this was a real danger. But it was no more of a danger than what inevitably followed the uncontrolled dictatorship of a single party, whose General Secretary was already Stalin.(7)

We are told that the country was at the end of its tether, that it had lost its ability to resist. True, the country was weary of war. But on the other hand it was full of constructive forces, ardently seeking to learn and to educate themselves. The end of the Civil War saw a surge of workers and peasants towards schools, workers' universities and institutes of technical education. Wasn't this yearning the best testimony to the vitality and resistance of these classes? In a country with a very high level of illiteracy, such an education could greatly have helped the working masses in the genuine exercise of real power.

But by its very essence a dictatorship destroys the creative capacities of a people. Despite the undoubted attempts of the Government to educate workers, education soon became the privilege of Party members loyal to the leading faction. From 1921 on, workers' faculties and higher educational establishments were purged of their more independent minded elements. This process gained tempo with the development of oppositional tendencies within the Party. The attempt at a genuine mass education was increasingly compromised. Lenin's wish that every cook should be able to govern the state became less and less likely to be implemented.

The revolutionary conquest could only be deepened through a genuine participation of the masses. Any attempt to substitute an 'elite' for those masses could only be profoundly reactionary.

In 1921 the Russian Revolution stood at the cross roads. The democratic or the dictatorial way, that was the question. By lumping together bourgeois and proletarian democracy the Bolsheviks were in fact condemning both. They sought to build socialism from above, throughskill ful manoeuvres of the Revolutionary General Staff. While waiting for a world revolution that was not round the corner, they built a state capitalist society, where the working class no longer had the right to make the decisions most intimately concerning it.

Lenin was not alone in perceiving that the Kronstadt rebellion was a challenge to this plan. Both he and the Bolsheviks were fully aware that what was at stake was the monopoly of their Party. Kronstadt might have opened the way to a genuine proletarian democracy, incompatible with the Party's monopoly of power. That is why Lenin preferred to destroy Kronstadt. He chose an ignoble but sure way: the calumny that Kronstadt was allied to the bourgeoisie and to the agrarian counterrevolution.

When Kouzmin, Commissar to the Baltic Fleet, had stated at the Kronstadt meeting of March 2nd that the Bolsheviks would not surrender power without a fight, he was saying the truth. Lenin must have laughed at this Commissar who obviously didn't understand the ABC of Bolshevik morality or tactics. Politically and morally one had to destroy the opponent--not argue with him using real arguments. And destroy its revolutionary opponents is exactly what the Bolshevik government did.

The Kronstadt rebels were a grey, amorphous mass. But such masses occasionally show an incredible level of political awareness. If there had been among them a number of men of 'higher' political understanding the insurrection might well never have taken place, for those men would have understood firstly that the demands of the rebels were in flagrant conflict with the policies of the Kremlin--and secondly that, at that particular moment in time, the government felt itself firmly enough in the saddle to shoot down, without pity or mercy, any tendency daring seriously to oppose its views or plans.

The men of Kronstadt were sincere but naive. Believing in the justness of their cause they did not foresee the tactics of their opponents. They waited for help from the rest of the country, whose demands they knew they were voicing. They lost sight of the fact that the rest of the country was already in the iron grip of a dictatorship which no longer allowed the people the free expression of its wishes and the free choice of its institutions.

The great ideological and political discussion between 'realists' and 'dreamers' between 'scientific socialists' and the 'revolutionary volnitza (8) was fought out, weapons in hand. It ended, in 1921, with the political and military defeat of the 'dreamers'. But Stalin was to prove to the whole world that this defeat was also the defeat of socialism, over a sixth of the earth's surface.

Social democracy: the rift widens

By Eric Lee

In a recent interview for an Australian newspaper, the leader of the world’s trade union movement made an interesting observation.

“Have progressive parties lost the narrative that connects them with working people in many countries?” asked Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

One would have expected a diplomatic answer — something along the lines of, well, it varies from country to country, clearly some labour and social democratic parties remain closer to their roots, and so on.

But that is not what she said. Burrow, who chose not to pursue a political career in Australia and instead moved to Brussels to take over the ITUC, was blunt:

“The answer is yes, absolutely,” she said. Labour and social democratic parties have lost their connection with the working class.

So next you’d expect her to say that it was really important for those parties to rebuild those connections, that unions and the parties they founded needed to re-connect, and so on. But once again, her answer was surprising.

“My job is not to worry about the parties,” she said, “but to build the issues on which we can base a conversation with workers.” “We” in this case means the trade union movement.

She did have one final comment for the politicians, though. “If any smart politician who shares even an ounce of our values can't get elected on the basis of that conversation, that is, frankly, pretty despairing stuff.”

I found her comments very interesting coming in the wake of 30 November public sector strike here in the UK — a strike which went ahead without the support of the Labour Party or its leader, Ed Miliband, who was elected with the support of unions.

Trade unionists in a number of countries are finding that the political parties acting in their names are doing very little on their behalf. In some cases, this is causing unions to turn inward. When Sharan Burrow says “my job is not to worry about the parties” it’s a clear expression of that feeling.

And the feeling is global. In the USA, many trade unionists have expressed a deep frustration with the Obama administration. Unions had a long shopping list for the first Democrat to win a national election since 1996 — and the top of their list was passage of labour law reform. They didn’t get it. Banks got bailed out, but unions got very little.

Marxists like to point out that the Democratic Party in the USA is a bourgeois party, so that’s pretty much what we can expect.

But this is a naive explanation. Unions in the USA play roughly the same role with regard to the Democrats as British unions do with regard to the Labour Party here. Sometimes, Democratic politicians even sound more left-wing than their British labour counterparts.

There are even worse cases like these — such as the Greek social democrats managing an austerity drive that triggered massive street protests. One imagines that Greek trade unionists have little time for “progressive” politicians these days.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. In Canada, the union-backed New Democratic Party which did extremely well in the most recent federal elections, threw its parliamentary support behind postal workers and others in recent national disputes.

One doesn’t have to be a supporter of the Fourth International to get that there is a growing rift between the working class and the social democratic and labour parties that speak in its name.

To hear a moderate, mainstream trade union leader like Sharan Burrow make comments like that shows just how far things have gone.

At the end of the interview, Burrow says “we believe in non-violent protest, absolutely.” But then she adds, “if there's no capacity to resolve the problem, then we are on the streets.”

The question is not how mainstream left parties can re-connect to their base. Burrow is right about that. It’s a bigger problem.

And yet her comments leave many unanswered questions.

Can unions go it alone? Do they not need to be engaged in politics? Can parliaments and local governments be left in the hands of those who have no sympathy for and no connection to the working class? Is being “on the streets” a strategy?

The willingness of trade union leaders like Burrow to speak the plain truth opens the possibility of having a serious conversation about these issues in the labour movement. And that’s a conversation in which Marxists have something to say.

Life on Labour?

By Dave Osler

Despite the failure of Russia’s latest space probe, scientists are rightly determined to continue their search for life on Mars. The way things are going right now, it looks like that quest will reach fruition long before anyone ever discovers signs of life in the Labour Party.

It’s not that I saw the defeat of New Labour at the ballot box last year as a prelude to a rerun of the Bennite years. Apart from anything else, the weight of the left both inside and outside Labour is insufficient to permit stuff like that. To revamp a period slogan, it’s never again for “never again”.

But as a Labour Party member myself, my expectation was that some sort of internal discussion over the way Labour governed for 13 years would open up. Perhaps some leading figures would finally give voice some of the criticisms they had been bottling up while the Thought Police held sway throughout Oceania.

Even the re-emergence of a distinctly social democratic current would mark a step forward of sorts, especially if it were open to dialogue with Marxism. But more than 18 months after the return of the ConDems, nobody on the left has even properly attempted a balance sheet of the 1997-2010 experience and asked what lessons should have been learned.

Interestingly, soon after Cameron got the keys to 10 Downing Street, there were reports of an upsurge in new recruits to Labour. Some of these people briefly made an appearance at my ward meetings. I hate to generalise from the particular, but no attempt seems to have been made systematically to integrate this layer.

Then there was the election of Ed Miliband to the leadership, by the narrowest of margins. Red Ed — as he was misleadingly dubbed by the tabloids — sometimes seems to speak in a strange kind of political code.

This or that comment is designed to be read between the lines as an encouragement to the soft left, although even then, they are usually counterbalanced with some ostensibly even-handed sop to rightist opinion. Is he or is he not to the left of, say, Hugh Gaitskell? Discuss.

Nor does what remains of Labour’s small remaining hard left seem to be striding ahead, if the recent Labour Representation Committee conference is anything to go by. The LRC claims to have grown by 10% in the last year, although that is from a low base.

But attendance at the event appeared to be down on last year. Many executive places were uncontested and even the LRC’s undoubted leading MP John McDonnell found constituency commitments more pressing than staying to the end of the proceedings.

In so far as what is going on in the Labour Party tells us things about the state of consciousness in the British working class, all this stuff actually does matter.

I am not an AWL member, but as the organisation makes at least some of its internal debates public, I recall that orientation towards Labour was controversial within the group a couple of years back.

Majority opinion believed that it was worth maintaining some sort of presence, and at least one other far left grouping seem to have reached a similar conclusion, with familiar faces cropping up in new guises at Labour Party events.

But it is worth asking what revolutionary socialists can usefully achieve in stumping up for a Labour Party card. The old entrism tactic of past decades seems scarcely applicable. The contentions that Labour can be transformed into a revolutionary party, or even that a mass revolutionary current can be built inside it, seems more farfetched even then before.

Nor is it obvious to me that the membership are especially receptive to socialist ideas; a substantial proportion of it is actively hostile. And if it is radical youth and students you are after, the Labour Party is just about the last place you will find them.

The most persuasive argument is that there are so few other outlets for activity, to the point where even limited possibilities can start to look appealing. Permit me to briefly revert to the life on Mars analogy; life on Labour, even if it only amounts to the presence of microbes, would at least establish that we are not alone in the universe. At least for now, we should keep looking.

Protests shake Putin

Demonstrators took to the streets in cities throughout Russia on 10 December as the latest stage in the campaign against ballot-rigging in the parliamentary elections.

Such protests went ahead despite police violence, the mass arrests of protestors, the summary imposition of two-week jail sentences on those arrested on previous demonstrations and the flooding of the capital Moscow with 50,000 police and 2,000 interior troops in preparation for the anti-government rally.

Estimates of the numbers demonstrating in Moscow varied from 35,000 to 85,000. In St Petersburg around 10,000 protested.

The protests in 99 cities represented not just the biggest public protests in Russia for some two decades but also the first sizeable protests against the twelve-year-old Putin regime.

Putin was appointed acting President by Boris Yeltsin in late 1999.

He subsequently served two four-year terms of office. In 2008 Putin stood down as President — the constitution barred him from serving more than two consecutive terms of office —– and was immediately appointed Prime Minister.

In September of this year Putin announced his intention to run for President in March 2012. Due to constitutional changes, he could end up in office until 2024.

Both as President and as Prime Minster Putin has presided over a regime which has been defined by authoritarianism, corruption, growing social inequality, an increasingly chauvinistic nationalism, and a more aggressive foreign policy towards states bordering Russia.

The main television channels and some of the major newspapers have slavishly supported Putin’s policies and effectively blacked out oppositional voices. Even last week’s Russia-wide protests received hardly any coverage on television or in the pro-Putin press.

Oligarchs who had grown super-rich under Yeltsin but who fell out with Putin were forced into exile or prosecuted and imprisoned. Those who remained on good terms with him, however, continued to amass their fortunes: Putin cut the tax on company profits from 35% to 24%, and also introduced a flat rate income tax of 13%.

Years of economic growth, especially after the virtual collapse of the Russian economy under Yeltsin, combined with Putin’s apparent determination to put an end to the social chaos of the Yeltsin years, initially secured Putin and his party (United Russia) broad support amongst the Russian electorate.

Putin was re-elected President in 2004 with 70% of the vote. And in the last parliamentary elections, held in 2007, United Russia won 64% of the vote, giving it 315 of the 450 seats in the Duma (Russian parliament).

But by 2011 disillusionment had begun to set in. Bloggers exposed a series of government-sanctioned financial scandals.

Despite Putin’s promises to crack down on corruption, Russia had become the world’s most corrupt major economy, with a worse level of corruption than Pakistan.

Annual economic growth of 7% a year and real wages growth of 15% a year faded away under the impact of the global economic crisis. Increases in wages stalled. Rates of economic growth fell by half. To balance the budget Putin and United Russia were left with the choice of cutting social spending or increasing the retirement age.

This disillusionment expressed itself in declining electoral support for United Russia.

Even according to official figures, United Russia won only 49% of the votes — down from 64% in 2007 — in this month’s parliamentary elections. But Russian and international observers put the party’s share of the vote far lower.

The Russian vote-monitoring organisation “Golos” (“Vote”) received 1,500 complaints of electoral abuse, including the fact that participation in the election in the Rostov region amounted to 146% of the electorate,

Based on data collected by 300 volunteers from 800 polling stations, Golos estimated United Russia’s real share of the vote amounted to just 30%. In Moscow alone a million fictitious votes had been added to United Russia’s share of the poll.

Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation In Europe (OSCE) visited 150 polling stations and judged counting at 34 of them as “very bad”. The OSCE also condemned media bias, state interference in the electoral process, and procedural violations including ballot-box stuffing.

In the week following the election the opposition movement, triggered by evidence of electoral fraud, coalesced around a number of basic demands.

These included demands that the results should be annulled, fresh elections held, an investigation conducted into the ballot-rigging, and all arrested protestors released.

But in terms of its overall politics, the opposition movement is politically amorphous and generally concerned to stress its moderate nature. It also contains some particularly unpleasant elements.

Alexei Navalny, for example, who has been praised in the Western media for his anti-corruption campaigning and anti-government blogging, is a hardline nationalist who scapegoats immigrants for what he calls “ethnic crimes”, attends the annual “Russian March” rallies organised by neo-Nazis and is a self-confessed admirer of French fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

24 December is to be the next day for nationally co-ordinated protests.

Narrow win for New Zealand Tories

Author:

Mike Kyriazopolous

By Mike Kyriazopolous

New Zealand’s Tories, the National Party, have been returned to lead the government, but only by the narrowest of margins.

National won 59 out of 121 seats in Parliament, and is reliant for a majority on the neoliberal ACT party and centre-right United Future, who got one seat each. Turnout was the lowest since the 1880s - about a million people (26.8%) on the electoral roll did not vote. The saving grace of the election was the result of the concurrently held referendum on the voting system — Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) will be retained. In 1990 National gained a similar percentage of the vote, but the First Past the Post system delivered them 70% of the seats. A vicious neoliberal onslaught followed.

National ran a dumbed-down election campaign, banking on the national euphoria of a Rugby World Cup win and the remarkable personal popularity rating of its leader, John Key. Labour’s campaign centred around opposition to privatisation, but it also advocated raising the state retirement age from 65 to 67 (which National opposed), and tried to attack the government from the right on police recruitment numbers. Labour’s share of vote collapsed in virtually every electorate, except in South Auckland, where they ran a vigorous campaign. The party’s leader resigned immediately following the election.

ACT’s meltdown was spectacular — it went from five seats to one. However its single MP (given a generous cabinet portfolio) will provide useful political cover for Key, especially when trying to justify hard right policies, such as Charter Schools (Academies). The Maori Party suffered from its close relationship with National over the last term, as well as facing pressure on its left flank from the newly launched Mana Movement. The Greens got their best ever result winning 11% of the party vote. New Zealand First, a populist nationalist party, also did well winning eight seats - their anti-privatisation propaganda centred on the perils of state assets falling into “foreign ownership”.

The Maori-led, working class-orientated Mana Movement retained its one MP, Hone Harawira, and won 1% of the party vote.

Its main campaign slogans were “Tax the rich”, “Feed the Kids”, “Jobs for all” and “20,000 new state houses”. Mana was only launched a few months ago, so 1% is not too bad, but it should have and could have done better. Mana failed to make a real breakthrough into the Pacific Island and working class European communities, perhaps because it was perceived to be exclusively a party for Maori. Mana did develop a decent policy on Pacific Islanders - equal rights with immigrants from Australia; and a 12 month amnesty for visa overstayers — but it was launched very late in the day.

Mana is a broad church, composed mainly of Maori Sovereignty activists, plus leftists and trade unionists, especially from Unite. All the major far left organisations are now active within Mana — the three Cliffite groups and the politically heterogeneous Workers Party.

In its post election analysis, the Workers Party identified contradictions in Mana’s propaganda on asset sales.

It is sometimes progressive, other times economic nationalist — concluding: “We in Mana need to be sharp on economic nationalism if we want to grow beyond 1% of the party vote. After all, if our policies are presented as a pale imitation of New Zealand First, we can hardly be surprised if voters end up going for the real deal instead.”

The most positive sign is that Mana activists are continuing to hit the streets immediately following the election, supporting locked out meat workers and state housing tenants facing eviction.

For the potentially vulnerable National-led government, Mana is likely to be the staunchest opposition it will face over the next three years.

Islamists gain in Egypt's poll

The second and third stages of elections to the lower house of Egypt's parliament are due on 14 December and 3 January.

Elections to the upper house will start on 29 January, and the new parliament - whose powers are still uncertain - will meet in March.

In the first stage of the lower-house elections, on 28 November, the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party won 36.6% of the party-list vote.

The more devout and rigid "salafist" Islamists of Al-Nour got 24.4%, making an Islamist total of 61%. Anecdotal evidence is that many workers voted for the Islamists on grounds that they seemed more "grass-roots" and in touch with people's lives than the liberal, secularist, and leftish parties. They were unworried by the Islamists' repressive attitudes or perhaps accepted their reassuring claims to be moderate,

The Egyptian Bloc (left-liberal) got 13.4%; al-Wafd (the traditional party of the Egyptian bourgeoisie), 7.1%; al-Wasat (a semi-secularising split from the Muslim Brotherhood) 4.3%; and the Revolution Continues Alliance (leftish) 3.5%.

The small new workers' parties in Egypt were unable to stand any candidates.

The further stages of the election, held in remoter rural areas, are likely to increase the Islamists' majority.

The Islamists may well move slowly and cautiously; but these election results pose a threat to the openings for democracy and a new workers' movement created by the Arab Spring and the overthrow of Mubarak.

Syrian state lashes out as sanctions bite

The Syrian police state is now responsible for over 4,000 deaths since the opposition movement emerged onto the streets in March.

This week, the regime staged local elections — part of a sham “reform” programme — with 17,000 candidates standing for 43,000 seats. State media reported voters were “flocking” to the polls. The on-the-ground opposition inside the country called for a boycott, and turn-out seems to have been poor.

On Sunday the opposition called an open-ended “Strike for Dignity” — the main effects being closure of small businesses and keeping children home from school. The strikers’ main demands are the release of political prisoners and the withdrawal of the Syrian military from urban centres. In areas where the rebels are strong — in Homs, Deraa in the south, and northern areas close to the Turkish border — the strike seems strong.

The BBC quoted an activist in Homs as saying, “The [regime is] attacking five neighbourhoods with heavy artillery in Homs. Many houses are damaged. You ask me about the election? The polling stations are empty, the only people there are government supervisors, that's it.”

Al Jazeera noted that the regime was taking revenge on shopkeepers who were observing the strike, burning down scores of stores in Deraa.

On 27 November, the 22-country Arab League took an unprecedented decision to impose economic sanctions on a member. It voted to stop trading with the Syrian state in everything but essential goods, to ban Arab investments in Syria, to freeze assets held by senior members of the regime abroad, and to end dealings with Syria’s central bank.

The Banque Saudi Fransi, a Saudi bank, announced it is selling its 27% interest in one of Syria’s private banks.

Three days later Turkey, one of Syria’s biggest trading partners, said it would follow suit.

American and EU sanctions have also been imposed. A ban on oil imports, begun by America in August and the EU in September, is costing Syria $400m a month. The Syrian pound has fallen 25% against the dollar.

Foreign investment has halted. Tourism, which accounted for over 10% of GDP in 2010, has ended. International credit cards no longer work.

Economic sanctions are beginning to hurt. Most Syrians have no heat because mazoot (fuel oil) is scarce in most regions of Syria.

Climate change: their solutions and ours

The Durban Climate Conference, which participants are hailing as a great success, concluded on 12 December.

Its 194 participants (including the world’s “big three” emitters — USA, China and India) agreed a legal framework for reducing carbon emissions and controlling temperature increase.

The world has been here before; negotiations at Kyoto and Cancun also presented themselves as historic achievements.

Writing before the conference, AWL member and Unite activist Max Munday looks at how the workers’ movement can develop our own solutions for fighting climate change which don’t rely on bourgeois diplomacy.

US withdraws from Iraq

By Martin Thomas

At the end of December, the last US troops will withdraw from Iraq, eight years and eight months after the invasion of March 2003.

Bungling to the last, the USA sent vice-president Joe Biden to tour Iraq declaring the operation a success, and he held forth to a puzzled audience on the great things the USA has done in Baku. Baku is in Azerbaijan, not Iraq.

The invasion was the product of a surge of US triumphalism following the collapse of European and Russian Stalinism in 1991, easy US military successes in Kuwait (1991), Bosnia (1995), and Kosova (1999), and seeming US military success in Afghanistan (2001).

By invading, US politicians around George Bush thought they could cut short a possible process of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein gradually regaining the regional support and influence he had lost after the Kuwait war in 1991. With a quick, sharp blow, they thought they could get a US-friendly, market-friendly regime in Iraq and use it as a lever to transform the Middle East and North Africa, which would otherwise fall to political Islamists when the decrepit old dictators like Mubarak, Assad, Qaddafi, Ben Ali, and the Saudi monarchy finally went.

In those terms, the invasion failed heavily. Iraq has a government dominated by Shia Islamists; the Iranian government, hated by the USA, probably has more influence in Iraq now than the US does, despite the fact that 16,000 US citizens (staff at the gigantic Baghdad embassy, and mercenary paramilitaries) remain in Iraq.

US clout in the region and the world has declined.

The USA has repeatedly declared it wants a two-states settlement in Israel/Palestine, and quickly, but has been unable to produce even a significant nudge in that direction.

The collapse of the old dictatorships which dominated the Middle East and North Africa for decades is now underway, with the "Arab Spring". The effect of the war in Iraq on that outcome has probably been to help the Islamists who now, with the election results in Egypt and Tunisia and the first declarations of the post-Qaddafi rulers in Libya, look like coming out on top.

Hardly anyone in Iraq positively endorsed the US invasion.

Some of Iraq's Shia majority, long suppressed by Saddam, were at first willing grudgingly to welcome the US's overthrow of the dictator and to deal with the US troops on a wary "wait and see" basis, hoping they would tidy up and leave soon. Hassan Jumaa, leader of the oil workers' union which sprang up in southern Iraq after the fall of Saddam's police-state, said: "The occupation is like a headache, but Saddam was like death".

The wariness soon turned to outright hostility, as the US clumsily destroyed the fabric of civil government in Iraq and tipped the country into a gangster-ridden chaos over which Americans strode demanding flat-rate taxes and rapid privatisations.

The USA was sucked into a long military presence. The chaos led the majority of Iraqis to demand that the US withdraw - but also to say that the withdrawal should come only after some civil order had been restored, so that withdrawal would not tip the country into full-scale sectarian civil war and the destruction of all the limited democratic and labour-movement opportunities which had opened with Saddam's fall.

Socialists hoped that the new Iraqi labour movement would shape that reconstruction.

In fact, after a year of almost-exploding sectarian civil war in 2006, the uneasy exhaustion into which Iraqi society finally fell from late 2007 was under the rule of a cabal of Shia Islamist parties, in loose alliance with Kurdish nationalists, and gradually reconstructing a state machine around themselves.

The Iraqi labour movement remains alive, though battered and still scarcely semi-legal, since Saddam's old anti-union laws remain on the books and have been supplemented by others.

It will still need our solidarity after the US withdrawal.

What the Greek left is saying

Author:

Theodora Polenta

By Theodora Polenta

As Greece struggles through huge cuts under the instructions of the European Union/ European Central Bank/ IMF "Troika", a lot of emotive language has been used, drawing parallels with the Greeks' national liberation struggle against the German-fascist invasion in the 1940s.

Greek flags, and alliances with nationalist and chauvinist forces, have been widely accepted, even by parts of the left, as symbolising the struggle for national liberation, the struggle of the dependent Greek nation against the German and EU imperialism.

A post-modernist analysis, offered by Greek intellectuals and groups such as the Spitha movement founded by the famous composer Mikis Theodorakis in 2010, talks about the transition to a new meta-left era in which the Greek people will build from below a new "national-popular-class" unity against the memorandum, the Troika, and the foreign creditors.

But is Greece really "under occupation"? Can we draw a valid historical analogy with the 1940s? Is it really the duty of the Greek workers and the Greek left to propagate and build up an "anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation" together with supposedly progressive forces of the capitalist class, defined as progressive by their anti-German and anti-EU stance?

Such analysis has very short legs.

The majority of the eurozone countries that are described in this analysis as German protectorates are capitalist developed countries. Italy is a major economy, the third biggest in the eurozone, the eighth biggest in the world.

In today's Greece the ruling class has not been defeated militarily and escaped to Egypt, as in 1940s. The Greek capitalists have control of their companies, their banks, and their state.

The Troika instructions are a product of negotiations with the Greek capitalist class. They are imposed on the Greek people after the prior agreement and consent of the Greek capitalists and the Greek government.

Contrary to prevailing myths, Greece is one of the most developed countries in the world. In 2010, it was the 31st richest country in the world, and the average GDP per person was €28,500.

Both the European Union and the eurozone played a key part in the above achievement. After 1989-1991, Greek capitalism became the driving force in the exploitation and imperialist domination of the Balkan states. The Greek banks became the parent companies of banks in Tirana, Bucharest, and Ankara.

That led to the neglect of previous areas of capitalist investment such as the agriculture production; the metal industry; and the food industry. The shift of capitalist interests to financial operations was a strategic decision by the Greek capitalist class, not imposed by Brussels or other foreign powers.

The Greek capitalist class reoriented, became the centre of financial transactions for all the Balkans, and discarded Greece's previous self-sufficiency in sugar, wheat, and other products.

The rapid expansion along that path was only achieved due to Greece's entry into the eurozone and the "hardness" of the euro as a currency.

The reorientation of Greek capitalism in the 1990s was, on a smaller scale, comparable to the shift in British capitalism during the Thatcher years. Thatcher abandoned the miners and the car industry in "return" for the City of London becoming the world centre for financial transactions.

That is why the majority of the Greek capitalist class want to stay in the eurozone, and negotiate the necessary cuts at the expense of the Greek workers. By supporting Greece's position within the eurozone the Greek capitalist class are supporting their position within the world capitalist hierarchy. For the Greek people and the Greek working class, no struggle against the austerity measures can be victorious if it does not first of all prioritise the class struggle against "our" Greek capitalist class.

In Greece, alongside the fascist groups, a sizeable minority of the "respectable" right in New Democracy (equivalent to the Tory party) advocates the "national" reorientation of Greek capitalism, a return to the drachma (i.e. exit from the eurozone and the EU), and a shift of Greece to a tough export policy. (That means a further devaluation and degradation of the people's wages and working conditions, the better to compete in world markets, but they gloss over that). They want a "multidimensional" foreign policy which would include accepting loans from and making alliances with Chinese and Russian capital.

The most dynamic sections of the Greek capitalist class vehemently oppose Greek exit from the eurozone, or the prospect of Greece going bankrupt or refusing to paying its debts. They do that for class reasons.

The ultra-right populist party LAOS, a party that acts as an umbrella for a lot of openly fascist and anti-Semitic politicians and is part of the recently formed National Unity government, advocates safeguarding Greece's position in the eurozone, whatever the cost to the Greek people, and the implementation of all the Troika's austerity measures.

The pleas from LAOS to the Troika that they should not further polarise further the political climate, or else the "disorderly forces of the left will come to power, establishing chaos and transforming Greece into a Cuba of the Balkans", show the blurring of the borders between the "cosmopolitan" and pro-European sections of the capitalist class and the ultra-right, racist, anti-Semitic, chauvinistic and fascist parties.

Both strands of right-wing agitation cuts against what the left must do.

After the 9 December European agreement, the possibility of Greece being expelled from the eurozone in the short term has decreased. There are no legal grounds, under existing EU legislation, to expel Greece; and the majority of the eurozone states now have "excessive" debt and deficit problems on the 9 December criteria. It is difficult or impossible to set Maastricht-type criteria which are violated only by Greece violates and not by bigger eurozone countries such as France or Italy.

But the left still needs to work out how to respond to the dilemma "euro or drachma"? How should the left respond to the possibility, immediate or remote, of Greece's expulsion from the eurozone under Merkel's and Sarkozy's instructions?

The Greek left's motto should be: "We are not taking sides in favour of the euro speculators against the drachma speculators, or vice versa". The slogan "No sacrifice for the euro" provides the right political direction for left-wing movements to lead the struggle against austerity policies.

Despite the good intentions of those parts of the left and progressive academics who advocate it, return to the drachma within a capitalist framework would lead to an even more extreme degradation of the Greek working class's living standards and conditions. If such a move succeeded in its own terms, by boosting productive development and exports (and it might well not), then that would happen only on the backs of the working class and the majority of the Greek people.

True, the euro is not a neutral symbol. It is linked with aggressive neoliberal policies and the austerity measures. A socialist revolution and a workers' government in Greece, if they emerged in that country alone, in advance of the rest of Europe, would have to break the eurozone framework as well as other frameworks (such as free movement of the capital etc.)

But that is different from claiming that exit from the eurozone and the EU will open the road to socialism.

If George Papandreou had proceeded with the referendum he promised at the end of October, then he was going to pose to the Greek people the blackmailing dilemma: either vote for the Troika's bailout fund and all the austerity measures that come with it, or accept that Greece is out of the eurozone and possibly the EU. In that sort of case, the left should vote against the cuts and the blackmail, and against the euro in that sense. However, that is a case of practical political duty. and should not be theorised into a general rule.

What is the Greek left saying?

The most extreme version of the pro-EU stance is expressed by DHMAR, a centre-left split from Syriza. DHMAR supports the safeguarding of Greece's position in the EU and in the eurozone at all costs. Its zeal and loyalty was manifested when it came close to giving a vote of confidence to the National Unity government which has an unelected banker as a prime minister and four fascist politicians as part of the cabinet.

DHMAR acts as a naïve left wing adviser to Merkel and Sarkozy. But the 9 December decisions teir predecessors are not a German mistake. Merkel and the German capitalist know very well that the proposed policies will lead the eurozone countries to stagnation and not to growth. That is a conscious political choice. The aim of the left cannot be to persuade Merkel and her allies of the wrongness of their choices so they can rectify their mistakes, but to contribute in the development of a pan European workers' movement to force Merkel to abandon the politics of neoliberalism and German capitalist domination.

Syriza pushes a "European-Keynesian" response to the crisis, with eurobonds and productive investment of EU funds in poorer areas as part of a progressive democratisation of the European Union. It is confined to legalistic forms of struggles and protests and dreams of broader green and centre left coalitions which will miraculously lead Greece and the eurozone out of crisis.

Like DHMAR, though inadvertently, Syriza confines itself to being an adviser of the government and the European Union. Its leadership hesitates to adopt well-matured slogans within the anti austerity movement such as the cancellation of the debt and the nationalisation of the banks.

Left wing sections of Synaspismos, and other parties that participate in Syriza, have more radical and left wing political positions, but they do not have the political weight to shift the main line. Synaspismos exposes and denounces the ultra-right's anti-EU sentiments; but its "internationalism" is empty, abstract, and stripped of class-based politics.

KKE has stuck to its opportunistic and reformist policy of an "anti-monopoly popular people's government" and the theory of stages. It has put forward a nationalistic version of Keynesian policies, advocating exit from the European Union without a direct connection with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the strategic aim of socialism.

KKE refuses to raise aggressive transitional demands and reduces itself to raising defensive slogans (for the working class to secure its current wages and working conditions). KKE uses revolutionary lingo, but refuses to form a united front with the workers who are leaving the PASOK party and losing their faith in the trade union leaders.

In an odd twist, KKE advocates the exit of Greece from the EU, but refuses to call for the exit of Greece from the eurozone. It says that "euro or drachma" is a false dilemma.

KKE insists on Greece's national road to development at a time where every Greek worker instinctively is starting to understand the commonality of the attacks across all the eurozone countries. The commonality of the attacks places as a duty the commonality of the workers' struggle. And,certainly, a socialist revolution in Greece depends on the solidarity and level of struggle of the European workers.

The current crisis is not primarily a Greek crisis, as the shift of the crisis to Italy and France is clearly showing and the threat of Moody's and Standard and Poor's to downgrade the credit status of 15 of the eurozone countries (despite the 9 of December commitments) demonstrates clearly. It is a structural crisis of the capitalist system.

Even the strongest capitalist nations have exceedingly big debts (Japan 190% of GDP, Italy 120%, Belgium 102%, Canada 83%, U.K 81%, Germany 77%, USA 70%...)

The current crisis is not a by-product of the nations' deficits; on the contrary, the deficits are a by-product of the current capitalist crisis. The crisis is not due to the idiocy or incompetence of the European leaders. It is associated with the very core and inner workings of the capitalist system.

The challenge of the left is to persuade the working class that the only way to defend their standards of livings and working conditions is though the route of uncompromising struggle and confrontation - against the EU and the IMF, but primarily against a part of the Greek nation: the Greek capitalist class.

The left has a duty to fight against the degradation of parliamentary democracy and against violations of national sovereignty and against the continuous blackmails by the eurozone leaders, but from a class perspective

The revolutionary left should take bold initiatives and contribute to the restructuring and resynthesizing of the workers movement for the build-up of a new revolutionary party.

That must attract into its ranks the vanguard and rank and file of both KKE and Syriza members as well as the most advanced of the PASOK workers, but most importantly the most vanguard and militant sections of workers and youth that are emerging from the struggle.

Euro-leaders set course for worse crisis

By Martin Thomas

David Cameron's veto, on 9 December, of the plan for a new economic treaty backed by all 26 other European Union governments, may shake British politics and Britain's future relations with the EU. The 9 December summit itself may shake more. The 26 adopted a plan which has little chance of smoothing the financial crisis shaking the eurozone, and may make it worse.

Felix Salmon, economic commentator for Reuters, was the sharpest of many mainstream economists who saw it that way: "A continent which has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to implode in a spectacle of pathetic ignominy. Its individual countries will survive, of course, albeit in unnecessarily straitened circumstances. But the dream of European unity is dissolving in real time, as the eyes of the world look on in disbelief. Europe’s leaders have set a course which leads directly to a gruesome global recession..."

Kevin Authers in the Financial Times (10 December) posed the "mundane question": "Has it [the 9 December plan] done enough to get us through to Christmas?... Probably not".

The plan is mostly a souped-up version of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which on paper committed all EU states (including the two who "opted out" from commitment to join the euro at some point, Denmark and the UK) to limit budget deficits to 3% of GDP and accumulated government debt to 60% of GDP.

Even supposing that is a good idea long-term (and it's not), it has little relevance short-term. Its only short-term relevance could be that it provided an excuse, or "cover", for the European Central Bank to do what it has so far refused to do, i.e. really "bail out" the hard-hit governments of Europe in roughly the same way as many central banks "bailed out" stricken commercial banks in 2008. The ECB is theoretically independent, so the EU summit could not directly and formally decide what it would do.

But the day after the 9 November Euro-summit, ECB chief Mario Draghi declared that while the ECB is the lender of last resort for Europe's banks, it is not prepared to play the same role for Europe's governments.

Far from replacing the inadequate European Financial Stability Facility (put together in 2010 as a sort of substitute for the ECB in the business of bailing out governments), the 9 December summit only noted that the plan by the last Euro-summit, on 27 October, to boost EFSF funds to 1000 billion euros, had proved unworkable. The EFSF will be lucky to get half that.

Draghi did promise easier credit for European banks, who at present are running nearly 200 billion euros short on new loans they planned to raise this year to repay bonds (fixed-term IOUs) issued in previous years and falling due for repayment in 2011. But the credit backstop for European governments in difficulty is weaker, not stronger, than was promised in the inadequate 27 October plan.

It is conceivable, I suppose, that greater ECB aid to the banks could ease the whole crisis. The banks' credit crisis and the governments' credit crisis are interwoven, since governments stretch their credit to support banks (the Irish government's debt crisis is entirely one caused by its actions to stop Irish banks collapsing), and banks' difficulties are increased when the government bonds which they hold lose value.

However, to me, and to many mainstream economists, it seems unlikely that increased ECB aid to the banks will be enough to stave off catastrophe.

Wolfgang Münchau, the Financial Times's commentator on the European economy, wrote: "All they [the EU leaders] did in the early hours of Friday morning was to create a new crisis without resolving the existing one".

Kevin O'Rourke, professor of economic history at Oxford, wrote: "The 'fiscal stability union' that [the Euro-summit] proposed is nothing of the sort. Rather than creating an inter-regional insurance mechanism involving counter-cyclical transfers [i.e. spending to offset slumps], the version on offer would constitutionalise pro-cyclical adjustment [cuts to worsen slumps] in recession-hit countries, with no countervailing measures to boost demand elsewhere in the eurozone. Describing this as a 'fiscal union', as some have done, constitutes a near-Orwellian abuse of language.

"What is needed to save the eurozone in the immediate future is a European Central Bank that acts like a proper monetary authority". The 9 December plan does not include that.

Looking at the shape of the 9 December plan before it was finalised, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times wrote that easing the eurozone crisis "requires a buoyant eurozone economy, higher inflation and vigorous credit expansion in surplus countries [i.e. countries like Germany exporting more than they import]. All of this now seems inconceivable" (6 December).

The Euro-leaders' action on 9 December - pushing for more cuts - will, if anything, worsen the crisis. It may also be ineffectual in its own terms. The new treaty they planned may well be overtaken by crisis, and never emerge, or emerge only with drastic changes; and even if it does emerge, its enforcement mechanisms will be at best erratic.

The Euro-leaders' inaction (no ECB bail-out for governments) increases the probability that at some point, possibly soon, Greece or some other government will just not have enough cash to pay its debts falling due. At that point, either the Euro-leaders will change course, or, in some way or other, the ECB will repeal the license for the Greek central bank to issue new euro notes (i.e. to pay its way by ECB IOUs). Rich Greeks will rush to get their euros out of the country (even more than they have done already).

The Greek government will have to print its own new money - new drachmas, or whatever - to sustain current operations, and compel Greek government employees and suppliers to accept it for wages and payments. For some period Greece will have a dual-currency economy (some things will be available only for payment in euros, though drachmas will be the official money), but Greece will be out of the eurozone.

If that happens, financiers already demanding sky-high interest rates to buy Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish bonds will be even more reluctant to lend there rather than elsewhere in the global markets. There will probably be a domino effect. One government after another will be unable to raise the new loans it needs to repay old bonds coming up for repayment (usually after ten years). The domino effect could go far. If Italy fails to pay its debts falling due, then many French banks will be ruined, and could drag the French government down with them.

The Euro-leaders know the dangers, but see them in a blinkered way.

There is a tendency among Marxists to think that all the phenomena of capitalist crisis are rigidly determined by the basic contradictions of capitalism itself, or, to put it another way, that capitalist government policies in crisis are always the most rational (in capitalist terms), or make no difference.

That is not true, and Karl Marx himself did not think it was true. He wrote at length in Capital volume 3 about the effects of the misguided 1844 Bank Act in making crisis worse in Britain. Even the wisest policies (in capitalist terms) by the Euro leaders would leave capitalist Europe in trouble, but the 9 December policies are unwise even in capitalist terms.

German chancellor Angela Merkel declared her priority as being "show that Europe is a 'safe place to invest'" (FT, 5 December). This is the characteristic priority of neo-liberal government policy, or, in other words, of the dominant trend of capitalist government policy since the early 1980s except in the brief "Keynesian moment" of 2008.

Economically, Governments aim at establishing their countries as good sites for quick-moving global capital, not as relatively-autonomous, relatively-integrated economic complexes. Especially if they are relatively high-wage, high-tech economies, the governments will want to develop infrastructure and education; but keeping regulation light, keeping social overheads low, creating new investment openings by privatisation, keeping their currency as a reliable, easily-traded token in global markets, and ensuring that their government bonds figure in markets as reliable and easily-traded, are their first principles.

The real risks of a sizeable decline in the value of the euro relative to other currencies (dollar, yen, etc.), and of bigger inflation across the eurozone, loom very large in the minds of most Euro-leaders.

They genuinely believe that the root of the current crisis is that some European governments "overspent". In fact, the countries with the worst debt crises have big deficits and debts as a consequence of the crisis, not crisis as a consequence of big deficits.

As Martin Wolf has pointed out in the Financial Times, on the "Maastricht" criterion of budget deficits less than 3% of GDP, all the crisis-hit countries were doing fine before the global crash, except Greece (on revised figures, though not on the figures cited at the time). The four "worst" governments for deficits were Italy, France, Germany, and Austria.

If the ratio to GDP of stock of debt, rather than flow of deficit, is taken as criterion, then Estonia, Ireland, and Spain were doing much better than Germany.

Thomas Catan summed up in the Wall Street Journal: "If public debt is your yardstick, then the Spaniards were paragons of virtue. They borrowed lightly despite the fact that their euro-zone membership gave them an all-you-can-eat buffet of financing at bargain-basement rates" (9 December).

Government overspending was not the cause of the crisis. Rapidly cutting government deficits now will harm, not help. But, proverbially "Germans don't read Keynes" (the great mid-20th century bourgeois economist who showed that capitalist governments can best deal with slumps by deficit spending, not cuts). On the Amazon online bookstore, Keynes's General Theory ranks no.11,572 for the best-selling list in Britain (quite high for a difficult book of economic theory); it is no.21,950 in the USA, and (in translation) no.24,089 in France, as high as no.5,911 in Italy, but... no.102,749 in Germany.

The textbooks of Greg Mankiw, the Harvard professor whose students recently walked out of a lecture to protest at his conservative bias, sell much better in Germany. Karl Marx's Capital, and other socialist economic theory, sell well in Germany, but not to the people who influence Merkel.

Capitalist leaders, and especially the hegemonic capitalist leaders of Europe, in Germany, think in neoliberal blinkers, and that has warped their response to the crisis. That is the problem, rather than (as some have it) a nationalist drive for German domination (an explanation which makes it hard to see why 25 of 26 other leaders backed Merkel, and Cameron dissented only on special-interest grounds).

David Cameron's government is as blinkeredly neoliberal as any, and his objection to the 9 December plan was not its neoliberal doctrine.

On 9 December, he made little comment one way or another about the content of the proposed new treaty as it was discussed. When the discussion was moving to a close, about 2am, he abruptly announced that he would veto the plan unless it was agreed that the treaty would include specific promises to Britain on financial-market issues.

He wanted guarantees written into the treaty that the EU would not proceed with a "Tobin" or "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions, and that it would not introduce rules to force firms making financial-market transactions in euros to do them through a financial centre in the eurozone. (At present, most of those transactions are done in London, outside the eurozone).

Both "Tobin" tax and re-siting of euro transactions are under discussion in the EU, but quite separately from the new treaty plan. Cameron responded like a US Senator refusing to vote for some major federal legislation unless some earmark of federal funds for a particular project in his or her electorate is attached. He had made no effort to convince other governments, or to round out his stance so as to broaden support.

Even then Merkel, keen to get all 27 on board, was "willing to offer declarations and assurances" on Cameron's gripes. Unsurprisingly, however, she was not willing to complicate things by having them "in the treaty" (Guardian, 10 December). No-one else backed Cameron.

I think Cameron probably decided in advance, and because of Tory party pressure, that he didn't want to sign up to a new treaty. He then "found" the demands which would give him a pretext for refusing, and announced the demands in a way that guaranteed they would not be accepted.

It appears to be a matter of Cameron being sensitive to the special demands of the City, but I think it's not just that. As early as 10 December, the Financial Times reported that many City financiers thought that Cameron's stance would backfire.

As Wolfgang Münchau explains, a new treaty area "will have to develop a highly integrated financial market with a single financial supervisor. [It will not] allow a situation to persist where its main financial centre is located offshore. It will also want to set labour market rules and co-ordinate tax policies". If Britain is outside the treaty area, then the City is likely to find itself outside the financial markets of the treaty area, and deprived of the political leverage it would otherwise have to maintain its historic advantages.

Many Tories would find that a fair price to pay. Some of them genuinely believe the nationalist rubbish put out by the Daily Mail and the Daily Express after 9 December.

Others think that Britain, with closer economic links to the USA than any other EU country, and a uniquely overdeveloped global financial centre, would do better with a status similar to that of Switzerland, Norway, or Iceland, which would allow it to escape EU social regulations.

In a catastrophic outcome, the treaty plan of 9 December will probably come to nothing, or be drastically revised. A full destruction of the capitalist semi-integration of Europe achieved over the last half-century and more is a remote danger, barring further huge shocks. More likely is a shrinking of the eurozone (by way of countries falling out of it), a closer integration of a reconfigured "core" Europe, and a larger division between that "core" and a second-tier Europe, or maybe an untidy multiplicity of tiers.

Such a division already exists. Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland are not in the EU, but have agreed to accept most of EU law. They comply with most of the conditions about free movement of people, goods, services and capital that apply to full member states (only they have no say in formulating the details of those conditions). They pay into the EU budget (but don't get anything back in regional development funds or the like).

One possible development from the coming tumult is a redrawing of the division, this time with more countries, including Britain and some debt-defaulters, in the outer tier.

That possibility does not correspond to the stupid bluster of former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie about Britain standing alone as "an island nation, a warrior nation". Other Tories also use nationalist bluster, but probably in a cynical way. Their real position is to favour the "Swiss option" as a matter of cool calculation.

Since 9 December, Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg has declared that the Lib Dems will not leave the coalition government, but in a way that indicates that he has seriously considered it, and rejected it only because the Lib Dems would be wiped out in the quick general election which it would force. The Lib Dems want Britain in core Europe, and many of them, including probably Clegg himself, are Lib Dems rather than Tories because of that issue. It is a big deal for them.

By 11 December, Clegg was openly attacking Cameron. He was "bitterly disappointed by the outcome", denied claims that he had approved Cameron's stance in advance, and declared that "things would have been different" if he himself had been in Brussels. He said he would try to reverse Cameron's opt-out, loudly welcomed by Tory MPs, with a "strategy for re-engagement".

Further euro-shocks, which are likely, will strain the coalition further, and maybe open up splits in the Tory party too.

Three things are important for the labour movement's response:

• To understand that this crisis has seriously weakened the coalition government;

• To reject the nationalist bluster of the Tories, which is still too often echoed on the would-be left;

• To counterpose to it not, of course, support for Merkel-Sarkozy's botched treaty plan, but a working-class programme for the reconstruction of a united Europe, centred round European-wide democracy, European-level public ownership and democratic control of the banks and financial institutions, and social "levelling-up" of rights and conditions across the continent.

East London teachers' fight against union busting continues

NUT members at Langdon School, Newham have agreed to suspend further strikes and return to work on Wednesday 14 December, following a series of important concessions by officers of the Local Authority in the last few days.

The overwhelming vote was taken at a strikers' meeting on Tuesday following a thorough evaluation of what was being offered. The range of measures to allay their grievances concerning excessive workload and oppressive management will come into force immediately.

But the NUT is equally clear that more strikes will be called if the measures do not work. The dispute will only be settled when all staff grievances have been thoroughly addressed.

NUT NEC member Nick Grant said that:

"This is an excellent result. Mass scabbing organised by the school managers could not break the solidarity of Langdon's majority of teachers, 70 of whom struck again today."

"Collective action has forced previously compliant Council officers to act as well as decreasing parents' confidence in the head teacher."

"Strikers in turn are very grateful for the hundreds of messages received from across the UK. This is not the end of the dispute, but should go a very long way to redressing the core injustices felt by teachers."

A joint public statement is expected from the NUT and Newham Local Authority tomorrow.

Sparks defy bosses and anti-union laws

Electricians working for Balfour Beatty Engineering Services struck on Wednesday 7 December, the date on which new contracts which could mean a 35% pay cut for many workers were introduced by seven of the construction industry’s biggest contractors.

Thousands of workers across the UK took action, shutting down or disrupting work on BBES sites across the country. The strike was reported 100% solid on flagship sites like the Blackfriars station redevelopment in London.

The strike was all the more significant because the workers’ union, Unite, had postponed the official action following a legal challenge from BBES bosses. An 81% vote for strikes had been overturned following an action by bosses questioning the legality of the ballot. Union lawyers said that, had the case gone to court, Unite would have lost. The union promised a re-ballot “before Christmas”, but workers took matters into their own hands by going ahead with the strike anyway.

An AWL member who visited the Blackfriars picket lines said: “Most if not all of the sparks were out today, numbers on the picket line this evening were around 40 and were still reeling from police violence in the morning. There was a strong City of London police presence. Some other trades [non-electricians] went to work but were loudly heckled by pickets. The picket succeeded in turning away a refuse truck and two minibus-loads from other sites.”

Workers also protested at Balfour Beatty’s London headquarters and at offices and sites of some of the other contractors involved in the attack. Workers walked off a Gratte Brothers site in Victoria, London, and occupied a construction site in Cambuslang, near Glasgow.

Ireland's Austerity Budget - Labour TD expelled over rebellion

The Fine Gael-Labour Irish coalition government this week passed its first austerity budget, aimed at making workers pay the cost of the deepening crisis of capitalism.

In the fifth such budget since 2009, Fine Gael Finance Minister Michael Noonan is picking up from where the previous Fianna Fail government left off.

While corporation and income tax were frozen, a regressive flat-rate household charge of €100 has been introduced and VAT was raised from 21% to 23%. Cuts were made to Child Benefit for third and subsequent children, fuel payments, and the allowance for young adults with disabilities.

For students, the Student Contribution has been raised by a further €250, along with cuts to undergraduate maintenance grants and the abolition of maintenance grants for new postgraduates.

The newly-elected Labour TD for Dublin West & Swords, Patrick Nulty, was the only coalition back-bencher to vote against the Budget. He has been expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Deputy Nulty told Solidarity, "I voted against the budget because austerity is not working. I believe the most vulnerable were hit hardest by this budget and that the reductions in jobs and investment will hamper economic recovery. I believe alternatives exist and those who have most must pay most."

In a sign of growing grassroots anger, Labour Youth have come out in support of Nulty.

National Chairperson Conor Ryan said that “many grassroots activists rightly respect Patrick hugely for the stand of principled opposition he has taken on behalf of ordinary people in this budget. I call on the PLP to listen to what he and other colleagues who have recently lost the Whip have to say on this budget, and ensure that the values of the Labour Party find voice in this government to a greater extent than is currently the case.”

Table of Contents

Solidarity 228

Pensions fight: plan now for the New Year

Having chemo? Get to work says the government

London Overground Olympics win

Unilever strike over pensions

Aspire: “Bosses are charming, polite, and utterly ruthless”

Should faith keep its fortresses?

For a united Europe!

For a democratic Europe!

The suppression of Kronstadt: Bolsheviks had no choice

Social democracy: the rift widens

Life on Labour?

Protests shake Putin

Narrow win for New Zealand Tories

Islamists gain in Egypt's poll

Syrian state lashes out as sanctions bite

Climate change: their solutions and ours

US withdraws from Iraq

What the Greek left is saying

Euro-leaders set course for worse crisis

East London teachers' fight against union busting continues

Sparks defy bosses and anti-union laws

Ireland's Austerity Budget - Labour TD expelled over rebellion