ICT May Day 2010 Statement

An Insoluble Crisis

It’s about three years since the sub-prime bubble burst shattering neo-liberal illusions that unlimited economic growth was possible on the basis of speculative financial games. Like a tsunami the mountains of speculative paper drowned out the real economy on which it was originally based, unleashing one of the worst crises in capitalist history. Now capitalist ideologues tell us that the worst is over but we can be sure that doesn’t include the working class or the poorest in society. Not even the extortion of wealth through an exploitation intensified in a thousand ways can breathe enough oxygen into a rate of profit which, despite ups and downs, has been falling for thirty years.

The international capitalist class has largely responded to the fall in the rate of profit with a global attack on the living conditions of the working class. The intensification of their predatory instincts has driven them to financial speculation and uncontrolled indebtedness, and to the reduction of wages towards subsistence levels.

Workers in the West have faced a loss of purchasing power of wages and incomes, the closure or reduction in size of the great concentrations of workers, the shift of entire sectors of production to countries where wage levels are twenty times less, with no legal limit to working hours and where strikes are more or less banned. This has started a competition to find the cheapest labour force in the world even amongst the highly qualified. Finally we have widening job insecurity one of the major instruments for getting the work force to bend to the demands of the bosses and their profits.

More Misery for the Working Class

However all this has not been enough to revive the productive economy much less jobs or wages.

Financial speculation is the only thing that has been strengthened by the oceans of money which governments have poured into the banks, insurance companies and industry. Thus the working class and the poorest in society are called upon to make more sacrifices to fill the hole in the state budget created by the need to salvage these financial institutions. Greece is the most dramatic case but it certainly is not, and will not be, the only one.

Between 2008 and 2009 unemployment levels increased everywhere, particularly in the advanced economies. According to official statistics, the numbers at work but “at risk of falling into poverty” rose to 215 millions whilst another 100 millions have been added to the one and half billion “vulnerable workers” i.e. those in insecure jobs earning minimal or even subsistence wages.

This dark picture will not change and the few insignificant employment opportunities to be found in the world will not substantially alter the pattern. In any case, economic revival or not, this unemployment will not be re-absorbed. For those not thrown out on the streets, the future offers only more exploitation more tiring work, more social insecurity i.e. another turn of the screw which has been boring into us for decades.

Faced with all this the response of the working class has been until now largely inadequate. This explains, at least in part, the weak and sporadic signs of economic recovery; the intensification of exploitation has given a little more oxygen to the sick capitalist body.

The Class Response So Far

Sure, there have been noteworthy examples of class struggle - real mouthfuls of fresh air - but we’re talking here of disconnected episodes which have failed to unite wider sectors of the class. Also when they have taken place struggles have limited themselves to immediate demands against the firm, i.e. sectional demands of a purely economic type.

In every case there has been no questioning of the capitalist mechanism, not least because the welfare state (so far, at least in the West) has softened the most ferocious blows of the crisis.

Even in the more unusual episodes of struggle compared with normal trades union practice (kidnapping bosses, climbing onto factory roofs etc) there has never been a radical critique of trades unions which so often play a major part in assisting the bosses in their attacks on the working class, and even now are peddling illusions about reforming a capitalism in crisis.

What is missing (at least in the West) is the old locomotive of the class struggle (the big factories).

Today the working class is dispersed and has been deprived for some time of its class identity as well as any hope of an alternative to capitalism (since the collapse of the fake communism of the USSR).

The working class is prey to confusion in the likes of populist movements of a racist character like the National Front in France, the Lega Nord in Italy, the Jobbik Party in Hungary, or UKIP and the BNP in Britain, which blame the weakest part of the class - the migrants - for all the social evils produced by ever more insecure living conditions thus reinforcing the social control mechanisms of capitalism.

Even when workers reject bourgeois politics by abstaining in elections they haven’t done this in an organised way. Thus far abstentionism has not yet taken an anti-capitalist direction.

The Way Ahead

There is however a way out of this depressing situation. In Greece, for example, the working class has shown that it is possible to oppose the general worsening of living conditions imposed by the bosses and the government, as well as global capitalist speculation. The Greek workers have set in motion some basic - even noteworthy - forms of immediate resistance which even the capitalist media has not been able to prevent filtering out.

Workers in every country should learn from the Greek example that opposition to capitalist attacks is possible by applying the lessons learned there to our own local reality. We need to take more steps towards class unity and the consciousness that we need an alternative to the capitalist system of production. We need to revive grass roots struggles, self-organised, outside of any deals with capitalism, outside of and against the union gaol, beyond the suffocating confines of trades or firms disputes, and led by independent bodies based on direct democracy.

This revival of class struggle has to be guided by an international revolutionary party which doesn’t limit itself to defensive demands but which goes beyond these to pose the issue in terms of the very nature of capitalism itself. This means also opposing its imperialist wars with our own revolutionary defeatism. In factories, in whatever kind of workplace, in local communities we need to struggle against the arrogance and barbarism of the capitalist class for a different and a better world.