Manifesto: A future worth fighting for

Humanity faces three great challenges today: economic crisis, imperialist war and climate change. They have the same root – global capitalism.

In the opening years of the millennium world capitalism reached a new high point of dynamism and global reach. There had been a near two-decade period of growth based on the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, eastern Europe and China combined with rising internet-based productivity in the west. But as the first decade of the new century came to a close this growth came to a shuddering halt in its old economic heartlands. The miracle of endless growth stood exposed as a mirage. Capitalism’s inbuilt tendency towards crisis re-asserted itself with a vengeance following a financial crash of 1929 proportions.

The expansion of financial capitalism was an integral part of the economic renaissance of world capitalism following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The major capitalist states, firmly controlled by the financial and corporate elites, knocked down all the barriers to the domination of the global capital markets by Wall Street and the City of London. The work begun by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s – on the back of the defeats they inflicted on the workers’ movement – was completed in the 1990s by the Democrats and New Labour, by Clinton and Blair – different faces; same global cash registers.

But complex financial innovation and ever riskier and more opaque investments punctuated the long expansion with bubbles and busts. From the 1997 Asian currencies crisis, through dotcom speculation to, finally, the mother of all bubbles, the US housing market and credit crunch of late 2008, “light touch” regulation inflicted a near fatal economic cardiac arrest on world capitalism.

While capitalism expanded the steady increase in social inequality, the rise in working hours, outsourcing and job insecurity, were all temporarily masked. In many countries high rates of employment, cheap manufactured goods and easier access to cheap credit turned better off workers into “customers” encouraged to “spend, spend, spend” on a glut of consumer goods.

But the credit crunch stripped away the veneer of affluence in a matter of months. Behind the collapsing banks and chaotic financial system lay the reality for millions of mass unemployment, home repossessions, personal bankruptcy, expensive or no credit for the poor and working class. This is the new reality for millions.

Meanwhile the architects of the crisis – the bankers – went cap in hand to the governments who told the voters that there was no alternative but to bail out the banks or face Armageddon. The banks demanded an emergency drip to pump our money into their sclerotic veins. And now they demand cuts in our services to finance the cash transfusion that kept their parasitic system alive. One thing has always been certain – these global leeches will not pay for the crisis their system caused.

Economic boom and bust

The credit crunch was a prelude to the worst post-war recession in the USA, Japan and parts of Europe. It was a watershed. In the period ahead all capitalist governments hit by the Great Recession will try to transfer the costs of bailing out the financial system onto the mass of the population. On top of mass unemployment and frozen wages will come higher taxes, lower pensions, reduced welfare entitlements, and underfunded education and health services.

Everywhere the interests of the great majority of workers will come under attack. Your rights, terms, conditions and historic gains will all be placed on the debit side of global finance capitalism’s great equation. Lose them, as British Airways tells its cabin staff, and it will be better for all of us. Defend them with militant action and all the fury of capitalism – from the propaganda of the gutter press, through the anti-union laws, right down to the cops who will be unleashed against picket lines – will be unleashed against the workers’ movement.

The bosses want to encourage competition and bitterness between young and old, between private and public sector, between those in secure employment and those on “flexible” contracts; between British workers and migrant workers and asylum seekers. They want to take their age-old strategy of divide and conquer to new levels.

To maintain their edifice of economic exploitation they will perpetuate discrimination against women, black people, lesbians and gay men. One in four women in the UK will suffer domestic violence in their lifetime. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people face abuse, assault or worse often a regular basis. Muslim people are abused as “terrorists” by gangs of racist and fascist thugs. Amongst the 120,000 people stopped and searched each year by the police, black people are four times more likely to be stopped than white people.

And in the background the fascists sit in reserve, just in case things get too hot for the normal parliamentary parties to keep control. That is the true significance of the British National Party (BNP) being given a platform on BBC’s Question Time in the name of democracy. Like fascist parties across Europe its “respectability” is being measured in votes received.

Capitalism survives through exploitation and breeds oppression on the back of it. It needs women’s oppression to sanctify the family unit and guarantee a new generation of healthy workers to exploit. It needs the oppression of LGBT people to keep people “normal,” to stop questioning its morality, its “family values” and reactionary traditions. It needs racism to keep wages low, workers fighting each other, and to justify its exploitation of the world. It needs violent cops and state control to stop us fighting back. And it may even need fascism.

The economic crisis has revealed the true face of capitalism. It is not a benign provider of growth. It is rather itself a malign growth that needs to be cut out. Socialists and anti-capitalists want something different from exploitation and oppression. We want workers to fight back – not only because we oppose the attacks that they inflict on us but because we want to turn defence against those attacks into an offensive for a new free, equal and truly human society.

We want equality now in every sphere of life and we want a socialist world without exploitation, oppression, sexism, homophobia or racism. We want a world ruled by ourselves, not one dominated by forces – like the cops, the judges, the big bosses – who we have no control over.

Our alternative is a socialist world where a government of the workers meets the economic crisis with a plan to end economic madness. We will re-organise industry and finance so that it serves the majority of working people not the minority of idle speculators.

Ruth Lee – a humourless economist whose pro-capitalist gob the BBC bosses love to shove onto our screens – recently told an audience of steel workers on a Question Time programme held in Redcar that there was “no market” for their steel. That was why their factory “had to close”.

A steel worker calmly replied that the steel he and his co-workers produced was needed all around the world to build hospitals that could save people, houses that could shelter people, schools that could teach people, high speed rail lines that could cut the volume of lorry traffic, factories that could initiate a revolution in green technology such as wind turbine production, electric transport solutions and so on. In other words, the need for steel was clear. The need was everywhere. So why sack steel workers?

The only answer that Lee could come up with – the only answer that capitalism ever gives to justify its market madness – is that the bosses’ profits outweigh the workers’ needs. And that is why capitalism has to be overthrown – completely and at root. We need to use the wealth of society for the benefit of all.

Of course at the end of the economic crisis that has shaken the world a new period of capitalist expansion may emerge – built on the ruins of millions of lives. But whatever a capitalist future holds, it will never end crises, poverty, oppression and war. Only socialism can do that. And only revolution against capitalism can bring socialism about.

War

Over the last 15 years the major capitalist powers of the west have waged one colonial war after the other – in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Other nations have been threatened – Iran, Venezuela, North Korea. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, have been bombed and maimed. Proxy conflicts have caused further misery in some of the poorest regions of the planet. And for what?

The USA and Britain occupied Iraq in order to secure vital oil supplies and supply routes in the Middle East, as well as to remove a regime that was opposed to Israeli Zionism’s aggression in the Middle East.

These wars – like the two global wars of the 20th century – were waged to gain or retain colonies, resources and markets. Capitalist governments always claim they fight to “defend the fatherland” or to “free citizens from domestic tyrants”. But the truth is wars are waged to profit the bankers and industrialists. In Iraq the corporations were like an infantry battalion marching in the tank tracks of the invading army. Capitalist war is waged for the modern financial and industrial carpet-baggers. Against weapons of mass destruction? No – for loot!

The powder keg of the 21st century remains the Middle East. The fuse is Israel’s continuing repression of the Palestinian people’s national rights. It is the USA’s stooge, defending US interests there. Terrorised and driven from their lands more than 70 years ago, Palestinians have never ceased to resist, and the Zionist government has never ceased in pushing the boundaries of its occupation ever forward.

Israel’s aggression and possession of nuclear weapons provoked Iran and other Middle Eastern countries to seek them, in turn inviting US hostility. Indeed, 9/11, the “war on terror”, the invasion of Iraq – the key moments of this decade – can be traced back to the running sore of Zionism’s belligerence in the Middle East and the reactions it has prompted.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union radical nationalism lost a prop that had engendered secular, nationalist resistance to imperialism. In contrast the resistance of the Afghan mujahideen and the triumph of the Islamic revolution in Iran have provided recruits for Islamic fundamentalism. The rank injustice in Palestine has radicalised generations of Arab. And Islamic fundamentalism has become the dominant ideology of the resistance.

But despite finding its outlet via religion, the fundamental features of the conflict that lies at the heart of so many other conflicts, actual and potential, are anti-imperialist and progressive involving peoples fighting to throw off oppression and invasion, which is why so many of the millions around the globe who stand against imperialist war stand with the Palestinians.

Dozens of other wars, inter-state and civil, periodically erupt in a number of “failed states”, especially in Africa, the result of centuries of colonial rule and exploitation and decades of post-colonial African dictatorships; wars fuelled by desire to gain access or control over precious raw materials, often breaking out along fragile ethnic lines.

And in Afghanistan, a battleground between the so called Great Powers for so long, the USA and their NATO allies are determined to assert their control at the centre of the Asian land mass in recognition of the strategic importance of this country as a crossroads between east and west.

 But behind all these wars are the imperialist states with their ever-changing diplomatic interests, and the arms industry and the multinationals whose trade is death. They are happy to supply both governments and insurgents with the means of mass annihilation as long as they can turn a profit.

The injustice of imperialism’s latest round of colonial war led millions of people to pour onto the streets in cities all around the world to protest against the lies, intrigues and warmongering of our leaders. The opposition was epic, but not even the largest demonstrations or the undisputed evidence that the majority of the population were opposed to these wars, were enough to halt the bellicose plans of the imperialist politicians.

Only decisive, mass working class action could have stopped the wars of the past 15 years. Workers have the strength to paralyse the system if we use it; trade unions can stop the transport of military arms, soldiers can refuse to obey the instructions of their officers, factory workers can demand alternative work to producing the means of death. A protest movement harnessed to such actions could have stopped the war.

But once the conflicts commenced the reformists in the workers’ movement dropped their opposition, backed their governments and put a stop to any prospect for action against the war. Which is why if we want a lasting world peace we need a revolution and a global socialist system. A world without capitalist competition would have no need for war. It must be eradicated as the irrational, cruel and perverse thing that it is.

Climate change

Carbon emissions have risen by 30% since 2000, more than during any previous decade. Fossil-fuelled industrial growth in the 20th century has brought the world to a global warming tipping point. If emissions do not peak by 2020 and fall by 80% by mid-century irreversible climate change will see temperatures rise by up to six degrees by 2100. This would potentially herald a cataclysm way beyond the anything the Hollywood screenwriters can come up with for their environmental disaster movies.

 Carbon-based fuels drove capitalism forward in the 19th century, offering the ability to remove the restrictions of time and place imposed by other energy sources. But capitalist competition for a higher share of profits compels rivals to constantly expand production. The whole destructive logic of capitalist economy – of overproduction and systematic waste – leads to the rapacious exploitation of raw materials and energy sources. Deforestation and systemic pollution are inherent to this system.

The historic cost of this fossil fuel equivalent to binge drinking now weighs down on the planet. Melting ice caps, rising sea levels, displaced populations, new and old infectious diseases, extreme weather patterns, disruption or disappearance of food supplies – all have begun, all have harmed the lives of millions. They place the very future existence of the planet at the centre of political life and activity.

Inter-state bourgeois diplomacy from Kyoto to Copenhagen has failed to impose the necessary restrictions on carbon emissions. Powerful oil and industrial oligarchies dominate imperialist governments which in turn refuse to implement legal and binding targets and timescales to achieve the crucial reductions.

Faced with this, major centres of industrialisation and pollution in the global south, above all China and India, have refused to agree to the necessary, unilateral cuts. At the same time commercially-driven, market-based incentives to reduce emissions (carbon trading) have only served to allow major polluters to carry on polluting by purchasing permits from the global south.

Without an end to capitalism’s environmental vandalism, without a socialist revolutionary change in production and consumption the destruction of the planet will continue apace. So, instead of a capitalist non-solution, we need to overthrow the entire system of capitalist exploitation.

An international socialist government could plan production that would break with the logic of capitalist growth. It would replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. It would abolish wasteful consumption and implement energy saving and efficient alternatives across the board now. A socialist government would empower people to rule their own lives from below and change the world from above.

What can we do?

Economic crisis, climate change and war; an unholy trinity of capitalist-made catastrophes, generated and sustained by our political and economic leaders. All are set to intensify in the decade ahead. The Great Recession may give way to recovery but it will be an age before the millions of jobs that have been lost return, if at all. The days of accessing cheap credit to compensate for low wages are gone.

Shame-faced but untamed, the powerful centres of finance capital will seek to evade controls and resume its insatiable search for higher profits in riskier assets. The seeds of new bubbles and more instability already exist. The underlying problem remains: a capitalist economy driven by an unquenchable lust for profit, reckless risk taking, the piling up of ever more unwanted goods and inherent waste and pollution.

There is a solution: socialism. But do we have time? Can we wait for the socialist revolution? Can we afford not to?

In the winter of 2008-09, so crisis-ridden was the financial system that even hard-nosed capitalists called for nationalisation, the state-ownership of key banks. The US government took an 80% stake in the world’s biggest insurer AIG, the UK government took over the major banks. For a brief period pragmatism overcame ideology. The complete nationalisation of the financial system was on the cards. But profits count in a capitalist economy, there is no way the capitalists could countenance that solution.

The Copenhagen summit was hailed as the last chance to save the planet. The US promised some small reductions in emissions, just like they did at Kyoto, and the Chinese promised not to grow as fast as they have. They ignored the recommendations of their advisers; they were immune to the pleas of the NGOs. They can bear the cost of environmental destruction, it’s cheaper than saving the earth.

Obama won the Nobel peace prize for promising to pull troops out of Iraq. Gordon Brown actually did so. But only to send them to Afghanistan, to increase the terror of its defenceless rural population. They talk a lot about peace but only so they can fight their wars in peace.

Put another way – unless we turn the world upside down the warmongers will continue to get peace prizes, the polluters will be honoured with green rosettes and the bankers will give themselves bonuses for creating panic and ruin. Workers and poor peasants across the globe cannot allow this to go on. It is, literally, madness.

We cannot “wait for the revolution”

The only way forward is to impose the goals of the majority on the minority through mass direct action, on the streets, in our communities and at work. We do not tell anyone to wait for the revolution. We simply spread the message that the harder we fight now the more we will win now.

In the streets we can disrupt the bosses’ summits, block their plans to pollute, demonstrate against their cuts and attacks on our rights. We can fight their racism and campaign for equality for all.

In our communities we must act by rebuilding a collective mindset as a prelude to collective action – both to help protect the environment and to fight tooth and nail to win the service provision and investment our communities need. We can do it through rallying to support campaigns to keep our schools open, our services accessible and our homes warm and free of pollution at the same time.

In our workplaces we can rebuild the fighting organisations needed to check and defeat the bosses’ plans to increase our exploitation, rob us of our rights and deprive us of our jobs and pay. We can build unions that act to defend our interests by kicking out the time serving officials who draw a fat salary but who are a fat lot of good when it comes to a fight. We need to transform the labour movement into an army of workplace militants ready, willing and able to take on the bosses.

Just as the three challenges of crisis, climate and conflict are intertwined, so are the solutions. A massive investment programme is needed to accelerate the development of the green technologies (e.g. mass solar farms tied to an intercontinental grid, and carbon capture). We need green jobs, a million of them in the next few years, skilled jobs, jobs for those young people “parked” on worthless government schemes. These measures are needed especially for the young who have the most to lose from runaway climate change. And we need to retrain workers presently in polluting industries to work in renewable energy sectors.

Such investment – planned and organised – will counter the impact of economic crisis. And the new industries will counter the impact of climate change. All this can be funded by imposing new wealth taxes, taxes on polluters and by redirecting existing government spending away from war (scrap Trident, get out of Afghanistan), by axing Big Brother state projects like ID cards and by cancelling PFI contracts. We can fight war and climate change by fighting capitalism, here and now. The fight for socialism isn’t a question of waiting for the revolution, it is a question of proving in struggle that revolutionary answers are practical – today.

Bring the resistance together

War, economic crisis, climate change and oppression; resistance to these takes place on many fronts every day, but by merging the resistance its concentrated power can overcome the chief political obstacle to our lasting victory – the power of the government and the state as a guardian of war mongers, climate change criminals and the economic elite. Our collective efforts on many fronts can push back, or slow down our enemies’ advances, but to achieve a root and branch solution we need to destroy capitalism altogether, in the first place by smashing its oppressive state.

Simply put, this means that the working class, usually on the receiving end of the bad decisions of others, has to take charge, has to become the ruling class. Workers need to overthrow capitalism through their own socialist revolution and form a democratic working class government based on genuine rank and file organisations of power.

This cannot come about by simply changing the occupants of Number 10, or electing a majority of socialist MPs. Westminster is part of the problem. It is a talking shop designed to conceal the real centres of power that lies outside: in the boardrooms of the multinationals and in the permanent core of the civil service that meets and greets one set of politicians after another as they temporarily wander through the corridors of power before surrendering their security passes on the way out.

The hard core of the state are the unelected top officials – the judges, the permanent secretaries, the chiefs of staff of the armed forces, all immune to pressure from below, but all deeply embedded in the society of company CEOs, media moguls, and religious leaders. This alliance of the executive of the state and the boardroom, the chief of staff with the chief of finance is as old as capitalism itself.

A revolution destroys all of this, or it is no revolution at all. And for this reason it cannot base itself on this same set of institutions that are used to con and exploit workers. The power of the revolution lies in entirely new institutions shaped and populated by the masses themselves.

Anyone who has been to a mass meeting in a workplace or an open community meeting on a vital issue knows that such gatherings are a million times more democratic than the established institutions of capitalist society. Decisions made by the masses are quickly carried out. Action means action and change is the usual result.

That is why a revolution bases itself on the power of rank and file working class organisations in the workplaces and communities. They represent real people, they can and must be democratic – recallability for all delegates is a norm not an extra. They are organisations of struggle and decision-making – they do not set one group of people against another.

But as the lessons of previous revolutions shows, even such organisations are no guarantee that revolution, let alone socialism, can eventually win out. That is why we need to learn not only how to build, preserve and guarantee the democratism of such organisations it is also why we need to recognise that the revolution is not just about institutions. It is also about revolutionising of the way we live, the way we treat each other, the way we act at work and how the organisations we belong to behave.

Revolutionising the trade unions, the workplaces, the communities we live in means promoting discontent with the state of things, organising that discontent into mass action and taking control of the organisations we belong to in order to achieve real and lasting change. It is about nurturing and spreading workers’ control in our factories and offices, in our communities, subverting top-down management authority and imposing democratic, collective decisions on all the key aspects of our working lives: pay levels, hiring and firing, discipline over work colleagues, retraining and support for those falling behind, holiday entitlements. A revolution is a permanent process as well as an event.

Being a revolutionary means injecting this culture of militancy, insubordination and democracy into all our struggles: to keep schools, hospitals and day care centres open when threatened with closure, to occupy council chambers to prevent budget-cutting decisions being taken, to strike against attacks at work. In short we want to shift the locus of power into our own hands, to rule for ourselves and determine our own futures together.

The state we’re in

The working class communities and organisations in Britain today are nowhere near to being up to the needs of waging a fight for the basic interests of the working class, let alone to carry out a revolution. Our trade unions are bureaucratised. The leaders spend more time avoiding action or even expelling their own members than they do fighting the attacks from the employers. The networks of militants and activists – the people who do the local recruiting and day-to-day case work – are politically and organisationally weak. The balance of power in the unions is resolutely in favour of the official not the ranks. We need to change that. And we can.

We can start to rally the forces of solidarity for every struggle that challenges the bosses. We can start to rally the forces of political opposition to the local councils, trusts and education authorities who authorise cuts. We can start to draw climate change activists into the ranks of the workers’ movement. We can rescue the traditions of militancy and pass them on to a new generation – from the Fisher Bendix occupation of the 1970s to the Vestas and Visteon occupations of 2009, from the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1984 to the construction workers’ strikes of 2009 and 2010. These are actions that can change things.

We need many more of the inspirational struggles in the face of attacks. And in the face of capitalism’s three-pronged crisis we are convinced that we will get them. Under attack – we fight back!

A revolutionary socialist party

The idea of a democratic, socialist and revolutionary party able to unite the resistance, rebuild the movement and spearhead struggle has lost a lot of ground. Not only did the failed experiment of the Soviet Union discredit the party idea – monolithic, bureaucratically imposed “leading role” monastic style discipline etc – so too did the antics of the far left copying the methods of manipulation and manoeuvre that were handed down to us by Stalin and his army of bureaucrats.

A number of small socialist groups exist, but they are incapable of working together constructively for the interests of the working class and socialism, let alone forming a new revolutionary socialist party. Sadly this was the lesson of ten years of failed attempts to bring about lasting and stable unity – attempts which our members played a key role in trying to make successful.

Despite these problems – which the socialist movement needs to re-discuss and reconsider – the basic proposition that we need a party still seems to us to be correct. A party is not just a loose network of activists, but an organisation that shares a common outlook, that embodies the lessons of all previous struggles and agrees about the next steps forward for the working class movement.

A party needs to be made up of activists who know what they want and know how to fight for it, who relish the fight against injustice and exploitation, and who are not put off by the repression and intrigue that the capitalist governments, bosses and media throws at them.

If we are to create such a party then the socialist left needs an entirely new way of working. We must reject the substitution of organisational control for genuine political authority won by argument. We must reject bureaucratic manoeuvres, and short term ploys. Instead a revolutionary party must rely solely on the strength of its political argument and conviction. It must reject top down control and replace it with voluntary, bottom up rank and file activity.

Socialism cannot come about as a result of an instruction. A new party, if it is to be genuinely revolutionary, can only rely on the discipline of conviction, of activists working together because they want to. Threats and punishment, orders from above, are no way forward. In fact they are a step backward, towards the old world that we want to escape. To begin a new process of creating a party today’s activists must learn to work together, to co-operate with each other, to establish mutual confidence, support and trust.

The working class requires an organisation which unites the most determined, creative and critical thinkers, not yes people, not sayers but do-ers. It needs to join together the rebels and the fighters. It needs thousands who won’t stand for being bossed around, who won’t take the word of the boss or some jumped-up bureaucrat. It needs those for whom disobedience is an instinctive reaction but who also know the value of loyalty, collective decision-making and a determination to bring fundamental and revolutionary change.

Join with Permanent Revolution supporters in rebuilding a working class movement that can give birth to the new socialist world we need today.

Mon 14, June 2010 @ 12:57