The question of anti-imperialism has been much debated on the revolutionary left–particularly during most of the twentieth century. More recently, the question of imperialism has emerged once again—in regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but more particularly in how the left should approach a popular struggle within a nation whose state perceives itself as a bastion against imperialism, or more precisely against US domination.

As students demonstrated in the streets in cities in Iran after the June 2009 elections, some of the left, particularly in the Unites States, was split, or at least confused, about how it should relate to this uprising. Should it support a movement challenging a regime that has been considered a bastion of anti-imperialist resistance?

The left in Iran already faced this question, with serious consequences, in the events around the revolution of 1979. In order to better assess our situation today, we should perhaps go back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to better understand the limitations set at that time. This question is not only pertinent to the left in Iran, but to the US left as well, in its relations to both the movement within Iran as well as to the uprisings sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.

Going back to the revolution of 1979 is important for many reasons. The revolution presents many questions and lessons in strategy and tactics for a revolutionary left, as well as many questions for theory. The presentation given here will in no way pretend to exhaust all the reasons for the left’s inability to maintain a foothold politically after the revolution, or to mount a significant resistance to the new regime. Indeed, many did resist and any claim to the contrary is a great affront to the memory of those who perished under the regime’s repression, as well as those who lingered and continue to linger in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic. When discussing a revolution, avoiding an analysis implying “I told you so” is difficult, suggesting that if the correct line had been followed, history would perhaps have been different. Perhaps it would have, perhaps not. An equal mistake, on the other hand, is thinking that there is nothing to be learned from history. Understanding may best be gained in the tension between the two poles.

In the dialectical irony so characteristic of history, one of the results of the ideology of the Islamic Republic is the exhaustion of the former analysis of imperialism. This hardly means that an analysis should take no account of imperialism, or take the position that imperialism no longer exists, nor does it mean that there could not be a resurgence of the old outlook. Some sort of military attack, for example, could strengthen nationalistic feelings. Every bit of external pressure helps to better support this type of world-view, putting ruling classes and those who wish to overthrow them in the same camp.

This article attempts to discuss how, in the years leading up to the Iranian Revolution, objective and subjective factors contributed to the development of an ideology that was an amalgam of socialism, nationalism, and religious imagery which can broadly be described as a form of third-world populism. The contention here is that the struggle against imperialism so dominated political discourse in the two decades leading up to the revolution that it, in many ways, became a fetter on the struggle for socialism. The struggle against imperialism became so much the dominant hegemonic discourse in the years before the revolution that, when the revolution did come, the left found itself faced with new problems in the face of which it was impotent. The intent here is not to give the impression that this is the whole story; it was merely one, albeit a very significant, part of the story. To quote Val Moghadam, “…it became clear that two strategic mistakes had been committed: namely, neglect of the question of democracy, and underestimation of the power of the Islamic clergy. It is now widely accepted that this blind spot was due to an inordinate emphasis on the anti-imperialist struggle and an almost mechanical application of the dependency paradigm.”1 This is the starting point.

A number of significant factors can be identified in the demise of the left during the revolution; the extreme repression unleashed by the new regime almost immediately after it gained some foothold was certainly one of them. But repression alone doesn’t explain much. And the establishment of the Islamic Republic was not a unitary affair that happened over night, but a process, one which included the incorporation as well as the repression of elements of the left opposition to the shah’s dictatorship.

The ideology of anti-imperialism, and the particular variant of Third Worldist populism as developed in Iran, is part of what can generally be referred to as the anti-imperialist paradigm. This developed into the dominant hegemonic discourse in the years preceding and during the Iranian Revolution. Regardless of its place on the political spectrum, almost every political group participating in the struggle against the dictatorship saw that struggle primarily through this lens. Thus, however they interpreted the struggle, by making anti-imperialism the primary contradiction to be resolved, the political groups provided a unifying factor, a true hegemonic ideology that could bring all the forces of opposition under an umbrella and revolt against the shah’s dictatorship. Thus the anti-imperialist paradigm was at once a great strength and a weakness of the revolution. Taking this into account helps to provide a better understanding of the course of the revolution; instead of seeing it as a revolutionary push, followed by a counter-revolutionary repression, as two successive moments, we can instead see it as a more mixed dialectical process. In other words, elements of the counter-revolution were contained within the revolution itself.

The debate over the understanding of imperialism and the struggle against it is nothing new, and indeed it found its clearest classical expression in the debates between Rosa Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin over the so-called “National Question.” These debates are still with us, and in many ways the current confusion in relating to contemporary struggles in many countries reflects this. A return to the classical theoretical debates is not our purpose here, but they should be mentioned. In the early 20th century, an ideology of anti-imperialism had not yet developed It is important to distinguish between anti-imperialism, meaning just any conception of imperialism and the expression of the struggle against it, and what has developed into an ideology. By ideology, I mean its classical negative conception; a theoretical understanding, which blurs or masks the real conflicts lying beneath the world we live in (particularly the conflict between classes). Like any ideology, it mystifies the world and obscures the “hidden” reality. The ideology of anti-imperialism, as it developed for the greater part of the 20th century and found its expression in what has been called “Third World populism,” plays exactly this role and serves this function. The clearest definition of this ideology is perhaps best explained by Asef Bayat:

By “Third Worldist populism”, here, I mean an analytical and ideological framework which represents a blend of nationalism, radicalism, anti-”dependencia”, anti-industrialism, and somehow anti-capitalism. This perspective blames the general “underdevelopment” of the Third World nations wholly on the fact of their (economic, political and especially cultural) dependence on the Western countries. The radical intellectuals of the Third World in the post-war period seemed to cling to this ideological perspective, although they perhaps differed from each other in terms of the degree of their adherence to the defining elements, i.e. anti-industrialism, anti-capitalism, etc.2

He goes on to say:

The implication of this paradigm for the struggle against domination of the center is a strategy of national unity, i.e., the unity of all classes in a given Third World country including the workers, the peasants, the poor, the students, the old and new middle classes and the “national bourgeoisie”. This strategy implies that the “national” classes, with different and often contradictory interests, should be united to form a national alliance against imperialism. However, within such an alliance, the political and economic interests of the subordinated classes are often compromised and sacrificed to the benefit of the dominant ones (e.g. workers are not to go on strike against their capitalist “allies”, or intellectuals are not to criticize their national ruling parties, etc.). The influential dependency paradigm is partly responsible for the nationalism and Third Worldist populism of the radical intellectuals and the political leaders of the developing countries.3

If, in the middle of the last century, anti-imperialism had some reality and some validity as a step towards socialism (and I say this only hypothetically) today it most fully serves an ideological function. This ideology has been shown to have reactionary consequences. The experience of the Iranian Revolution proves to be the greatest historical example of this. In our contemporary situation, we see this in the support that some factions of the Left have shown towards petit-bourgeois dictators and authoritarian regimes purely on the basis of the latter’s stance against the imperialist west.4 This has become clearest in the support of some elements, not only for the Islamic Republic, or Hugo Chavez, but also for Muammar Qaddafi! Marx once said that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.” If the experience of the Iranian Revolution is a tragedy, as indeed it is, the current support for populist regimes under the banner of anti-imperialism is a great farce.

We digress for a moment to briefly explain why the Iranian Revolution is such an important case for understanding Third World populism and the ideology of anti-imperialism in general. The Iranian Revolution is exemplary because it reflects many of the great paradoxes of capitalist modernity. Its very occurrence posed a challenge to many paradigms held at the time about revolution in general. Many of these challenges were not the ones people imagined or expected, and this is often still the case.

Fred Halliday, in a talk in February 2009, described the Iranian revolution as “the first truly modern revolution.”5 Now this formulation may indeed raise some eyebrows, but there is some truth to it. For many, various 20th century revolutions had presented a challenge to Marx’s theories of revolution. And for those who choose to take this view, the Iranian Revolution is often the case they invoke. Most revolutions of the 20th century were not spearheaded or carried out by the industrial proletariat, but had their social base in the peasantry. Quite the contrary, in the Iranian Revolution what remained of the peasantry played almost no role.6 The death knell of the dictatorship was sung by the general strike of 1978, particularly the involvement of oil workers that bought the regime to its knees.

This presents us with a paradox. A revolution, very modern in one respect, brings into power a theocracy. It is this paradox, which I believe is what perplexes analysts and which obscures both the real nature of the revolution and the nature of the state it produced. It poses a much-debated question about social revolutions, namely: why do revolutions produce authoritarian regimes? I believe, however, that the question is more complicated than that and the question itself obscures the picture. The Orientalist veil still affects us when looking at this revolution. The “Islamic” character continues to veil (no pun intended) and obscure the character of events. The ideology that developed was not powerful because of its particularly religious character so much as for its militant, populist, and anti-imperialist character.7

The nature of the situation before the revolution and of the balance of forces, as well as the theoretical imperatives of the oppositional forces, contributed to the development of an ideology that gained hegemony in the Iranian Revolution. This ideology was picked up and run with by the founders of the Islamic Republic. The point is not that the development of this ideology was purely the conscious decision of certain actors, but that the historical conditions on the one hand, and the theoretical explanations of this situation on the other, worked together in a dialectical relationship to produce an ideology that served as both the great mobilizing strength of the revolution as well as a great fetter upon its development in a more emancipatory direction.

This ideological hegemony did not develop out of thin air; it grew out of a real situation. A history of imperialist domination contributed to this development. The most dramatic event that affected the consciousness of most Iranians was the 1953 coup against nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Something of a myth developed around Mossadegh that partially obscured the real nature of that time. But suffice it to say that he was a nationalist liberal who supported parliamentary democracy. The struggle at that time was over the nationalization of oil. Mossadegh himself was no great friend of the working class. And tension between him, the trade unions, and the Tudeh party, which dominated the trade unions, grew. Strikes were banned, and anti-union legislation was enacted. The coup set the tone for the popular imaginary. Mossadegh became a symbol in more ways than one. Most importantly, Mossadegh symbolized the overthrow of a popular leader perceived as struggling for Iran’s independence and replaced by the establishment of the shah. The “coup government”, as it was called, carried out a wave of repression against the opposition in general, but against the workers movement and above all the Tudeh Party.

This traumatic event really was imprinted into the popular consciousness. It shaped the political discourse of a whole generation. As Hamid Dabashi writes, “28-Mordadism is the central traumatic trope of modern Iranian historiography.”8

On the political stage, not just everything that occurred after 28 Mordad but even things that have happened before it suddenly came together to posit the phenomenon of 28-Mordadism: foreign intervention, colonial domination, imperial arrogance, domestic tyranny, an ‘enemy’ always lurking behind a corner to come and rob us of our liberties, of the mere possibility of democratic institutions.9

The three political and thus ideological forces, if we are to abstract for the sake of clarity, were socialism, nationalism, and political Islam; all contributed to the development of this ideological hegemony, which found its clearest and most resonating expression in an Iranian form of what can best be described as Third World populism. This Third World populism, in turn, found its strongest voice in that developed by the partisans of the Islamic Republican Party. The clerical militants, for a number of reasons, won the battle for hegemony over the course of the revolution. “The traumatic memory of the 1953 coup was very much rekindled and put to effective political use in the most crucial episodes of the nascent Islamic Republic in order to consolidate its fragile foundations.”10

The Shah’s White Revolution, a series of reforms begun in the early 1960s, had dramatically altered traditional social relationships, particularly in the countryside.

The Shah’s reforms in many ways set the stage for the revolution. “The Pahlavi White Revolution essentially advanced the simultaneous goals of primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation proper.”11 The most dramatic policy was that of land reform. Indeed, this was a form of bourgeois revolution from above, intended to prepare Iran for capitalist development. It opened the way for modern agribusiness, mostly US, to move in, thus further incorporating Iran into the imperialist fold. The great landowning estates were divided and distributed among the peasants with little or no technical assistance. This turned the countryside into mainly “small-scale and petty-bourgeois”12 rural production. The state then worked to promote large-scale capitalist agricultural production. Many of the former peasants sold their lands and moved to the cities. Masses of former peasants flooded the cities looking for work in the state’s many construction and industrial projects, while those that stayed worked for agribusinesses as wage earners, making them agricultural proletarians. It is important to keep in mind that all of this took place in essentially a decade. The ranks of the working class swelled.

Other reforms had their effects as well. New education initiatives, while authoritarian, helped create a modern bureaucracy. The expansion of scholarships and opportunities to study abroad helped in the creation of a modern educated middle class, many of whom, as a result, had become politicized. The enfranchisement of women, including further employment and educational opportunities, also helped in this modernizing development. The regime did not understand, or underestimated the fact that all these policies were creating the material basis for a social revolution. Like all development under capitalism, the results were uneven. As the country as a whole became more developed, the class differences also became greater. Most of the new proletarians that flooded the cities lived a world away from the image of modern Tehran promoted by the state in its tourism brochures.

Simultaneously the regime used the tremendous oil revenues at its disposal to finance industrialization, and a policy of import-substitution resulted in rapid expansion of the manufacturing sector and the growth of and urban industrial labour. State policy came to favor large-scale, capital-intensive industry, at the same time that its urban bias and neglect of the countryside were displacing large numbers of peasants. Both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors—as well as a veritable population explosion—thus contributed to the massive rural-urban migration of the 1960s and 1970s, and to the creation of a pool of immiserated semi-proletarians in major cities, notably Tehran.13

Capitalist development was indeed state-centered. And, alongside the development of this entire modern infrastructure, went the development of the repressive apparatus of the state. The military, but more importantly the domestic security apparatus, became more developed technically and in its ability to gather intelligence. A society was developing with modern class forces coming to the fore in an environment that was becoming more repressive.

Most important to keep in mind is that the main modes of the revolution were what are generally attributed to modern forms of mass political struggle. Street demonstrations, some of the largest in history, strikes and factory occupations were the main modes of struggle during the course of the revolution. The players in the Iranian Revolution, then, were from what are considered modern classes: students, industrial workers, civil servants, writers/journalists, etc. Elements of the traditional society participated, but their role at first glance can be quite deceptive at first glance. These elements included the clergy and the bazaaris, or traditional merchant class. They may, on a more superficial level, be seen as a residue of the past, but they were very early on incorporated into the capitalist fold. This is evident by their modes of political struggle, which took a very modern form. A proper discussion of the role of the bazaar in the economic and political life of modern Iran is too lengthy to be taken up here, but it nonetheless needs to be touched upon. The bazaaris resemble what may be called the national bourgeois class. They, like the clergy, historically enjoy some autonomy vis-à-vis the state, and have risen to political action when this autonomy has been threatened. But this class is by no means homogeneous economically or politically. This is the case both before and after the Revolution.14

The Pahlavi state’s growth and increasing strength saw it begin to exert its control over this sector, as well as that of the clergy. The state began to impose regulations on the bazaar such as foreign exchange regulations. It also provided competition to the bazaar commercially by building modern retail stores and shopping centers. Like all other dominant social classes, including landowners and clergy (these three elements often overlap) the state had a policy of attempting to incorporate as well as dominate. Those that it could get to go along with the project were included and often benefited from this relationship, but the state was always keen to show its greater hand. In the mid-1970s, growing inflation, largely a result of the pumping of petro-dollars into the economy, was blamed on the bazaar. These were just some factors that helped develop the opposition of the bazaar. This added to the dissent, where the state was seen as benefiting ‘western’ business interests at the expense of the national marketplace. The opposition of the national bourgeoisie only added to the anti-imperialist dimension of the opposition.

The clergy had a somewhat similar relationship with the new state. It is by no means a homogeneous element. Some of the clergy benefited from a relationship with the Pahlavi state. These benefits included financial and political influence. But this was not the case for all, and much of the clergy began to resent their receding autonomy as well as what was seen as the “anti-national” aspect of the regime.

The cries of opposition from various elements of Iranian society developed more and more a similar ‘national’ or ‘popular’ voice, one that stood for national independence against the ‘west.’ Although the state was becoming more alienated from any social base and the opposition was finding more and more unity, it was not always understood that the interests of these various forces were not identical. The anti-imperialist nature of the opposition obscured this reality.

In terms of an individual, the common enemy was Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. In terms of class, the enemy was the “comprador bourgeoisie,” that is, a bourgeoisie reliant on capital and power emanating from the centers of world capitalism, and serving as their extension in the peripheral country.15

The left was essentially disarmed theoretically by the fact that it confronted a new state formation that was both anti-imperialist and reactionary. It was placed in a position of forcing the issue by attempting to prove that the Islamic Republic was indeed still tied to imperialism, and not truly revolutionary. On the other side of the coin, the left was stuck either fully supporting the regime, as in the case of the Tudeh party, or offering “critical support” pending socialist revolution, as some of the Trotskyist organizations did. I do not mean to insinuate that there were absolutely no left organizations that offered a different analysis, as there indeed were. But the more significant point is what had the influence on the street. The ideology of anti-imperialism was indeed the hegemonic discourse on the street, and this is much more significant in the final analysis than a proper analysis by a small number of left sects. The majority of left organizations were stuck banging their fist against a wall, attempting (if they were critical), to prove that the Islamic regime was still a puppet of imperialism; the uncritical supporters were attempting to prove that the regime was revolutionary and progressive because of its anti-imperialist credentials. This specter of 1953, or the flag of its anti-imperialist credentials, emerged most spectacularly in the taking of the American embassy in 1979. This was a great propaganda victory for the new regime.

Let us fast forward to our current period. The latest outburst of resistance since the June 2009 elections is a manifestation of many developments since the revolution. After the war with Iraq ended in 1988, a period of post-war reconstruction began. This centered on a policy of economic liberalization. The radical-populist rhetoric was momentarily toned down for a more pragmatic approach that favored privatization as a development strategy. This again created a social base that would later develop into an antagonistic force within the republic. There was an economic boom that created many millionaires, but also a generation of educated youth that were coming of age and becoming politicized once again. This also meant not only a whole generation of young workers entering the industrial workforce, whose job prospects were becoming more uncertain, but also a new modern and technical workforce. During the period of the liberal-reformist president Muhammad Khatami, the three social movements that have shown to be a force came on the scene; the student movement, the women’s movement, and the labor movement.16

The period of (very) relative political liberalization offered an opportunity for greater open organizing. The limits of the new liberalization were tested, and the state showed its hand during the student riots of 1999. Labor as an organized force has emerged since 2004, when striking copper workers in Khatoonabad were attacked by the local gendarmerie.17 Since then, there have been a series of militant strike actions as well as coordination and organization among different sectors of workers coming together as a class. The most publicized of these was perhaps the struggle of city transit workers, in particular bus drivers, whose strike actions and organizing efforts were met with severe repression.18 But militant activity has also taken place, and still continues, among automobile workers at the Iran Khodro plant, the largest automobile plant in the region. Another important sector has been public school teachers. They succeeded in shutting down a large number of schools during a strike over lack of pay in 2004.19

Industrial proletarians make up about 7.520 out of about 70 million people in Iran. This does not include much of the technical and service, or “white collar” forms of employment that make up a large part of the Iranian workforce. This needs to be factored with a 20% unemployment rate (the conservative estimate.) Taking into account a changing proletariat, we can see that there is a force much greater than 10% of the populace. We are faced, much like here in the US, with a young, highly skilled, technically advanced workforce. But when this force leaves the university and enters the ranks of the proletariat, there is no prospect waiting. There are more workers than positions. This is true not just of the “white collar” sector, but also for industrial workers, but for different reasons. Regardless, a precarious position awaits much of the population. The situation affecting a nineteen year old in Tehran is quite similar in many ways to that of her contemporary in Athens, Cairo or Paris. And we see the explosions taking place. The alienation, so commonplace, is not one that can be quelled by the emotional rhetoric of national independence.

One of the dramatic outcomes is that the paradigm of anti-imperialism, particularly what Dabashi calls the paradigm of “28-mordadism”, has indeed exhausted itself. An entire generation born during or after the 1979 Revolution has developed within an Islamic Republic preaching self-sufficiency, independence, and an “anti-west” discourse from every channel. The issue of national independence, which plagued their parents’ or even more so their grandparents’ generation, seems like a relic of the past, and its only ideological function today is to cover up the real contradictions affecting people’s lives on a daily basis. This is true not only for young educated students and intellectual workers, but also for the industrial working class, which is vital to any social revolution. The experience, especially of those who were active worker-militants during the revolution, has taught them valuable lessons. Their inability to accept what is farcical today and which proved tragic to them yesterday does not only undermine the populism of Ahmadinejad. It is also a vaccine against the appeals by the liberal reform candidates of the opposition. The working class in Iran today, especially since 2004, has been increasingly active and militant, with strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations, and occupations a regular occurrence.21

But some worker-militants still keep a certain distance from the liberal-reform elements of the opposition. Is this because they are leaning towards the populism of Ahmadinejad? Not in the least. As we have seen in many of the communiqués from the militant worker syndicates before and after the election, they don’t support any candidate, but at the same time do support the struggle for democracy. This is an important distinction.

If the working class is not rushing into either camp, this is not in spite of their class-consciousness, but exactly because of their class-consciousness. The working class, in particular those workers that were active during the revolution, have learned the lessons of the past. They lived through the tragedy of the revolution, as well as the reformists’ attempts to appeal to the people. “The June 2009 presidential election marks an epistemic exhaustion of 28-Mordadism, when the paradigm has finally conjugated ad nauseam.”22 As was mentioned early in this essay, it is important to distinguish between an analysis of imperialism and the struggle against it, and the ideology of anti-imperialism, which is a particular historical manifestation. This critique should not imply that there is no such thing as imperialism, or that it is of a bygone era of capitalism. Nor is it out of the question that this ideology could be resurrected. But it does influence our understanding of imperialism, or more precisely global capitalism (a redundant term because capital has always been global, yet it is important always to emphasize its global character) as well as of the character of the struggle against it. So what is the outcome of the death of this ideology? The most important outcome of the negation of the ideological fetter of anti-imperialism is its positive supersession. But, as usual, this supersession is only a potential. The end of anti-imperialist ideology, in this particular case the “end of 28-mordadism”, offers a potential space, an opening, through a new understanding of the situation, as well as a new understanding of revolutionary subjectivity becomes possible. The recent uprisings are the clearest historical example of the potential overcoming of the binary between east and west, us and our other (whether this “other” is the Islamic world, or Iran, or Cuba, or whether it is the “west,” however we may interpret the term). It is this negative space through which a new positive may be created but not finished, always in a process of formation and creation. In this space, new conceptions of revolutionary subjectivity offer us something new, through which a new universal can be created–one which is the product of collective human struggle, the antithesis to the universalism of capitalist modernity. “The end of 28-mordadism does not of course mean the end of imperial interventions in the historical destiny of nations. It simply means that now there is a renewed and level playing field on which to think and act in postcolonial terms.”23

The Iranian Revolution, and the anti-imperialist ideology that corresponded to its rise and demise, was indeed a tragedy from the perspective of proletarian revolution; to hold such an ideology today is indeed farcical. It no longer revolutionary, as we have tried to show (and it is doubtful that it ever was); it today serves nothing but reaction. It does nothing but bring workers, students, and women’s organizations into an illusory harmony with those who maintain their oppression and exploitation. If this ideological position once served an emancipatory potential, it is today nothing less than utopian and reactionary.

• 1Val Moghadam, “Socialism or Anti-imperialism? The Left and Revolution in Iran” New Left Review (1987)
• 2Assef Bayat, “Shariati and Marx: A Critique of an ‘Islamic’ Critique of Marxism” Alif. Issue 10 , Pg. 16 (1990)
• 3Ibid., Pg. 17
• 4The clearest expression of this farce lately was the last time President Ahmadinejad came to New York to attend the United Nations he met with a number of “leftists” so they could express their solidarity. See “US Progressives Meet with Ahmadinejad.” http://www.fightbacknews.org/2010/9/23/us-progressives-meet-iranian-president-mahmoud-ahmadinejad. Since then there have been other expressions of this farce such as their support for the Qaddafi regime.
• 5See “The Islamic Republic of Iran After 30 Years”, a lecture at the London School of Economics, February 23, 2009.
• 6The great exception to this was the land occupation and formation of a peasant council in the Turkoman Sahra region, which was swiftly dismantled during the establishment of the Islamic Republic. This was indeed was one of the early important conflicts between the left and the new regime, as well as within the left itself. See Maziar Behrooz, Rebels With a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran. I.B. Tauris, 2000. Pg. 109
• 7For the best analysis of the ideological dimension of the Islamic Republic see Ervand Abrahamian Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic.
• 8Hamid Dabashi, Iran, the Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox, Pg. 92
• 9Ibid., Pg. 93
• 10Ibid., Pg. 94
• 11Moghadam, Pg. 10
• 12Ibid., Pg. 11
• 13Ibid., Pg. 11
• 14“If the assembly line, or the coal mine, is the historically ideal space for the fostering of proletarian class consciousness – workers being densely packed together, in perpetual communication with each other and forced by material necessity to develop a dense of fellowship – then the bazaar is the equivalent for the petty bourgeoisie…But the bazaar stretches beyond the confines of this class category.” Shora Esmailian and Andreas Malm, Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers & Threats of War. 2007, Pluto Press. Pg. 28
• 15Ibid., Pg. 26
• 16It should be stated that these three movements overlap and are not so easily abstracted from each other, particularly in the post-June 2009 election period.
• 17Iran in the Brink, Pg. 71
• 18Their union leader, Mansoor Ossanlou, is currently in Evin prison.
• 19A third of all teachers participated in the strike. See Esmailian, Malm, Pg. 74-77. The Iran Khodro actions began in 2004 as well and have continued. This plant has been referred to as the “Detroit of the Middle East,” and its workers are known for their militancy and class-consciousness but this is counteracted by tactics such as temporary contracts and threat of sack as well as blatant repression. During the protests of June 2009 the workers staged a work slowdown in protest of the repression and in solidarity with the popular movement. http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/iran-khodro-auto-workers-begin-work-slowdown-protest-regime
• 20International Labour Organization. Statistic from 2008 http://amar.sci.org.ir/Detail.aspx?Ln=E&no=98515&S=TP
• 21For the most comprehensive report of worker activity in Iran under the Islamic Republic, in particular since post-war reconstruction see Shora Esmailian and Andreas Malm, Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers & Threats of War. 2007, Pluto Press. Since its publication much has happened, including the June 2009 elections, but this does not invalidate the book as a good source of information on the labor movement.
• 22Dabashi., Pg. 94
• 23Ibid., Pg. 98

There is a photograph of a young man standing in the middle of an embattled Cairo with a sign which reads: “Egypt supports Wisconsin workers one world one pain.” In Madrid, where masses of the unemployed youth currently occupy the Puerta del Sol, homages to Tahrir Square can be seen next to banners which announce the Spanish Revolution. Underscoring this collective sentiment was the recognition of the limits to the trade unions and political parties, whose appearance on the scene arrived post festum. This resurgent brand of internationalism is nothing short of inspirational, and has clearly shown that the so-called Arab Spring is a much more global in content than its baptismal name would otherwise suggest. Turkey, a country with historic and religious links with the Arab world has not, however, experienced this same seismic upsurge. This almost unnerving quiet in the wake of such upheavals has (per usual) reinforced the tired narrative of Turkey as the stalwart secular republic, whose democratic tendencies and relative economic stability present itself as a model to which its restless southern neighbors can aspire.

Regardless of the fact that Taksim Square1 did not transform itself into Tahrir Square, there has been a major upswing in labor militancy in the past few years which seems to have no clear end in sight. Reports of yet another strike or demonstration in the past several months have managed to drown out even the more stentorian accolades to Turkey’s successful weathering of the current crisis. This relative success of the Turkish bourgeoisie in maintaining growth was accompanied by a number of legal measures implemented to make labor more “flexible”, suppress the minimum wage, and continue the fire sale of state-owned enterprises. The Tekel strike of 2009-2010 provided the first substantial challenge to the continuous assault against the working class in Turkey, as explained in Issue No. 22 Why the Tekel strike was so remarkable, beyond its militancy—which included hunger strikes, occupations, the formation of a tent commune in the middle of the capital city of Ankara—was the background of the workers themselves. Most closely aligned themselves to the Islamist AK Party (AKP) or the fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP), and had otherwise been staunch anti-leftists. For the first time, many considered alternative ideas beyond what any of these parties had offered, and the lack of trade unionist support cast doubt over that form of organized labor as well. Yet in the months following the defeat of the Tekel workers, signified in the passing of Article 4/C, new anti-labor laws have been enacted which have in turn provoked the working class to continue its fight.

The willful refusal of the trade unions to support the Tekel workers was a lesson which they feel needs no repeating. Since the strike, they have begun to reassert themselves on the scene, with aggressive calls for strikes and demonstrations. Apart from those Tekel workers who continue to denounce trade union bureaucracy and its meddlesome character in the class struggle, others have answered the call to participate in union-led protests and demonstrations. In the latest of a series of laws pushed through the Turkish Grand National Assembly by the ruling AK Party was the “Bag Law”, which takes aim at the power of trade unions in addition to the working class. The Bag Law, named as such because of the plethora of legal measures, some related to labor, some not, aims at continuing the process of cutting costs and providing narrower job opportunities. Here are some of its more distinctive features:

1. The creation of a flexible labor regime.

2. Providing less waged internship positions for the youth upon entering the labor market.

3. A sizeable reduction in corporate taxes for both foreign and domestic corporations.

Other aspects of the law include a reduction of the minimum wage. There appears to be more to come, as one journalist put it, that most of these laws are just the “tip of the iceberg”;3 what comes next will perhaps be further structural adjustments in order to accommodate the Turkish bourgeoisie’s growing dependence on FDIs.

Reactions against these laws in February were met with blunt force: tear gas, arrests and beatings, similar to how the previous Tekel strike was handled by the state. Students, workers and trade unionists all seemed to have joined in blockading streets in Ankara, as the protests began to spread to other cities such as Istanbul, Diyarbakir and Trabzon. The inclusion of students is important, particularly as a report from the ILO last August reported that youth unemployment is at an all-time high. According to the Turkish Statistics Institute, unemployment for those “15-24 years of age is approximately 25%.”4 Life for the youth in Turkey in general looks precarious at best, as public debt begins to spiral out of control and fears of inflation deepen as job prospects decrease.

And the election…

The upcoming election on June 12th may nevertheless signal a victory for AKP, though with not quite the margin it had in 2007.5 Mounting protests against the increasingly authoritarian AKP have been met with scores dead and injured. In one such protest on May 31st in the Black Sea city of Hopa, a retired school teacher died in a tear gas attack, causing further outrage against AKP. Having stuck its finger in the air to test the political change of wind, CHP has managed to purge some of its more orthodox Kemalist members for the sake of gaining more votes. One may recall a similar transformation of the CHP in the 1970s under the first government of Bülent Ecevit. Even the unions are beginning to take advantage of the situation and encouraging the rank and file to elect their own personal picks. The real danger which then presents itself to the working class in Turkey no longer seems to come from the call to (political) prayer of AKP or even MHP, but from the social democrats, garden-variety leftists and even the Stalinist Communist Party Turkey.

Much of the talk of “neoliberalism” coming from such leftist organizations is often a call for a return to state-administered enterprises under “workers’ control”, which is nothing more than bureaucratic state capitalism. It should be remembered that even under the most intense periods of nationalization in Turkey, often glorified among the social democrats and the like, was fought against by the working class. To therefore conclude that what is occurring in Turkey can be reduced to a neoliberal agenda only recycles the endeavors of past struggles, at a time and place where neither such a term nor entity existed. The effort for the working class to reject fascist and Islamist politicians is admirable, and should not be downplayed in any sense. Yet failure to consider how in the most trying of times, the trade unions or leftist parties have not always come to the defense of the working class—or come at a time when only they have been threatened—should be a point of departure, rather than an alternative to, the so-called neoliberal right-wing.

• 1Taksim Square has traditionally been a rally point for activists and protesters on the European side of Istanbul.
• 2See Toros Korkmaz and Kadir Ateş, “Lessons from the Tekel strikes: class solidarity and ethnic (in)difference” in Issue No. 2.
• 3Zafer Adyin, “Torba yasa, torbadaki sendika , December 12, 2010.
• 4Bianet.org, Youth Unemployment in Turkey Twice as High as World Average , August 13, 2010.
• 5AKP won with almost 50% of the vote.

“From the Monongahela valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name”

– Bruce Springsteen, Youngstown

The Mon Valley follows the windy Monongahela River, which forms at a confluence in Fairmont, West Virginia and flows north to its terminus into the Ohio River in Downtown Pittsburgh. The valley and its namesake river get their names from the Lenape word Mënaonkihëla, which means ‘where banks cave and erode.’ Although originally intended to refer to the tendency of the river to undercut its banks, causing them to cave in, it’s just as fitting today, as countless developments constructed along the river and in the immediate area over the years are literally crumbling to the ground.

Several Native American groups—including Shawnee, Seneca and Iroquois—inhabited the Mon Valley before the arrival of Europeans, which began with the appearance of French trader Robert de La Salle in 1669.

These newcomers established their first trading post and settlements in the area in 1717. A dispute over control of the area sparked the French and Indian War between the French and British in 1754. The latter was victorious, coming out of the war as the dominant power in eastern North America.

In 1768, descendants of William Penn, the “founder and absolute proprietor” of the Province of Pennsylvania, took control of what would become Pittsburgh and the surrounding area from the Six Nations through the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

Pittsburgh’s strategic position at the intersection of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio Rivers led to growth. After the American Revolution, a boat building industry sprung up to meet the needs of European settlers headed west into Ohio Country.

In 1791, small farmers in the Mon Valley angered by taxes decreed by the new government launched the Whiskey Rebellion after their efforts at peaceful repeal failed. The rebellion grew and drew in large numbers of poor people with their own economic grievances. The French Revolution was praised in mass meetings and calls were raised to bring the guillotine to Southwestern Pennsylvania.1 Finally, the federal government raised a militia larger in number than Washington’s army during the revolution to put down the insurrection. The rebellion collapsed as the armed forces moved in in 1794.

Glass production begin in the city in 1797, and increased (along with the production of metals and metal alloys) as the War of 1812 shut off access to British goods.

Growth continued, increasing the need for coal mined from the surrounding area. The extensive Pittsburgh Coal Seam, which stretches many miles southwest of the city, became the most important coal seam in the United States. In 1760 coal was being retrieved in small quantities from natural entries. By 1857, more than 22,000,000 bushels of coal were being taking out of the mines annually to supply some 1,000 factories.

The American Civil War added to the region’s growth. The Union’s need for iron and weapons opened new avenues for capital. The first steel mill was founded in Braddock by Andrew Carnegie in 1875. The mill’s easy access to bituminous coal for coking combined with the new Bessemer process technology for mass production contributed to its success. Growth was subsidized through the intensive exploitation of workers at every step of the process.

A huge boom in the railroads occurred after the Civil War. Capital flooded the industry—which was then the largest employer in the country—between 1866 and 1873. Then the bubble burst as the Great Depression of 1873 set in.

Attempts to “correct” the economy by attacking workers were met with resistance. Increasingly poor working conditions and dramatic cuts in wages and hours prompted a number of scattered strikes.

In 1877, a strike broke out in Martinsburg, West Virginia, after railroad bosses cut wages for the second time in a year. Train movements in and out of the city were brought to a standstill. The governor called in the state militia, but its members refused to act against the strikers. Word spread out of West Virginia, and so did the strike. Outside of the St. Louis Commune2 , which arose when rail workers joined others in taking over and running the city, the most dramatic events occurred in Pittsburgh. After local police refused big capitalist Thomas Alexander Scott’s recommendation to give starving strikers there “a rifle diet,” the militia was sent in. The murder of twenty strikers and the injury of dozens more only led to more anger and further actions. The militiamen were forced to take cover in a railroad structure. Strikers then burned down dozens of buildings and locomotives and hundreds of train cars. The militiamen shot their way out of town, killing 20 more people. The rebellion continued on until federal troops were sent in by President Hayes.

In 1892, another serious dispute erupted in the town of Homestead, a borough directly across the Mon River from Pittsburgh. When Carnegie’s manager Henry Clay Frick demanded wage cuts for skilled workers—as a result of new technologies that allowed for more production by unskilled workers—and attempted to break their union through the removal of numerous workers from their bargaining unit, the members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers refused to sign new contracts. Frick responded by locking the workers out of the Homestead Steel Works and declaring that Carnegie would no longer recognize the growing union, which had carried out various successful strikes in the recent past, integrating the struggles of groups of immigrant workers, running off strike breakers and even taking control of the town. The plant was surrounded with barbed wire and high pressure houses and towers housing snipers were installed. Sympathy strikes soon broke out across the region. Workers set up 24 hour pickets around the area and patrolled the railroads and rivers. Communications were maintained with workers elsewhere through the telegraph lines. Deputies sent to order the strikers not to interfere with the plant’s operations had their orders ripped out of their hands and were put on a ferry and sent downstream. Carnegie then hired 300 Pinkerton security guards to reopen the plant and allow scabs to enter. As the Pinkertons approached Homestead by boat on the Monongahela they were greeted by pot shots from the advance guard of workers stationed on the river. Word got back to Homestead and the strikers blew the whistle at the plant, sounding the signal for the town’s populace to meet there. Soon after, the Pinkerton guards attempted to land. Shots broke out. Two were killed on each side, and several were injured. The tug that brought the guards into town departed with the injured, leaving the rest stranded on a barge. Five thousand descended on the river bank. A cannon was set up and attempts were made to sink the barge. When news spread to Pittsburgh, thousands of workers gathered in the streets. Many were armed and planned to march on Homestead to join the fight against the Pinkerton agents. Mill hands from surrounding areas joined the strikers. The agents finally surrendered. They were eventually put on a train and sent out of town. The state militia entered the town and took control of the plant, allowing production to restart with replacement workers brought in from other areas by train. The working class was divided amongst itself with the typical tactics. At a time when pay could be determined by ethnicity, desperate black workers and Eastern European immigrants willing to work for lower wages were the first to cross the picket lines. Strike leaders were jailed or forced into hiding. The American Federation of Labor refused to support the struggle. A last ditch effort by the strikers to enter the plant and prevent the ovens from being lit ended when militiamen fought them off, bayoneting six in the process. It wasn’t long before the strike fell apart. Steel output recovered, and then expanded.

Financier J.P. Morgan and attorney Elbert H. Gary combined the Carnegie Steel Company with several other outfits to form the U.S. Steel Corporation in 1901. Pittsburgh became the producer of half of the steel being used in the continually expanding country.

The need for labor sparked mass migrations. European immigrants arrived in droves. They were joined by workers from the South. The already large population grew 66 percent between 1900 and 1910, continuing a massive population swell that began in the beginning of the 19th century.

Large numbers of houses were constructed by and for workers around the mills and mine towns were established throughout the area.

Industry continued to develop for years, boosted by U.S. needs in the first and second world wars. Throughout the duration of World War II, the Mon Valley produced nearly 100 million tons of steel.

The population peaked in 1950. Although the industrial base continued to expand for another two decades, changes were already beginning to unfold. Increased productivity and efficiency, automation, drop in demand, increase in the price of raw materials, and competition from newer, less expensive production facilities in places like Germany and Japan—which were often funded at least in part by profits extracted from workers in the Mon Valley and surrounding regions—lead to the shut down of one facility after another. Plant closures were followed by mine closures. Huge numbers of workers lost their jobs.

In the aftermath of the recession in the early 1980’s, some 153,000 steel workers were laid off.3

In the onslaught against the working class in the Reagan years, attempts to fight against closures and mass unemployment—where they existed—fell flat. Union bureaucrats, comfortable in their downtown offices and homes built with dues money, offered nothing more than concessions and nationalist poison that blamed workers in other countries for everything.

An organization called the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee sprung up from the initiative of laid off steel workers that urged their union, the United Steel Workers, to set up unemployed committees to keep them involved in struggles with the bosses that had eliminated their jobs. Running into barriers set in place by the union leadership, they eventually set out to work on their own. They established a food bank and helped workers facing eviction, utility shutoffs and other economic problems, and lobbied government officials for extensions in unemployment compensation. They held protest actions and raised demands. As a reformist pressure group, the organization enjoyed some level of success. But it never became any more than that. After its earliest struggles, it grew almost in direct proportion to the abandonment of many of its original stated goals. Today it is funded by charities like the United Way and grants from foundations. Paul Lodico, a leading member of the group, died in late 2010. Any possibility of the organization being anything more than a lobbying group had already died years earlier.

And so, with nothing to stop it, the decline continued. In fifty years, Pittsburgh went from being the twelfth largest city in the United States to the fifty first. The entire Mon Valley shared its fate.

The loss of income for steel workers, miners, glass workers and the like lead to a disappearance of businesses that relied on their spending.

Massive plants up and down the Mon River and throughout the area were stripped and abandoned. Having already served their purpose in the eyes of the capitalist class, the huge, complex facilities were deserted.

In 1986 an abandoned steel plant along the Mon in the city of Monessen was used to film RoboCop, a dystopian movie set in a future Detroit in the midst of an economic collapse, illustrating the case perfectly. Monessen, which was created by the East Side Land Company in the late 19th century, has lost more than 50 percent of its population.

A few miles down the river, the borough of Brownsville also lays in ruins. Once a major transportation hub and center of coal and steel production that was larger even than Pittsburgh, Brownsville now resembles a ghost town, with a downtown lined with abandoned and disintegrating buildings. The town, which in the past gave birth to its own suburbs and is home to the prototype flatiron building, has lost 74 percent of its population since 1940. More than 50 percent of the population under age 18 falls under the official poverty line.

The Homestead Works was torn down in 1984. In 1999, a strip mall was constructed in its place, offering low-paying, part-time employment to the remnants of the borough’s population.

The coal town of Marianna, Pennsylvania, built by the Pittsburgh Buffalo Company in 1907, which was considered such a shining jewel of industry that it was visited by President Theodore Roosevelt upon its construction, was totally forgotten after the mine closed in 1988. Though several hundred residents remain, the town’s economic base is long gone. A trip through Marianna reveals the collapse and decay of dozens of the borough’s distinctive yellow brick row houses and buildings.

Canonsburg too has lost its economic base. The area which once housed a refining mill that processed uranium ore for use in the Manhattan Project was simply covered over with clay and fenced off, in a process resembling the sort of approach taken to much of the region in recent years.

These are just specific examples of a disaster that has affected the entire Mon Valley, and the larger “Rust Belt,” for the last several decades.

But for a select few who don’t have to worry about trivial matters like finding a regular source of income, things have apparently improved. Since 1989, Pittsburgh has regularly been named one of the “most liveable cities” in the country, and even the world, by outlets like Yahoo!, Forbes, The Economist and Places Rated Almanac.

In 2009, President Barack Obama lauded Pittsburgh in a statement released a few weeks before the heads of the most powerful countries in the world gathered downtown for the G-20 Summit, claiming the city stood “as a bold example of how to create new jobs and industries while transitioning to a 21st century economy.”4 Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell gushed that the choice of Pittsburgh as host of the gathering was “a vote of confidence that Pittsburgh had transformed itself from the old economy to the new economy.”5

What sort of transformation has occurred? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are now fewer jobs in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area then there were ten years ago. Jobs for workers in manufacturing decreased 17 percent between 1999 and 2004, from already low numbers6 . This loss of jobs, which is two percentage points lower than the national average, is what’s being promoted as a “success.” The much touted “high tech sector” accounts for only 6 percent of the jobs in the region7 , and few of those are accessible to unemployed workers forced from their jobs in industries like steel and coal. While there has been moderate job growth in healthcare, the biggest growth has come in the lower-wage accommodation and food services sector.

It seems then that more than anything else, Obama and Rendell’s statements serve as a stern warning to workers that in the “new economy” meager job growth limited largely to a few new positions—for those with special skills and education—and a continued shift in existing employment from heavy industry to low paying jobs in services is the best they should expect.

Indeed, large numbers of working people have already realized this, prompting them to search out alternative sources of income. Many rely on disability benefits from the state (with disability in Braddock, once home of Carnegie’s premier steel works, reaching nearly 30 percent, according to most recently available US Census data8 ). Some have resorted to theft. (Pittsburgh’s robbery rate is more than twice the national average, according to FBI statistics9 .) The numerous home invasions that have been carried out across the region in recent years are but an acute expression of this. Many more still have fled the area in search of employment.

In 1950, the population of Pittsburgh was nearly 680,000. Today, the population is under 310,000. There has been a huge decline in population throughout each of the last 6 decades. While some of this is due to a shift away from the city and into the surrounding vicinity, much more is a result of massive departures, largely of young people, from the entire area. The well-known diaspora of fans of Pittsburgh’s football team—the Steelers—is a palpable indicator of this mass exodus (“Steelers bars” can be found from New York to Los Angeles, and everywhere in between). One is reminded of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.

Other have sought out a different kind of escape. Drug abuse has been growing for years, especially among middle and high school students and young adults. In 2003, the number of deaths in Allegheny County from drug overdose was more than twice the number in 1999.10 Considering the futures many have to look forward to, this comes as no real surprise.

A large portion of the population that remains in the region is aged or aging. Close to one fifth of the population in the six-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area is aged 65 or older—well above the national average. Allegheny County, which contains Pittsburgh, has the second-oldest population of the 34 major counties in the United States (behind retirement haven Palm Beach County, Florida).11

The latest trend across the region is the exploitation of the immense natural gas reserves that exist deep underground. The hydraulic fracturing process that is used to retrieve the gas has an enormous social and environmental impact (the extent of which is far beyond the scope of this article). But unlike the coal mining boom of the past, “fracking” does not employ large numbers of people. Still, many in the area desperate for employment of any kind welcome the corporations searching for natural gas with open arms, even as the very water they rely on for life is poisoned around them. Ruined farming families look forward to signing lucrative contracts, and young workers hope they can be one of the lucky few to grab a job on the gas rigs, for however long they last.

Once again we see the reality that capital serves only capital; that the “invisible hand” of the market serves only to pat the capitalists on the back and jerk around the working class.

Capital embedded itself along the virgin banks of the Monongahela. It carved up the land in search of coal to fuel its expansion, releasing acid drainage into the water and air. It crammed in factory after factory, filling the sky with so much smoke and soot that author James Parton described Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid off.” It brought in millions to make it all go. And when it was done, it moved on to greener pastures, leaving only industrial waste and fractured remnants behind. It reappears here and there, whenever it sees an opportunity; but never offers any solutions.

This is not a special case or isolated phenomenon. The only thing separating many of the Mon Valley’s young nomads setting out in search of work elsewhere from Japan’s growing number of “pension parasites” resorting to hikikomori—locking themselves in their rooms and refusing to talk to anyone, including their mothers, who deliver their every meal—is the ability of their parents to take care of them. One can imagine what will come of the so-called pension parasites themselves when their source of support no longer exists.

Ours is a shared future.

Only the combined struggle of the international working class can overcome the tyranny of capital and transform the world into a place fit for human beings. This must be our goal. Otherwise the murderer of the Mon Valley may become the murderer of humankind.

• 1Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1986.
• 2See: Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Straight Arrow Books, 1972.
• 3Hoerr, John P.. And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.
• 4Obama, Barack. “Statement by the President on G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh. The White House: Office of the Press Secretary. Updated: 2009-09-08. Retrieved: 2011-01-24. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Statement-by-the-President-on-G-20-Summit-in-Pittsburgh/
• 5Smaglik, Paul. “From steel to science.” Nature. 14 January 2010.
• 6State of the Pittsburgh Economy. Pittsburghfuture.com. Retrieved: 2011-01-24. http://www.pittsburghfuture.com/economy.html
• 7“Pittsburgh: Economy.” City-Data.com. Retrieved: 2011-01-24. http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-Northeast/Pittsburgh-Economy.html
• 8Rankin borough, Pennsylvania. U.S. Census Bureau Fact Sheet. Retrieved: 2011-01-24. http://factfinder.census.gov
• 9Pittsburgh Crime Statistics. CityRating.com. Retrieved: 2011-01-24. http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=Pittsburgh&state=PA
• 10Fahy, Joe. “Drug overdose deaths increasing in Allegheny County.” Post-Gazette.com. Updated: 2004-09-27. Retrieved: 2011-01-24. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04271/386182-85.stm
• 11Rotsetin, Gary. “Allegheny still second oldest big county in United States.” Post-Gazette.com. Updated: 2001-05-24. Retrieved: 2011-01-24. http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20010524census4.asp

Let’s review:

1. Marx’s contribution to the critique of capital, of capitalism, of industrial capitalism is its historicism, its material historicity. The critique begins, ends, and is at all points in between configured by the realization that the substance of human history is the social organization of labor. Capitalism begins, ends, and is at all points configured around the opposition of the material conditions of labor—those instruments of production—to labor itself; the opposition of the labor process to the specific capitalist expression of that process. Labor opposes its organization of wage-labor as it reproduces it. Wage-labor exists as the loss, the devaluation of labor through its exchange as, and for, the commodity.

Each, capital and wage-labor, exists only in the organization of the other. Each can reproduce itself only in the reproduction of both. Yet, capital in order to accumulate must also and always expel labor-power from the production process.

2. In contra-distinction to Marx’s critique of the expanding reproduction of this identity in opposition of the labor process and its doppelganger—accumulation—Marx’s theory of ground- rent, in its first presentations, is formed in and around the notion of “demand” and demand’s body double, scarcity.

Ground-rent is what it is not only because capital is what it is; not only because private property is what it is; not only because labor-power is what it is. Ground-rent is what it is because, in the first, last and all points between analysis, nature is what it is, finite and determined.

While Marx argues that ground-rent is the result of capital’s encounter with feudal property in land, the feudal organization of property becomes, and sustains itself, as an obstacle in the path of accumulation because land is limited; the output from the “instrument of production”—agricultural commodities from cultivated land—cannot be multiplied “at will” as it can be, according to Marx, in industry.

3. Still, the news from Marx’s economic manuscripts that become Theories of Surplus Value, part 2 isn’t all bad: in grappling with absolute and differential rent, Marx is wrestling with that “wave/particle,” that certain quantum of absolute uncertainty that every capitalist grasps at– excess profit, profit above the average. This becomes a thread within volume 3 of Capital.

The determination of value by labor time, the materialization of surplus-value as profit is manifested in this iteration as the distribution, allocation of the total available profit among the capitalists who personify in all its miserable glory and glorious misery of the reproduction of capital.

4. For Marx, the question that starts him down this road is: how can lands of unequal fertility yield agricultural commodities of equal prices when the law of value determines prices and governs the exchange of commodities?

We could answer: “The market does that through competition, through the prices of production.” Actually, the market does that through adjustment to the prices of production. The market does that through the divergence of price from value, where the equal prices represent a transfer of value among producers. The market in all its divergences, its manipulations, its “spreads,” its arbitrage; in all its scams, swindles, manipulations, panics, manias, booms, busts, fear, greed, swings, shortages and overproductions, does just that—transfers value from the least efficient to the most efficient, most necessary capitals.

5. But Marx isn’t buying any of that; not for agricultural commodities. There he is convinced that because of increasing demand, because of the scarcity of land of sufficient fertility, prices of production and market adjustment to the prices of production do not govern.

And Marx is not buying it for the commodities of the “extractive” capitals [mining], and not even for processing capitals [grain mills] which can utilize “natural” advantages such as access to the power of falling water to drive the mill. Ground-rent here begins where there is ownership of a valueless force of nature, where that natural condition has been captured and presented as private property, packaged in the as if condition; as if it were a capital. .

Rent becomes a mechanism of “regressive redistribution.” It is tribute, penalty, fine, and/or fee, embodied in price but deducted from the profit of the most productive, efficient producers both within a specific sector and among all sectors. Rent accrues without purchase, without valorisation, without amplifying production, without the accumulation of the means of production as capital requiring living labor to sustain its fragile, expropriated heartbeat.

Rent lives, if it can be said to live at all, as the incubus and succubus of history, that weight of all dead generations, of all dying modes of production, on the brains of the living. I know it sure has been weighing on my brain like a nightmare for the last two years.

6. But the news isn’t all bad. Within ground-rent, money-mediated ground rent, there is the essential ambiguity of capitalism, that ambiguity between private property in the means of production without which capital can never come into being, can never exist as a condition of labor to which labor must present itself as labor-power, as wage-labor; without which capital can never aggrandize increasing portions of social time; without which capital can never overwhelm the limits of the artisan and handicraft production and the opposition the socialization of labor, of accumulated social labor that threatens capital immanently and imminently with the now reduction, now collapse, of profits.

7. The ambiguity of rent is manifested in the ambiguity of capitalist agriculture. Capital pretends there are no limits; capital requires limits. The landlord personifies a social limit but only because the landlord capitalizes—presents as value engendering value—on the “natural” limits of agricultural production. The landlord capitalizes the limits to fertility; the limits to enhanced fertility; the limits to the very existence of land.

These limits can be pushed, extended, even battered by capital but never completely overcome.

The ambiguity exists in that the very actions required for modifying the limits are the differential applications, degrees, and expenditures of capital, thus re-establishing the limits to agriculture [and extraction] and re-posing the original question: how is it that lands of different, unequal fertilities yield agricultural commodities of the same price? How is it that lodes, veins, ores, reservoirs of different “richness,” intensity, ease of access yield commodities of the same price? Or to put it in more familiar terms, what sets the market, other than fear and greed that is? More correctly, what makes fear and greed the manifestation and mediation of value?

Let’s Continue

1.1 This question, “how do lands, areas, territories of different fertility, productivity yield commodities of a single [or average] price,” parallels the general question that Marx engages throughout volume 3 of Capital: “how do the particular, singular, private, individual expropriations of surplus-value, become, more or less, a general [or average] profit, the average rate of profit?”

How do the individual values, generated, extracted through capitals of different compositions, where greater labor time means greater value, become transformed into an average, a social average where the accrual of value conforms to the socially necessary time of reproduction of… not just any particular commodity, but to the totality of capitalist production relations?

And the answer is…. in the deviations of prices from values.

In this regard, Marx’s analysis of ground-rent undergoes a transformation, or more correctly, undergoes development and enhancement, that in the very midst of its own historical inaccuracy [as I described it in Part 1], provides us with a mechanism, which by means of its immanent critique gives us more than a clue to that process, that totality of reproduction.

We move with Marx from ground-rent, to rent; from ground-rent being the mechanism by which agricultural commodities are sold at their values above their prices-of-production, to rent as the description for any and all accumulations of “excess profit.”

1.2 In his opening remarks on rent in volume 3, Marx warns against “three major errors that obscure the analysis of ground-rent.”

[1] The confusion between the various forms of rent that correspond to different levels of development of the social production process…

[2]All ground-rent is surplus-value, the product of surplus labour. In its more undeveloped form, rent in kind, it is still a direct surplus product. Hence the error that the rent corresponding to the capitalist mode of production, which is always an excess over and above profit, i.e. over and above a portion of commodity value that itself consists of surplus-value (surplus labour)—that this particular and specific component of surplus-value can be explained simply by explaining the general conditions of existence for surplus-value and profit. [Penguin, p.772-773]

OK, so far? So far, OK, but then Marx follows up with this:

[3] A particular peculiarity that arises with the economic valorization of landed property, that is the development of ground-rent, is that its amount is in no way determined by the action of its recipient, but rather by a development of social labor that is independent of him… This is why something that is common to all branches of production and their products on the basis of commodity production, and to capitalist production in its entirety, is easily conceived as a peculiar property of rent (and of the production of agriculture in general).

The level of ground-rent (and with it the value of land) rises in the course of social development, as a result of overall social labour. Not only do the market and the demand for agricultural products grow, but the demand for land itself also grows directly, since it is a condition of production [emphasis added] competed for by all possible branches of business, including non-agricultural ones…

In actual fact, what we have here is not a phenomenon peculiar to agriculture and its products. The same applies rather to all other branches of production and products, on the basis of commodity production and its absolute form, capitalist production. [p. 775-776]

Major error #3 seems to run head-on into major error #2.

Marx has in mind here the relationship of agricultural products to other commodities as values. The mere fact that agricultural commodities are produced as, and for, accumulated, and the accumulation of, values; that agricultural production requires production not for subsistence of direct producers but for exchange with other “mediated” products is the condition of production for all possible branches of production.

Well then, if that—private ownership of a source, means, etc—is the condition of production common to all, then the idiosyncratic nature of ground-rent can’t be quite that idiosyncratic at all. If that is the common condition of production for capitalism which is, as Marx describes it in his economic manuscripts, a self-mediating relation of production, reproducing itself at and in every moment of its circuit of realization, then ground-rent is part of the reproduction and the distribution of the total social surplus and not some vestigial appendage, clinging to the sacrum corpus of capital [see above remark about immanent critique].

1.3 Before proceeding, or better yet, in order to proceed in the analysis of rent, we need to consider Marx’s explanation of the formation of the general, average, rate of profit. And here again we meet up with a more than just a bit of ambiguity. Marx initially builds a case for particular rates of profit, specific to the individual sectors, if not units, of production. He states:

(2)We have shown that, even assuming the same degree of the exploitation of labour, and ignoring all modifications introduced by the credit system, all mutual swindling and cheating among the capitalists themselves and all favourable selections of the market, rates of profit can be very different according to whether raw materials are purchased cheaply or less cheaply, with more or less specialist knowledge; according to whether the overall arrangement of the production process in its various stages is more or less satisfactory, with wastage of material avoided, management and supervision simple and effective, etc. In short, given the surplus-value that accrues to a certain variable capital, it still depends very much on the business acumen of the individual… [Penguin, p. 235].

That’s part of the case, but not a particularly strong part. Or it’s a strong part expressed weakly. The strong part is that rates of profit differ based on the internal ratio of the components of production, living and accumulated, in each sector…provided all surplus labor time is absorbed efficiently into the production process and converted into the maximum surplus value, and that surplus value is realized fully by the exchange of commodities at their values.

Just a few pages later, Marx moves from the particular to the general rate of profit:

We have shown, therefore, that in different branches of industry unequal profit rates prevail, corresponding to the different organic compositions of capitals, and, within the indicated limits, corresponding also to their different turnover times; so that at a given rate of surplus-value it is only capitals of the same organic composition—assuming equal turnover times—that the law holds good, as a general tendency that profits stand in direct proportion to the amount of capital, and that capitals of equal size yield equal profits in the same period of time. The above argument is true on the same basis as our whole investigation so far: that commodities are sold at their values. There is no doubt, however, that in actual fact…no such variation in the average rate of profit exists between different branches of industry, and it could not exist without abolishing the entire system of capitalist production. The theory of value thus appears incompatible with the actual phenomena of production, and it might seem that we must abandon all hope of understanding these phenomena. [Penguin, p.252]

Marx does not demonstrate this using the actual data from actual industries and sectors of capitalist production. Again, as is the case with rent, this is not a conclusion drawn from history; it is a conclusion based on the necessity of the logical exclusion of the conflicting possibilities.

And again again, what is the core to that logic?

It has emerged from Part One of this volume that cost prices are the same for the products of different spheres of production if equal portions of capital are advanced in their production, no matter how different the organic composition of these capitals might be [emphasis added] . In the cost price, the distinction between variable and constant capital is abolished, as far as the capitalist is concerned. [Penguin, p. 253]

This is an iteration of the principle of commodity exchange that suffuses all of volume 3 of Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value, including the analysis of rent, the critique of Rodbertus and Ricardo, where Marx introduces the concepts of cost-price [although his definition of “cost-price” in TSV is very different from that in volume 3], average prices, and average profit.

A few pages on in volume 3, Marx gives us another iteration of this principle:

…to transform profits into mere portions of surplus-value that are distributed not in proportion to the surplus value that is created in each particular sphere of production, but rather in proportion to the amount of capital applied in each of the spheres, so that equal amounts of capital, no matter how they are composed, receive equal shares [aliquot parts] of the totality of surplus-value produced by the total social capital. [Penguin, p. 274]

Capitals of equal size must yield equal profits regardless of the relation between the living and dead components of the capital.

The whole difficulty arises from the fact that commodities are not exchanged simply as commodities, but as the products of capitals, which claim shares in the total mass of surplus-value according to their size, equal shares for equal size. [Penguin, p. 275].

We have moved with Marx from the production and exchange of commodities, to the reproduction of capitals, to the distribution of the total social capital through the arenas of commodity production.

The law of value governs the exchange of commodities at their prices of production—cost of capital plus the average rate of profit. The law of value regulates the exchange of commodities at the prices of production. The law of value is expressed, manifested socially as the law governing reproduction of capitals through the variance of the prices of production from individual values.

The “objective” basis for Marx’s affirmation of the general rate of profit is that all value is the transmogrification of labor. Therefore, the components, living or accumulated, fixed or circulating of the value of a commodity are, in the moments of exchange of all commodities, transparent, obscured, invisible.

The “subjective” basis for the general rate of profit is that just as the make-up of value is “invisible” to itself, the components of value are immaterial to the bourgeoisie–when it comes to selling the product of labor, as opposed to buying the ability to labor–because of what the bourgeoisie cannot see. The capitalist produces, or rather employs others to produce, because he or she needs to accumulate surplus-value, but the capitalist cannot comprehend, much less admit that wage-labor is the source of surplus-value, the source of the profit realized in the process of exchange. To do that would be to acknowledge that surplus labor-time is hidden in the even dispersal of the working day, that unpaid labor is hidden in the uniform distribution of the wage—that commodities are exchanged in proportion to the labor-time embedded in them save for the exchange of capital with wage-labor.

The capitalist cannot see the surplus-value extracted in production. The capitalist cannot measure the surplus-value embedded in the commodities. He, or she, can’t see what he or she doesn’t pay for. But the capitalist does know cost. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but under the gaze of the accountant, all the components of production, living and dead, are equally ugly. They all cost. In the eyes of the capitalist, what’s purchased below cost is good-looking, but what’s sold above cost is simply stunning.

Given the congenital deficiency in depth-perception of the capitalist, he, or she, makes do, compensates, adjusts, and calculates a “cost-plus” number for his or her commodities. The capitalist adds an “average rate of profit,” a percentage of the cost-price, to the cost-price of the commodities he or she brings to market.

It is, in the “normal” course of capitalist events, through the exchange of commodities at their production prices, that value is distributed among the capitals, and that capital as a whole is reproduced.

For Marx, the establishment of the general rate of profit is not the calculation of an arithmetic mean, a simple, a worthless calculation that exists always in the abstract and never in the concrete. Despite all Marx writes about particular rates of profit, about the lower rate of profit common to railroads, the general rate of profit is, if not the governing principle, at least the proxy of the governing principle, at least a compelling principle of accumulation. Competition not only creates the general rate of profit, but it is the competition to achieve the general rate of profit that drives capitalism up against the inside of the cage of its own making.

Each/all capitalists must reduce the “ordinary” cost-prices, the costs of production, of his/her/their commodities in order to market those commodities at prices of production that appear to be an extraordinary gain. All capitalists will expel labor-power disproportionately from the production process in order to substitute machinery which reduces, and only to the extent it reduces, the costs of production. Each/all capitalists think they can outrun, outpace, outmaneuver, every/all capitalists when in fact every/all capitalists exist as shadows to each other, and have about the same chance of outracing the general rate of profit as they do of outracing their own, and each other’s, shadows.

So we get to that space between the rock and the hard place of capital—between the need to reduce cost-price in an attempt to garner an extra shred of value from the total available social value and the result of that very reduction, which is of course, the decline in the general rate of profit. Capital, to reduce the cost-price, will introduce greater quantities of fixed assets to the degree that this displacement of labor reduces the cost-price. This is manifested in the labor process by the expulsion of labor power. All of the fixed capital must be engaged to expel the labor power to the level that actually reduces the cost-price. But only a fraction, a portion, of the fixed capital transfers, recuperates its own cost in the valorization process. So capital is involved in a continuous process where accumulation creates devaluation; where achieving a general rate of profit requires acting to aggrandize an excess profit; and where price is, if not the only mechanism, certainly the most important and developed one.

Any and all capitals, to achieve the general rate of profit must furiously struggle for increments of profit above the general rate. Any and all capitals in so endeavoring to reduce its cost price will reduce its price of production. The arbitrage, the lag, the differential between the individual producer’s price of production and the general price of production constitutes an aggrandizement of excess or surplus profit.

The individual aggrandizement, the arbitrage, draws all of capital into the struggle to reduce cost prices as capital always and everywhere migrates in the very existence and action of the arbitrage itself. Thus the struggle for excess profit, necessary to achieve the general rate of profit reduces the general, average, social rate of profit.

Capital, having no existence without valorization, exists only in lock-step with devaluation.

“We Must Go On”—Kane, Alien

3.1 In chapter 38, Part 6, Volume 3 of Capital, Marx applies his theory of rent to capitalist production, contrasting the costs and profits of factories powered by waterfalls with those of factories powered by steam-engines:

To demonstrate the general character of this form of ground-rent, we assume that the factories in a country are powered predominantly by steam-engines, but a certain minority by natural waterfalls instead. We assume the production price in the branches of industry first mentioned to be 115 for a quantity of commodities for which a capital of 100 is consumed. The 15 per cent profit is calculated not just on the consumed capital of 100 but on the total capital that is applied in the production of this commodity value. This production price, as we explained, earlier, is determined not by the individual cost price of any one industrialist producing by himself, but rather by the price that the commodity costs on average under the average conditions for capital in that whole sphere of production. It is in fact the market price of production; the average market price as distinct from its oscillation. It is always in the form of the market price and moreover in the form of the governing market price or the market price of production that the nature of commodity value presents itself, its character being determined not by the labour-time needed by a certain individual producer to produce a certain quantity of a commodity, or a certain number of individual commodities, but by the socially necessary labour-time…

…we shall further assume that the cost price in those factories that are driven by water-power comes to only 90, instead of 100. Since the production price of the great mass of goods that governs the market is 115, with a profit of 15 percent, the factories that drive their machines with water-power will also sell at 115, i.e. at the market price as governed by the average price. Their profit will amount to 25 instead of 15; the governing price of production enables them to make a surplus profit of 10 percent, not because they sell their commodities above the price of production but because they sell them at this price, because their commodities are produced, or their capital functions, under exceptionally favourable conditions, conditions that stand above the average level prevailing in this sphere.

Two things are immediately evident here.

Firstly,…This surplus profit is thus similarly equal to the difference between the individual price of production of these favoured producers and the general social price of production in the sphere of production as a whole, which is what governs the market. This difference is equal to the excess of the general production price of the commodity over its individual production price. The two governing limits of this excess are on the one hand the individual cost price and hence the individual production price, and on the other the general production price. The value of the commodities produced by water-power is lower because a smaller amount of labour is required for their production, i.e. less labour enters in the objectified form, as a portion of constant capital. The labour here is more productive, its individual productivity being greater than that of the labor employed. Its greater productivity is expressed in the way that it needs a smaller quantity of constant capital to produce the same amount of commodities, a smaller quantity of objectified labour than others; and a smaller quantity of living labor as well, since the water wheel does not need to be heated. The greater individual productivity of labor applied reduces the value of the commodity and its cost price and therefore its price of production as well. For the industrialist, this presents itself in the following way, that the cost price of the commodity for him is less. He has less objectified labour to pay for, and similarly less wages for less living labour applied. His cost price is 90 instead of 100. And so his individual production price is only 1031/2 instead of 115 (100:115=90:1031/2). The difference between his individual production price and the general one is determined by the difference between his individual cost price and the general one. This is one of the magnitudes that set limits to his surplus profit. The other is the general price of production, in which the general rate of profit is one of the governing factors. If coal becomes cheaper, the difference between his individual cost price and the general one declines, and so therefore does his surplus profit. If he had to sell the commodity at its individual value, or at the production price determined by this individual value, the difference would disappear….

Since one limit to this surplus profit is the level of the general price of production, and the general rate of profit is a factor of this, the surplus profit can arise only from the difference between the general and individual production prices, and hence from the difference between the individual and the general rate of profit….

Secondly, the surplus profit of the manufacturer who uses natural water-power as his motive force instead of steam has not so far been distinguished in any way from all other surplus profit. All normal surplus profit…is determined by the difference between the individual production price of the commodities produced by this particular capital and the general production price which governs the market prices of commodities for capital right across this sphere of production…

But now comes the difference.

To what circumstances does the manufacturer in the present case owe his surplus profit…

In the first instance to a natural force, the motive force of water-power which is provided by nature itself and is not itself the product of labour…It is a natural agent of production, and no labour goes into creating it.

Marx then considers the case where an improvement in the methods of work, the scale of production, productivity, etc. aggrandizes a surplus profit:

Conversely. The simple application of natural forces in industry may affect the level of the general rate of profit, through the amount of labour required to produce the necessary means of subsistence. But it does not in and of itself create any divergence from the general rate of profit, and it is precisely this that we are dealing with now…The reduction in the cost price and the surplus profit which flows from it, arise here from the manner and form in which the capital is invested. They arise either from its concentration in exceptionally large amounts in a single hand—something that is cancelled out as soon as equally large amounts of capital are employed in the average case—or from the circumstance that capital of a particular size function in a particularly productive way—and this ceases to operate as soon as the exceptional manner of production becomes universal, or is overtaken by one still more advanced.

The reason for the surplus profit in this case is thus inherent in the capital itself (including the labor that it sets in motion)…and nothing inherently prevents all capital in the same sphere of production from being invested in the same way. Competition between capitals…tends to cancel out these distinctions more and more…Things take a different form with the surplus profit of the manufacturer who makes use of the waterfall. The increased productivity of the labour he applies arises neither from the capital and labour themselves nor from the simple application of a natural force distinct from capital and labour but incorporated into capital. It arises from the greater natural productivity of a labour linked with the use of a natural force, but a natural force that is not available of all capital in the same sphere of production…What is used is rather a monopolizable natural force which…is available only to those who have at their disposal particular pieces of the earth’s surface… The condition is to be found in nature only at certain places, and where it is not found it cannot be produced by a particular capital outlay…Those manufacturers who possess waterfalls exclude those who do not possess them from employing his natural force because land is limited, and still more so land endowed with water-power…Possession of this natural force forms a monopoly in the hands of it owner, a condition of higher productivity for the capital invested, which cannot be produced by capital’s own production process; the natural force that can be monopolized in this way is always chained to the earth. A natural force of this kind does not belong to the general conditions of production in question nor to those of its conditions that are generally reproducible. [Marx, volume 3, Penguin 1981 p.779-785]

So Marx tells us the surplus profit is the product of the divergence between the individual price of production and the general social price of production. This leads to a similar divergence between the individual rate of profit and the general, social, average rate of profit. In this facet, there is no distinction between the surplus profits accruing, or more properly– distributed by the market– to the water-wheel owner, and surplus profit that is distributed to the capitalist who deploys any technology of greater efficiency in production.

The difference comes in that the advantage accruing to the water wheel owner is not the product of human social labor. No matter how powerfully the water flows, it is not the objectification of labor. It is not labor flowing as a value-magnitude.

The commodities produced under these conditions do not enter the market, exist in the market, at their, as their prices of production, but claim, suck in, portions of the value embedded in other commodities by exchanging at those other commodities prices of production. Unlike the [mythological] competition of all commodities with all other commodities, the natural, restricted, non-reproducible condition of the production of these commodities does not permit the equalization of profit rates.

The water has no value. Rent, in fact, is an effort, an assignment, a “proxy” of value assigned to such resources held as private property, which have yet to engage social labor. Once assigned, such rent appears as a cost, as a deduction from, a transfer of surplus value, through the mediation of the prices of production, from production to ownership.

If private property in the social means of subsistence and production is essential to the “sucking in” [Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” in Value, Studies by Marx, translated by Albert Dragstedt, New Park Publications, London 1976] of labor as wage-labor, and the capitalist’s aggrandizement of surplus value, then private property in land, water, minerals, electromagnetic spectrum etc is the Nosferatu of capital, the shadow on the bourgeoisie’s wall, the non-image in the capitalist’s mirror.

Marx then takes us back to his earlier discussions of rent in Theories of Surplus Value. Waterfalls are limited. They cannot be reproduced at will. Natural resources are limited. They are monopolized. They are owned. The owner, the class of owners has no need, no social compulsion to valorize, to make an asset, capital, of his or her ownership.

First, once again Marx has abstracted rent as an economic process, from the concrete history of the conditions surrounding, determining the growth of capitalism. That concrete history shows us that the use of water-mills, water-wheels, natural water power, is indeed restricted. It is restricted by natural occurrence, but as is the case in every natural occurrence, the restriction is embodied and embodies, is preserved and preserves, in the low level of the means of production as a social force. More exactly, the restriction is embodied in, and embodies, the poor development of social labor. This “natural advantage” is nothing other than the reflection of the scattered, fragmented, individualized, atomized level of social production, that is to say the diminished, impoverished, productivity of labor.

Marx’s description of the labor consumed at the watermill as “more productive” is curious, puzzling, confusing, right/wrong. We know what productive labor is—it is labor that increases the wealth of the bourgeoisie. It is labor that expands capital. It is labor that valorizes value. It is labor that yields a surplus value. That is the productivity of labor in the valorization process.

We also know that labor has that old “two-fold” character under capitalism. What goes on in the valorization process does not stay in the valorization process. It happens also in the labor process. We know that productive labor is labor that increases the output of product with no increase, or relatively less, consumption of labor power. We know that the increase in output with less consumption of labor power usually requires the expulsion of labor power from production through the substitution of machinery, through applications of technology.

We know that productive labor is labor that reduces the individual cost price, and prices of production, of the commodities. We know that productive labor is labor that animates, absorbs greater capital values in sum, in the labor process, while reducing new values in particular and in ratio to that sum.

We know that the labor process under capitalism is an isomeric process, where the same process exists simultaneously in different states, different conditions, with those conditions bleeding into each other, with the products of the process embodying in their unitary physical existence the collective, social, condition of production.

We know that the fixed assets amplify the productivity of labor, reducing the cost price, increasing the relation of surplus-value to the necessary value of wage replacement. We know that the fixed assets participate fully in the labor process of production, but only marginally in the valorization process.

We know that the reduction in cost-price, in prices of production, entails—not always, not immediately, but always inevitably—more intense exploitation of labor, increased aggrandizement of relative surplus value as the value necessary to replace the wages of wage-labor is reduced in time, in proportion to the time of production.

We know that it is just this increased exploitation that sets the state for the formation of a general rate of profit.

Historically, we should know that water-powered production, of mills, looms, proved incapable of matching steam-power in any of these areas so critical to expanded accumulation. Between 1784 and 1836 in Britain, the application of steam to cotton manufacturing reduced unit processing costs of cotton cloth by eighty percent in comparison to the costs of water-powered production, while vastly expanding output, and increasing profitability. That is the productivity of labor under capitalism.

We should also know that the history of capitalism, in sum, embodies the inadequacy of “natural sources” in meeting both the needs of production and the needs of capital accumulation. Capitalism is a testament to the diminution of “natural advantage.

It is the inability of the “rental mode” to achieve these three interlocked measures of accumulation– reduced costs, expanded output, increased profitability– that makes the “natural advantage,” “the different fertilities,” rent, so immaterial, so trivial to capitalist accumulation. It is precisely the fact that the rental mode cannot satisfy the increasing demand that undermines, rather than reinforces, its hold on social production.

We should also know that if, as Marx says, the more capitalism develops the more important rent becomes, the more surplus-value is transferred as rent, and as such exists outside the mediation of the prices of production, then a general, average, social rate of profit cannot exist. However, the individual, particular struggles to aggrandize excess profit so essential to the formation of the average social rate of profit continues to drive, and wreck, the accumulation of capital.

A Case of Oil—Of Drills and Bits

3.2 The US Department of Energy through its Energy Information Agency [EIA] collects, analyzes, and publishes the operating and financial performance of the major US energy producing companies. The companies reporting the data participate in the DOE’s Financial Reporting System [FRS].

Over the course of 35 years, the individual companies participating in the FRS have come and gone, merged, been acquired, integrated, divested, but the specific weight, the gravity of the FRS companies in relation to all US industrial corporations, and the US economy in general has been constant.

Operating revenues of the FRS companies generally amount to 10% of operating revenues for the Fortune 500 largest corporations. In 2005 and 2006, FRS companies’ revenues measured 22% of the revenues for all US manufacturing companies. In 2005, net income of the FRS companies equaled approximately 30% of total manufacturing income in the US. That ratio measured 28% the following year.

Perhaps most importantly, the assets of the FRS companies represent a more than slightly overweight portion of the total assets of US manufacturing companies.

In 2005, gross property, plant, and equipment [PPE] of the FRS companies was equal to 40% of the gross PPE of all manufacturing companies. The ratio measured 44% the next year. Net PPE [Gross PPE minus accumulated depreciation, depletion, and amortization] measured 48% and 58% of the total for years 2005 and 2006.

The EIA produces an annual review of the FRS companies entitled the Performance Profile of Major Energy Producers, usually within the year following the year under review. The data used here is from the Performance Profiles from the years 1992 to 2007. The annual performance profiles, beginning with the 1993 review, are available in .pdf format from the EIA at: http://www.eia.gov/emeu/finance/histlib.html

3.4 Fueled by the consistent high prices for oil in the years from 1974 to 1985, the FRS companies engaged, actually engorged, themselves in a sizeable expansion of assets. Between 1974 and 1981 alone, the asset base of the FRS companies tripled.

The point of capitalist accumulation is the conversion of those production assets into greater masses of the commodity being produced. Accumulation must always become overproduction. The overproduction of oil as a commodity during the period of overall slower growth after 1979 had to bring down the price of oil, eventually, and with a thud. That thud was 1985, 1986 and beyond.

The dramatic price declines of the mid-1980s which brought the FRS companies up short and down low had dramatic repercussions on the US, and the world’s, economy. Petro-dollars which, after 1974 and then again after 1979, had recycled through the US commercial and financial networks, had supported U.S. agriculture, housing construction, Houston, Texas, and Mexico among others. For the Soviet Union, the higher prices had meant harder currency, and greater integration with and vulnerability to the world markets.

After the thud came the divestment, massive divestment, a Grand Destockage [you should pardon my French]. Between 1990 and 1992, the FRS companies reduced exploration and development expenditures by some 30% compared to the previous three year period.

The petroleum companies spun off maintenance operations, exploration and development divisions, and reduced, of course, that living component of capital accumulation, human labor. By 1992, direct employment by the FRS companies had declined more than fifty percent to 670,000 persons.

The price collapse was the invisible hand of the market slapping the FRS companies upside the head. Tattooed across the knuckles of both invisible hands and one invisible foot was

“O-V-E-R-P R-O-D-U-C T-I-O-N.”

Direct production costs [the actual cost of “lifting” a barrel of oil to the surface] had declined steadily during the ten years ending in 1992. Nevertheless, the return on investment sank lower and lower. The FRS companies’ ratio of net income to total assets for the years 1990, 1991, 1992 was measured at 4.7%, 3.3%, and 0.6% respectively. At least, the FRS companies didn’t suffer alone. The ratios for the S&P industrial companies measured 4.6%, 2.6%, and 0.6% over the same period. Misery loves companies.

In 1993, the profitability of the FRS companies began to recover as part of the general industrial expansion during the Clinton years. By 1995, net income for the FRS companies had increased for its third straight year. Additions to investments in place [a general measure of capital spending] excluding merger and acquisitions, increased 13.4% over the 1994 level. Direct lifting costs in US onshore and offshore operations declined from $3.68/barrel to $3.47/barrel. Costs in foreign operations declined 6% to $3.40/barrel.

Finding costs, defined as exploration and development costs divided by reserve additions minus net purchase fell 12% in 1994 from the year earlier, and fell another 11% in 1995. Finding coast however are not a reliable index to the efficiency, and success, of exploration and development activity as reserves is an economic, and not a geological, category. Any supply of crude oil only becomes a reserve when it can be produced at an established price, using current technology, at a profit. If ever there was a two sentence summary of the first chapters of Capital, there it is.

Happy days were there again in 1996, with net income from oil and gas production doubling on the year-to-year basis. Return on investment for oil and gas production reached 14.1% in US operations and 12.8% in foreign operations. Lifting costs continued to decline. For the period 1991-1996, lifting costs had declined by more than one-third. Well productivity, the output per active well improved in US offshore and onshore operations by 17%, and in the overseas operations some 41% as the OECD Europe areas, mainly North Sea operations, recorded the highest productivity per active well.

Overall the FRS companies’ ratio of net income to total invested capital had improved steadily from 9.7% in 1994 to 11.7% in 1995 to 15.7% in 1996. The ratio for US industrial corporations as a group measured 13.5%, 13.8%, and 14.8% in those same years.

Another record profit was recorded 1997, although a 10% decline in the price of oil did not bode well for the future. Reported the EIA in its Performance Profile of Major Energy Producers, 1997:

On the supply side, crude oil production in 1997 was up 3.5 per cent over 1996 production. The 2.3 million barrel-per-day rise in production was the largest since 1986 and was considerably in excess of the 1.6 million barrel-per-day increment in demand.

Step ups in oil production of 6 percent over 1996 levels by members of OPEC account for most of the added oil supplies. Nearly all OPEC members reported increases with Iraq registering a doubling of production [PP 1997, p.2]

Remember those words, “with Iraq registering a doubling of production.”

Still, FRS companies recorded further reduction in lifting and finding costs, and greater success rates in their exploratory drilling. That rate improved from 36% in 1985 to 51% in 1997 despite/because of increased drilling activity. The FRS companies’ investments in 3D seismic imaging and horizontal drilling were still paying dividends even as the realization of those investments set the stage for devaluation of the commodity itself.

In 1998, oil prices fell to a 25 year low, with prices breaking below $10 per barrel. Iraq essentially doubled its daily 1997 production [remember those words, too], provoking various expressions of displeasure from the FRS companies. Net income as a percentage of total invested capital for FRS declined to about 6.5%, with the ratio being 12.7% for the US industrial companies.

The year 1998 was the same year that our celebrated “oil-cons” got together to produce their seminal work on the forthcoming American century in the Mideast in general, and the need to get rid of Iraq’s Hussein in particular. An uncharitable sort might make a connection between that declining ratio of return on invested capital, Iraq’s continued excess production, and the peer-reviewed and sanctioned proposals for regime change.

Anyway, the Saudis responded to the anguished cries of the FRS companies and announced alterations to production quotas and in 1999 oil prices rose from $10 to $24 per barrel. The Saudis, controlling 30-40% of OPEC’s production capacity reduced their production, but Iraq actually increased its production.

Another price increase in 2000, driven by prices that averaged $10 per barrel above 1999 levels, brought record high profits for the FRS companies. The companies, in turn, doubled their capital expenditures, except….90% of that expenditure was absorbed in mergers and acquisitions with/of other companies.

Replacement of reserves “through the drill bit”—expanding known reserves from developed fields, again a reflection of the economic, price, determination behind the meaning of reserve, was the second highest in 25 years. The FRS companies replaced 166% of their US onshore production, 136% of US offshore production, and 119% of foreign production.

Most importantly, for only the second time in two decades, 2000 was a year that the profitability of FRS companies exceeded that of US industrial companies. The FRS ratio of net income to total invested capital reached 16.3%, with the S&P industrial recorded a 12.9% rate.

For every year between 2000 and 2007the FRS companies’ measure of profitability exceeded that of the S&P Industrial index. Just as importantly, for our consideration of Marx’s arguments that capitals of equal size will command equal profits, the ratio of the FRS companies’ net earnings to the net earnings of the US industrial corporations began a dramatic climb. This increase in proportion, actually disproportion of total net income approached, but just approached, the disproportion, the overweighting of the FRS companies’ accumulated asset base in relation to the total assets of US industry:

FRS net income ratio to S&P Industrial net income, by year

1995, 9%

1996, 14%

1998, 5%

2000, 27%

2002, 18%

2003, 19%

2005, 30%

2007, 28%

3.5 The point of this examination is simply that the recent history of the oil industry, the recent history of oil prices is not a product of the mechanisms of rent, or the actions of renters. There are no increased costs of production by “marginal” “less efficient” operations. On the contrary, costs of production declined steadily.

There is no declining productivity of successive investments in the extractive process. On the contrary, successive applications of capital increased productivity.

There is no inability to satisfy demand. On the contrary, production outpaces consumption.

There is no increase in prices based on the inability to multiply production, or the instruments of production. On the contrary, there is a rapid and dramatic decline in price, the result of improved ability to multiply the assets of production [i.e. improved success rates].

There is no impingement of accumulation by landlords, by national governments, by monopolists. On the contrary there is over-accumulation by the oil producers.

There is, however, a conflict between production and accumulation, between use and value.

There is, however, the conflict between the general rate of profit and the rate of profit specific to the FRS companies at the start of the 1990s.

There is however, the conflict between a general rate of profit and the compulsion of capital to distribute profit according to the size of the capitals engaged in the process of accumulation.

There is, however, the functioning of price as a distributive mechanism to “relieve” that conflict.

There is, however, the divergence between price and value to mitigate overproduction.

There is, in short and in total, the mechanisms, conflicts, dynamics of capital.

4. And It Ends Up… Here

A plague of rent-seekers is seeking quick gains by privatizing the public sector and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees to roads, power plants and other basic infrastructure….

Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because that’s where the assets are to take.

Michael Hudson “Wisconsin Death Trip” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23664

Here then, courtesy of Dr. Hudson, is the problem with rent-theorizing. It precludes the recognition, and apprehension, of capitalism as value-producing, as requiring a specific organization of labor for the reproduction of a value. There is no accumulation, no valorization, no reproduction. There is only rent and renters, loot and looters, theft and thieves, rip off artists, swindlers, accruing monopoly rights to “public domain.”

There is no Marx, only Proudhon. Property is theft.

Behind Hudson’s seemingly deep insight into “rent” is nothing other than the prosaic and pedestrian reality that capitalist production, like all production, has to access and utilize natural resources; that it takes place in a material world where value has no innate existence; that value is not inherent in nature; that in the organization of value-production the “natural” platforms for such value-production must be assigned an “as-if” value; as if the land, the lake, the forest were realized in their inception economically, as social products controlled, owned, by private producers. Without the “as-if” characteristic, the land, the lake, the mine, the forest cannot be circulated in the value of the commodities extracted from the land, the like, the mine, the forest. The private property cannot be exchanged, and without exchange we know property is useless.

Clearly, notions of renter, and rentier, capitalism figure prominently in the work of those theorists of “monopoly capitalism”—where the divergence of prices from values is considered proof that, in its “monopoly” phase, capitalism has overcome, transcended, “abolished” the law of value. Again, missing here is the recognition that capitalism is first and foremost a system of accumulation. Value is, if not nothing today, pretty much nothing tomorrow. The reproduction of value is pretty much everything.

Swindles, looting, theft certainly exist but only phenomenally, as expressions of moments in the organization, and disorganization, of value production. They cannot, as rent cannot, replace valorization. Opposition to renter or rentier capitalism cannot replace opposition to the reproduction of capital.

Accumulation beats the hell out of rent every day of the week, and twice on Sundays.

Now let’s move on to something really important, like the struggles in Greece, China, the Philippines, and Egypt.

S.Artesian

June 16, 2011

Editor/translator’s note: The following is a brief account of the culmination of the “May 15^th movement” in Barcelona. The movement had begun in Madrid with the occupation of the central Plaza del Sol by tens of thousands of young people, on the model of Tahrir Square in Cairo and other similar mass gatherings of the past six months. After an early (and failed) attempt to clear the Plaza del Sol by police, the movement spread, with occupations of public space in 50 other Spanish cities. The account (and critique) that follow applies generally to the Spanish movement as a whole.

Two problems of translation presented themselves. The first was of the Spanish word “ciudadano”, or “citizen”, with the overtones of the ideology of the affirmation of “civil society” that spread over the previous three decades with the collapse of the older paradigm based on variants of Marxian, or pseudo-Marxian, class struggle. The use of this term of self-identification by the movement went hand in hand with its initial overwhelming rejection of political parties, unions, violence and explicit politics of any kind, as well as its affirmation of a “real” democracy with, presumably, everyone as “citizens”. The word “citizen” in English does not carry quite the same set of associations (outside of similarly ideological and largely academic circles), but nothing better presented itself.

The second translation difficulty was the account’s play on the words “indignos”, (i.e. contemptible), identifying the political class as a whole, and “indignados” (angry, enraged), as the rank-and-file of the movement called themselves. Since no comparable play on words presents itself in English, the Spanish words are indicated in parentheses where they occur.

To the Editors:

The meeting called at the Barcelona encampment, intending to block access of the professional politicians to the Catalan Parliament, showed two distinct aspects in the course of the morning and early afternoon of Wednesday June 15th, and seemed to mark the beginning of the end of the movement, which had begun a month earlier.

June 15th was chosen for protest because, on that day, the Catalan parliament was scheduled to approve budgets with radical cuts in health care and education, and was also scheduled to implement mechanisms of privatization and to make shifts from public to private firms (insurance companies, private clinics, etc..), the effects of which had already been felt in previous months in (among other things) the elimination of services and ever-longer waiting lists in hospitals.

Various neighborhood assemblies converged on the park of the Ciutadella. The camp was set up during the night, around the fence of the park where the Parliament is located, and starting at 7 AM on the 15^th, it was swelling with people arriving at every park entrance. On neither the 14^th nor the 15^th, however, did the crowd reach the numbers seen on Friday May 27^th… Were the much-touted “alternative” media not working? Were the very people who had called the demo themselves frightened, since disrupting parliamentary activity is a felony, with prison sentences of several years?

Whatever the case, the demonstrators (3,000?) were numerous enough to force the MPs to enter the park, huddled behind lines of police and jeered by the crowd, while the President of the Generalitat, the Minister of Interior, and more than thirty MPs had to arrive by a makeshift helicopter airlift.

Naturally, this made this contemptible grouping (“ los indignos”) indignant in turn. After all, people accustomed to making their own personal use of public assets and to making instrumental use of democracy in the defense of their caste interests, could not swallow this humiliation. On this point, there was unanimity among fascists, xenophobes, apologists for the central government in Madrid, Catalan nationalists of different shades, leftists, environmentalists and parvenus of every stripe, ensconced one and all in Parliament. The unanimous statement they issued showed democracy to be explicitly the alibi of people who are conscious accomplices of the ongoing kleptocratic degeneration of the administration of public life. The MPs showed the same consensus in their shameful passivity when faced with the offensive presence of Felix Millet, well-known swindler of public funds and generous benefactor of the Catalan cultural and political elite, who appeared before this same parliament with a haughty silence and a smile of contempt.

The media of mass intoxication set aside their condescending paternalism in portraying, to that point, the May 15 movement, and thereafter set about their task of misrepresenting and criminalizing. Starting at noon that very same Wednesday, they tried to sow division among the demonstrators, resorting to their usual stratagems, distinguishing between “violent” and “peaceful” people, and spreading messages against violent people on twitter, etc; they did all this with the aim of diverting– and distorting- attention to the well-worn topic of violence. One spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, in a further demonstration of his ineptitude and crass bad faith, characterized the gathering at the park as “urban guerrilla warfare”.

Nonetheless, that Wednesday morning indeed threatened to draw a red line, (as the indignant (indignado) president of the Generalitat put it). That was the red line separating the representatives of the kleptocratic system, protected by thugs with privileged labor contracts, from the people literally thrown into the street, homeless, diminished in their rights (health, education, employment, pensions) and having no other recourse than to throw their bodies against the armed violence of the state; it was a red line, finally, showing the isolation of a political caste more and more deeply entrenched in its own inanity.

Did the “Citizens” Desert?

Although the morning passed without incident, apart from those organized by the Ministry of the Interior and by the media of intimidation, the threats by President Mas at noon on Wednesday, announcing that he would unleash his guards against the protesters, seem to have had their effect on the self-described “pacifists.” The meeting of the afternoon, where unions, neighborhood organizations (also present in the morning, but without much enthusiasm) and other associations of so-called civil society had promised to attend, was notably short of people. Where were the health care workers, who had been in the streets a few weeks earlier, and who had been so active against the cuts? Where were the “combative” trade unionists, now that the central government, the previous week, had approved new rules severely undermining the framework of industrial relations? It is difficult to escape the feeling that the “enraged” (indignados) had played politics and had, again, left in the lurch those people really expressing their outrage (indignacion) in front of Parliament.

One does not have to fall into conspiratorial paranoia to suspect that there was a sotto voce “disassembly” underfoot to isolate the supposedly “violent” people from the pacifists. Although the mass meeting in front of Parliament was supposed to be an all-day affair, the self-proclaimed “pacifists” called a meeting at noon on Wednesday, with very few people in attendance, canceling the afternoon part of the demo, and in a clear maneuver aimed at sowing disarray, urged the people in the Ciutadella to head for the la Placa Sant Jaume. Was this some incoherence of the spontaneous movement, or was it a maneuver of those “citizen” ideologues embedded in the movement itself, trying to abort it at a time when the May 15 movement was showing more and more outrage (indignacion)? Whatever the case, it amounted to capitulating to the blackmail of the criminalization being touted by the government-media apparatus.

It would not, therefore, be off the mark to conclude that the dominant component of the mobilization beginning on May 15 was, as intimated previously, a symptom of the proletarianization of the middle class, as well as an accurate expression of its political dimension and its limited capacity to counter that trend. It showed the political inconsistency of a social movement based on a wrong-headed pacifism which fell into the trap of the media’s spectacular dichotomy between violence and pacifism, and whose no less ambiguous talk of democratic regeneration was recuperated by those same representative bodies the movement initially seemed to denounce. When things reached this point, the riff-raff of the political class (los indignos) had defeated the enraged people in the movement (los indignados).

The May 15 movement will, therefore, go down as one more episode in the process of social decomposition, an episode whose massive presence on the streets rattled the cages of those who administer the increasingly fragile capitalist socioeconomic order. We must therefore focus our attention on what happens in the street and not on the TV or computer screen (the solidarity movements of residents against evictions and resistance occurring at the grassroots level of society are some examples).

The lived experience of the past month suggests that the experience of political conflict of the people who unleashed the May 15 mobilization is predominantly intellectual, academic, ethical, and ideological, i.e. an experience specific to those generations who lived with the illusion of economic expansion under the hegemony of finance capital over the last two decades, and who are puzzled by its collapse. These generations had benefited from a certain accumulation of family resources and from public spending (a social peace subsidized with scholarships, employment and training schemes, NGOs, etc.)., which ran parallel to the consolidation of the democracy elaborated at the time of Franco’s death, and whose social and political experience is not based on confrontation. This would explain why the May 15 movement, at least initially, did not call for a break with the “system”, but rather for its cleansing.

Nonetheless, the “system” continues. During the week prior to the mobilization at the Catalan Parliament, the central government in Madrid, given the absence of any agreement between employers and the unions, enacted new laws amounting to a further hollowing out of the guidelines for labor relations, just as it was launching a new debt issue (at twice the interest on German debt). Thus the combined forces of capitalist order, without much difficulty, managed to criminalize the movement of May, but will they be able to criminalize an unstoppable reality?

C. V. Barcelona, June 21, 2011

PS-On Sunday June 19^th, a great sea of humanity filled the streets of Barcelona (more than 100,000 people, this time with “all” those missing in action on Wednesday) with a predominantly playful, festive atmosphere, one touting the actions of the previous month, and in which the political machines of the institutional opposition were trying to claim their share of the credit. What will come of this remains to be seen. The movement will have at least served the purpose of showing the practical limitations of mass mobilizations of a “citizen” (cuidadano) character, which seek to regenerate institutions in a context defined by the rampant degradation of the material conditions of life and by democratic totalitarianism.

1) CONTRACTING SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
(Editor’s Note: The following theses were circulated within the Insurgent Notes collective for discussion. They attempt to expand on the programmatic points sketched in brief in the editorial of IN No. 1 a year ago. They are the opinions of the author and not of the IN collective as a whole.)

The current crisis, on a world scale, began ca. 1970, as the postwar boom—reconstruction from the destruction of the 1914- 1945 period—exhausted itself, first in the US, and then shortly thereafter in Europe and Japan. Since that time, capitalism has struggled to “recompose” itself, through a grinding down of social reproduction, most importantly of the total working class wage bill (“V”) and aspects of constant capital (“C”),both fixed capital and infrastructure. It has done this by debt pyramiding, outsourcing of production around the world, technological innovation (in telecommunications, transportation and technology-intensive production), all having the same goal of transferring “V” and “C” to “S” (surplus value), while enforcing an overall NON-REPRODUCTION of labor power.

Capital has attempted to achieve the same result as it did in the 1914-1945 period—re-establishment of an adequate rate of profit for a new expansion—without, as yet, resorting to large-scale war. Capital has tapped cheap labor power in the collapsed former Eastern bloc, in Asia (Korea, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India) while at the same time dismantling or whittling down the old “worker fortresses” of the West: the American Midwest, the British Midlands, the Paris suburbs and Alsace, and the Ruhr. It long ago abolished the one-paycheck blue-collar family. Capital has expelled or is expelling the working class from “financial centers” such as New York, London and more recently Paris, greatly increasing commuting time, making housing an expense approaching 50% of a typical working-class income, and turning the major cities into theme parks for the unproductive FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) population.

2) CONJUNCTURE

The 2008 crash, the biggest since 1929, seemed on one hand to discredit the “neo-liberal” “financialization” model (apparently) propelling capitalism since ca. 1980 (Reagan, Thatcher) but in fact was followed by a second wind in which governments attempted to revive the status quo ante with ever-greater infusions of debt. This has had the effect of intensifying the previous, 1970-2008 trend of “capital expanding, social reproduction contracting”. Stock markets recovered, banks cut their losses and consolidated, the top 1% of the population continued to take an ever-greater percentage of “income growth”, while in the U.S., the “real economy” stagnated or declined, with probably 15-20% of the work force unemployed or underemployed, and hundreds of thousands losing homes to foreclosure and apartments to eviction. Japan has been mired in stagnation for 20 years; in Europe, Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and the southern periphery (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece) have been the hardest hit.

3) OBSOLESCENCE OF VALUE

Underneath all appearances, the reality of the situation is the obsolescence of capitalist value—the necessary social time of the reproduction of commodities, above all the commodity labor power — as a framework for the continued expanded material reproduction of humanity. Capital in crisis spirals backwards, pulling society with it. It must either devalue existing commodities, whether labor power or capital plant or consumer goods, until a new general rate of profit can coincide with some real expansion, or else the working class must destroy value.

4) COLLAPSE OF STATIST ALTERNATIVES

The crisis since 1970 has had the positive effect of more widely discrediting the former, apparent alternatives, namely Social Democracy and above all Stalinism. In their diminution or disappearance, the crisis revealed them for what they always were: the completion of one aspect of the minimum program of the bourgeois revolution, (in the countries where they achieved state power or real influence) the elimination of pre-capitalist forms in agriculture and land to the peasants. Where some semblance of their former selves remains (such as in western Europe) they can only compete with the “right” in administering the crisis.

5) PARTIES, UNIONS AGAINST THE WORKING CLASS

Well before the 1970 turning point, however, these old organizations of the left and the unions linked to them were fighting against the working class and the latter’s “shop floor rebellion” beginning in the 1950’s and culminating in the early to mid-1970’s. Since that time, far from challenging any prerogatives of capital, they have only embraced them.

6) LEFT COMMUNISM

We identify ourselves broadly as left communists. Left communism first appeared as a self-conscious tendency in the revolutionary surge after World War I, above all (but not only) in German-Dutch council communism and in the Italian Communist Left (“Bordigists”). Despite their differences, which were real enough, these two currents were briefly able, in the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, to demarcate themselves in different ways from Bolshevism, and its “dual revolution” alliance with the peasantry, with their rejection of the Russian Revolution as a universal model, insisting that in the developed capitalist West, the proletariat stood alone. The solution of the agrarian question, the main lasting achievement of the Russian Revolution, and the related development of the productive forces, are tasks of the bourgeois revolution, and the “grand illusion” of the 20th century was the confusion of numerous substitute bourgeois revolutions (beginning with Russia, once the failure of the world revolution had isolated it and when internal degeneration had eliminated its proletarian content, the soviets and workers’ councils) with socialism/communism. The recovery of genuine communist theory and practice can point to many sources, with the Hegel renaissance after World War II, the wide availability of many previously unknown works of Marx (1844 Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, the Unpublished Sixth Chapter of vol. I of Capital, his writings on non-Western societies, the ongoing publication of the MEGA). In addition to elements of the German-Dutch left and the Italian Communist Left, we can cite Rosa Luxemburg’s mass strike conception, Socialism or Barbarism, CLR James, the Situationists, Italian operaismo, the early Camatte, the post-1968 French neo-Bordigists as sources (the list not being exhaustive or exclusive). This recovery, it goes without saying, would never have occurred without the historical developments of the 1960’s and 1970’s, in the culmination and end of the post-World War II expansion.

7) CLASSWIDE ORGANIZING VS. ‘REVOLUTIONARY TRADE UNIONISM’

We argue that the period ushered in by World War I marks a qualitative change in the history of capitalism, characterized alternately, by different currents, as the epoch of the “obsolescence of capital”, “decadence”, or the “real domination of capital”. We see this post-1914 period as one in which reform (trade unionism and parliamentarism), as practiced by the First and and above all Second Internationals and muddled in the Third and Fourth Internationals, is no longer viable as a step forward for the working class as a whole. By this we do not mean that partial struggles, defensive or offensive, outside periods of revolutionary upsurge are meaningless. We disagree with those left communist currents which reject work within and around trade unions as solely the terrain of the “left wing of capital”. Where possible, we favor work within trade unions while always maintaining an extra-union perspective, looking to transform isolated “class-in-itself” struggles into class-wide movements involving other workers and the unemployed, on the model of the e.g. 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike or the 2004 Buenos Aires subway strike. We at the same time reject the perspective of “capturing the unions” for revolution, as advocated by (some) Trotskyists. We aim to supercede unions by class-wide organizations.

8) GEOPOLITICS

The developing geopolitical situation is closely related to the world economic crisis, first of all because it is there that a future major war, as part of capital’s “solution” to the crisis, will emerge. The current world situation is characterized by the (relative) decline of the United States as the undisputed capitalist hegemon it was until the 1970’s. While there is currently no national power or bloc capable of challenging U.S. hegemony, the global situation is characterized by a “multi-polarity” which did not exist in 1970. The U.S. accounted for 50% of world production in 1945, and accounts for 20% today. Part of this is due to the “normal” reconstruction of Europe and Japan after World War II, part of it due to U.S. overseas investment (similar to Britain’s increased overseas investments in the era of its decline), and part of it is due to the emergence of new zones of development. East Asia accounted for 5% of world production in 1960, and accounts for 35% today. While the much-touted “rise of China” is overblown (one need merely think of its inability to resolve the situation of 750 million people still on the land and another 100 million in the floating, casualized migrant population) , the total post- 1945 industrialization of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, taken together, as a power center and moreover a greater potential power center, is not. Germany, East Asia, Brazil, and India are, in different ways, other established or potential poles of independence from U.S. domination in a way unthinkable 40 or 50 years ago.

One aspect of the economic and geopolitical crisis is the problematic global status of the U.S. dollar as the dominant reserve currency, a status giving the U.S. the unique ability to print money to pay its own external debts—a privilege no other indebted nation enjoys– and to periodically devalue foreign holdings of dollars (Germany and Japan in the early 1970’s, Japan in 1985) which are external debts of the United States. That status further allows the U.S. to fund its perennial state deficits with the recycling of dollars held abroad, which now amount to ca. $15 trillion. In contrast to 1945, the international weight of the reserve currency status of the dollar is out of all proportion to the weight of the U.S. in total world production. As with the British pound over the 1914-1945 period, this disproportionality will not be resolved at some international conference table but by crisis, shakeout and (possibly) a major war.

9) NEW INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASSES

The increasing multi-polarity of the world economy reflects the geographical shifts in the concentration of wage-labor proletarians around the world. According to some estimates, 60% of all workers today are in Asia. This translates into sharpening of class struggle there; China alone experienced over 100,000 “incidents” (local uprisings and confrontations, not all of them involving blue-collar workers) in 2010; Vietnam has experienced 336 strikes in the past year, many of them wildcats; worker ferment has also erupted in Bangladesh (mainly textile workers, as reported in IN No. 2) and India (in the industrial zone around Delhi). In North Africa and the Middle East, workers have played central roles in the insurgencies in Tunisia and Egypt, and important strikes have occurred in Turkey.

These working-class struggles in countries previously associated with the mirage of “Third Worldism” (peasant-bureaucratic movements and revolutions) is a shift of inestimable importance in the “geography” of class struggle.

10) PERMANENT REVOLUTION

While we recognize and welcome the growing importance of the new industrial working classes created by the spread of capitalist investment in recent decades, we continue to see the wage-labor work force in the “old” centers of accumulation—Europe, the US and Canada, Japan—as central to any successful world revolution. The long arc of the history of communism has seen two international revolutionary waves, those of 1848 and 1917-1921, as well as the international wave associated with “1968”. In 1848 and 1917, particularly, the truth of Marx’s theory of permanent revolution (as later developed further by Trotsky) was demonstrated, whereby working-class upsurge in the “center” was complemented by the emergence of an independent working-class upsurge in the emerging “weak link” of accumulation. In the first instance, the “center” was the apex of the English Chartist movement in January 1848 and, above all, the communist uprising in Paris six months later in June, and the “weak link” was Germany; in the second, more protracted case, the “center” was western Europe (Germany above all) and the “weak link” was Russia. In both cases, the “crossover” necessary to the triumph of the revolutions failed, but we consider such a “crossover” as essential, so that a successful revolution in the “center” spares the working class and peasantry in the “weak link” the rigors of “socialist accumulation” in bureaucratic autarchy. The overcoming of the capitalist “law of value”, as transmitted to the developing world, first of all through the world market, must be the task of workers in both the old “center” and in the emerging “weak links”. The history of successive Stalinist and Third Worldist revolutions in the semi-developed and underdeveloped world has demonstrated time and again the impossibility of “socialism”, or even of real capitalist development, in one country, under the pressure of the world market.

11) NATIONALISM

Seen in this light, we consider nationalism in the current epoch to be reactionary. Nationalism in the period from the French Revolution until approximately World War I could play an historically progressive or even revolutionary role (i.e. in the era of bourgeois revolutions) when the formation of viable nation states out of the old dynastic order (e.g. Germany, Italy) was still possible. This said, the “right of nations to self-determination” was never, as an abstract principle, part of the revolutionary tradition separate from a geopolitical-strategic orientation to the unification of the working class, which is always an international class. Marx supported Irish nationalism against British rule, and Polish nationalism against Russian rule, but opposed Balkan nationalism that might weaken the Ottoman bulwark against Russian expansionism. The nations or Ersatz nations which emerged out of the collapse of the empires (Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) after World War I, or out of the dismantling of the British, French, Dutch, Belgian or Portuguese empires between 1945 and 1975, or finally out of the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, have almost without exception, due to the dynamic of (an absent) permanent revolution, failed to solve the “tasks” of the bourgeois revolution, most immediately the completion of the agrarian revolution. The few exceptions (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan) managed to do so as “showcases” in competition with the Stalinist revolutions (China, North Korea, Vietnam) in Asia, with serious land reform, but they still remain viable only—to date—with significant U.S. military assistance.

12) “ANTI-IMPERIALISM”

Despite these developments, a certain “anti-imperialism” has revived, after experiencing an eclipse in the late 1970’s. It is no longer a question of barefoot doctors and people’s communes in China, or guerrilla focos in the Andes, or various and sundry “tricontinental” “national liberation fronts”. Led by the Petro-Peronist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, it consists of a loose collection of countries such as Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, (occasionally) Brazil, and then extends to even more questionable forces in the Middle East such as Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Palestine) and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even further from the front lines are Russia and China, hardly troubled to watch the U.S. squander blood and money in its losing wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) and its declining influence throughout the region (Turkey, Pakistan). These “anti-imperialist” forces are cheered on by the World Social Forum and its array of NGOs; North American trade unionists fly to Beijing to have tea with the official state trade union leaders while workers attempting to organize independent unions there are incarcerated. Perhaps if the Taliban reconquer Afghanistan, they too will be joining these “progressive anti-imperialist forces” at the World Social Forum.

13) RACE, CLASS, GENDER, SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’

Concentrated as we are, at least for the moment, in the United States, we necessarily recognize that the “color-blind” Marxism of many left communist currents—a proletarian is a proletarian is a proletarian—is simply...blind Marxism. The largely black and Latino population of U.S. prisons (1% of the U.S. population) or the black and Latino youth gunned down with impunity every year by the police, are excellent “first approximations” showing that the legacy of 350 years of white supremacy in American history is still with us, if somewhat deflated since the 1960’s. Similarly, gender and “normative sexual” questions are hardly resolved, either within the class or in the larger society. We hardly consider it an accident that most of the incremental progress on these questions since the 1960’s, however piecemeal and fragmentary, has mainly benefited what can be broadly characterized as “middle class” and “professional” elements among blacks, Latinos, women and gays. (Our use of the term here is not to be confused with the repellent and ideologically- charged American use of “middle class” when referring to the working class.)

The dynamic between class and race, gender and sexual orientation varies widely from one concrete situation to another. But since the ebb of the vaguely Marxian or pseudo- Marxian climate of the 1960’s and 1970’s, when many of these oppressed groups (we are thinking first of all of the black and Latino nationalists of that period) still felt obligated to articulate their agendas within a broader (mainly Stalinist and/or Third Worldist) “proletarian internationalism”, the emergence of an “identity politics” starting in the late 1970’s dispensed with that framework altogether. A whole industry of NGO’s backed by foundation money came into existence to cement this fragmentation of different groups and to bury the question of class, thus becoming an important anti-working class force, the first line of defense against communist politics in different communities. It was hardly an accident that this ideology and these NGOs and foundations emerged and thrived during decades of defeat, rollback, concessions and factory closings that decimated the living standards of the working class, white, black or brown.

The reunification of a movement on a true class basis, which means a movement that puts the poorest and most downtrodden groups at the center of its problematic, is not something to be solved by a deft theoretical formulation, but something that must emerge from practical experience in struggle. It is therefore a commitment of Insurgent Notes to chronicle those struggles when and where they emerge, to participate in them where possible, and to expose the ideologues of fragmentary, anti-working class “identity” and their foundation (and government) backers.

14) IMMIGRATION

Closely related to the problems posed by race, class and gender, in both the U.S. and in Europe, is the question of immigration. In the worst capitalist crisis since the 1930’s, political and ideological mobilizations against immigrants are emerging as the perfect lightning rod for channeling growing populist rage into struggles among the “native born” and “immigrant” members of the class that “has no fatherland”. The abject failure of “development”, aided by Western policies in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and much of Asia for decades, as well from the administration of local bourgeoisies and statist elites in those regions, has turned tens of millions of proletarians and sub-proletarians into refugees from the resulting social and economic vacuum. Far- right groups organized around anti-immigrant feeling have made important breakthroughs in virtually every European country, and with similar developments in the U.S. (first of all along the border with Mexico) becoming a dominant issue here as well.

Mainstream capitalists tend to favor immigration as a source of cheap labor and leave immigrant bashing to the populist right, but will hardly fail to see its uses as serious class antagonism intensifies. Well-meaning but empty calls for international solidarity, in the abstract, will hardly do. From our point of view, and recalling the central role played by an earlier wave of immigration in class struggles in the U.S. before and after World War I, we see immigrant labor as playing a potentially vanguard role again. At the same time we present a programmatic approach to the question, with our perspective of global reconstruction in the transition out of capitalism aimed at undoing the huge imbalances between regions resulting from colonialism, imperialism and capitalist “development” schemes as the ultimate practical common ground between workers in different parts of the world.

15) PROGRAM

We see as essential to our tasks the elaboration of a program for the transition out of capitalism. Too much of the debate in the left communist, ultra-left or libertarian communist milieu revolves around questions of forms of organization, and too much of the conception of a post-capitalist society devolves into highly abstract arguments over “Value”. We see the need to emphasize the “material content” of the transition to be implemented, once political and economic power has been taken away from the capitalists, indispensable to the actual abolition of value, i.e. of the regulation of life by the socially necessary time of reproduction. Given the advanced degree of decay in the West, headed by the U.S. and the U.K., it can no longer be (and never really was) merely a question of “taking over production” and establishing “workers’ control”. In countries with such a high level of employment in socially useless (the FIRE sector of finance- insurgance- real estate) sectors, or socially noxious ones (e.g. armed forces and arms production) or (not too long ago) the automobile (and related) industries, such a vision, inherited from the ferment of the 60’s and 70’s, is almost meaningless. More workplaces will be abolished by the revolution than placed under “workers’ control”. We see it as fundamental to conceive of the future society in use-value terms on a global scale. A linear spread of post-1945 models of consumption in the West–such as individual home ownership and the two-car family– to the entire world is on the face of it a social and environmental absurdity. Such an alterative program will not spring full- blown from the head of some world reformer, but will be, on the contrary, a “work in progress” elaborated by tens of millions, and ultimately billions of people. Nonetheless we can throw out the broad outlines of basic necessities. Already the dismantling of the automobile-steel-oil-rubber complex and its replacement by greatly improved mass transit and rail transport has implications far beyond transportation, namely in the relationship between cities and countryside and in the social organization of space generally; environmental concerns; the huge social waste involved in commuting time; the reorientation to new sources of energy; and the overcoming of the social atomization and social costs induced after World War II by suburbanization and sprawl. The freeing of the tens of millions of people currently employed in state and corporate bureaucracy, in the military and in military production, the FIRE sectors, or police/intelligence and prisons, for socially useful work will also make possible the realization of a key part of the communist program: the radical shortening of the working day. We do not doubt that the collective practical knowledge of working people, once free to reconfigure necessary work from a use-value viewpoint on a truly social (worldwide) scale, will greatly facilitate the implementation of such a broad outline, but we consider it essential to start this discussion now to counter the long-assumed notion that “all this will be worked out in the soviets” after the revolution. Without an active current with some widely-shared vision of a radically different social order, (in the sense that the old Social Democratic/Stalinist vision of nationalization plus state planning was widely shared) there will be a no successful revolution.

16) HOW WE RELATE TO PARTIAL STRUGGLES

Between now and the revolution, local, partial struggles short of the open struggle for the overthrow of capital are emerging and will continue to emerge. Some parts of the left communist scene (we can take the ICC as a reductio ad absurdum but they are hardly alone) tend to relate to such struggles with an attitude that ultimately reads “when you’re ready to form soviets, get in touch”. We reject that kind of posturing abstentionism that hides remoteness from the struggles of ordinary working people behind “big theory”. This posturing results from 40 years in the wilderness in which there were, at least in the West, few mass movements in the streets (as there was in the late 60’s/early 70’s) pressuring such groups to do something more than publish their journals, sell their newspapers and maintain their P.O. boxes or, more recently, their web sites.

That said, serious problems arise in relating to such struggles as they are usually posed, problems represented first of all by the thicket of far-left groups that still work off of Trotskyism and Maoism and which circle around those struggles that do emerge like “vultures circling a dying beast”, as someone once put it. The Trotskyists, in particular, characterize such struggles and rival groups as “reformist”, whereas our starting point is an analysis of the impossibility of consequential reformism ( the latter being something different than saying, as we do, that there can be small temporary victories in the midst of generally bigger defeats). Such groups are still wedded, at best, to the dialectic of reform and revolution that was the outlook of revolutionaries before 1914, such as Rosa Luxemburg in her polemic against Bernstein: revolution THROUGH the struggle for reform.

Unfortunately for that outlook, no reformism for the class as a whole is possible today. The crisis started 40 years ago and has only intensified. Already in the 1970′s “left” parties in the West were backing off from any promises of “reform”. “Reform” today is mainly the war cry of the right, meaning burning and slashing what is left of the old welfare state and labor legislation. It is no secret that the official left since the 1970’s has reinvented itself as the kinder, gentler face of “neo-liberal” capitalism. We hardly need bother with the Democratic Party (Clinton, Obama) and its hangers-on in the U.S. In the U.S. as in Europe, the ever-growing gap between the wealthiest 1% and everyone else has grown relentlessly since 1968, whether “reformists” or “conservatives” are in power. Mitterand in France, Felipe Gonzalez in Spain, Schroeder in Germany, Blair in Britain, now Papandreou in Greece barely deserve any more of a mention: ”reformists” all, “neo- liberal” slashers of workers’ living standards all.

We might consider some recent, disparate but somehow similar struggles of recent years: the piqueteros in Argentina in 2001-2002 or Oaxaca in 2007. All the post-2008 movements and uprisings– the French mass protests of fall 2010, or, in 2011: Tunisia, Egypt, Madison, Madrid, Greece—are linked in some way to the world financial and economic meltdown. Most of these struggles took on a qualitative nature in a huge initial burst of “spontaneity” unleashed by some “spark” in an increasingly explosive situation, (or in the case of Greece, two direct, savage attacks on working-class living standards over the past year). The Argentine uprising began with the total meltdown of the economy and of the Argentine political class, but was brought to a head by the piqueteros, mainly no-future working-class youth, who had been refining their tactics for several years, in actions large and small. Oaxaca began with a provocation by the state government against the initial phase of the normal collective bargaining of the local teachers’ union. Tunisia began with the desperate suicide of an unemployed university graduate, following everyday police harassment. Egypt began with a combination of “normal” everyday state atrocities mixed with the “contagion of struggle” coming from Tunisia, in a worsening economic situation. Madison began, like Oaxaca, with a provocation by the state against public employees.

All of these movements were characterized by a creative “leap” from local forms of protest (even the suicide of the unemployed Tunisian ex-student was the latest in a series by similar people) to a mass spontaneous outburst that no one foresaw, underscoring the always unforeseeable consequences of local acts of defiance.

And most of these movements (with Tunisia and Egypt and now Syria and Yemen, for all their specific differences, still unfolding) have been defeated, and those, like Tunisia and Egypt, find themselves in danger of containment by the usual cast of characters in a facelift of the status quo ante. The Argentine piqueteros were either co-opted into a recomposed Peronist state or dispersed by repression; in Oaxaca, it was straight-up massive repression and the isolation of the movement from the rest of Mexico.

(The situation in Greece remains in abeyance at this writing-July 2011). The French government stonewalled the fall 2010 movements in the streets, and won out. The Madison movement never escaped the embrace of the Democrats and the unions and mainly threw itself into an “anti-Republican” recall campaign. The Spanish Socialist government let the “indignados” (cf. our report on that movement) occupy the central plazas in 50 cities for the better part of a month (police attacks and provocations notwithstanding) until the movement collapsed, with some factional acrimony, of its own weight, like so many others, having taken the first creative step of occupying public space and then being incapable of taking another one.

Communism is a concrete possibility because of what capital “compels the working class to do” (Marx). In the situations described above, what is the relationship between “reform” and revolution?

Before people go massively into the streets, in those struggles that occur, revolutionaries can participate with a “class-wide”, “Toledo Auto-Lite” perspective. The key, in such situations, is always to underscore the “break” with established institutions, such as the unions and the state, and the political pseudo-left that accommodates to those institutions. The perspective should always be “dual power”, however small the forces capable of making that demarcation. The consequences of such a stance are always fluid. Revolutionaries always speak to the “class-for-itself” impulse in the broader movement.

The goal is not the specific “demand” or what in some cases might be temporarily won, but the increased unity of the class through the experience of breaking the barriers between different sectors of workers, or workers and the unemployed, and racial caste and gender separations.

When masses of people are in the streets, as they have been and are, in places such as Argentina or Greece or Egypt, the sole real question is that of state power. This is not to endorse just any putschist adventure: there is a dynamic in play that cannot be forced.
But the successful struggle against the state, and its replacement by class-wide institutions (soviets, workers’ councils, whatever new forms may emerge) requires program (as discussed earlier) and a current formed in advance to take the initial steps to implement that program. This current emerges over time from the networks of the most combative and conscious elements, in the ebbs and flows of struggle, and does not need to belong to any more formalized organization. The latter will come as the intensified rhythm of struggle requires it.

I don’t think I was criticizing what you wrote that sharply. I do remember mentioning that one of the first groups out there was the Latino “Immigrant Workers Union” which is a coalition to draw attention to things that affect Latinos in the Madison. In Milwaukee the mood was much different than in Madison. From what I heard from the Milwaukee people, I know the feeling there was much more hopeless generally than in Madison; ‘hopeless’ was the word I heard them use repeatedly. The crisis hit Milwaukee workers really hard. Workers in Madison exist largely in the state and the insurance business and have sources of state-capitalist investment that are more steady than Milwaukee, which needs heavy industry. For me, growing up as a worker in Madison, I could bounce around working at small workshops around the city and never once get my foot in the door at a bigger, better-paid blue collar workplace. For all Milwaukee workers, the deindustrialization has been brutal. Workers at Harley-Davidson in Milwaukee were forced to accept a 50% cut in starting pay just to keep the company from leaving the state. Milwaukee has been a laboratory of this austerity and public education demolition for decades now. The feeling I got from the Milwaukee people was one of despair.

Strange thing is that there is almost no contact with leftists in Milwaukee and Madison at all, even among white leftists, It is as if Milwaukee is on the other side of the continent and not an hour and half away by bus. There were a few contingents that did come from Milwaukee to the protests in Madison, and a few protests in Milwaukee itself, but even there African-Americans were less present than Latinos who were much more active. Your criticisms aren’t much different from mine on the whole. There were contingents of people from the various “First Nations” bands who came to Madison as well. The City of Milwaukee maybe has 500,000 people, maybe a third of them are African-American, I don’t know. It is reaching a point where the Latinos will be equaling them in numbers. The ethnic makeup of people here is heavily German, Scandinavians live further north mostly.

The most positive thing in the protests was the open microphone in the capitol rotunda in Madison where there was an open forum that the DP folks couldn’t control. For a lot of workers this was the first time they ever got to speak in front of other workers and listen to other workers speaking publicly. The most active left group by far was the IWW and they have benefited from this. Their General Strike poster was the most popular poster. Still their activity raises questions in my mind of the nature of the left, even the IWW, in tailing initiatives that are run by the DP/Union nexus of bourgeois power. Even when they have the numbers to undertake their own initiatives, they still tail the “progs”. There was no attempt to raise awareness of state tax increases on the poorest workers, or to link the austerity measures to the constant austerity and repression faced by racial minorities. The Latino presence at the protests also raises questions because they seem obligated, or constrained, as immigrants, to show their patriotism by carrying US flags around to all the protests.

Due to a stretch of unemployment, I took a half-time job late last summer working at the office of AFSCME Local 2412. So, I became the office manager for a union local. In an office of one, I “manage” myself. I saw the whole thing unfold from the defeat of the last contract, to the Walker austerity bill. I was present at the union local meeting where we heard from the higher ups in AFSCME Council 24 that there would be no strike, which was decided and declared from the start. I even sent out the rally notices to the state workers on campus. Now AFSCME Local 2412, and my office neighbors, Local 171, represent respectively the clerical and blue collar sectors of the UW Madison campus. 2412 is the big union on campus and was right at the center of much of these protests. I was fielding calls from the press trying to get information out of me.

This all was strange for me. I had once been a member of Local 171. I had helped animate the Group Internationaliste Ouvrier in Montreal, I helped create Internationalist Notes. I took up left communism after being repeatedly called an ultra-leftist by mainline lefties back in the eighties. Needless to say I’m not that keen on the DP, or the unions. At the same time I feel obligated to participate and be present, which is doubly difficult without funds or propaganda to distribute. A struggle takes on a different tone altogether when it is your friends and family that are there protesting the wage cuts and austerity measures.

I saw the left groups descend on Madison, sell a few papers and then leave. I believe that in what I said to RS, I might have been directing some of this at your article. It is a shame I couldn’t have shown you around a bit, as I do know this area very well. I did make an attempt to contact the ICC but I was too late and the militant they sent came, sold a few papers and then left. I was busy working and sending out the bulletins for the protests and wasn’t doing a lot of propaganda distribution, so it was to them as if I was never even there, at least from what they said. They subsequently denounced the whole thing as a DP/Union maneuver. In ideological content we had the same dominant reformist thinking as in the protests of the “indignados” in Spain today, we even had something of a workers assembly going on in the capitol for a time. Yet they denounced the protests here and praised the protests there. The real question wasn’t the ideological content of these protests but their own participation which brings their praise, or condemnation when they do not participate. The left reformism and DP dominance doesn’t change the fact that there were 150,000 workers in the streets and every scrap of poster board in the county had been turned into picket signs such that all the stores in the county ran out of poster board. It was an extraordinary thing to see.

It seemed to me as though east coast militants only noticed when the protests were almost done, and my own efforts at creating small groups of revolutionaries around the mid-west and the south has been a failure by and large but I think what took place here confirms what I’ve tried to tell militants that workers in the mid-west and the south are important and that there wont be a class struggle in the US without them. It is disheartening when a massive protest of workers comes along the revolutionaries weren’t present even in small numbers and the usual cast of left-ish characters took over playing their role as adjunct to the left arm of the ruling class and its Democratic Party. The “left” in Madison consists of the IWW, the ISO and “Socialist Action” (pro-Castro-ex-trots, Minnesota and Wisconsin based largely). Many of the shop stewards and leaders in AFSCME are supporters of “Labor Notes” as well as being loyal Democrats.

Yes, the electoral stuff is what has taken over. The protests were called off. Some activity has remained sporadically across the state in smaller towns and cities. There were demonstrations in Mount Horeb, a town of 7,000 people had a workers demonstration which drew over a thousand at the peak of the demonstrations; this was happening all over. Now all energies are put into these recalls. People believe it will achieve some sort of victory or stability in the face of the fact that more recalls are being attempted at one time than have ever occurred before. As strikes were ruled out by the unions from the start, and the teacher/student sickout/walkout was called off two days into it, it is seen that a strike is impossible by most people. One justification I heard was that since people are no more than 16 lost work hours away from losing everything they have, to talk about a strike is “irresponsible”. I have argued against this the most successful wave of strikes in US history occurred at the end of WWII and usually lasted for less than five days on average during a time when workers were considerably poorer. I have also argued that the strike tactics that are illegal, sympathy strikes etc., are illegal because they work. The recall effort is feverish. I believe that the workers will be disappointed by the results given the past history of recall elections. The electoral stuff really bled the energy out of the movement.

The whole “Wisconsin’s progressive tradition” propaganda is quite strong and lends unwarranted credibility to DP’s bourgeois power structure. They seem to have forgotten that the last governor, Jim Doyle the Democrat, was the one who gave state workers a rolling layoff amounting to almost three work weeks a year amounting to a sizable cut. Basically the Democrats gave them a pay cut without formally cutting anyone’s hourly pay or benefits. For the bourgeoisie this was a clever maneuver but not brutal enough for the other faction of bourgeois politicos. There was absolutely no attention given by the unions to the layoffs that public sector workers will be facing, almost 22,000 people will lose their jobs and they are told to wait until the recall elections. There was no protest over the gutting of tax credits to the poorest workers in the state in both the public and private sectors either.

The university system is now messing with payroll data so that the unions don’t even know who is paying dues or who is even in the workforce now. It was two members of the Democratic Party who shot down the last contract in the state senate and assembly. They just refused to show up for the vote on the new contract that the state workers unions had negotiated knowing full well that the GOP was going to take over in the next session and be out for blood, so the Democratic Party basically allowed this situation to happen. When the state workers’ union boss, Marty Beil, called the two DP state congressmen “whores”, it was evident that the bosses has just stopped playing ball and no longer considered the unions as necessary for assistance in implementing the austerity measures. I’ve never heard a union leader speak that bluntly about a failed contract, ever, so even last November it was clear that something was going to go down this spring. The union leaderships were not ready for politicians who weren’t interested in playing by the established rules of the game.

AS

Taken from Insurgent Notes website (Originally posted August 2, 2011)

Letter from France

Editor’s Note: We received the following letter from our comrade in France, Brunel, who for many months has been in the thick of a very interesting struggle of public employees in F., a Paris suburb. As background for the foreign reader, he begins with a short narrative of that struggle.

Brief Contextual Summary

The city government of F. oversees a Paris suburb of 50,000 inhabitants and employs about 1500 people. It is controlled by the left (the French Communist Party, Socialist Party, the Greens and the Left Party) In the first three weeks of 2010, a local social movement of municipal employees formed a struggle committee, made up of more than 60 people, which took direct charge of defending the interests of city employees, outside the unions. Driven by the activism of a small group of city workers, themselves advocates of proletarian autonomy, the committee demanded a meaningful and egalitarian wage increase, working conditions based on solidarity among colleagues, the unconditional defense of public services, and an increased control of tasks by the workers themselves. For good measure, the committee unequivocally condemned management ideology, advocating instead the refusal of the criterion of profitability and more generally of the imperatives of valorizing the capital brought in from the private sector. Supported by management, the unions used all their power to put an end to this agitation with a one-day general strike, which took place on June 22, 2010. Since then, with threats of repression, calumny and disinformation, the unions succeeded in provisionally dispersing the workers’ anger into hastily-called negotiations with city management. These negotiations resulted in nothing but a complicit silence between the union reps and management during the following eight months. The struggle committee, which continued its underground activity, decided to act again in the run-up to the cantonal elections of March 2011, thus provoking the hasty reopening of the negotiations, which management and its union sycophants would have preferred to quietly lay to rest with no result. These negotiations ended in the decision to give three-fourths of municipal employees a raise of 100 euros a month over three years, falling quite short of the 300 euros demanded at the peak of the movement. The committee continues to exist in clandestine form and will again be able to make itself heard when the time comes. The old mole continues to burrow…

Dear Insurgent Notes,

In France, the crisis of public finances and especially of the decentralized local budgets reemerged in the wake of the meltdown of October 2008. It was then that the media pretended to discover that a large number of local governments were drowning in a morass of “toxic” debts. For the moment, the difficulties arising from this have been papered over, but nothing has really been resolved. Financial constraints are reducing the room for maneuver of cities, departments and regions. The direct consequence has been a reduction in the activities of the public sector, as well as cuts in staff. This has necessitated a series of laws making the work force even more precarious and calling into question the very status of public employees established in the great social compromises after World War II. Not surprisingly, since the beginning of the year, we have been seeing different local struggles by public employees opening up. These struggles have moved into a space opened up by the supine role of the trade unions at the national level, as evident in the low level of mobilization by such workers when strikes are called nationally.

In F., the struggle continues, even if we have to quickly find new ways to intervene, because an important threshold has just been crossed. Last March, the municipal authorities opened emergency negotiations, after eight months of silence, when confronted with the threat posed by our petition denouncing the “omerta” (vow of silence) practiced by the entrenched unions, and which we submitted right in the midst of local (cantonal) elections. The upshot was an average pay increase of 100 euros for three-quarters of city workers over a three-year period. That fell short of our demands, but by handing out some crumbs, the authorities won themselves a few months of social peace. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the local bosses attempted to toss off these financial concessions in discriminatory and arbitrary forms of remuneration. They proposed that certain employees in services judged to be “strategic” would get an immediate increase of 150 euros. Moreover, an “attendance bonus” (granted only if the employee does not miss more than 15 days of work per year) would condition part of the salary. In response, the massive and instantaneous protest movement by workers of the entire local government quickly checkmated these reactionary provocations, not without some grotesque attempts at intimidation. Dozens of employees raised the clear threat of rolling strikes by the rank-and-file, and moreover without the unions. A very interesting new scenario was in the works. The precipitous withdrawal of the proposed measures succeeded in calming down most people. But all these recent events allowed us to identity more clearly that group of our colleagues who, while a minority, are ready to intensify the conflict along openly anti-union lines. With a certain number of these enragés, we have been able to have discussions on subjects which could not be broached before: the condemnation of business-as-usual party politics (no small thing in a left-wing town) , an out-of-hand rejection of the unions, on struggle as the sole way to improve our condition, and the rejection of the servile mentality afflicting a section of the personnel, tied as they are to the paternalism of the local powers that be. The onset of the summer holidays has put us on standby. But we are quite sure that the local context, not to mention the global conjuncture, will present new occasions to hit back again in a few months.

Our Group

I will continue to write about this struggle as it evolves. But my time is quite taken up by laying the political and organizational basis for a new political group, so I’ll take the occasion to tell you, in summary fashion, about our motives, our goals and the current stage of our project.

Our starting point is three-fold: in France, there is almost nothing “to the left of the far left” (Translator’s Note: The term “far left” in France refers to the (mainly Trotskyist) groups active in the space opened up by the decline of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, including Lutte Ouvriere (LO), the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR, 4th International Mandelists, or more recently the NPA, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, organized mainly by the LCR). Those formations identifying themselves with the ultra-left and with councilism (I’m not mentioning the “autonomists”, whom I consider to be politically inconsistent) are aging, and distinguish themselves by their absence from the increasingly intense class struggle, a stance which has pushed them, for years, to retreat into the heavenly realms of theory. I’m not dismissing their considerable efforts to theoretically re-ground the communist perspective, a task we consider fundamental. But this attempt should, in our view, prove itself efficacious enough for the idea of proletarian revolution, and the notion of abolishing classes and the state, to re-enter the proletarian imagination (imaginaire). The perspective of the Situationists, hardly in evidence in the contemporary French ultra-left, needs to be reformulated. We can at the very least say that, today, despite the ongoing social ferment, the movement of the masses is running up against its own ideological limitations, limitations resulting from the considerable discredit which the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals have repeatedly heaped on communism over decades. Access to “for itself” consciousness, attained at different times by the revolutionary movements of the past century, today seems blocked by the indestructible wall of the bourgeois world outlook. Overcoming such a formidable obstacle implies a renewed and audacious communicative practice, one which does not hesitate to adopt a polemical tone when called for, nor to occupy social spaces abandoned for ages by revolutionary discourse and practice (the lower strata of the proletariat, culture, language, the immediate process of production). Because, thinking about it a bit, we can more than glimpse a theoretical and practical path opening up before us. The historical moment in which we live is particularly pitiless with the remnants of the ideological barracks of the far left and far right, revealing their objective complicity ever more clearly. Some of the stances of these apparatuses are very revealing. Not only do the leftovers of the Bolsheviks show the greatest discomfort in supporting proletarian movements in the Arab countries, but they overlook any solidarity (one which is in fact quite promising), with the social movements in Asia. At the same time, they insist on occupying minefields such as the anti-Zionist struggle, identity politics, or the old nationalist porridge, through their support for the “alter-imperialist” regimes (regimes also supported by the far right). All this smells of an ideological decomposition which today can only lead to an impasse. These serious handicaps cry out for a new language linked to an authentically revolutionary praxis. Confronted with this fundamental problematic, various themes touched on by Insurgent Notes, as well as the implacable method informing them, have been of capital importance for us.

Our group is named “Action Group for the Recomposition of Proletarian Autonomy” (Groupe d’Action pour la Recomposition de l’Autonomie Proletarienne).

We say “Action” because the political lineage to which we lay claim currently has few active heirs in France. We are inspired by the communist left in the broad sense of the the term (Socialism or Barbarism, the KAPD, International Council Correspondance, the IWW) but also by Amadeo Bordiga, I.I. Rubin, Georg Lukacs, Karel Kosik, the Situationists and operaismo, to quickly mention some key names and movements. And, of course, what we find in Insurgent Notes has provided important clarification. Today our group consists of about fifteen people, coming from different backgrounds: former Trotskyists, (the Lambertists, Lutte Ouvriere, and even ARS COMBAT, a small sect created some time ago), former anarcho-syndicalists (CNT), a former activist from the autonomist movement of the 1970’s, a former activist from the “anti-precarious” struggles of the early 2000’s (the “stop precariousness” networks, support committees), and some individuals who have never belonged to any organization. White-collar workers, public employees, students, and casual workers are all represented. We range from 22 to 48 years of age. We currently have a presence in the Parisian region and in Brittany. We plan to constitute ourselves as a founding nucleus through the networks of our current members over a time period during which various sessions of theoretical education, extending over several months, will consolidate the human and ideological cohesion of the group. Once this work is completed, we will develop a manifesto and an internet site. We already have propaganda material we use in different campaigns on both specific and general subjects (ranging from support for the Arab revolutions to denunciation of the new far right, by way of a critique of commodity alienation and of the management of various big companies). We will then move to a more intensive and wider phase of propaganda, attempting to embrace as closely as possible the front lines of contemporary society, and when it is possible becoming actors on them.

We say “recomposition” because we try to analyze capitalist society with a view of the totality and from the sphere of reproduction (and not merely production, as Insurgent Notes points out). At the same time, “recomposition” points to the term “composition”, a notion taken up in a new way by Italian workerism, with which we identify. We plan to revive the “worker inquiry” (as we already did a bit at the city hall of F.), notably with workers on the Paris subway system (where we have sympathizers).

And we say “Proletarian autonomy” because, although dated, this expression still has meaning for us, since the problematic of freeing ourselves from bourgeois language and forms of control remains posed today. We preferred the term “proletarian” to “worker”, because in a country like France, dominated by unproductive labor, the working class has tendentially given way to the proletariat for the past 40 years.

Brunel