Chicken Game: Eurocrisis, Again

Early May 2012

Beginning in the summer of 2011, the crisis hit the sovereign debts of the European periphery hard, almost putting the euro itself at risk. With the launch of austerity policies issuing from the ruling “commissariats” of Brussels and Frankfurt and the “orderly default” in Greece, the waters were calmed a bit, solely because of the injections of liquidity by the European Central Bank. Spring, however, seems to herald new storms on the horizon, with new pressures on the Spanish sovereign debt and the unknown future of Greece.

Beyond the ever-uncertain forecasts, this article attempts to reconstruct the dynamic of the Eurocrisis in the past year, situating it in the framework of the global crisis, of which it is an important flashpoint.1 The question is whether it is possible to grasp the outlines, on one hand, of a conflict, one not yet fully out in the open but neither merely muted, between the Wall Street–Fed–Treasury condominium, with its British financial appendage, and a counter-strategy by Berlin, albeit with still confused delineation, on the other. Identifying a specific logic behind events is important both analytically and politically, to grasp the possible tendential outlines of the crisis. In this way we can recognize aspects and moods of the social classes in Europe while looking for a trigger point—one for now only hinted in the scattered movements of the “indignados” and in the struggles in Greece—beyond the critique of a generic “financial speculation” and beyond the risk of being sidelined in localist or nationalist anti-German attitudes.2

An Infusion of Oxygen into the Global Impasse?

After several months of fireworks, with the political changes in Greece, Spain and Italy, and the final downgrade of the sovereign debts of half of Europe, at the beginning of 2012 the perspectives for the euro and for the European Union seemed much less dark. If the markets allowed themselves a breather, this was due first of all to the double operation at the end of December and the end of February by which the European Central Bank extended around €1 trillion to the shaky banks over three years at a symbolic interest rate, in exchange for devalued collateral or ad hoc debt, with its issues guaranteed by various states.3 This was a necessary move, undoubtedly undertaken with the agreement of Berlin, to shelter the banks from the repayments falling due foreseen for this year (€800 billion) during a most serious credit crunch and in view of the need to recapitalize them, which since last fall almost paralyzed private European finance, loaded down as it is with toxic assets and depreciated government paper from the European periphery. The ruinous short-circuiting between the banks and public finance was thus stopped temporarily. But the oxygen infusion is still based on an enormous recycling game, which in the last instance will weigh on government balance sheets, and by which the financial institutions acquire the paper of the European states currently under attack, profiting from a carry trade of 5–6 percent.4 Be that as it may, the European banks, and especially those on the periphery, have not in fact resumed lending to families and businesses.

This says a lot about how long the situation will remain precarious, suspended between capital flight from the euro and the costs of sovereign financing (€1.7 trillion coming due in 2012), which are currently oscillating at high levels, from which they will have a hard time coming down, in the context of increased global competition for “good” cash (€11.5 trillion in global public debt coming due). In the meantime, if the “voluntary” Greek default has happened, the consequences are still visible, especially in light of the looming sovereign Portuguese crisis, and the stormy waters which Spain and Italy have entered. In those countries, the recession is already a reality, while in a fair number of European countries, including Germany, a clear slowdown is in the cards. Meanwhile, the hoped-for recovery in the United States remains more and more of a question mark, which has forced the Fed to guarantee virtually zero interest rates through 2014 (will there be a third “quantitative easing?”), in the framework of a global slowdown which is also due to the increasing difficulties of the emerging countries, with China in the lead.5

These are, then, all the conditions explaining why the epicenter of the crisis is shifting once again to Europe. Spontaneously?

Chicken Game

In the middle of last year, as the effects of the Fed’s injections of liquidity were being exhausted,6 underscoring the risk of a double dip in the United States, we saw a further surge of speculative funds betting against European sovereign debts, a surge which pushed Italy and Spain into the highly dangerous grey area between liquidity crisis and insolvency, but which also hit France and its banking system. The crises of public debt issue and the devaluation of the assets of European banks, left without liquidity from a simultaneous withdrawal of US monies, were circularly reinforced, while the euro itself entered the risk zone.

The double calculus here7 is to profit from the deterioration of public balance sheets and to give Europe a serious warning, specifically to the ECB and especially to the German government, because they more substantially and more certainly guarantee the debts of the periphery. Confronted with the risk of straight-up real losses, something which has been avoided by state intervention but is now the order of the day (as shown by the Greek events), the demands are clear. Germany must save the euro…from the financial markets (!), reads the verdict of George Soros, who demands the launch of the eurobond.8 Or, as the New York Times reaffirmed, commenting on the European summit of last December, European austerity is not going well, and it is time to print more money. The ECB should function as the lender of last resort and save the PIIGS (Portugal-Italy-Ireland-Greece-Spain); the European Union must become a real transfer union of the center to the periphery countries to stimulate “growth”; in short, Germany must do its part.9

And this is the convergence which, without having recourse to conspiracy theories, sees Washington and Wall Street as more “European” and “Keynesian” than Berlin, and they are seeking possible rapprochements against Berlin with the European governments having the greatest balance sheet problems.10 The propping up of the European state debts guaranteed by the EU is to serve as a bit of a substitute bubble to fatten up the profits of finance. Across the Atlantic, if not in a minority of the elite, the goal is not the end of the euro but the relaunching of a “growth” based on a new wave of privatizations of public services and on the acquisition at low cost and/or the selective elimination of banks and pieces of the European productive apparatus by the financial flows which are profiting from the Eurocrisis.11 This is the game of chicken underway between Washington/Wall Street and Berlin which has not been pushed, up till now—but for how much longer?—to the extreme limit from fear of total collapse.12 The condominium of big finance and Obama has turned the tables: the epicenter of the crisis will no longer be in the United States but in Europe!

Thus the Eurocrisis is a crucial phase of the global crisis which, in the general deterioration of the situation, is also giving rise to a financial war in the Western camp: between the dollar and the euro, between transnational financialization linked to the guarantee of US imperial power, and financialization of the German and European variety.

Berlin’s Strategy

If Germany accepts this program, it will have to guarantee European debts on its own balance sheet to spare international finance “disorderly defaults” and real losses (on interest payments, derivatives, collateral debt swaps…) but will quickly confront a deteriorated ability of markets to recover and an increased potential for blackmail by the centers of financial power. US treasury bills would continue to represent the “safe harbor” for frightened global investors, allowing the US Fed–Treasury complex to take in financial resources at extremely low interest rates and to issue liquidity to keep the banking system alive, while the euro is seriously weakened as a world currency and potential rival to the dollar. Further, the indirect consequence would be to reduce Europe’s productive base (starting with Germany’s) to functioning as a performing asset for a new wave of speculative finance through the gigantic mortgaging of its public debts.

In opposition to some superficial interpretations, we can affirm that Berlin’s interests are aligned with Europe and the euro, but of course not on the conditions outlined above. Thus the Merkel government is resisting the pressures for an anti-austerity monetary and fiscal policy in every possible way. Not without contradictions13 and rather pragmatically, a unitary approach is emerging on various questions, one which is imposing itself on Germany’s European partners. The European summits of early December 2011 and late January 2012 adopted a strategy to avoid new indebtedness which would further weaken the euro and which, if taken onto a single European balance sheet, would put the German state balance sheet and the competitiveness of Germany industry at risk. This explains the rigid fiscal compact, even if it means a slowdown in the German and European economies and a break with London.14

Only in this way will Berlin allow the ECB to partially and indirectly monetize the European sovereign debts and to launch an effective government bailout fund (the ESM, European Stability Mechanism), eventually moving from there and only in a second phase to the issue of a Eurobond. But Berlin will do so precisely in the way that Merkel has synthesized: “erst sparen, dann retten” (save first, then rescue), and not on the conditions demanded by US-British finance. Save first, then decide if there is something to “rescue.”

Contextually, in the game of the Greek “voluntary default,” while Berlin made a point of taking its time in “sterilizing” part of the toxic paper, and also making the banks pay a little, it also issued a mild warning to speculative finance (especially on the question of credit default swaps, whose payment would be triggered in the event of a “disorderly” default). Merkel, moreover, is putting forward, with a significant domestic consensus, some timid proposals to “regulate” finance15 > (taxation, rating agencies, limitations on short selling, etc.).16

This is clearly a compromise, not a strategy for direct confrontation with the United States and with international finance. And this compromise is not certain to save the euro, in which case Berlin is considering, as a last resort, a Plan B for exiting the single currency. Further, it remains to be seen how the populations of the European periphery—first of all Greece but also Eastern Europe (consider developments in Hungary and Rumania)—will react to the consequences of shock therapy practiced on them in vivo,17 and if the crisis will allow the German strategy time to consolidate and if, instead, in the context of breakdown, there crystallizes an anti-Berlin sentiment on one hand and a corresponding rejection of austerity by the German proletariat on the other.

The Stakes

It is important to point out that what is in play is not a renewal of a great game between Anglo-Saxon speculations and “real” German production. Financialization, which is “productive” in its way as a condition for profit-taking and expropriation, is today the general form of capitalist accumulation. The “blood, sweat and tears” projects of both Obama and Merkel aim to globally capture more consistent value flows. The stakes are the euro as an alternative or even a rival project to the dollar, or, put in another way, as a distinct European financialization under German auspices.

Everyone sees that, in the current crisis, the rescue of US and British (“transnational”) finance has been possible because of the use—one anything but neutral—of the dollar as the world currency, not to mention the role of Washington as the military guarantor of international order. The dollar has made, and continues to make it possible to offload the enormous creation of liquidity onto the government balance sheet, with no external constraints (at least in the short or medium term) which saved the balance sheets of the banks, helping them to “deleverage” and prop up the values of the financial market, and thus, in clear distinction to 2010 on the European stock markets, helping Wall Street and the City to recover, and improving the profit margins of US multinationals as well.18 Part of the enormous debt accumulated from private parties is thus monetized and taken over from both the “middle class,” hit by the collapse of its stock market and real estate assets, and from international actors: China and Japan as massive holders of dollar reserves and Treasury bills, and now Europe. Deleveraging as a weapon in the crisis!

The euro project, we recall, was conceived precisely to limit dollar seignorage. It was intended not merely to attract capital but to construct a European pole strong enough to appropriate global value for itself, to capture the growing production of emerging countries and at the same time to reduce its ties to the US balance of payments. After national reunification, German economic power began to center the continental economy on itself, not merely in production by setting up corporate affiliates beyond its borders, but also financially, recycling the commercial surpluses inside the EU—thanks to the low interest rate policy of the ECB—toward the banks of the periphery (we are thus dealing with something well beyond a mere neo-mercantilism based on commercial flows). The continental platform has thus been used for an orientation, now quite visible, towards Russia and China. An ECB as a “lender of last resort,” as a real central bank, was to emerge at the end of this process of deeper economic and political integration on a continental scale, and not before.

With the crisis, however, this financialization European style as a work in progress has taken on not only the predatory character of Anglo-Saxon finance, but is also caught in the contradiction between a German industrial apparatus in need of external markets and the explosion of a bubble which is convulsing the construction of Europe. European finance is thus much more eviscerated, and subordinated, in the web of US derivatives, from which all European participants, whether “grasshoppers or ants,” were drawing sustenance in the “happy” phase of globalization. Now the bill is due. This situation has been underwritten up till now by Berlin, thanks to support for its own companies and banks—but which increased the public debt to more than 80 percent of GDP—and by exports benefitting from China’s monetary stimulus at the outbreak of the crisis. But for how long? It is nonetheless obvious that the failure of the European project would deal a harsh blow not merely to a European policy more independent from its transatlantic partner and tilted toward Russia and China, but also to the vain ambition of exiting the crisis with a tendentially multipolar global geo-economic arrangement which would partially offset the unipolar military position of the United States (which explains the great concern of Beijing and Moscow).

Thus to “do what the Fed does,” printing money in these conditions—i.e., without having been able to impose the euro as a world reserve currency or at least as a reserve currency competing with the dollar19 —would mean that the ECB would be providing Europe with fresh credit owed to international finance, thus constituting an enormous mortgage on current and future production.20 . This will be something quite different from the deficit spending for investment and consumption which the European center-left likes to chatter on about taking their cues from…Paul Krugman.

A New Phase of the Crisis

Behind this confrontation, we see the outlines of an unavoidable next phase: the devalorization of the enormous mass of fictitious capital (Marx) which has accumulated over the cycle of more than thirty years of growth based on debt. This is a cycle which can boast of undoubtable successes for capital, built on the watershed of the 1970s with three crucial elements: the dollar’s break with gold in August 1971 which opened up the autonomization of currency; the Sino-American rapprochement of 1972 which dismantled the postwar bipolarism and opened China to the world market21 as well as breaking up the front of peripheral countries; and finally the victorious reaction against the long “68” with the incorporation of its recuperable social demands, made to converge in the multiform process of financialization (and the eclipse of the old left). Seen in this light, finance became the modality of accumulation which allowed the west to centralize the value produced in the new global workshops and to commodify and tendentially subsume as profit all the labor and reproductive activities, enormously increasing the pressures on labor in exchange for a real or anticipated financialized consumption22 . At the same time, this modality pushed to the extreme the mechanism by which credit money created by the financial markets was able to restart the cycle of the reproduction of capital with continuous anticipation of future value. The “becoming rent” of profit is inextricably intertwined with the “becoming profit” of finance.

Today this process seems at an end, or at a serious blockage. Confronted with the enormous gap separating it from real accumulated value and with multiple forms of social resistance,23 money has turned into insolvent debt: fictitious capital with an inadequate real basis, the perverse face of an unparalleled productivity in social cooperation, but trapped within the strictures of labor time and profit. From this flows the apparent absurdity of the need to destroy capital, on paper or physically, dead or living, to reconstitute profit margins and to eliminate the debt. This problem remains all the more urgent after the incredible injection of liquidity with which “emergency financial Keynesianism” (Robert Kurz) has avoided the collapse of the financial system but has not set in motion any productive recovery, thereby opening the way for speculation against various states.

The process of devalorization is already underway, and is most advanced in the United State—the monetization of banks and bank closings, devaluation of pension funds, individual bankruptcies, the collapse of housing prices, closings of factories—where the costs can be more easily offloaded domestically—of course within certain limits, at the risk of a social explosion—and, for reasons we have seen, offloaded externally through the mechanism of repaying debt with money.24 > Meanwhile, the process has barely begun in Europe; it will not be painless or equitably shared. The question is who will be forced to burn more of their own capital than others, wiping out uncollectible debts; who will lose parts of their own banking and productive system; who will give up the corresponding liens on flows of value, and who will hand over to others the savings of the population. It is inevitable that a further terrain of confrontation is opening up, and all the more so if there is a straightforward liquidation of public debts with a strategy of default from above.25 This is compounded, for the west, with the growing difficulty of either offloading the burden onto the rest of the world or else going ahead with a devalorization within a framework pushed by international finance. Contextually, as if to prove that finance is “real,” pressures are becoming tremendous, not merely to sacrifice welfare, services and other areas to mad money, but also to “free” labor from any residual limit to profits, as the new governments of Spain and Italy are in the process of doing with measures to restructure labor markets and the size of subsidies. And here we have the prescription for…growth, after the fiscal consolidation. While Mr. Obama and Frau Merkel disagree on the question of how much liquidity to inject into the system, they agree on the strategy of “growth” based on a straightforward recovery in the productivity of labor. But one must be careful: even on this level, there is already a battle underway centered on the US strategy of insourcing26 by productive firms which have already outsourced to China and Mexico once the conditions of the work force in the States have deteriorated to the point at which the operation becomes profitable.

Thus: the confrontation over the sharing of losses is also a confrontation between different strategies for exiting the crisis in relations to possible new global and class assets.

Geopolitics of the Crisis

The distribution of the costs of the debt economy is a peculiar war, one which does not cancel out but rather accentuates the specifically diplomatic, military and geopolitical turns. These turns are often a further element removed from the debate. Nevertheless, something is happening; one need merely think of Obama’s hijacking of the Arab spring, or the military intervention in Libya (and in Syria?),27 or Washington’s assertive reorientation (pivot strategy) in East Asia. All this while China and Japan sign an agreement to abandon the dollar for their commercial transactions and Germany, which opposed the Libyan adventure, is looking east.

It is not possible to deal with this theme here, which has to be seen as an integral part of the dynamics of the global crisis. We should, however, at least recall, regarding the discussion of the presumed decline of the United States, the United States’s ability, hobbled but hardly vanished, to make itself the guardian of order for the entire capitalist system, with no credible substitute in sight. This edge from its systemic position, based on a still unequalled military-cognitive apparatus and its “dialectical” connection with global finance, allows Washington to do what its indebtedness would preclude for any other power. Certainly, the world order has become fluid and the US response is a reactive one, and not an effective Grand Strategy. But this, rather than pointing to the hegemonic succession of another rising power,28 should perhaps be seen in the possible fragmentation of the international system. This points to a hybrid situation between an imperial configuration, with dynamics subsumed to a hierarchy both polymorphous but in the last instance unitary, and an imperialist dynamic, with competition reemerging powerfully with and against inter-capitalist cooperation.

The successive phases of the crisis might throw light on the problematic: is the world headed toward the construction of a front posing an alternative to the United States? Or is it heading toward a Western reorganization around the perspective traced out by Obama, of creative destruction of the Middle East and a co-engagement with China? Or, instead, will the Sino-American duopoly hold, and for how long? The Iranian and Syrian questions will give some indications of where things are headed.

The overall framework provides at least three major political problema. How does one take an autonomous position against the European policies of social butchery without falling into nationalist, anti-German nostalgia or into rhetoric against “Anglo-Saxon speculation”? How do we put together struggles about rights, work and life with a constitutive struggle on the issue of debt, while avoiding any recourse to solutions “from above” to the risk of default? Finally, and closely related, how do we overcome the false alternative between politics of austerity on one hand and “financial Keynesianism” on the other (between Merkel and Obama, to put it bluntly), taking into account, within the irreversible integration of states into the new finance capital and the profound transformation of class composition, of the eclipse of a possible antagonistic use of state expenditure? And so: what is the program for the real movement?

• 1See my Mr. Obama, “Frau Merkel e la finanza” (now available in Obama nella crisi globale, Trieste 2010) and Eurocrisi eurobond lotta sul debito (Trieste, 2011) as well as in N. Casale, “Alimentare la bolla o sgonfiarla?,” December 2011. Obviously, for a complete analysis of the unfolding of the crisis, it is necessary to add other fundamental elements, starting with developments in China and its double bind with the United States.
• 2For a certain version of this, see especially the Keynesian left. “The decision about how much will happen…has been expropriated by the power of Germany…for the third time in a century.” according to the daily paper of the Italian left Il Manifesto November 27, 2011, which went on to praise the “valid analyses carried out by Standard and Poor’s, the IMF, Gorge Soros and the Financial Times against Berlin’s austerity policies, January 27, 2012.
• 3It is the Italian and Spanish banks which have made the most use of the ECB’s lines of credit.
• 4The “carry trade” refers to borrowing in one currency at very low interest rates (for example, Japanese yen at 1 percent) and investing in something else in a different currency at a higher rate of return (e.g., a Brazilian stock denominated in reals). It amounts to “free money” unless the Japanese yen abruptly rises in value when the loan becomes due.
• 5Cf. in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook for January, the report of P. Boone and S. Johnson, and from the Peterson Institute, also in January, and on the weakness of the US economy, among others, the post “Charting The US (Un)Recovery.” The question of China is more complicated and cannot be dealt with here.
• 6See my “Fine del change? Linee di faglia negli Stati Uniti,” November 2010.
• 7I speak of calculation because of the oligopolistic concentration of “financial markets,” currently treated in the literature: cf. the recent study of Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston, in “The Network of Global Corporate Control.”
• 8Soros was also not pleased with the Draghi operation in December.
• 9“Europe’s Latest Try,” New York Times, September 11, 2011.
• 10Like in the Italy of the Napolitano-Monti duo. This was confirmed by Monti’s trip to Washington and the letter signed by the Italian government, together with the British government, for a “strengthening of the single market.” The G8 meeting planned for late May will further advance this “encirclement” of Merkel, particularly after the electoral defeat of Sarkozy in the French presidential elections.
• 11Cf. “Why Europe stocks are too cheap to ignore.” One example is the Chrysler-Fiat operation: who bought whom?
• 12“The European crisis isn’t over until the First Lady pays, and the First Lady of Europe, Angela Merkel, cannot pay enough. She needs to erect a large enough firewall to ensure that the European Union’s weaker members do not, again, face financial disaster. That will not happen—which means the euro faces at least defections, and perhaps destruction,” “For Europe, it doesn’t get better,” Reuters, April, 4, 2012.
• 13Like the imposition of recapitalization measures by the European Bank Authority (EBA) in a rather critical moment for the continent’s banks.
• 14For an idea of the tone used by the British press, cf. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “America and China must crush Germany into submission,” the Telegraph, November 9, 2011.
• 15Cf. Walden Bello, “Germany’s Socialdemocrats and the European Crisis.”
• 16An essential factor in the break with London: see “Europe’s great divorce,” Economist, December 9, 2011.
• 17The struggles in Greece have been the factor which, from below, has contributed to the restructuring of Greek debt but, given their isolation, they have not up till now been able to avoid the tremendous conditionalities which the troika has imposed on them.
  
• 18$16 trillion between December 2007 and June 2010, according to the most recent official statistics of the US government. According to other sources, $29 trillion.
• 19Chesnais, an exponent of the French theorists of “mundialization” grasps the substantial difference between the euro and the dollar and speaks of the “incompletness of the euro,” but does not manage to go more deeply because of the Keynesian framework he uses. Les dettes illégitimes. Quand les banques font main basse sur les politiques publiques, Raison d’agir, Paris 2011.
• 20The German “hawks” are aware of it but for now the question has not emerged in the German public debate: see the interview with Hans-Werner Sinn in “Wir sitzen in der Falle,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 18, 2012.
• 21R. Sciortino, Un passaggio oltre il bipolarism: Il rapprochement sino-americano 1969–72, Bologna 2012.
• 22C. Marazzi, E il denaro va: Esodo e rivoluzione dei mercati finanziari, Torino 1998, p. 171, footnote: “With the development of capital on a world scale, the function of money as a means of payment created ex nihilo assumes an increasing importance…and takes on the form of the community.” The thematic of capital as the real (bad) community had already emerged in the 1960s, within left communism, in the reflections of Jacques Camatte.
• 23Cf. Midnight Notes collective, Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons.
• 24For more up-to-date data, see McKinsey, “Debt and deleveraging: Uneven progress on the path to growth,” January 2012.
• 25See “The Liquidation of Government Debt,” Peterson Institute, April 2011.
• 26This is linked to US pressures for a revaluation of the yuan/renminbi and for a greater opening of the Chinese internal market, also by means of an increase in wages(!).
• 27See my “Disinnescare la sollevazione,” February 2011, and “Obama dopo Osama,” May 2011, online.
• 28The anomaly was already pointed out by Giovanni Arrighi.

In Greece, the initial austerity measures developed into a full blown shock policy of devaluation of capital, which has deepened the recession and increased public debt. A main ingredient of the politics of devaluation of capital is the depreciation of labour power which aims at the weakening of the power of the working class by establishing permanent austerity and disciplining mechanisms, and by the creation of a large reserve army. Furthermore, this depreciation of labour power is facilitated by the institutional abolition of collective bargaining agreements, a process which, to a great extent, undermines the very function of the labour power representation mechanisms. The extremely volatile and explosive situation does not allow any safe conclusions for the time being since the inability of the proletarian struggles to have any real and persistent effects (in the production and reproduction spheres of the capitalist totality) is accompanied by a deep, generalized and amorphous despair and anger precipitated also by the destruction of any safety valves for their containment. Therefore, the widespread prospect of a rather prolonged dead-end period looming ahead could be easily reversed by a social explosion that will change more deeply the balance of forces.

(the original introduction and article text copied from Occupied London for wider distribution: From The Greek Streets)

What follows should be read in the context of our analysis of the crisis in “Burdened with Debt”, the paper we presented at the 2010 summercamp.

Very briefly, our point of view is that the aggravation of the protracted capitalist reproduction crisis had been postponed by a certain politics of money that had led to a relative autonomisation of finance capital and a closer interaction between exporters of capital/lenders of money and debtors with increasing private or public debts (on the level of the EU this was expressed as a hierarchical interaction between the “core” nation-states and the “peripheral” ones). With the bursting of the real estate bubble in the US into a global financial crisis in 2008 there were additional public debts due to socializing of capitalist losses and bailing out banks. In some countries, the financial crisis turned into a fiscal crisis of the state. In Greece, the regime of accumulation of the ’90s and 2000’s based on the increase of fixed capital investment and productivity of labour, a dual labour market and high public and private spending made possible by the low real interest rates in the Eurozone “periphery” (due to the higher inflation rates compared to the ones in the “core”) and the corresponding influx of capitals from the surpluses of the EU “core”–a regime that had started showing signs of decline since the mid 2000’s due to the fall in the rate of exploitation– collapsed completely with the advent of the crisis. Due to the fact that this is a country with a relatively high level of proletarian unrest which, despite capitalist modernization in the last two decades, coexisted with a strong petit-bourgeois class and a traditional system of political clientelism, it was considered suitable by the dominant fractions of the Capitalist International and their local allies as a laboratory of fiscal terrorism and police repression.

In Greece, the initial austerity measures developed into a full blown shock policy of devaluation of capital, which has deepened the recession and increased public debt. A main ingredient of the politics of devaluation of capital is the depreciation of labour power which aims at the weakening of the power of the working class by establishing permanent austerity and disciplining mechanisms, and by the creation of a large reserve army. Furthermore, this depreciation of labour power is facilitated by the institutional abolition of collective bargaining agreements, a process which, to a great extent, undermines the very function of the labour power representation mechanisms (see below).

The general politics of devaluation, with its bank recapitalization measures, the elimination or expropriation of that portion of the total-social capital (small and medium-scale enterprises) that is unable to valorise surplus capital, the depreciation of promissory notes and the fall in consumption and investments, aims at the centralization of capital, the reproduction of so-called primitive accumulation and the overcoming of the separation between the different moments in the reproduction of the capitalist relationship that existed before the crisis.

We do not pretend to have a full understanding of the internal contradictions of European capitalism and our research into the matter is still a work-in-progress. Whether this peculiarly irrational condition of “unemployed capital at one pole and unemployed worker population at the other” (Marx) will be resolved in the future through a controlled recession that will lead to a rise of the competitiveness of the Greek economy inside a new European cycle of accumulation or whether the increasing contradictions due to protracted politics of devaluation will lead to chaotic development and the rupture of the Eurozone, we do not know. We can’t tell what the extent and the forms of the centralization of capital will be. While we are still in the midst of a devaluation process through “debt crisis”, it is too early to say what the form and content of a future regime of accumulation will be –if there is going to be one– fuelled by a devalued labour power and how much stable it will be. This process has led to a competition among the capitalist “hostile brothers” where, both at the level of relations between nation-states and on the national terrain, the strongest and the most cunning “tries to reduce his own share [to loss] to a minimum and to shove it off upon another” (Marx). It has also led to the rise of nationalism inside the working class, an individualist struggle to preserve one’s job, an export of labour power (especially its skilled part) and a rust out of the unemployed labour power..

In the midst of a capital devaluation process, there are nevertheless certain investment plans especially in the energy sector (solar power, oil and hydrocarbons) and a long list of imminent privatisations of state services and state controlled companies, which, however, in an environment of deep recession and lack of state investments, seem very uncertain.

As an illustration of what we said above, here are the most recent data we have gathered.

Concerning the recession: in 2010-2011, GDP (in 2000 fixed prices) has decreased by 10% (overall recession for 2008-2011 is 16,3%). Total consumption has fallen by 12.6% (-10.7% for private consumption and -14.5% for public consumption). Gross fixed capital investment has decreased by 17.9%.

Concerning exports: the exports of goods and services have increased by 14.5% in 2010-2011. This is due to the recovery of international trade, that is the increase of external demand in all countries. So, if it is put in its international context, Greece’s market performance of exports of goods and services in 2010-2011 is -1% compared to 2009, which is the worst export performance in the last 20 years. Exports correspond only to the 1/5 of GDP.

Concerning employment and unemployment: in the second quarter of 2011, employment has decreased by 6.1% and unemployment has increased by 36.5% compared with the second quarter in 2010. The rate of unemployment had reached 20.9% last November or, in other words, more than one million people. Particularly affected are women from 15 to 34 years old whose unemployment percentage is 32% and young people (15-24 years) in general whose percentage is 48%. As a result economically non-active population has exceeded active one by 500.000. GSEE estimates that the unemployment rate will run into 26% in 2012. This percentage of unemployment is comparable only to the one in the early ‘60s when hundreds of thousands of Greeks emigrated to central Europe, North America and Australia. Note that the 2012 estimates do not count in the forthcoming dismissals in the public sector: 15,000 state workers will be dismissed this year and 150,000 in total by 2015 (the total number of employees in public services and the state apparatus was 768,000 by 2010, that is 15% of the total workforce, one of the lowest in Eurozone: note that since 2010 this number has further decreased due to the minimal new hirings in 2011 and 2012 and the (early or not) retirement of many employees). The only sector where employment is increasing is the police.

Concerning unit labor cost and productivity of labor: during 2010-2011 the unit labor cost decreased only by 1.2%. This happened because while average nominal wage in the private sector decreased by 4.5%, productivity of labor also decreased by 3.3%. Productivity of labor is related to the number of laborers employed, the rate of labor discipline and the net investment in fixed capital. Total investment in both constant and variable capital has decreased by 29.4% in the last two years. Apart from that, the unit labor cost decrease has led to a meager 3% decrease in the prices of export goods and services.

Concerning the closing down of small and medium-scale enterprises: already 1 in 4 commercial enterprises has closed down and their confederation estimates that by the summer 2012 38% of them will have closed down. During 2010-11 68.000 small and medium-scale enterprises have closed down (Jan-Sep 2011: 67.000 job losses) while estimates for 2012 seem gloomy too: 60.000 more enterprises are to close down resulting in 100.000 job losses. It is important to note down that small and medium size enterprises in Greece are the true backbone of both the Greek economy and society, accounting for 99.9% of all capitalist enterprises, their share in total employment being 85.6% –without taking into account the “black” labour force– compared to 66.9% in EU and they count for 72% of value-added production compared to 58.4 % in the EU according to 2011 statistics.

Concerning retirement pension cuts: without going into details, since the cuts vary according to the age of the pensioners, the amount of the pension and the pension fund one belongs to, due to the new measures pensions will be cut by 10 to 20%, retirement compensation by 30% while health care has deteriorated and social benefits to disabled people have been cut too. Note that according to the European Committee new pension cuts have to be applied by 2012-2013 so as to make-up for the pension funds losses due to the recent PSI implementation.

Concerning wage cuts: in 2010-2011, wages in the public sector had been cut by 23%. With the introduction of the new wage scale in this sector in November 2011, the wages have been cut by an additional 20% in average. Before the new round of austerity measures, the real wages in the private sector had been cut by 8%. Now the basic pay is cut by 22% and for those under 25 by 32%. This means that the basic pay is reduced to 480 euros or 400 euros for those under 25. The unemployment benefit is reduced to 350 euros (note that in Greece you can’t get this benefit, which is the same for every unemployed, for more than one year and you are entitled to get it only if you have worked for two consecutive years full-time before your dismissal). All existing union contracts will cease after three years at maximum and private contracts are encouraged. Wage drift is freezed until the rate of unemployment falls under 10%. Employers’ social security contribution is reduced by 3%.

Concerning the fiscal crisis of the state: in 2011 the government budget deficit has increased in absolute terms by 1.3% in comparison with 2010. The state revenues have decreased by 1.7% while the state expenses have increased by 2.8% in the same period. The decrease of state revenues is due to: a) the reduction of average wages, pensions and employment and, therefore, the reduction of the associated individual income taxes, b) the decline in the profitability of the capitalist enterprises which combined with the reduction of the profit tax rate by 1% in 2011 led to a significant reduction of the tax on profits (which will be decreased from 24% to 20% in 2012, see below), c) the lower than expected increase of revenues from indirect taxes (VAT, taxes on oil, alcohol and tobacco), despite the big increase of the tax rates, because of the reduction in consumption, d) the big increase of tax rebates instead of their initially planned decrease due to the failure of the new relevant tax regulations. The main reason behind the increase of the expenses has been the increased debt service: interest payments rose by 23.6% in comparison to 2010. On the other hand the so called “primary expenditures” have been decreased only by 1.3% in spite of the deep cuts of the wages in the public sector. This is due to the increase of the expenditure for social security, social care and social protection by 12.8%. This increase is the result of a) the increased subsidies to the pension funds which are on the verge of disaster due to the big reduction of the social security contributions caused by the big rise of unemployment, the reduction of average wages and the wide extension of part time labour contracts and b) the increased expenditure for unemployment benefits caused also by the rise of unemployment. Further, military expenditure declined by 60% while expenditure related to the “Public Investments Program” declined by 21.8%. According to EUROSTAT, the ratio of Greek government debt to GDP has risen dramatically from 113% in 2008 to 129% in 2009, to 145% in 2010 and reached 165,3% by 2011. According to the European Committee, this ratio will be decreased to 161,4% by 2012 due to the PSI implementation, before rising again to 165,3% in 2013. Then, according to EC’s “wishful thinking”, it will start to decline slowly, as the Greek GDP will be increasing to reach a bit less than 120% in 2020, namely, where it was in 2009 when the fiscal terrorism strategy was adopted for the “salvation” of the country!

Concerning taxes and profits: “Greece has been cutting the corporate tax rate over the last few years. The statutory tax rate for non-listed companies was cut from 40 % to 37.5 % in 2001 and to 35 % in 2002, followed by a cut to 29 % in 2006. It was then further reduced to 25 % in 2007. The tax reform enacted in 2008 foresaw a gradual reduction by 1 percentage point per year of the corporate income tax rate for the years between 2010 and 2014 (from 25 % to 20 %). Under the new tax law enacted in March 2011 the corporate income tax rate of 20 % shall apply to the total taxable income already from the year 2012 (for income earned in 2011), whereas a rate of 24% shall apply only for the year 2011 (for income earned in 2010).” Taxation Trends in the European Union, 2011 Edition – European Commission (available at: http://ec.europa.eu/taxtrends)

Concerning the introduction of additional taxes: due to the fact that the state is unable to increase its revenues through income and indirect taxes, new real estate taxes have been introduced with the aim to collect 2.5 billion euros more. Direct taxes are expected to contribute 22.3 billion euros to state revenues in 2012 compared to 17.8 billion euros in 2011. This they expect to achieve through the rise of the objective value (market value) of real estate property which will increase the relevant taxes by 33%. One has to keep in mind that the homeownership rate in Greece is 70%.

Concerning saving account deposits: according to a Focus Bari survey in March 2011 43% of Greek citizens do not have bank deposits at all while most of the rest use their deposits in order to survive.

Concerning poverty, medical care and suicides: in 2010 the Greek proletariat was the seventh poorest one in the EU in relative terms, with 27.7% of the population living in a household with a disposable income below the “poverty threshold” (60% of the median national disposable income). It is sure that this figure has risen since then and that a higher proportion of the proletariat is below “the poverty threshold”. The number of homeless people is approximately 20,000 (11,000 in Athens alone) having increased in the last two years by 20-25%. Most of the new cases of Greek homeless people are not related to drug addiction or mental illness as was mostly the case before 2008 but to long-term unemployment and/or house foreclosures. Suicides (both attempted and accomplished) have increased from 507 in 2009 to 622 in 2010 (+22,5%) before getting stabilized in 2011 (598 until December 2011, -3.9%). By comparing those numbers to the Greek average suicide rate (3.5 per 100,000 citizens -one of the lowest in Europe), then the increase gets much higher: +31,4% in 2009, +61,4% in 2010 and +55,7% in 2011. A few days ago hundreds of people witnessed a 77-year old pensioner shooting himself at Syntagma Sq. At his suicide note he wrote that he did not want to end up searching for his food in the trash bins. The news of this tragic event caused widespread anger. The same afternoon a few thousands of people gathered at Syntagma Sq. As a result, small scale clashes occurred with the riot police at the square and nearby streets.There is no official survey of the state of the medical system in Greece for the years 2010-2011. Some of the main changes we have experienced: since the beginning of this year, four major Health and Insurance Funds (those for civil servants/state workers, private sector workers, self-employed –both workers and small bosses– and farmers/peasants) have been unified into one, the National Organization for Healthcare Provision (EOPPY) which covers 9.5 million people. According to the regulations of this new fund, the number of doctors who are in contract with it is just 5000, which means 1 doctor for 2000 insured patients. Moreover, the maximum number of patients who are allowed to visit a doctor for free is 50 during a week and 200 during a month. After these numbers have been reached, the next patients should pay. Besides, the state compensation to doctors has fallen from 20 to 6.5 euros per visit, which is certain to become an additional factor for the deterioration of medical care –unless one can afford to pay more.

Concerning emigrants and immigrants: there is a growing tendency of emigration among both skilled and unskilled workers. The state seems to favour such a development for reasons of weakening forthcoming class struggles, that’s why it looks forward a bilateral agreement with Australia and New Zealand similar to the one it has already made with Canada. Many immigrants from Eastern Europe (Albania, Poland, Romania) working during the past years at the constructions sector, as well as many Kurds are leaving the country since they can’t find a job any more. At the same time the police is persecuting street vendors from Africa and Asia under the pretext of eliminating “illegal trade” and the centres of the cities are kept under constant surveillance, while the presence of riot cops and police squads in areas where marginalized proletarians hang around is more than evident, mainly around university buildings situated in downtown Athens where street vendors usually gather. Currently, massive arrests of immigrants without papers are being made in the central neighborhoods of Athens, while new concentration camps, where arrested immigrants are going to be held awaiting to be deported, are to open soon in regions all over Greece. To make matters worse, illegal immigration is crudely related to increased criminality rates and threats for the public health according to the overwhelming media propaganda that diverts the public discourse agenda, imposing the immigrant figure as the convenient scapegoat for all the suffering currently experienced by the Greek population. At the same time, the police doesn’t prevent fascist gangs and thugs from attacking immigrants. According to a new law introduced by the government as part of the new agreement with the troika, within the next three months all “illegal” immigrants employed at the agricultural sector or as nurses, maids and cleaners must present with their employers at the police in order to register themselves. In case they do so, the employers are exempted from all social security contributions and from all fines for hiring an “illegal” worker till the moment of his/her registration. If the “illegal” immigrant and his/her employer don’t present themselves at the police and the immigrant is arrested, the employer has no penal implications but he is not exempted from the contributions of the period before his/her arrest/registration. Within six months after his/her “registration” the immigrant must return to his/her country of origin and only in one month after his/her deportation from Greece, his/her employer can apply in order to get a one year permit for his employee.

Concerning housing and the unions: The undermining of the function of the unions is also shown by the recent closing of the Workers’ Housing Organisation (OEK) and of the Workers’ Social Fund (OEE) both supervised by the Ministry of Labour, as part of downsizing the public sector in observance of the terms set by Greece’s creditors. These two organisations were funded by workers’ and bosses’ contributions, which were recently abolished (the so-called ‘decrease of the non-wage cost’) so that the government could find an extra 300 million to finalize the deal of the new bailout package with troika. As OEK was in charge of state-subsidized housing for the poor and large families, it was estimated to have around 1 billion euros of available capital for the development of housing units across Greece. The provision of rent subsidies to 120,000 beneficiaries, the issuing of 10,000 subsidized housing loans a year and the building of more than 1,500 homes annually have come to an abrupt halt (with widespread repercussions in the construction sector and on banks that issue subsidized loans, which will further deepen the recession). However, the closing of the Workers’ Social Fund (OEE) has another effect, one on unions. Founded in 1931 by the state, OEE’s role was to manipulate and control unionism, as it would support financially and house those unions whose ‘objectives and activities were not against the Law’, as its founding law dictated. Through the contributions by workers and bosses, OEE housed labour unions of the private sector and the regional Labour Centres all over Greece and financed them (including payment for their personnel), it held a supplementary insurance fund for union cadres, it supported financially union cadres’ training by holding seminars and only later, in the 80’s onwards, it had also a welfare function (programs of subsidized tourism and kindergartens etc). Having been less and less able to perform their essential function –the bargaining of the price of the labour power and in general the reproduction of the working class as working class, as variable capital– the unions have reached a point where this inability of theirs has finally undermined their very existence. However, if it is the capitalist state that gives a decisive blow to its valuable pillars, even in a state of emergency, then it will not be left intact from such an historical change in its relationship to the unions...

Concerning the Private Sector Involvement (PSI)

The PSI bond exchange is a sovereign debt restructuring agreed on 9 March which means that Greece is under an orderly default. Despite the fact that the PSI exchange is characterized as the ‘largest ever sovereign debt restructuring’ and the exultation that accompanied its agreement,1 the real decrease of the Greek sovereign debt is actually low. Let’s see why. The debt which is held by private investors (banks, pension funds, hedge funds, individual holders) will be restructured according to the agreement (21 February 2012) between the Euro-leaders and the Institute of International Finance (IIF).2 The agreement includes a 53.5% “haircut” on the nominal value of eligible Greek bonds.3 The rest of the amount will be covered by EFSF notes (having a face amount equal to 15% of the old bonds), short term EFSF notes (to repay the interest rates of the old bonds), new government bonds (having a face amount equal to 31.5% of the old bonds and a 10 to 30-year maturity) with GDP-linked securities (e.g. the bond interest rate will proportionally increase if Greece achieves higher GDP increases than planned).

In absolute numbers the bond exchange aims to restructure approximately 197 billion euros, if the participation in the PSI reaches 95.7%.4 Therefore, the total reduction of the Greek debt due to the 53.5% haircut amounts to 105 bn euros. However, the financing of the PSI through the second Troika bail-out reduces significantly the actual amount of the restructured debt: 85.5 out of 130 bn euros of the second Troika bail-out will finance the PSI bond exchange. This amount is composed of 30 bn euros EFSF notes (also known as “PSI bond sweeteners”), 50 bn euros help to the Greek banks (also known as “recapitalization” process)5 and 5.5 bn short term EFSF notes to repay the old bond interest accrued. Therefore, the actual relief from the swap is rather small, less than 50 bn [=197-85.5-62 bn, where the 62 bn correspond to the new government bonds that replaced the 46.5% of the 197 bn bonds]. If we also take into consideration the financing of the public deficit for 2012 (more than 14 bn), the servicing of Greek sovereign bonds owned by the ECB (ca. 4.6 bn), and the new loan of the second bail-out, then the real decrease of the debt will only be ca. 30 bn (=50-14-4.6) or ca. 8% of the total debt for this year. This is why according to the European Commission the Greek debt as a GDP percentage will still be very large during 2012 (161,4% from 165,3% in 2011), rising again to 165,4% in 2013. 6

Leaving therefore aside the spectacular presentation of the sovereign debt restructuring as ‘a major national and European success’, the PSI bond exchange demands 85.5 bn euros deriving from the second Troika bail-out (130 bn euros loan) that was announced the same day (21.02.12). Ironically and in a true twisted logic the ‘success’ of the sovereign debt restructuring was presented as a precondition for this second bail-out while it was the other way round and, more importantly, both were ultimately premised on the agreement of the new internal devaluation package known as “Memorandum n.2” and the implementation of the measures it includes.

The only thing that spoilt the fun was that the Greek government had to activate the recently famous CAC’s7 in the face of the refusal of 6 out of the 14 Greek pension funds which hold government bonds and are facing imminent danger. Consequently, the bond exchange lost its “voluntary” character; ISDA characterized the Greek PSI as a “credit event” and as a result CDS were activated.8 According to some media, law firms representing bondholders (from individuals to hedge funds) intend to sue the banks and the Greek state, claiming full repayment of their holdings. At the same time, the ‘markets’ and the rating agencies treat the new Greek bonds as unsafe. It is indicative that although they are registered under the British legislation and advertised by the IIF and political officials9 , their prices fall near 15% to 20% of their nominal value, depending on the bond-contract duration.

The political conclusions are rather gloomy:

1. The PSI constitutes a decisive moment in the management of the debt crisis against the proletariat reaffirming the capitalist neoliberal strategy of money terrorism through debt. The Greek state gets even tighter tied up to the Troika’s and Eurozone’s vicious circle of new loans for the repayment of debt which lead to a deeper internal devaluation of labour and unproductive/non-competitive capital. A had been cut by 8%. Now the basic pay is cut by 22% and for those under 25 by 32%. This means that the basic pay is reduced to 480 euros or 400 euros for those under 25. The unemployment benefit is reduced to 350 euros (note that in Greece you can’t get this benefit, which is the same for every unemployed, for more than one year and you are entitled to get it only if you have worked for two consecutive years full-time before your dismissal). All existing union contracts will cease after three years at maximum and private contracts are encouraged. Wage drift is freezed until the rate of unemployment falls under 10%. Employers’ social security contribution is reduced by 3%.

Concerning the fiscal crisis of the state: in 2011 the government budget deficit has increased in absolute terms by 1.3% in comparison with 2010. The state revenues have decreased by 1.7% while the state expenses have increased by 2.8% in the same period. The decrease of state revenues is due to: a) the reduction of average wages, pensions and employment and, therefore, the reduction of the associated individual income taxes, b) the decline in the profitability of the capitalist enterprises which combined with the reduction of the profit tax rate by 1% in 2011 led to a significant reduction of the tax on profits (which will be decreased from 24% to 20% in 2012, see below), c) the lower than expected increase of revenues from indirect taxes (VAT, taxes on oil, alcohol and tobacco), despite the big increase of the tax rates, because of the reduction in consumption, d) the big increase of tax rebates instead of their initially planned decrease due to the failure of the new relevant tax regulations. The main reason behind the increase of the expenses has been the increased debt service: interest payments rose by 23.6% in comparison to 2010. On the other hand the so called “primary expenditures” have been decreased only by 1.3% in spite of the deep cuts of the wages in the public sector. This is due to the increase of the expenditure for social security, social care and social protection by 12.8%. This increase is the result of a) the increased subsidies to the pension funds which are on the verge of disaster due to the big reduction of the social security contributions caused by the big rise of unemployment, the reduction of average wages and the wide extension of part time labour contracts and b) the increased expenditure for unemployment benefits caused also by the rise of unemployment. Further, military expenditure declined by 60% while expenditure related to the “Public Investments Program” declined by 21.8%. According to EUROSTAT, the ratio of Greek government debt to GDP has risen dramatically from 113% in 2008 to 129% in 2009, to 145% in 2010 and reached 165,3% by 2011. According to the European Committee, this ratio will be decreased to 161,4% by 2012 due to the PSI implementation, before rising again to 165,3% in 2013. Then, according to EC’s “wishful thinking”, it will start to decline slowly, as the Greek GDP will be increasing to reach a bit less than 120% in 2020, namely, where it was in 2009 when the fiscal terrorism strategy was adopted for the “salvation” of the country!

Concerning taxes and profits: “Greece has been cutting the corporate tax rate over the last few years. The statutory tax rate for non-listed companies was cut from 40 % to 37.5 % in 2001 and to 35 % in 2002, followed by a cut to 29 % in 2006. It was then further reduced to 25 % in 2007. The tax reform enacted in 2008 foresaw a gradual reduction by 1 percentage point per year of the corporate income tax rate for the years between 2010 and 2014 (from 25 % to 20 %). Under the new tax law enacted in March 2011 the corporate income tax rate of 20 % shall apply to the total taxable income already from the year 2012 (for income earned in 2011), whereas a rate of 24% shall apply only for the year 2011 (for income earned in 2010).” Taxation Trends in the European Union, 2011 Edition – European Commission (available at: http://ec.europa.eu/taxtrends)

Concerning the introduction of additional taxes: due to the fact that the state is unable to increase its revenues through income and indirect taxes, new real estate taxes have been introduced with the aim to collect 2.5 billion euros more. Direct taxes are expected to contribute 22.3 billion euros to state revenues in 2012 compared to 17.8 billion euros in 2011. This they expect to achieve through the rise of the objective value (market value) of real estate property which will increase the relevant taxes by 33%. One has to keep in mind that the homeownership rate in Greece is 70%.

Concerning saving account deposits: according to a Focus Bari survey in March 2011 43% of Greek citizens do not have bank deposits at all while most of the rest use their deposits in order to survive.

Concerning poverty, medical care and suicides: in 2010 the Greek proletariat was the seventh poorest one in the EU in relative terms, with 27.7% of the population living in a household with a disposable income below the “poverty threshold” (60% of the median national disposable income). It is sure that this figure has risen since then and that a higher proportion of the proletariat is below “the poverty threshold”. The number of homeless people is approximately 20,000 (11,000 in Athens alone) having increased in the last two years by 20-25%. Most of the new cases of Greek homeless people are not related to drug addiction or mental illness as was mostly the case before 2008 but to long-term unemployment and/or house foreclosures. Suicides (both attempted and accomplished) have increased from 507 in 2009 to 622 in 2010 (+22,5%) before getting stabilized in 2011 (598 until December 2011, -3.9%). By comparing those numbers to the Greek average suicide rate (3.5 per 100,000 citizens -one of the lowest in Europe), then the increase gets much higher: +31,4% in 2009, +61,4% in 2010 and +55,7% in 2011. A few days ago hundreds of people witnessed a 77-year old pensioner shooting himself at Syntagma Sq. At his suicide note he wrote that he did not want to end up searching for his food in the trash bins. The news of this tragic event caused widespread anger. The same afternoon a few thousands of people gathered at Syntagma Sq. As a result, small scale clashes occurred with the riot police at the square and nearby streets.There is no official survey of the state of the medical system in Greece for the years 2010-2011. Some of the main changes we have experienced: since the beginning of this year, four major Health and Insurance Funds (those for civil servants/state workers, private sector workers, self-employed –both workers and small bosses– and farmers/peasants) have been unified into one, the National Organization for Healthcare Provision (EOPPY) which covers 9.5 million people. According to the regulations of this new fund, the number of doctors who are in contract with it is just 5000, which means 1 doctor for 2000 insured patients. Moreover, the maximum number of patients who are allowed to visit a doctor for free is 50 during a week and 200 during a month. After these numbers have been reached, the next patients should pay. Besides, the state compensation to doctors has fallen from 20 to 6.5 euros per visit, which is certain to become an additional factor for the deterioration of medical care –unless one can afford to pay more.

Concerning emigrants and immigrants: there is a growing tendency of emigration among both skilled and unskilled workers. The state seems to favour such a development for reasons of weakening forthcoming class struggles, that’s why it looks forward a bilateral agreement with Australia and New Zealand similar to the one it has already made with Canada. Many immigrants from Eastern Europe (Albania, Poland, Romania) working during the past years at the constructions sector, as well as many Kurds are leaving the country since they can’t find a job any more. At the same time the police is persecuting street vendors from Africa and Asia under the pretext of eliminating “illegal trade” and the centres of the cities are kept under constant surveillance, while the presence of riot cops and police squads in areas where marginalized proletarians hang around is more than evident, mainly around university buildings situated in downtown Athens where street vendors usually gather. Currently, massive arrests of immigrants without papers are being made in the central neighborhoods of Athens, while new concentration camps, where arrested immigrants are going to be held awaiting to be deported, are to open soon in regions all over Greece. To make matters worse, illegal immigration is crudely related to increased criminality rates and threats for the public health according to the overwhelming media propaganda that diverts the public discourse agenda, imposing the immigrant figure as the convenient scapegoat for all the suffering currently experienced by the Greek population. At the same time, the police doesn’t prevent fascist gangs and thugs from attacking immigrants. According to a new law introduced by the government as part of the new agreement with the troika, within the next three months all “illegal” immigrants employed at the agricultural sector or as nurses, maids and cleaners must present with their employers at the police in order to register themselves. In case they do so, the employers are exempted from all social security contributions and from all fines for hiring an “illegal” worker till the moment of his/her registration. If the “illegal” immigrant and his/her employer don’t present themselves at the police and the immigrant is arrested, the employer has no penal implications but he is not exempted from the contributions of the period before his/her arrest/registration. Within six months after his/her “registration” the immigrant must return to his/her country of origin and only in one month after his/her deportation from Greece, his/her employer can apply in order to get a one year permit for his employee.

Concerning housing and the unions: The undermining of the function of the unions is also shown by the recent closing of the Workers’ Housing Organisation (OEK) and of the Workers’ Social Fund (OEE) both supervised by the Ministry of Labour, as part of downsizing the public sector in observance of the terms set by Greece’s creditors. These two organisations were funded by workers’ and bosses’ contributions, which were recently abolished (the so-called ‘decrease of the non-wage cost’) so that the government could find an extra 300 million to finalize the deal of the new bailout package with troika. As OEK was in charge of state-subsidized housing for the poor and large families, it was estimated to have around 1 billion euros of available capital for the development of housing units across Greece. The provision of rent subsidies to 120,000 beneficiaries, the issuing of 10,000 subsidized housing loans a year and the building of more than 1,500 homes annually have come to an abrupt halt (with widespread repercussions in the construction sector and on banks that issue subsidized loans, which will further deepen the recession). However, the closing of the Workers’ Social Fund (OEE) has another effect, one on unions. Founded in 1931 by the state, OEE’s role was to manipulate and control unionism, as it would support financially and house those unions whose ‘objectives and activities were not against the Law’, as its founding law dictated. Through the contributions by workers and bosses, OEE housed labour unions of the private sector and the regional Labour Centres all over Greece and financed them (including payment for their personnel), it held a supplementary insurance fund for union cadres, it supported financially union cadres’ training by holding seminars and only later, in the 80’s onwards, it had also a welfare function (programs of subsidized tourism and kindergartens etc). Having been less and less able to perform their essential function –the bargaining of the price of the labour power and in general the reproduction of the working class as working class, as variable capital– the unions have reached a point where this inability of theirs has finally undermined their very existence. However, if it is the capitalist state that gives a decisive blow to its valuable pillars, even in a state of emergency, then it will not be left intact from such an historical change in its relationship to the unions...

Concerning the Private Sector Involvement (PSI)

The PSI bond exchange is a sovereign debt restructuring agreed on 9 March which means that Greece is under an orderly default. Despite the fact that the PSI exchange is characterized as the ‘largest ever sovereign debt restructuring’ and the exultation that accompanied its agreement,10 the real decrease of the Greek sovereign debt is actually low. Let’s see why. The debt which is held by private investors (banks, pension funds, hedge funds, individual holders) will be restructured according to the agreement (21 February 2012) between the Euro-leaders and the Institute of International Finance (IIF).11 The agreement includes a 53.5% “haircut” on the nominal value of eligible Greek bonds.12 The rest of the amount will be covered by EFSF notes (having a face amount equal to 15% of the old bonds), short term EFSF notes (to repay the interest rates of the old bonds), new government bonds (having a face amount equal to 31.5% of the old bonds and a 10 to 30-year maturity) with GDP-linked securities (e.g. the bond interest rate will proportionally increase if Greece achieves higher GDP increases than planned).

In absolute numbers the bond exchange aims to restructure approximately 197 billion euros, if the participation in the PSI reaches 95.7%.13 Therefore, the total reduction of the Greek debt due to the 53.5% haircut amounts to 105 bn euros. However, the financing of the PSI through the second Troika bail-out reduces significantly the actual amount of the restructured debt: 85.5 out of 130 bn euros of the second Troika bail-out will finance the PSI bond exchange. This amount is composed of 30 bn euros EFSF notes (also known as “PSI bond sweeteners”), 50 bn euros help to the Greek banks (also known as “recapitalization” process)14 and 5.5 bn short term EFSF notes to repay the old bond interest accrued. Therefore, the actual relief from the swap is rather small, less than 50 bn [=197-85.5-62 bn, where the 62 bn correspond to the new government bonds that replaced the 46.5% of the 197 bn bonds]. If we also take into consideration the financing of the public deficit for 2012 (more than 14 bn), the servicing of Greek sovereign bonds owned by the ECB (ca. 4.6 bn), and the new loan of the second bail-out, then the real decrease of the debt will only be ca. 30 bn (=50-14-4.6) or ca. 8% of the total debt for this year. This is why according to the European Commission the Greek debt as a GDP percentage will still be very large during 2012 (161,4% from 165,3% in 2011), rising again to 165,4% in 2013. 15

Leaving therefore aside the spectacular presentation of the sovereign debt restructuring as ‘a major national and European success’, the PSI bond exchange demands 85.5 bn euros deriving from the second Troika bail-out (130 bn euros loan) that was announced the same day (21.02.12). Ironically and in a true twisted logic the ‘success’ of the sovereign debt restructuring was presented as a precondition for this second bail-out while it was the other way round and, more importantly, both were ultimately premised on the agreement of the new internal devaluation package known as “Memorandum n.2” and the implementation of the measures it includes.

The only thing that spoilt the fun was that the Greek government had to activate the recently famous CAC’s16 in the face of the refusal of 6 out of the 14 Greek pension funds which hold government bonds and are facing imminent danger. Consequently, the bond exchange lost its “voluntary” character; ISDA characterized the Greek PSI as a “credit event” and as a result CDS were activated.17 According to some media, law firms representing bondholders (from individuals to hedge funds) intend to sue the banks and the Greek state, claiming full repayment of their holdings. At the same time, the ‘markets’ and the rating agencies treat the new Greek bonds as unsafe. It is indicative that although they are registered under the British legislation and advertised by the IIF and political officials18 , their prices fall near 15% to 20% of their nominal value, depending on the bond-contract duration.

The political conclusions are rather gloomy:

1. The PSI constitutes a decisive moment in the management of the debt crisis against the proletariat reaffirming the capitalist neoliberal strategy of money terrorism through debt. The Greek state gets even tighter tied up to the Troika’s and Eurozone’s vicious circle of new loans for the repayment of debt which lead to a deeper internal devaluation of labour and unproductive/non-competitive capital. According to the Declaration of the Eurogroup of 21 February (when the PSI was agreed), in order for the Greek state to ‘carry out fully the privatisation plans and implement the bold structural reform agenda, in both the labour market and product and service markets, in order to promote competitiveness, employment and sustainable growth[sic]’, certain preconditions were set: a) Further strengthening of the European Commission’s Task Force with a permanent presence on the ground and a stronger on-site monitoring, working in close and continuous co-operation with the Greek government in order to assist the Troika in assessing the measures taken by the Greek government, b) Establishment of a special account controlled separately from Greece’s main budget, which should, each time, contain enough money to service its debts for the next three months, c) Introduction in the Greek Constitution/legal framework of a provision ensuring that priority is granted to debt servicing payments.

Besides, the biggest part of the sovereign debt gets under the English Law which endeavors to grant a bigger protection to the creditors in case of a default, even giving them the ability to confiscate assets of the Greek state.19 Moreover, if Greece were to leave the Eurozone, it could no longer pass legislation to convert euro-denominated debt into new drachma debt.

Furthermore, except for the servicing of payments, the above procedures aim to forcibly deepen the political unification of the Eurozone, even if their outcome could equally be its disintegration. This has given rise to a political turmoil over the last year in Greece:20 the formation of a “National Salvation” government with a technocrat prime minister; the unofficial, yet substantial, declaration of a “status of emergency”; the splits of political parties and the creation of new ones; the oncoming national elections through which the ruling fraction of capital tries to establish itself and respond to the social discontent and the political turmoil; the strengthening of left and right nationalist tendencies both on the political and on the social level.

2. The currently main holder of the Greek public debt is the Official Sector,21 the Euro-area one (ECB, NCBs) and the IMF, if we add together the two bail-out packages and liquidity with which the ECB has supported Greek banks, with the private sector now declining to almost one third. Through the PSI, therefore, the leading fraction of the European bourgeoisie has managed to destroy ‘orderly’ a large part of financial capital already devalorized, freeing thus mainly banks from the burden of toxic debt and transferring it to ECB and NCBs and through it to the “European taxpayers” (that is, mainly to the European proletariat and petty bourgeoisie). As Greece is used as a laboratory of fiscal terrorism, the rest of the European proletariat is soon to follow. Besides, such relations of debtor-creditor ‘partners’ in the EU leaves a lot of ground for the political management of the already rising nationalism among European proletarians.

3. The assault on the Greek and immigrant proletarians seems to have no end. As already mentioned, the PSI scheme is greatly connected to the implementation of the new internal devaluation package (“Memorandum n.2”). If the progress of the latter is not the expected one, then no money from the “rescue plan” will be deposited to the special account serving the Greek debt, while the Greek government will have to fund it by itself (eg. tax money). The European Committee has already suggested that new austerity measures accounting to more than 11 bn have to be applied within the next two years22 , mainly targeting on further cuts on pensions, unemployment benefits, minimum wages, social spending related to the national health system, etc. Massive lay-offs from the public sector (15,000 during 2012 and 150,000 by 2015) are on the plan too. It seems highly probable that the revenues from this new attack will be channeled to make-up for the losses of the Greek pension funds (roughly estimated to 11 bn) due to the implementation of the PSI “rescue plan”.23

Class struggles in a war-like situation

As general strikes have had less and less participation after 2010 at both private and public sector and precisely because of their total failure to halt the wave of institutional measures which has been imposing an unprecedented depreciation of labour power, struggles emerged on the terrain of the implementation of this devastating attack, that is the separate workplaces at both public and private sector.

*

The ‘sovereign debt crisis’ attack unsurprisingly found its immediate target at the public sector. Therefore, the workers at this sector were the first who responded against the wage cuts, the huge slashes in public spending, the dismantling of services and the dissolution of a vast amount of state entities.

Apart from strikes and demos which escalated last October, a wave of sit-in protests at town halls, ministries and public service offices by civil servants in Athens and around the country marked an unusual upgrading of struggle for this particular sector. Workers sealed off the entrance to the social security informatics directorate, as well as the entrance to the housing, interior and development ministries and to the pensions directorate of the General State Accounts Office. These militant practices, which blocked at least temporarily the ‘labour reserve’ plans of the government (whereby 30,000 civil servants were supposed effectively to lose their jobs within months) signalled the awakening of the majority of the chronically lethargic civil servants whose very existence, according to the state propaganda, now constitutes the main ‘structural problem’ of the country.

Municipal workers nationwide occupied local government offices and refuse collectors were on a ten- day protest that included a blockade of the capital’s main landfill site in northwest Athens. The municipalities undergo drastic cuts at the moment, as some of their services (starting with cleaning services) will get privatized and a part of their personnel is going to be dismissed.

On October 12, members of the GENOP union began an occupation of the printing offices of the Public Power Corporation (DEI). As part of new property tax legislation, the DEI billing department was to send homeowners bills for increased property taxes as part of their electricity bills. Although not devoid of populism -they claimed they would not cut off electricity only of those who live in abject poverty, thus undermining the aggressive character of the movement against taxes- and a macho bravado, those unionists’ action slowed down the whole process.

Capitalist crisis proves to be particularly unhealthy for proletarians as the severe cuts in all kinds of health services show: there were about 40% cuts in hospital budgets, understaffing, reported occasional shortage of medical supplies, merges or even closures of hospitals as well as mental institutions and rehabilitation centres. Health workers have responded by continuous strikes or even occupations of the Health Ministry with the last one having lasted for 15 days. An interesting struggle took place in the General Hospital of Kilkis, a town in northern Greece, for some weeks. The general assembly of all health workers (doctors included) decided to occupy the premises and started the retention of work, serving only emergencies until the complete payment for the hours worked, and the rise of their income to the levels it was before the arrival of the troika (EU-ECB-IMF), as they say. They also provided free healthcare declaring that the long-lasting problems of the National Health System (ESY) in the country cannot be solved through limited claims of the health services sector and thus they placed their special interests inside a general framework of political and economic demands against the brutal capitalist attack asking for solidarity from everybody. Though the occupation is over, the unpaid health workers continue the retention of work.

*

A series of defensive and sectional struggles at workplaces at the private sector revealed that the Greek industrial capital has already taken advantage of the new institutional framework of the ‘state of emergency’ now ruling in Greece to prop up its profitability or just transfer its own debts and losses onto the workers.

The basic demands around which these struggles evolved were mainly against lay offs, factory closures, removal of machinery and commodities’ stock by the bosses, for due payment and defense of existing labour contracts. Over several months last year numerous struggles appeared of a similar trend. In a steel factory in Volos 100 workers were on strike for a month against its closure and lay offs. In an aluminium factory in a western suburb of Athens, workers were on strike demanding payment due for over a year. Similar strikes with the same demands took place in two other aluminium factories in the same area.

Two milk factories in Attiki and Larissa correspondingly were the terrain of some victories: after just one-day strike in Agno milk factory against lay offs and clashes with the riot cops, the workers got back to their jobs. In Larissa the strike made the bosses revoke both the lay offs and the wage cuts. In a pharmaceutical factory in Northern Attiki the 330 workers’ struggle was focused on demanding wages due (they had not been paid for months) and rejecting the imposition of intermittent work (once a week). There were also clashes with the riot police when the bosses tried to remove commodities of thousands euros value out of the factory.

The 400 steel workers’ strike at Elliniki Chalivourgia (over 150 strike days) in West Attiki started as a response to 50 lay offs after the bosses’ blackmail to change the labour contract (5 hours a day for a 50% wage cut) had been rejected. The same company owns another factory in Volos, of a smaller productive capacity and with 360 workers who, acting as scabs, work 8 hours a day temporarily to make up for the production of the factory on strike, although, according to the bosses’ plan, their labour contract has changed, too.

It is a struggle ‘adopted’ by PAME through the control of its union. According to the initial strategy, the struggle was presented as having emblematic dimensions for the working class in general, with its possible victory being symbolically a ‘victory for all’ and conversely, its defeat a ‘defeat for all’. What helped build this emblematic character -apart from PAME’s activities and aspirations- was not only the unusually long duration of this struggle but also the unexpected solidarity shown by all political milieus, base unions, neighbourhood assemblies, the workers’ own community or just ordinary people (a solidarity, however, mainly confined to financial support). As time went by and the bosses seemed intransigent, the limits of the stalinists’ tactics imposed on the struggle became obvious: the strike remained stagnant without any prospect either from within –it is indicative of the Stalinist lawfulness that the strikers do not dare to even call their struggle ‘occupation’, let alone seize the means of production for whatever purpose...– or from without. Some solidarity actions were met with reserve and even hostility by the union: ‘All those who believed that they would keep our struggle away from other factories or companies, that they would turn us against the organized class movement, PAME, where we belong and which supports us, now that they failed, they will intervene more openly. They will attack us with slander, lies, terrorism and provocations, in order to weaken our struggle. They have already started doing so in various ways so far. In press announcements, through various events under the pretext of solidarity...’, (from Sifonios’ speech, the head of the union, on January 17, at the strike demo of PAME). In this way political opponents of KKE were held at bay while on this very day (17/1) of an Attiki-wide strike declared by Attiki Labour Centres, the strikers of Elliniki Chalivourgia chose to follow PAME strolling down to the Ministry of Labour leaving all other solidarity strikers take the usual route to Syntagma square. Instead of an ‘escalation’ of the struggle, the strike actually was used by the KKE as another opportunity for its electoral campaign: ‘No dialogue-No retreat-the plutocracy should pay for the crisis-Down with the government of predatory taxes-Elections now-All join the strike on 17/1 and PAME’s demo’, as the announcement of PAME ended.

The use of the steelworkers’ strike as a tool for promoting the stalinist party’s general political line, does leave room for some opportunistic maneuver though, as the recent (17/2) warm welcome to the neo-nazi Golden Dawn ‘solidarity delegates’ in the factory by the head of the union showed. Whether

the steelworkers are heading for a double defeat –both by the bosses and the stalinists who manipulate a workers’ struggle subordinating it to their political games– or not is a bet that a lot would not like to make...

Mass media were hard hit by the recession: the huge cuts in state subsidies and private money injections led to massive lay offs in newspapers and TV stations. At ‘Eleftherotypia’, a newspaper identified with the ‘rebirth’ of democracy after the fall of the dictatorship and of a prestige equivalent to the French ‘Liberation’, journalists, administrative personnel and printers went on strike when it became known that the boss intended to file for protection from its creditors under Article 99 of the Bankruptcy Code. The boss claimed credit problems and left the workers unpaid since summer while giving shares to shareholders the previous years. Before December, there had been a series of strikes without any effect and after it the workers published two issues of the paper with the support of the journalists’ union, without however having any definite prospects ahead.

‘Communist’ bosses have been hit by the recession, too. Since December 2010 the administration of the KKE-owned 902 FM radio station /902 TV had started firing non-party member workers without previous notice. What’s worse, when some workers started organizing against the firings, they faced the party’s divide-and-rule tactics pitting them against the party members. Just recently, KKE’s press company, Typoekdotiki, a giant printing company in Greece, which was facing potential closure, filed for protection from its creditors under Article 99 of the Bankruptcy Code. The Code stipulates that employees and other interested parties cannot request or seize assets of a company in trouble until a recovery program is applied and until it gets clear whether the company will continue to exist or will be liquidated. However, it was PAME that condemned such practices of the bosses just almost a year ago. Here is an extract from their daily newspaper, Rizospastis (10-11-2010): ‘The only ones who gain [from the application of this Code] are the employers, since they get rid of those they are indebted to, both suppliers and workers (namely the workers are regarded to be suppliers), safeguarding employers so that they proceed to default on payment to all. Workers lose everything, wages, redundancy payment, insurance money, eligibility for unemployment benefits, while they are blackmailed by employers to leave, taking half the redundancy pay or by being imposed to shiftwork or part-time employment so that the company’s profits can be saved’. So much for workers’ rights and ‘socialized’ means of production, as KKE’s political programme emphasizes!

At a TV station called Alter, its 620 unpaid for months workers proceeded to work retention, brought transmission to a halt and with interventions at the TV frequency in the occupied TV station they presented mainly struggles at various workplaces. This struggle, we must note, is also largely controlled by PAME.

Certain other strikes were effective enough at least in blocking attacks on wage and labour relations: at Vodafone mobile-phone company, the few days’ strike resulted in preventing the change of labour contracts (less hours for less wages). At Notos department chain stores, a 24-hour strike and strike pickets were enough reasons for the bosses to withdraw a new labour contract (less hours for less wages) at least for the moment.

Struggles over wages due are quite often the case in the tertiary sector, too. Hotel workers were on strike in Northern Greece demanding wages due for months and mainly young and unemployed people who took part in the National Census managed to get their wages after a 6-month delay and after self- organized mobilizations (since there was no union for them).

*

Apart from workplace struggles and because of the head-on attack on both the production and reproduction spheres, new forms of struggle have flourished mostly organized in neighbourhood assemblies.

These ‘popular assemblies’,24 as most of them are called, have proliferated (over 40 only in Attiki) after the repression and exhaustion of the mobilizations at Syntagma square last August. They attract a growing number of disappointed, conservative voters of the two big (which is highly questionable now, as their legitimacy is fast diminishing) parties, leftists of all kinds, anti-authoritarians and quite ordinary workers or unemployed who are not acquainted with any political procedures and usually frequent the assemblies in the beginning of certain struggles to abandon them later and thus delegate powers to the militants. Such struggle is the one against a new property tax integrated within the electricity bill which just shows the emergency nature of the capitalist attack we undergo. For a combination of reasons (the struggle is an opposition to the blackmail with the electricity, it expresses certain legal claims of unconstitutionality and it’s a privileged ground for a collective refusal of payments from below), it soon took on the characteristics of a country-wide movement, mainly through neighbourhood assemblies. It is estimated, according to data by the GENOP union (of the Public Power Corporation), that around 30-40% of the households have not paid this particular tax. Faced with this mass indiscipline, the state seemingly retreated while it made a manoeuvre subsuming the tax under the responsibility of the Tax Office and thus it hopes to weaken the movement dispersing it into isolated, fragmented tax-payers. At the moment, they are cutting off electricity at small enterprises or professionals who have not paid the tax and at households that are in arrears with electricity bills for over four months. Moreover, as a response to the movement, the Ministry of Finance is claiming to have purloined money paid for the electricity and channeled it into the payment of the tax instead, which will be a new terrain of struggle.

The responses to the crisis are however varying and not necessarily of an antagonistic character. There has been a growing tendency –mainly within neighbourhood assemblies or ‘citizens’ networks’– of promoting projects of co-operative commodities exchange (usually without the intermediary sellers), service exchange, soup kitchens, self-sustained farming or even local social programmes for unemployed in an era when the welfare state is disintegrating and the social wage is under attack.25 It seems that this self-managed austerity strategy’s boundaries with charities flourishing now in Greece and led by the Church, NGO’s and various well-known capitalists are somehow blurred. This movement will have a long way to go at the expense of a more radical and aggressive class one.

A short volcanic eruption in the heart of a prolonged winter

[h5]A brief description of the events of February 12, 2012[/h5]

[right]
We didn’t die when we were starving for affection.
We won’t die a hungry dog’s death now,
you bloody bastards!

From a wall in Athens
[/right]

February, 12 can be considered as a massive proletarian eruption which was simmering for months now in a prolonged “state of emergency” and found a violent outlet against an equally violent capitalist shock policy. It was a temporary social explosion that took place during a day on which the majority of the parliament voted for a new “Memorandum of Agreement” between the Greek state and ECB, EC and IMF. The new Memorandum deepens the politics of devaluation and the fiscal discipline in both the public and the private sector, serving as a necessary condition for a new loan 26 and the PSI bond exchange.

The destructive burst of proletarian rage which took place that Sunday followed a rather disappointing, both in terms of participation and effectiveness, 48-hour general strike called by GSEE and ADEDY 27 . It becomes thus more and more obvious that general strikes, let alone the fetishistic call (propagated monotonously mostly by leftist organizations) for a “political general indefinite strike”, have become quite unpopular to the majority of workers. Of course, since the evacuation of the Syntagma square occupation (during last summer) till now, a series of struggles and sociopolitical events has taken place, but they never expressed such a dynamic and practical confrontation with capital and its state on the street level, as on that day, even if its duration was short.

The generalized riots declared a material negation of the present policy followed by the Greek capital, its state and its EU partners. Despite the fact that they didn’t manage to cancel the voting of the “Memorandum no 2” (this could only happen by invading the parliament), 28 they sent a message of insubordination. Of course, this message is not clear as it reflects the multiplicity of motives and political tendencies of those that participated. The riots involved massive demonstrations, long and harsh confrontations with the police forces, extended destructions of fixed and circulating capital (looting and burning of banks, cinemas, commercial shops, pawnshops) as well as offices of MP’s and police stations, mostly in Athens, but also in other major cities of Greece, too. 29 Many public buildings (ministries, town halls, public service offices) were occupied before and during that day. At least 200-250 thousand people 30 joined the events, in one way or another, in Athens. Many people were injured by the police forces. We will stick to Athens because this is where we witnessed some of the almost chaotic events.

Concerning the political and social composition of the demonstrators we can say, without exaggeration, that almost all the political milieus (anarchist-antiauthoritarian, parliamentary and non-parliamentary left parties and organizations as well as nationalists of all kinds) were there, a large number of organized football fans and many (first and second generation) immigrants mostly from Albania, East Europe, Middle East and North Africa. There were calls from the majority of unions, base-unions, and numerous neighbourhood assemblies. Although the huge crowd was predominantly proletarian, one cannot deny that a significant part of the petit-bourgeoisie was there too, as in all violent demonstrations and mobilizations since the outbreak of the capitalist attack under the name of “debt crisis” two years ago. The age range covered three generations: from school students to pensioners. 31

Despite the fact that all the calls for the mobilization at Syntagma square were for 17:00 and 18:00, 1,000-1,500 people had occupied Amalias St. (the road in front of the parliament’s building) already by 16:00. 32 It was in this street where the cops immediately and without any excuse started their effort to disperse the crowd by using pepper spray and flash-bang grenades. Then the clashes began... The arrival of a black-block at that time, was met with applause by other demonstrators, according to many witnesses.

The riot police used tons of tear gas in order to make the demonstrators leave the Syntagma square. We have to say that there were many people (including some of us) that didn’t manage to approach Syntagma. Most of the streets that converge to Syntagma Square were transformed into battlefields. Contrary to the divide-and-rule police tactics during the first day of the general strike, when the riot cops tried to attack and isolate only the “trouble makers”, on Sunday they aimed primarily at driving all the demonstrators away from Syntagma square: the crowd should not have remained as a unified body in that place and thus jeopardize in whatever possible way the voting process.33 Besides, there was a need for the state for a spectacular management of the situation so that an empty square would symbolize the victory of the dominant capitalist policy in the repeated dilemma between “memorandum or default”. However, crowd dispersal was not an easy task. Barricades, molotov cocktails, a rain of smashed marbles and even close combats for 6-7 hours resulted in an atmosphere saturated by chemical gasses and fires in the centre of Athens from 19:00 until midnight. The police had also to deal with thousands of demonstrators who although not actively participating in the clashes, lootings or burning were equally angry, persistent and determined to remain in the streets, supporting in various ways the most violent ones. Anti-cops slogans were constantly heard ranging from “Pigs, killers” to even “Traitors” (!) or “Albanians” (!) accompanying the back and forth movement of the crowds and also revealing both the increasing delegitimization of the state as embodied in its repressive mechanism and the mystified in nationalistic terms reading of the devastating class attack as “treason”. However, it is noteworthy, at least in comparison to the violent clashes around Syntagma square in October that not only fear was in general absent but also hostile behaviour by significant parts of the demonstrators against the most violent ones (such a behaviour was confined only to certain leftists).

The extended destructions, burning and looting took place wherever the police was absent or where they could not intervene because of the barricades and the clashes. Thousands of people participated in these events and there was a festive atmosphere. People were applauding and cheering when banks were violated, smashed and set on fire. Many people young and old found opportunities to loot stores with clothes, shoes, optics, mobiles etc. 34 Constant and spontaneous collaboration and solidarity among demonstrators was an important reason for the duration of the riots.

Finally, around 1:00 in the night, the police managed to prevail and disperse the demonstrators. About that time some of us made a stroll in the center, where thousands of policemen blocked the routes to Syntagma and the parliament and a lot of firemen worked to extinguish the fires. Few people in small groups stayed around the square and a few hundreds were still in front of the parliament shouting slogans.

As Athens was set ablaze, the leaders of all the political parties, obviously scared by the ferocity of the riots and the response of the crowd, condemned the riotous proletarians in the name of a “peaceful and justified protest”, trying more and more hopelessly to create false divisions among the demonstrators. Needless to say, it is the very capitalist management of the crisis (to which some of them are supposedly opposed) that is wiping them out quicker than their commodity temples are burned down.

The fierce witch-hunt, both in repressive and ideological terms, which was enacted by the state on the very next day of the riots shows that no questioning of the dominant capitalist policy can be allowed, especially when it gets so generalized and threatening.

The police published photos of the persons who where detained on Sunday, 12 and also 23 photos which picture people in action (during that day) asking the public for information. This was a material expression of A. Samaras’s statement (president of the conservative party): “I will take off the hoods of those scum who destroyed the city”, an instant of intensified repression. Also, police presence was increased in Athens the following days, as was the presence of fire brigades in various main streets. A week after Sunday, 12 a small (around 3,000-4,000) and non-violent protest in the Syntagma square, called by unions controlled by Syriza and other leftist organizations, resulted in 6 arrests and 135 detentions!

The next day saw also a series of short occupations of public buildings in Athens and other cities and a wave of international solidarity in other countries which is a first sign of the validity of the characterization of Greece now as a laboratory of a war-like capitalist strategy at least for certain parts in Europe.

The extremely volatile and explosive situation does not allow any safe conclusions for the time being since the inability of the proletarian struggles to have any real and persistent effects (in the production and reproduction spheres of the capitalist totality) is accompanied by a deep, generalized and amorphous despair and anger precipitated also by the destruction of any safety valves for their containment. 35 Therefore, the widespread prospect of a rather prolonged dead-end period looming ahead could be easily reversed by a social explosion that will change more deeply the balance of forces.

TPTG

April 2012

• 1See for example the triumphant but touching at the same time announcement of the Greek technocrat Prime Minister, Papademos: ‘With the completion of the biggest debt restructuring that has ever taken place, a window of opportunities and hope opens for Greece. It is a considerable, I would say historic, success, that became possible with the systematic, coordinated and tough efforts of many. With the help of our partners, with the sacrifices of the Greek people and the cooperation of the political forces that support the government, we achieved a very difficult task’. To enjoy the full announcement, see http://www.emg.rs/en/news/region/176168.html
• 2 Check here for the members of IIF: http://www.iif.com/membership/members/
• 3Due to the lower interest rates of the new government bonds and their prolonged maturity the real loss for the bondholders reaches approximately 75% of the net present value. However, we must note that some hedge funds have bought big amounts of Greek bonds at very low prices, well below 46,5% of their nominal price, at the secondary bond market, bonds that were additionally secured by means of CDS. Thus those funds can now profit due to both the low prices they bought and the securities that were triggered by the haircut.
• 4Note that the total amount of the Greek public debt is approximately 366 billion euros.
• 5The Greek banks will receive 50 bn euros for their recapitalization after taking haircut losses on their Greek bond portfolio (42 bn euros) of no more than 23 bn euros...
• 6After all, the nominal reduction of the Greek debt due to the haircut is 105 bn, while the second bail-out loan is bigger by 25 bn...
• 7Collective Action Clauses allows a supermajority of bondholders to agree to a debt restructuring that is legally binding on all holders of the bond, including those who vote against the restructuring (wikipedia).
• 8http://www2.isda.org/news/isda-emea-determinations-committee-restructuring-credit-event-has-occurred-with-respect-to-the-hellenic-republic
• 9The Greek minister of Economy, E. Venizelos, advertised the PSI exchange as “a smart and profitable choice”, a “success story”.
• 10See for example the triumphant but touching at the same time announcement of the Greek technocrat Prime Minister, Papademos: ‘With the completion of the biggest debt restructuring that has ever taken place, a window of opportunities and hope opens for Greece. It is a considerable, I would say historic, success, that became possible with the systematic, coordinated and tough efforts of many. With the help of our partners, with the sacrifices of the Greek people and the cooperation of the political forces that support the government, we achieved a very difficult task’. To enjoy the full announcement, see http://www.emg.rs/en/news/region/176168.html
• 11 Check here for the members of IIF: http://www.iif.com/membership/members/
• 12Due to the lower interest rates of the new government bonds and their prolonged maturity the real loss for the bondholders reaches approximately 75% of the net present value. However, we must note that some hedge funds have bought big amounts of Greek bonds at very low prices, well below 46,5% of their nominal price, at the secondary bond market, bonds that were additionally secured by means of CDS. Thus those funds can now profit due to both the low prices they bought and the securities that were triggered by the haircut.
• 13Note that the total amount of the Greek public debt is approximately 366 billion euros.
• 14The Greek banks will receive 50 bn euros for their recapitalization after taking haircut losses on their Greek bond portfolio (42 bn euros) of no more than 23 bn euros...
• 15After all, the nominal reduction of the Greek debt due to the haircut is 105 bn, while the second bail-out loan is bigger by 25 bn...
• 16Collective Action Clauses allows a supermajority of bondholders to agree to a debt restructuring that is legally binding on all holders of the bond, including those who vote against the restructuring (wikipedia).
• 17http://www2.isda.org/news/isda-emea-determinations-committee-restructuring-credit-event-has-occurred-with-respect-to-the-hellenic-republic
• 18The Greek minister of Economy, E. Venizelos, advertised the PSI exchange as “a smart and profitable choice”, a “success story”.
• 19It’s hard not to bring to mind what Marx had written on the national debt: ‘The national debt, i.e. the alienation by sale of the state... marked the capitalist era with its stamp. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is the national debt’. Capital, vol. 1, p. 919.
• 20Similar changes we can trace in Italy.
• 21During the last two years the ECB has been buying a large amount of “junk” bonds (not only Greek ones) in order to provide banks with liquidity and ameliorate the private losses from the debt restructuring. This means that the exposure of ECB at problems of servicing the debt has increased.
• 22IMF in its last report on Greece talks about 14 bn!
• 23One should note that all the money that the pension, hospital or university funds had deposited on the National Bank of Greece were invested by the NBG management on Greek bonds, without the funds’ knowledge or consensus, even a few days before the PSI implementation, resulting in huge losses for the funds as the bonds were bought at the nominal and not at the market price.
• 24Some of them pre-existed the Syntagma square occupation.
• 25Particularly for SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Left), such initiatives are promoted under the slogan “No one on their own to face the consequences of the crisis” as a project of an informal welfare state. It may seem similar to alternative self-managed schemes but it is basically the Left programme for a social-democratic welfare state.
• 26130 billion euros for the years 2012-2014. The first “Memorandum” was accompanied with a loan of 110 billion euros (2010-2012).
• 27The umbrella union organizations of private and public sector respectively.
• 28There have been multiple efforts to invade the parliament since 2010. All of them were blocked by police forces.
• 29In for example, a city in central Greece, a riot in a juvenile penitentiary broke out.
• 30According to other estimations, the number of demonstrators reached 500,000.
• 31According to the police there were 79 arrests (53 Greeks and 26 foreigners). There were also 92 (68 Greeks and 24 foreigners). Foreigners were from Albania, Algeria, Tunisia, Romania, Pakistan, Poland, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq.
• 32Interestingly, this time the members of the stalinist KKE were prudent enough to keep themselves away from Syntagma square in heavily self-guarded blocks in safe places (like Omonia square or elsewhere, too), chanting slogans to themselves alien to whatever was happening next to them. KKE made its demo and when, after hours of clashes, the police managed to push the masses of protestors to Omonia, they left the place.
• 33For an analysis of the divide-and-rule police tactics, see our two Open Letters, http://www.tapaidiatisgalarias.org/?page_id=105
• 34Few ATM’s were emptied.
• 35Quite indicative of both the depth of the volatile nature of the proletarian response and the slow reflexes in suchcritical times of its most organized part (including the antiauthoritarian milieu) was the outcome of a big gathering of all the neighbourhood assemblies (about 42, only in Attika) on the very eve of the voting of the new Memorandum: the delegates agreed to meet after a month and a half later (!) without taking any practical initiatives regarding the next day even though the majority of them were among those who took part in the generalized riots the following day! On the other hand, we have to recognize that the role of organized anarchist/antiauthoritarian groups and also of football fans was important for the continuation of street fighting.

Geographical and Historical Background

In this text, we will deal only with the struggles which have unfolded since the first big strike wave in 2006. We don’t think it necessary to dwell on the very troubled historical past of this country, a past which goes back much farther than the recent colonial wars and French colonization itself, to the conflict-ridden domination by powerful neighbors (above all China), although this past has influenced and continues to influence recent social and political events.1

On the other hand, we feel it essential to remind the reader of a few basic geographical, economic and social realities which still condition the political orientations, most often beyond whatever the current political system happens to be. The relatively recent political unity of Vietnam is a poor reflection of its political vicissitudes, shaped to a great extent by its varied terrains and the living conditions flowing from them. The 330,000 square kilometers (three-fifths the size of France) inhabited by 90 million people (one and a half times the French population with a density six times higher than the world average), unequally distributed between two poles (the Mekong Delta for Cochinchina and the Red River for Tonkin), separated by roughly 1,500 kilometers of a narrow coastal mountain range where a third pole, Annam, developed. Two-thirds of the territory, therefore, is formed by mountains and high plateaus. The whole history of Vietnam up to the present is bound up with these disparities, which led to integrations and disintegrations with neighboring countries.

The Meaning of the “Independence” Won Militarily in 1975: The Failure of State Capitalism as an Ideology in its Pure, Hard Form

The present economic development of Vietnam, once the reconstruction period at the end of the American occupation was over, can be seen in parallel to that of China, once things are kept in proportion. The occupation of Saigon by the Viet Cong in April 1975 put an end to a long period of warfare but left the country completely ruined and drained, to be rebuilt from an unprecedented level of destruction affecting material conditions, nature and people with short and long-term consequences.2 Nearly thirty years were necessary to overcome this economic handicap, one made even worse by the collapse of the Soviet system and by the autarchy of a strict state capitalism dominated by a very large, totalitarian, corrupt and often incompetent bureaucracy.

The problem posed in 1975, when the victorious Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army took over the whole country, was the survival of a state and political system of an essentially agrarian country (in 2003, in an industrial capitalist world, 68 percent of the Vietnamese population still lived off of agriculture) which for all its diverse natural wealth, cannot survive without interacting with the capitalist world, and without submitting to its laws.

To understand the terms of this necessary economic reorganization, we must emphasize that these peasants, who were the great majority and thus the social base of a political regime established by force of arms, had massively contributed to the successes of the wars against the French and later the Americans but who had, by the same token, borne the brunt of the war (from its military demands to the impact of defoliants). Their commitment and their sufferings were the counterpart of their hopes for a new world: for the peasants, this new world meant the recovery of the land and the chance to till it as they wished, in order to feed themselves and to perhaps, one day, to expand their activities.

The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) at this time mainly lacked any theoretical or precise vision of how to organization rural production while still winning the support of the peasants. The party’s vision was one of total planning of the economy, one whose bureaucratic dimension was supposed to give (or impose upon, if necessary) the peasants a “socialist or—if one prefers—communist” knowledge which they did not have from their earlier evolution in a “capitalist world.” This was a first phase, one necessary to win peasant support in the period when the expanding power of the nationalist struggle was based on the seizure and redistribution of land on an egalitarian basis (or one presumed to be such). But this was in fact only a political strategy, one rapidly replaced, in the framework of the planned economy, by a collectivization of agriculture (the land being in any case state property), a copy on a small scale of what had been done previously in the USSR and of what was then underway in China.

The goal of this collectivization was to have an agriculture providing not merely for the needs of the entire population, but also for it to be an important pawn in the necessary international exchanges. We won’t linger over the details of the collectivization, imposed in 1978, but its result was catastrophic in terms of agricultural production, to the point that Vietnam in 1980, two years later (given the importance of the peasantry), continued to be an importer of basic foodstuffs. This was due to the fact, as everywhere else where forced collectivizations took place, the peasants saw no reason to produce anything above and beyond their own consumption. Further, in the advisory and control structures, experienced local leaders had been replaced by incompetent (and often corrupt) bureaucrats who were being repaid for their loyalty to the party and for their military actions in the “liberation war.”

“Market Socialism” under the Dictatorship of the VCP: the Opening to World Capital and the Mutation of the Ruling Class

The VCP needed to find a solution that fit into the overall program of necessary economic development, which implied the social control of an excess peasant population. Beginning in 1981, and until 1988, the collectives were dismantled; land remained state property but its distribution, through local cooperatives, was finally given to the peasants with usage rights (which could be passed on to others) of 50 years. Similarly, in 1986, a more thoroughgoing measure authorized the creation of private enterprises, most importantly in agriculture.

This turn did not, however, attenuate the control of the VCP over the use of land, or the impact on agricultural production of a melange of local privileges, corruption, subsidies and speculation. From 1990 to 1999, industrialized farming increased by 64 percent for annual rotations, and by 91 percent for non-annual rotations (including an increase in fruit production by 80 percent) whereas the sector producing locally consumed food increased only 30 percent, as did stock breeding. While there was an extension of plantations (coffee, tea, etc.), setting off conflicts involving speculative hoarding (supported by corruption) with the peasants, most notably in mountainous regions, on the other hand, in the areas close to cities, in 2002, the average size of agricultural plots was 0.7 hectares, and 0.3 hectares in the Red River delta in Tonkin,3 and 19 percent of the rural population was made up of “landless peasants.”

Even as it attempts to influence agricultural practices and to fit them into the industrial development plan, the VCP is attempting to tread carefully with the rural population, which makes basic land use problems very complex, caught as they are between regulations and local speculative or custom-driven realities. At the end of 2010, a study on “Land Reform in Vietnam” emphasized: “The situation of rural households is, on one hand, extremely unequal according to the region, and there are cases where the modalities of access to agricultural and forest lands are designed to effectively protect such households, especially the most fragile among them.”4 Recent events, and particularly the world food crisis, reminded Vietnam that the agrarian and peasant questions were not yet solved, and put the rural land question back at the top of the agenda. Responding to this crisis (and a considerable increase in the price of rice) the government decided to freeze the status of more than a million hectares of rice paddies and started a campaign (the “three nong”) whose objective was to rebalance the rural and urban worlds.5

Despite these flip-flops, we might say that on the whole, the peasants did respond to reforms which gave them more control over the land and more power to decide what to do with it. In 2010, Vietnam was not only agriculturally self-sufficient but had become an exporter: it was the fifth largest producer and the second largest exporter of rice; it was the second largest exporter of coffee; the fifth largest exporter of tea; and it had achieved a respectable ranking in other products: cashew nuts, rubber, and in hydroponic production. But, even though it employed the majority of the population and remained an essential factor, the agricultural sector’s share of the total product declined relative to (most importantly) industrial development from 25 percent of GDP in 2000, it represented only 20 percent in 2010 whereas industry had grown from 36 percent to 40 percent; this is, moreover, quite relative, since GDP had tripled between 2002 and 2010.

With these overall figures, it is difficult to get a sense of the general living standards of the peasantry, which is still by far the majority of the population. The small plots under cultivation, as well as variations in climate, in the price of fertilizers and of marketable products all mean that many peasants, even those with land, often live in poverty. We can find some indications in the marginal elements clearly in poor and precarious situations. The roughly 19 percent of the population who are landless peasants (at least 10 million people) live for all intents and purposes in the same conditions as the European agricultural workers of a century ago. One illuminating detail: in April 2008, when the absorption of these poor peasants by industrial development was already well underway, the VCP was worried about the theft of rice in “wildcat” nighttime harvests. The party passed legislation stipulating severe punishment for this kind of theft and outlawing all nighttime use of any implement or vehicle used in the rice harvest. At the same time, peasants were required to post armed guards in their fields night and day.

This pressure on the poor peasants to merely survive is further increased by demographic pressure (an increase in the birth rate but also in life expectancy, now reaching the level of the industrialized countries). Something that might be seen as positive brings with it a risk of social destabilization; the VCP is sufficiently aware of this to adopt a policy of restricting births to two children per couple.6 Overall, we see a combination of factors which, from the necessity of economic development to the maintenance of social peace, by way of the level of poverty and self-sufficiency in food, both compels and allows the VCP to promote industrial development by the entry of foreign capitals, with its competitive advantage of cheap labor power.

The “Doi Moi” (Renewal) policy was developed in 1986. It can be briefly defined: enterprise reform aimed at integrating the country into the world economy, by introducing methods and capitalist relations into a modification of the political apparatus of the party-state. This results in a dynamic of political and economic polarization, pushing the sphere of state power to appropriate for itself the benefits of the economic opening by the creation of increasingly Mafia-like networks. Generalized corruption transforms the party from a structure of domination into an access route to resources and a locus for the concentration of goods. Ideology itself has evolved considerably: personal enrichment is hailed as a contribution to national development, young business men are decorated with the “red star,” and the new millionaires (in dongs) are edified as heroes of the “renewal.”

Formation and Development of a Proletariat: The Sale of the National Work Force on the International Market Underwritten by the Dictatorship of the VCP

Nearly 20 years, however, were necessary before this reform allowed the VCP, in 2007, to request membership in the WTO, i.e., before it was able to open up, without too many risks, to a competitive penetration of the national economy by international trade. Only in 1991 was the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) authorized, allowing foreign capital to benefit not merely from facilities in place and financial and fiscal advantages, but also from conditions for the exploitation of the work force that were particularly enticing for the capital invested. These SEZs are unevenly distributed and will be concentrated in the most populated regions of Tonkin in the north and Cochinchina in the south.7 At first, these investments were not particularly important; as one official put it “One sewing machine, one brush to spread glue on a shoe sole, and we have created a job.” At the beginning of the 2000s, the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce advertised its work force on the international market in these terms: “One of our advantages over Indonesia is that the Vietnamese work force is not inclined to involve itself in struggles.” This was confirmed by another official who in 2003 clarified that “if the country is to remain attractive for FDI8 it must furnish a cheap and docile work force.” It is true that, on paper, the dictatorship of the VCP could guarantee rigorous working conditions, an official trade union present in only 10 percent of companies, and a new proletariat which could offer every guarantee of stability; but the bureaucrats, however sure of themselves, could hardly fail to know that a proletariat rapidly becomes conscious of the conditions of its exploitation and starts to struggle.

These changes deeply changed the attitude of the population toward the regime. The worker, peasant and minority revolts against the local party organs and company managements (who were flaunting their ill-gotten gain with insulting ostentation), are clear proof of the way that people kept involuntarily in poverty experience these situations as unbearable.

Workers certainly struck as foreign capital moved in and as people migrated to the centers where the work force was being exploited, and did so all the more when it was seen that the investors barely paid attention to existing labor legislation and that the state authorities not only closed their eyes but violently repressed people who merely asked that the laws be applied. Foreign investors had a weighty argument for getting their special conditions of exploitation: the threat of going elsewhere. According to a study by the official Institute of Workers and Trade Unions, only 60 percent of foreign direct investments offer working conditions compatible with Vietnamese labor legislation. One might think that the media coverage of these struggles in 2005 was not due merely to their dimensions in major workplaces and their geographic extension. One might think, then, that the young generation born after 1986, those whose exploitation began as soon as they finished school, no longer had the same reasons to “respect” the VCP, with its struggle for national liberation, and for the privations accepted by their parents in the patriotic reconstruction of a country ravaged by war. But one factor remained central in the escalation of struggles, a factor which led to the opposition to the totality of extremely harsh working conditions, and that was the inflation which made it impossible to live with very low wages.

This table shows precisely how inflation was progressing after 2002 and how it then surged in 2004 and in the following years.9

The financial crisis and the major devaluation of Asian currencies in 1997 (between 40 and 50 percent relative to the US dollar) rendered more vulnerable the outsourced sector of key industries (textiles, clothing, shows, electronics, etc…) employing many workers. Textile industries alone, for example, employ 500,000 workers. As they became less and less competitive, these industries were forced to constantly lower the outsourced price on many items. The cost of producing one jacket, for example, fell from $4 in 1993 to $3 today. In spite of that, outsourcing contracts brought in less and less money, as did the price for the raw materials (gas, natural rubber, coal, etc…) Vietnam exported. This was an increasingly difficult situation for those who had migrated from agriculture to the factories, out of necessity but also with hopes for a better future.

Who then were these new proletarians who would be revolting?10 As in other Asian countries, including China, they were and are the migrant workers, often those coming from the north to the south of the country. Four and a half million migrated between 1994 and 1999; 6.7 million more between 2004 and 2009; women make up about half of them, but they are much more numerous in the temporary migrations. Starting in 2000, the importance and the character of these migrations can be seen in the 43 percent turnover rate which the bosses complain about, and notably in the fact that after the Tet festival only two-thirds of these migrants return to their jobs in the same factory.

Development and Fluctuations in the Class Struggle: Organization and Repression

Before the major strike wave of 2005–06, a few warning signs had revealed and spread through the media some idea about the conditions of exploitation of the Vietnamese workers. In June 2005, 10,000 workers of a factory in Da Nang (a joint venture with a Hong Kong firm) staged a wildcat strike11 against a whole situation which is too poorly rendered as “working conditions,” a situation found just about everywhere, with a few variations:

* no contract,
* a minimum 12-hour day but often expanded by unpaid overtime,
* two bathroom visits per working day, under surveillance,
* one cup of water during the entire work day,
* no social benefits, no days off for illness or for death of a relative,
* “we are treated like animals,” according to one woman, i.e., not merely insulted, and humiliated, but sometimes hit,
* firings for the first infraction.

The first strike wave took place between December 28, 2005, and January 8, 2006, on the Binh Duong SEZ (Cochinchina). Sixty thousand workers in 50 factories took part, three-fourths of them women between the ages of 18 and 25. The first factory to walk out was a Taiwanese plant with the lowest wages and the worst conditions. This factory employs 1,000 workers, who demanded an increase in the basic monthly salary of €32; they resumed work with a 10 percent pay increase but, to make up for it, management increased the pace of work: 1,200 pieces had to be submitted by 6 pm, as opposed to 8–8:30 pm before the strike. After this first wildcat, the movement spread to other factories in the zone throughout 2006 over salaries and other demands about working conditions. The impact of the strikes was such that the CPV raised the minimum wage by 40 percent in February 2006, but in a differential way: €44 a month in the two biggest cities, Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon); €40 in medium-sized cities and €36 in the rest of the country.12

These strikes (which were always wildcats) marked the beginning of a sort of race between inflation and wage increases, in struggles which have continued up to the present at an uneven rhythm. One can surmise that, after having made these concessions (as in the above examples) management tried to recover their control by other means, most notably in labor time or in speedup, which resulted, given the constant increases in inflation, in a new strike wave. In Hanoi alone, in June 2006, every week saw between 400 and 2,000 workers in wildcat strikes. The official figures at least give some sense of this:

2006: 330 strikes in 6 months;
2007: 700 strikes for the year;
2008: 762;
2009: 218;
2010: 424;
2011: 857 over an 11 month period.
Seventy-five percent of these strikes took place in foreign companies. The falloff in 2009 can be explained by the impact of the crisis in 2008 which reduced the activities of the exporting companies, resulting in the layoff of migrant workers.

One of the first questions we might ask, in guessing the reasons that sparked these struggles, given (stated bluntly) the totality of the conditions of exploitation, is how they broke out and how they spread. On these points, we have little information, beyond official statements and/or on-the-spot accounts of the strikes.

First of all, there is no doubt that these were wildcat, i.e., illegal, strikes; it is difficult to say if low-level organizers of the official trade union were able to participate in sparking the wildcats and/or if they were able to play a role as mediators with management (in 2008, while wildcats strikes were underway in different sectors, one official noted that the wildcats “are becoming more and more common and that is due to the fact that the union cannot play its role as mediator”; the official union was represented in only 10 percent of the foreign export firms and even there was not recognized by the workers as their representatives). In May 2009, during a strike of 500 workers in a textile factory in the south, an official admitted that “the strike was launched independently by an informal group of workers.”

A manager of one of these companies summarized as follows the way in which these strikes unfolded: “The workers remained in the factory in an organized way and designated a representative to talk with management. Some of these workers were aggressive. They fought with the guards and with the police, threw projectiles and destroyed property.” This would not be confirmed by another official during a strike of 800 workers in a Japanese electronics factory: “They didn’t destroy anything. They merely gathered at the factory entrance to protest peacefully.” What is certain is that we can find all possible variants from peaceful occupations to violent confrontations. Some recent examples: on October 19, 2011, in Binh Duong province (south of Ho Chi Minh City), 6,000 workers in a Taiwanese shoe plant occupied the factory, fought with the security guards, blocked the adjacent streets and destroyed equipment. In January 2012, a minister confessed that strikes “imply confrontations, destruction and deaths.” This was undoubtedly an allusion to what happened in June 2011 during a strike in a motorcycle parts plant where a security agent rammed a picket line in a car, killing one woman and injuring six others. It seems that, here or there, strike or struggle committees were formed, and it is quite obvious that the VCP is trying at any cost to prevent these formations from becoming permanent and, even worse for these managers, from coordinating on a regional or national level through political or other channels of opposition. There have been, on one hand, direct forms of police or administrative repression during localized conflicts. From June 24 to 29, the 93,000 workers in the Pou yen Vietnam Co., a shoe factory in Ho Chi Minh City (producing mainly for Adidas), struck for a wage increase and for the payment of a bonus; the strike extended to neighboring factories. A thuggish intervention put an end to the strike, with the arrest of 29 workers and the condemnation of three of them—the so-called leaders—to prison terms of 7–9 years.13 There were on the other hand concessions attempting, more or less at the same time, to cool off pressure from the base (one reportage indicated that “every day in this country, there is a strike”); the government raised the minimum wage by 12 percent; another increase followed on October 1.

Such an alternation of repression and concessions is only one aspect of which is only one element among many of the whole apparatus of control and domination by the CPV. But in the last analysis, it is repression which wins out, ranging from direct military and police force to administrative detention, from constant surveillance of the conversations and writings of the population to an ever stricter control of the use of such modern means as cell phones and the Internet. This makes attempts to support struggles from the outside particularly haphazard, as has been the case of the Committee for the Protection of Vietnamese Workers (CPVW) which has been trying to be active in Vietnam itself (with leaflets, support and advice to strike “leaders”) but also with Vietnamese émigrés around the world, for the establishment of independent unions (we might suspect somewhat that, as in other totalitarian countries, such as e.g., China, they are instruments for American penetration, piggy-backing on struggles).

Current Economic Changes Resulting from the World Crisis and Their Impact on Struggles

f, in 2011, the number of strikes had been the highest in years (16 strikes per week) this situation seems to have changed in 2012. This surge of strikes in 2011 and in earlier years is usually explained by the surge of economic activity, which meant that strikers had no fear of being fired, being sure that they could find a new job. It does seem to be the case that the fall off of social conflicts in 2009 corresponded to the impact of the world crisis of 2008. This situation may well recur today. GDP grew at only 4 percent in the first quarter of 2012 and no major conflict cracked the media barrier. Nevertheless, inflation is still high, rising to 16 percent, and poverty levels are also high; roughly 30 percent of the active population is either unemployed or precarious. The average salary for unskilled workers is €100 a month; if it is difficult to estimate what that represents in terms of living standards, the announcement that one-third of all children under five is suffering from malnutrition gives a certain picture. In the same way, a lack of manpower in certain SEZs might indicate that low wages and harsh conditions are no longer attractive for migrants from the country.

The whole economic system is evolving, with the recent emergence of new sectors such as oil exploration and export, or the increasing use of new information technologies.14 To maintain its social dominance, the VCP nonetheless has to take account of this, given that three-fourths of its economy is based on the activity of the SEZs and new investments in FDI. The international crisis is harshly affecting all countries which live essentially off this activity, closely tied to that of importing countries, i.e., the industrialized countries, which are themselves in crisis.

The poverty wages paid to Vietnamese workers undoubtedly remain 30 percent lower than the wages of their Indian or Chinese counterparts, but other elements play a role in investors’ choices in this cutthroat competition over costs of production, namely the global conditions of exploitation.15 One of the first elements is the system’s resistance to workers’ demands both in terms of costs and of social peace; put another way, structural reforms of internal factors of the economy on one hand, and the strengthening of repression on the other. That assumes that the VCP can finance the necessary infrastructure, particularly for energy output and, once again, for guaranteeing social peace.

The older proletariat, which will not have given up its habits of struggle, will be joined by this new, better educated proletariat, which will demand wages and working conditions different from what has been the practice in the past. Last February, interviews at the highest level, and most notably with the head of the official trade union (VLC), were seeking ways to “reduce the number of strikes to attempt to reassure and calm investors.” But the main unknown, when we consider these domestic problems of Vietnam and class resistance, remains the world evolution of the economic crisis. Any forecast would be risky: in all circumstances, the VCP will seek to maintain its power by every means at its disposal. This future depends as much on the ability of world capitalism to overcome the resistance of the proletariat, and in this sense the working-class struggles in Vietnam, even in the absence of direct ties, are connected to the struggle of proletarians everywhere. These struggles are in fact unified because they are a response to a common exploitation and a common intensification of the conditions of exploitation and, while apparently separated by borders and by very different situations, they modify in their way the problematic of survival for a capitalism in crisis.

• 1The most penetrating approach to the struggles in Vietnam, both in the past and today, especially those of the Vietnamese peasantry, is to be found in the different books and articles of Ngo Van, particularly in Vietnam 1920–1945: revolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale, (Nautilus Publishers), in his articles in ICO (Informations et Correspondances Ouvrieres) from 1967–72, and in Le joueur de flûte et l’oncle Ho, Vietnam 1945–2005 (Paris-Méditerranée). The main work of Ngo Van available in English is the translation of his autobiography (Au Pays de la Cloche Felée in the French original), also covering the 1920–45 period in the first person, is In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (AK Press, 2010).
• 2 From 1965 to 1975, on this small territory, which was their experimental area, the Americans dropped 7 million bombs, three to four times the tonnage dropped by all belligerents during the Second World War (nearly 200,000 of these unexploded devices still present a latent danger) and 84 million liters of “Agent Orange.” In addition to the pollution of the soils, nearly 5 million Vietnamese have been contaminated for life by this defoliant, as well as their offspring. The American war alone killed one million Vietnamese combatants and five million civilians. These figures do not take account of all the long-term effects of the war among the wounded, the victims of unexploded bombs or mines, or of Agent Orange extended over several generations.
• 30.7 hectares correspond to 7,000 square meters and 0.3 hectares are 3,000 square meters (in reality a large garden), 0.3 à 3,000m². The average grain-producing farm in France covers between 500 and 1,000 hectares.
• 4The question of land use has been central to the peasant revolts which have been more frequent than those making it into the media throughout the years of VCP domination. A revolt by the peasants in the Mekong Delta over the issue of land use in 1987–88 ended bloodily. Four months were needed in 1997 to put an end to an agitation against the exactions of the local VCP cadre in Thai Binh (Tonkin) and Dong Nai (Cochinchina). In February 2001, in the high central plateaus, demonstrations (sometimes with an ethnic coloring) over land use and the granting of land to between 10 and 300,000 migrants from the overpopulated regions of the north and south ended in confrontations and numerous arrests.
• 5Cf. « La réforme foncière au Vietnam », published by Aménagement, Développement, Environnement, Santé et Société (ADES) (September 16, 2010).
• 6 We also find here a disequilibrium common to all of Southeast Asia; due to different discriminatory practices at birth, in Vietnam 112 boys are born for every 100 girls.
• 7f certain SEZs do manage to attract foreign direct investment, others show evidence of a bureaucratic megalomania, one certainly tied to corruption. Thus, for example, in the central region of the high plateaus of Binh Dinh, the 70,000 hectare SEZ Bo Y International was set up at great expense and, over an 8-year period, attracted only a few small factories. It is obvious that the choices of foreign investors are focused on the populated areas where infrastructure facilitates exports at low cost.
• 8FDI: Foreign Direct Investment is the term for investments in a specific country coming from another country for an economic activity under one or another juridical form (creation of a company, a joint venture, the purchase of an existing company) and where production is essentially for export. Three-fourths of all FDI comes from the United States and several Asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, Singapore).
• 9This persistent inflation may have different sources (capital entry, the export of agricultural products which squeeze the home market, risky credits from local banks in unprofitable operations, the disproportionate weight of the administrative and police apparatus) which can be summed up as an excess of financial liquidity (very poorly distributed socially) for a diminished mass of commodities on the market.
• 10The urbanization resulting from these migrations is developing in southern Nam Bo (Cochinchina) or in the Da Nang region on the central coast. As for exports from the SEZs, the center and the south are more important, because they are situated on the routes of container shipments.
• 11To be legal, strikes must be approved by local authorities and the bureaucrats of the official trade union, with advance notice of 20 days. The fact that the representatives of the official union are paid by the company puts into proportion of such strike approvals, not to mention of a possible strike call.
• 12 It is difficult to compare wages and even more so living standards in different countries. The wage of migrant women might be the complement of the income of a peasant, the latter as well being quite variable according to the extent and fertility of the land, and the degree of overpopulation. The theft of rice during the food crisis of 2008, widespread enough to motivate special legislation, can be evidence of a low living standard, or even, in extreme cases, of famine.
• 13These are not the only ones, because these arrests are rarely covered in the media. Such sentencing means being sent to forced labor camps, often presented as institutions for drug rehabilitation.
• 14] One of the VCP’s problems is how to absorb the annual 260,000 university graduates into economic development. One possibility is opened up by the evolution of competition in attracting FDI and shifting them toward the use of high tech, requiring a better-trained work force. This sector has apparently grown by 38 percent between 2009 and 2010 due to special circumstances: for example, a shift of Japanese factories from Thailand in the wake of the recent floods there, the choice being motivated not only by costs by campaigns of hostility toward Japan in China (also amplified by confrontations over offshore oil exploration). This high-tech development is still quite limited (32,000 workers in 2011 as against 7,000 in 2009) but it remains promising for FDI, with wages in this sector being half those in India and 60 percent of those in China.
• 15 It is quite difficult to give a prognosis when dealing with such contradictory analyses as those appearing recently in the media; cf. “Le Vietnam, eldorado des délocalisations” (“Vietnam, El Dorado of Outsourcing”), Le Figaro February 28, 2012, and “Paradise lost: strikes and riots in the export zones in Vietnam” (libcom, 2012).

…. oh, terrible days of green youth! Ah, on the road nearby, I hear the solitary song of the worker returning to his poor lodging, late, after the revels: and it grips my heart fiercely to think the whole world passes, and scarcely leaves a trace. See: the holiday’s over; some nondescript day follows; time carries off all mortal things.

Giacomo Leopardi, Canti XIII, La sera del dì di festa

To understand and make sense of the recent wave of social unrest in Chile, we have to refer to the history of the last half century of this country: the revolutionary upsurge that had its peak in late 1972, the destruction of the social movement after the military coup, the neo-liberal restructuring imposed by the Pinochet regime and the consolidation of that legacy by successive civilian governments. Such events, which have overshadowed the lives of several generations of Chileans, now emerge in a new light. Recent events seem to suggest that this nightmare was only an interlude between two festivals, and that it was only a matter of time before the old tensions re-emerged. Today, however, these tensions emerge in a much more educated form than forty years ago. Four decades of forced modernization in the economy and the culture had to leave their mark on minds and hearts: revolt has broken out again, but now with a decidedly “citizenist” (“ciudadanista”) cast, full of moderation and very suspicious of the ideologies and grievances that ruined everything in the uprisings of the past. What earlier generations had clearly perceived as class struggle and the abolition of an anachronistic social system, is now viewed with a much friendlier and more optimistic eye. Today the issue is not abolishing the horrible dominant mode of production, but to make it fulfill its promises. Indeed, although the current protest movement is far from homogeneous, it is easy to recognize its fundamental ethos: since it has not yet posed the question of the exploitation of man by man, but only its moderation, what this movement pursues is nothing but the old and incongruous dream of a good capitalism.

This crude affirmation does not mean we condemn this social movement in any way. The revolt that shook Chile over the past year has changed many things for the better, starting with the fact that it has awakened a social force that seemed to be languishing forever, and whose transforming potential we can scarcely foresee today. But this latent revolutionary force will never fully emerge if it is not aware of its own reality, its current limitations and future possibilities. Groping, especially through its most minoritarian and ambitious nuclei, the rebellious movement is trying today to ask the right questions, to arrive at more fruitful answers and to be fully aware of its strength and its real possibilities

With this text we wish to contribute to the social process now underway.

This movement of revolt, so full of unabashed confidence and realism, so free of messianic impulses and so hostile to the drama of the old class struggle, does not claim to change everything, and knows it. But it knows very well, on the other hand, what it does want to change. It wants to wipe out the old oppressive atmosphere which for decades has not allowed anyone to breathe freely, and that on first approach comes from an easily recognizable source: the educational apartheid that is also an outrageously lucrative business; authoritarian political institutions embedded in a constitution imposed by force of arms; the looting by transnational capital of natural resources and the resulting environmental devastation throughout the country, the ruthless exploitation of the labor force and its subjugation by credit, advertising and medication; the despotic control over politics and culture by ten billionaire families whose fortunes amount to one third of GDP …

All this, which was known and accepted as a fact of nature, has suddenly emerged as an intolerable reality. Consequently, there emerges an overwhelming need to change it and the suspicion that, after all, it is possible to change it. Of course, from the simple daily hassles to the consciousness that there is a socio-economic structure which produces them, there is always some distance to be traversed.

These themes had been, so to speak, in the air for some time. In recent years news kiosks have begun to gradually accommodate citizen newspapers, leftist and even anarchist publications, whose headlines challenge the government of the day and sometimes spread openly anti-capitalist positions. Some neighborhood radio and TV channels have developed, although with great difficulty, in various regions of the country.

At the same time, a “popular culture” has emerged at “ground level” with fairs, plays, music concerts, workshops and meeting places, which served as a refuge for many people reluctant to accept the frivolous desert of mass culture. This slow and laborious reconstruction of the initiative and creative power of ordinary people held out steadily and against all odds for decades, and has formed a breeding ground for revolt. The most notable result has been, above all, a certain spirit. Last spring, one felt, at times and everywhere, something of a breath of optimism and of power spreading through people’s countenances and words. One felt, after each day of protest, the joy that comes from the struggle, of any struggle whereby we will no longer be kneeling before our masters. On the walls of the city center one can read: “We will lose a year, but we will win the future,” “We are poor people at war,” “The streets are ours,” “Kill your rector,” “social war,” “joy and subversion”…

The main protagonists of the revolt were the secondary and university students. Since April, when there was the first big march organized by the CONFECH (the Chilean Student Confederation), the movement has never stopped growing in geographical extent and intensity, multiplying since then the occupations of schools, colleges and university campuses. The first manifestations, driven by the university students, focused on the modest demands which had been customary in previous years: more state funding for universities, for scholarships and for the National Student Card.1

Successive government responses to these demands were rejected by the students, which gave greater intensity to their demonstrations, and especially to street actions. This radicalization and extension of the movement forced the government to give in on one of the key demands of the moment: the resignation of Education Minister Joaquin Lavin. That was followed by an increasingly vast and intense escalation, which included calls by the CUT2 for a “national strike,” days of heavy street fighting from early morning until evening, and massive “cacerolazos,” beating on pots and pans in every street and every neighborhood,3

which otherwise had not been used in Chile since 1985, when it was often a form of opposition to military rule.

Only the arrival of the end of the year, with the cessation of academic activities and of uncertainty about the results of a “wasted” school year, defused the intensity of that progression of mutual challenges between the government and the mobilized masses.

The occupation of the local high schools for several months allowed students to develop their initiative in creating workshops and courses, artistic events, forums and lectures… This has not only fueled an increasingly accurate critique of the educational system, but also helped socialize to some extent a more elaborate critique of capitalism. Moreover, the occupied premises served as shelter against the brutal attacks of the police, which had systematically attacked the students with water cannon, tear gas, batons and torture sessions aboard the police vans.

This repression, directly ordered by Interior Minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter and his political team, did not, however, prevent the increasingly massive marches from being accompanied in turn by ever more numerous and better organized groups of self-defense, willing to confront the police force with stones, sticks and Molotov cocktails. As the weeks passed, it became common for students to perform lightning actions, leaving the occupied buildings to block the main streets, and stopping traffic early in the morning, thus bringing traffic to a halt in large parts of the capital and in the provinces. Most of these actions were sparked by high school students. The university students were more oriented to marches and “symbolic” protests.

The difference in the fighting methods of both sectors reveals a fairly significant fact, which we will try to elucidate further: during the whole wave of protests, radicalization of the high school students was largely ignored, and sometimes even rejected by the university students, who showed themselves generally more confident in the ability of institutions to provide a “negotiated” end to the crisis. The general perception, as the end of the year approached, is that the university organizations completely abandoned the high school students, and did not even include their demands in the negotiations initiated with the government and parliamentary representatives.

This attitude by the university students seems difficult to understand if one takes literally the central demand of the mobilization, which, moreover, was the same for all sectors: “an end to profits in education, free and public education at all levels.” But, of course, it is better not to take this literally, but rather read between the lines. This slogan expresses the general interests of a large mass of people eager for better living conditions, and who have found a way to express their discontent in a more or less unified and coherent way, but it also tends to hide the fact that this mass is rigidly segregated in sectors experiencing class domination, and the practical struggle against it, in different ways. Though this movement expresses a crisis of the reproduction of capitalist dynamics, and though to understand it we need to include all the actors within the general category defined as exploited labor power, that should not blind us to the fact that within the movement there is a real segregation with real practical and possibly decisive effects.

The demand for free education finds its legitimacy at almost a common sense level for most of the Chilean population, mainly because the increasing privatization of education has only contributed to the deteriorating quality of life for all who must sell their labor power to survive. Those who do not have capital or a rich enough family inheritance see obtaining a college or technical degree the only hope for a job and a decent life. With education being perceived as a vital necessity of the first order, its transformation into a lucrative business controlled by banks could only exacerbate the discontent of people. In fact, the full liberalization of the education business has taken things to disconcerting extremes: in Chile, studying for a university degree costs about $500 monthly, which when paid on credit can add up to $60,000, in a country where the minimum wage is less than $300 and the average wage is around $900. The common perception in this regard is ambivalent: on one hand, Chileans assume that “studying is for those who have money”; on the other hand, they consider professional qualifications as a need so basic that they have long been willing to endure any hardship or indebtedness to get them.

This disproportionate emphasis on professionalism has to do with immediate economic calculation, which in turn is justified by a powerful ideology. Currently two out of three college students are first generation, meaning that for their parents “higher” education was never anything but an impossible dream. The current generation of students and professionals carry with them this new burden of expectations that their parents and grandparents developed in an era of economic growth and of the expansion of individual consumption. Indeed, the idea which has acted as a driving force of the current mobilization is that higher education is not only a necessity but also a fundamental human right which the State must guarantee to all. Such an idea is inseparable from a belief in an unlimited expansion of production, consumption, of the cultural industry and of material well-being, and as such is part and parcel of a powerful faith in the basic logic of capitalism: infinite growth.

But it is not just a mirage. No ideology could hide the fact that in Chile today 60 percent of university graduates do not work in the field for which they studied, and this figure can only increase in the future. That proletarianized families nonetheless continue to make enormous sacrifices to professionalize their children is a result of the severe defeat of the workers in recent decades. As long as the Chilean working class is deprived of the most basic tools of economic struggle, its ability to recover some of the surplus value that the capitalist class takes from them in the production process has been reduced to a minimum. This weakening of the work force in relation to capital is clearly expressed in the very fact of economic growth in Chile: in recent decades almost all of this growth is attributable to corporate profits, while the overall wage bill relative to GDP growth has only decreased to negligible levels.

Given the apparent impossibility of extracting from employers the means for a minimally comfortable subsistence, Chilean workers have had no other way to escape from economic insecurity than to mortgage their hopes on the promises of well-being that professional qualifications imply, either for their children or for themselves. That this defeat of the working class, moreover, has been transformed into a booming capitalist business, is evidenced by the fact that nearly half of higher education is provided by Technical Training Centres (TTCs) and Professional Institutes (PIs), whose slightly lower fees than those of the universities have made their main marketing “target” the middle and lower layers of the population. Significantly, among the ranks of the lower classes, these PIs and TTCs are currently recruiting 87 percent of first-generation students, of whom 40 percent study in the evening in order to work during the day.

This, however, does not prevent these young people from graduating with a bank debt averaging $25,000, with interest rates higher than those imposed on the relatively privileged students at the state universities, whose employment prospects are much higher than those of the poorest students. All told, the increased access of poor families to higher education through these non-university centers does not at all mean that the rigid segregation reflected by the ESOMAR mode4

has become more flexible, since the quality of education that a young person receives and their labor market prospects depend on how much his/her family has paid previously. The industry of technical-professional education, in the best of cases, assures that members of the lower middle strata remain there, which, in any case, seems better than nothing.

The multi-million dollar business of the TTCs and the PIs continues to be presented, nevertheless, as a contribution to the advancement of the workers. Whether the workers believe it or not, the fact is that labor market saturation and the relative stagnation of wages never fail to show that this seeming way out is as illusory as any other within the existing framework of relations between capital and labor. For now, professionalization seems at least to give atomized workers psychological security and self-esteem in an extremely competitive and precarious environment.

For this and other reasons, the preservation of university education is a palpable reality, something concrete to defend, only for one-fourth of the Chilean population, including the most privileged classes. For other strata, “advanced studies” continue to be for the most part out of reach. This persistent social stratification must be taken into account if we seek to understand why, during the last wave of agitation, university and secondary students seemed to take divergent paths. The interests of the former consists, above all, in softening the burden of indebtedness they have had to take on, without forgetting that they did so in exchange for a personal validation already guaranteed them and one which was for life. They are already integrated in the mechanism which assures them of their places in the higher echelons of society, and their struggle is basically to keep increasing costs and debts from pushing them into the strata below them. For them, “an end to profits” in education means ending the risk of losing their relatively privileged socio-economic position.

For the students at the secondary level, taken as a whole, the situation is different. In fact, 40 percent of them study in technical-professional high schools, which set their life trajectory on a clear direction, one quite far from the universities and from the upward social mobility offered as compensation to whose students who “really work hard.” At least for the 65 percent of secondary students, who come from the poorest two-fifths of the population, these promises seem mainly a joke, because they are hardly stupid, and they know that their life situation from an early age gives their life chances an indelible stamp.

As a result, for them the slogan of “an end to profits” in education does not mean improvement in a situation which is already assured them, but rather conquering something they never had and which they will never have if things continue as they are. This is the reason why the occupations, hunger strikes, barricades and confrontations have been carried out mainly by the 75 percent of young people who attend municipal or subsidized high schools, and not by those from the private high schools whose access to the university has been guaranteed from birth.

This also explains other revealing facts. For example: since 2006, the Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students (CASS) has developed more ambitious sets of demands and more audacious programs for action, going well beyond the timid demands raised year after year by the CONFECH. Further: the CASS, and not the CONFECH, actively solidarized with the casualized miners of El Teniente on strike in May 2011, almost as soon as the last waves of protests began. During this joint march of miners and students, the secondary school youth spontaneously adopted the slogan “nationalization of copper under workers’ control” as a demand of their own, since they know that without structural economic changes, they will never set foot in a university.

But this disconnect between secondary school and university students does not merely reflect a spontaneous divergence of interests, determined by socio-economical stratification. It corresponds to the very logic of a social movement which is being instrumentalized for the specific ends of a political caste. The very existence of a “student” movement delimited as such, mediatized by the celebrities of the university student bureaucracy, fits, like other “citizen” movements, in the programmatic development of a left which, for now, has no other perspective than participation in national political life, which means in the life of the parties in power.

Whether this objective is expressed in calls for a “new kind of politics,” or anything else, is of no importance, because at bottom it is an attempt to expand the parameters of the same old politics, the only kind that is possible in a capitalist economic framework. At least in part, the power of the last mobilization can be explained by this ever more imperious necessity for the left to regain its existence as an active political force. Or, in other words, as an entity floating above the social movement to determine its evolution from the outside, as the active negation of the social.

This helps us answer the question why, today, the student movement is being much more intransigent in its demands than was the “penguin revolution”5 of 2006, or the periodic student “flues” of recent years. The fact is that, in the past several decades, the destruction of the social “tissue” gives the parties of the left and the right the monopoly over formal organizations, as well as over the very initiative and capacity for action of students and workers, in the student centers, federations and unions.

Discontent and rage have always been there, but while Social Democracy was in power, the supporters of the regime—well placed in the open spaces for action and thought in high schools, universities and companies—were able to use them to channel protests into directions that did not endanger the political credibility of the ruling parties. Thus the large mobilization of 2006 was unable to formulate any clear objective beyond the repeal of the general education law and free public transportation for students, remaining in a defensive position. This led to an agreement which helped to strengthen the image of the government then in power. Today, those political militants have quite simply ceased to act, allowing protest energy to flow spontaneously toward the more logical objective: the demand for free education, which was always in the air without being expressed with the clarity and force it took on in the past year.

The “laissez-faire” strategy toward the social movement, however useful it may be for the left and center left parties, also implies a potential loss of control which is difficult to ignore. This potential self-activity is obvious in the proliferation of autonomous means of communication, the assemblies and the independent networks emerging in recent months, through which a distant and cautious attitude toward parties and formal organizations became clear. This attitude was given form in a slogan cropping up repeatedly in the street demonstrations: “The people united moves forward without a party.”6 The spread of the conflict throughout the country also shows in some way this relative autonomy of the social movement from the parties, since the formal organizations have always tended to concentrate their forces in the capital, thus following the modus operandi of bourgeois politics, which centralizes and concentrates things in order to better control them.

In previous years, social agitation did not succeed in changing life in the provinces, where normally action tends to be very isolated and have a merely symbolic character. During the last wave of protests, on the other hand, in many cities, there were road blockages, “cacerolazos” and confrontation. This geographical extension of the conflict is especially revealing of the centrifugal tendencies of the movement, which found a powerful decentralizing impulse in its center, immune to any political manipulation.

The meaning given to all these events varies a great deal, of course, depending on the position one occupies in the order of exploitation; but for everyone it has some meaning, and this is perhaps the most important change: the revolt has forced people to think about how, why and for what they are living. Some, perhaps those most damaged by the capitalist order, have been content to take advantage of the temporary turmoil in a daily asphyxiating routine, throwing their own energies into increasing this turmoil. Others, more confident, have been redoubling their efforts to built up and increase what they call “popular power,” which is nothing else than the power of initiative and the ability to react which are hammered out in the course of the struggle itself. There are always those who, above all, pursue their politics, and those who bend submissively to the temperament of the majority, whatever that may be.

If, finally, one had to point to a dominant discourse which imposed its meaning on virtually all the manifestations of this revolt, this discourse can be summarized as follows: if we have taken to the streets, this means that the history of Chile has once again taken up its old march towards a future which will be most just, more developed, happier and more democratic…

Outside this candid desire for harmony between social classes, in the framework of a “good national capitalism,” there is not much else. An understanding of the how and the why of the categories which define real existing capitalism is something which remains deeply disconnected from the social malaise and its practical expression. Between the clamor about “civil society” and the latter-day regurgitations of Leninism, the radical critique of the system has at best a phantasmagoric presence in the public scene. In Chile, in the last analysis, explosions of mass non-conformity continue to be, as in other epochs, much ado within a disarmed prophecy.

• 1This card is used for discounts on various types of purchases.
• 2The Confederacion Unitaria de Trabajo, the national trade-union confederation.
• 3This method of protest characterized such uprisings as the “piquetero” revolt in Argentina in 2001–02.
• 4A plan for measuring social-economic status.
• 5A shorter-lived student mobilization in 2006, which began to raise some of the demands.
• 6 “El pueblo unido avanza sin partido.” A significant “correction” of the putrefied Popular Front slogan “el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido,” which mass demonstrations were chanting in Santiago just days before the September 1973 overthrow of Allende, and which has been mindlessly taken over by the international left with no apparent understanding of its sinister overtones.

April 13, 2012

The general strike of March 29, although it mobilized a good part of the population, apparently took place with more pain than glory. Once the day of the strike was over, everything seemed to continue as before: namely, the continuation of an aggressive policy against the wage-labor population, in an economic context characterized by recession. The government had already announced that it would not change the Labor Law Reform. The response to the strike call was significant in the main industrial centres and cities, and there was the usual ballet of widely varied statistics on participation, as always occurs. Participation in the strike was irregular, since many workers did not join it in order not to lose a day’s pay and, above all, because employers threatened to fire participants, taking advantage of the existing procedures for doing so. That said, support for the strike was significant in industrial centres and in some services, as was the (very large) attendance at the demonstrations of the afternoon in the main cities.

Once again as always, the topic of violence was the smokescreen by which the government and the media tried to divert attention from the real causes of the strike and the real inability of the police to guarantee “normality” when people take to the streets. For example, in Barcelona, the shops and small businesses in the center of the city opened, although business was slower than on any typical working day. Nevertheless, starting at noon, the city was brought to a halt by the actions of pickets and groups of demonstrators.

The massive demonstration of the afternoon, in which the columns of the “majority” and “minority” unions converged, was attacked by the police who, nevertheless, proved impotent in containing the outbursts of rage by a good part of the demonstrators against bank offices throughout the day. The mayor’s office estimated the damage caused by the angriest demonstrators at €500,000. Since the Ministries of the Interior, both in Madrid and in the Catalan government, are in agreement on using the violence for their own ends, in the name of “civil society” demagogy, a climate of opinion is being created to legitimate a rollback in the right to strike or to demonstrate, further deepening the penalties for people who cause riots, burn garbage cans, break bank windows, disrupt street traffic or who are simply present when such things occur. Everything points to the creation of a permanent state of emergency, with characteristics closer to fascism than to democratic formalities.1 As was always the case in the past century, where political and social repression are concerned, there is full agreement between the heirs of Franco currently running the Madrid government and the political representatives of the provincial Catalan bourgeoisie. All in all, it continues to be significant that the political-repressive option is the only solution which occurs to the Spanish ruling class, faced as it is with an unprecedented economic, social and political crisis.

Be that as it may, calling the general strike took its toll on majority unions,2 the Comisiones Obreras and the UGT 3 ; in reality, they did not want it. Even after announcing it one month in advance, they continued to call on the government and bosses to sit down and negotiate and thereby avoid the strike. On the day of the strike, they continued to implore their interlocutors in the government to sit down and negotiate—at the beginning of April they were still insisting on it—although no one really knows what they want to negotiate. We must therefore conclude that, if they had to resort to the strike, it was for reasons they could not admit publicly since, on one hand, the labor law reform is a further step in the restructuring of the labor market in the different pacts that have been negotiated by the big unions over the past thirty years and which was intensified in the past decade; this was a process which has been progressively eroding workers’ rights and working conditions. On the other hand, we know there are under-the-table negotiations which concern directly and exclusively the interests of the trade-union structure, that is of those holding cushy well-paid jobs which are not mentioned in public disclosure. As one example among many, the labor law reform is a setback for them, since it limits the legal scope of union contracts, giving most decision-making powers to the employer.

In this sense, the labor law reform, which certainly hurts the interests of workers, is a simple pretext in the game of interests of the trade-union apparatuses, which are in a compromised situation. On one hand, they have to respond to the continual aggression of the government and the bosses if they do not want to see their their influence over the wage-labor work force undermined even further. On the other hand, they are afraid to make their growing inability to control mobilizations obvious, and to finally empty of any significance whatsoever the general strike based on the unions, itself already seriously diminished (in reality, a mere day of protest). The succession of general strikes with no results of relevance for improving the lives or jobs of the wage-labor population has been banalizing the strike as an instrument for defending class interests.

In fact, the so-called majority unions found themselves forced to act by the agitation over recent months of the minority unions, which have serious influence in some autonomous communities and sectors of activity, as well as by the pressure of a diffuse social malaise and the intransigence of an openly reactionary government which thinks that the services of unions are no longer necessary in an unregulated labor market with a demobilized and highly fragmented working population. A few days after the strike, the government’s general budget proposals were presented to parliament. In them, the government reduced the subsidies4 for unions (some of which have had to resort to a judicial ruling allowing them to reduce the hours and wages of their own staff) and again showed its intention to limit trade-union participation in state institutions, which means depriving them of access to financial resources and influential centres of decision-making.

The labor law reform, in general outline, aims at improving conditions for exploiting the work force to boost profits (reducing penalties and fines, lowering real wages, cutting employer contributions to Social Security, etc.) and to facilitate layoffs for any reason (for example, employee absence, even for legitimate illness, can be a basis for firing). The reform further aims at concealing unemployment by a reshuffle of available work. In fact, the new framework for layoffs and for the flexibilization of contracts prefigures a relative mobility in the labor market which will promote the fiction that unemployment (officially more than 5.4 million people) is decreasing, simply by multiplying the number of contracts of shorter duration.

Nevertheless, the reality is that neither the labor law reform nor the cuts in rights and social services, despite their negative consequences on people’s living conditions, are sufficient to restart the economy, i.e., to re-establish economic activity in conditions favorable for the accumulation of capital.

The need to maintain a minimum of economic activity and of social assistance which does not accelerate the degradation of living conditions, and the need to deal with interest payments on the sovereign debt, means that the debt continues to increase (it is still at levels around 70 percent of GDP), and new debt has to be issued at higher interest rates.

Further, dealing with the public deficit is at odds with maintaining a certain level of social stability, which in past decades was achieved by policies for subsidizing social peace. On the other hand, investment is contracting; attracting foreign investors also seems to have failed in a country where consumption is on the wane, which is peripheral to the main European market and whose labor costs, in spite of the reform of the labor law, continue to be high compared to eastern Europe and to North Africa. Investments in the tertiary sector go to low-skilled services that are secondary to capitalist technological and strategic development,5 since the Spanish economy is based on mass tourism (the number one sector of economic activity in the country) and the perspectives for developing other productive activities or services are negligible, except in very exceptional cases of export goods or producers of very specific types of machinery, which in no way constitute a realistic alternative for job creation, since the firms which are best dealing with the crisis are precisely those which are capital intensive.

Thus, in spite of the reforms, the credibility of the country—and of the measures adopted by the Spanish government—continues to decline in the so-called international “markets”: interest on the Spanish public debt has shot up, and from the European Central Bank to The Wall Street Journal, by way of The Financial Times and The Economist, everyone has expressed their skepticism about the results of the government’s handling of the economy after the presentation of the state budgets in the first days of April.

But this lack of confidence in the Spanish economy has extended to a sector of the Spanish bourgeoisie and its political representatives, in spite of the upbeat speeches intended for public consumption.

The reform has increased unemployment, since employers are taking advantage of the new situation to offload personnel and to substitute formerly contracted groups of workers with new ones. The government itself has announced that “initially” unemployment will increase, and that this year will be bad economically, etc. And so it is, since there are still sectors of activity which are pushing ahead with their restructuring, such as banking, where the elimination of whole departments would mean sending some 41,000 employees onto the unemployment rolls, according to a report by the Institute of Stock Market Studies.

One good indicator of the country’s drift is the package of measures announced by the government at the beginning of April intended to cut €10 billion in health and education, thereby winning credibility with the “markets” as well as improving productivity through the labor law reform. Add to this the fact that while oficial discourse is announcing the necessity of a change in the productive model, oriented to the production of “knowledge,” the state budgets are substantially reducing resources intended for R&D. This is much more than simple incongruousness; it is the faithful reflection of a ruling class which, while quite aware that there is no way out, is intensifying its predatory actions (increases in salary and pension plans for high-level executives and for their counterparts in the state administration, through subterfuges which increase their perks) and is squirreling away its wealth in a social situation of everyone for him/herself.6 Last but not least, the government proposal of a fiscal amnesty for concealed money, estimated at €25 billion, in exchange for a 10 percent contribution (much lower than the legal requirement) is doubly significant in showing the government’s desperate search for liquidity and investment (since most of this money is in offshore tax havens), as well as the state’s protection for economic criminality and for large and médium-size fortunes.

• 1One example, among others, of the fascist element in Spanish democracy, or what could be called democratic totalitarianism as the form of capitalism in crisis: the sentence of 4–10 years for four youths from Navarra from the movement opposing construction of a high-speed train for throwing four pies at the head of the Navarra Autonomous Community [translator’s note: the latter refers to the regional government conceded by the central state in Madrid to various Spanish provinces during the “democratic transition” alter Franco’s death in 1975].
• 2Majority unions are those controlled by the Communist and Socialist parties; there are a number of minority unions, some with a regional base of support.
• 3Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO) is the major trade union oriented to the Communist Party and the UGT (Union General de Trabajo) is the major union oriented to the Socialist Party.
• 4In many European countries, unions have traditionally received subsidies from the state.
• 5The auctioneer role of the governments in Madrid and in Catalonia to attract the creation of Eurovegas (a replica of Las Vegas, a “free” area with none of the labor or tax laws of the rest of the country) is quite representative of the model they are proposing. In the name of the creation of employment—of this type of employment—everything is justified, up to and including this pathetic remark of Welcome Mr. Marshall.
• 6As one example among many of this type, the SEPLA (the pilots union of Iberia Airlines), which was on strike during the first week of April against the airline’s plans to create a low-cost company, denounced the fact that the eleven members of the board of directors were sharing €15.5 million a year among themselves.

In the run-up to the first round of the French elections in late April, one surprise was a surge of the “far left” (as described in the bourgeois media, and undoubtedly in some parts of the alternative media) around the candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Mass rallies throughout France, with slogans deriding the Socialist (PS) candidate Francois Hollande as “Hollandreou” (referring to the Greek Socialist leader whose personal position and political party, the PASOK, collapsed as his government implemented European Central Bank austerity), showed something brewing to the left of the mainstream battle between the “center-right” Sarkozy and the “center-left” Hollande of the French SP. Behind the Mélenchon phenomenon was the French Communist Party, making its biggest organizational breakthrough in more than 30 years.

Insurgent Notes could care less about elections, in and of themselves, but we contacted our Paris comrade, Yves Coleman who publishes the journal Ni patrie ni frontières, to find out what (if any) social significance lurked behind these electoral maneuvers. (This e-mail “interview” took place before the first round, in which Mélenchon got 11 percent of the vote.)

IN: What do you think of this Mélenchon phenomenon? Today the Financial Times foresaw him getting 12–15 percent of the vote. Is this Arlette Laguiller1 on a larger scale or something quite different?

YC: The Front de Gauche (Left Front) is a coalition, based on the German model of Die Linke. It includes the French Communist Party (PCF) being reborn from the ashes; a small contingent from the so-called left wing of the Socialist Party (PS) which formed the Parti de Gauche (Left Party) in 20082 ; some no-global movement local members; some ex-Maoist and ex-Trotskyist tiny groups and finally some “intellectuals” who tried to make a quick career in the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party) but were confronted with the old Trotskyist core and left. Where the organizational apparatus is concerned, this phenomenon would not exist without the PCF. The PCF is the main force of the Front de Gauche, even if the leader (Mélenchon) of the coalition belongs to the small Parti de Gauche and not to the PCF. The mass rallies of the Front de Gauche Mélenchon talked to would not have been possible without the financial and organizational support of the PCF who paid for hundreds of buses and thousands of train tickets to transport its supporters and even its municipal employees to fill the huge squares where they met.

From a social viewpoint, Mélenchon is the only politician appearing a bit outside the tandem of the UMP3 and the PS while not defending an anti-immigrant4 program as the right wing and National Front do. He does not project the image of a tiny left group leader such as Besancenot (NPA candidate in 2002–07), Poutou (NPA candidate in 2012) or Arthaud (Lutte Ouvrière candidate in 2012),5 although he is a leader of a small and new party.

The Left Front and its leader Mélenchon are anti-American (in the traditional French, Gaullist, reactionary way: they criticize American foreign policy but are almost silent about French imperialist policy abroad and never criticize French military forces). They are pro-“Maghreb” (they want to have good relationships with North African governments and peoples), pro-South (with a “no global” ideology). They support the necessity of trade unions and strikes; they have a rather “radical” taxation program (100 percent tax for all income above €360,000, etc.) as compared to the Socialist Party program; they call for a maximum 10:1 ratio between the highest and lowest wages, and total control of the European Central Bank by governments.

They are critical towards Europe,6 without calling for an exit from the euro. They support the idea of a “social Europe.” Mélenchon’s rhetoric is a rhetoric of left-wing nationalism (it situates itself in the tradition of Robespierre and Jaurès), rather proto-Gaullist or even Gaullist. He clearly advocates democratic socialism (in the social-democratic sense), while defending the PCF and its role in the existence of the nation. He expresses sympathies for Cuba and Chavez while remaining unclear about the nature of these regimes.

For all these reasons, Mélenchon is “popular.” He quite often attacks journalists, showing the extent to which they have sold out to their bosses, but he does not do this in a fascist way, but more in the tradition of Georges Marchais, the former general secretary of the CP in the 1960s and 1970s. As one journalist put it, Mélenchon is “Marchais with a master degree.” He is entirely secular, is rather critical towards all religions, and not at all multi-culturalist, but without being anti-Muslim. He denounces Islamophobia.

That said, Mélenchon has good relationships with Serge Dassault (the major military aircraft producer and also right-wing senator); he defends all the sleazy aspects of Mitterrand (in the name of respect for personal privacy7 ); he is a peerless interloper in all sorts of associations which he and his friends tried to infiltrate and take over; he is a self-declared Freemason; he has never gotten rich himself but did not oppose the PS system of false billings to beef up the coffers when he was the right-hand man of the Socialist Party mayor of Massy; he tried to take power in the PS for 30 years by allying himself with all sorts of sleaze balls: Mitterrand, Emmanuelli, Jospin, etc.

He doesn’t impress me as an orator, but all the media and all parties (including the right) tout his talents as a speaker. Let’s just say that he is not too off-putting and has a certain charisma for people who like rather brutal politicians, both in the way he talks and in the way he treats journalists (at least in public… because some recent articles showed he had good “private” relationships with reactionary journalists). He lacks the youthful and hip humor of Besancenot (NPA former candidate and leader), but he does have a good feel for repartee.

He does give the impression of doing something new, of linking up with the 2005 movement against the European Community Treaty (TCE), and above all of being able to put pressure on the PS to push it to the left. In a nutshell, people won’t need to struggle; they’ll elect lots of “Front de gauche” deputies in the legislative elections (scheduled for June) and everything will be fine. His problem is that he pretends he does not want to participate in a left-wing austerity government, whereas the PCF is perfectly ready to do so.

After the presidential and legislative elections, Mélenchon will either stick to his line “to the left of the PS” and thus will lose the militant support of the PCF. Then his party, the Left Party, with only 10,000 members (as opposed to at least 120,000 in the PCF) will initially probably stagnate or even collapse (the PCF is now recruiting, for the first time since 2005). Mélenchon will have to wait until the next presidential elections and will have to be able to build a mass party as important, or more so, than the PCF. For that, he will need to integrate LO and the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) members and cadres (more or less 2,000 or 3,000 “militants” each), but these two groupings won’t help him, particularly since all the careerists of the NPA have already left or will soon leave (the minority of the NPA wants to leave, take 40 percent of the election money with them and go the Parti de Gauche!) to join Mélenchon’s Party of the Left before the parliamentary elections. The other possibility is that Mélenchon will be given a ministerial post and will be rapidly marginalized. I don’t see much hope for his future, unless he just wants to have a seat in parliament (and ideally lead a “Front de Gauche” parliamentary group) and use it as a tool for the 2017 presidential elections.

I recently talked with a woman in the Left Party, one of the founders. She is convinced that neither Mélenchon nor the PCF will accept a ministerial portfolio, and that they will therefore constitute a force outside the government which will support it without participating in it, which will allow it to put pressure on the PS. I’m skeptical about the ability of the PCF to play the role of a pure, tough opposition, especially after the experience of the austerity turn of 1983. But in her opinion, the Left Front coalition exists precisely to avoid such a turn, and that’s why it will be effective. We’ll see which of us is right.

I reminded her of the experiences of the Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German “Communists” who never succeeded in pressuring the socialists when the latter were in power. She hopes that it won’t be the same in France. Which would mean that the Left Front coalition and the PCF will prepare themselves to ride on the backs of the social movements, and that my comparison with Largo Caballero is not wrong.8 The other day I was reading a chapter of a book on Largo Caballero; I can easily see Mélenchon talking very radically if a mass strike movement emerges. But it will be nothing but talk. He could be part of a facelift solution for the bourgeoisie in the event of a very serious social crisis. But he doesn’t have enough of a party for the moment.

Mélenchon certainly inherited, from his time in the OCI,9 a real capacity to politically educate the people around him, and to organize schools of political education around himself, and therefore a minority of cadres able to have a certain influence, write booklets, publish newspapers and journals, etc. He pulled in several no-global movement intellectuals, which allows him to stake out some apparently serious left-wing reformist positions. But he has a long way to go if he wants to be credible for the bourgeoisie (journalists regularly denounce his program as unrealistic or good for the ’70s) and credible for the wage laborers who would like to create and support a new PCF, or something like it. LO thinks Mélenchon will collapse like a balloon and that he is only a puppet of the PCF. The future will tell.

Last but not least, he is a quite unpleasant fellow in his daily dealings. He rarely listens to other people, doesn’t like being contradicted, and he imposes a very authoritarian style inside his own party. He doesn’t have the skills and subtlety of a Krivine, a Bensaid, or a Besancenot (all leaders in the LCR now called NPA) in his relations with the party militants. But if rank and file militants want an authoritarian leader, they’ve got one.

IN: But if Mélenchon gets 12–15 percent of the vote, will that imply a rearrangement of the political spectrum?10

YC: Quite honestly, I don’t think so, because of the lack of political courage of the PCF. At any rate, if the PCF refused to participate in a Socialist Party–led government, the PS would make an alliance with the MODEM (« left » center party whose leader is sometimes very critical of Sarkozy but has been a right-wing minister) and would undoubtedly have a majority. This is what the “left-wing” of the PS and the PCF (more timidly) have always denounced: that Royal11 and now Hollande were ready to ally with the centrists.

On the electoral front, I don’t think that the PCF is ready to radically commit suicide just when it is breaking out of its isolation thanks to Mélenchon’s “charisma” and support of the media.12 The PCF doesn’t have the ability to force the PS to do anything, from the electoral standpoint. For now (but that might change), it doesn’t have enough salaried workers, and still less enough proletarians, who would be ready to strike, occupy the city halls, and occupy the administration buildings to put a symbolic pressure on the left-wing institutions.

IN: So if I understand correctly, the big Trotskyist groups (LO, OCI, etc.) are not supporting Mélenchon?

YC: Heavens no! LO has been denouncing him constantly, both for ideological reasons but also because they want to feed the discontent of the PCF militants who find themselves putting up posters and generally running errands for a guy who, even though he is the candidate of an electoral front which includes the PCF, is always talking about himself in the first person, in the most egotistic and arrogant manner, and rarely mentions the Communist Party which is doing most of the work.

LO is still trying to win over a part of the PCF rank-and-file. The problem for them is that the “left” oppositions within the PCF are generally ultra-Stalinist and anti-Trotskyist. The NPA has been denouncing Mélenchon because its members who favored an alliance with Mélenchon’s Left Party, people from other little eco-socialist groupings, and ex-Maoists, rushed to sign on with the Left Party before the elections, so they could get seats in the next legislative elections or at least in the municipal elections, or responsibilities of that kind. For example, Christian Picquet, an NPA right-winger who has for years leaked information to the bourgeois press about his own party (the LCR and then the NPA) to promote his own views, is now supervising the negotiations and the debates between the PCF with its 120,000 members and the Left Party with 10,000, even though Picquet left the NPA with only 300 or 400 militants.

IN: But who exactly are these new people recruited by the CP? Workers? Marginal youth from the high-rise suburbs (banlieues)? Students? People disappointed by LePenism? And on what political basis is the PCF recruiting? For years, they have been so disoriented that any far-left militant could publish in L’Humanité. Has a Stalinist nucleus remained through that whole period?

YC: From what I can read in the press, it’s a mixture of students, lower-middle-class wage earners (especially if they are not Gallo-French and their parents were migrant workers), local municipality employees, public servants and precarious young workers. Politically this is a consequence of the battle for the No to the European Community Treaty in 2005. At that time, nobody succeeded in capitalizing on this upsurge of militancy. The Left Front coalition led by Mélenchon was able to recreate a dynamic unit around a pseudo charismatic character, based on a violent denunciation of the National Front in the media and milder attacks against Sarkozy, but without concessions. On the basis of left nationalism (“we are a great nation, we have a great history, we have the means to disrupt the functioning of the EU, we can get out of NATO,” etc.).

There are still some Stalinist or neo-Stalinist cores in the PCF, but they have no power at the national level. They have fiefdoms including in the north of the country, Marseilles and Lyon, but on opposed political positions. For example in Lyon they do nothing for the undocumented people, while in Marseilles and Lille they are very active. The same goes for the CGT trade union: they are old grassroots activists who supported the strike of 6,000 construction or restaurant workers, they had the backing of some national leaders of the CGT trade union, but that was all.

The PCF has become multi-culturalist, pro-gay rights, feminist (at least in its top circles), etc. There has been no deep self-criticism or serious balance sheet of its Stalinist past, but the Party has slowly moved on many “socio-cultural” issues which enabled it to attract the new petty bourgeoisie of wage earners (teachers, social workers, etc.), people who are not careerist enough to go to the Socialist Party, people who still believe the working class exists, who do not fall into the myth that each of us should create a small business.

Everyone knows that the PS will continue to dismantle the welfare state. The PCF and the wider Left Front coalition regroup all the people who still believe in the welfare state, think that the crisis is not inevitable (unlike the UMP and Socialist Party) and that there is a national solution to the crisis. They are people who are left nationalists but not xenophobic.

The National Front and journalists use often a declaration made by the Communist Party general secretary Georges Marchais in the 1970s (a video which can be seen on the Net) where he explains that there are too many migrants in France. Mélenchon responded: “The Communist Party has evolved, and anyway Marchais meant that French workers and migrants should have the same rights.” This is a lie, but it works. The Left Party and even the Left Front coalition have the most favorable program towards immigration. And this is important given the fact the ethnic composition of the wage earners has changed in France. It is no longer made up only of Gallo-French blue-collar workers, but also of precarious people or petty bourgeois wage-earners, who are the sons and daughters of migrants, who have French nationality and who vote.

IN: Do the final results of the presidential election cause you to reconsider any of what you have already said [question posed on May 26]?

YC: Not really, although it may seem presumptuous. The balance between the Right and the Left is most of the time the same in France, around 50 percent for each “camp.” This time it was 48 percent for the Left and 52 percent for the Right and the Far Right (as they were divided they did not win).

As there is no “proportional suffrage” for the next parliamentary elections in June, the Left (i.e., mainly the Socialist Party) will probably win and the Left Front will have a parliamentary group.

Mélenchon has chosen to confront the National Front’s leader Marine LePen which is not a risky move at all: if he loses this parliamentary election in a working area of Northern France (where the National Front has been active for 15 years), he will keep his seat at the European Parliament with a very good wage (at least €10,000 per month) and if he wins (Hollande gathered 60 percent of the votes in this constituency) he will be a “media hero” for a long time because he will continue his pseudo radical show in the French Parliament and on TV, and earn just a bit less of money.

As the Front de Gauche and Mélenchon failed with their 11.1 percent (3.9 million votes) to beat the National Front in the presidential elections (the NF got 17.9 percent and 6.4 million votes), Mélenchon will have a kind of personal and political revenge if he is elected as an MP against Marine LePen. In both cases, he will anyway attract media attention for 6 more weeks.

For the moment what preoccupies working class people in France is not so much the next elections (although they will certainly vote) but the euro crisis and the massive layoffs postponed by the bosses and the Right until after the elections. I doubt Melenchon, his party (the Left Party) and the Left Front will be able to organize workers against these massive sackings or will be able to promote a common struggle of European workers to break up the schemes imposed by the various European governments with the help of the IMF. All the work is left to be done!

As regards President Hollande, his choices for his first government leave no room for any hope of a significant change. But, as we know, there is always a certain gap between our pessimistic perception of social-democrat and stalinist parties and the way working class people see (or want to see) the political situation and opportunities. We will have to learn the hard way, I’m afraid, there is no room for a soft and painless reformist-capitalist solution to the present crisis.

• 1Arlette Laguiller was the perennial candidate, from 1973 to 2007, for president of the French Republic of Lutte Ouvriere (LO), a Trotskyist group which claims to have the largest workplace implantation, based on decades of distributing factory bulletins.
• 2The model of Mélenchon and its Parti de Gauche was “Die Linke” in Germany. But the failure of Die Linke to influence German politics leaves their French imitators with no clear perspective.
• 3The UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) is the party of incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy.
• 4Yves here refers to the other non-mainstream party, the National Front (FN) of Marine LePen, a far-right anti-immigrant grouping which received 18 percent of the vote on the first ballot (Insurgent Notes).
• 5It may be interesting to note that Arlette Laguiller was a bank clerk, Olivier Besancenot a postman with a university degree, Philippe Poutou a Ford autoworker (and ironically an ex-member of Lutte Ouvrière!) and Nathalie Arthaud a technical school teacher. So in this last election, in 2012, it was the organization (LO), which brags about being the most working-class-oriented, which ran a petty-bourgeois (teacher) candidate and the organization (the NPA) supposedly much more “petty-bourgeois” that ran a blue-collar worker.
• 6The European Community Treaty provoked a relatively massive campaign against it, gave birth to many local meetings and ended with a “victory” for the “No” vote. This “victory” gave rise to many illusions on the left and far left but no party was able to build a new force from this “victory” and it all ended in widespread disillusion and confusion (for more details see my article “The sad farce of the no ‘victory’” and other texts in English on the French situation).
• 7Recall that, among these so-called rights to a « private life », Socialist Party leader François Mitterrand, who entered the French Resistance rather late, maintained friendly relationships, during his entire life, with some top Vichy civil servants who had cooperated with the Nazis during the Second World War.
• 8Largo Caballero was the leader of the Socialist Party in Spain during the 1930s; he served briefly as the Prime Minister in the Popular Front government that was dominated by the Communist Party.
• 9Organisation Communiste Internationale, the “Lambertist” Trotskyist group in France. Well-rooted in the most right wing trade union (Force ouvrière) and in the primary school teachers union, this group is famous for having sent Lionel Jospin into the Socialist Party, as an entrist move. Jospin then dropped the OCI, became a leader of the SP and was even Prime Minister for 5 years!
• 10After the first round of the Presidential elections, it should be noted that the “Front de Gauche” coalition reached only 11 percent and has completely failed to block the National Front. The National Front has expanded its influence in all segments of the population especially among the workers, youth and women. The Mélenchon campaign has absolutely failed to halt the rise of the National Front, and this is understandable, as the National Front social base is quite different from the Left Front coalition (mainly PCF) social base (note added on May 1, 2012).
• 11Segolene Royal, the moderate PS presidential candidate in 2007, who was crushed by Sarkozy.
• 12In the same way that the media used Royal and Besancenot in 2007, this year they used Mélenchon. Not because they agreed with him, but because he was somebody “new” (at least in the mainstream media) who could help them to gain more readers, viewers or listeners. This superficial dimension is quite important in France as there are many elections (almost every year if you count the European, presidential, legislative and municipal levels) and the media have difficulties maintaining the interest of their public at a high level. Publishing polls every day is not enough. Presenting (fake) new images to the public and supporting these images with the candidate’s story telling can be quite good, financially speaking, during the election periods.

In Love and Capital, published in 2011, Mary Gabriel makes a really good case that love was at the center of the life of the revolutionary named Karl Marx. She does so by situating what might be considered the biography of Marx’s public life in the biography of his personal life. Although she includes the details of numerous private matters, her concern is not to produce a “tell-all” account of sins, failures and shortcomings but, instead, in a manner that’s quite consistent with Marx’s observation that people make their own history but do not make it as they please. Marx made his own life and made his remarkable contributions to the possibility of human emancipation within the context of that life, a life that was profoundly shaped by the life of his family. His wife and their three daughters who survived to adulthood were deeply committed to the same political hopes that he had and, often enough, were genuine collaborators in the development of his political views and, in the case of his daughters, independent political actors.

Love and Capital is a very readable book. It begins in 1835 when Jenny and Karl fall in love and ends in 1911 when Laura (the last surviving daughter) and Paul Lafargue are buried after their double suicides.1 The author has provided some very helpful complementary materials—a political map of Europe in 1848, short biographical sketches of the numerous characters who appear in the book, a political timeline from 1837 to 1917, and chapter headings that situate the reader in year and place. The latter feature makes it especially easy to go back and re-read important chapters.

Even though it runs to almost 600 pages, I would recommend it as a place to start for those who are becoming interested in Marx and Marxism before turning to Marx’s writings—or perhaps as a companion to a reading of Marx’s works in more or less chronological order. Much that can appear hard to understand without the contexts of times, places and personalities becomes easier to comprehend when those contexts are provided. I’d also recommend it to those who have read and appreciated Marx because I believe they will appreciate him even more after they see him and his wife, Jenny, on the run, at work and trying to raise a family in and between Cologne, Paris, Brussels and London.

Gabriel, so far as I can tell from reading the book and hearing her talk once in person, is no Marxist but she is a sympathetic chronicler of Marx’s life and a serious student of his work. However, her book should not be read as a guide to resolving perennial debates within Marxism—wisely, she has all but nothing to say about such matters. Much that she writes about has been written about before but it reads quite differently as the result of her extensive and skillful use of thousands of pages of letters (in multiple languages) written by and to members of the immediate and extended families and friends to situate the great and not so great episodes of Marx’s life. Of special value are the letters to and from Jenny and their three daughters.

In spite of being readable, Love and Capital is not an easy book to read. There is no air-brushed Marx in its pages. It portrays Marx as a courageous revolutionary, a brilliant thinker, a sophisticated political strategist, a doting father and grandfather, a tender and mostly devoted husband, a charming conversationalist, a Victorian gentleman, an unreliable provider for his family, a careless spender of other people’s money, a man all too willing to rely on his most loyal friend (Engels) to cover up his shortcomings (at earning money, writing articles, meeting deadlines and fathering a child) and, at times, someone who simply did not seem to think very much about the consequences of what he was doing for himself and those he loved most dearly. I’d suggest that we consider his well-known inclination to drink excessively neither a plus nor a minus—although definitely a source of some rather hilarious adventures.

Among all the characterizations above, the one that might strike readers as the most unexpected would be “Victorian gentleman”—implying that he was a member of respectable society and therefore an individual obedient to the social customs of the upper classes, and not a member of disreputable society and therefore an individual obedient to few social customs and sensitive to the demands of working-class solidarity. But Marx seems to have fit the bill. Among other instances that Gabriel cites, Marx wrote to Paul Lafargue to express his disapproval about Lafargue’s forwardness in relation to Laura, his second oldest daughter:

If you wish to continue your relations with my daughter, you will have to give up your present manner of “courting.” You know full well that no engagement has been entered into, that as yet everything is undecided. And even if she were formally betrothed to you, you should not forget that this is a matter of long duration. The practice of excessive intimacy is especially inappropriate since the two lovers will be living at the same place for a necessarily prolonged period of severe testing and purgatory. I have observed with alarm how your conduct has altered from one day to the next within the geological period of one single week. To my mind, true love expresses itself in reticence, modesty and even the shyness of the lover towards the object of his veneration, and certainly not in giving free rein to one’s passion and in premature demonstrations of familiarity. If you should urge your Creole temperament in your defense, it is my duty to interpose my sound reason between your temperament and my daughter. If in her presence you are incapable of loving in a manner in keeping with the London latitude, you will have to resign yourself to loving her from a distance. I am sure you will take the hint.2

The difficulty with this characterization is that, separate and apart from his attitudes regarding the daughters he loved and an occasional preoccupation with appearances, he dedicated his life to tormenting those who were responsible for respectable society in the first place.

But this book is about more than Marx. In large ways, it is also about his wife, Jenny, and their three daughters (Jennychen, Laura and Eleanor and their rather sad-sack cast of husbands—Charles Longuet, Paul Lafargue and Edward Aveling). The first was domineering; the second was unscrupulous and even despicable (for his role in all but forcing Eleanor to kill herself), and the third was irresponsible. It’s also very much about Engels, who, whatever problems he caused in his editing of Volumes II and III of Capital, comes off very well (except in the six months after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions which he spends with women and wine in the French countryside). Helene Demuth and her son by Marx, Freddy, emerge from behind the screen as real persons. Freddy lived until 1929—the longest living of Marx’s children. In small ways, the book is also about a whole lot of other individuals who cross paths with the Marx family—Heinrich Heine, Proudhon, Bakunin, LaSalle, Bernstein, Wilhelm Liebknecht, various British socialists, George Bernard Shaw, and Olive Schreiner (later to distinguish herself as an early advocate for a non-racial South Africa).

Marx was, of course, well known to revolutionaries across Europe (especially during the period of his active engagement with the International Workingmen’s Association) and, to some extent, among émigrés in the United States, and known as well as to the police forces of the various countries he lived in. On a number of occasions, he rose to prominence as a journalist—including stints as the editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRZ) in Cologne and, during the 1850s and 1860s as the foremost European correspondent of the New York Tribune.3 In 1848, Marx had returned to Cologne from Paris to become involved in the communist revolt launched in March. Soon afterwards, he became editor of the NRZ. The newspaper became quite popular—with five thousand subscribers and many more readers. Gabriel suggests: “…what drew readers was the scope of the newspaper’s coverage and the audacity of its reportage in a country that had scant experience with a free press. Using a web of correspondents around Europe and clips from foreign papers traded in an informal exchange system, Marx published more news from abroad than any other newspaper in Germany.”

As the last embers of the revolt were being extinguished in May of 1849, Marx was ordered to leave Cologne. He rushed out a final issue. He wrote: “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall make no excuses for the terror.” But perhaps more striking than the issue’s words was the dramatic effect achieved by its ink:

The entire issue was published first page to last in red ink and became an instant classic. It sold twenty thousand copies—more than triple the number of subscribers—and some copies went for ten times the original price. Engels recalled with pride, “We had to surrender our fortress, but we withdrew with…band playing and flag flying, the flag of the last, red issue.”4 >

However, Gabriel makes clear that his theoretical writings usually attracted little attention while he was alive. A few examples:

• When Marx and Engels finished The German Ideology in 1846, they unsuccessfully tried to interest eight different publishers and the manuscript was “left to the mice.”
• The first edition of the Manifesto in 1848 only consisted of 800 copies and was barely noticed—in large part because the continent-wide upheavals of that year were already underway.
• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (in German) was printed in a New York newspaper but there were no funds for distribution and so it sat in piles. Meanwhile, an English translation was “botched.” To add insult to injury, Marx learned that Proudhon had earned more than 100,000 francs for his book on Louis Napoleon.

For the most part then, during his lifetime, Karl Marx the revolutionary was known through his journalism and active participation in political debates, perhaps most notably within the International Workingmen’s Association, and not through his theoretical work. While his political instincts and determination deserve respect and admiration, those of us who read him today should instead focus on the way in which he deciphered capital. To the extent that he developed a distinctive style for doing so, we should be prepared to learn how to read it in ways that are adequate to that style.

Marx worked on Capital for the better part of twenty years before volume 1 was finished in 1867 and first published (in German) in 1868. During the years when he was working on it, the family experienced hard to believe difficulties and sorrows. They were, more often than not, miserably poor and frequently ill. The combination of poverty and ill health took its toll. In eight years from the late 1840s to the mid-1850s, four children died. The first-born boy, Edgar (also known as Musch) who was born in 1847, died before his eighth birthday and neither Heinrich Guido, born in 1849, nor Franzisca, born in 1851, lived for a year. When Franzisca died, her dead body was left in one room of the two-room apartment while they scraped up the money for a burial. And then in 1857, a boy died before he had even been given a name. But Marx was affected most of all by Musch’s death. Gabriel described the funeral and its aftermath:

Marx sat dumbly in his carriage, his head in his hands, as the glass-sided hearse took Musch’s body to the cemetery. Liebknecht stroked Marx’s head and tried to reassure him of the family and friends who loved him. But Marx shouted, “You cannot give me back my boy!” and groaned in pain. The rest of the short journey to the cemetery was made in heavy silence. Liebknecht said that when Musch’s small coffin was finally lowered into the ground, he so feared that Marx would try to follow that he jumped to his side to prevent it.5

Marx later wrote to Engels, “I cannot tell you how we miss the child at every turn… I’ve already had my share of bad luck but only now do I know what real unhappiness is. I feel BROKEN DOWN. Since the funeral I have been fortunate enough to have such splitting headaches that I can neither think nor hear nor see.”6

In 1859, Jenny came down with smallpox. The children were sent to the Liebknecht’s home and Marx devoted himself to caring for his wife. The illness was an awful one—causing Jenny to lose control her limbs and bodily functions and to suffer from fevers and constant pain. She later wrote:

All the time, I lay by an open window so that the cold November air must blow upon me. And all the while hell’s fire in the hearth and ice on my burning lips, between which a few drops of claret were poured now and then. I was barely able to swallow, my hearing grew ever fainter and, finally, my eyes closed up and I did not know whether I might remain shrouded in perpetual night!7

On a number of occasions, Marx, Jenny and Engels commented on the toll that Marx’s work on Capital had taken. Engels wrote to Marx:

I always had the feeling that that damn book, which you have been carrying for so long, was at the bottom of all your misfortune, and you would and could never extricate yourself until you had got it off your back. Forever resisting completion, it was driving you physically, mentally and financially into the ground, and I can very well understand that having shaken off that nightmare, you now feel quite a new man… I am exceedingly gratified by this whole turn of events, firstly, for its own sake, secondly, for your sake in particular, and thirdly, because it really is time things looked up.8

Marx wrote to a friend in New York that he had “sacrificed my health, happiness, and family”9 to complete the book. And after Ludwig Kugelmann had sent Marx a bust of Zeus in recognition of his accomplishment in volume 1, Jenny wrote: “Dear Mr. Kugelmann, you can believe me when I tell you there can be few books that have been written in more difficult circumstances, and I am sure I could write a secret history of it which would tell many, extremely many unspoken troubles and anxieties and torments.”

Gabriel suggests that Marx’s own lived experience profoundly shaped Capital: “The man who wrote Capital was an extraordinary philosopher, economist, classicist, social scientist, and writer, but he was also someone intimately acquainted with the slow death of the spirit suffered by those condemned to poverty while surrounded by a world of wealth.”10

Lest I draw too depressing a picture, there are also portraits of a warm, fascinating (albeit somewhat chaotic) family life. Ironically, the best description of Marx’s family life on Dean Street, their first home in London, came from a Prussian spy’s report [in 1853]:

He leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming, and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk… He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up.” The report said the three Marx children were truly handsome, and, despite Marx’s wild and restless character, as a husband and father he was “the gentlest and mildest of men.” But the household was such to make a gentleman shudder:

Marx lives in one of the worst—therefore, one of the cheapest—quarters of London. He occupies two rooms. … In the whole apartment there is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken down, tattered and torn, with a half inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere. In the middle of the living room there is a large old-fashioned table covered with an oilcloth, and on it there lie his manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, and rags and tatters of his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash—in a word, everything topsy-turvy; and all on the same table. … To sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business. Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children are playing at cooking—this chair happens to have four legs. This is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers.

…

Eventually a spirited and agreeable conversation arises to make amends for the domestic deficiencies, thus making the discomfort tolerable. Finally you grow accustomed to the company, and find it interesting and original. This is a true picture of the family life of the communist chief.11

In 1852, Marx was determined to produce an analysis of the rise to power of Louis Bonaparte in France. His kids had other ideas:

Marx worked at the family’s only table, surrounded by more than the usual household commotion. The children had created a new game that involved harnessing Marx to chairs they lined up behind him to form a stagecoach. The seated Marx was the horse, who had to pretend to pull his exuberant passengers or face a whipping. His daughter wrote years later that “several chapters of the Eighteenth Brumaire were actually written in this capacity as steeple chaser of his three small children.”12

Many years later, Marx invited John Swinton, a liberal New York journalist, to visit him during a family holiday at the seaside. After a private conversation, Marx suggested a walk to the beach.

There on the sand the two came upon the Marx family: Jenny, Jennychen, Laura, and the children, and Marx’s two sons-in-law, one of whom Swinton described as a professor at King’s College and the other as a man of letters. … Swinton reported, “It was a delightful party—about ten in all—the father of the two young wives, who were happy with their children, and the grandmother of the children, rich in the joysomeness and serenity of her wifely nature.” Marx, Swinton, and the two younger men then left the women for a chat and a drink. Swinton said he had been waiting all afternoon to pose a question to Marx about what Swinton called the “final law of being.” Finally, he had the chance, and asked, “What is?” Marx looked at the roaring sea and the restless crowds on the beach and replied: “Struggle!”13

So, after working away for all those years to produce his masterpiece, what was the reaction? Marx had a hunch that people were going to be surprised by the book. Gabriel writes about the moment when Marx delivered the first proofs to Engels:

Engels had not read any of the work as yet, and Marx was nervous about his reaction. He considered Engels his most important critic and also one of his most difficult, if for no other reason than Engels knew the subject as well as Marx himself. Marx had made a very revealing recommendation to Engels before leaving for Hamburg (to pick up the proofs), suggesting he read Balzac’s short novel The Unknown Masterpiece, which he described as “full of delightful irony.”14 The book was about a painter who, after years of labor and amid great anticipation, produced a masterpiece that only he could see or understand.15

Balzac had hinted at the outcome in an epigraph:

“Do you see anything?” Poussin whispered to Porbus.

“No. Do you?”

“Nothing.”

“The old fraud’s pulling our leg.”16

On June 16th of 1867, Engels’s first response to Marx’s work was mixed. He had received the book in parcels of sixteen pages and said by way of gentle criticism that the difficult second batch “in particular has the marks of your carbuncles rather firmly stamped upon it.”17 He did not like the abstract character of Marx’s development of the notion of the value form:

It was a serious mistake not to have made the development of these rather abstract arguments clearer by means of a larger number of short sections with their own headings. You ought to have treated this part in the manner of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, with short paragraphs, each dialectical transition emphasized by means of a special heading and, as far as possible, all the excurses or merely illustrative material printed in special type. The thing would have looked somewhat like a school text-book, but a very large class of readers would have found it considerably easier to understand. The populus, even the scholars, just are no longer accustomed to this way of thinking, and one has to make it as easy for them as one possibly can.18

He thought that the dialectic had been “greatly sharpened” since Marx’s earlier Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but there were some things Engels liked better in that work than in Capital. Otherwise, he liked what he had read.

It’s not quite clear how Marx took the criticism. But, on June 22nd, he wrote back:

With regard to the development of the form of value, I have both followed and not followed your advice, thus striking a dialectical attitude in this matter, too. That is to say, 1. I have written an appendix in which I set out the same subject again as simply and as much in the manner of a school text-book as possible, and 2. I have divided each successive proposition into paras. etc., each with its own heading, as you advised. In the Preface, I then tell the non-dialectical reader to skip pages x-y and instead read the appendix. It is not only the philistines that I have in mind here, but young people, etc., who are thirsting for knowledge. Anyway, the issue is crucial for the whole book.19

What exactly was Marx saying? Was dialectics a matter simply of a parlor game of “Now you see it, now you don’t?” And just who would be left to read the actual text if the non-dialectical readers, the philistines (whom he hated) and the young people (“thirsting for knowledge”) all followed his advice and turned to the Appendix? And, if the issue is crucial for the whole book, why didn’t he include a version of the Appendix in the original text? This is, I believe, Marx being “topsy-turvy” himself.

On the 27th, he wrote again and provided an outline for the Appendix.20 Marx takes Engels’s comment about a school text-book and provides him with a text-book outline to out-do all textbooks. The Appendix was included in the first edition but not in the second. Those who posted the Appendix to the Marx-Engels Archive wrote: “This appendix contains an extraordinarily clear and succinct exposition of Marx’s concept of value. Indeed there is no better introduction to the much more involved exposition in the first chapter of volume 1 of Capital as we now have it.” I don’t think so; I think it’s a bit of a joke at Engels’s expense. For the most part, it consists of a series of claims that x = y and y = x. But check it out for yourself.

Other friends and sympathizers expressed difficulty and puzzlement with the volume. Peter Fox, a delegate to the International Working Men’s Association, said he “felt like a man who had been given an elephant and didn’t know what to do with it.” I don’t know if Fox was familiar with the various versions of the folktale of the blind men and the elephant but he may very well have been suggesting that he simply didn’t know what part of the elephant he was holding and felt blinded by the complexity.21

After the copies began to be distributed, Marx waited anxiously for public comment. Its absence made him ill and anxious. He suffered from a new attack of carbuncles and could only lie on his side. In her letter to Kugelmann mentioned above, Jenny had sarcastically commented on the absence of responses: “It would seem that the Germans’ preferred form of applause is utter and complete silence. … If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes to be completed they would perhaps show a little more interest.”22

This was in spite of Engels’s strenuous efforts to publicize the book. He wrote seven different anonymous reviews for various publications, some favorable and others not, in an effort to attract attention to the book. He argued that the best thing to do was to get the book denounced: “The main thing is that the book should be discussed over and over again. … And as Marx is not a free agent in the matter, and is furthermore as bashful as a young girl, it is up to the rest of us to see to it. In the words of our old friend Jesus Christ, we must be innocent as doves and wise as serpents.”23

British socialist Henry Hyndman described the original reaction: “Accustomed as we are nowadays, especially in England, to fence always with big soft buttons on the point of our rapiers, Marx’s terrible onslaught with naked steel upon his adversaries appeared so improper that it was impossible for our gentlemanly sham-fighters and mental gymnasium men to believe that this unsparing controversialist and furious assailant of capital and capitalism was really the deepest thinker of our times.”24

So what exactly had Marx thought he was writing and what kind of a text is Capital? Marx had told a Geneva friend that Capital “is without question the most terrible MISSILE that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie.” But, as has often been noted and as Jenny claimed, Marx had also written Capital for workers. Gabriel observes:

“[Marx] was not a patient man, and he was notoriously wrong when it came to predicting people’s readiness for change—whether that be their ability to accept new ideas or to rise up in revolt. He repeatedly stated that it would take years, if not decades, to educate and prepare the workingman to assume the reins of power, and yet he expected that same workingman not only to absorb and understand Capital, but to do so quickly. Yet the sheer physical weight of the book, not to mention its mathematical formulas, multiple languages, erudite literary and philosophical references, and abstract theorizing, made it nearly unapproachable.25

Gabriel offers a couple of suggestions regarding the complexity of the text:

The concepts Marx presented appeared clear as day to him and Engels because they had discussed them since 1844. The two friends seemed to have forgotten that Marx’s ideas (though not all new or original) combined to create a theoretical earthquake—a revolution in thought that shook the foundations of the young capitalist society, which in 1867 had reached its highest point to date. In his book Marx held up a mirror to that society, daring exploiters and exploited alike to gaze upon the awful truths of their relations as he saw them.

…

There was also a sense that Capital was actually two books. Marx’s extensive use of footnotes—some taking up nearly an entire page—made the reader feel he was being asked to absorb a text and running commentary in tandem. One has a sense of a pianist playing two sets of keys simultaneously, which made it difficult for a listener to give full attention to either. In a way the style was a return to the Marx family’s deep rabbinical roots; it was not unlike the Jewish homiletic tradition Aggadah, which explained truths from classic Jewish texts using a two-tiered approach, overt and covert, shouts and whispers.26

But what are we to make of the claim that Capital was intended to be read by workers? Marx’s living circumstances in London were frequently all but identical to those of the workers in the same neighborhoods so he knew well the state of their degradation. And, clearly, Marx knew radical workers on the Continent and in Great Britain and engaged in political work with them—including within the First International but it’s not likely that those individuals were typical of the larger working class. In any case, I don’t doubt Marx’s intention that he wanted workers to read Capital but I think his judgment about the capacity of most of them to read the totality of such a complex text was simply mistaken.

What do we know about the workers who eventually did read Marx? Jonathan Rose reported that a study of the use of libraries maintained by the German Social Democratic Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries revealed that workers “found Marx difficult to digest.”27 “Freidrich Stampfer [a worker using one of the libraries] borrowed Karl Kautsky’s popularization of Das Kapital and found only the first twenty pages heavily thumbed: the rest was ’virgin purity.‘”28 Rose also wrote about Wil John Edwards, a student at Ruskin College:

It was in the pits—“the centre of culture among the miners”—that Edwards was introduced to Karl Marx. None of the miners could really understand him or satisfactorily explain the labor theory of value, but that did not limit their enthusiasm: “Marx was a prophet of revolution; what he said went, and it could hardly matter where.” Edwards wrote that his own Marxism was: “…a crusade demanding all the devotion of a religion. It was less a political philosophy than a deeply spiritual cult. … I am bound to admit that in those days I was swayed more by emotion than understanding. … I was a socialist, but if anyone had asked why I was a socialist, I could not have given a clear explanation. I was looking for a precisely drawn creed, perhaps for a gospel, something I could grip mentally.”29

Perhaps it would be helpful to emphasize that reading is not completely about what an individual reader independently does with a text in front of him or her. The interaction between a reader and a text is profoundly social in character. It is shaped and informed by a reader’s previous literacy-related activities and practices, by the various social circles that he or she is involved with and the literacy practices of those circles and by the extent of familiarity with what might be considered the “genre” of the text—meaning the conventions and meanings that the author of the text more or less took for granted among his or her readers. (By way of example, what do academics mean when they say they are writing a “critique”? Are they all French?) But familiarity with literacy conventions is ultimately not narrowly a matter of literacy. It is, almost certainly, a matter of social traditions and cohesions that situate the reading of certain kinds of texts within larger understandings of things like “which side are you on?” 30

According to Gabriel, Isaiah Berlin (no radical) suggested that, if the workers who read Capital understood nothing else, they would have understood Marx’s message that “there is only one social class, their own, which produces more wealth than it consumes, and that this residue is appropriated by other men simply by virtue of their strategic position as the sole possessors of the means of production, that is, natural resources, machinery, means of transport, financial credit, and so forth, without which the workers cannot create, while control over them gives those who have it the power of starving the rest of mankind into capitulation on its own terms.”31

Let’s keep something quite important in mind—Marx was enraged by what he saw and knew: “I laugh at the so-called ‘practical’ men and their wisdom. If one wanted to be an ox, one could, of course, turn one’s back on the sufferings of humanity and look after one’s own hide.” Instead, he turned his learning and his passion to the writing of memorable sentences such as:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. … Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.

Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

In its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus labor, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day.

I work on the assumption that Marx’s arguments in Capital cannot be simplified and that, perhaps, they cannot ever be read in one definitive fashion. What might make his complexity more accessible to more people, including workers, is the extent to which capitalist society follows the trajectory he outlined. In other words, a changed world changes the possibilities. So, we might find out that Marx’s hope for his readers was fulfilled—about a century and a half later than he thought.

In any case, I don’t think that Marx was especially concerned about the issue of readability. My guess is that he assumed that his readers would invest the time and effort needed to understand what he had written. I know of one bit of evidence that perhaps Marx’s readers knew more than what we might think. In Capital, he refers to “labor in general” or abstract labor as “gallerte.” The word is usually translated as “congealed”—suggesting something like freezing. But “gallerte” is not a verb; it’s a noun—a kind of food glue that has been boiled down from animal parts. Apparently, Marx’s use of the word as a description of abstract labor—meaning, more or less, that the workers’ bodies had been boiled down into an “undifferentiated” mass—was all but guaranteed to provoke feelings of disgust among those who understood the reference.32 It may be that many of the references that Marx makes would have been more familiar to his contemporaries than they are to us and, therefore, more would have been able to get what he was up to.

Keston Sutherland has forcefully argued that that much of the difficulty involved in reading Capital springs from a conviction that it should be read as a work of pure theory and that the essential task is to get the theory right. He believes that such an approach fails to appreciate the distinctive literary purposes informing Marx’s writing. He cites Marx’s comment in the preface to the second German edition that, “No one can feel the literary shortcomings in Capital more strongly than I myself.” He insists that Marx’s concern with style was inseparable from his larger political goals—including a determination to not let the bourgeoisie or its apologizers off the hook. In his view, theory can always be made into something rather innocuous but vicious satire cannot. Sutherland makes an interesting argument about what might be considered a central moment of volume 1—the theory of commodity fetishism. He argues that it’s not especially a theory at all (although it certainly has theoretical merits). He begins by pointing out another translation error—the phrase should better be translated as the “fetishistic character of commodities” rather than the “fetishism of commodities.” The distinction is reinforced by Sutherland’s extended commentary on Marx’s use and abuse of the concept of fetishism. The first person to use the word was Charles deBrosses, an eighteenth-century aristocratic ethnographer who used it to celebrate European civilization in comparison to the benighted world of superstitious primitives all over the world. Marx, of course, wanted nothing to do with celebrating bourgeois civilization and took special delight in exposing the superstitious dimensions of political economy. For Sutherland, the theorists who miss the satire miss Marx: “Each time this theory is extracted, the impurities of style and satire are washed away with the ‘caustic’ of pure theoretical paraphrase.”33 In this sense, then, interpreting Marx is not reading Marx.

What might we do if we were asked to articulate Marx’s theory of vampirism or were-wolfism? We would, I assume, say that theory is beside the point. What would we do if we were asked to ignore the vampires and the were-wolves? I hope we would answer, “Not on your life.” Many of the most memorable passages and concepts in Capital defy simple theorization. They are, instead, efforts to propose a “critical anthropology” of capitalism, wherein moving descriptions of horrifying realities, rigorous theoretical explications of complex phenomena, and heretical histories (along with an ironic/satiric style) all contribute to a work intended to shock the world into sense.

Marx died in 1883—not long after his daughter, Jennychen, and his wife. He never recovered from those deaths and, perhaps, gave up some of his all but indefatigable determination. Eleven people attended his burial at Highgate Cemetery. His death attracted little notice:

Reuters carried the first news of Marx’s death, but the initial report—like so many press reports about Marx—was incorrect, claiming that he had died at Argenteuil. Even when it was determined that Marx had died in London, the British press picked up the information only after a Times correspondent read the news in a socialist paper in Paris. Twelve years earlier Marx had been front-page news in the flurry of stories following the Commune, but in 1883 his passing barely warranted a mention.34

A year later, about six thousand marched to the cemetery.

Karl Marx was one of us and much more. In 1976, my wife and I visited Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery in London. Consistent with the customs of the time, there were bouquets of flowers in plastic containers placed on the grave with written messages enclosed. One of those messages said, “Thanks for the help, mate. We’re still at it!”

Let’s imagine what Marx wanted us to be still “at.” In 1842, he had written the following:

You admire the delightful variety, the inexhaustible riches of nature. You do not demand that the rose should smell like the violet, but must the greatest riches of all, the spirit, exist in only one variety? I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest. Grey, all grey, is the sole, the rightful colour of freedom. Every drop of dew on which the sun shines glistens with an inexhaustible play of colours, but the spiritual sun, however many the persons and whatever the objects in which it is refracted, must produce only the official colour! The most essential form of the spirit is cheerfulness, light, but you make shadow the sole manifestation of the spirit; it must be clothed only in black, yet among flowers there are no black ones. The essence of the spirit is always truth itself but what do you make its essence? Modesty. Only the mean wretch is modest, says Goethe, and you want to turn the spirit into such a mean wretch? Or if modesty is to be the modesty of genius of which Schiller speaks, then first of all turn all your citizens and above all your censors into geniuses. But then the modesty of genius does not consist in what educated speech consists in, the absence of accent and dialect, but rather in speaking with the accent of the matter and in the dialect of its essence. It consists in forgetting modesty and immodesty and getting to the heart of the matter. The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter’s essential nature.

Further, if seriousness is not to come under Tristram Shandy’s definition according to which it is a hypocritical behaviour of the body in order to conceal defects of the soul, but signifies seriousness in substance, then the entire prescription falls to the ground. For I treat the ludicrous seriously when I treat it ludicrously, and the most serious immodesty of the mind is to be modest in the face of immodesty.

Serious and modest! What fluctuating, relative concepts! Where does seriousness cease and jocularity begin? Where does modesty cease and immodesty begin? We are dependent on the temperament of the censor. It would be as wrong to prescribe temperament for the censor as to prescribe style for the writer. If you want to be consistent in your aesthetic criticism, then forbid also a too serious and too modest investigation of the truth, for too great seriousness is the most ludicrous thing of all, and too great modesty is the bitterest irony.

Finally, the starting point is a completely perverted and abstract view of truth itself. All objects of the writer’s activity are comprehended in the one general concept “truth.” Even if we leave the subjective side out of account, viz., that one and the same object is refracted differently as seen by different persons and its different aspects converted into as many different spiritual characters, ought the character of the object to have no influence, not even the slightest, on the investigation? Truth includes not only the result but also the path to it. The investigation of truth must itself be true; true investigation is developed truth, the dispersed elements of which are brought together in the result. And should not the manner of investigation alter according to the object? If the object is a matter for laughter, the manner has to seem serious, if the object is disagreeable, it has to be modest. Thus you violate the right of the object as you do that of the subject. You conceive truth abstractly and turn the spirit into an examining magistrate, who draws up a dry protocol of it.35

Years later, when he was dissecting the human corpse that is capital, he wanted nothing to do with being an “examining magistrate.”

Without theoretical sophistication, Mary Gabriel understands that. It may very well turn out to be the case that she attracts more people to an appreciation of Marx than the efforts of all the various Marxist groups. For the most part, that will be a good thing since so much of what parades as Marxism has very little to do with Karl Marx. Mary Gabriel knows Marx and we know him better after we read her book.

• 1Although I share very little of the renewed enthusiasm for Lenin (in some circles), I feel obliged to note that he spoke at the funeral.
• 2Love and Capital, p. 338.
• 3For those who have not yet seen it, a valuable collection of Marx’s journalism is Karl Marx: Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, edited by James Ledbetter and published by Penguin in 2007.
• 4Love and Capital, p. 164.
• 5Love and Capital, p. 245.
• 6Love and Capital, p. 245.
• 7Love and Capital, p. 287.
• 8Love and Capital, p. 342.
• 9Love and Capital, p. 343.
• 10Love and Capital, p. 358.
• 11Love and Capital, pp. 234–35.
• 12Love and Capital, p. 220.
• 13Love and Capital, p. 478.
• 14Francis Wheen has written a similar account of this episode but does not mention that Engels had not yet seen any of the manuscript.
• 15Love and Capital, p. 345.
• 16The novel is available online.
• 17A carbuncle is made up of several skin boils. The infected mass is filled with fluid, pus and dead tissue. Carbuncles may develop anywhere, but they are most common on the back and the nape of the neck. The carbuncle may be the size of a pea or as large as a golf ball.
  
  In August, Engels was more critical: “But how could you leave the outward structure of the book in its present form? The fourth chapter is almost two hundred pages long. … Furthermore, the train of thought is constantly interrupted by illustrations, and the point to be illustrated is never summarized after the illustration, so that one is forever plunging straight from the illustration of one point into the exposition of another point. It is dreadfully tiring, and confusing, too, if one is not all attention,” Love and Capital, p. 349.
• 18See Engels to Marx in London.
• 19See Marx to Engels in Manchester.
• 20It’s available at Marx to Engels in Manchester.
• 21There are a couple of versions of the folktale.
• 22Love and Capital, p. 358.
• 23Love and Capital, p. 349.
• 24Love and Capital, pp. 351–52.
• 25Love and Capital, p. 351.
• 26Love and Capital, p. 351. Marx’s family had included prominent and learned rabbis since 1693.
• 27Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
• 28Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
• 29Rose, p. 263.
• 30Even today, I think that the demands of much political writing appear to be quite beyond what most workers think they should be able to read—including many who have college degrees. Contrary to what some might think, I try pretty hard to make my writing “considerate” of what readers may not already know but my own adult children are frequently puzzled by what I produce.
• 31Love and Capital, pp. 356–57.
• 32See Keston Sutherland, “Marx in Jargon.”
• 33Sutherland, p. 12.
• 34Love and Capital, p. 506.
• 35Thanks to Nicole Pepperell for this wonderful fragment. It’s available on her blog.

A small and dangerous volume, this republication of C.L.R. James’s A History of Pan-African Revolt is a concise survey of Black freedom struggles in the United States, the Caribbean, and on the African continent from 1739–1969. A product of two periods in his life and work, his first British years (1932–38) where he emerged as the author of The Black Jacobins, the classic history of the Haitian Revolution; and his second American sojourn (1969–79) where he was a mentor to Black Power activists who had been members of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; this book documents famous and obscure race and class struggles in two parts written from the vantage of 1939 and 1969 respectively.

While some scholars have misunderstood this slim text as perhaps among James’s least original works for its dependence on his past Haitian Revolution research, comrades in the International African Service Bureau such as George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, and Issac Wallace Johnson, and silent reliance on W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and other’s scholarship; those who repeatedly have commended it as timeless have arguably not assessed properly the innovative power of the book either.

Pioneering in how it depicted intellectual and social movement history among peoples of African descent, it was not without its limitations. However, what makes A History of Pan African Revolt enchanting is the thread of speculative philosophy that holds the assorted anecdotal historical commentaries on labor strikes, anti-racist rebellions, heroic personalities, and anti-colonial events together. A vision of Black autonomy, James depicts peoples of African descent thinking and acting for themselves as they pursue their own emancipation through movements of their own invention. From a contemporary perspective, we must be careful that this is not received by readers as a cheap platitude.

First written at the dawn of modern anti-colonial revolt for Africa and the Caribbean, it is true that this historical work was distinguished by a collection of ideas ahead of its time. The first incarnation not only anticipated his famous speech “A Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA” (1948) which inspired the African American autoworker James Boggs, and later led white socialists to identify with Black Nationalists such as Robert Williams and Malcolm X. For those familiar with James’s Notes on Dialectics (1948), and its survey of the Puritan, French, and Russian Revolutions, in an attempt to sum up the spontaneity and organization of the toiling masses in socialist and democratic movements in Europe; A History of Pan-African Revolt, without the abstract discussion of Hegelian categories of cognition, might be re-evaluated as a dynamic kindred work.

Early (and even contemporary) studies of people of color tended to struggle to break away from racial categories of contempt and pity (and preoccupations with what white people were doing and saying—whether nice or not nice—and how Black people were to react). This often led to an impediment—the specifying of autonomous criteria for valuing the beauty in Black cultures and the content of people of color’s self-government was often neglected. That all Black people must do is “stay black and die,” while a common refrain, cannot be the basis for such assessments. Neither that Black people always had their own philosophies and cultures and were thus human. Something else was required.

James, while emphasizing people of African descent, even under the status of slaves, “brought themselves” to the Americas, recognized Black people brought notions of moral philosophy, family forms, languages, and artisan and agricultural skills with them and learned to innovate under adversity in the face of new technological challenges and cultural environments. At its best A History of Pan African Revolt, informed unevenly by his affinity for direct democracy and worker self-management, takes a bigger leap forward than most realize. It traces ruptures not merely with mischaracterizations of Black humanity but also with nation-states, ruling elites, and ordinary party politics.

Repeatedly, James shows political treachery, in the age of white supremacy and empire, was not a monopoly of the white race alone. He anticipated the post-colonial moment where some people of color saw their new role in hierarchal representative government as the culmination of what for them was perceived as otherwise an already satisfactory existence without disturbing the empire of capital. James also saw Black freedom struggles as necessarily making evaluations not just on the terms of Black autonomy but the potential of multi-racial alliances.

A sharp reading of James’s A History of Pan African Revolt reveals that his outlook on direct democracy and national liberation struggles at times intersect. Where they do not, that in its own way is an education in history and politics. James was willing to stretch his categories of radical political thought to accommodate Black mass movements and rebellious expressions that the average Marxist or historical materialist (and even himself) might be uncomfortable with. Still, at his best, James rarely did this without criticism of past historical movements or the political thought of others. By this means he advanced these struggles or their representative power as historical lessons. Yet he did not do this as an innovative “Black Marxist” to break with the limits of European socialism around race matters—for that is to reduce James to a fragment of the man.

James, a dynamic partisan of world revolution, constantly made strategic and philosophical adjustments in how he evaluated Russia, Britain, France, Germany, or the Age of the CIO to point the way forward for American and European workers’ self-emancipation, as distinct from people of color, as well. James was not a narrow expert on what was once called “the Negro Question” but told European socialists when he thought they were wrong about the self-emancipating nature of their own working class and the democratic legacies of their own civilizations (of both of which he was quite fond). Not a hegemony theorist, James never spoke of the false consciousness of toilers—regardless of color. He believed recognizing what he termed mass movements’ “partial mistakes” allowed for the later completion of insurgent historical moments which at times became derailed for a decade or even an epoch. To be sure, he did not advocate these delays, but saw himself as facilitating the overcoming of the next social hurdle. Let us take note of these dynamics as they function in this fine work.

The Stono Rebellion of 1739 of South Carolina, which was ultimately defeated, is an opportunity for James to evaluate a slave revolt where white slave masters were killed (but a kind one was allowed to live), property was burned, a military garrison is seized, and a strategic plan to flee across the international border with Spanish Florida where Angolan ancestral affinity is a potential motivation for an alliance. The Haitian Revolution is recognized as an inspiration to a slave revolt which failed to take place in Louisiana of 1795, where whites were allies from the beginning and disputes over strategy and method made the specter of it memorable. Gabriel’s Revolt, a slave insurrection outside Richmond, Virginia, gathered thousands of slaves who, with clubs and sharpened swords, intended to massacre the whites. But it was decided to exclude Frenchmen and Quakers for their perceived politics and strategic sympathies. Elements of contingency, chance storms which flooded rivers and tore down the bridges impeded events. James always depicted slave revolts as not embarrassing outbreaks of anger and violence but the work of African Americans who had original organizational and strategic capacities and moral philosophies. Importantly, he did not manufacture a cheap heroism to justify future capitalist politicians in their civil rights and welfare policies. For James could see how this suppressed more contemporary visions of Black self-emancipation.

Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner are seen as theologians with different political implications. Vesey is seen as having a prophetic vision that insisted all those who opposed the uprising must be killed and who was betrayed by collaborationist house servants. Turner’s revolt, which massacred women and children, is viewed as having linkages to rebellious poor whites. James sees Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad as a change in tactics which anticipated the success of the Union Army in the Civil War.

James is innovative in highlighting labor strikes in Sierra Leone and South Africa.

He unevenly recognizes, but was far ahead of his time, aspects of religious rebellion in the Congo’s Simon Kimbangu or the John Chilembe led rising in Nyasaland (later Malawi). He seems to minimize aspects of the spirit unnecessarily in a nevertheless intriguing materialist reading of Kenya’s Harry Thuku Revolt of 1921 as a general strike. He shows famous statesmen such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta being pushed from behind by the African masses’ self-organization, compelling colonizers to release them from jail to govern, even where the colonizer militarily defeats profound insurgencies such as the Mau Mau rebellion (1952–56) led by Dedan Kimathi. He does not let on that British colonialism also disoriented Nkrumah’s Positive Action campaign of 1950.

We might rethink the notion that the British were forced to release Nkrumah and Kenyatta from jail. Just as the case of Nelson Mandela’s later release from prison and collaboration with F.W. DeKlerk, they lifted the struggle to the moral plane emphasizing they “suffered without bitterness.” But they also propped up Black capitalism each in their own way (in collaboration with multi-nationals) at the expense of insurgent Black workers and farmers. James never highlighted that Mau Mau leaders like Kimathi and Bildad Kaggia, who was a defender of the landless, were betrayed by Kenyatta at the post-colonial moment. Further, that Nkrumah early on in state power purged radical labor leaders such as Pobee Biney of the Sekondi-Takoradi dockworkers, who really pushed Nkrumah from behind into the Positive Action campaign. Biney later inspired the 1961 general strike against Nkrumah’s regime. This labor action, and the mass discontent it represented, should have revealed a reassessment of Nkrumah’s regime, long before the 1966 coup often blamed too narrowly on the CIA, elite Ashanti ethnic leaders, and a military plot alone.

James’s discussion of the period of the great strikes across the Caribbean from 1934–39 is interesting for its highlighting of Adrian Cola Rienzi (Krishna Deodarine), an Indo-Trinidadian, as a major labor leader of the era which should be brought to the attention of Pan-African audiences. His more famous Afro-Trinidadian comrade, whom James was to valorize later in his sojourns in Caribbean party politics, was Uriah Butler.

James’s discussion of the Marcus Garvey movement is profound for his capacity to tease out the kernel of desire for provisional government that this huge Black mass movement represented while discarding the conservative and capitalist tendencies of its leader. He accomplished this in an era where the standard approach of socialist people of color toward Garvey was to viciously denounce the personality allowing for little validity of the independent self-mobilization behind it.

Robin Kelley’s introduction to this volume shows the evolving publication history from A History of Negro Revolt to A History of Pan African Revolt in global social movement context and highlights some interesting dynamics. He restores James’s pioneering leadership as a coordinator of global resistance to the Italian invasion of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia (1935–41) as a major context for the first crafting of this volume in 1938–39. Yet close readers will observe remarkably that James did not write an Ethiopia section for the part which discussed Africa, with these events seemingly fresh on his mind. What are we to make of this? In a brief instance, in the part on Caribbean revolts, he acknowledged that the plight of Ethiopia heightened the consciousness of militant labor action against empire in Trinidad. James underlined that the majority of peoples of African descent everywhere had the mistaken conviction that Ethiopia was treated badly on account of race. Certainly, James was aware that colonialism had racism and capitalism intertwined as causes for the denial of self-government. But this fragment suggested James held deep beliefs, with complex nuances, on how national liberation struggles were to be understood, that are still not grasped by most scholars and activists who are fond of him.

Kelley’s approach, which seeks to reconcile James, the anti-Stalinist and libertarian socialist, and African American and Caribbean communists affiliated with Moscow through a “Black Marxism” framework around the Ethiopia Question cannot principally highlight James’s ultimate clash with his associates in Pan African activism over the need for “workers’ sanctions” (not League of Nations or later United Nations sanctions). Peace, James insisted, unlike Popular Front communists, could not be genuinely sponsored by imperialists such as Britain or the United States. Dockworkers and maritime workers regardless of race, like his comrades the seamen from Barbados, Chris Jones and Arnold Ward, could implement their own embargo against Italian trade and goods through direct action.

It would be a mistake to assume that “workers’ sanctions” uncritically borrowed from a narrow European Marxism. All over the African world, people of color volunteered, including James, to go to Ethiopia to fight the Italians, as a group of multi-racial volunteers did in the Spanish Civil War. However, Ethiopia was not for James a matter of a thin Black solidarity. James assessed Selassie and his foreign minister, Dr. Martin, as selling out the popular self-mobilization of the Black masses on a world scale for an alliance with the European and American imperialists. It is true the imperialists made a mockery of “collective security,” and degraded the Ethiopian regime as less than their peer, and made them wait to have their rights, as a manager of Black labor, restored.

James unlike most Black communists and Pan Africanists wished to expose and encourage not merely the overthrow of Italian colonizers, but as well Emperor Haile Selassie, who would later be viewed as omnipotent by the Rastafarian movement. James could not stay loyal to a Black-led state power, whatever the insults of white imperialism, where it was not perceived by him as consistently cultivating mass development and unleashing the popular will. James was so disappointed with the Pan African movement’s inability to look for the self-organization of the Ethiopian rank and file, in contrast to the personality of Selassie, he never directly addressed that solidarity movement in this narrative.

Ethiopian solidarity does shadow the conclusion to James’s The Black Jacobins, written the year before, and his sarcastic depiction of Dessalines being crowned emperor, a proxy for Selassie’s coming restoration, with the assistance of the forces of Anglo-American capital in Haiti. As a foreshadowing of a self-emancipating future for Africa in 1938–39, James looked to obscure Africans’ mutinies and general strikes, linking up with Black and white workers abroad, seemingly beyond nation-states and their aspiring rulers.

The Ethiopian context of A History of Pan African Revolt can only be easily incorporated into a unitary framework of “Black Marxism” by willfully ignoring, if documenting at times, James’s political differences with George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, and Ras Makonnen within the International African Service Bureau, but also Paul Robeson’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s Council on African Affairs, on how to approach national liberation struggles in the 1930s through the 1950s. For example, Padmore’s advocacy of class struggle in Ethiopia against Selassie before the Popular Front era and James’s criticism of Padmore after the Popular Front, for changing his view, and looking for “progressive” opinion among the imperialist rulers is documented by Kelley. Yet, this for Kelley, does not make the paradigm of a Black radical tradition, which purportedly never minimized Black rank and file resistance in contrast to European Marxists, implode on itself. Revisionist accounts, while not always bad, can minimize important facts. Of course, James in his elder years was silent on these differences over Selassie’s Ethiopia, partially as a result of his strategy of triangulation between statesmen and radical activists to build the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania, and thus his experience of Ethiopian politics in the 1930s could not even be amplified even from the vantage of 1969 for this study.

At times, Kelley asks challenging questions that the reader should consider carefully. Indeed, James’s valorization of Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere as making the greatest contributions to radical thought on peasants since Lenin is very peculiar on a number of levels. These include, as Kelley points out, ignoring labor revolt and radical dissent suppressed by Nyerere’s regime including the most autonomous Ujamaa village councils, such as the Ruvuma Development Association. But also Nyerere can truly be said to have an affinity for Lenin’s last writings on the peasantry, as James underscores validly. Yet James and Kelley overstate the value of Lenin’s writings and obscures how dictatorial the Russian leaders’ policies actually were toward workers and farmers.

James, as a writer of Caribbean short stories and his novel Minty Alley, published before the first edition of the classic under consideration, highlighted the self-activity of unemployed and low wage single mothers, their theologies and interaction with patriarchal forces. Between the two editions of Pan African Revolt, James did some interesting theorizing which began to see the power of Ghana’s market women and Kenya’s peasant women behind Nkrumah’s and Kenyatta’s shadows. He attempted to present their own terms of being and ways of knowing as self-emancipating processes that audiences of so-called modern politics, in their backwardness, still strain to comprehend. We must note that, except for brief mention of Harriet Tubman, Black women’s role in the process of Black self-emancipation was underrepresented in this particular volume.

James’s brief survey of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Little Rock school desegregation, Greensboro’s first lunch counter sit-ins, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, and the Black Panthers places their politics on the world stage of historical significance without offering the type of insight he more silently shared with younger colleagues in that generation. James is at his most bold and transparent when he looks at the meaning of the urban uprisings of 1964–68 culminating in the rebellion in Washington, DC.

After King was assassinated, the US military defended key government buildings but otherwise conceded the burning city to the insurgent Black masses. James concludes that, despite fear of a conservative white backlash against Black Power, the American rulers could not consistently mobilize white racism against the just demands of Black radicals and the white youth and students who were their allies. In 1969, in this text, he does not speak of white workers as allies—it was becoming increasingly unfashionable. James insisted to suppress the Black movement in its totality is to destroy the American nation root and branch. Of course Black freedom struggles were attacked, officially and unofficially, but James’s diagnostic analysis of the mode of rule in the United States of 1969 concluded correctly that soon a more ethnically plural and multi-cultural approach to managing the crisis of race and class struggles would emerge. In the meantime, he marveled at the advance in Black political thought among the masses which rising up against police brutality suggested, while most at the time could only see embarrassing “riots” and “racial disturbances.”

Kelley’s suggestion that James evolved from an emphasis on Black labor revolt in the 1930s to a more heterogeneous emphasis that included Black middle class forces and intellectuals in the Black Power era is prescient on one level. However, the publication date of the revised edition in 1969 by the Center for Black Education and Drum and Spear Collective in Washington, DC, led by Jimmy Garrett and Charlie Cobb, veterans of the Black Panthers and SNCC, predated the emergence of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) in Detroit the same year. We might conclude by placing this work in conversation with that movement and moment.

James was very influential on the LRBW but the terms of how he came to be are still obscure. James’s comrades George Rawick and Martin Glaberman, and his former comrades James Boggs and Grace Lee, did facilitate study groups and mentor the core of who became the leadership of the League. While his vision of workers’ self-management and rejection of vanguard parties are often seen as the basis of James’s influence, prominent LRBW leaders overwhelmingly did not share those politics, despite being against capitalism, managers in industrial workplaces, and white-led trade union hierarchy.

Instead, James influenced more marginal members and secondary leaders of the LRBW to approach his more advanced direct democratic perspectives through their Pan-African cultural nationalism, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s was perceived by many falsely as inherently in conflict with class struggle perspectives. Critiques of European arrogance or ignorance of African ontologies, philosophies, languages, and history need not be a façade of Black capitalist politics whose adherents masquerade as advocates for the welfare of the masses of the Black renters and wage earners. Not incompatible with a vision of workers control, reconfiguring one’s identity and psychology out from under white supremacist degradation is not a small matter for all human beings.

In fact, the LRBW members James influenced toward direct democracy, such as Modibo Kadalie and Kimathi Mohamed, saw in the earlier part of James’s Pan African Revolt a vision of independent labor which was “black enough” and spoke to their needs in a way that his uncritical valorization of Huey Newton in this same book did not. James once lectured an LRBW audience in 1971 where Kadalie and Mohamed were present. James was explaining his own unique understanding of dialectic, and how this was the method he used to come up with “the Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem” in 1948.

James pointed out in 1948 the instinctive proclivity of African Americans for independent politics inspired the most radical among the industrial working class. Black folks’ elemental political drive called into question capitalism, imperialism, and the neutrality of the state. James said few back then saw the merit of the perspective he had worked out through proper observation and speculative method. One can say the same thing for this classic on Pan African Revolt under consideration.

James underscored, in his lecture to LRBW cadre, everyone was impressed with his analysis of 1948 in 1971—but this evaluation was a breakthrough decades ago. James told them, they would have to work out their own perspective for their own historical moment. This implied those old categories of thought, even James’s own, could not properly explain the post-civil rights, post-colonial moment which was emerging. If one desired to have dynamic and current political thought, James’s philosophical method for interpreting history, he emphasized, may be of value.

When the meaning of Kadalie’s purging from the staff of the LRBW, and Kimathi Mohamed’s writing in 1974 of the neglected classic Organization and Spontaneity: The Theory of the Vanguard Party and its Application to the Black Movement Today (which was dedicated to Mzee CLR James—Mzee is a Swahili title for revered elders) is properly considered, the intellectual legacies of A History of Pan African Revolt become larger.

This concise classic speculative philosophy and historical narrative placed in the service of Black revolution will charm scholars and activists, despite at times being inconsistent in its post-colonial criticism, and introduce new readers to a worldview that still can disturb authority and inform a new beginning.

Readers though must bring an outlook, which James strived to promote, that starts with the achievements of past freedom movements, the highest standards they set, and inquires about past mistakes made, to understand properly where to begin anew. A History of Pan African Revolt provides a foundation.

Paul Mattick, Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.

David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2011.

Not long after Karl Marx completed the first volume of Capital, he boasted to his friend, Louis Kugelmann: “even if there were no chapter on ‘value’ in my book, the analysis of the real relationships which I give would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation.”1 Marx did not carry through on this suggestion, never completing the work that centered on the concept of value (the unfinished volumes 2 and 3), let alone attempting something more ambitious still. But he seemed to suggest that it was fully possible to comprehend societal reality in all its essential complexity without resort to the simplifying conventions of theory. His intriguing remarks thus serve as a vantage point from which to judge recent marxian interpretations of the economic crisis, especially ones that aim at a popular audience for whom a background in theory—marxian, economic, or otherwise—is not necessary.

Paul Mattick’s, Business As Usual, and David McNally’s, Global Slump, follow through to varying degrees on Marx’s suggestion. Each author focuses on a single, primary aspect of Marx’s theory as a means to explain the current crisis. For Mattick, the point of entry into the economy is money; for McNally, it is competition. This propels them in very different directions, largely a function of how close to Marx they remain. Mattick’s book takes the form of an extended essay that warrants close reading. McNally’s lengthier treatment is both breezier and polemical.

If Mattick only occasionally describes ideas and events by means of marxian value theory, he nonetheless takes full advantage of the ability to think abstractly about the economy. This is implicit in his use of money as a jumping off point. Money is the most mystifying, if not outrightly befogging, arena of all. Money is where the intertwining of economic categories and economic reality is so extreme that few commentators avoid slipping repeatedly from one conceptual domain to the other without a real awareness of the transgressions they have committed. In Mattick’s hands, money becomes an easily-understood substitute for what Marx, at various moments, labeled “value” or “labor-time,” albeit at an even greater level of abstraction.

Mattick is particularly interested in economists who, like Marx, form a minority current within the wider profession of economic analysis because they focus on economic crises rather than economic prosperity, attribute crises to the peculiar mode of functioning unique to capitalism alone, and who single out profit as the sine qua non of business operations. He calls our attention to economists such as Wesley Claire Mitchell and Hyman Minsky who used profits (or the lack thereof) as a means to explain the Great Depression of the 1930s and the cyclical nature of capitalist enterprising. Prior to Marx, it was J.C.L. de Sismondi, writing in the early 1800s, who identified the destabilization of the economy in the inability of the working population to consume all that was produced. Marx might not have agreed with Sismondi’s explanation (without a gap between production and consumption, profits would not be possible), but he appreciated the attempt to explain crises by looking internally at how capitalism operated as an economic system.

Mattick mentions that there have been other voices along these lines. Nonetheless, he highlights Marx, who more than anyone else focused attention on the relationship between crises and profit. The economics profession has tended towards an unending, and ultimately unsatisfying, search for factors exogenous to the industrial system to explain what goes wrong. If at one point natural disasters and agricultural productivity were resorted to as explanations for the periodic downturns and stagnation that have plagued the world’s economy, it has been the emotional habits of investors, consumers, and financiers alike that has focused economists’ attention ever since. In modern-day economics, as Mattick aptly points out, profit simply becomes one income stream among others, leading to a profound inability to see capitalism for what it is—a profit-making system that creates its own difficulties.

If Mattick leads readers to reconceptualize their understanding of economic reality, McNally approaches matters quite concretely with easily understood descriptions of the competitive process. He has us assume, as is the custom within the field of microeconomics, that the actions of a single competitive firm are indicative of business behavior everywhere. “Overaccumulation,” he tells us, “emerges at a point where, relative to demand backed by money, there are simply too many factories and too much equipment producing the same good.” Unable to sell all that has been produced and unable to cover expenses, “this is the point at which overaccumulated capital finds itself in a crisis situation” (Global Slump, p. 77). McNally echoes Sismondi, except that insufficient consumption is now generalized throughout the economy rather than attributed to the underconsumption of a particular class. For McNally, even businesses are consumers.

But where Mattick uses abstract thinking (theory) to selectively explain pertinent aspects of economic reality, McNally has no such luxury. By beginning in the concrete, he quickly becomes mired in it. McNally’s treatment of competition—the centerpiece of his analysis—is far from adequate. For one, much has been written by marxists (from Hilferding to Sweezy) and mainstream economists alike during the last century on the effects of monopolies and oligopolistic competition on price-setting, output restrictions, the predatory nature of advertising, and the manipulation of effective demand. Not competition, but the progressive disappearance of competition over time, has animated discussion. Yet, McNally’s descriptions of the overproduction of commodities fail to mention this trend.

Secondly, competition for Marx takes place on multiple levels—within specific spheres of business (of the sort described by McNally), but also between and among the different spheres of production. Each firm, no matter how monopolistic in its own arena, must still seek ways to secure a portion of the total profits that are generated in the economy at large. There need not be direct competition between producers for them to nonetheless experience the competitive effects of capitalism’s internal mechanisms. Steel makers, oil companies, and home healthcare providers all compete against one another even though none of this takes place directly. Monopolistic prices in one area of the economy, say oil production, mean that there is less left over society-wide for everyone else.

Insofar as McNally embraces what is specific to Marx (the theory of the falling rate of profit), he does so as part of a two-track explanation: “whenever both of these trends—over-accumulation and declining profitability are at work—capitalism is heading for a crisis” (Global Slump, p. 79). This is an odd way to pose the matter. For Marx, the two trends posited by McNally were actually one, since declining profitability manifests itself in overaccumulation. But the reverse is not true. Overaccumulation can be accompanied by either a falling or a rising rate of profit (and often varies, depending on the particular phase of the crisis). For Marx, it isn’t the rate of profit per se that provokes a crisis, but the insufficiency of profit, of which the rate of profit is—in theoretical terms—a shorthand means of explaining this phenomena.

Mattick, in Business As Usual, keeps these various relationships clear: the lack of profits vis-à-vis the profit needs of existing capital stands behind capitalism’s tendency towards crises. Mattick has largely accomplished what Marx indicated could be done, avoiding the terminological use of the marxian value theory without abandoning the accompanying discursive explanations.

McNally, on the other hand, doesn’t succeed because of gaps in his presentation regarding the competitive process and also in his comprehension of the marxian theorem. Theory is collapsed into reality as if they are the same entity. In McNally’s understanding, competition functions in this dual capacity, but so does the empirical rate of profit (as experienced by businesses) which is treated as if identical to the theoretical rate of profit (as posited by Marx).

Sometimes McNally gets downright psychological. The crisis cycle, he claims at one point, results from a repetition compulsion by the 1 percenters: “just as denial is unhealthy for individuals, so it is for groups and societies. To deny or repress a traumatic experience means, as Freud taught us, to invariably repeat it. And this is what global elites are in the process of doing” (Global Slump, p. 16).

For the most part, though, politics for Mattick as for McNally flows naturally from the starting points of their respective analyses. For McNally, this means the elimination of crises by restricting and counteracting the negative effects of the competitive process and the market economy. In Global Slump, McNally endorses a wide range of social movements, including regime change in Ireland, one-day demonstration strikes in France, broad-based electoral movements in Bolivia, and the formation of small trotskyist parties. In other publications, McNally offers additional recommendations—corporate bailouts, conversion programs, and even Keynesian-like stimulus packages (albeit with qualifications).2

Mattick puts such solutions into question. When both inflationary and deflationary policies threaten to deepen the crisis, as evidenced in the fierce disagreements among the world’s bourgeoisie over which policies to follow, governmental action of any sort—interventionist or isolationist, expansive or repressive, stimulus-oriented or deficit-reducing, or entirely inactive—becomes a hindrance to the expansion of the for-profit market economy. What’s the point, then, of intermediary measures if the world’s economy, and its attendant social systems, is already stuck in a dead-end?

It is worth reading Mattick’s account of the previous 60 years in some detail because of how he reconstructs this ongoing dilemma. The post-WWII boom, unprecedented in terms of the prosperity it brought forth, nonetheless required massive amounts of government-managed deficit spending. During the 1970s, however, government debt itself became one of the obstacles to a further expansion of the world’s economy. A never-ending process, of lurching from one economic crisis to another, came to characterize the modern era.

Piece by piece, society has been transformed—without much of any overall coordination—in order to help counteract the failing economy. Because of his focus on the reshaping of the global system currently under way, Mattick is able to inter-relate a huge number of seemingly disparate phenomena and trends. These include the quest for low-wage labor, the privatization of publically-owned assets, erratic investment behavior, and the torturous discussions everywhere as to whether it is best to enlarge or shrink government, with economists often saying the opposite of what they had said just months before.

Neither Mattick nor McNally refer to Marx’s theory of exploitation, by which employers extract a surplus over and above what is needed to recreate the material and human resources to continue the production process. That such a discussion is missing from McNally’s account is understandable since it is commodities, and not the employed, that are the focus of his economic analysis. Given the general lack of rigor in his argumentation, it’s probably unfair to even point out all that is absent in his interpretations.

Mattick, however, is more rigorous in his investigation, and it’s precisely because he raises expectations by explaining reasons, and not just effects, that one can ask more from him. For Mattick, the system has failed, and can’t be fixed, which explains why the world must change. Exploitation, though, is not among the desiderata.

Might we then conclude that the disappearance of any discussion of exploitation is one of the costs of following Marx’s suggestion of a value-free value theory? Perhaps it’s no accident that Marx never followed up on his own suggestion. If this is the case, we owe it to Mattick for showing us all that can be done in such terms.

• 1Karl Marx to Louis Kugelmann, July 11, 1868.
• 2See the interview with McNally, “The Global Economic Meltdown” in Sasha Lilley, Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult. Oakland: PM Press, 2011, pp. 102–03. Lilley seems not to notice that McNally embraces some of the very solutions she criticizes.

2011 saw the emergence of powerful new movements stretching from Wisconsin to Egypt, from Chile to Greece. It was the year of Occupations as public spaces were taken over by activists beginning with Tahrir Square in Egypt and eventually moving on to Wall Street, Oakland and hundreds of other locales worldwide, including several unsuccessful attempts in South Africa. Conspicuously absent from the renewed and resurgent discourse amongst anti-capitalist forces and the popular imagination was sub-Saharan Africa, and by this I mean “black Africa,” the Africa of the eternal cycle of dictators, corruption, famine, “bad governance” and debt. African Awakenings: The Emerging Revolutions ambitiously sets out to remedy this and place the host of new movements arising across the continent in a singular socio-political context. This ambition importantly matches one of the more impressive features of the movements of 2011, in the form of the growth of a new internationalism as statements of solidarity and support were transmitted from the occupations of Wall Street to Tahrir Square and activists have begun to share tactics and experiences in what is increasingly being perceived as a global struggle, emerging from specifically local contexts.

African Awakenings begins with Pamabazuka editor Firoze Manji posing a question which goes on to form a central part of both the book and thinking about “Africa” in general: “Where does Africa begin and where does it end?” Historically there has been conceptual distinction between predominantly Muslim North Africa, which has been lumped in with the Arabic world and “black” sub-Saharan Africa, despite the fact that much of Africa’s Muslim population is, in fact, black. In this, black Africa is culturally separated and walled off from the rebellious spirit of North Africa; it is stuck in the same primal stasis which Western commentators continually repeat in the same tired coverage on the ever-constant “African Crisis.”

The book itself has an explicit goal to rescue the “Arab Awakening” or “Arab Spring” from the insular liberal narratives which seek to isolate the revolutionary wave which swept North Africa and parts of the Middle East last year as a specifically “Arab thing,” a reawakening of the Arab people. This sort of ethnic narrative, which fits into the same limited pathology which failed to predict or understand the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia in the first place, except as a some of sort of Western inspired phenomena, inspired by the “Western forces” of Facebook and Twitter or according to the New York Times’s most respected court jester Thomas Friedman, even “Israel”…“Africa,” meaning specifically black Africa, is of course a place of stagnation and repetition, not of history and thus cannot be susceptible to such world-historic revolutionary moments. African Awakenings, on the contrary, attempts to situate this revolutionary wave within the context of long-running and emergent struggles across the continent directly linked to the events in the Maghreb.

Pambazuka is a unique entity formed of some 2800 writers, bloggers, activists, academics and artists, based in Oxford and edited by Firoze Manji; it is an earnest attempt to provide a continental forum for African intellectuals and activists located both in the continent and in exile across the globe. It is, as far as I know, the only source of both serious analysis and commentary by such leading intellectuals as Mahmood Mamdani and Samir Amin, as well as local reports of struggles from South Africa to Algeria. It functions both as an accumulator of information about various struggles across Africa and a forum for debate and conversation for those committed to serious change. The book itself is the offspring of some of the writings featured in a weekly newsletter which reaches an impressively sizable audience.

It speaks to the sheer diversity and strength of the content carried by Pambazuka that such a book could be assembled like this without being a complete waste of time. There is nothing earth-shatteringly new contained within the pages, rather a selection of on-the-ground reports and reflections from activists, particularly activists who participated in the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions, mixed with various essays from mainly academic contributors. In this the likes of Samir Amin and Mahmood Mamdani share the pages with dedicated members of the million strong Tahrir Square occupations. South African academics such as Patrick Bond and Richard Pithouse are featured along with those of a more international bent such as Nigel Gibson and Horace Campbell.

Pithouse’s contribution “South Africa: On the Murder of Andrias Tatane,” chronicles the resurrection of police militarization in South Africa during the build-up to and following the 2010 World Cup, leading to the eventual televised murder of an activist (Andrias Tatane). This wave of militarization closely resembles both politically and tactically similar developments in the United States, the results of which were experienced first-hand by those caught up in the various occupy protests, particularly in Oakland. South Africa according to Peter Alexander “can be reasonably described as “the protest capital of the world.” In the last three years, there has been an average of 2.9 “gatherings” per day resulting in a 12,654 “gathering” incidents during 2010–11.1 This however has yet to transform into a mass movement capable of forming an effective challenge to the state or the ruling ANC’s (African National Congress) hegemony.

One of the notable points made early on in the book is the centrality of Africa to the functioning of the global economy. This centrality takes two forms, one in the form of the influx of debt payments to Western powers, most of it incurred during the heyday of Structural Adjustment Programs forced upon countries. Each year $340 billion flows from Africa Northwards to pay off $2.2 trillion of debt. Since 1980, over 50 Marshall Plans worth somewhere over $4.6 trillion have been sent from the peoples of “the periphery” to their creditors. Combine this with a staggering amount of capital flight—an estimated 30 percent of sub-Saharan Africa”s GDP and Africa might be a net creditor to the rest of the world.2 Africa is also the location of strategically vital raw materials central to both Western powers and increasingly the emerging economic powerhouses of China and India. The immense mineral wealth of countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the oil riches of Libya, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria have been anything but a blessing to their people, as most of the population continues to live in relative poverty while a small elite continues to prosper and Western investors reap most of the benefits. Historic attempts to reverse this established neo-colonial paradigm in the form of organic attempts at building African Socialism or nationalist projects led by the likes of Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, have ended in failure, whether through the barrel of the gun of an assassin, a US sponsored insurgency or the pressures of international capital.

With this in mind and a recognition of both the crisis of capitalism we are currently experiencing and the emerging struggles across the globe, Africa, at least “black Africa,” has been conspicuously absent from the discussion. Attention has been focused on the Occupy Movement which swept across the United States last autumn, the student movements in Chile, the UK, the May 18 movement in Spain, the increasingly militant movements in Greece and of course the forces that brought about the downfall of Mubarak and Ben Ali. At the same time shack-dwellers’ movements and an increasing wave of small scale insurgent protest in my own nation of South Africa have been accompanied by protests and small insurrections in countries as diverse the Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Gabon and Burkina Faso. Even the last absolutist monarchy in the world found in the tiny country of Swaziland was rocked by a wave of mass demonstrations inspired by the “Arab Spring” and chronicled in the book by Peter Kenworthy. Furthermore, there was of course the latest grand outing of imperialism in Libya, another bout of regime change led by the French and endorsed by the UN in Ivory Coast, increased covert bombing and on-the-ground activity in Somalia and the beginnings of a new outpost of the American empire in Uganda (yes, even before the almost satirical imperialism of Kony 2012).

One of the weaknesses of the book is the homogeneity of the writers in the context of the particular struggles, mostly the country which I know best. Sadly all of the writers who have contributed in relation to the struggles are white middle-aged academics, not that their contributions are not important, but reports from working-class participants in said struggles would greatly strengthen the section. Furthermore, the lack of younger voices is troubling considering that in line with global paradigms younger activists are often at the front of these struggles, particularly in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia.

Another notable weakness is an excessive focus on Libya, rather than focusing on the emergence of new movements and the awakening of “Africa,” the text is stuck in chapter after chapter aimed at dismantling the myths surrounding the latest bout of humanitarian intervention and assaulting the myth-makers of Imperialism. Valuable as this may be, it’s out of place with the desired goals of the book and becomes repetitive quickly, even reaching dangerous flirtation with Qadaffi apologetics in the case of one essay by Jean Paul Pougala.

In South Africa, the precarious position of the youth is a national tragedy as the majority of young South Africans face the very real possibility of never finding decent work in their lifetimes. Furthermore, the official left formations of the national trade union COSATU (Congress of South Africa Trade Unions) and the SACP (South African Communist Party) have remained ensnared in a Faustian contract in the form of the tripartite alliance with the ruling ANC (African National Congress). The alliance has led to the leadership of both the SACP and COSATU being deployed as ANC cadre and defending ANC neoliberal policies. Both formations have been unable to provide a response, let alone leadership or formations, aimed at combating what is increasingly looking like a position for permanent precarity for the so-called “born frees,” referring to the generation that grew up after the fall of Apartheid in 1994. This political vacuum poses a challenge to forming a resurgent independent left in South Africa and remains alive with possibility particularly because the hegemony of the ANC is not quite so potent among those who have grown up in abject poverty. The absence of these voices amongst the independent left at least in South Africa, speaks of a current location on the margins of South African politics and the failure to take advantage of the lack of interest and neglect of the ANC aligned left.

The voices of this new generation of activists in South Africa and across the rest of the continent is where an “awakening,” if it can be called that, has its base. So far, we have yet to witness the transformations of current “African” struggles from local contexts into long-term revolutionary mass movements or see the transformation of spontaneous uprisings such as the one which gripped Nigeria early this year sparked off by marked increase in gas prices, due to an end in state subsidies, into sustained mass movements. A measure of realism is needed when assessing African politics, not a banal morbid fatalism, but an honest assessment of the strength of social movements, an avoidance of romanticism and the descent into sectarianism which distinguishes a marginalised left.

The book itself illustrates the formations of a new wave of struggles, but it is unfair to view them yet as a part of an “African Awakening.” The ambition of the book fails to match up to the current reality; this is not however to say that the seeds of dissent may not spring into something else in the near future. Although it is fair to place these struggles in the same political universe as the other movements of 2011, the book itself is not going to feature as a future monument to the world-historic events of 2011. It was hastily assembled and the essays featured within are a mixed bag; however it serves as a valuable introduction to contemporary African left politics. Furthermore, the internationalism and ambition at the heart of Pambazuka is admirable in itself; the fact that a book with such a diversity of content could be assembled in such a manner serves as testament to the strength and potential of Pambazuka News. In short an admirable if not quite successful book which, ultimately, is more useful than necessary.

• 1See “Protests and Police Statistics in South Africa: Some Commentary.”
• 2Firoze Mangi, “African Awakenings: The courage to invent the future,” p. 7.