Forum

 

In this section we publish articles, statements and documents from other organizations and activists who are not affiliated with the RCIT and who, therefore, do not necessarily share our programmatic outlook. Usually, these documents remain on this page for a certain period after which they are replaced by others. This section is intended as a forum for the spread of ideas and information as well as one which encourages debate between forces which view themselves as part of the liberation movement of the workers and oppressed. We invite other organizations and activists to send us contributions for this section. Naturally the Editorial Board reserves the right to decide on the final acceptance or rejection of any submitted piece.

 

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Statement of Greek Socialists against the imperialist EU (with a Preface of the RCIT)

 

Solidarity Appeal for Jammu Kashmir People's Rights Movement

 

Dmitry Petrov: An Anti-Imperialist Fighter Has Fallen

English   Español    Francais   Português   Italiano  한국어

 

Anatomy of the Covidian-Left: Response to “The Left and Covid” (Part 1 & 2)

 

Казахстан: социалистический подход к инфраструктурному кризису

 

France: Demonstration against “Green Pass” and Compulsory Vaccination in Angers (13.8.2021)

 

“It’s about our Identity!” - Interview with activists about the uprising of the Ahwazi Arabs in Iran

 

South Africa: Interview with a Revolutionary Marxist on the Hunger Riots in July 2021

 

From Cuba: a description of the protests

 

Compulsory Vaccination in France / Vaccination obligatoire en France 

 

The uprising as a part of the global circulation struggles  (NonPolitics / Achim Szepanski)

 

La victoria de Netanyhau, la imposibilidad de reformar el Estado de Israel y un debate histórico con el PO

 

Chile: derrota enorme del gobierno y duro golpe al régimen semi-pinochetista

 

Netanyahu, los capitalistas y la ley del bombero loco

 

Netanyahu, the capitalists, and the mad fireman law

 

De la guerra comercial a la guerra de las patentes

 

From the Trade War to the Patent War

 

Covid: laboratorios bloquean desarrollo de tratamientos eficaces y baratos

 

La izquierda argentina con las masas colombianas

 

1M y la izquierda que cambio Plaza de Mayo por la virtualidad

 

Gran victoria: sigamos el camino que marcaron los piquetes de Neuquén

 

Primero Chile, ahora Colombia, la llama de la rebelión sigue prendida

 

El homenaje a los Mártires de Chicago no puede ser virtual, sino en las calles

 

Gramsci y el abandono de la teoría marxista del Estado

 

El poderoso gremio portuario de Chile, va a la huelga

 

Argentina: Socialist Rally in Buenos Aires against the Lockdown

 

Argentina: Jornada de agitación en Casa de Gobierno contra toque de queda

 

Free Karen Marin!

 

Aufruhrgebiet: Zur Methodologie der Klimawissenschaft

 

Erasing People through Disinformation: Syria and the “Anti-Imperialism” of Fools

 

Louis Proyect: Book Review of Michael Pröbsting's 'Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Great Power Rivalry'

 

Victor Conti: Bare Life: Biopolitics and Covid Capitalism

 

Colectivo Emancipacion Proletaria: ¡¡Abajo el estado de sitio!! ¡¡La única pandemia es el capitalismo imperialista!!

 

 

Preface of the RCIT

 

Below we republish a statement which we did receive from the New Left Current (NAR), one of the largest organizations of the radical left in Greece with a number of deputies in regional and municipal assemblies. The statement outlines an intransigent opposition against the European Union (EU) and correctly denounces it as an imperialist institution.

 

Hence, the comrades advocate that countries should break with the EU and leave it: “The only way out in defense of the people’s rights in Europe is the struggle against the EU, the break and disengagement from it from an anticapitalist, class and internationalist perspective. It is impossible to have an anti-capitalist perspective without challenging the EU and European capitalist integration.”

 

The RCIT and its predecessor organization have always opposed the EU as an imperialist institution which can not be reformed in the interest of the working class. (1). This is particularly true in the current phase where the biggest European powers – France and Germany – want to utilise the EU to create a pan-European Great Power which could independently confront other imperialist powers like China, Russia or even the U.S. (2)

 

Likewise, we consider the EU also as an imperialist instrument to subjugate semi-colonial countries in Europe. Greece is a case in point for such a capitalist semi-colonial country which suffered from the reactionary austerity policy which the EU enforced on the country in the past one and a half decades. (3).

 

Concerning tactics about EU membership, we differentiate between imperialist and semi-colonial countries. In the case of the latter – like Greece –, we support a rupture since an exit from EU membership means more political independence from imperialism and, hence, better conditions for the working class and the oppressed to fight. (4)

 

However, things are different in the case of imperialist states. Of course, we do not share the reformist approach which considers EU membership as “progress” or as a “lesser evil”. (5) At the same time, we also oppose any illusion that national imperialism would be something superior to pan-European imperialism. Hence, we did not support the pro-Brexit position which many of the British left adopted in 2016. In imperialist countries, we advocate a “neither-nor” position in referenda about joining resp. leaving the EU. This is the only valid position to advocate a working-class position which is independent of EU as well as of national imperialism. (6)

 

The most important task in the struggle against capitalist austerity and imperialist aggression – in imperialist as well as in semi-colonial countries – is the international class struggle across the borders. This is the key to advance the struggle to overthrow the ruling class and to build the United Socialist States of Europe!

 

 

 

Footnotes

 

1) See for example our essay by Michael Pröbsting: The Reformist Pipe Dream of a “Socialist” European Union. Is A Socialist Transformation of the Imperialist EU Possible? A Marxist Analysis on the L5I’s Latest Opportunistic Adaptation to Labour Reformism, 01.10.2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/is-a-socialist-transformation-of-the-imperialist-eu-possible/

 

2) See on this e.g. RCIT: European Imperialism: A Shift towards Armament and Militarisation, 4 May 2024, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/european-imperialism-a-shift-towards-armament-and-militarisation/

 

3) See on this e.g. our book by Michael Pröbsting: Greece: A Modern Semi-Colony. The Contradictory Development of Greek Capitalism, Its Failed Attempts to Become a Minor Imperialist Power, and Its Present Situation as an Advanced Semi-Colonial Country with Some Specific Features, November 2015, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/greece-semi-colony/

 

4) See on this e.g. RKOB: The European Union and the issue of the accession of semi-colonial countries, 14.10.2012, http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/europe/eu-and-semi-colonies/

 

5) Michael Pröbsting: Marxism, the European Union and Brexit. The L5I and the European Union: A Right Turn away from Marxism. The recent change in the L5I’s position towards the support for EU membership represents a shift away from its own tradition, of the Marxist method, and of the facts; August 2016, in: Revolutionary Communist No. 55, http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/eu-and-brexit/

 

6) See on this e.g. Michael Pröbsting: The British Left and the EU-Referendum: The Many Faces of pro-UK or pro-EU Social-Imperialism. An analysis of the left’s failure to fight for an independent, internationalist and socialist stance both against British as well as European imperialism, Revolutionary Communism Nr. 40, August 2015 http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/british-left-and-eu-referendum/;

 

 

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The common struggle of people to defend their rights relate to the rupture with the EU and the dissolution of it

 

“I know it sounds devastating, especially for the younger generation, but we have to get used to the fact that a new era has begun: the pre-war era”

 

“We must be defence-ready and shift to a “war economy” mode”

 

Political officials of the EU are preparing to make the workers and the youth "cannon fodder" to save European capitalism from its crisis. The imperialist antagonisms are an implication of the capitalist crisis, which has not been resolved and has intensified the capital competitions at all levels. The dramatic developments in Ukraine and the Middle East have already a decisive impact on the lives of workers.  The EU and all its member states increase their military budget. EU's military strategy in Ukraine but also in Africa and the Middle East leads to dangerous militarization and rise of nationalism, strengthening of the bourgeois state especially in its repressive forms.

 

The working class in Europe, the youth, the great majority of the farmers have already experienced for decades the adverse impacts of the EU:

 

-The EU was never the “peoples’ home”. By contrast, it is the leading power of the exploitation, the destruction of working rights, the submission of every public good to the “market”.  It promotes privatization as well as flexible labor. The common agricultural policy and the subsidies led to the destruction of small and medium farmers.

 

-The EU does not guarantee the peace. It is an imperialist mechanism. It participates and backs all the invasions that have destroyed whole countries and have led to millions of refugees, in the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Agfhanistan, former Yugoslavia and Africa.

 

-The EU does not include “equal partners”. It deepens the inequalities among countries and converts the peripheral economies to zones of cheap labour and hyper-exploitation, while shrinking and deregulating several sectors of production.

 

– The EU is not “humanitarian”. It implements deeply racist policies creating Fortress-Europe in the Aegean, the Mediterranean Sea, Melilla. It assigns agreements to make massive deportations and pushbacks of displaced people, leading to thousand deaths.

 

-The EU does not attempt to “solve the issue of the public debt”. By contrast, the “public” debt has greatly risen since the eurozone was established and it is paid off by the working class people.

 

-The EU is not a “space of democracy”. It restricts democracy, working rights and popular sovereignty. Its policies facilitates racism and fascism.

 

The EU constitutes the political and economic union of the capital, it provides the mechanism for the unification of European ruling classes against the peoples. The experience in Greece from the recent years indicates in a cruel way that the EU is impossible to be reformed.  Since the debt crisis, the EU has managed to incorporate not only the great wave of social unrest but also the challenge to the EU and the euro itself in the period 2010-2015. The reactionary turn at all levels are the response of the governments and the EU to the crisis.

 

But, on the same time, movements and resistances are growing. The pan-European farmers uprising brought the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to the political debate. According to Eurostat, in the 15 years 2005-2020, the implementation of the CAP has wiped out five million poor farmers, with further concentration of agricultural land and production on agri-food industrialists and modern medieval-style landowners! Students in Greece revolted against the foundation of private universities as the EU turned the country’s Constitution into a rag paper. The exclusively public and free nature of higher education is written in the Greek Constitution but the government invoked the European Directive of “the freedom of movement of capital and businesses”which ensures that international agreements and European law take precedence over the Constitution.

 

The only way out in defense of the people’s rights in Europe is the struggle against the EU, the break and disengagement from it from an anticapitalist, class and internationalist perspective. It is impossible to have an anti-capitalist perspective without challenging the EU and European capitalist integration. This element is crucial and must be at the heart of the political and ideological debate in the run-up to the European elections in June 2024. The dominant forces in the Union seek to keep the peoples of Europe trapped in the dilemma between the pro-EU parties and and the far right. But, indeed, they both are interested in ensuring the interests of the bourgeoisie. The logic of the “lesser evil” always leads to the greater evil, as the historic examples have shown. It is in this framework of the reactionary policies of the EU, the war, and the capitalist crisis that “eurosceptic” parties, racist ideas and the far-right are developed all over Europe during the last years. The reactionary bourgeois political forces of the so-called “Euroscepticism” (Meloni, Le Pen, Orban etc) do nothing more than negotiate a better position for their own bourgeois class within the framework of the European capitalist integration. They are the governments and the political forces of the “liberal” and “democratic” EU, that adopt step by step the agenda of the far-right, supposedly in an effort to moderate.  But the only thing they manage to do is to legalize it and reinforce it, deepening their own crisis.

 

The break and disengagement from the EU are an indivisible part of the total struggle to impose the interests and the needs of the workers and the people. The struggle for the exit from the EU is tightly related with:

 

- The struggle for peace, against the imperialist imposition of the EU, the European Army, the shift to militarization. The critical starting point pertains to the anti-war strategy and independence from the bourgeois politics and interests of each country and from the international capitalist-imperialist blocs. The crucial issue is the connection between the anti-EU, the anti-war and the social-class arenas of struggle, adopting a clear position against the unjust, reactionary and aggressive antagonism of the bourgeois classes.

 

- The struggle of the workers for better salaries and pensions, against the continuing austerity, for stable work and labor rights, against the flexible  work, for the defense of public goods, against the privatization and the liberalization of the markets. The struggle to reduce the working hours and eliminate unemployment.

 

- The struggle to erase the usurious public debt, which despite the rhetoric that is used will never become manageable. For nationalization of the banks and the big enterprises, putting them under workers’ control.

 

- The struggle for the contemporary democratic rights of the workers and the youth and the popular sovereignty. Against the transfer of the decisions in the hands of the technocrats of the EU and the multinational corporations, far from every social control.

 

- The fight for open borders, cities and neighborhoods for the refugees and the immigrants who are a part of our class and our struggle against fascists and the extreme-right.

 

- The struggle for the ecological survival of the planet, against the capitalist’s profit.

 

- The fight against the oppression of the women and LGBTQ people

 

THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE, OUT OF THE EUROZONE AND THE EU

 

The popular movement must intervene, demanding the exit from both NATO and the EU, to unite the anti-war movement with the struggle for bread, peace, health and freedom, against the governments and the barbaric capitalism. An initiative for the release from the EU will contribute to the strengthening of the perspective that “there is an alternative, out of the Eurozone and the EU” in the labour movement. An initiative for the release from the EU will connect the struggle against the EU with the struggling against the war, the imperialism and fascism, defending the democratic rights of the people. This initiative aims:

 

• To reveal the role of the EU, to highlight the target of the release from the EU
• To support the belief that we it is possible to live out of context the EU
• To organize joint actions on specific issues, such as the fight against the war
• To contribute to the struggles of labour and social movement, emphasizing their connection with the fight against the EU and its mechanisms.

 

 

 

1 Agapitos Thanasis, former regional councilor of Central Macedonia

 

2 Antonopoulos Pavlos, member of the Pensioner Teachers Association

 

3 Binioris Nikos, member of the General Assembly of the Municipal Workers' Union

 

4 Desi-Louka Christini, secretary of the Union of Employed Technicians (SMT)

 

5 Dinopoulou Vaggelitsa, Secretary of  the Local Union of Primary Education Teachers

 

6 Dodou Lida, PhD in History, former regional councilor of Central Macedonia

 

7 Frida Litsa,  member of the Board  of the  Secondary State School Teachers of Pireaus

 

8 Gjikuria Aida, member of the Board of the Local Union of Primary Education Teachers, member of the Initiative of Albanian Immigrants 

 

9 Govas Dimitris,  trade unionist, member of  Athens Labour Association (ΕΚΑ)

 

10 Kalousis Akritas, member of the Board of the Greek Federation of Secondary State School Teachers (OLME)

 

11 Katsaris Panagiotis, president of the Panhellenic Association of  Agricultural Engineers (ELGO-DIMITRA) former regional councilor of the Peloponnese

 

12 Kilakou Sylvia, civil engineer, former member of the Board of Athens Labour Association (ΕΚΑ)

 

13 Kosinas Christos, biologist, former regional councilor of Western Greece

 

14 Kosmopoulou Olga, member of the Board of the Employees' Association of the General Hospital of Nikaia

 

15 Lathiras Yannis, municipal councilor of Sikies-Neapolis (Thessaloniki)

 

16 Manavis Nikos, farmer, former regional councillor of the North Aegean

 

17 Manikas Stavros, public transport worker, member of the Board of the Public Transport Trade Union

 

18 Michailidis Georgios, PhD in History

 

19 Miltsakakis Michalis, Municipal Councilor of Kaisariani/Athens

 

20 Muca Mikel, student, University of Macedonia/Thessaloniki

 

21 Papachronis Thodoris, president of the Union of Workers in Private Education (SEFK)

 

22 Papanikolaou Panos, Secretary of Federation of Unions of Hospital Doctors of Greece (OENGE), Municipal Councilor of Peristeri/Athens

 

23 Papantzikos Dimitris, member of the Food - Tourism - Hotels Trade Union

 

24 Pavlopoulos Giorgos, journalist, editorial board of PRIN newspaper

 

25 Peredidis Thodoris, economist-accountant, former regional councilor of Eastern Macedonia - Thrace

 

26 Reppa Dina, member of the Board of the Teachers' Federation of Greece (DOE),former  municipal councilor of Athens

 

27 Rizos Michalis, member of the Board of Doctor’s Union of Attiko Hospital

 

28 Smilios Ilias, municipal councilor of Ampelokipi-Menemeni/Thessaloniki

 

29 Talahoupis Nikos, construction worker, member of the Board of the Larissa Construction Workers' Union, former regional councilor of Thessaly

 

30 Thanou Irini, President of Research Workers Union (SERETE)

 

31 Toulgaridis Kostas, secretary of the Local Union of Primary Education Teachers “K.Sotiriou” , former regional councilor of Attica

 

32 Tzortziotis Stavros, municipal  councilor of Vyronas/Athens

 

33 Xenopoulos Kostas, former municipal councilor of Thessaloniki

 

34 Xoplidis Panagiotis, member of the Union of Bookshop Workers, Thessaloniki

 

 

Introduction by the RCIT: Below we republish a solidarity appeal by the Revolutionary Youth and Workers Movement in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. The region is currently facing important mobilizations with confrontations between the masses and the police and army.

 

 

 

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We appeal to the oppressed nationalities, students, human rights, Labour, women, farmers and international socialist organizations of Pakistan, India and world to support the Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir People's Rights Movement which central demands are (provision of electricity according to the production cost from hydropowers, subsidy on wheat flour and abolition of Ruling class privileges).

 

We believe that the way in which the popular masses expressed conscious intervention in this movement is rare. This movement is definitely not limited to Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir, but considering the nature of the demands, it is an anti-imperialist movement, because on the one hand, while imperialism is politically custodian of the system, and economically It is also a major shareholder in the major Mangla and Neelum Jhelum hydropower projects where the investment brought by (UK, US, France and Chinese) companies in the production. Therefore, it is necessary to stand in solidarity with this mass movement and support the popular people of Jammu Kashmir.

 

Details and our political stance

 

On May 10, The Joint Mass Action committee (JAAC) called complete shutter down and wheel jam strike against the police crackdown and overnight raids in various areas of Muzaffarabad and Mirpure Divisions, with several of its leaders and activists were arrested by the police. Clashes broke when police used heavy shelling of teargas and stone pelting.

 

Last month, the committee had announced that people from across the state would on Saturday (May 11) take a long march towards Muzaffarabad demanding the (provision of electricity according to the production cost from hydropowers ,, subsidy on wheat flour and abolition of Ruling class privileges).. Joint Awami Action Committee held a shutter down strike in August last year due to these demands. After that dialogue between the government and (JAAC) leadership took place at various times. In December last year, an official conciliation committee was formed by the government, after which an agreement was reached between the two parties on February 4, 2024 after which the government issued the notification but did not follow, even this none committed agreement of government, the Joint Mass Action Committee was criticized by subordinate Mass Action committees being so lenient with the government.

 

However, in April the committee had announced a long march on May 11 to protest the against government’s "non-fulfillment of written commitments".

 

In the state capital and other districts, clashes broke out between police and protesters, which later turned violent with police firing tear gas at peaceful protesters as police violence led to retaliatory stone-pelting. used against Demonstrations were held in various cities, where people vowed to continue the struggle for their rights.

 

Violent clashes broke out between the police and rights movement activists across the region on Saturday, May 11 amid a wheel jam and shutter-down strike, with one policeman killed and over 90 injured, according to various government sources. Thousands of protesters were injured. Police officer Sub-Inspector Adnan Qureshi succumbed to his injuries after being shot in the chest in Islamgarh town where he was posted along with other policemen to stop the rally going to Muzaffarabad via Kotli. This time, the leadership and workers of the People's Rights Movement are looking more enthusiastic, courageous and organized than in the earlier days. The members of the caravans take care of each other. In every town and city, the caravans are warmly welcomed and offered food and drink. People are using music and Bhangra (dance) to ignite their feelings, emotions, thoughts, courage and in the movement without any fear of the state.

 

Pakistan-administered Kashmir, most of people were praising Pakistan on cultural and religious grounds, until a few years ago believed and followed the narrative set by the Pakistani state through education, art and media. Culture, religion and love of the country have been discussed through the media for the last decades. The space was kept so much that if anyone asked questions to understand the culture, religion or love of the country; he was put in the line of enemies of the country. the working people were so brainwashed until a few years ago, the ruling class did not face any problem in achieving their interests. The same chauvinism was being peddled in the masses with anti-Indian chauvinism at its core. But the new generation has not only smelled the stench of the chauvinism given to their forefathers but is also treating it as a cure. In this social change.

 

The global economic crisis of 2007-09, the war in Ukraine and the Israeli aggression on Palestine also played an important role. Where the world capitalism had to face the economic crisis, the condition of a developing country like Pakistan became very worse. The ruling class of this country has always played the role of a rentier state for the US due to its strategic importance. Maintained the social structure in such a way that all strata of feudalism, religious patriarchy, capitalism and rural capitalism were intermingled, always headed by the establishment, Because the most authoritative force in Pakistan after imperialism is the establishment, whose capital has now been tied to imperial capital, so every year the news of various economic activities of journals come to the fore that such and such journals have run many restaurants and other businesses in US and Canada . It is the establishment that keeps using different parties like tissue paper according to the time and public mood. It is the establishment that chooses rulers for imperialist policies who follow neoliberal policies. But for the last two decades, the interests of American imperialism have moved towards India due to the Kashmir issue. Because India is a larger and important market of imperialism, which is not only playing an important role in the division of labor, but also an important country providing cheap labor which opened up the market on very low term and conditions. Being a large economy, it became important in the imperialist camp.

 

The Pakistani state, which in the recent past continued to provide services to the American imperialism as a tenant state. Now her importance has concluded, so the American imperialism did not give any opposition to India on ending the special status of Kashmir, but formally allowed the ruling elites of Pakistan to continue giving speeches in the UN to make its people more fool. It simply and bluntly means that the Modi government on 5th August 2019 by abolishing the special status of Jammu and Kashmir from its constitution. Behind this control there was the imperialist Asharbad(back), which had been given prior notice to Pakistan.

 

 Pakistan, which in the past kept swearing to hoist the Pakistani flag at Delhi's Red Fort, not only remained silent on this act of India, but also threatened the people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir to remain silent. When some of her X-pro tried to cross the line and were stopped near the Line of Control and finally, to save their reputation in front of masses, UNO was once again put in the middle. Do the nationalists not know what the United Nations is?

 

Then the remaining nationalists and revolutionaries formed another coalition called People's National Alliance (PNA) which openly discussed the duplicity of the Pakistani state that Pakistan was not a partner of our movement but an occupier thus who is slaved either side raised a rebellion against it.

 

It was a very correct action that both the countries are occupying and stopping the Kashmiris by drawing a line on both sides. Therefore, the people of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir should fight against the direct occupation of the Pakistani state. Therefore, they should be fought against. But the leadership of PNA continued to use confused border lines with extreme centralization without coming up with a solid program, sometimes empowering the Legislative Assembly, sometimes combining Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan into Constituent Assembly etc. , much of the leadership of this coalition ran away from debates and discussions among the cadres. The main reason for which was the same logic to meet the demands of unity, freedom and national democratic revolution together with the rulers of the Legislative Assembly. (PNA) was unsuccessful in evacuating more people. A few thousand reached in Muzaffarabad, on October 22, 2019, the state severely tortured them. This process not only demoralized the youth but also exposed the leadership completely and after that all the parties of this alliance kept falling in aparts

 

The current movement is mostly led by the youth who have previous or existing association with resistance in one way or the other. Those who have been fighting in Pakistan-administered jammu Kashmir for long time against the end of occupation, looting of resources, unemployment and inflation against both occupying countries Pakistan and India. Most of them are young people who joined their nationalist or progressive groups, are fed up with oscillating politics. It is true that these youth do not have a clear path forward or control, but they continue to resist. Due to which the masses are standing with them. The masses have a longing to take revenge for decades of deprivation, they want to heal their past pains and sufferings. Their hatred against the local rulers has never been seen before. Which is coming out now?

 

We understand that there are enormous flaws in this social upheaval. The most important weakness is what should be the time of public intervention in historical events, for this it is important to studied historical references. At a time when masses want to fight on a militant and revolutionary basis. They are turning from the movement of rights to the slogans of freedom, independence and revolution. We must remember that it is not today's deprivation that the people have risen up against, but decades of deprivation that have been tolerated till date. . Therefore, it is necessary to struggle while advancing the program.

 

Civil disobedience has been called for by the popular masses for a long time because while the people consider the rulers of Pakistan as occupiers, they consider the representatives of the Legislative Assembly given by Pakistan as equal partners. This is the assembly which till date has not given freedom of speech and inscription to Kashmiris. In assembly election participation, they cannot even submit papers regarding the independence of Jammu Kashmir, but first they have to take an oath that Jammu Kashmir will become Pakistan.

 

For 76 years, the ruling class of Pakistan has been fooling the people by using their occupied Kashmir as a base camp, that they will fight for Kashmir for thousands of years. The main reason is to keep the Kashmir issue alive. to loot the resources of Pakistan and on the other hand to arouse the sentiments of the Pakistani masses. For which Pakistani media and curriculum have played an important role. The Pakistani establishment, which is the main player in Pakistan, has kept most of Pakistan's resources under its control by creating countless institutions since the birth of Pakistan, keeping an arrangement with the United States, but in the name of defending Kashmir, an important part of the country's budget Used more in name of defense . Pakistan was virtually under martial law four times and the rest of the country remained under the control of the Bonapartist regime, meaning that historically the runaway political regimes remained with the military elite.

 

This military elite and its fringe political elite have never allowed any development within Kashmir, always providing the justification that Kashmir is a remote/divided area that is yet to be decided. Although there could have been good tourism in this land of beautiful mountains, forests, rivers and waterfalls, it was not allowed because if there was tourism, how would the families of military officers spend their summer holidays in such a peaceful environment?

 

Industry could have been set up in Jammu Kashmir but it was not allowed to happen because if the industry was set up, more of the 20 to 3 million people who migrated to other countries for employment because they could not have found here jobs. Hydropower plants have been installed in Jammu Kashmir, from which approximately 4 to 5 thousand megawatts of electricity is currently being generated, which will reach 8 to 10 thousand megawatts in the next three to five years. Most of the workers engaged in this production process do not even belong to Kashmir and then the total requirement of electricity in Kashmir which is about 385 megawatts is being provided very sparingly. The rulers of Pakistan-administered Kashmir put all the responsibility on Pakistan Wapda and Pakistan Wapda back on these incompetent rulers of Kashmir.

 

Shimla Agreement based for Partition of Kashmir

 

There is no doubt that the primate partition of Kashmir started with the partition of the subcontinent when the people of Jammu Kashmir were busy with unnecessary taxes and the struggle for freedom which had already started before the partition of the subcontinent. The movement was so intense that the ruler of Jammu Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, was ready to give more concessions to the masses with all his cruelty and oppression, but on October 1948, Pakistan intervened at the behest of the British Empire and brought a large number of tribals. Entered into Kashmir, who not only proved the freedom movement from the Maharaja of Kashmir and provided justification to the Maharaja to seek help from India, for which India was already prepared. How can it be that after the division of the subcontinent, the rulers of both countries and the British Empire were not aware of the division of Kashmir. Although the armies of both countries were still being trained by the imperialist commanders. We believe that this was a strategic move of old imperial Britain and the emerging imperialism, which also exposed Kashmiris. Because not only the elites of both countries looted it, but by keeping the Kashmir issue in the UNO, imperialism also defended its strategic interests.

 

In 1971, there was a war between India and Pakistan, in which Pakistan was traumatized and India arrested about 93,000 soldiers of Pakistan. Both the countries declared it as their private issue and the international powers America and Russia also significantly supported this arrangement, and the original heirs of the issue, Kashmir, were excluded from the list of parties. Thus, the Kashmir issue was raised from the United Nations It was made a private issue of both the countries.

 

When India was in the Soviet camp, America was in dire need of Pakistan, not only with the help of Pakistan in the war against Russia in Afghanistan, but also in Kashmir, it continued to help in armed activities against India, but Russia turned to the free market economy. By doing, the situation has changed equally. US imperialism as a single power changed its policies for many states in front of its economic and strategic goals within each region.

 

On the one hand, India is a market for cheap and in-demand labor, which has become a metropolitan state due to the division of labor. On the other hand, the United States needed an ally against the emerging imperialist China, for which India was the best option. Should always be kept under constant pressure from neighboring India.

 

The role of the current movement

 

We have already explained above the background of this movement . This movement is a continuation of the previous movements. But sometimes the de travel for decades can be achieve in days. This is happening not only in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, but this movement has also inspired the workers of Pakistan to turn the hunger given by the rulers and the so-called freedom into actual autonomy. . The movement of Pakistan-administered Kashmir in general is a general movement against the rise in prices of self-consumption and especially electricity and against the rulers. The meaning is definitely not only to challenge the rulers of Pakistan, but also to resist the rulers of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. For a long time, who used the resources of Jammu Kashmir were looted at the command of the of Pakistan ruling class. Pakistan's parties were introduced in a controversial area, but after coming to power, they made much/ properties in Jammu Kashmir, Pakistan and foreign countries, where the children of these rulers not only get higher education in the universities of America, Canada and the United Kingdom. There they also take care of their own business and then come back in a better way and get elected for Legislative Assembly by giving lies to the masses to protect the wealth earned by their parents and further sources of wealth. To get a glimpse of this spectacle, look at the descendants of the rulers in the present assembly, who won the election to the legislative assembly with the establishment's laissez-faire and are sitting as ministers. What more evidence do we need of the lust for wealth and greed of these rulers that they are sitting in power and discord at the same time?

 

Can these legislative assembly rulers be trusted?

 

If the evolution of the political consciousness of the current rulers is honestly analyzed, the biggest lesson of the history of Jammu and Kashmir will be that these rulers should never be trusted. The old political party of Jammu and Kashmir known as Muslim Conference. Since its inception, it has been loyal (more loyal to the king than to the king) first to the Muslim League and then to Pakistan. The posture of the leadership of the Muslim Conference was created in such a way that the public would give examples of the honesty and simplicity of its leadership. The rulers of Pakistan were introduced as big brothers. Kashmir Baniga (become) used to give importance to the narrative of Pakistan so that on the one hand they took advantage of the simplicity of the people to usurp the resources and on the other hand, the rulers of Pakistan especially the establishment asharbad(back). Keep getting.

 

But since the changes taking place in the society are also subject to the laws of science, so as the human consciousness develops, it keeps questioning the old and searching for the new. When the masses of Jammu and Kashmir started a series of questions, countless formulas Tried to bring. Under which GB and the so-called Azad Kashmir were included in Pakistan's possession. It is not acceptable that a piece should be added to Pakistan. Thus, the formula of the leadership of the Muslim Conference to include all of Kashmir in Pakistan was difficult for the establishment and on the other hand, the leadership of the Muslim Conference was revolving around Sardar Abdul Qayyum after the departure of Sardar Ibrahim Khan. He handed over the leadership of his party to his son Sardar Atiq to establish further centralization after him, due to which the rest of the party leadership distrusted him and founded the party of capitalists of Pakistan, Muslim League-Nawaz. Even before this, the Pakistan People's Party was launched by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's feudal popular leader. In which not only the first level leadership of the Jammu Kashmir Muslim Conference was joined in the form of Sardar Ibrahim Khan, but also numerous nationalists, the important leader who discussed the issue of referendum, KH Khurshid, the former president of Jammu Kashmir, also changed his party to the People's Party. Many Stalinists of Jammu Kashmir followed their Pakistani Stalinist brothers and fell at the feet of Bhutto. Earlier they were the rulers led by Sardar Ibrahim Khan. Who in October 1949 signed an agreement with the rulers of Pakistan in Karachi to complete his job and gave important part of Jammu Kashmir (the Gilgit-Baltistan) under the complete control of Pakistan. As the demography of the important strategic region was changed, taking advantage of this, plans are being made to make the respective region a province of Pakistan.

 

Therefore, it is important not to trust the representatives of the Legislative Assembly keeping in mind the past experiences. The main reason for this is that they have earned so much wealth that there is a huge difference between their standard of living and the standard of living of the common people. All the proofs of all the corruption they have done to get wealth are kept by the establishment so that none of them can do any economic or political activity without the approval of the establishment.

 

Will these rulers used same food items, electricity prices, family treatment and children's education so that some kind of alliance can be made with them? "

 

Therefore, it is important to organize the movement in the layers of popular fighting masses without trusting these rulers!

 

Role of middle class/small entrepreneurs in the movement

 

By middle class we mean small entrepreneurs who are running their business with few employees, Bank managers, well-paid doctors, lawyers and mid-level officers are also included.

 

At present, the middle class in Jammu Kashmir, especially the small traders, are suffering from extreme difficulties, due to which they are part of the movement. Taxes are calculated. Due to inflation, the common people are forced to be frugal in buying and selling, due to which the small traders are facing difficulties. Due to big stores where everything is available in special discount, the way turned small traders in extreme complications. They are compelled to give goods on credit where they never expect pay back from customers due to economic crisis is the main problem. So there is a crisis in all sectors. People prefer to spend whole days in public hospital queues to avoid private doctors' fees, heavy prescriptions and tests. People have reduced their visits to police stations and courts so that they do not have to face lawyers and judges. People have come to know the reality of educational justice to such an extent that even spending a little on their children's education as considered seems wasted. Workers are tired of paying taxes on their salaries. The semi- colonists middle class is squeezed by inflation and their labor charges therefor oppose the big business.

 

But this opposition has sometimes been greater and sometimes less, because the middle class in Jammu Kashmir consisting of the leadership of traders and transporters which was resisting in many districts with the people at the beginning of the People's Rights Movement. Now many of them are opportunistic and self-interested soldiers of the state shouting for peace, but are involved in the state strategy to sabotage strikes and sit-ins. This analysis was made by the Red Army Commander Leon Trotsky, the second most important leader of the Great Bolshevik Revolution of the 20th century, after seeing the same maneuvers of the middle class. As the revolutionary movements intensify. The middle class, out of cowardice and fear of losing something, checks the balance of power. If the working class seizes power by force, the middle offers its services to the working class, and if the ruling class maintains its hold by force, If he keeps it, the middle class will sit back in his lap. Therefore, it is important that the people get the power to control; the middle class itself will come to their support.

 

Failure of Nationalist and Socialist Tendencies

 

The nationalist and socialist politics played same role as traditional parties did both sides of Jammu Kashmir, they continued to perform the same responsibilities to some extent, and they tried to resolve the issue on a conditional basis. No one has offered a complete solution. Some kept it subject to the liberal and progressive constitution of India, while some talked about the accession of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu Kashmir to Pakistan. They continued to see the occupation as a lesser evil and even said that Pakistan was not the occupier but a friend in freedom fight against India.

 

Our partner in the war of independence and some justified the occupation of India by saying that because of Pakistan's October 1948 surrender, India entered into an agreement with Maharaj Hari Singh in Kashmir, therefore Pakistan is the occupier. India is not occupied, that is, according to them, Jammu Kashmir was a fiefdom of the Maharaja and when the common people revolted against the cruel taxes of his fiefdom, it was not a rebellion but an external conspiracy by Pakistan.

 

By simply ignoring the popular uprising and movement, they lean towards the so-called secularism of India. Is it possible to fight against another usurper at the behest of one usurper?

 

That is why we say that Kashmir is occupied by both the countries. In fact, Pakistan intervened and sabotaged the movement of the common people against the Maharaja from the Asharbad (back) of the British Empire by keeping a special group together in Muzaffarabad, 5135 square miles of Jammu Kashmir. , founded the Interim Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir Government consisting of Poonch and Mirpur divisions and later Gilgit-Baltistan, whose control was handed over by the British Empire from the Maharaja to an agency of its own. After the partition of the subcontinent, Pakistan occupied it in 1949. And then to make this occupation permanent, on April 28, 1949, he signed the Karachi Agreement with the Interim Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir Government of his own making.

 

In this article we will also discuss some nationalists and revolutionaries who talk about the independence and revolution of Kashmir, some of them talk about mass power with a very confused position on the slogans of independence and the ever existing assembly. It should be adopted and sometimes without the coordination of the people of Gilgit-Baltistan,( Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir will be given a constitutional assembly. On which there no clear position has ever been placed that how will all this happen?

 

The rest of the revolutionaries subject the national oppression to exploitation and take the politics of the issues and make the solution of the Jammu aKashmir problem conditional on the socialist federation of the subcontinent, that is, partial and interim solutions have no importance to them.

 

The major and major problem of both these political tendencies is that they see things from a very centralized point of view and democratic centralism is never given importance within their parties. That's why some break after every year and some after decades. The leadership goes around creating followers from the lower crowd in big ways by writing long speeches or books from selected leaders. Hence, they travel from parties to companies. Due to which the resisted element mistrusts them and organizes joint mass action committees critically. Even in the present situation, JAAC also need an advance program.

 

Working Class (Workers)

 

Because historically it has been proved that service sector plays an important role in movements after industrial labor and due to the absence of production process in Kashmir, the main responsibility of services workers to protect the rights of popular masses and their own. , and force the leadership of their trade unions and associations to take forward the demands of their workers with the popular masses in the current revolutionary situation and start a series of protests because for the last several years Trade Unions are being attacked. The Act 2016 and Ordinance 2023 are aimed at depriving workers of the right to strike, altering service structures, pension’s reforms and various right-sizing and down-sizing tactics. It is necessary to fight back because, if workers organize organize together with popular masses, they can get back their rights and interests. Due to global crises of capitalist system, workers are being constantly attacked in a colonial region like ours. So that the many achievements that are available are easily taken away under the neoliberal policies. We often hear the conversation that education is being privatized and this is true if education in Pakistan The process of privatization has already started. If the state violence was used against teachers’ strikes during the process of privatization , will it not happen in Kashmir?

 

Looking at the current attacks, it seems that the ruling class of Jammu Kashmir definitely go into process of privatization of education, health and electricity etc. Therefore, it is important that the workers should understand these attacks and protect the interests of their organizations not individually but Start a joint fight instead of saving face. Of course, all the previous two sectors have jointly elected a council for the federation, but the need for this process is that while holding a conference together, the abolition of anti-worker laws of the ruling class and more demands should be asked. The workers should bring their leadership by create pressure from below to support the organizations whose leadership is trying to build federation . Because the only workers' unions that can be worth mentioning is one that involves workers, which is more democratic. Indeed, in union politics. I always think the people. Procedures vary. The nature of their responsibilities is different, their leadership affiliations are different. Most of the leadership of some trade unions and associations revolves around solving the small problems of specific workers within their sectors. Prabrajaman.( to dominate) The trade unions around the world take care of the interests of their workers, but in our country, the help of government officials and ministers is taken for the interests of the workers. For some years young workers and some honest senior leadership Intensified workers' politics, which has led to attacks on worker against attacks on trade unions and associations by state ,that is why it is necessary to lay the foundations of a militant, democratic and popular federation whose program includes workers of all institutions. All kinds of exploitation and coercion should also be included with the interests of workers.

 

The Politics of Mass Action Committees

 

Without going into the background of the politics of public action committees, all the working people, from villages to cities, should be congratulated from whatever stratum they belong to, and perhaps seems that this was the right method due to which mass action committees were formed. The movement and leadership has reached this point. We pay tribute to these workers who wrested control from the traditional leadership and forced the nationalist leadership to believe that your strategy, methodology and centralism are obsolete. Some activists awakened the popular masses in such a way that today almost 90 percent of masses have understood that their direct intervention in politics can take care of their interests. As the movement progresses. In the same proportion, the morale of the common people is also rising. The youth are moving forward with new colors.

 

Weaknesses of Mass Action Committees

 

All of us are self-critically aware that there are immense weaknesses within the prevailing leadership of Mass Action Committees. Most activists of central committee are still remaining sectarian despite breaking away from their nationalist parties. Due to their different backgrounds, they still avoided discussing the program openly with each other. For fear of polarization by the leadership, the slogans were not advanced, which now the masses,They are doing it themselves. From the platform of public action committees, there is a repeated appeal to leave aside the actual reality of the program and limit it to demands only. There should be no dialogue of alternatives against those responsible for all this helplessness for decades. It is not wise not to give an alternative even if the rulers are ineffective.

 

What to do

 

It is important at this time to generalize the question of "what is to be done" because the intensity of this question is present during every movement. How and with whom the movement should be carried forward. At this time, it is necessary to use the ineffectiveness of the ruling elites to call a constituent assembly in Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir. For calling the constituent assembly it is important to demand Temporary revolutionary government because due to the exposure of corruption and immense wealth of the current ruling class , the people have lost their trust in them. The people have understood that they are loyal and puppets of the Pakistani ruling elites. They kept different Food, drink, house, car, everything is different from popular masses. Their caste and tribe are different. Because of them, how many mothers send their children to work in Pakistan or foreign countries at the age of 18. How many young people who have run away from the narrowness of their homes have fallen in love with nature by using dinky routes. How many families go into depression due to lack of better education and health for their children. 70 percent of people are outside the country, of which are 20 to 25 percent are working in Pakistan and 40 to 45 percent are working in the U.S. UK and Gulf countries etc. These dirty rulers and their masters do not feel ashamed when they receive remittances from foreign exchange belong to these immigrant. They serve for those who could not provide employment opportunities here. Seeing these sorrows, sufferings and in mental stress! Friedrich Nietzsche! Remember the saying that the rich have left nothing but God for the poor!

 

So struggle without trusting them. Which continuously moved forward. The rulers came and told the people every day that Pakistan does injustice to them, according to their promises, nothing is provided, etc. There was an objection. Therefore, it is important to take advantage of their spontaneity. The people should not do anything to empower them, but now it is important not only them but all the state stakeholders including representatives of the general public, working class leadership, middle Class (lawyers, professors, traders and transporters), women, neighborhood and student leaders should be included to form a provisional revolutionary government that will carry out the duties of constitution making for the Constituent Assembly.

 

 

A Russian revolutionary died in the trenches fighting for the defence of the Ukraine against Putin’s invasion

 

Preface by the RCIT: Below we republish the last message from Dmitry Petrov, an Anarcho-Communist from Russia who fought as a solider defending the Ukraine against the barbarous invasion by Putin.

As revolutionary Marxists, we do not share the ideology of Anarcho-Communism. However, this does not prevent us from stating our deep respect for comrade Dmitry Petrov and his co-fighters in the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK). Dmitry and his friends refuse to serve “their motherland”. Quite the opposite, they are dedicated enemies of Russian imperialism and its ruling class. Hence, they take the side of the oppressed people and defend the Ukraine.

Dmitry has dedicated his life to the cause of the liberation struggle and paid the highest possible price. His life was short, but it was not wasted. It was more meaningful than many others because he contributed to a higher goal – the liberation of humanity. He left a legacy and the best way to remember him is to keep fighting for a socialist future, free of all forms of oppression, exploitation, filth and humiliation!

From the RCIT, we send our deepest condolence to his family, friends and comrades!

Down with Russian imperialism! Long live the socialist struggle for freedom and justice!

 

* * * * *

 

A message from our comrade Dmitry Petrov

Anarcho-Communist Militant Organization, 6 May 2023

 

My name is Dmitry Petrov, and if you read these lines, then most likely I died fighting against the Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

I am a member of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK), and I will still remain this after my death. The BOAK is our brainchild, born of our faith in an organized struggle. We managed to carry it on different sides of state borders.

I tried my best to contribute to the victory over dictatorship and to bring the social revolution closer. And I am proud of my comrades who fought and fight in Russia and beyond.

As an anarchist, revolutionary and Russian, I found it necessary to take part in the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people against Putin’s occupiers. I did this for justice, for defense of the Ukrainian society and for liberation of my country, Russia, from oppression. For the sake of all the people who are deprived of their dignity and the opportunity to breathe freely by the vile totalitarian system created in Russia and Belarus.

Another important sense to participate in this war is to approve internationalism by example. In the days when the deadly imperialism awakes, as a response, a wave of nationalism and contempt for Russians, I argue by word and deed: there are no “bad peoples”. All peoples have the same grief — greedy and power-hungry rulers.

It was not just my individual decision and step. It was a continuation of our collective strategy aimed at creating sustainable structures and guerrilla combat confrontation with the tyrannical regimes of our region.

My dear friends, comrades and relatives, I apologize to all those I hurt with my leaving. I appreciate your warmth very much. However, I firmly believe that the struggle for justice, against oppression and injustice is one of the most worthy meanings that humans can fill their life with. And this struggle requires sacrifices, up to the complete self-sacrifice.

The best memory for me is if you continue actively struggle, overcoming personal ambitions and unnecessary harmful strife. If you continue to fight actively to achieve a free society based on equality and solidarity. For you and for me and for all our comrades. Risk, deprivation and sacrifice on this path are our constant companions. But be sure — they are not in vain.

I hug you all.

Your Ilya Leshy, “Seva”, “Lev”, Fil Kuznetsov, Dmitry Petrov

 

This message was originally published in Russian language on the Telegram channel of the Anarcho-Communist Militant Organization on 27 April 2023 (https://t.me/boakom/109). It has appeared in English on several websites, including https://solidarity-us.org/a-message-from-our-comrade-dmitry-petrov/.

 

Un revolucionario ruso murió en las trincheras luchando por la defensa de Ucrania frente a la invasión de Putin

Prefacio de la CCRI: A continuación republicamos el último mensaje de Dmitry Petrov, un anarco comunista de Rusia que luchó como soldado defendiendo a Ucrania contra la bárbara invasión de Putin.

Como marxistas revolucionarios no compartimos la ideología del anarco comunismo. Sin embargo, esto no nos impide expresar nuestro profundo respeto hacia el camarada Dmitry Petrov y sus compañeros de lucha de la Organización de Combate de los Anarco-Comunistas (BOAK). Dmitry y sus amigos se niegan a servir a "su patria", todo lo contrario, son enemigos acérrimos del imperialismo ruso y su clase dominante, por esa razón se han puesto del lado del pueblo oprimido y defienden a Ucrania.

Dmitry ha dedicado su vida a la causa de la lucha por la liberación y ha pagado el precio más alto posible. Su vida fue corta, pero no fue en vano, fue mucho más significativa que muchas otras, porque contribuyó a un objetivo superior: la liberación de la humanidad. ¡Dejó un legado y la mejor manera de recordarlo es seguir luchando por un futuro socialista, libre de toda forma de opresión, explotación, inmundicia y humillación!

* * * * *

Un mensaje de nuestro camarada Dmitry Petrov

Organización Militante Anarco-Comunista, 6 de mayo de 2023

Mi nombre es Dmitry Petrov, y si lees estas líneas, lo más probable es que haya muerto luchando contra la invasión de Ucrania por parte de Putin. Soy miembro de la Organización de Combate de los Anarco-Comunistas (BOAK), y lo seguiré siendo después de mi muerte. El BOAK es una creación nuestra, nacida de nuestra fe en una lucha organizada. Logramos llevarlo en diferentes lados de las fronteras estatales.

Hice todo lo posible para contribuir a la victoria sobre la dictadura y acercar la revolución social, estoy orgulloso de mis camaradas que lucharon y luchan en Rusia y más allá. Como anarquista, revolucionario y ruso, me pareció necesario participar en la resistencia armada del pueblo ucraniano contra los ocupantes de Putin. Hice esto por la justicia, por la defensa de la sociedad ucraniana y por la liberación de mi país, Rusia, de la opresión. Por el bien de todas las personas que se ven privadas de su dignidad y de la oportunidad de respirar libremente por el vil sistema totalitario creado en Rusia y Bielorrusia.

Otro sentido importante para participar en esta guerra es aprobar el internacionalismo con el ejemplo. En los días en que el mortífero imperialismo despierta, como respuesta, una ola de nacionalismo y desprecio por los rusos, argumento de palabra y de hecho: no hay “pueblos malos”, todos sufren el mismo dolor: gobernantes codiciosos y hambrientos de poder. No fue solo mi decisión y paso individual, sino la continuación de nuestra estrategia colectiva dirigida a la creación de estructuras sostenibles y el combate guerrillero de confrontación con los regímenes tiránicos de nuestra región.

Mis queridos amigos, camaradas y familiares, pido disculpas a todos aquellos a quienes lastimé con mi partida, aprecio mucho vuestra calidez. Sin embargo, creo firmemente que la lucha por la justicia, contra la opresión y la injusticia es uno de los sentidos más dignos que el ser humano puede llenar en su vida, y esta lucha requiere sacrificios, hasta el completo sacrificio de uno mismo.

El mejor recuerdo para mí es si continúan luchando activamente, superando las ambiciones personales y las luchas dañinas innecesarias. Si siguen peleando activamente por conseguir una sociedad libre basada en la igualdad y la solidaridad. Por ustedes y por mí, por todos nuestros compañeros, el riesgo, la privación y el sacrificio en este camino son nuestros compañeros constantes, pero estén seguros, de que no son en vano.

Los abrazo a todos.

Ilya Leshy, “Seva”, “Lev”, Fil Kuznetsov, Dmitry Petrov

 

Este mensaje se publicó originalmente en ruso en el canal Telegram de la Organización Militante Anarco-Comunista el 27 de abril de 2023 (https://t.me/boakom/109). Ha aparecido en inglés en varios sitios web, incluido https://solidarity-us.org/a-message-from-our-comrade-dmitry-petrov/

 

Un révolutionnaire russe est mort dans les tranchées en luttant pour la défense de l'Ukraine contre l'invasion de Poutine.

 

CCRI/RCIT Préface : Nous publions ci-dessous le dernier message de Dmitry Petrov, un anarcho-communiste russe qui s'est battu comme soldat pour défendre l'Ukraine contre l'invasion barbare de Poutine.

En tant que marxistes révolutionnaires, nous ne partageons pas l'idéologie de l'anarcho-communisme. Cependant, cela ne nous empêche pas de déclarer notre profond respect pour le camarade Dmitry Petrov et ses compagnons d'armes de l'Organisation de combat des anarcho-communistes (BOAK). Dmitry et ses amis refusent de servir "leur patrie". Bien au contraire, ils sont de fervents ennemis de l'impérialisme russe et de sa classe dirigeante. C'est pourquoi ils sont du côté des peuples opprimés et défendent l'Ukraine.

Dmitry a consacré sa vie à la cause de la lutte pour la libération et a payé le prix le plus élevé possible. Sa vie a été courte, mais elle n'a pas été gâchée. Elle a eu plus de sens que beaucoup d'autres car il a contribué à un objectif plus grand : la libération de l'humanité. Il a laissé un héritage et la meilleure façon de s'en souvenir est de continuer à lutter pour un avenir socialiste, libéré de toutes les formes d'oppression, d'exploitation, de saleté et d'humiliation !

Le CCRI/RCIT adresse ses plus sincères condoléances à sa famille, ses amis et ses camarades !

À bas l'impérialisme russe ! Vive la lutte socialiste pour la liberté et la justice !

 

* * * * *

 

Un message de notre camarade Dmitry Petrov

Organisation militante anarcho-communiste, 6 mai 2023

 

Je m'appelle Dmitry Petrov, et si vous lisez ces lignes, il est probable que je sois mort en combattant l'invasion de l'Ukraine par Poutine.

Je suis membre de l'Organisation des Anarcho-Communistes Combattants (BOAK) et le resterai après ma mort. La BOAK est une de nos créations, née de notre foi en une lutte organisée. Nous avons réussi à la porter de part et d'autre des frontières nationales.

J'ai fait de mon mieux pour contribuer à la victoire sur la dictature et pour rapprocher la révolution sociale. Et je suis fier de mes camarades qui se sont battus et se battent encore en Russie et dans d'autres pays.

En tant qu'anarchiste, révolutionnaire et Russe, j'ai jugé nécessaire de prendre part à la résistance armée du peuple ukrainien contre les occupants de Poutine. Je l'ai fait pour la justice, pour la défense de la société ukrainienne et pour la libération de mon pays, la Russie, de l'oppression. Pour le bien de tous ceux qui sont privés de leur dignité et de la possibilité de respirer librement par l'ignoble système totalitaire créé en Russie et au Belarus.

Un autre sens important de la participation à cette guerre est de soutenir l'internationalisme par l'exemple. À l'heure où l'impérialisme meurtrier suscite, en réaction, une vague de nationalisme et de mépris pour les Russes, je prône, en paroles et en actes, qu'il n'y a pas de "mauvais peuples". Tous les peuples ont la même souffrance : des dirigeants avides et assoiffés de pouvoir.

Il ne s'agissait pas seulement d'une décision ou d'une démarche individuelle de ma part. Il s'agissait de la poursuite de notre stratégie collective visant à créer des structures durables et une guérilla contre les régimes tyranniques de notre région.

Chers amis, camarades et parents, je présente mes excuses à tous ceux que mon départ a blessés. J'apprécie beaucoup votre affection. Cependant, je crois fermement que la lutte pour la justice, contre l'oppression et l'injustice est l'une des significations les plus dignes dont les êtres humains peuvent remplir leur vie. Et cette lutte exige des sacrifices, même une abnégation totale.

Pour moi, le meilleur souvenir est celui d'une lutte active, d'un dépassement des ambitions personnelles et des conflits inutiles et préjudiciables. Si vous continuez à lutter activement pour parvenir à une société libre fondée sur l'égalité et la solidarité. Pour vous, pour moi et pour tous nos camarades. Les risques, les privations et les sacrifices sur ce chemin sont nos compagnons constants. Mais soyez assurés qu'ils ne sont pas vains.

Je vous souhaite à tous beaucoup de plaisir.

Ses Ilya Leshy, "Seva", "Lev", Fil Kuznetsov, Dmitry Petrov

 

Ce message a été initialement publié en russe sur le canal Telegram de l'Organisation militante anarcho-communiste le 27 avril 2023 (https://t.me/boakom/109). Il a été publié en anglais sur plusieurs sites web, dont https://solidarity-us.org/a-message-from-our-comrade-dmitry-petrov/.

Um revolucionário russo morreu nas trincheiras lutando pela defesa da Ucrânia contra a invasão de Putin

 

Prefácio do CCRI/RCIT: Abaixo, republicamos a última mensagem de Dmitry Petrov, um anarco-comunista da Rússia que lutou como soldado defendendo a Ucrânia contra a invasão bárbara de Putin.

Como marxistas revolucionários, não compartilhamos a ideologia do anarco-comunismo. Entretanto, isso não nos impede de declarar nosso profundo respeito pelo camarada Dmitry Petrov e seus companheiros de luta na Organização de Combate dos Anarco-Comunistas (BOAK). Dmitry e seus amigos se recusam a servir "sua pátria". Muito pelo contrário, eles são inimigos dedicados do imperialismo russo e de sua classe dominante. Por isso, eles estão do lado do povo oprimido e defendem a Ucrânia.

Dmitry dedicou sua vida à causa da luta pela libertação e pagou o preço mais alto possível. Sua vida foi curta, mas não foi desperdiçada. Foi mais significativa do que muitas outras porque ele contribuiu para um objetivo maior: a libertação da humanidade. Ele deixou um legado e a melhor maneira de lembrá-lo é continuar lutando por um futuro socialista, livre de todas as formas de opressão, exploração, sujeira e humilhação!

Do CCRI/RCIT, enviamos nossas mais profundas condolências à sua família, amigos e companheiros!

Abaixo o imperialismo russo! Viva a luta socialista por liberdade e justiça!

 

* * * * *

 

Uma mensagem de nosso camarada Dmitry Petrov

Organização Militante Anarco-Comunista, 6 de maio de 2023

 

Meu nome é Dmitry Petrov e, se você está lendo estas linhas, é provável que eu tenha morrido lutando contra a invasão da Ucrânia por Putin.

Sou membro da Organização de Combate aos Anarco-Comunistas (BOAK) e continuarei sendo após minha morte. O BOAK é uma criação nossa, nascida de nossa fé em uma luta organizada. Conseguimos levá-la para diferentes lados das fronteiras estaduais.

Dei o meu melhor para contribuir para a vitória sobre a ditadura e para aproximar a revolução social. E tenho orgulho de meus companheiros que lutaram e lutam na Rússia e em outros países.

Como anarquista, revolucionário e russo, achei necessário participar da resistência armada do povo ucraniano contra os ocupantes de Putin. Fiz isso pela justiça, pela defesa da sociedade ucraniana e pela libertação do meu país, a Rússia, da opressão. Pelo bem de todas as pessoas que estão privadas de sua dignidade e da oportunidade de respirar livremente pelo vil sistema totalitário criado na Rússia e em Belarus.

Outro sentido importante de participar dessa guerra é aprovar o internacionalismo pelo exemplo. Nos dias em que o imperialismo mortal desperta, como resposta, uma onda de nacionalismo e desprezo pelos russos, eu defendo com palavras e ações: não existem "povos ruins". Todos os povos têm o mesmo sofrimento - governantes gananciosos e sedentos de poder.

Não foi apenas uma decisão e um passo individual meu. Foi uma continuação de nossa estratégia coletiva com o objetivo de criar estruturas sustentáveis e um confronto de combate de guerrilha contra os regimes tirânicos de nossa região.

Meus queridos amigos, camaradas e parentes, peço desculpas a todos aqueles que magoei com minha partida. Aprecio muito o carinho de vocês. No entanto, acredito firmemente que a luta pela justiça, contra a opressão e a injustiça é um dos significados mais dignos com que os seres humanos podem preencher suas vidas. E essa luta exige sacrifícios, até o completo auto-sacrifício.

Para mim, a melhor lembrança é quando você continua lutando ativamente, superando ambições pessoais e conflitos prejudiciais desnecessários. Se continuarem a lutar ativamente para alcançar uma sociedade livre baseada na igualdade e na solidariedade. Por você, por mim e por todos os nossos companheiros. Risco, privação e sacrifício nesse caminho são nossos companheiros constantes. Mas tenha certeza: eles não são em vão.

Abraço a todos vocês.

Seu Ilya Leshy, "Seva", "Lev", Fil Kuznetsov, Dmitry Petrov

 

Esta mensagem foi publicada originalmente em russo no canal Telegram da Organização Militante Anarco-Comunista em 27 de abril de 2023 (https://t.me/boakom/109). Ela foi publicada em inglês em vários sites, inclusive https://solidarity-us.org/a-message-from-our-comrade-dmitry-petrov/.

Un rivoluzionario russo è morto in trincea combattendo per la difesa dell'Ucraina contro l'invasione di Putin

 

CCRI/RCIT Premessa: di seguito pubblichiamo l'ultimo messaggio di Dmitry Petrov, un anarco-comunista russo che ha combattuto come soldato per difendere l'Ucraina dalla barbara invasione di Putin.

Come marxisti rivoluzionari, non condividiamo l'ideologia dell'anarco-comunismo. Tuttavia, questo non ci impedisce di dichiarare il nostro profondo rispetto per il compagno Dmitry Petrov e per i suoi compagni d'arme dell'Organizzazione Combattente degli Anarco-Comunisti (BOAK). Dmitry e i suoi amici si rifiutano di servire la "patria". Al contrario, sono nemici convinti dell'imperialismo russo e della sua classe dirigente. Pertanto, sono dalla parte del popolo oppresso e difendono l'Ucraina.

Dmitrij ha dedicato la sua vita alla causa della lotta di liberazione e ha pagato il prezzo più alto possibile. La sua vita è stata breve, ma non è stata sprecata. È stata più significativa di molte altre perché ha contribuito a un obiettivo più grande: la liberazione dell'umanità. Ha lasciato un'eredità e il modo migliore per ricordarla è continuare a lottare per un futuro socialista, libero da ogni forma di oppressione, sfruttamento, sporcizia e umiliazione!

Da parte del CCRI/RCIT, inviamo le nostre più sentite condoglianze alla sua famiglia, ai suoi amici e ai suoi compagni!

Abbasso l'imperialismo russo! Viva la lotta socialista per la libertà e la giustizia!

 

* * * * *

 

Un messaggio del nostro compagno Dmitry Petrov

Organizzazione militante anarco-comunista, 6 maggio 2023

 

Mi chiamo Dmitry Petrov e se state leggendo queste righe, è probabile che io sia morto combattendo l'invasione dell'Ucraina da parte di Putin.

Sono membro dell'Organizzazione degli Anarco-Comunisti Combattenti (BOAK) e lo sarò anche dopo la mia morte. BOAK è una nostra creazione, nata dalla fede in una lotta organizzata. Siamo riusciti a portarla al di là dei confini degli Stati.

Ho fatto del mio meglio per contribuire alla vittoria sulla dittatura e per avvicinare la rivoluzione sociale. E sono orgoglioso dei miei compagni che hanno combattuto e combattono in Russia e in altri Paesi.

Come anarchico, rivoluzionario e russo, Ho ritenuto necessario partecipare alla resistenza armata del popolo ucraino contro l'invasione di Putin. L'ho fatto per la giustizia, per la difesa della società ucraina e per la liberazione del mio Paese, la Russia, dall'oppressione. Per il bene di tutte le persone che sono private della loro dignità e della possibilità di respirare liberamente dal vile sistema totalitario creato in Russia e Bielorussia.

Un altro senso importante della partecipazione a questa guerra è quello di sostenere l'internazionalismo con l'esempio. Nei giorni in cui l'imperialismo mortale suscita, in risposta, un'ondata di nazionalismo e di disprezzo per i russi, io sostengo con parole e azioni: non esistono "popoli cattivi". Tutti i popoli hanno la stessa sofferenza: governanti avidi e assetati di potere.

Non è stata solo una mia decisione e un mio passo individuale. È stata una continuazione della nostra strategia collettiva volta a creare strutture sostenibili e un confronto di guerriglia contro i regimi tirannici della nostra regione.

Cari amici, compagni e parenti, chiedo scusa a tutti coloro che ho ferito con la mia partenza. Apprezzo molto il vostro affetto. Tuttavia, credo fermamente che la lotta per la giustizia, contro l'oppressione e l'ingiustizia sia uno dei significati più dignitosi con cui gli esseri umani possono riempire la loro vita. E questa lotta richiede sacrifici, anche il completo sacrificio di sé.

Per me, il ricordo migliore è quando si continua a lottare attivamente, superando ambizioni personali e conflitti inutili e dannosi. Se si continua a lottare attivamente per realizzare una società libera basata sull'uguaglianza e sulla solidarietà. Per voi, per me e per tutti i nostri compagni. Rischi, privazioni e sacrifici in questo cammino sono i nostri compagni costanti. Ma state tranquilli: non sono vani.

Salute a tutti voi.

Il suo Ilya Leshy, "Seva", "Lev", Fil Kuznetsov, Dmitry Petrov

 

Questo messaggio è stato originariamente pubblicato in russo sul canale Telegram dell'Organizzazione militante anarco-comunista il 27 aprile 2023 (https://t.me/boakom/109). È stato pubblicato in inglese su diversi siti web, tra cui https://solidarity-us.org/a-message-from-our-comrade-dmitry-petrov/.

 

 

Note of the Editorial Board: The following article has originally been published on the website of "Socialist Alternative", a Trotskyist organisation in Russia which takes a principled stance against Russian imperialism and on the side of the Ukrainian people defending their country against Putin's invasion. The article contains a highly informative and interesting analysis of the situation in Kazakhstan - a key country of Central Asia.

 

* * * * *

 

Техногенная катастрофа в Екибаcтузе и национализация убытков

1 декабря 2022, https://socialist.news

 

27 ноября, на следующий день после инаугурации Токаева, произошла масштабная техногенная катастрофа в городе Екибастуз Павлодарской области. Екибастуз называют энергетическим сердцем Казахстана — это главный угледобывающий город страны.

Несмотря на свою ключевую роль для всей энергетической отрасли Казахстана, весь город оказался в момент лишен отопления, включая критическую инфраструктуру и социальные объекты — больницы, школы, детсады. Это случилось в тридцатиградусные морозы, которые сами по себе стали испытанием для инфраструктуры северных и центральных регионов Казахстана: случались перебои с электричеством, а, соответственно, и связью, были задержки железнодорожного сообщения в Петропавловске, Павлодаре, Оскемене, Семее, Астане, Караганды. Из-за погодных условий по соображениям безопасности были перекрыты многие магистральные автодороги, связывающие областные центры и крупные города.

На фоне недавних выборов и российских ракетных атак против энергетической инфраструктуры Украины распространились конспирологические версии причин случившегося. Дескать, это могла быть диверсия назарбаевских реваншистов или даже России, недовольной дипломатическими позициями Астаны. Но настоящие причины лежат куда глубже.

За несколько дней до этого, 24 ноября, произошел взрыв котлов на аркалыкской ТЭЦ. Казахстанский Аркалык — в некотором смысле город-призрак, инфраструктура там находится в куда более плачевном состоянии. Но то, что эти аварии случились почти синхронно, прямо показывает, что инфраструктура, построенная примерно в одно время в годы СССР, также одновременно и износилась — без должного системного обслуживания холодная зима их «добила».

За пару дней до аварии в соцсетях распространилось видео, которое записал один из рабочих екибастузской ТЭЦ: «Трубы разморозило, сварщик варит, как зимовать будем — я не знаю... Оборудование уже все старое, ничего не выдерживает, везде все бежит... Крепитесь, если морозы будут». В действительности, это очередной эпизод, показывающий абсолютный крах и кризис энергетической отрасли Казахстана после приватизации 90-х и нулевых, и слова рабочего отчетливо это подтверждают. Оба эпизода в Екибастузе и Аркалыке не являются чем-то новым: в этом же году в Петропавловске рухнула одна из труб ТЭЦ-2, которая обогревает город. Причины те же: износ, отсутствие инвестиций в капитальный ремонт и обслуживание, низкие зарплаты рабочих.

Masa.media со ссылкой на Международный фонд защиты свободы слова «Әділ сөз» пишут о том, что власти всячески препятствуют журналистской работе по освещению аварии в Екибастузе:

«Несмотря на просьбы журналистов, оперативный штаб не проводит брифинги и прямые эфиры. Пресс-служба акима области высылает уже вычищенные комментарии, иногда через три-четыре часа. Зачастую перед самыми эфирами ТВ-новостей... Журналисты недоумевают, почему не провели брифинг 29-го ноября днем, когда они все были в Экибастузе, или почему тогда не 30-го утром, когда СМИ могли бы приехать в город, почему решили провести ночью и без прямой трансляции? Складывается впечатление, что сейчас региональные власти стараются скрыть ситуацию» — говорится в сообщении фонда.

Первая реакция акимата Екибастуза была абсолютно лицемерной: «авария случилась из-за низких тарифов за отопление». Почему же тогда при более-менее сходных тарифах такие аварии не случаются в Астане — городе чиновников? Если о чем-то эта авария и говорит, так о критическом классовом разрыве в Казахстане между 99% рабочих и 1% олигархов и чиновников.

Власти каждый день обещают исправить ситуацию в ближайшее время, но сейчас реальную помощь жителям Екибастуза оказывают только волонтеры, собирающие средства на обогреватели, спальники и поиск пропавших.

Но вскоре власти заговорили в разных формулировках об изъятии «проблемных» энергетических предприятий из частных рук в государственную собственность. Дошло даже до речей о национализации таких предприятий!

Конечно же, это не настоящая национализация в том смысле, в котором ее понимают социалистки и социалисты, и в котором она могла бы принести благой эффект для трудящегося большинства. Речь идет лишь о «национализации убытков» — то есть устаревших, износившихся предприятий, прибыльность которых под угрозой из-за необходимости вложений в капитальные ремонтные работы.

При этом никто не говорит о национализации тех компаний в сфере ЖКХ, которые получают деньги напрямую от плательщиков. Такие компании — паразитирующие посредники между предприятиями критической инфраструктуры и конечными потребителями тепла, водоснабжения и электричества. В отличие от критической инфраструктуры, которую надо периодически «сдавать государству» для реновации за госсчет, посредники, которыми владеет средний и крупный бизнес, безо всякой национализации продолжат наживаться на завышенных ценах для населения.

Сама схема национализации убытков известна еще с начала приватизации в 90-х. Например, так же «национализировали» аэропорт в Петропавловске, который находится в плачевном состоянии: в частных руках остался заработок на авиабилетах, в то время как находящиеся в аварийном состоянии взлетные полосы были переведены на баланс государства. Без ремонта они стоят аж с 1970-х годов.

Такая «национализация» не решит никаких проблем. Что действительно нужно:

— Финансировать решение техногенных катастроф в Екибастузе, Аркалыке и Петропавловске за счет государственного бюджета;

— Национализировать всю энергетическую, добывающую, транспортную, телекоммуникационную отрасль страны, а также банковскую систему, под контролем организованных трудящихся коллективов, вырвав все источники прибыли и рычаги влияния из рук олигархов и связанных с ними чиновников;

— Обеспечить масштабные инвестиции в модернизацию инфраструктуры за счет перераспределения всех благ в пользу рабочего класса;

— Судить таких «предпринимателей», которые наживаются на трагедиях в жизнях простых людей;

— Обеспечить полную свободу журналистики, организаций и партий без препятствий в регистрации, мирных собраний — иными словами, настоящую рабочую демократию. Без нее невозможно обеспечить в перспективе стабильную работу экономики страны вообще;

— Организовать демократически планируемую социалистическую экономику, в которой во главе угла стоят интересы миллионов людей, а не единиц-миллиардеров.

 

 

The uprising as a part of the global circulation struggles

 

NonPolitics / Von Achim Szepanski / 2021-01-20 / https://non.copyriot.com/the-uprising-as-a-part-of-the-global-circulation-struggles/

 

 

 

The protests against the G-20 summit in Hamburg in the summer of 2017 culminated in a micro-riot in the Schanzenviertel.1 For the first time in a long time, a social antagonism flared up in Germany for a brief moment, the intensity of which no one had expected. The uprisings that have taken place worldwide since the 1970s – following the student movement – are by no means voluntaristic actions, but in their structural significance they possess historical conditions that are partly responsible for the forms of the uprisings, although each individual event retains its contingency.

 

We will try to illustrate this primarily by reading Joshua Clover’s book Riot.Strike.Riot2. Clover’s text is an impressive Marxist analysis of the genealogy of early and post-industrial insurgency and of the political and socio-economic conditions that repeatedly lead to struggles of the proletariat and the subaltern, bearing in mind from the outset that Clover’s analysis focuses on the leading capitalist industrialised nations, in particular the USA. In this, for Clover, Marxist theory is immanent to class struggles, but often enough these also precede the theory. The insurrection is theoretically conceived by Clover in much the same way as by the French philosopher François Laruelle as lived experience and confrontation (Laruelle usually uses the concept of the real in place of lived experience) rather than as the interpretation, analysis or descriptive of a thing, a movement or an object. The insurrection as a real event stands for transcendence ~ x, for an outside in which a new relation between the world and lived experience is invented, indeed much more, for an outside that escapes the world. The insurrection can serve as a referent for discourse and one can debate it almost endlessly, but it should never be the object of a political narrative that appropriates it.

 

The insurrection and the circulation (of capital)

 

For Clover, the primary insurrection (he ideally draws the line insurrection-strike-primary insurrection in his study) cannot be thought of without the economic and political transformations of global capital since the 1970s.3 A first thesis is that the uprisings that have taken place since that time are a constitutive part of the global circulation struggles against capital and its states, that is, they take place mainly in circulation, which must be understood firstly as an important constituent of capital and secondly as a social dispositif sui generis.

 

On a purely empirical level, the circulation of capital includes the various service sectors, commercial enterprises such as Walmart, Aldi or McDonald’s, as well as the enterprises and institutions of the international financial system. On a conceptual level, it is important to note that capital already ties the production process to (monetary) circulation, i.e. production itself is to be understood as a part of the circulation of capital, the general form of which can be written down in the following formula: G-W-P-W’-G’.

 

If capital (the subject position here is purely virtual, i. e. capital is a relation) has the capacity to set itself as an end in itself in an excessive, growth-oriented and spiral movement (the circle is a special case of the logarithmic spiral, namely a spiral whose growth is zero) – the starting point is here the end point and vice versa – then it comprehensively dominates the sphere of production as a sui generis monetary process in order to integrate it precisely into the primary “monetary circulation and distribution” G-W-G’.4 Production, distribution (the distribution of profits) and circulation are thus, in terms of their integration (both structural and temporary), necessarily to be understood as parts of the monetary economy of capital and its metamorphoses, as its phases, aspects and moments.5

 

If the capital principle is the engine of the breathing monster called total capital, then the financial system is its central nervous system. The financial system executes the competition, the coordination and the regulation of enterprises, which in turn are presupposed by total capital, which updates itself through the real competition of individual capitals, which for Marx is always not a ballet but a war. Financial capital constantly modulates the competition of all enterprises and reignites it – it is therefore an integral part of the capital economy and not a cancer that a doctor can remove in order to help the capital body back to health.

 

Today’s highly technical and globally networked infrastructures are unthinkable without the existence of logistics companies. Logistics today runs in lines around the globe and like capital, it processes in spirals and cybernetic feedback loops whose non-linearity and vectoriality is differential, a-linear – they are lines that spread out in all directions depending on effectiveness and geography. In this process, capital in real and virtual terms tends increasingly towards an economy of logistical and virtual space, shaped by series of intra-capitalist and inter-state competitive struggles. Financialised global shipping, logistics and containerisation signal this infrastructural change, with just-in-time production indicating the methodological and temporal capital aspect of the same change. The triumph of logistics began with containerisation, which has been integrated into global value chains since the 1970s in order to build them up, speed them up and make them more effective. Accordingly, it is also no coincidence that the blockades at the Port of Oakland were among the more radical actions of the Occupy movement. If capital is increasingly in the sphere of circulation in order to reduce costs through credit, the technological acceleration of transport and with the help of logistics, i.e. to shorten the turnover times of capital as a whole, then the struggles in these areas also become increasingly important for capital and the states. But think here not only of the barricades, blockades and struggles in the streets, but also of collective forms of resistance in other areas of society, such as debt strikes or the hacking of algorithms.

 

The surplus population

 

While the accumulation of capital at the beginning of the 20th century entailed a shift of the working population from agriculture to industry, at the end of the 20th century it led to the widespread transfer of capital from the industrial production sectors to the financial, service and information sectors, and at the same time entailed increased unemployment in the industrial centres. At this point, we should return to Marx’s law of capitalist accumulation6 which states that, depending on the conjunctural cycles of capital accumulation, both an industrial reserve army and a surplus population develop on the margins or outside the official labour markets, with both populations either being socially subsidised or employed at low wages, or somehow trying to secure their reproduction with slave labour, part-time jobs and illegal activities.7 The important membrane here is that between the industrial reserve army (as part of the official labour market) and the surplus population, which is outside the official labour market and pushed into informational, semi-legal or illegal economies worldwide. The global proletariat today includes not only the wage-dependent working class with relatively high wages (core workforce) in Western countries, which is still protected by collective agreements, but also the precariat and a surplus population of well over a billion people who are denied any access to the official labour markets and who have to reproduce themselves in informal and non-capitalist economies or vegetate, i.e. exist as accumulated corpses. It is these totally dispossessed, the masses of unemployed, the day labourers and the Asian and African migrant workers exploited under proto-industrial conditions, the post-colonial army of slaves, the old and the sick, but also the superfluous young, who are trained for jobs that will not even exist in the future by an education system that focuses above all on the everyday evaluation of everyone by everyone – all in all, the global lumpenproletariat that stands below the official labour system. The surplus population today vegetates on the fine line between survival and total liquidation.8

 

Gilles Deleuze already spoke far ahead in the 1990s of the universally indebted human being, but was quick to add, against any ontologisation of indebtedness, that for the powers of control the danger of revolts always arose – the indebted and the excluded were one.9 They are the same global surplus, whereby the indebted as borrowers still have an important economic function for financial capital, while the surplus population largely vegetates functionlessly for capital as human waste in the slums of the metropolises.10 Capital today must always find new agents capable of indebtedness, students, homeowners and part-time workers, without, however, being able to reduce the surplus population on a global scale even rudimentarily. Marx speaks of capital accumulation as a condition that multiplies the proletariat. If the insurrection is not only a collective action, but a kind of class struggle, then the surplus population must also have a mediating and explanatory power in this; it is to be understood as a constitutive part of the global proletariat, whose historical task consists in the negation of capital. For the more the better-off and tariff-protected sections of the working class in the Western metropolises have to affirm capital in order to still be able to reproduce themselves on a relatively comfortable economic and social level, the more massively the political signification of a globally expanding proletariat is revealed at the same time, large parts of which can no longer find access to the traditional forms of reproduction. According to Clover, we are in the midst of a long-running exodus of the dispossessed from all corners of the globe to the Western world,11 driven by increasing geopolitical volatility, wars and the inability of capital to adequately absorb the labour force in the states of the Global South – a diaspora inseparable from the expanding superfluidity of a simultaneously immobilised surplus population.

 

The insurgency and the surplus

 

Any theory of insurgency is always also a theory of crisis, that of an entire economy, but also that of a community or city, that of an hour or that of days. Surprisingly, Clover identifies the first important relation between insurgency and crisis in the concept of surplus,12 whereas insurgency is usually understood in the context of deprivation, lack and deficit, whereas for Clover it indicates precisely the experience of surplus lived in itself, such as surplus danger, surplus instruments and surplus effects.13 The most important surplus is the actively negating, the resisting population in the erupting moments of mass mobilisation, which condense into an event in which the insurrection explodes the police management of a concrete situation and at the same time radically decouples itself from everyday life. This kind of insurrectionary surplus production, however, always remains confronted with the conditions of socio-economic processes and transformations that respond to crises or constitute them in the first place. All this indicates insurgency not at all as a purely contingent, but also as a necessary form of political struggle. Given the existence of a huge surplus population and the insurrectionary politics of the surplus, Clover arrives at a first conclusion: insurrection is the modality through which the surplus is lived.14 Primary circulation is now primary insurrection, which is surplus life itself, however short-term; the latter is the subject of politics and thus the object of state violence. The violence of the police now itself becomes part of the insurgency or, to put it another way, the flashing coalition of the insurgent surplus exists in an economy of state violence.

 

In this context, the insurgency is the political sign of a historical situation that becomes absolute. And this is not because of a somehow wild nature of the insurgency, but because of a multiply unfolding deterritorialising situation in which it finds itself and which it itself produces, an intensity which makes change possible in the first place and which has neither a logical origin nor a comprehensively formulated goal, but owes itself entirely to the outside of the conflicts.15 Thus the primary insurrection makes no demands at all, but rather establishes civil war, concludes Clover in unison with Tiqqun.16 On the one hand, the insurrection must make itself absolute in order to invent new social affects beyond wage labour, capital circulation, and stifling and disciplining public spaces, as well as a movement towards the Commune that is inseparable from civil war; on the other hand, it is constantly confronted with the police violence that seeks to block such an absolutisation.17

 

The French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, in his comprehensive studies of everyday life,18 recognised early on that the purely affirmative reference of struggles to the everyday life of the population is too ephemeral and at the same time too cumbersome to strengthen in the long term the field of activities directed against the rules, institutions and everyday modes of work and consumption, Today, it is important to add, even the gaps, times and spaces that fall outside of capitalisation and functional consumption are constantly absorbed by the digital media and their large corporations and at the same time structured or even completely eliminated in the sense of a comprehensive financialisation of ways of life and existence. The decisive aspect of the 24/7 metric of everyday life today lies less in the standardisation and homogenisation of ways of life than in the consolidation of a redundancy of un-time, in which there is no longer any opportunity not to shop, not to consume, not to work or not to retrieve data and, in particular, not to act as a subject of risk, however precarious or socially disconnected.19 The thus motivated, the panic-stricken neoliberal subject is supposed to do nothing but exploit itself and occasionally still stare into a coma, while at the same time remaining locked into comprehensive quantification and control mechanisms of the state and private institutions that perpetuate its superfluousness. Yet algorithmic governance is now ubiquitous, invisible and materialised in decentralised networks; power is part of an interactive environment in which we live.

 

Nevertheless, the uprising must still also be understood as a spontaneous articulation against the intolerable structurings of everyday life, what Lefebvre calls contestation, which calls for the absolute rejection of the everyday, the imagined and experienced humiliations, and this contestation is therefore for him a movement of the subaltern born in the negative and in negation, a subtraction, an interruption of the political legitimacy of the state and its institutions and of the hegemonic forms of communication that today permeate all areas of the social; the contestation points to the improbable. One would now have to examine more closely the interplay of negation and surplus in the context of the insurrection, but this is something we cannot do within the framework of this contribution.

 

For Lefebvre, insurrections are always also struggles for the control of passages through space; they are now organised around buildings, passages, streets and squares. It is the short-term non-institutionalised urban spaces that, in the moments of insurrection, point to the political emptiness of the spaces of the state apparatuses.20 There is thus something genuinely urban in the insurrections, something architectural, not to say something that opens up space.21 The struggle here is something that is exposed to open space, inventing new guerrilla strategies of “back and forth” that turn out to be a disappearance and at the same time the “absence of this absence”. The barricade, one of the important instruments of insurrection, had the function in Paris during the struggles of the Commune in 1871, among other things, of sealing off neighbourhoods against the hostile attacks of the police, until the wide boulevards and industrial growth, including the equipment of the security forces, put an end to this instrument for the time being.

 

Lefebvre understands spontaneity, which appears and works in the uprising in a strangely continuous way, as an event or as that movens of the movement that resists and escapes the hardened and institutional of the apparatuses; it is constitutive of resistance and consequently spontaneity is the enemy of power. The event here is a surface on which the performance of struggles moves. Following this, Gilles Deleuze can write: “The battle is not an event example among others, but the event in its essence. “22 Such a statement is strongly contradicted by Leninist orthodoxy: There, spontaneism is rejected not only because it is characterised by a lack of organisation, but also because it is allegedly in direct opposition to the genuinely productive labour of the proletariat. In the Leninist concept of the proletarian vanguard party, then, spontaneous insurrection has no place; rather, it is denounced as a purely apolitical, spasmodic and anarchist-inspired chaotic disruption, a pure disorder that must be decisively rejected by the Marxist-Leninist party, which alone possesses a mature and scientifically grounded historical method, unless it organises and directs it. In this context, then, insurrection and strike are grasped as incompatible antipodes.

 

Indeed, insurrection seems to preserve or affirm nothing, perhaps a divided antagonism, a divided misery and a divided negation. In the sense of a fusing group (Sartre), which is always a group of the city, the insurrection lasts no longer than the actions of the rebels that constitute it, whereby these must proceed in a certain temporality, the speed and duration of which in turn remain dependent on the historical situation.23 Action and the fusing group are the practice of the participants, the moments of which are fleeting and precarious, and yet the fusing group insists with its actions on the problem of how to give the insurrection a certain duration without falling back into the hardened segments of a cadre organisation. In the fusing group adequate to the insurrection, seriality and alterity, inherent in any inert or, as Sartre says, inert group,24 are dissolved; the fusing group is, for Sartre, its own common reality and at the same time the mediation between the self and every other as the third. All members of the group are the third, each member of the group, totalising the reciprocity of the others, thus functions as the third by means of the group and only in this way can others be conceived as equals, while yet the relations of seriality continue to burden and affect the resistant forms of action and the fusing group and its axiom of equality.25 Equality here is what actually happens in the fire of the event, insofar as the participants of the fusing group succeed in punching holes in the state and social order with their actions or in emerging in its gaps.

 

The global proletariat, which comprises the surplus population vegetating in the slums of the metropolises, is today directly confronted with the state and the police when it rebels in the streets (in the early uprisings of the 17th century, the economy was close and the state far away). While the capitalist lines of production have become more and more branched out, huge quantities of goods are channeled through long global transport routes, and in the western metropolises even the basic foodstuffs are imported from other continents, leaving the global export of goods, not to mention the export of capital, largely invisible, the standing army of the state, the police, now highly militarised, ostensibly solely for the anti-drug and anti-terrorist war, is always present on the streets, especially in the so-called problem zones of the metropolises. The police can be spotted by the insurgents at every corner. Well-trained and militarised task forces, conditioned to use violence like workers are conditioned to assembly line work, now dominate public space at demonstrations to such an extent that any political dissent articulated in the streets has from the outset merely the character of the tolerated and at the same time of the eliminable at any time – and thus almost the destiny of absurdity. Nevertheless, as Clover shows in his study of the historical relations between insurrections and strikes, modern insurrections enable an important mode of struggle that is directly directed against the police, the state and capital.26 Insurrections, moreover, are not an exclusively spontaneous and short-lived expression of discontent, but are more broadly, to put it in the words of Stuart Hall, a mode through which the class struggle is lived. And, as the events in Hamburg have shown again, they point to the urgency of blockades insofar as global value chains and logistical networks depend on the regular and timely transport of goods around the clock.

 

The early uprising

 

Clover grounds his theory of insurgency with explicit reference to Marx’s theory of value and crisis, as well as along the analysis of the dynamics of the accumulation of capital on a global scale, but also along the study of local business cycles and finally the theory of long waves.27 The crucial economic fact that the theory of early insurgency has to study is the industrialisation in Europe that started in the 17th century, while for the contemporary or, as Clover says, the primary insurgency, the phase of deindustrialisation in some areas of the Western countries that has been going on since the 1970s is extremely relevant. The early local markets precede the historical imposition of capital and later remain an integral part of the surplus value production of capital, albeit at a completely altered qualitative level (this concerns the transition from insurrection to strike). While the early insurrection, usually associated with a violent disturbance of social peace, a lawless extravagance and chaotic frenzy, was gradually forgotten with the development of capitalism, the strike, which took its explicit form in the years 1790 to 1842, nevertheless took up certain forms of action of the early insurrection, but also stood in opposition to it. In certain temporal intervals, insurrection and strike coexisted, for example around the year 1968, until the crisis in 1973 led to a re-composition of the class, the transformation of the global division of labour and an extreme weakening of the political possibilities of militant workers’ organisations and thus to the declining relevance of the strike, which, however, already heralded a new age of insurrection. Although the long historical phases are not the exclusive defining moments for insurrection, it is precisely for the present insurrection that the aforementioned second long phase designates the temporal terrain in which, on the one hand, the insurrection is present and, on the other, the logic of capital becomes visible in its catastrophic autumn. For Clover, the new forms of insurrection respond to the global transformations of capital and thus always to objective conditions.28

 

Let us briefly summarise at this point: The early insurrection has its primary place in the marketplace or at the port, the strike has its place in front of the factory of industrial capitalism, and the contemporary insurrection occupies squares and blocks streets. Today’s uprisings in the metropolises do not take place in front of the granaries, but in direct confrontation with the police on the streets. Paradigmatic of this are the uprisings in Los Angeles in 1992, which lasted several days, when the mistreatment of Rodney King by the police was recorded by passers-by and quickly disseminated through the media.29 Contemporary uprisings in the USA always formulate themselves against the discourse of racism and refer less to the economy than to the state as the direct opponent.30

 

The British historian E.P. Thompson, in his important study The Making of the English Working Class, has examined the political economy of the early revolts in more detail.31 He emphasises in his historical research rather the practical aspects of revolt, more precisely the life-supporting practices directed against price increases of food and involving blockades, seizures and violence by the subalterns against traders and transporters. Thus, for the early revolts, it was hunger and political emotions that gave rise to the revolt, especially in the marketplace, which played an essential role here. Between 1740 and 1820, the so-called food riots in the European heartlands developed into the paradigmatic form of social conflict.32 From the beginning, revolt thus became a struggle in the sphere of circulation. The period in which the industrial transformation of agriculture had begun and industrialisation in the cities had not yet taken hold, this was the incisive historical passage that Clover calls the “golden age of insurrection”. However, the flowering of the early revolts already contained the seeds of their decline. England was the historical place where the transition from insurrection to strike took place. Clover refers here to the studies of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, according to which the development of capitalism started from the transformation of class relations in the countryside.33

 

If in the early phases of the revolts the price increases for food offered at the local markets were the problem for the population that directly affected their survival, for the factory workers it was later the wages (themselves a price) that determined their conditions of reproduction. The insurrection is the backdrop through which price-fixing was struggled for in the markets, while in strikes the level of wages is fought for in front of the factories.34 In the insurrection, the actions include the entire social reproduction of the subalterns, while in the strikes the workers take on the role of both consumer and producer within a historically singular and common collectivity, which is absolutely necessary to reproduce the class. The social reproduction of workers is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it includes those who rent out their labour power and have to take care of their reproduction in this form; on the other hand, it is related to the realisation of commodities in circulation, where they encounter the worker as consumer. This is one and the same process seen from two perspectives. Moreover, reproductive labour includes not only wage labour, but also women’s unpaid labour, which takes place in the home, in care and also in the marketplaces.

 

The strike

 

The transition from insurrection to strike, Clover argues, is related to or correlates with the transformations in the structure of capital and capital accumulation from an economic mode in which profit is generated in the market to a mode of industrial surplus value production by self-moving capital in production.35 The strike as a form of action emerges in the new world of capitalist production, initially still driven by seamen meeting urban artisans and merchants to fight together for higher wages. Once the wage-labour relationship is comprehensively introduced, the proto-capitalist market loses its central social significance and becomes part of self-regulating capital, thus subsuming all communal values that still belong to local markets to the profit motives of capital. The rural poor now become landless proletarians dependent on wage labour or part of the industrial reserve army. The workers’ struggles, including those of the Luddites, demand a wage that will at least allow them to survive, oppose unemployment and demand the right to form trade unions.36 The Luddites cannot easily be called machine strikers in this respect, insofar as in their struggles they mostly leave the machines, which do not replace workers, intact. Clover writes that in this context, the strike must be understood as a social struggle related to the preservation of employment, to higher wages and to better working conditions and rights, while the so-called machine storming marked the transition from insurrection to strike. There was a brief period of transition where food riots and the factory struggles met, that is, there were fluid transitions in the different sites of struggle (from the marketplace to the workplace) and from the struggle over the price of goods to that over the price of labour power, as the fulcrum of reproduction.

 

The strike is the dominant tactic of the workers or the central form of social and economic antagonism in the heyday of industrial capital; it also allows a view of insurrection (and vice versa) and always remains related to the metamorphoses and transformations of capital. It is a struggle for the level of wages or the price of labour power and for securing employment, led by workers in their function as workers in production. The narrow definition of the strike, as carried by the official workers’ movement, further characterises it as an orderly, legalistic and disciplined action that takes place in front of the factory and ultimately has to be considered as a temporary refusal. However, the textile workers’ strikes in Lyon in 1831, for example, show that they could well be accompanied by barricade fighting and guerrilla action.37 A large proportion of historians, however, deny that the strike could have any connection with the uprisings and place the two in clear opposition to each other. It was, after all, the trade unions that in 1839 sought to demarcate the disciplined strike of glass workers in Belgium against the smashing of glass panes by renegade workers – the strike is then exactly what the insurrection is not. However, this construction of an insurmountable opposition between insurrection and strike refers only to the mode of certain actions, without any examination of the social, economic and political content of the struggles and the environment of the forms of struggle in the first place. Moreover, the social content of strike and insurrection cannot be reduced to the collective will, beliefs and affects of the participants. Clover sees the strike in two folds, on the one hand as a confrontation with capital over the level of the price of labour power, on the other hand the strike also possesses a social explosive power in itself.38 Nevertheless, it takes place more strongly in the boom phases of capital accumulation and it becomes central to the workers’ movement when workers’ reproduction becomes entirely dependent on the wage, which in turn remains to this day, despite the growth of consumer credit, the most important part of workers’ reproduction.

 

In this context, it is worth pointing out a statement by Walter Benjamin according to which the technological conditions of production, its progress and success, are always in relation to the transparency of social content.39 Industrial production, progress and transparent and maintained glass architecture – they stand for the world of the strike. The ideology of the “good strike” absolutely adheres to the idea of transparency (think, in contrast, of the Black Bloc, the Invisible Committee and the idea of the imperceptibility of political action) and to the belief that one can see directly to the bottom of social conflicts through the perception of the surface. The strike here becomes strike by being explicitly formalised by the official labour movement against insurrection. It is order itself, the window pane that is not broken. Accordingly, the insurrection, now set in direct opposition, must also find its content in form. But this remains paradoxical, because its form is the disorder that now becomes its content. The insurrection thus wants nothing more than itself, its luminous opacity. Shine and shards of broken glass.40

 

Even still in the mode of the general strike, the traditional workers’ movement will ascribe to the strike a disciplined and disciplining form of organisation, an orderly form of confrontation against capital (and not against the state), while the alleged disorder and chaos of the anarchist-inspired actions in the insurrection, to which pointless spontaneity is also always imputed, mutate into objects of antipathy. Spontaneity appears here merely as a slave to the (natural) stimulus, although in a broader sense one could point out that Kant did indeed refer to the transcendental unity of apperception, the fact that I myself become aware of my own experiences, as a spontaneous act that is not exercised naturally but freely and willingly.41 Even tactics that arise spontaneously must, on the one hand, reckon with an already given order of space and time and, on the other hand, skilfully try to exploit their respective gaps, imponderabilities and inconsistencies.

 

In Leninist orthodoxy, the spontaneism of the insurgents is rejected not only because it is allegedly characterised by a lack of consciousness and organisedness, but also because it stands in direct opposition to the labour that is put into production (by capital!) and thus to the proletariat. In Leninism, one finds the conception of traditional Marxism explicitly formulated, according to which the capitalist economy, on the one hand, exploits labour power, which must be sold, and on the other hand, however, labour power – naturalised – at the same time represents the fundamental human potential for the generation of general social wealth in every social formation. The worker is thus not only seen as a productive force that is exploited by the capital economy in quantitative terms, but is at the same time metaphysically overcoded as the sole producer of social wealth. Traditional Marxism-Leninism thus tells the worker that he is exploited and alienated through the sale of his labour power, thus preventing the much more radical hypothesis that he is “alienated” as a labour power in itself, that is, as a force that creates value through its labour, already to be questioned.42

 

After the end of the Second World War, there was a period of stagnation in the militant struggles of the labour movement, which ended in the 1960s with a sudden interruption in which, due to the student movement, the New Left and radical workers’ struggles, something new appeared on the horizon, although there were still elements of continuity in the old struggles. At the same time, the labour movement in general is not to be equated with organised labour struggles; rather, from the end of the 18th century onwards, this was a mode of organisation, an apparatus and an urban machine that held workers together in their workplaces and neighbourhoods. Insofar as the labour movement succeeded in this, it always referred to an affirmative class identity, with the activists of the workers’ parties and the trade unions leading workers to suspend their interests as isolated sellers of their labour power in a competitively organised labour market and to act instead as a collective project, as a movement. The workers’ movement also embodied a certain idea of how capitalism could be replaced, opening up a communist horizon that enabled a positive dynamic of class struggles, but also showed their limits. In this, the workers were to build a new world with their own hands, a world in which they would be the only social group to expand, while all other groups, including the bourgeoisie, would diminish. The workers were not only the majority of the population, they also became a compact mass in the form of the collective worker, drilled in the factories in concert with the machines. They would nevertheless have been the only ones capable of managing the new world according to their own logic, following neither a hierarchy of command receivers or givers nor the irrationality of market fluctuations, but rather installing a finely graduated division of labour themselves. Moreover, the labour movement realised the truth of history in qualitative terms. These visions motivated the workers’ struggles, especially between the years 1873 and 1921, and partly explain the exponential growth of the movement.

 

Today, however, we are faced with the absence of those institutionalised forms of collectivity that formed the backbone of the workers’ movement. Today, the workers’ movements are reduced entirely to the politics of the trade unions, which at best still want to manage stable employment, to social democratic parties which implement austerity policies when the conservative parties fail to do so, and to a few anarchist and communist sects which wait in vain for their historic chance. The labour movement has long ceased to be a political force with the potential to change the world, because the coordinates of the struggles have changed. Therefore, there is no reason to simply repeat the constitutive modes and features of the old organised struggles today, since, moreover, the modern working class is completely caught up in the wage-commodity nexus. Capital and labour in Western countries today are in close and fatal collaboration to secure labour relations along the lines of corporate liabilities and ultimately to maintain the self-reproduction of capital. In order to be able to guarantee their reproduction, workers must now necessarily affirm their own exploitation. Thus the working class has finally ceased to be the antithesis of capital. Traditional Marxism-Leninism, which considers productive labour as a transhistorical force of social constitution, has finally shot its powder. The struggle for wages retains its justification, but it now always legitimises the mode of existence of capital.

 

The masses and the political: masses, classes, mobs, multitude

 

The sense of metamorphoses and antagonisms, the sense of the political. As this cannot be separated from the question of the many, the re-composition of the class body that is constantly transformed in relation to the material base. In this context, insurrection and strike are not singular events, but part and figure of the many that are adjacent to them. In contrast to the strike, the insurrection today, although it remains bound to certain necessities of reproduction, can only be political, since the surplus population participating in it remains fundamentally denied participation in social wealth. The capitalist states have long since replaced Keynesian economic policies and the politics of social peace with austerity policies and direct police confrontation, especially towards the surplus population, whereby the violent behaviour of the police, which today dominates airports and other places of transit, as well as their militarisation have become part of everyday life. Police and insurgency are therefore mutually dependent. The insurgency has a necessary correlation to the current structure of the state (and economy), it is characterised by the abject43 – it is those who are excluded from any gains in productivity who are at the forefront of the insurgency.

 

At this point, it can be summarised with Clover: The strike is a collective action that a) aims to increase the price of labour power, reduce working hours and improve working conditions, in which b) the worker is purely in the position of the worker and which c) takes place in the inclusive context of capitalist production. Whereas the insurrection a) involves the struggle to fix prices in the markets or steal commodities, b) whose participants are completely expropriated and, moreover, disenfranchised, and which c) takes place in the context of circulation.44 Now, in order to analyse the current insurrection, it is necessary, firstly, to define the insurrection and the strike precisely, secondly, to justify the return of the insurrection since the 1970s, and thirdly, to analyse the relations between the constitution of the (future) insurrections and the logics of the global transformations of capital. The primary insurrection, which began around 1960 and was accompanied by the decline of the great strikes, thus encounters new conditions, logics and structures related to the technical, economic and social transformations of capital. And a new class politics of the left today consequently faces multiple socio-economic transformations of capital on a global scale.

 

The primary insurrection

 

For Clover, the (historical) line “insurrection-strike-insurrection” is not so much the result of theory, but the designation of a form. The passage from early insurrection to strike is historically and logically linked to industrialisation in the 19th century, while the passage from strike to primary insurrection correlates with the rise and later the slow decline of US hegemony in the second half of the 20th century. Clover refers here to Giovanni Arrighi’s three major historical divisions: mercantilism, industrialisation and financialisation.45 The historical periodisation “insurrection-strike-primary insurrection” maps for Clover at the same time the logical line “circulation-production-circulation (of capital)”. While Clover places the period 1784 to 1973 for the period of productive industrial capital, he sees the decisive characteristics of the movement of capital in circulation, in financialisation and its accompanying deindustrialisation, at least in the western industrialised countries, for the period thereafter.46 Following the historian Ferdinand Braudel, Joshua Clover thinks he sees in 1973 a point in time – think of the series of oil shocks, the final collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the final withdrawal of the USA from Vietnam – that ushered in a new phase of economic crisis development in global capitalism unfolding beyond a business cycle.47 In the context of Braudel’s and Arrighi’s economic business cycle theories, Clover grasps the year 1973 as a metonym that stands for economic changes that extend far beyond the transformational capacity of a decade.48 The decline in growth and profit rates that began in 1973 stands for a phase of decline of industrial capital in the Western countries, while at the same time money capital flows more strongly than ever into the financial sectors, where higher profit rates can be expected and also realised.

 

The looting, the barricade and finally the whole destructive arsenal of insurgent actions are always to be understood as an implicit response to the logics of capitalisation and the state. The tactics, means and methods of today’s uprisings include, in particular, blockades and barricades that challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force and the police’s control of public space, looting that at least hints at a redistribution of general wealth (in the 1970s, such actions were still called “proletarian shopping” in Italy), and property damage that symbolises a specific form of property critique. Even if the uprisings do not refer to an explicit strategy, they certainly bring a political articulation into play as a radical negation – and partly also as an inversion – of workers’ power; whereby it is important to bear in mind here that the workers in Fordism were still successful at least in the wage struggles, but today they are completely on the defensive even in these as a class, insofar as the preservation of the reproduction of the workers often also goes hand in hand with the moral support and thus the stabilisation of the successes of the companies in which they are currently employed.

 

Mostly, then, the uprisings do not have explicit demands, but are (seemingly) purely infused with the negative language of vandalism, destruction and chaos. But still, the riots do not lack political determination. Clover speaks at this point of the overdetermination of insurrection by historical transformations, which make more than a reconstruction of class antagonism, that is, in particular today, the reframing of struggles in circulation necessary.49 The new insurrections in circulation do not necessarily have to be carried by workers, because in principle any political group can liberate a marketplace, blockade a street or occupy a port.50

 

It is also essential to recognise that from the middle of the 20th century, capital established new technological relations between networks, communication industries and infrastructures in huge shock waves, which then finally became dominant around the year 2000. In this context, the blocking of traffic and the disruption of circulation circuits at various levels of the system expresses the collective desire to bring it to a complete standstill. The transition from the Occupy to the Blockupy movement marks the replacement of the politics of occupying squares with the politics of blockades, namely blockades of commodity flows and infrastructures. All too often, however, individual actions still block precisely where the opponent expects or even desires it, and at the same time the focus is not on disrupting the infrastructure itself, but on symbolic actions, whereby it is essential to take into account that the functioning of infrastructures is now inextricably linked to the rhizomes and abstractions of financial capital. One must therefore ask the inescapable question: How does one block an abstraction today? As Alexander Galloway has surmised, both financialisation and the cybernetics with which digital technology is focused on the input/output relation (black box) and the interface would have to be countered today by a (non)politics of black bloc that focuses on the question of the appearance and disappearance of actions and struggle groups in the digital media as well as outside. The politicisation of the problem of presence and absence requires a very specific rhythmology that cannot be grasped as mere acceleration.51

 

Clover writes: “The uprising, the blockade, the barricade, the occupation. This is what we will see in the next five, fifteen, forty years. “52 Since 2006, the most important reservoirs of insurgency have consisted specifically of young people who are blocked from entering the employment systems, but more generally of the surplus population, which is directly confronted day and night with the controlling state crisis management. The organisation of the camps, as seen in the Occupy movement in Oakland, was both the strength and the weakness of the movement in terms of its militancy and the class composition of the excluded. The relationship between the abjection of the refugee camps and the activism of the political camps also plays a certain role here. The dominant discourse of Occupy – we are the 99% and thus we are entitled to a corresponding share of social wealth and class power – was not able to represent those who have long lived beyond the promises of state institutions and redistributive social policies. On the other hand, a link must be established between the different camps of the surplus population and the left groups that are anti-state, precisely because the production of non-production and global political volatility persist in an intolerable manner.

 

Moreover, the reformist tendencies of the new uprisings must also be avoided in the future: The tendency towards populism, desperately seeking sympathy in the mass media, and towards pacifism, tirelessly pleading for a policy respectable to the state. The demandless insurrection is often initially coded correctly as if it were the demand itself, although it is then often continued that the existing order must finally recognise it after all, if only it would understand it. The much more radical political impulse finds in the uprising something that comes as an event before or after hegemonic communication, and this in the context of a practice that consists in looting, autonomous control of space or the successful erosion of police power. The success of the former, the discursive strategy often adopted by the civil rights movements, seems more than doubtful today, especially in light of the socio-economic transformations of capital and the state. And the frenzy of insurrection arising from these transformations is undoubtedly an indicator of the social pressure that is permanently weighing on the surplus population in particular. Finally, in the struggles, there is a glimpse of the Commune appearing on the horizon, as a social relation, as a political practice and as an event that also requires a corresponding theory. In the context of the insurgency, the term contagion is often used; the Invisible Committee, on the other hand, speaks, somewhat too idealistically, of the resonance of revolutionary movements.53 In any case, the insurgencies, some of which spread virally, live off the surplus population as the basis of their own expansions. From the perspective of the insurgency itself, however, it is not only about the participants and their collective actions and visions, but also about the radical-negative “processing” of crisis, surplus population and “race”. It is the idle capacities of the subalterns as “concomitants” of the crises, as well as the surplus of the production of non-production, that are targeted in the insurrection. The insurgents may be workers, but they do not function as workers in the insurrections, because the participants in the insurrections are not unified here solely by their occupations or their jobs, but specifically in their function as the socially disenfranchised and dispossessed within the whole process of reproduction under capitalism. At the same time, the insurgents remain confronted with the intolerable socio-economic conditions of capital accumulation, which is why actions such as looting and sabotage are always to be understood as short-term responses to the logics of the market. The insurrection is the negation of the trap into which the workers have fallen. Insurrection, Clover sums up, is thus a privileged tactic that stands for the struggles in the sphere of circulation, the insurrection, the blockade, the occupation and finally, on the horizon, the Commune.54

 

Clover is interested not only in the historical genealogy of insurrection, but also in particular in (theoretically) deciphering the political signification and potential of insurrection. In an economistically truncated sense, the early uprising is interpreted exclusively as a spontaneous protest against the increase in food prices (think of this subsequently to the current actions against the IMF, which notoriously and brazenly sets the conditions for precarious food prices in the countries of the South), and this in a more conditional sense, as if an increase in prices at a certain point must lead to insurrectionary reactions by the population. The politicist counter-position is taken here by Alain Badiou, who accuses the insurgents of a pathetic spontaneism to which Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg had already said everything necessary.55 At the same time, Badiou at least concedes that the communist idea springs from the event of the insurrection, although it must be given an organisational form and duration. In this respect, however, the insurrection can only ever assume a proto-political status, which must be translated into a revolutionary conception of political action. For Badiou, however, it is not the party but the idea that makes the specifications here. Thus, insurrection appears as an absolutely acausal affair that has nothing to do with historical (social) time and the economic cycles of capital accumulation. Clover sums up at this point that both economism and the purely political abstract show each other their limits in the negative, whereby both theoretical approaches could not grasp the insurrection as a social phenomenon sui generis.56 And he poses the question of how one could still navigate between the two positions, between the insurrection as a mere revolt against hunger and the diaphanous structure of a political feeling. Nevertheless, and it is important to note this, the historical potency of the current uprisings is neither to be seen as the sole result of an idea (Badiou) nor exclusively in the context of the fluctuations in food prices that are killing the population, but it is to be understood as a radical and contingent resistance to the state and the socio-economic structure of capital, as a struggle against the material reorganisation of the social body.

 

If we consider the strikes of the 1960s as a popular and at times successful tactic of the trade unions, then the return of insurrection appears as a strangely heroic attempt to transform the two forms of collective action into a single revolutionary process, and yet insurrection seems to mark only the second front of a single economic antagonism. In the Western countries, the strike, as the leading tactic of the workers’ movement, still survives during the 1960s, but in terms of frequency it is synchronous with the growth processes of capital, indeed it follows in its frequency the economic business cycles and the level of employment (the higher the unemployment, the lower the number of strikes). The correlation of the number of strikes with the industrial expansion, the positive developments of the labour market and the high profit rates could be clearly observed in the long phase from 1830 to 1973. While high profit rates could still be observed in the industrial sectors of the Western countries during the Fordism of the 1960s and the traditional labour movement maintained its position in the class compromise between capital and labour, the new insurrections were already becoming more visible, especially in the “long hot summers”: the historical transition from strike to insurrection had begun.

 

The modern insurrection, although it shares certain characteristics with the early insurrections, takes on completely new contours and forms of struggle in a completely changed historical situation, and especially in the USA it is to this day always also a struggle for the rights of black people, which springs from the civil rights movements and is also in direct demarcation to the whiteness of the traditional labour movement. The blackness of the uprisings appears here not only as the continuity of the civil rights movement, which defends itself against state racism, but also as a movement against the specific whiteness of the strike.57 Detroit and Los Angeles were probably the cities in which the transitions from strike to contemporary, primary uprising could be observed most significantly in the 1960s. This involved the coexistence and confrontation of riots and strikes on the one hand, and the massive racialisation of the black population on the other.

 

According to Clover, there is a paradox to report in this context: On the one hand, insurgency is always in confrontation with the violence of the racist state; on the other hand, the identification of insurgency with “race” proves to be a mistake (a confusion between correlation and reason), as if skin colour were the origin of insurgency itself.58 At the same time, the ideological definition of insurgency as spontaneistic and undisciplined proves to be a vehicle for portraying the racialised black subject as animalistic, irrational and nature-like. In this, of course, skin colour is not the cause of the uprising, but rather black people are part of the uprisings that are directed against the racialisation processes of white elites and middle classes. It is not race that makes insurrection, but insurrection that makes race, but only insofar as it is the modality of the lived class that experiences and recognises itself in insurrection as excluded, exploited and controlled. The logic of a structural surplus that characterises the new proletariat permeates the (alleged) antinomy between class and race, ultimately to radically challenge racism as a feature of the new class composition by the ruling class. In doing so, the surplus is not to be placed identically with race, nor are the two readily distinguishable. In this context, Clover quotes Stuart Hall, who speaks of race as a modality in which class is lived.59

 

Deindustrialisation in the US has itself a racial component: for example, unemployment among the black population in the US has remained higher than that of the white population since the 1960s and has remained so to this day. Moreover, the militant actions carried out by blacks, for example in Detroit, usually moved at a certain distance from the official labour markets; they were often struggles for better conditions of reproduction outside the sphere of production. In regions where one finds a high unemployment rate, especially among black youth, who are constantly monitored and harassed by state control instruments and apparatuses, today the state’s only answer to the existence of the surplus population seems to be prison. Thus, resistance to incarceration is also inscribed in the uprising. It is the radical response to the regime of inclusion and exclusion, to the demanded superfluidity of the labour force, to the lack of purchasing power and to state surveillance, control and violence. In relation to the economy and the state and law, Blackness appears here as a surplus that promises the transgression of regulation and order. “Negroes” are blackness, are riot.60 Insurrection is an instance of black life characterised by total exclusion, but at the same time it is also the surplus in the noisy atmosphere of circulation. It can only expand in its own modulation, it is a collective action through which the struggle must happen, it is a social modality. It is in this context that the black resistance movements establish their links with the anti-colonial movements, though ultimately, and this remains crucial, it is the global class of the dangerous that is unified not by its role as producer but by its common relation to state violence. This is the basis of surplus rebellion.

 

When the everyday life of large sections of the population is increasingly played out in circulation, in the informal economies or outside the employment system, these groups tend to become abjects and are confronted with the conditions of reproduction not through wages and factory work but directly in the supermarkets and shopping malls where the necessities of life are offered, and in this situation any gathering of people on a street corner, in a public square or in the street can potentially be understood as a revolt. Quite unlike the strike, it is difficult to figure out when the riot even starts or when it ends. On the one hand, it is a particular event, on the other hand, it is also the holographic miniature of a complete socio-economic situation, a world picture. While the early insurgency was less confronted with the police and the armed state (it took place in the economic spaces of the early markets), this has changed in the post-industrial insurgency. On the one hand, he finds himself confronted with an ensemble of almost unattainable goods in the department stores and local shops; on the other hand, he suspects, even when it comes to the prices of the goods, that the economy today has planetary logistics, a police-military secured transport system and a barely visible financial industry. In this context, Guy Debord sees in the looting of supermarkets not at all a hyperbolic realisation of the ideology of consumption, but the subversion of the commodity as such61 , whereby today, at the same time, with every insurrectionary action, the apparatuses of the state, the police and the armed units, immediately appear on the scene. The police now quite obviously stand for the economy, the violence of the commodity becomes flesh, according to Clover.62

 

Insurrection and violence

 

Often enough, people associate insurrection exclusively with chaos and violence, describing it as anarchist or simply illegitimate.63 Correspondingly, the strike is then seen as pacifist, whose operations always remain anchored in the legal framework. Large sections of the traditional workers’ movement, which generally rejected violence as a political means of struggle, defended and opposed the violence of insurrection with legal strikes, overlooking the fact that even strikes, up to and including general strikes, were historically often associated with extraordinary outbreaks of violence, with open warfare against private or national military forces, in which many people died only because of the possibility, briefly glimpsed in the struggles, of gaining social security, housing or a more or less tolerable working life. It is important to define violence and to look back at history and see that truly groundbreaking transformations in history have never taken place without the use of violence by the insurgents. While insurgencies rarely took on revolutionary proportions, hardly any revolution began without some kind of uprising.

 

The general equation of insurrection with physical violence is an important discursive tool of the ruling classes, their media and elites to strip the insurrection of its political explosive power, to fix its separation from the “clean” politics of the reformist workers’ parties and to defame it as chaos and rioting. This equation obscures the systemic-structural, the everyday and the ecological violence that is the norm for the majority of the population today; the very double freedom of the wage worker – free from ownership of the means of production and free to choose to rent out his labour power – integrates latent violence into the system of wage labour, whereby the numerous forms of de-limited exploitation (land grabs, the production of cheap labour, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap food, slave labour, racism and neo-colonialism, etc. ) already refer much more directly to physical relations of violence.64 The dominant discourses on violence are characterised by their denial of structural violence or de-limited exploitation, whereby the second, totalitarian aspect of these discourses is to constantly normalise structural violence via the mass media. Here, in the sense of Felix Guattari, the differential coefficients of freedom of the state, the systems of power and the economy would have to be examined, with which the relations of violence display themselves, sometimes more and sometimes less clearly, in order to derive from them corresponding necessities and potentials for uprisings.65

 

State violence has a latent and an open aspect. In order to maintain public order, the state and power can usually be content with latent violence, so that overt violence can be held in reserve.66 According to Machiavelli, anyone who constantly resorts to police or military means to secure political order is not up to the concept of absolute politics. In order to secure the economic system and the state in unstable situations or, and this is quite decisive today, since at present the political situation in Western countries cannot be understood as unstable, in order to implement the preventive logic of the security state, the police must be pushed more and more to the fore in terms of language, the visual, representation and material intervention. This works through the endless invocation, even worship and mythologisation of terrorism, with which the state organs are supposed to lend the appropriate legitimacy to an unleashed security policy prevention in advance. If the aim is to prevent the worst, then almost anything must be allowed. This kind of security policy is itself to be understood as a kind of organised crime, with which fear of terrorist attacks and generally the collective feeling of insecurity are to be permanently generated in the population. Moreover, one can be punished now for crimes that one may or may not commit in the future. A strange inscription of insecurity is taking place here in the bodies of the population, which is incidentally complementary to the programming of financialised insecurity into the brains of neoliberal subjects.

 

It is precisely in the face of this totalitarian occupation of the future by capital and the state that resistance remains unreservedly justified. Merleau-Ponty writes: “The contingency of the future, which explains the violent acts of power, simultaneously deprives them of any legitimacy, or equally legitimises the violence of opposition. The right of opposition is completely equal to that of power. “67 For Georges Bataille, the moment of transgression, waste and cruelty comes into play at this point with counter-violence. Here, counter-violence is not simply a means, but a resource of attention for minorities, whereby the principled prohibition of violence against the population, which the state pronounces, is for Bataille a form of terror in the sense of elimination and the elimination of natural resources, which people in need and distress must make use of.68 In contrast, the state totalitarian claims violence as its own exclusive resource to maintain public order or stability of the system at all costs, while denying the very population to use violence as a resource. In an interview, the criminologist Fritz Sack says: “One can no longer talk about the positive function of violence. That’s why you can’t call state violence violence, state violence is something else. Denial, that’s part of violence like the amen in church. It plays a big role in the military. They are trained to use violence in a controlled and civilised way(…) Therefore, in our society we can experience every day the ambiguity and hypocrisy associated with this demand for renunciation of violence and fading out of violence and denial of violence. “69

 

Uprising and police

 

Let us now briefly assess the role of the police within the capitalist state apparatus. To state it upfront, the main role of the police is not at all to help and protect citizens when they are in danger, but rather to both secure, defend and maintain the economic and political system at the national level and tend to keep those outside the official labour market and system of wage labour in illegality. As cities industrialised in the 19th century, the police possessed the task of disciplining the newly inflowing workforce. The laws they enforced were always coded by class, unless the police were simply trained to punish and harass workers and the poor anyway. In the 19th century, vagrancy in particular, and with it unemployment, were criminalised; today begging and sleeping in parks are punished, at least in part. The police act as a private army of industry in times of strikes, and alongside them private security services are emerging today, which are de facto equipped with local police power.

 

The tasks and actions of the police spring less from the spontaneity of social relations than from the rigidity of state functions. Benjamin writes about the role of the police: “The disgraceful thing about such an authority (…) lies in the fact that in it the separation of law-making and law-maintaining power is abolished. If the former is required to prove itself in victory, the latter is subject to the restriction that it should not set itself any new ends. Police power is emancipated from both conditions (…) Rather, the ‘right’ of the police basically designates the point at which the state (…) can no longer guarantee itself through the legal order. Therefore, ‘for the sake of security’, the police intervene in countless cases where there is no clear legal situation (…). “70 The police thus always possess a certain autonomy. Benjamin goes on to say about the violence of the police institution: “Its violence is shapeless, like its nowhere comprehensible, all-spreading ghostly appearance in the life of civilised states. And even if police may look alike everywhere in detail, it cannot be denied in the end that its spirit is less devastating where, in absolute monarchy, it represents the power of the ruler, in which legislative and executive powers are united, than in democracies, where its existence is elevated by no such relationship and thus testifies to the greatest conceivable degeneracy of violence. “71 The police constantly construct new realities with their interventions, precisely by not only sanctioning the rules that serve to normalise the population, but also by setting them themselves, at least in certain situations. The construction of social reality requires a police power that is fundamentally given in the state. The police are also inscribed with an esprit de corps, an informal rule on how they are to act, especially in conflict situations. There is no doubt that the state itself constantly commits crimes, which it tries to mask and eliminate through its discourses of legitimacy. But it is not only about the crimes committed by the state, but especially about the everyday penetration of the population by the police. The police are the part of the state that most aggressively penetrates the community, invades the lives of the population, organises surveillance and issues prohibitions. Essential to the police is the organisation of an order of bodies that defines exactly how something can be done and said, how social being is, i.e. an order of the sayable and the visible that ensures that one particular activity is visible and another is not, that one speech is discourse and another is noise. The police are less concerned with the discipline of bodies than they are with organising the rules of how bodies appear in public, namely as a configuration of occupations and properties in spaces where these occupations and positions are distributed. The military and the police are disciplined and disciplining, symbolic and centralised institutions charged with guaranteeing this order, the army on the outside, the police on the inside, a differentiation that is being partially undone today.72

 

In Hamburg, the protest met directly with the executive and the police, who constantly suspended basic rights such as freedom of assembly, as well as disregarding orders of the courts and freedom of the press. In view of the police operations in Hamburg, the jurist Fritz Sack speaks of a partly “furious army that kicks and punches unprotected people lying on the ground, sprays them with gas, drives them up the wall in places where they could not flee. “73 This roughly coincides with a statement by Kroker et al. on Robocop: “Listless technique. By being stiffly erect, the Robocop is erection without discharge, a second of coming that is no coming at all. “74 It is thus also logical that the use of violence in the self-reception of the police “is not defined as the use of violence at all, but as a professional obligation and as a task that one has; that it is not experienced as violence at all, but that it is experienced as a civic duty. “75

 

Police operations today have a viral effect insofar as the escalation of operations creates the call for more police. The basis for their own deployment is thus created. The police strategy in Hamburg also had something of a very specific escalation, a kind of “milieu control”, that is, creating a ring, observing the riot, waiting and then entering with military units, SEK troops, and eliminating the riot.76 And it was quite obvious that everyone who was on the streets of Hamburg during the G20 summit was a potential criminal from the police’s point of view. For this reason, one should by no means follow the state’s discourse of the good versus the bad demonstrator, because in Hamburg, for the state and its police, potentially everyone belonged to the bad demonstrators.77

 

And a word about the Black Bloc. The Invisible Committee writes: “Let us beware, then, of seeing it as the proof finally given of our radicalism when completely blind repression descends upon us. Let us not think that they are trying to destroy us. Let’s rather start from the hypothesis that they are trying to bring us forth. To produce us as a political subject, as ‘anarchists’, as a ‘black bloc’, as ‘opponents of the system’, to separate us from the general population by giving us a political identity. “78 If young people in particular – as happened in Hamburg – defend themselves against what they suffer in the system on a daily basis in terms of subjective and structural violence, then the insurgents are indeed more than just actors of the black bloc. Perhaps it would therefore be better to say that the insurgent youths are not the Black Bloc, so that the Black Bloc remains non-identifiable. On the one hand, this subtly refers to the Black Bloc and thus dominates the media’s image politics for a moment; on the other hand, one remains in the non-perceptible. The inversion of image politics here must keep in mind the distinction between ontological non-perceptibility (the night when all cows are black) and political non-perceptibility (the night when all demonstrators look the same). With regard to the former non-perceptibility, we find ourselves disabled in the face of pure immediacy. In the latter situation, on the other hand, we find ourselves activated to take up the confrontation against the everyday staged by capital and its state apparatus of appropriation.79

 

 

 

 

Report from a mass demonstration against compulsory vaccination

 

by Tagore, a left-wing activist in France, 20 July 2021

 

 

 

Preface from the RCIT’s Editorial Board

 

Below we publish a report which we received from comrade Tagore, a left-wing activist in France, about the mass protests against the reactionary compulsory vaccination campaign by the chauvinist-bonapartist government of Macron. We thank the comrade for providing us with such an interesting overview about the situation in France and about one of these demonstrations which took place in Paris on 17 July.

 

The report correctly points out the shameful situation that nearly all left-wing parties have failed to oppose the COVID-19 Counterrevolution – one and a half year after its beginning! As a result, small right-wing parties – like « les Patriotes » in this case – succeed to play a leading role against the dramatic expansion of the bonapartist police and surveillance state. For this reason, we see a similar picture as in various other European countries: many people who oppose the reactionary Lockdown policy for fundamental democratic reasons see no alternative than joining mobilizations initiated by right-wing forces because they are the only ones taking such initiatives.

 

To a certain degree, the situation resembles Europe in 1939-41 when Nazi-Germany occupied nearly all countries. There was little left-wing resistance against the occupiers at that time because the Stalinists – the dominant force among left-wing parties in the occupied countries – failed to do so since Moscow was in an alliance with Nazi-Germany.

 

However, in our opinion, it is not legitimate for socialists to build for or to speak from the platform at such demonstrations which are organized and controlled by right-wing forces. As we explained in past documents, this would be an error as socialists can not help or lend political legitimacy to forces which are sworn enemies of the working class. Socialists should try to break away democratic participants from such mobilizations and bring them closer to a progressive, class-orientated standpoint. This can be done by going to such demonstrations and discussing with participants, by distributing leaflets in such a spirit, etc. However, it is imperative to avoid any impression that the red flag could have anything in common with the flag of right-wing chauvinism! In the end, the solution can only be that socialist, progressive and democratic forces organize their own, independent mobilizations against the COVID-19 Counterrevolution.

 

Finally, we want to draw attention that there are a number of progressive and initiatives against Macron’s reactionary compulsory vaccination campaign. They correctly oppose the introduction of a new Apartheid system. For example, the trade unions of the fire fighters – including the left-wing CGT and SUD – have launched an initiative against such compulsory vaccination. (See here: https://snspp-pats.com/vaccination-obligatoire-les-sapeurs-pompiers-refusent-la-politique-du-baton/?cn-reloaded=1). These are initiatives which socialist and democrats should fully support and bring together to organize a nation-wide campaign to stop the counter-revolutionary offensive of the Macaron government.

 

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

In France, the Apartheid begins

 

 

 

Emmanuel Macron, the President of the French Republic, announced on 12 July on television the following measures:

 

from 21 July, it would be prohibited for people without a health pass to enter the following places:

 

* places of culture and of leisure: cinemas, theaters, sports halls, museums, conservatory ...

 

from the beginning of August:

 

* places of collective catering: cafes, restaurants, bars, mess, etc. 

 

* shopping centers,

 

* healthcare facilities: hospitals, retirement homes, medical-social establishments, etc. 

 

* long-distance means of transport: autocars, trains, planes, etc. 

 

from September:

 

* A third dose will be necessary to validate the health passport, except for first-time vaccinated people.

 

The law has not yet been passed, and I do not know if the deadlines will be met or how these announcements will materialize.

 

On the same day, the Paris police headquarters announced that the celebration of the National Day, the commemoration of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 during the French Revolution, would be prohibited for people without a health pass. It is therefore in the midst of shouts and invectives from the crowd that President Macron marched in the midst of his entire army, without which it is not certain that he would have kept his head on his shoulders at night.

 

At the same time, demonstrations broke out here and there in all the towns of France, small, scattered, calling for union.

 

It was the small far-right party "the Patriots" which succeeded in bringing together all these protests, calling on all the opposition forces to demonstrate on July 17, 2021. The day before, I went up to Paris to attend the main demonstration and hear the speakers.

 

On the Royal Palace square, there was already a crowd, even an hour and a half before the start of the demonstration. There were a lot of national flags. I met two people: a salesperson from an IT company who told me that Florian Philippot, the leader of the “Patriots”, had changed a lot, and was no longer, strictly speaking, a leader of the extreme right; and a person decked out in a blue-white-red cape, with an unusually pale complexion (perhaps he was wearing makeup?), who had never taken part in a demonstration and who was obviously an ultra-nationalist (haircut, attire, etc.).

 

I read out the speech I had prepared to the salesperson, who found it very good, and we set out on a campaign to find the organizers of the meeting and try to get to the rostrum. At the “Patriots” stand, the activists told us that all the speakers were already scheduled, and that it was impossible to accept more. I approached the rare red flags which fluttered here and there, and asked their bearers how to address the crowd during the meeting: they replied that I had "every right" to make a speech; but that was not the question, since the nationalists were going to de facto lock the platform for themselves.

 

But soon, the crowd became denser, and the red flags disappeared under the mass of nationalist flags. Then, the Marseillaise (the national anthem) was sung which is an ambiguous song since it is as much a revolutionary song as a nationalist song.

 

At the head of the procession, there were figures from the minorities of the right and the far right; plus the Yellow Vests, an unstructured movement with leftist and nationalist elements. I tried to access the singer Francis Lalanne, a figure of the Yellow Vests, but the “Patriots” had formed a mesh of activists around the speakers: they all held each other by the shoulders and formed a sort of shield.

 

In general, the crowd was extremely dense, and everyone tried to access the head of the procession to speak to the speakers, like the lawyer Fabrice Di Vizio. Invectives were launched against the government, but also against the “National Front”, the majority far-right party, which was called "collabo" [Nazi collaborater], in reference to its position considered too conciliatory with the government, although it also pronounced itself against confinement and against the health pass. I saw a nun carrying against her heart the portrait of Eric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist, whose face was also displayed on many walls along the route of the demonstration. I saw Chouans flags, of the White Army during the French Revolution, royalist flags, attesting to the presence of far-right forces in all their diversity.

 

At the end of the demonstration, the crowd gathered around the platform, protected by a sizeable professional security service. I was over a manhole cover and started to smell the bad odor. I made a not-possible scandal to deliver my speech, until the organizers placed me behind the podium, promising me that they would come and get me soon (obviously, they did not).

 

The first speeches were quite weak, bearing on the need to challenge elected officials, to take legal action and to unite in a great movement the vaccinated and unvaccinated people. “It was also necessary to prepare for the next elections and to oppose the European Union.” Philippot, leader of the “Patriots”, finally denounced the apartheid and called for a boycott of all companies participating in it. He is a candidate for the presidential election of 2022. 

 

It is really a joke of history that the extreme right presents itself as the champion of freedom and democracy. It must be said that the French government appears to be an extremism of the center, much more radical in its measures than the extreme right itself, by imposing an internal passport in the country. Each pub, each train station, each hospital will become a border post in front of which you will have to present your papers. Despite denials from the government and the state-subsidized journalists, these measures are indeed comparable to those imposed by the German army during the occupation of France in 1940, during which Jews were prohibited from attending same establishments:

 

1. Restaurants and tasting places,

 

2. Cafés, tea rooms and pubs,

 

3. Theaters,

 

4. Cinemas,

 

5. Concerts,

 

6. Music halls, and other places of pleasure,

 

7. Public telephone booths,

 

8. Markets and fairs,

 

9. Swimming pools and beaches,

 

10. Museums,

 

11. Libraries,

 

12. Public exhibitions,

 

13. Castles, historic castles as well as all other monuments of a historical character,

 

14. Sporting events, either as participants or as spectators,

 

15. Racetracks and pari-mutuel premises,

 

16. Campsites,

 

17. Parks.

 

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

En France, l’Apartheid commence

 

 

 

Le 12 juillet, le président de la république française, Emmanuel Macron, annonçait à la télévision les mesures suivantes :

 

à partir du 21 juillet, il serait interdit aux personnes dépourvues de pass sanitaire :

 

* les lieux de culture et de loisir : cinémas, théâtres, salles de sport, musées, conservatoire…

 

à partir de début août :

 

* les lieux de restauration collective : cafés, restaurants, bars, réfectoires, etc. 

 

* les centres commerciaux,

 

* les lieux de soin : hôpitaux, maisons de retraite, établissements médicaux-sociaux, etc. 

 

* les moyens de transports longue distance : autocars, trains, avions, etc. 

 

à partir de septembre :

 

* Une troisième dose sera nécessaire pour valider le passeport sanitaire, sauf pour les primo-vaccinés.

 

La loi n’est pas encore votée, et je ne sais pas si les délais seront respectés ni comment ces annonces vont se matérialiser.

 

Le même jour, la préfecture de police de Paris annonçait que la célébration de la fête nationale, la commémoration de la prise de la Bastille le 14 juillet 1789 lors de la Révolution Française, serait interdite aux personnes dépourvues de pass sanitaire. C’est donc au milieu des cris et des invectives de la foule que le président Macron a défilé au milieu de toute son armée, sans laquelle il n’est pas certain qu’il aurait gardé au soir la tête sur les épaules.

 

En même temps, des manifestations éclataient ça et là dans toutes les villes de France, petites, dispersées, appelant à l’union.

 

Ce fut le petit parti d’extrême droite « les Patriotes » qui réussit à rassembler toutes ces énergies, appelant toutes les forces d’opposition à manifester le 17 juillet 2021. La veille, je montais à Paris afin d’assister à la manifestation principale et entendre les orateurs.

 

Sur la Place du Palais Royale, il y avait déjà foule, même une heure et demie avant le début de la manifestation. Il y avait beaucoup de drapeaux nationaux. Je rencontrais deux personnes : un commerciale d’une entreprise informatique qui me dit que Filippot, le chef des « Patriotes », avait beaucoup changé, et n’était plus, à proprement parler, un chef d’extrême droite ; et une personne affublée d’une cape bleu-blanc-rouge, au teint anormalement pâle (peut-être était-il maquillé ?), qui n’avait jamais participé à une manifestation et qui était visiblement un ultra-nationaliste (coupe de cheveux, accoutrement, etc.).

 

Je fis lire le discours que j’avais préparé au commercial, qui le trouva très bien et nous nous mîmes en campagne pour trouver les organisateurs du meeting et essayer de passer à la tribune. Au stand des « Patriotes », les militants nous dirent que tous les orateurs étaient déjà programmés, et qu’il était impossible d’en accepter d’autres. Je me rapprochais des rares drapeaux rouges qui flottaient ça et là, et demandaient à leurs porteurs comment m’adresser à la foule lors du meeting : ils me répondirent que j’avais « parfaitement le droit » de faire un discours ; mais telle n’était pas la question, puisque les nationalistes allaient de facto verrouiller la tribune pour eux-mêmes.

 

Mais bientôt, la foule se fit plus dense, et les drapeaux rouges disparurent sous la masse des drapeaux nationalistes : on chantait la Marseillaise qui est une chanson ambiguë puisqu’elle est autant un chant révolutionnaire qu’un chant nationaliste.

 

En tête de cortège, il y avait des figures minoritaires de droite et d’extrême-droite ; plus des Gilets Jaunes, un mouvement non-structuré comportant des éléments gauchistes et nationalistes. J’essayais d’accéder au chanteur Francis Lalanne, une figure des Gilets Jaunes, mais les « Patriotes » avaient formés un treillis de militants autour des orateurs : ils se tenaient tous par les épaules et formaient une sorte de bouclier.

 

De façon générale, la foule était extrêmement dense, et tout le monde essayait d’accéder à la tête du cortège pour parler aux orateurs, au grand dam de l’avocat Fabrice Di Vizio qui se désespérait de cette foule brûlante et regrettait ses chevaux dans l’écurie de sa maison de campagne (dans cette vidéo). Des invectives furent lancées contre le gouvernement, mais aussi contre le Front National, le parti d’extrême droite majoritaire, qui fut traité de « collabo », en référence à sa position jugée trop conciliante avec le gouvernement, bien qu’il se soit lui aussi prononcé contre le confinement et contre le pass sanitaire. J’ai vu une nonne portant contre son cœur le portrait d’Éric Zemmour, un polémiste d’extrême droite, dont le visage s’affichait également sur de nombreux murs le long du parcours de la manifestation. J’ai vu des drapeaux Chouans, de l’Armée Blanche durant la Révolution Française, des drapeaux royalistes, attestant de la présence des forces d’extrême droite dans toute leur diversité.

 

À la fin de la manifestation, la foule se pressait autour de la tribune, protégée par un important service d’ordre professionnel. J’étais sur une bouche d’égout et je commençais à sentir la mauvaise odeur. Je fis un scandale pas possible pour prononcer mon discours, jusqu’à ce que les organisateurs me placent derrière la tribune, me promettant qu’ils allaient bientôt venir me chercher (évidemment, ils ne l’ont pas fait).

 

Les premiers discours étaient assez faibles, portant sur la nécessité d'interpeller les élus, de saisir la justice et de s’unir dans un grand mouvement vaccinés et non-vaccinés. Il fallait également préparer les prochaines élections et s’opposer à l’Union Européenne. Philippot, chef des « Patriotes », dénonça enfin l’apartheid et en appela au boycott de toutes les entreprises qui y participeraient. Il est candidat à l’élection présidentielle de 2022. 

 

C’est vraiment une farce de l’histoire que l’extrême-droite se présente comme la championne de la liberté et de la démocratie. Il faut dire que le gouvernement français apparaît comme un extrémisme du centre, beaucoup plus radical dans ses mesures que l’extrême-droite elle-même, en imposant un passeport intérieur dans le pays. Chaque bar, chaque gare, chaque hôpital deviendra un poste frontière devant lequel il faudra présenter ses papiers. N’en déplaise au gouvernement et aux journalistes subventionnés par l’état, ces mesures sont effectivement comparables à celles qu’imposa l’armée allemande durant l’occupation de la France en 1940, au cours de laquelle les Juifs furent interdits de fréquenter les mêmes établissements :

 

1. Restaurants et lieux de dégustation,

 

2. Cafés, salons de thé et bars,

 

3. Théâtres,

 

4. Cinémas,

 

5. Concerts,

 

6. Music-halls, et autres lieux de plaisir,

 

7. Cabines de téléphone public,

 

8. Marchés et foires,

 

9. Piscines et plages,

 

10. Musées,

 

11. Bibliothèques,

 

12. Expositions publiques,

 

13. Châteaux-forts, châteaux historiques ainsi que tous les autres monuments présentant un caractère historique,

 

14. Manifestations sportives, soit comme participants, soit comme spectateurs,

 

15. Champs de courses et locaux de pari mutuel,

 

16. Lieux de camping,

 

17. Parcs.

 

 

 

18 July 2021, by Comunistas, https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article7232

 

Four days after the events and after a thorough analysis, Comunistas reveals its official position on the protests that took place in Cuba last Sunday, 11 July.

 

Almost simultaneously and with greater or lesser intensity, on Sunday 11 July, Cuba experienced a series of social outbreaks that encompassed at least six of the 14 provinces that make up the country. In the 62 years since the triumph of the revolution led by comandte Fidel Castro, Cuba had not faced a situation like this.

 

Although the first protests began peacefully, almost all the demonstrations ended up seeing violence, which was carried out by both sides. This series of simultaneous anti-government demonstrations is something never before seen in socialist Cuba. This must be taken into account to understand the events.

 

It should be remembered that in Cuba, the last massive protests date back to 5 August 1994, later known as Maleconazo, which was contained in a few hours with the appearance of Fidel Castro at the protests.

 

A demonstration of 200 people chanting anti-government slogans in a central location is something almost inconceivable in Cuban society. Yet, in Havana there has been a spontaneous march of at least 3,000 people.

 

The events in Havana

 

The protests—triggered by the demonstration that broke out in the city of San Antonio de los Baños, located no more than 100 kilometres from the capital—quickly spread to Havana. Shortly after 3pm local time, around 200 people took to La Fraternidad Park in the city centre, later moving in front of the Capitolio, the official Parliament building.

 

During the first hour of the protest, the police arrests were isolated, allowing, at least tacitly, the protesters to march, who moved to Máximo Gómez Park, located between the Spanish embassy and the headquarters of the National Bureau of the Union of Young Communists.

 

By that time, more than 500 people were peacefully concentrated in the park’s esplanade, while sporadic arrests continued.

 

Subsequently, a group of approximately 100 people, waving Cuban and 26 July Movement flags, with socialist slogans and in favour of the government, peacefully took the Máximo Gómez Park. At the same time, other groups linked to the Communist Party and the Union of Young Communists, together with Ministry of the Interior cadets, occupied the area.

 

Voluntarily, the protesters demobilised, and it seemed that at least in Havana, where they had originated, the protests had ended, almost without clashes. However, later it was known that the march turned into a long demonstration that ran through important streets of Havana.

 

As the protest march progressed, people joined it, and according to data issued by unofficial sources, between 2,000 and 3,000 protesters chanted slogans against the government.

 

Revolution

 

The protesters decided to go to the emblematic Revolution Square, where the headquarters of the presidency, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of the Armed Forces, as well as the HQ of the main national newspapers are located. Near the Square, the demonstration was resisted by public order forces and pro-government civilian groups, leading to violent clashes, which resulted in an undetermined number of arrests and injuries.

 

At the same time, in the Calzada de 10 de Octubre, Havana, there were serious violent events, where two police cars were overturned.

 

Subsequently, videos of serious vandalism have been released, such as the stoning of a children’s hospital. The death of the civilian Diubis Laurencio Tejeda during the protests has been confirmed. So far, no other deaths have been reported as a result of the demonstrations.

 

Both the protesters and the civilians who came out to confront them used violence, mainly with stones and sticks. The number of those injured by both sides is unknown. The number of detainees at the scene is also unknown, as is that of subsequent arrests related to the protests. We still do not know the number of citizens who, six days later, are still in irregular detention.

 

While the protests were taking place in Havana, similar events unfolded in the cities of Bayamo, Manzanillo, Camagüey, Santiago de Cuba, Holguín, among others of less significance. These also ended, and in some cases started, violently.

 

Origin and essence of the protests

 

Three characterisations of the protests in Cuba on 11 July have been given. The government claims they were a confrontation between counterrevolutionaries and communists; the bourgeois press says they represented the oppressed rising against a dictatorship; others have argued this was a revolutionary working class against a politically degenerate bureaucracy.

 

None of the three is useful to understand the nature of the protests.

 

In reality, the 11 July protests brought together the three previous perspectives: the counterrevolutionary organisations—financed by the United States—violently attacking the Communist Party; groups of intellectuals, who feel their civil liberties severely restricted, facing censorship; and the working class demanding that the government improve their living conditions.

 

However, although the overwhelming majority of protesters belonged to the third category, this cannot be understood as a politically conscious socialist mass, demanding more socialism from a stagnant bureaucracy.

 

The protests of 11 July have nine essential characteristics:

 

1. Most of the protesters were not linked to counterrevolutionary organisations, nor were the protests led by counterrevolutionary organisations. The immediate trigger of the demonstrations was the discontent generated by the terrible shortages caused by the economic crisis, the economic sanctions imposed by the US government and the questionable and inefficient management by the state bureaucracy.

 

It was the shortage of food and health products, the existence of stores in Freely Convertible Currency that can only be accessed through foreign currency and that hoard supplies of basic products; the long queues to buy food as basic as bread; the shortage of medicines; the restriction of the deposit of dollars in cash in banks; the rise in prices of public services (Havana transport saw a price increase of 500 percent); the cuts to subsidies; the drastic inflation rise; the rising cost of basic products; and the long power outages.

 

These are the objective factors that created a scenario conducive to a social outbreak.

 

Crisis

 

At the same time, Cuba is experiencing its greatest economic crisis in 30 years. For Cuba’s Gross Domestic Product to grow by 1 percent in 2020, the country would have required the visit of 4,500,000 tourists and stable prices in the international market. Instead, in 2020 tourism was down to one and a half million tourists, and the world economy went into crisis.

 

The decline in foreign visitors caused a loss of around 3 billion dollars in 2020. Cuba imports around 80 percent of its food and the government allocates two billion dollars to this end.

 

Barring a modest recovery in China, the rest of Cuba’s trading partners fell into economic recession. Up to June 2021, Cuba had only received just over 130,000 tourists. Most of the country’s reserves had been consumed by 2020.

 

The health emergency response to coronavirus has caused serious damage to the Cuban economy. To this must be added the serious sanctions imposed by Donald Trump, which have not been lifted by president Joe Biden, intensifying the impact of the blockade.

 

However, the reasons why the Cuban economy is in crisis do not matter to the working family when it comes to putting food on the table, even more so when the political legitimacy of the government is progressively eroding.

 

2. The political legitimacy of the government is considerably diminishing. Official political discourse is ineffective and doesn’t reach the youth. The political propaganda of official youth organisations is alien to the youth. This is shown by the large number of young people among the protesters (an exact figure is impossible at the moment).

 

The wear and tear of several years of crisis and the cumulative errors by the state administration have had an impact. Added to this, the current government doesn’t have the political legitimacy of the historic leadership of the Revolution.

 

There is a widening gap between the leadership of the country and the working class, with differences in living standards becoming increasingly visible.

 

3. The protests originated in the working class neighbourhoods with the greatest social problems. Social inequality is a growing problem in Cuban society. Poverty, social neglect, precariousness of public and social policies, limited supply of food and basic products by the state, as well as poor cultural policies, are characteristic of life in peripheral and lower-income neighbourhoods.

 

In these areas, political consciousness tends to decline, with survival coming before ideology. Political discourse doesn’t address the daily needs of ordinary people. In these socioeconomically vulnerable neighbourhoods, the country’s leadership is perceived to have high living standards.

 

4. The protests did not represent a majority. Most of the Cuban population continues to support the government. Although it is true that the protesters had support from the residents of the areas where the events took place, an important sector of the population also has rejected the protests.

 

Although the protests in Havana generally gathered around 5,000 people, this is not to say the demonstrations had majority support. Despite the political deterioration suffered by the Cuban government, it’s still the repository of the legacy of the Revolution, capitalising on the image of Fidel Castro and maintaining hegemony over the socialist imaginary. It is largely through these mechanisms that it achieves considerable political legitimacy among the majorities.

 

5. In the protests there were no socialist slogans. The slogans launched in the demonstrations focused on “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life), “Libertad” (Freedom), “Abajo la dictadura” (Down with the dictatorship) and attacks on president Miguel Díaz-Canel. “Patria y Vida” is a slogan drawn from an openly right-wing song, popularised from Miami and by the right-wing opposition.

 

The other slogans mentioned have the character of claiming civil liberties, which does not imply socialist demands. Beyond the claims against censorship and the demand for greater civil liberties, the slogan "Down with the dictatorship" is frequently used by the Cuban right and counterrevolutionaries.

 

Comunistas Editorial Board members spoke to protesters who were not against Fidel Castro or socialism, and whose motivation was demanding better lives. However, this differentiation was not made explicit in the protests.

 

6. A small number of intellectuals were linked to the protests. A minority group of intellectuals, mainly part of the 27N movement, took part to demand citizens’ rights, centred on the right to free expression and uncensored artistic creation. However, this was not the central character of the protests.

 

This is because the demands of dissident intellectuals did not correspond to the needs of the majority, who protested to demand basic improvements in life.

 

7. The lumpenproletariat played a significant role. These were the groups that carried out looting and violent acts of vandalism, which distorted the originally peaceful spirit of the demonstrations in Havana.

 

8. Counterrevolutionary propaganda had a role in organising the protests. Although this was not the main factor that triggered the protests, it is undeniable that a strong right-wing campaign was orchestrated from the United States on social media, openly focused on the overthrow of the Cuban government. This campaign had a strong impact on an important sector of the population. 4.4 million Cubans have access to social networks from their phones.

 

9. The demonstrations turned violent. In Havana, initially, except for isolated events, the demonstration took place in a peaceful manner. However, the demonstration degenerated into a serious confrontation with police forces and citizens in favour of the government when the demonstrators tried to access Revolution Square.

 

Both sides were involved in violent actions, causing serious injuries to civilians. Violent groups carried out acts of vandalism, attacking communist militants and government supporters with sticks and stones.

 

Why was comrade Frank García Hernández, founder of our Editorial Board, arrested?

 

Comrade Frank García Hernández, on his way to a friend’s house, with whom he had been since the beginning of the demonstration, accidentally ended up at the site of one of the violent clashes that took place near Revolution Square.

 

Comrade Frank had been present at the protest since its start, but attending as a member of the Communist Party. When the protesters left the Máximo Gómez Park (around 6pm), Frank and his friend assumed that the protest had ended, which is why they both went home.

 

The building is located less than 200 meters from where the violent clashes took place between the protesters and the police forces, who tried to prevent the access of the protesters to Revolution Square.

 

According to Comrade Frank, the moment they reached the corner of Ayestarán and Aranguren streets, shots were heard in the air.

 

Both ended up in a pro-government group that was marching accompanied by police officers.

 

At that moment, Comrade Frank accidentally met Maykel González, director of the LGBTIQ rights magazine Tremenda Nota, a publication that has reproduced the texts of Comunistas. Maykel González had participated in the course of events, from the beginning of the march to the violent events between the two groups, taking part in the protesters, although without carrying out any type of violent acts.

 

When the protests were ending in the presence of Comrade Frank García, a police officer detained Maykel González, falsely accusing him of having thrown stones at the forces of public order. Faced with this, Comrade Frank García, in his capacity as a member of the Communist Party, tried to intercede in a calm manner between the officer and Maykel González.

 

While trying to convince the policeman, asking him not to arrest Maykel González, Frank García was also detained by this officer. The police officer accused Frank of carrying out violent acts and being on the side of the protesters. Later, the authorities verified the falsehood of this accusation.

 

Arrest

 

The arrest took place around 7pm. Both were taken to the nearest police station. Later, around 1.30am, Frank was taken to another detention centre, where the facts were immediately clarified, showing that he had not participated in violent acts, nor in the group opposed to the demonstrations.

 

Together with the director of Tremenda Nota, Maykel González Vivero, comrade Frank García Hernández was released on Monday 12 July at around 8pm.

 

During his little more than 24 hours of detention, Frank affirms that he did not receive physical abuse, nor any type of torture. Currently Frank García is not in custody, but rather a precautionary measure where his ability to move is regulated, his movement being limited to his workplace and medical access.

 

However, Frank doesn’t need to make any statements to the authorities about his daily movements. The legal measure is part of the procedure to follow until their non-participation in violent acts or in the demonstration is officially demonstrated.

 

The Comunistas Editorial Board appreciates the impressive wave of international solidarity that demanded the release of Frank García Hernández. Soon, Comunistas will publish a detailed report on the internationalist campaign, through which a fair recognition will be given to the people and organizations that fought for the freedom of our comrade.

 

It is worth noting that during the protests no other member of the Editorial Board, collaborator or comrade close to our publication was arrested.

 

Because our starting point is our elemental sense of revolutionary justice, this, however, doesn’t prevent us from demanding the immediate release of the rest of the detainees in the 11 July demonstrations; as long as they have not committed actions that have threatened the lives of other people.

 

Somewhere in Cuba, 17 July 2021

 

NOTE: At the time this statement was published, Comunistas are aware of the call made by both the government and the opposition to go out and demonstrate in the streets. Apparently, both sides have called to concentrate on the same point in Havana, known as La Piragua. Comunistas rejects both calls, considering it irresponsible, taking into account the seriousness of the coronavirus health situation, with more than 6,000 daily cases. But with greater force we condemn any possible act of violence that may occur in the clash between the two groups.

 

This is a translation of an article published originally published in Spanish on the website comunistascuba.org. For the original go here. Thanks to Héctor Sierra for the translation first published on Socialist Worker.

 

Note of the Editorial Board: Below we publish a highly interesting interview with comrade Azanian Red. He is a revolutionary socialist activist in South Africa (Azania). He is committed to building a revolutionary vanguard party for the achievement of a socialist anti-racist world. He is interviewed in his personal capacity.

 

Please tell us a bit about the background of the hunger riots which have shaken South Africa in the last days?

 

The riots are correctly characterised as being the result of hunger, despite the spark being the arrest of ex-president Zuma. There was already structural hunger for the South African black^[1] working class majority before Covid-19. This crisis plunged them into total despair when the ANC government discontinued the R350 (about 21 Euro) per month Special COVID-19 Social Relief Distress Grant. This was paid to unemployed adult South African residents, who are not the recipients of any other income, or any other social benefits from the state.

 

This leads us to the two primary reasons for food insecurity in South Africa despite its agricultural abundance. The one relates to access to land for independent agricultural production, and the second relates to the lack of incomes and insufficient incomes. Both these are experienced most severely by the African indigenous population that had their land dispossessed by colonialism and fossilised in the 1994 Democratic Counter Revolution.

 

The 1996 Constitution guarantees property rights with a ‘willing buyer willing seller’ formula to address matters of land redress within the logic of neoliberal integration of the South African food value chain to world and domestic markets. This maintenance of land and all other patterns of ownership with the settler colonial bloc that was already integrated into the world imperialist system under Apartheid are at the heart of the counter revolution of 1994.

 

South Africa as a whole is food secure, and an exporter. The financial-agricultural-retail value chain is well integrated vertically. This monopolistic integrations is supported by credit and pricing structures. Access to food therefore for the majority of the population is via the retail end of this sector. The overall structure of the food value chain has led to, along with other factors that I will point to later; food becoming inaccessible and unaffordable for the majority of the South African black working class.

 

The arrangement of this sector has been done under total accommodation by the ANC to neoliberalism even before the 1994 Democratic Counter Revolution. For example, subsidies to farmers were slashed at the behest of the Bretton Woods Institutions in 1993, and South African produce is subject to World Trade Organisation Tariff arrangements and barriers from the European Union. Despite these restrictions, South African agricultural exports have grown from R8bn in 1994 to R110bn in 2018.^[2]

 

The lifting of subsidies caused many black farm labourers to loose employment, rudimentary farm dwellings for their families and significantly, access to food as part of their wage or allotment of small patches for basic cultivation. An estimated 1.5million people left the land as a result. Most headed for urban areas, increasing the rate of urbanisation that had already started in the early 1980s despite Apartheid era movement controls for Black-African people of all classes. This trend continues to date, to the fringes of urban locations in search of work and access to basic municipal amenities. This takes the form of the establishment of sprawling informal settlement ghettos. The process continues in the face of structural joblessness.

 

Joblessness is a key driver for the lack of incomes. In 1994, the unemployment rate was 21%. By 2002 it had grown to 27.8% due mainly to the deindustrialisation and integration of the autarkic Apartheid era industrial base into the international value chain with whole industries, such as the garment manufacturing industry being offshored to China. Or, for that matter, the steel industry being privatised and integrated into a multinationals production value chain, with a resultant job bloodbath.

 

In 2008 before the effect of the Global Financial Crises, the unemployment rate had dropped to 22.8%, reflecting that despite GDP growth of on average 5.5% for the two preceding years, on the back of strong mined minerals exports, the level of job creation remained the key structural crises directly affecting the largely black working class. The effect of the financial crises, despite the South African Financial Services Sector’s minimal exposure to the contagion, nevertheless led to the loss of about 1 million jobs. This was caused by the drop in physical demand for minerals on the world market, reflected in the drop in GDP growth to 3.1% in 2008. By 2010 unemployment stood at 24%.

 

However, along with the overall trend under capitalism worldwide, the impotence to prevent the financial crises from translating directly into the crises of accumulation has found full impact in South Africa. By 2019 the unemployment rate had reached 28.8% and in the middle of the 2020 pandemic year 29.2%, with about over 2 million jobs said to have been lost as a result of the total lockdown in 2020. The current official joblessness rate is 32.6%. The GDP rate had reached a negative (0.15%) in 2019. In 2020 it reached negative 7% as a result of the effect of the COVID pandemic hard lockdown.^[3]

 

The statistics are defective but indicative of the crises. Their defect is that they relate to formal work seekers and exclude the lumpen section of the class structurally and permanently unemployed. These are estimated to add another 10% at the least to the joblessness rate. A most recent statistic is that 63.3% of the youth between ages 15 to 24 are unemployed. In 2019 this age group comprised 16% of the total population.^[4] By 2021, 71% of all unemployed are aged between 15 and 34. ^[5]

 

The use of GDP is indicative only, as it skews the distribution of the GDP growth with the working class enjoying a significantly lower share of GDP per capita.

 

The income void is filled by an increase in social grant recipients from 7% of the population in 1996, to 20% by 2005. Since 2011 it has averaged at 30% and currently stands at 31%. This is aside from the additional 11% of the population receiving the Relief Grant in 2020 during the pandemic. This makes for a minimum total of 41% of the population dependent on social grant incomes. ^[6]

 

Significantly, much of the employment available is precarious and large employers use labour brokers to intermediate the employment relationship with workers. This is a response to manage the risks of the robust labour relations legislation passed on the wave of gains made by workers throughout the 1980s.

 

Wages are poor and reflect race based hierarchical stratification of the working class. Minimum wage legislation introduced in recent years entrenches South Africa, from its colonial days, as a low wage hyper-exploitive economy. The current legal minimum wage is R3 470 (208 Euros) for most workers and for domestic workers it is R3 054 (183 Euros) per month.^[7] In 2019, excluding all other living costs, the food poverty line for each individual was determined to be R561 (34 Euros) per month.^[8] According to a report, 30% of households that comprised more than three children reported that food access was inadequate. More than half of workers eligible for the minimum wage are paid below this level.

 

South Africa is the most unequal country in the world both by income and asset ownership. The top 1% earn 20% of the income (own 67% of assets); the next 9% earn 45% (assets 26%) and the remaining 90% earn 35% of income (7% assets).^[9]

 

So all of these factors have made for a pre-COVID structural hunger pandemic!

 

The picture in 2017 was that of 16.2 million households in South Africa in 2017, almost 20% had inadequate access to food and 12% experienced food hunger. More than 500 000 households with children below five years of age had experienced hunger. Just fewer than 16% of households engaged in some basic agriculture to supplement food, despite receiving social grants.

 

A leading bank in South Africa estimated before June 2020, that about 50.3% the current population would be food insecure as a result of the pandemic within 9 months.^[10] This includes growing food insecurity among white collar workers and strata of the middle class, both black and white. However, the insecurity falls most heavily on the wider black working class, most of who are indigenous Africans.

 

So the withdrawal of the special COVID Grant, as modest as it is, brought the food insecurity to a volcanic point. The extension of the looting to opportunistic and middle class elements does not detract from the essential character of the riots. Nor does the lit match thrown on the incendiary condition of the working class by the Zuma allied wing of the ANC!

 

How do you view the court sentence against former President Zuma?

 

The sentencing was in respect of a conviction for contempt of court. He had refused to appear before a Judicial Commission tasked with investigating ‘State Capture’ during his presidency. This is aside from his having been charged criminally in relation to, among other charges, the receiving of a bribe from French arms manufacturer Thales. That matter is yet to commence beyond preliminaries before the courts.

 

State capture is used by the mainstream media to distinguish the brazen methods used by the Zuma administration to enable capital accumulation by a marginalised aspirant black political and middle class. It is distinguished from the facilitation, creation and absorption of small strata of black capitalists within the dominant structures of the existing capitalists. These, have been drawn mainly from liberation struggle notables from within the ANC, including Ramaphosa. Their facilitation into the mainstream has been by means of Black Economic Empowerment legislation and major ownership deals with large capitalist players. They are largely collaborative with the policy framework required by the established white and international bourgeois.

 

The methodology of this collective bourgeois class in South Africa is their dominant influence over policy, and its execution via legislation, regulation and implementation; as is the lobbying in any other capitalist country. However, their kleptocrat activity, when discovered, is always downplayed by the press.

 

In contrast, under Zuma, the rentier activity of senior state officials at all levels of the ANC and government had grown to greater proportions, and were focussed on more keenly by the bourgeois press. Organs of the state and its administrative arm, government, were controlled to ensure that contracts benefitted new and aspirant capitalists who had been marginalised from any prospect of significant accumulation. This took the form of patronage, controlling decision making, using state assets to further private interests, and controlling the boards of state owned enterprises to direct inflated priced contracts to the newly emerging capitalists. It also took the form of guttering out certain governmental departments such as the intelligence services.

 

This intersected very directly via his family and key political allies with the Gupta family. These recently arrived immigrants from India rose from near penury to a dominant influence on the Zuma years; with powers to influence cabinet appointments. Their activities intersected with international advisory firms and established capitalists therefore reflecting the entire capitalist class as being corrupt, notwithstanding their outward pretences at respectable behaviour.

 

The political angle to this activity was stated as being Radical Economic Transformation. This was a smokescreen by this wing of capitalists and frustrated aspirant capitalists, to use the state as the instrument of primitive accumulation. This was the political ruse of filling the vacuum of economic aspects of the programme of the petty bourgeois nationalist ANC; not having been addressed to dismantle white monopoly capitals dominance when the 1994 change of state-form to Constitutionalism, happened.

 

The more significant factor was that the Guptas and their allied business partners had entered the field of the physically productive capitalist economy as opposed to have emulated there mainstream kleptocratic cousins, merely as rentiers. They owned mines, a newspaper, and other businesses and were intent on launching a bank. This represented a real challenge to the collective arrangement among the existing monopolies all dominated substantially by ‘white monopoly capital,’ the obverse characterisation to Radical Economic Transformation.

 

This conflict, has played out since President Ramaphosa had narrowly won the Presidency of the ANC and hence confirmation as the State President in the last elective conference of the ANC. He has moved gradually and deliberately and has yet to decisively consolidate his hold on the party and the state apparatus. He has promised a clean-up from corruption and to uphold the supremacy of the bourgeois rule of law and its citadel defence, the Constitution.

 

However, he has encountered resistance at all levels both within the party and the state apparatuses, from those who feel vulnerable to his wing of the party, and the elements of the state, involved in the anti-corruption drive. The riots, however they were primed, reveal the inability of the present order overseen by the ANC in the main, of addressing the structural basis for the riots.

 

The priming of the food riots indicates a level of popular mobilisation capacity and militaristic and intelligence capability at play. Strategic economic targets were attacked with trucking on major inter-provincial highways being stopped, permitting them to be looted and set alight to cause blockades. Major large food supermarket chains and retail shopping malls were attacked, looted and set ablaze. About 16 tons of ammunition from a newly arrived shipment at Durban Harbour has been stolen. However, there is also evidence of police inactivity and in instances participation in looting.

 

Troop deployments have been gradual and in KwaZulu Natal province the violence has degenerated into inter-‘racial’ conflict. There is a sizeable retail presence among the ‘Indian’ population; but not anywhere near the monopolistic dominance of the large retail chains. So too is there an historic pattern of home ownership both provided by the state and privately held since the days of social engineering of entire communities, irrespective of class, into race classified areas, including dormitory labour township-ghettos mainly on the periphery of cities such as Durban. Proximate to these have sprung up informal settlements occupied overwhelmingly by the dispossessed Africans now urbanising. This differential and competition for jobs from both ends of their marginalised sections of the wider working class, has led to a deep mutual racial divide that has been a feature of the province historically, and promoted in the colonial and Apartheid era.

 

It also reflects on the programme of the ANC as a liberation organisation in its affirmation of separate nations being amalgamated into a Rainbow Supra National Identity. For example, the Natal Indian Congress established by Ghandi, was a front for the ANC during its exile, and was a decidedly ethnic mobilisation vehicle to its programme. This has been decidedly not anti-racist but multi-racial, mirroring the logic of Apartheid; and wanting to establish a non-racial South Africa.

 

This situation also reflects on Zuma having invoked continuously his Zulu ethnicity (“100% Zulu Boy”) from the days of his fight to win the presidency and now emphasised by his followers in their campaign to have him freed. This has intersected the pre-existing ethnic tensions.

 

Greater ‘Indian’ income and social mobility since the end of formal Apartheid, via access to jobs because of their classification as black and their historically better access to education; partly a result of a sturdy merchant class within the community funding the establishment of schools and partly the result of social race classification based segregated education funding levels under Apartheid. All this made for violent confrontation during the riots with vigilantism taking a ‘racial’ and racist form, especially in the absence of police and army protection of the businesses and properties of both the petty bourgeois and workers in this community.

 

However, vigilantism has not been exclusively racially biased. In the Gauteng province where the looting took place mainly within formal housing in historically established township labour-dormitories; many Kombi Taxi owners, drivers and community members have taken up armed protective duties against looting.

 

The phenomenon of vigilantes has arisen in the absence of police efficacy, complicity and inaction in protecting businesses and communities. This reflects on a fracture that is emerging within the ANC as a party, and in government structures. There is clearly a degree to which the centre around Ramaphosa is contested, as reflected by the slow pace response to the riots and the confusing and contradictory actions and statements from within government. Many hedge their political bets!

 

The riots are therefore a popular expression of deep distress at food insecurity. They were primed by the Free Zuma expression of the faction within the state and the ANC. They have opened all the deep wounds of South Africa in its race-class contradiction. In essence this is a factional civil war between two wings of capitalism as played out within the ANC and now wider society.

 

The working class have no objective interest in fighting this conflict for the two factions of capitalism, and less so to be divided along ethnic and socio-racial lines. Nevertheless this has opened up the prospect of putting to the working class a revolutionary socialist programme for the resolution of all the contradictions of South Africa, including its position within the International Capitalist system, and the neo-imperial arrangements in Southern Africa.

 

In fact the narrative of the bourgeois press and the government is that the riots are simply criminal. The Zuma supporters are criminally insurrectionists against a legitimate constitutional order. The rule of law in defence of private property is supreme. Their bourgeois directives to the government are the legitimate way of doing things. That community vigilante defence groups be brought under state control and be disarmed. That the spontaneous mobilisation of clean up brigades reflects the majority of South Africans are behind the rule of law.

 

In short: the masses are experiencing ferment and are subject to all kinds of intrigue in the absence of their independent organs that now spontaneously spring up, being led by a socialist programme that declutters the fog that the mainstream narrative seeks to obscure whilst their army and police raid from door to door confiscating the food and goods taken by the hungry masses.

 

These riots will be used to repress the working class and to begin a programme of reform that have slim prospect of success given the current international and domestic capitalist crisis. The conviction of Zuma and other key allies is necessary to demonstrate the integrity of the capitalist rule of law.

 

How do you characterize the ANC-SACP-COSATU government which has been in power since 1994?

 

The ANC is the dominant political partner in this alliance with the South African Communist Party and the Congress of Trade Unions. The ANC’s petty bourgeois nationalist programme enjoys dominance over the other two components that have gone along with it.

 

Since the overt adoption of neoliberal policies once the Constitution was finalised as the instrument of bourgeois rule in 1996, the so called developmental state was to be achieved by trickle-down economics. That black economic empowerment and affirmative action in the workplace to redress the historically segregated labour market, would build a sturdy black middle class.

 

Whilst awaiting job creation by this mechanism, the teeming masses trapped in Apartheid labour reservoirs in the rural areas and the teeming urban unemployed would enjoy the balm of social grants way below the amount required for a minimal living. There is much talk of reorienting the economy with a resignation to the deindustrialisation in the face of the holy neoliberal international market.

 

COSATU as the dominant trade union federation since the mid-1980s had played a very significant role at the economistic level in improving workers terms of employment and wages. It had more significantly been dominated by ‘workerists’ who saw in the absence of democratic political rights the need to extend their activities into the political arena in support of the ending of Apartheid. However the majority of the leadership was captured to the policies of the ANC by means of Ministerial appointments since 1994 and their false confidence in influencing the ANC programme and policies. In exchange, they were satisfied with the legal codification of the gains at the workplace in the anti –Apartheid struggle. In short, they became the managers of industrial peace in South Africa.

 

The SACP has, since the two stage theory of revolution and emphasis on the National Democratic Revolution of Stalin’s Third International from the 1920s, accommodated itself to coat tailing the ANC. Its total accommodation to the neoliberal policies of the ANC is further reflective of its total misunderstanding of the nature of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Apartheid government, in conjunction with the leading western capitals all agreed that South Africa was opportune for saving for capitalism with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of socialism as a system. The SACP seems to have accommodated itself to this logic, given its fundamental inability to understand the nature of the degenerate workers state under Stalinism. In Short, the SACP is no champion of an independent socialist political programme of the working class, let alone any pretensions at social democracy.

 

In summary, this government is not committed to any other path than being responsive to the credit rating agencies and international financial institutions in operating within an austerity budget consistently to ensure its creditworthiness rather than focus on what is required to change the conditions of the structurally poor since colonialism and Apartheid. An abiding feature of the pre and post Zuma ANC administrations is that they continued in their commitment to neoliberal policies!

 

Zwelinzima Vavi, the General Secretary of the South African Federation of Trades Unions, has threatened to launch a general strike. How do you see the possibility of such a development?

 

A general strike is conceived of by some sections within SAFTU as using the vulnerability of the ANC government and the capitalist system at this juncture as an opportunity to win a universal income grant of about R1 500 (900 Euros). It is also advocated to win decent jobs for all to address the unemployment question. Despite the demand being made within the context of a slash in social spending, it is in reality a call for shuffling the deck chairs. Capitalism in South Africa is largely an appendage of international capitalism and hence there is not going to be massive shifts in wealth or incomes by some cocktail of social democratic reforms.

 

As I had explained earlier the void of political articulation of the independent political programme of the working class in South Africa (by a party of that class) is a distinct problem for the revolutionary programme. This combines with the failure of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party to articulate and organise this politics. The SRWP was formed out of the same process that led to the formation of SAFTU: The break by the largest COSATU affiliate; the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) from that federation on the basis of the continued neoliberal policies of the ANC.

 

So in this political void, it is the proverbial trade union bureaucratic dog that wags the political tail of the class! I do not see this general strike call as being a political strike despite it being made to seem so. Frankly, the possibility of this becoming a generalised strike without strong organisation outside of the shrinking and divided workforce will have limited impact. It will have to call upon the unemployed masses and mobilising community based organisations. Hence there have been Assemblies of the People via remote participation to build a movement. Nevertheless, the build up to a possible strike seems to be driven by considerations of uniting the class and talks with COSATU and other federations are very possible. However, it seems more so as a precursor to the uniting of the working class and the building of a mass workers party of the entire class on the lines seen in the 1920s in Britain. The dangers remain the same: the absorption of the political arm of the labour movement into the mainstream constitutional parliamentary arrangements. Already, far sighted bourgeois pundits are advocating an economic CODESA and calling for greater inclusive participation in this process. Given the pronouncements by SAFTU on the loss of jobs by truck drivers due to the looting, the confusion between economistic demands and clearly political demands are blurred and served up as a set of transitional demands. More worrying is the affirming references to the constitution and the rule of law when addressing the Zuma conviction phenomenon and subsequent events by some trade union leaders.

 

Notwithstanding these limitations, I would advocate participation in the strike action no matter how ineffective, in advocating for the building of a revolutionary vanguard party of the working class pronouncing its independent political programme.

 

What is the state of forces to the left of the SACP?

 

Communism was proscribed in 1949 in South Africa. Despite this, with the advent of Trade Unionism and the Workerist Movement within that; there was space created to have Marxist concepts and revolutionary thought permeate many working class cadre within the union movement. The liberal universities created space for the academic dissemination of Marxism within the confines of the Arts faculties.

 

On the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP to facilitate negotiations in the early 1990s, Marxism was no longer proscribed. Instead of this new space being effectively exploited for the furtherance of Revolutionary Marxism, the opposite occurred. The SACP accommodated its Stalinist conceptions to the neoliberal reality and seem oblivious to the ripe conditions for their so called second of two stages to revolutionary power by the working class.

 

The advent of postmodernism as the vogue in Universities internationally has not escaped South Africa. However, more troublesome is the retreat of those to the left of the SACP who have lost all hope of the vanguard party being the vehicle for the proletariat. Their refrain is that the vanguard leads to Stalinism. Instead they advocate socialism from below. Their intersection with radical liberalism is most keenly observed in the NGO sector that straddles particular issues and specific interests that fund them.

 

Their political expression is largely to take Marxism into movements and there is a distinct Capitalist Climate disaster wing that does not see the seizure of workers power as the basis for the resolution of this accelerated degeneration by capitalism.

 

There are small groups of Marxist still committed to revolutionary Marxism in their posture. However, they seem overly dependent on the various internationals for guidance to their politics in South Africa. They are resultantly schismatic. Most of them advocate a very radical but nauseating accommodation to the mainstream narrative inasmuch as they try desperately to distinguish themselves from that narrative. Their interpretation of the absence of a revolutionary Marxist leadership within the class necessarily requires that the looting and vandalism that has taken place is wrong and anti-revolutionary.

 

However, irrespective of the recognition of the revolutionary potential or not, they remain committed to a Mass Based Workers Party of the entire class.

 

The SRWP and its professed vanguardism had been missing in action since the commencement of the food riots. The reason is that the party is fundamentally flawed in that its building is beholden to a trade union bureaucracy that sees in its Bolshevik members the end of the project they midwifed into being, and that is required to accommodate to their particular brand of politics to fulfil the unfinished tasks of the Freedom Charter. This mainstream within the party heralds a SACP Mark II.

 

All of these socialist political expressions are weak organisationally, and more important in their politics.

 

How do you see the possibilities or building a revolutionary party in South Africa?

 

The possibility has taken a quantum leap given the events recently. The working class is ripe for leadership and the trade union movement and community based organisations are the terrain from which a revolutionary party cadre may be drawn from and developed. This means both organic theoretical and practical work in building solidarity action committees within each community, educational institutions and workplaces to build the independent programme within the organs of the class.

 

The RCIT has issued a statement on the hunger riots. What is your view on it?

 

The statement correctly characterises the riots as proceeding beyond Jacob Zuma’s release and that they are in substance hunger riots. I have explained some structural features and their deepening nuances under current conditions, of the pre-existing crises as it manifests specifically in South Africa.

 

The statement is significantly accurate in its advocacy that the revolutionary Marxists not stand aside this great fissure in the volcanic terrain of the working class.

 

However, as the matter of whether a lockdown or not is appropriate for South Africa, the matter has to take into account the appropriateness of support measures in the face of the prevailing poverty and unemployment.

 

The relief has been strongly partial to big businesses and not aimed at providing immediate and sustainable and adequate relief to the poor. In substance the lockdown is sub-optimal for this reason and for the reason that the health system is underfunded because of austerity. Under Apartheid South Africa was a leading health research centre internationally. All of this has been denuded by the integration of health research and medical production capability along neoliberal production- lines internationally.

 

The health system is two tiered. The state health care system caters for 84% of the population. The private health care system employs 70% of doctors. The ability of the health system to deal with the COVID pandemic is therefore a major factor in the lockdowns. The overriding factor as I see it is the question of the level of vaccination achieved by the state and the private sector before the health system can be sufficiently efficient to cope with the pandemic.

 

That does not mean that the repression and the erosion of civil liberties that have accompanied the lockdowns should not be combatted. At the heart of this is the near absence of ability to organise politically by all. The entry of the rioters into the historic stage may at this juncture not as yet have translated into any degree of sophistication of organisation, but it certainly is necessary to grow and organise this in-embryo phenomenon; I agree with RCIT.

 

The matter of what the appropriate liberties and measures that should have accompanied the lockdowns is the subject of much debate and campaigning since the first hard lockdown in March 2020. The matter of lockdowns in principle for South Africa yes, has to be debated actively by revolutionary Marxists. However in this debate the left should not in any way emulate Narendra Modi as a super-spreader of COVID by a reckless approach to the question.

 

 

 

 

Interview with activists about the uprising of the Ahwazi Arabs in Iran

Published by the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 30 July 2021, www.thecommunists.net

 

Note of the Editorial Board: Below we publish an interview with two brothers: Ramazan Nazeri, a long-time representative of the Ahwazi migrant community in Austria, and Majed Sadiqah, a young activist. The interview was conducted in the course of a meeting between these brothers and leading representatives of the RCIT.

 

The Ahwazi are an Arab minority mostly living in in southwestern Iran (in a province which the Iranian state calls “Khuzestan”). They have repeatedly revolted against their national oppression. The Ahwazi share this fate with many other ethnic minorities in Iran since the state is dominated by the Persians (constituting about 51% of the total population).

 

The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) has always supported the struggle of the Ahwazi for national self-determination. In Austria, our comrades have repeatedly participated in solidarity activities. (See e.g. https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/ahvaz-rally-17-2-2017/ and https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/ahvaz-conference/) It should be also noted that Ahwazi activists have joined demonstrations of Syrian as well as Iraqi activists. For our statement on the latest popular uprising in Iran see “Iran: Mass Struggles Shake the Regime!”, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/iran-mass-struggles-shake-the-regime/)

 

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

Question: Can you please tell us a bit about the current uprising?

 

Answer: It has been a powerful uprising which has provoked wide repercussions in the whole of Iran. The regime reacted with utmost brutality. Until now at least 10 people have been killed and about 500 arrested. Like in other countries, the regime utilizes the COVID pandemic as an excuse to impose curfews and to suppress demonstrations. At the moment, the wave of struggle has somewhat subsided but it is clear that the fire of revolt continues to blaze below the surface. The regime tries to discredit the uprising as being directed by Israel but this is simply ridiculous and is not taken seriously by anyone.

 

Question: What has been the background of the uprising?

 

A: The uprising has been triggered by the water crisis. The effects of the climate change are worsened by the reckless exploitation of our region by Teheran. The oil drilling, the redirection of rivers, etc. all this results in devastating dehydration. However, there are more, and deeper, causes which have provoked the latest uprising. First, our people have been nationally oppressed since many decades. The Persian state tries to subjugate our people by any means. They are suppressing our culture, our language, everything which is essential for our national identity. The state is also systematically settling Persian people in our province in order to change the ethnic composition in its favor (similar to what the Chinese regime is doing against the Uyghur people in Xinyang). Hence, this uprising is first and foremost about our identity!

 

In addition, the people in our region are suffering horribly from the ecological disaster which causes massive pollution. In 2011 the World Health Organization ranked Ahwaz – the capital city of the province – as the most air-polluted city in the world. As a consequence, a disproportional high number of people die of cancer and other diseases. Animals which have lived in our regions for hundreds of years – various bird species, buffalos, etc. – are disappearing.

 

Q: Is the uprising limited to the Ahwazi Arabs or are other ethnicities also involved?

 

A: On of the most interesting characteristics of the current uprising is the fact that it is not limited to the Ahwazi Arabs. There have been also large protests by other oppressed people – most importantly the Azeri but also the Kurds. In addition, some Persian people have also joined the protests.

 

In general, we see a wider attention for our cause than it had been in the past. Even Palestinian people have expressed their solidarity. There have been also actions in Azerbaijan in solidarity with the national minorities in Iran. Supporters of a football club in the major league unfurled a huge banner during a game last year which read: “Iranian regime: decide if you prefer the Czechoslovakian or the Yugoslavian way!”, meaning that it is up to the regime if the national minorities will split from Iran in a peaceful or in a violent way.

 

And there is also another noteworthy feature. In the last years, there has been a strong interaction between the protest movements of the Ahwazi and that of the Iraqi people. This is evident in the slogans, the protest culture, etc. One symbolic evidence of the interaction between the Arab Revolution and the Ahwazi protests is the prominent place of the slogan “Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām” ("the people want to bring down the regime"). This has been the most important slogan in all mass protests since the beginning of the Arab Revolution in 2011.

 

Q: There is currently a huge strike of oil workers going on. Are there any connections between the strikers and the Ahwazi uprising?

 

A: one can not say that the strike movement as a whole has positioned itself on this issue. Many oil drills are located in our province and some of the oil workers are Arabs (not many as a result of the systematic discrimination and the demographic change policy). However, the Arab workers clearly support the uprising. The strikers of two cities – Hovayze and Masjed – have openly stated their support. There has been also a declaration of solidarity from the workers of an important sugar factory.

 

Q: Thanks a lot for taking the time for this interview! We wish you all the best for the liberation struggle!

 

A: Thanks a lot! It has been a pleasure!

 

Report by Tagore, a left-wing activist in France, 13 August 2021

 

Preface from the RCIT’s Editorial Board

 

Below we publish large excerpts from a report which we received from comrade Tagore, a left-wing activist in France. The report gives an insight into these kind of spontaneous demonstrations with all their contradictions and problems. Nevertheless, the current movement against the reactionary attacks of the Macron government is highly impressive. Despite its spontaneous and loosely organized character, hundreds of thousands march on the streets every weekend.

 

This is even more impressive as they take place in the midst of the summer holiday period which has always been a politically dead period in France. (Already Trotsky made jokes about the French who would never start a mass struggle during the holy summer period but wait for autumn!) Angers, from which our correspondent reports, is a small city of 150,000 people. Nevertheless, even here more than 3,000 people demonstrated last Saturday!

 

Again, we thank the comrade for providing us with such an interesting overview about the situation in France and about one of these demonstrations. For our programmatic position on “Green Pass” and compulsory vaccination we refer to our Manifesto: “Green Pass” & Compulsory Vaccinations: A New Stage in the COVID Counterrevolution, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/green-pass-compulsory-vaccinations-a-new-stage-in-the-covid-counterrevolution/ (English) resp. https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/green-pass-compulsory-vaccinations-a-new-stage-in-the-covid-counterrevolution/#anker_2 (French).

 

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

Friday 13 August I went to a meeting of Reinfocovid49.

 

I learned that the demonstration of the 14th in Angers was not declared and that its route was not announced.

 

The leader of the meeting declared nevertheless that the route of the demonstration was planned and that it would end at « Place du Ralliement » (« Rally Square »). The leader argued with a trade unionist because the latter stated that the anarchists were necessary to the demonstration in order to protect some people. The leader replied that the anarchists were paid by the state to create disorder in the demonstration. I tried to reconcile them by saying that you can't stop people from doing what they want, but that I didn't believe that such incidents could happen at the demonstration.

 

The next day, the demonstration did not go at all "as planned". We marched for hours in the sunshine pulled by a head of procession who went everywhere their fancy took them. The demonstration, which resembled an accordion, disintegrated as people wore themselves out: there was no definite end at any particular time or place.

 

The demonstration by a crowd of people from every political stripe, from the far left to the far right, through the left and the right. Despite the fears expressed by some, there is no fighting. From a social point of view, there is EVERYTHING: employees, farmers, entrepreneurs, marginalized people, etc. I never thought that a demonstration could bring together such diverse people.

 

I've talked to a lot of people. There is a palpable fear of political "recuperation", i.e. that the movement will take on a political character of some kind, which would immediately explode the movement. I would like to quote, from memory, some people, because I think they give a part of the spirit of the movement:

 

[to reinfocovid49] Our watchword must be "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!". We must not allow new slogans to emerge, "otherwise all is lost" (dixit).

 

[a protester] We must demand the withdrawal of the health pass, "and nothing else" (dixit). Even talking about containment risks dividing the movement.

 

[a blanquist] We need a new Commune. General Assemblies? Why not. Vote on motions? But for what demands? "We don't have any demands" (dixit). Moreover, we do not want to deal with the organizational aspect...

 

Do you realize that despite the dozens of political and trade union organizations in Angers, nobody dared to declare the demonstration? Nobody wants to take the lead. Nobody dares to pronounce a slogan. It's as if there was something very fragile that threatened to burst at any moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liga Bolchevique Internacionalista - Quarta Internacional, 5 de outubro de 2020, https://lbi-qi.blogspot.com/2020/10/governanca-global-do-capital-financeiro.html

 

 

 

O mundo todo está sendo enganado sobre as reais causas e consequências da crise sanitária, ou melhor dito, da pandemia deflagrada pela OMS e seguida por todos os países, inclusive os que têm governos “negacionistas” de extrema-direita, como o Brasil e os EUA. Por mais espasmos alegóricos contra a longa “quarentena social”, Trump, Modi, Jonhson e Bolsonaro não moveram uma palha (além dos discursos inócuos para quem tem o controle de um governo central), para anular as orientações gerais da OMS em seus países. Mas porque? Que poderosa “força oculta” estaria acima inclusive da Casa Branca neste planeta?

 

AS ORGENS DA PANDEMIA

 

A crise é marcada por uma “emergência” de saúde pública sob os auspícios da Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS) que serve de pretexto e justificação para desencadear um processo global de reestruturação econômica, social e política do modo de produção capitalista, em uma etapa de esgotamento de suas contradições entre a produção e a circulação (fluxo) financeira mundial.

 

O que está acontecendo não tem precedentes na história mundial. Cientistas de prestígio apoiam o confinamento sem questionar, apresentando-o como uma única "solução" para uma emergência de saúde global. Há muita documentação mostrando que as estimativas de COVID-19, incluindo mortalidade, são altamente manipuladas. Foram criadas plataformas de algoritmos exclusivamente para a projeção estatística de mortos, sem qualquer relação com o que estava se passando nos hospitais do mundo todo. A mídia corporativa global, também pela primeira vez na história, trabalha de forma altamente centralizada para espalhar o pânico na população, com um noticiário dedicado exclusivamente aos óbitos por três meses consecutivos.

 

Em 30 de janeiro de 2020, o Diretor Geral da OMS determinou que o surto de coronavírus representava uma “Emergência de Saúde Pública de Preocupação Internacional” (PHEIC).  A decisão foi tomada com base em 150 casos confirmados fora da China, os primeiros casos de transmissão pessoa a pessoa: 6 casos nos Estados Unidos, 3 casos no Canadá, e 2 no Reino Unido.

 

O Diretor-Geral da OMS teve o apoio da Fundação Bill e Melinda Gates, Big Pharma e do Fórum Econômico Mundial (WEF). Não por coincidência a decisão da OMS de declarar uma emergência global foi tomada paralelamente ao Fórum Econômico Mundial realizado em Davos, Suíça (21 a 24 de janeiro).

 

Um dia depois (31 de janeiro) do lançamento da "emergência global" da OMS, o governo Trump anunciou que impediria a entrada de estrangeiros "que viajaram para a China nos últimos 14 dias". De repente, ocorreu uma crise no transporte aéreo, no comércio entre a China e os Estados Unidos, bem como na indústria do turismo. A Itália fez o mesmo, em 31 de janeiro cancelou todos os voos para a China. A primeira fase da Pandemia foi acompanhada pela interrupção das relações comerciais com a China e pelo fechamento parcial do setor manufatureiro voltado para a exportação.

 

MEDO DA POPULAÇÃO E MANIPULAÇÃO DO MERCADO ACIONÁRIO, “CASSINO” EM FESTA

 

Ao longo de fevereiro, desdobrou-se uma crise financeira global que terminou com o colapso dramático dos títulos do mercado de ações e uma queda histórica dos preços internacionais do petróleo bruto.

 

Este colapso foi manipulado. Graças a informações privilegiadas e conhecimento prévio. A campanha do medo desempenhou um papel fundamental no crash do mercado de ações. Em fevereiro, cerca de US$ 6 trilhões desapareceram dos mercados de ações em todo o mundo. Tem havido perdas maciças de poupança pessoal, agora sem qualquer remuneração, sem falar na pandemia de falências.

 

Foi uma bonança da qual os especuladores institucionais, incluindo fundos de hedge corporativos, tiraram proveito. Assim, a crise financeira levou à transferência de riqueza monetária para o bolso de um punhado de instituições financeiras, rentistas públicos e “ocultos”.

 

Os Estados nacionais, inclusive os governados pela extrema direita neoliberal, foram forçados a implantar programas de renda mínima, assim como destinarem bilhões e bilhões de dólares na aquisição de equipamentos de medicina e montagem de hospitais de campanha (muitos dos quais não recebeu um único paciente) especialmente para o tratamento da Covid.

 

FECHAMENTO E CONFINAMENTO, A PARALISAÇÃO PARCIAL DA ECONOMIA

 

O colapso financeiro em fevereiro foi seguido por um bloqueio social no início de março. O lockdow e o confinamento apoiados pela nova “engenharia social” foram fundamentais na reestruturação da economia global, “cancelando” setores já falidos ou fortemente deficitários. Aplicado em um grande número de países quase simultaneamente, o fechamento levou ao fechamento da economia nacional, juntamente com a desestabilização das atividades comerciais, de transporte e de investimento em infraestrutura, em contraste com a ascensão de plataformas de tecnologia e serviços financeiros.

 

A decretação da pandemia constituiu um ato de guerra econômica contra o setor mais vulnerável da humanidade que resultou em mais pobreza e desemprego em escala global, além de uma orientação sanitária completamente “equivocada”, do ponto de vista da ciência. Na Índia, por exemplo cercaram favelas “apestadas” com cerca de 5 milhões de pessoas em seu cinturão, o país até o momento tem oficialmente perto de cem mil óbitos por Covid (em 6 meses de pandemia), e meio milhão a mais do que a média anual de mortos por desnutrição!

 

A tarefa que mobilizou os maiores rentistas do planeta, não é outra senão levar a cabo o projeto de reestruturação produtiva, que consiste em frear parte da atividade econômica industrial em todo o mundo, para favorecer a especulação financeira, com a forte redução do contingente da classe operária pela via da introdução do trabalho remoto e de novas tecnologias da transmissão de dados e informações.

 

Nos Estados Unidos, eles estão muito preocupados com a reabertura da economia antes do desfecho eleitoral em novembro de 2020. Essa campanha midiática em oposição à reabertura da economia nacional e mundial é apoiada por "muito dinheiro", estamos falando de trilhões de dólares...

 

Nas principais regiões do mundo, os governos nacionais foram instruídos por poderosos interesses financeiros a manter o bloqueio e impedir temporariamente a reabertura da economia, ainda que alguns presidentes (governos) de extrema direita vociferarem contra, seguiram as ordens como “cordeiros berrando” no caminho do matadouro.

 

Não há nada espontâneo ou acidental. A recessão econômica foi conduzida nos níveis nacional e global. Ao mesmo tempo, essa crise faz parte do planejamento militar e de inteligência dos Estados Unidos e da Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte (OTAN). Pretende não apenas enfraquecer a Rússia, mas também desestabilizar o tecido econômico da União Europeia, fazendo-a também refém do “clube” do capital financeiro.

 

A GOVERNANÇA GLOBAL DO RENTISMO E SUAS CORPORAÇÕES FINANCEIRAS

 

Estamos em um novo estágio na evolução do capitalismo global. Um sistema de "governança mundial" controlado por poderosos interesses financeiros, incluindo fundações corporativas e grupos de pressão em Washington, que supervisionam a tomada de decisões em nível nacional e global. Os governos nacionais, inclusive os imperialistas, estão subordinados a esta “governança global”. O conceito de "Governo Mundial" foi levantado pelo falecido David Rockefeller na reunião do Bilderberg Club em Baden, Alemanha, em junho de 1991: “Somos gratos ao The Washington Post, The New York Times, a revista Time e outras publicações excelentes cujos editores participaram de nossas reuniões e mantiveram suas promessas de discrição por quase 40 anos ...Teria sido impossível para nós desenvolver nosso plano para o mundo se tivéssemos sido expostos aos holofotes da mídia durante esses anos. Mas o mundo agora está mais sofisticado e pronto para avançar em direção a um governo mundial. A soberania supranacional liderada por uma elite intelectual e banqueiros mundiais é certamente preferível à autodeterminação nacional praticada nos séculos passados." (Citado por Aspen Times, 15 de agosto de 2011).

 

Em suas memórias, David Rockefeller afirma: “Há quem acredite até que fazemos parte de uma camarilha secreta que trabalha contra os melhores interesses dos Estados Unidos, caracterizando minha família e eu como 'internacionalistas' e conspirando com outras pessoas ao redor do mundo para construir uma estrutura política e econômica global.  mais integrado, um mundo. Se for essa a acusação, eu me declaro culpado e tenho orgulho disso”.

 

O cenário de governança global do capital financeiro impõe uma agenda totalitária (controle sanitário sob o pânico do contágio viral), mas também de uma nova engenharia social do isolamento, incluindo a submissão econômica do setor produtivo industrial. Constitui uma extensão radicalizada da estrutura política neoliberal imposta desde a queda da URSS, tanto aos países imperializados, como as nações imperialistas. Em resumo, consiste em eliminar a "autodeterminação nacional" e construir uma rede mundial de regimes políticos pró-OMS (rígidas regras sanitárias e de comportamento social) controlados por uma "soberania supranacional", um governo imperial “oculto” aos olhos do povo, sem fidelidade a nenhuma burguesia nacional específica, formado por instituições financeiras bilionários e suas fundações filantrópicas. Esta realidade nada tem a ver com a tese revisionista do “superimperialismo”, muito pelo contrário, é a sua negação!

 

O “Cenários para o futuro da tecnologia e da área de desenvolvimento internacional” da Fundação Rockefeller (2010), produzido em conjunto com a Global Business Monitoring Network, já havia delineado as características centrais desse tipo de governança. E foi colocado à prova, de forma exitosa, com a decretação da pandemia global.

 

A campanha do consórcio midiático mundial para disseminar o medo e os números da morte, desempenhou um papel crucial na aceitação social e submissão a uma “soberania supranacional liderada por uma elite rentista”, que todavia foi mascarada por um organismo sanitário que dizia se preocupar exclusivamente em salvar vidas, além de condenar os “hereges ao fogo do inferno”, ou seja, os poucos, mas verdadeiros cientistas que apontavam outros caminhos clínicos e medicinais diante do coronavírus. A governança global estabelece um “consenso sanitário” que é então imposto aos governos nacionais "soberanos" em todo o mundo. A ideia de fechar parcialmente, por um determinado tempo, a economia mundial e isolar socialmente a população para “salvar vidas” foi aceita como única forma de combater o vírus. A esquerda reformista e domesticada ao capital, entrou nesta campanha covarde com todo seu cretino vigor de traidores compulsivos da classe operária mundial.

 

GOVERNANÇA GLOBAL E O ATUAL CENÁRIO ECONÔMICO

 

A crise pandêmica, ápice da crise capitalista de superprodução, redefiniu a estrutura do cenário econômico mundial. Desestabiliza pequenas e médias empresas em todo o mundo, afunda setores inteiros da economia mundial, incluindo transporte aéreo, infraestrutura, turismo, indústria e manufatura, etc... O confinamento (“apestamento”) cria fome e mortalidade em massa nos países periféricos, por exemplo na Índia até agora morreram oficialmente de Covid pouco mais de 100 mil pessoas, enquanto de fome e doenças que ficaram sem tratamento por conta do coronavírus, faleceram no mesmo período mais de 2 milhões de habitantes.

 

O Pentágono e a inteligência dos EUA (Deep State) estão envolvidos até a medula na construção desta pandemia. A crise do coronavírus afeta a condução das guerras lideradas pela indústria armamentista dos Estados Unidos e sua Organização do Tratado do Atlântico Norte (OTAN) no Oriente Médio, Síria, Iraque, Afeganistão, Líbia, Iêmen, Líbano e no futuro a própria China e Rússia. Eles também são realizados para atingir e desestabilizar países específicos, incluindo Irã e Venezuela. Esta crise não tem precedentes na história mundial. É um ato seminal que anuncia uma nova de guerra mundial.

 

O "estabelecimento" da governança financeira global não é completamente homogêneo, pressupõe fricções e atritos frontais entre os próprios segmentos capitalistas de grande poder econômico e político. A existência de um governo com as características de Trump nos EUA, é a prova viva desde fenômeno contraditório e que recém inicia sua “era histórica”. Não admitir este fator seria como negar a existência da luta de classes, substituindo por uma espécie de pastelão da “teoria da conspiração”.

 

CAPITALISMO FINANCEIRO SEM PÁTRIA E INTERESSES NACIONAIS

 

Os interesses do “Big Money” (interesses financeiros globais) se sobrepõem e subordinam aos da Big Pharma, Big Oil, dos empreiteiros do Departamento de Defesa, etc. As principais instituições corporativas bancárias, incluindo JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, State Street Co., Goldman Sachs, etc... estão investindo pesado em laboratórios e na economia de guerra, incluindo o desenvolvimento de armas nucleares no âmbito do programa de armas hipersônicas. Também o 5G é uma área estratégica. O mais interessante é que esses investimentos do “Big Money” são totalmente apátridas, e ocorrem simultaneamente desde o próprio EUA, até a China, os dois principais contendores globais na conjuntura atual. Essa é exatamente a marca e o “DNA” da governança global!

 

O objetivo final do "Big Money" é transformar os Estados nacionais (com suas próprias instituições e economia nacional) em "territórios econômicos abertos". Esse foi o destino experimental do Iraque, Líbia e Afeganistão. Porém as “revoluções coloridas”, financiadas pelo “Big Money”, pretendem ampliar em muito esta lista. Vamos ser claros.  É uma agenda imperial. O que as elites financeiras mundiais querem é quebrar (com altos níveis de endividamento) e depois privatizar o Estado para depois assumir e privatizar todo o planeta em sua governança global.

 

“A intenção impronunciável do capitalismo global é a destruição do Estado-nação e de suas instituições, o que causará pobreza mundial em uma escala sem precedentes”. Esta citação de Lenin, datada de dezembro de 1915, no auge da Primeira Guerra Mundial, alerta para algumas das contradições que enfrentamos hoje. Não existe possibilidade de mediação para curso criminoso da dominação do rentismo global, as “inocentes” teses dos reformistas de “controlar e taxar” o fluxo do capital financeiro internacional, não passa de mais uma idiotice reacionária. Nesta etapa histórica não pode haver “meio termo”, ou seja, uma espécie de “capitalismo humanizado”, gerido pela esquerda Social Democrata. A disjuntiva colocada para a classe operária internacional, exatamente quando irrompe no cenário uma nova ordem mundial ainda mais reacionária e regressiva, não pode ser outra: Socialismo ou Barbárie!