The Fourth International’s youth school has just finished. Anyone who fancies an illustrated day by day account can find it here.  An ability to read Portuguese would be helpful. Each year it brings together young socialists from around the world for a gruelling ten days of study and discussion.

I was asked to speak on the centrality of the working class in anti-capitalist struggles in Europe to an audience which included a comrade from the Revolutionary Workers Party of Mindanao (RPM-M), the International’s section of the Philippines where they appear to have a strong peasant base and a comrade from Brazil where they are wrestling with the idea of setting up a left union federation. Occasionally you wonder who should be doing the teaching. Comrades from Morocco and several European countries made up the rest of the group.

They were a questioning and self confident bunch who obliged me to go back and do some more study.

As threatened earlier these are the notes and an updated version of the slideshow which gave them some respite from looking at me.

Introduction

It’s the ruling class which has put the working class at the heart of anti-capitalist struggles in Europe and internationally.

We’ll look at the way in which this has been done some possible responses that our side can make.

Need to have a perspective of years and decades.

Nature of the period is important.

Experience of revolutionaries in other time and places is important.

We are not always starting from a blank slate. There are precedents to learn from, mistakes that others have made which we can avoid.

That’s the whole point of a school.

Tendency to overestimate the significance of mobilisations.

“The world of labour has remobilised. In almost every country the working classes have come out for demonstrations and strikes – sectoral, multi-sectoral and general. After Italy, Spain, Greece and France, which led the way, countries like Germany and Austria have shown an exemplary militancy and shaken Europe’s most powerful and monolithic trade-union bureaucracies.”

Anti-Capitalist Manifesto for a Different Europe (2004)

European Anti-Capitalist Left

Bureaucracies still look intact.

Historical fact is that a ruling class offensive which opened in the late 1970s has not been halted and is presently being intensified.

That is the key fact of this period.

Working class in Europe is in opening stages of a series of major defensive struggles. In Britain, Greece, Ireland, Germany Italy, France, Spain.

The ruling class has put the working class in the centre of its solution to the economic and banking crisis.

Can we find anywhere in Europe where people are retiring earlier, having free healthcare and childcare extended, leaving university in large numbers to go into secure jobs with strong union organisation and employment rights?

Impossible in short time to do complete survey of conditions all across Europe.

Will focus on couple of examples as representing broad trend. Details can be changed according to local circumstances.

History: Let’s start in 1889. London Dockers’ Strike was a turning-point in the history of trade unionism. Over the next few years a large number of unskilled workers joined trade unions. Between 1892 and 1899 membership of trade unions increased from 1,500,000 to over 2,000,000.

Reading material on website refers to another example from same time. Matchgirls’ strike.

Site of factory is now luxury flats in a Labour controlled area of London with chronic social housing shortage.

Obvious similarity with today.

 

 

Zero hours contracts.

Expectation of jobs without rights. People employed and made unemployed with little protection.

● 1888 only 5% of the labour force were members of trade unions.

● Tended to be skilled craftsman and workers in the textile and mining industries.

● Dockers’ Strike – large number of unskilled workers joined trade unions.

● Between 1892 and 1899 membership increased from 1,500,000 to over 2,000,000.

New unionism took several decades for this process to develop unevenly across Europe.

Post war: High point of social democrat achievements.

Free education and healthcare.

High level of union membership.

Expectation was that progress was inevitable.

Possible for one salary to sustain a family.

Assumption was that people would work less, be richer, have security.

2010 Promise to young people is that they will work till at least 70, rely on debt to survive and have constant job insecurity.

Three elements: The ecological catastrophe is the most serious that humanity has experienced.

Directly related to capitalist productivism. Explicitly a working class issue.

John Bellamy Foster “It is impossible to exaggerate the seriousness of climate change. It threatens the existence of industrial civilisation itself. It is set to kill many multiples of the 60 million lost in the Second World War.”

80-90% carbon cuts necessary are in direct conflict with the capitalist model of production.

Even though the science is clear it is not possible to identify any bourgeois government or significant company which is taking the steps necessary.

Billions of pounds of investment in carbon capture and storage, renewable energy, public transport, energy-efficient homes, and building insulation.

Massive cuts in fossil-fuel consumption, road transport, and air travel.

Heavy taxes on the rich and the corporations to support the victims of climate change in the impoverished Global South.

Obvious conflict between social relations and forces of production.

Bourgeoisie has a solution which it will make the workers and poor of th
e world pay for.

Only one class can offer a solution which benefits the overwhelming majority of humanity.

Extent of economic crisis is unclear but ruling class agenda is more attacks on our class.

US imperialism has demonstrated that it is still willing to engage in long term aggressive war.

Other aspects being dealt with in other workshops.

Ireland: “First-mover advantage” and typical of packages being offered in Italy, Greece, Spain, Britain and France.

● Unemployment has risen to 467,000 in a population of less than 4.5 million.

● Salaries in the public sector have fallen by at least 15 per cent.

● Cuts of at least €3 bn with more the year after and the year after that; all this after a budget cut of €3 bn in December last year and €5.5bn in April 2009.

● A large and sudden cut in living standards and transfer of wealth

Massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the bankers, developers.

Contrast the two responses.

A whole series of general strikes culminated on May 5th with the country at a standstill, 500 000 marching in Athens and attempts to seize the parliament buildings.

When the government moved on to phase 2 and began to implement IMF demands for the privatization of lorry transport, they were met by the total mobilization of the lorry drivers, an all-out strike and hand-to-hand fighting with the police.

The six-day nationwide strike by 33,000 truck drivers was halted on the 1st August when the union leadership won a narrow majority to call off further action.

The strikes were only demobilised by the union leadership against the background of government steps to mobilise the army and declare elements of martial law and conscript the drivers.

Greek workers have a long history of political struggle against the native capitalist class, an anti-imperialist sentiment expressing itself in hatred of the IMF, strong rank and file organization and a suspicion of and independence from the union bureaucracy.

In Ireland the bureaucracy settled for a couple of large demonstrations before accepting virtually everything the government proposed.

The anti-capitalist movement

Source of this summary has political conclusions we may disagree with. So what?

Roots of the anti-capitalist movement were in the jungle of southern Mexico with the rise of the Zapatistas (EZLN), fighting for indigenous rights against the federal government.

Also opposed effects of neoliberal trade agreements with the USA on their communities.

Jungle based, peasant movement was in no position to offer leadership to Mexican workers. Despite that elan and combativity Mexican politics still oscillates around two bourgeois formations.

Was able to inspire on global level due to relatively cheap air travel and emergence of internet.

Spoke to emerging radicalising generation that had little memory of Stalinism and was generally disconnected from parties and trade unions.

Politics was something to be done in an “alternative space”.

1997-98 Asian financial crisis. The devastation of the jobs and lives of millions in south Asia and its subsequent impact on Latin America heightened the incipient movement’s awareness of the destructive capabilities of capitalist globalisation.

It was the intervention of the multilateral institutions of the IMF and World Bank into these crisis torn countries that focused the anger of North American and European activists.

These institutions were dominated by their governments, and their interventions and prescriptions only deepened the misery of the people whose lives had been blighted by the anarchic character of the financial markets and the depredations of the multinationals.

An insistent and sharper critique of these multilateral agencies emerged, leading many campaigns to focus their protests on the planned 1999 IMF ministerial meeting in Seattle.

Seattle announced the arrival of a global movement that contested the legitimacy of the institutions and not just the style of their interventions.

Militant, democratic and fused a new generation of young activists with members of established working class organisations such as trade unions.

The major defect of Prague was the failure to enlist significant trade union forces to the event, something that had been achieved at Seattle

Nice revealed a dangerous divide in the fledgling anti-capitalist movement. On 6 December 80,000 working class trade unionists from Europe took over Nice for the day to press for social reforms from the EU.

The next day they were largely gone, the bureaucrats spiriting the workers away from the influence of the anti-capitalist minority.

That left only 6-7,000 conscious anti-capitalists – whether socialist or anarchist – for the battles of the next day. They were young and mainly working class but for the most part not oriented to the organised labour movements.

A very isolated, politically diverse and underdeveloped amalgam.

Outside of the framework of ESF’s themselves developments within specific countries where the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements had been strong set the movement back.

The anti-capitalist movement as it developed from Seattle offered the possibility for revolutionaries to unite a youthful and radical movement with mass workers’ struggles against neoliberalism.

It could have built a powerful movement joining the workers of the imperialist countries with the oppressed and exploited of the global south in a common struggle against neoliberal capitalism.

● In 1970s struggles were in workplaces as well as women’s, LGBT, Black liberation

● Part of radical wave that opened in 1968 and was based on strong workers’ movement as well as high levels of class consciousness and combativity.

● Less favourable balance of forces today

● In last couple of decades struggles have tended to be against results of free market.

● These can quickly become political but are limited by refusing to put an alternative to capitalism.

We have to be explicit about what we want. “Anti-capitalist” is quite a recent invention. As individuals and organisations which understand that working class has power to transform society we have to put case for socialism.

We have to be a politically and intellectually coherent force in these movements.

How does a class express itself politically?

Working class in Europe does not have TV stations, courts, mass circulation newspapers.

Relies on its unions, mass parties and, to a very limited extent, tiny revolutionary propaganda groups with negligible social weight.

Don’t get too carried away by what’s in yesterday’s paper. Activity is not a substitute for politic or prog
rammatic clarity.

Immediate choice in coming months is between two programmes.

Ruling class and bureaucracies disagree on details but agree on central point that the bill for the capitalist crisis will be paid by our class.

Other option is a programme which explicitly challenges the logic of the capitalist solution. It’s basic Marxism that there will be such a resurgence of the class.

In times of crisis the workers have no alternative but to fight back.

It is further evident that it is the organised working class that will lead these struggles. All sections of society will be involved in struggles, but not as autonomous broad movements – rather behind the big battalions of the working class.

This will need to be on a pan-European level.

The social democratic organisations across Europe have been to the forefront in pushing forward the austerity offensive.

The trade union bureaucrats, often with close links with the Social Democrats, accept that the workers should pay for the bankers.

The struggle now is to defeat and supplant existing leaderships and build a new movement. It will organise, not around a broad platform, but around a programme leading to the socialist transformation of society.

Activity of revolutionaries has to encourage self organisation of working class and encourage its willingness to fight.

This is not the same as substituting ourselves for it and there are no alternative social forces which can replace it

Tasks in the upcoming struggles

No guarantee of victory. Bourgeoisie has had some early wins.

Build broadest possible united fronts with those forces which are willing to engage in effective resistance. That sometimes means breaking with individuals and parties.

Propose solutions which meet the needs of the majority of society. These can only be socialist.

Build our own organisations and an international which trains its members to think and act on a global level.