Quebec City - A gathering of vampires

Internationalist Notes statement on the occasion of the protests at the Summit of the Americas - April 2001

Can there be a single person living in Canada who hasn’t heard of the important summit to be held in Quebec City, from April 20th to the 22nd 2001? For months now, we have been witness to an unprecedented media barrage. Not a single news report goes by without the anchor devoting headlines to the event and no newspaper is published without giving ample coverage on the stakes of this meeting.

We know that this summit will bring together 34 of the 35 heads of state of the Americas, the exception being Cuba. They will be accompanied by 9000 “partners” (bureaucrats, capitalists, trade unionists and academics) who will participate at different levels of the discussion. We also know that the goal of the summit is the implementation of a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), by 2005 if possible.

All this commotion around the meeting has given rise to different kinds of mobilizations. First off, and its quite normal, it has created a rallying point for the various social strata worried by the effects of capitalist “globalisation”. The state of the world is indeed quite worrisome. Its prevailing condition worldwide at the beginning of this millennium is one of chaos. We live in a world where the lust for profit starves hundreds of millions of people everyday, pollutes the skies, the earth and the oceans, ignites the fires of war on every continent, plants the seeds of hate and has almost killed off all hope of change. It is the devastating effects of imperialism that are, in good part, feeding this anti-globalisation movement. In the last 2 years, this movement has made its presence felt through a whole string of spectacular demonstrations. Seattle, Washington, Nice, Prague, Davos and Naples have all been stops along the way of this “new social movement”.

The other mobilization that of the police forces has been taken to unimaginable lengths in the context of Canadian politics up till now. Quebec, the old fortified city of the 18th Century, is once again an armed camp, but this time the Citadelle’s cannons are pointed inwards. A 3.8 kilometre wall of concrete, chain link fences and barbwire of nearly three metres in height, surrounding a vast semi-residential area, will keep the protesters as far away as possible from the deliberations. More than 25000 people have been issued a special identity card that will have to be presented each time they will need to go to work, come home or simply take a walk. Also of note, are the more than 6000 cops, armed to the teeth and from all over the country, that are on permanent alert. For good measure, and at great cost, the state has evacuated a penitentiary and part of a hospital in case they are needed and have established surveillance at the borders. This whole production by the state’s repressive apparatus is to intimidate and disrupt the mobilization of the more radical oppositions. As we are writing these lines, this goal seems to have been partially attained.

Imperialism and the Quebec Summit

All the recent important international meetings have been an occasion for major imperialist confrontations. Thus, contrary to popular mythology, the M.I.A. was not scrapped because of the weak-kneed protest of a few feeble reformist organisations. In fact the accord was terminated due to the opposition caused by the disagreements put forth by some of the major powers, notably European ones. With the collapse of the former Soviet empire, the old post war order no longer exists. Since then, the discipline of the old blocs has broken down and new imperialist forces are arising to replace them. One of these forces is the European Union, which has been in the process of expansion and consolidation since 1992. Another one is being created in the Far East around China, Japan, Korea and the other members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The meetings in Seattle (WTO) and Prague (IMF/World Bank) were battlefields for all the imperialist blocs and countries. The Quebec Summit however is to prepare for the consolidation of a third bloc. The main countries driving the Quebec meeting (Canada and the USA which already constitute NAFTA with Mexico), hope for a new “Monroe Doctrine” ⁽¹⁾ assuring them of maximum penetration of the national markets represented in Quebec and thus, a greater competitiveness and power on a worldwide scale. To do so, they will have to discipline other countries already united in smaller blocs, such as Brazil and Argentina with Mercosur, historically more oriented towards Europe than towards North America. Capitalism being the “war of all against all”, the junior vultures from the South will try to play one against the other, but would also like to develop a relatively independent bloc. Under the circumstances, its not surprising that the Brazilian minister for International Commerce, Celso Lafer, recently declared that:

The FTAA is an opportunity, but Mercosur is our destiny.

Our conception of “globalisation”

For our political current, “globalisation” is the natural continuation of the tendency towards the centralisation of capital, identified by Marx, which led to the great imperialist monopolies. That is why we still qualify our epoch as that of imperialism; quite simply imperialism is the era of capitalist competition on an international scale. What is new is the mass of capital at the disposal of the monopolies today. Now, the great transnationals are dominated by finance capital rather than by the industrial capital. They control more wealth than almost all the states on the planet. In this way, a new contradiction has been grafted to the capitalist system. The system is essentially organized around nation-states, but these nation-states and particularly those of the periphery, have less and less control over what happens within their borders. That is why the reformists of the alternative meeting called the People’s Summit would like to return to the capitalism of their youth, that “good old capitalism” of the long boom following the Second World War, which came to an end with the termination of the Bretton-Woods agreement in 1971. But that capitalism is finished, shaken to its very core by the crisis of accumulation that we’ve seen for about thirty years. The time has passed when the ruling class could afford the luxury (at least in the rich countries) of granting relatively “acceptable” public services and social legislation. “Globalisation” is the product of the general crisis of capitalism. Reformists who claim that “another world is possible” without cutting down the current mode of production, are at best extremely misinformed or at worst the ‘progressive’ accomplices of the capitalist disinformation campaign centered more and more around the concept of citizenship.

“The citizen’s can opener?”

The idea that one can battle the devastating effects of capitalism, while preserving its structure, is as old as capitalism itself and has always had its promoters. By the way, even in ancient times, there were already slaves and well-wishers who would promote the reform of the slave system rather than its abolition. Writing as early as the middle of the 19th century, Marx and Engels aptly described both the script and actors of this black comedy.

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. ⁽²⁾

We only need to add priests and nuns to this list for a complete contemporary portrait of the good hearts of anti-globalisation. Their out dated political line is that by “civic” action (acting under the completely preposterous idea that we all live in ‘civil society’ and therefore are all equal under capitalism), we can have access to “a city” ⁽³⁾ that we well know has only its sewers and gutters reserved for us.

These policies, notably originating from the ‘left’ nationalists of the Monde Diplomatique and the ATTAC crowd, have become the ideological cement of the whole capitalist left: trade unions, NGO’s, feminists, academics, reformist parties and sects. This is the line of the new reformist international coming out of the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre. Its effectiveness is such, that openly bourgeois parties are also using it more and more. We can judge the true nature of this ideology when we know that at the opening of the People’s Summit, all these honest “citizens” were invited for cocktails in the comfortable salons of Quebec’s National Assembly. The host of the occasion was none other than their “comrade”, the Premier of Quebec, Bernard Landry; a “lefty” that is particularly useful to the ruling class. Let’s bet that Landry even offered his solidarity to his “comrade” Bové for his glorious defence of Roquefort cheese! But behind all the speeches, remains reality. For the needs of this exercise, it can be summarized by the following eloquent declaration. Its from Tarso Fernando Herz Genro, the well known mayor of Porto Alegre who said:

Porto Alegre nor the World Social Forum do not oppose the liberalisation of the markets. ⁽⁴⁾

In fact what the capitalist left wants most of all, is to be invited to the negotiating table so it can at last play its full role of workers containment and class collaboration, i.e. convince the whole of humanity that it is condemned to capitalist mediocrity. Reformism hopes for nothing more than enlightened barbarism. It will deliver nothing else than more misery and exploitation. The citizen’s can opener is finally nothing more than the proverbial lid on the pot.

The third mobilisation

In addition to the thousands of people who will legitimately come to express their concerns and their hopes in Quebec and the thousands of cops who await them, we also have to take note of a third mobilization of great political interest. It is the mobilisation of the trade union, community and feminist goon squads and all the other forces of containment and sabotage of working class struggles. By the hundreds, they have promised to support the work of the police. The trade unions intend to “geographically isolate” the most radical elements, and the day of the 21st promises to be difficult. The apparatus has even decreed on the content and tone that slogans could take. As with the Women’s March, of last October 14th, the capitalist left wants to impose its own “single ruling idea”. The best that can be hoped from the day would be that a portion of the participants come away disgusted by all these nauseating practices and finally draw the evident conclusions .

What is to be done?

As we have seen previously,

The struggle for the parasitic appropriation of surplus value will become increasingly fierce and the global village is destined to become smaller and smaller for the growing number of vampires who inhabit it. ⁽⁵⁾

Numerous siren songs are once again attempting to cover the voices of the tiny forces that try to maintain the red thread of history and stay the course towards a true liberation of humanity. This ultimate emancipation can only realise itself in a stateless, classless and moneyless society.

This society will have abolished exploitation, national borders and armies. Against all Stalinist and Trotskyists falsifications, we continue to define the next society as Communist, because that is what it will be. To get there however there is still a lot of work to be done. It is high time that the working class refurbish its toolbox. We need to break the yoke of the trade-union logic that claims to reconcile the interests of the workers and the vampires that feed off us. We also need to create mass organs of struggle, arising from the struggles themselves and under the absolute control of the people in the workplaces and neighborhoods. Finally, the working class must build its revolutionary organisation, a real communist and internationalist party. Not a party that will lead, over and in the place of workers, but a party that will struggle in the midst of its class, before as well as after the revolution, by contributing its vision of the historical program of true communism.

We refuse to submit because we know that we are not alone. Yes, there is a way out of this city of shadows.