(Editorial for Revolutionary Pespectives 60)

Despite the hopes of many grassroots activists, last November’s public sector workers’ strike has not triggered a more determined resistance by those who are paying for this capitalist crisis: the working class as a whole. The truth is that the unions are not the organisations many workers believe them to be. So long as resistance is trapped within the union frame there is little prospect of an effective class wide fight back against the onslaught we are facing.

This point could hardly have been made clearer when, only a week or so after N30, Unilever workers took to the picket lines over exactly the same issue — i.e. the robbery of their pensions. Somehow or other the unions always manage to undermine the potential strength of real class solidarity. This is a constant process, not simply a question of the leadership ‘selling-out’ over one issue or poor organisation. It is absolutely no surprise that since November’s ‘day of action’ most of the public sector unions have simply accepted that’s the end of the battle and knuckled down to discussions over the exact terms of pension cuts. The position of those who are holding out, such as the teachers, and others who were not officially balloted for N30, such as fire fighters, is therefore that much weaker.

While our take on the unions is often more or less shared by a minority of workers, the union hold is secure so long as the majority are not ready to put up a serious fight and cannot see beyond the token actions of the unions. This is part and parcel of the generally low level of class consciousness which still pervades today but it is also the case that for the most part revolutionaries with an alternative way forward are few and far between in the workplace. It is in this context that a group of us met one night in Durham to discuss the question of how revolutionaries can organise in the workplace. (For a full account see p.26) Our starting point was not how to create alternative unions, but to create a hub of class conscious militants ready to pose a different way of struggling, above all within a revolutionary political perspective which puts the daily attacks of the bosses in the wider context of the need to overthrow capitalism.

Since the financial explosion of 2007-8 the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘crisis’ have become almost a regular part of everyday parlance. To be against capitalism is no longer the preserve of revolutionary Marxists and ‘class struggle anarchists’, that is so long as ‘capitalism’ is defined as ‘unfair’ and ‘anti-capitalism’ a matter of getting more democracy in order to reverse the growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. This kind of ‘anti-capitalism’ is epitomised by the Occupy movement which has caught the public imagination with its telling slogan (We Are the 99%) and put itself in the limelight with its ‘tent cities’. Clearly, such a movement deserves our attention and we have already commented on it and some of our experiences with the Occupiers both here and in Italy as well as reporting on significant Occupy events in North America. The article in this issue is a Marxist overview of this disparate multi-class movement; a movement which if nothing else reflects the growing sense that there must be a better way than this…

The Economic Crisis

Of course the material basis for the widespread questioning of capitalism’s automatic right to exist, or at least to carry on as it has been doing over several decades, is the capitalist economic crisis. This crisis, which is no less than the cyclical crisis of capital recognisable by Marxists but once denied as outmoded by capitalist economists, revealed itself decades back. In 1971-73 US President Nixon announced the de-linking of the dollar from gold and then proceeded to devalue the currency which had been established at Bretton Woods as the unit of international trade. By so doing the US not only exacerbated the crisis for the whole world, it opened the way for further manipulation of the dollar to maintain its position in the world and then to a secondary struggle to maintain the dollar by virtue of its military might … in order to maintain US capitalism’s (declining) position in the world.

Aware of the lessons of two world wars (where trade wars and currency devaluations turned into full-blown military confrontations) and encouraged by the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc the capitalists resolved to find a way to revive profit rates (because this is what the crisis is really about). Somehow or other they had to increase the rate of surplus value — or the portion of value (wealth) produced by workers’ unpaid labour (in capitalist terms, ‘productivity’). By a combination of industrial restructuring on the basis of new technology and a ruthless dismantling of industries once regarded as indispensable to national economies, all of which involved massive unemployment and were not accepted without a fight, the conditions which had held in the workplace since the war were already undermined. The era of flexible working had begun. Combine this with the farming out of more and more swathes of industry to areas of massively cheaper labour - part of the globalisation of capital - the portion of surplus value accruing to the capitalist class increased. It is now acknowledged that in the UK and the USA at any rate the share of wages in national income has been declining since 1970. For two decades or more this fact was disguised, even to workers themselves, by the effect of credit and financial speculation.

While financial capital found endless ways of multiplying the amount of (paper) profit that could be made from one original source of capital value derived from workers’ unpaid labour, the working class — especially in the USA and UK — took advantage of the cheap money policy and learned how to use their credit cards for deficit financing and employ cheap mortgage loans for their own property speculation. Looked at in this light it is easy to see how Cameron and Co have got away with the idea that ‘we are all in this together’. Yet there is no comparison between the negative equity of a working class household who finds that the nominal value of their house has dropped, or the outstanding credit card debt which is forcing hundreds of thousands to resort to pay day loans, and the trillions and trillions of dollars (for the sake of argument) of fictional capital amassed on the balance sheets and off-balance sheet accounts of banks, investment houses and the like and which is still undeclared, waiting like a ticking time bomb to bring another financial explosion.

More Attacks to Come

But the biggest con trick of all is the idea that somehow, if workers make sacrifices and tighten their belts, the ‘national’ debt for which we are all supposedly responsible, can be reduced or made ‘sustainable’. In other words, not only must workers pay off their own personal debts from their wages, they must accept lower wages, lower pensions, longer working lives and cuts in every possible welfare service and work harder to produce a higher profits for the sake of paying off capitalism’s debts — a debt mountain which is so large that few financial commentators are ready to face the fact that it is impossible to pay off. Only a massive write-off and devaluation of capital, a write-off of unprecedented historical proportions, could really revive capitalist ‘productivity'. In other words capitalism is facing an existential crisis, the crisis of its existence as a mode of production. This is not to say that ways will not be found to prolong its life. In fact capital’s major way of prolonging its own existence at the moment is to find ever more ways of cheapening the cost of labour power. (Vietnam, where, according to the Financial Times, 2012-02-10)

"unskilled workers are typically paid a half to a third of the $300 a month their counterparts might receive in the manufacturing clusters of southern China..."

is becoming a very popular focus for capitalist outsourcing.) The inexorable logic of this, of course, is that workers elsewhere must accept more sacrifices and become ‘more competitive’.

In this context the TUC’s call for government spending cuts to be introduced gradually in order not to damage the recovery, Labour’s theme of getting back to ‘responsible capitalism’, the Occupiers focus on parasitic financiers, Osborne’s talk of a ‘John Lewis economy’, Cameron’s stripping of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood (which has only provoked others to say why not take away the honours given to Alan Greenspan or Mervyn King, both of whom presided over the loose money policy prior to the financial crash): all this adds up to futile posturing. The reality is that capital will continue to try and get itself out of crisis in the only way it knows: by attacking the working class at the same time as trying to maintain the fiction that ‘we are all in this together’.

Every day in the UK there is news of more axing of benefits and services yet so far only 6% of the government’s planned public services cuts have been implemented. The Bank of England’s latest bout of ‘quantitative easing’ has staved off an immediate liquidity crisis for the banks but it means that another million people approaching retirement face a further cut in their pensions. Essentially workers everywhere are under attack. From Greece to Italy and Romania, from Nigeria to South Africa, from China to Vietnam the working class are obliged to resist. It can hardly be otherwise. In the words of Onorato Damen,

"The proletariat would return to the ranks of mere plebeians if it lost its class character as the antagonist of capitalism."

This issue charts some of their struggles and the obstacles and illusions which prevent a definite push towards the only meaningful anti-capitalist struggle, the struggle for a new kind of society based on direct democracy and the rational allocation of production to fulfil real social need. The biggest obstacle of all, of course, is the absence — as yet — of a revolutionary political leadership to point the way to such a course. As Damen pointed out, the means to overcome this obstacle can only be found inside the struggles themselves. This is not an argument for simple spontaneity but a recognition that the class struggle is a permanent state of affairs within which revolutionaries themselves have to play their part.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that capitalism may be facing systemic decline but it remains a system of competing imperialist interests. The old cold war blocs no longer exist and a relatively weaker US is preparing to regroup and defend the hegemony of the dollar against all. The ‘international community’ has been unable to halt the present bloodbath in Syria because in reality it is a network of competing imperialisms. There is no such thing as an ‘international community’ only strong powers and weaker powers, useful alignments and dispensable agreements. The British and Argentine governments may be posturing over the Falklands but it is a reminder, however, of how easily capitalist governments facing serious economic problems at home can turn to nationalism and war in the hope of ‘uniting the nation’ behind them. All the more reason for revolutionaries in the present period to redouble their efforts to reach the wider working class.