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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Ukraine: Interview with a Left-Wing Soldier

English   українська

 

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!!

 

 

Ukraine: Interview with a Left-Wing Soldier

30 January 2024

 

 

 

Question: Hi, comrade, great to talk with you! Please tell our readers a little bit about yourself.

 

My name is Dmitry. At the moment, I am in military service in the ranks of the Armed Forces. I am a music teacher by education and I am also an IT specialist.

 

Question: How long are you already serving in the army?

 

This period of service for me began almost from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion. Despite the fact that I tried to enlist as early as February 26, 2022, two days after the invasion, due to the large number of people who wanted to expel the enemy, I was accepted only up to three weeks later. Although I was also in the service before, during the anti-terrorist operation in 2016-2017 in the ranks of the National Guard of Ukraine.

 

Question: How is the current situation on the front lines?

 

The situation could be better. The enemy is cunning and quite insidious. The Russians quickly adapted to the conditions of the war and are constantly building fortifications. We don't have enough supplies, weapons. This is true in all sectors. There is not enough equipment. Therefore, the breakthrough to liberate the territories becomes more difficult. Thanks to the support of Iran and North Korea, Russia regularly receives the necessary weapons. Daily launches of Shaheds have already become a common phenomenon for Ukrainians. Recently, North Korean-made missiles were spotted, which confirms the support of the country, which would seem incapable of war. Assistance from China is also noticeable. Although they do not take part and do not arm the Russians, they supply many humanitarian goods and various technical devices. Some Chinese companies, such as AliExpress, have been accused of sponsoring terrorism, for providing intensive assistance to the Russian army. Our army is actually maintained at the expense of the civilian population, both taxpayers and volunteers. Also, the financial assistance of Western countries, which currently supports the Ukrainian economy, makes a significant contribution.

 

Question: The international audience does not know so much about the challenges and difficulties for the soldiers. What would you like people to know?

 

First of all, this is a mental disorder. Constant pressure and fear make themselves felt. Many cannot stand it, but this is a natural phenomenon of war. There are also huge problems with the lack of medicines and medical supplies. Tourniquets are needed constantly and several per soldier. They diverge very quickly. Quality turnstiles are not cheap, but it saves a person's life. Injuries at the front are daily and they save the lives of our heroes.

 

Question: Do you operate with modern military equipment? And is the food supply sufficient?

 

There are definitely no problems with food where I am on duty. I heard that there is food corruption in other brigades. But personally I have not seen this. But what about modern technology cannot be answered unequivocally. Small arms in the vast majority from the times of the USSR. If anyone has a new type of weapon, it is most likely the special forces, GUR or SBU. As for military equipment, the same is true. Although aid from Western countries really sends us high-quality tanks, artillery, etc., it is not enough due to the huge concentration of the enemy on the front line. I must also thank the volunteers for their help with radio communication, which is difficult for the enemy to listen to. This also applies to the issue of telecommunications. Although it is modern in our country, it is all at the expense of the civilian population.

 

Question: How is the relation between the territorial defense units and the general army leadership?

 

The territorial defense forces are actually part of the general forces. TrO quite often performs the same functions as other divisions. Therefore, now there is no difference between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and TrO.

 

Question: How popular is Zelensky among soldiers and have there been changes in his popularity since the beginning of the war?

 

Zelensky still has quite a lot of support from the population of Ukraine, but many are disappointed in his actions. The military, their relatives and loved ones felt his actions on themselves. The actions of the government, or its inaction, have hit the president's reputation very hard. More and more military literally hate Zelensky and all his supporters. In addition, there are many volunteers who will never forgive the "green" authorities for decisions that harmed volunteer activities.

 

Question: Based on your experience in the Ukrainian army, what are the main (political) demands that revolutionaries in Ukraine should raise if you can put it in brief words.

 

It would be good (first of all) to think over mechanisms for the protection of the civilian population that suffered from the aggressor's attack. Many Ukrainians left the country using refugee aid, and a significant part of them will definitely not return. And they left in the first place not because of a war but rather because of the lack of a roof over the head, work and help from the state. Also, labor relations became even more strained. In Ukraine, they have always been problematic, but the war intensified the already great difficulties. Employers use the argument "we have a war" and force the workers to work overtime, and sometimes even without days off.

 

Introduce more severe punishments for corruption and make it impossible to get out on bail, although the bail can be left, but in the amount of three times the amount stolen or the amount of the bribe.

 

It is necessary to stop putting sticks in the wheels of volunteers, to simplify the mechanisms of their work. This will greatly speed up the victory. In my opinion, the Ukrainian volunteers are now a vivid example of collective work that keeps the country going.

 

In fact, the list of necessary measures for Ukraine can be listed endlessly. Because there are actually a lot of problems. But these are the main problems that greatly hinder victory.

 

Question: As a revolutionary socialist in a bourgeois army, how does your political worldview influence your actions as a soldier?

 

Quite a tough question actually. Any changes in the democratic direction in Ukraine are already quite revolutionary.

 

a) If it were a socialist army, everything would depend purely on command and the relationship between commanders and subordinates. But there would be the main difference, the life of the unit would depend purely on the decisions of the unit itself, and not on any whims of the higher command. It is difficult to talk now about what a socialist army would be like. Because it depends not only on the organization of the socialist armed forces, but also on the economic base and how the work of state administrations is organized. Therefore, in fact, this is a very large and complex question, which cannot be answered now.

 

b) To call the Armed Forces of Ukraine bourgeois at the moment is not an accurate definition, even a little insulting. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are held together to a greater extent due to the joint work of Ukrainian citizens and the help of taxpayers of other countries. We are the people's army. Among us, only a few are professional soldiers. We are not fighting for the bourgeois elite. If it had been a bourgeois army, there would not have been such queues in front of the local centres of the “Territorial Center for Staffing and Social Support” at the beginning of the invasion. At that time, no one thought about financial security. It was a challenge to protect not just your hut, but to save everyone. Therefore, now the troops of Ukraine are the opposite, an example of the emergence of a new type of people's socialist army.

 

Україна: Інтерв'ю з солдатом лівих поглядів

Питання: Вітаємо, товаришу, раді бачити тебе у нашому колі! Будь ласка, розкажи нашим читачам трохи про себе.

 

Моє ім'я Дмітрій. На даний момент перебуваю на військовій службі в лавах ЗСУ. За освітою викладач музики. Також ІТ спеціаліст.

 

Питання: Як довго ви вже служите в армії?

 

Даний термін служби для мене розпочався майже з самого початку повномасштабного вторгнення. Не дивлячись на те, що я намагався вступити на службу ще 26го лютого 2022 року, через два дні після вторгнення, із-за великої кілкості бажаючих вигнати ворога мене прийняли аж на три тижні пізніше. Хоча раніше я також був на службі, ще під час АТО у 2016-2017 роках у лавах НГУ.

 

Питання: Якою є зараз поточна ситуація на передовій?

 

Ситуація бажає кращого. Ворог хитрий та доволі підступний. Росіяни швидко адаптувалися до умов війни та постійно будують укріплення. У нас не вистачає припасів, зброї. Це скажуть на будь якому напрямку. Не вистачає техніки. Тому прорив для звільнення територій ускладнюється. Росія завдяки підтримці Ірану та КНДР регулярно отримує необхідне озброєння. Щоденні запуски шахедів вже стали звичайним явищем для українців. Нещодавно були помічені ракети виробництва КНДР, що підтверджує підтримку війни, завалось би, не спроможної до війни країни. Також помітна допомога зі сторони КНР. Хоч вони і не примають участі та не озброюють росіян, але постачають багато гомунітарних товарів та різні технічні прилади. Деякі Китайські компанії як AliExpress взагалі винано спонсором тероризму, за інтенсивну допомогу армії РФ. Наша ж армія тримається фактично за рахунок цивільного населення, це як платники податків, так і волонтери. Також не аби який внесок докладає фінансова допомога країн заходу, на якій зараз тримається ураїнська економіка.

 

Питання: Міжнародній аудиторії не достатньо відомо про виклики і труднощі, з якими стикаються солдати на передовій. Що б Ви хотіли, щоб люди знали?

 

В першу чергу це порушення психіки. Постійний тиск та страх дають за себе знати. Багато хто не витримує, але це закономірне явище війни. Також є величезні проблеми з нестачою медикаментів та медичних засобів. Турнікети потрібні постійно і по декілька на одного бійця. Вони дуже швидко розходяться. Якісні турнікети не дешеві, але це рятує життя людинию. Травми на фронті щоденні і вони рятують життя наших героїв.

 

Питання: Чи маєте ви доступ до сучасної військової техніки? І чи забезпечені ви продуктами харчування належним чином?

 

Там де я перебуваю на службі точно нема проблем з продовольством. Чув що у іниших бригадах існує корупція на продовольство. Але особисто такого не бачив. А от що до сучасної техніки не можна відповісти однозначно. Стрілкова зброя у переважної більшостіз часів СРСР. Якщо і є у когось зброя нового зразка, це скоріш за все війська спецпризначення, ГУР або СБУ. Що до військової техіники приблизно так само. Хоч допомога від країн заходу дійсно відправляє нам якісні танки, артилерію та інше, але із-за величезного скупчення ворога по лінії фронту цього не достатньо. Маю також подякувати волонтерам за допомогу у засобах радіозв'язку, який ворогу прослуховувати важко. Також стосується питання засобів телекомунікації. Хоч воно в нас і сучасне, але це все за рахунок цивільного населення та зборів волонтерів.

 

Питання: Які відносини між підрозділами територіальної оборони та загальновійськовим керівництвом?

 

Сили територіальної ооборони фактично є частиною загальних військ. ТрО доволі часто виконує ті ж самі функції що і інші підрозділи. Тому зараз немає різниці між ЗСУ та ТрО.

 

Питання: Наскільки популярним є Зеленський серед солдатів і чи відбулися зміни в його популярності з початку війни?

 

Зеленський має досі доволі велику підтримку від населення України, але багато хто розчаровані у його діях. Військові, їх родичі та близькі відчули його дії на самих собі. Дії влади, або ж її бездіяльнність дуже сильно вдарила по репутації президента. Все більше і більше військових буквально ненавидять Зеленського та всіх його прибічників. Також треба додати до цього і волонтерів, які ніколи не пробачать "зеленій" владі рішень які нашкодили волонтерській діяльності.

 

Питання: Виходячи з вашого досвіду служби в українській армії, які основні (політичні) вимоги повинні висунути революціонери в Україні, якщо ви можете висловити їх коротко?

 

Було б непогано (в першу чергу) продумати механізми захисту цивільного населення які постраждали від нападу агресора. Багато українців покинули країну користуючись допомогою для біженців, і значна частина з них точно не повернеться. І виїджали в першу чергу не від війни так такої. А через відсутність даху над голової, роботи та допомоги від держави. Також ще більше загострились трудові відносини. В Україні вони завжди були проблемними, але війна посилила і так великі труднощі. Роботодавці користуючись аргументом "а у нас війна" змушують працювати понаднормовано, а іноді і без вихідних.

 

Впровадити більш жорстокі покарання за корупцію та неможливісь вийти під заставу, хоча заставу можна залишити, але у трикратному розмірі від суми що вкрадена або ж суми хабаря.

 

Треба перестати вставляти палки в колеса волонтерам, спростити механізми їх роботи. Це сильно пришвидчить перемогу. Як на мене саме українські волонтери зараз яскравий приклад колективної роботи що тримає країну.

 

Насправді перелік необхідних заходів для України можна перераховувати безкінечно. Оскільки проблем насправді багато. Але це основні проблеми що сильно заважають перемозі.

 

Питання: Як революційний соціаліст у буржуазній армії, як ваш політичний світогляд впливає на ваші дії як солдата

 

Доволі важке запитання насправді.

 

Будь які зміни у демократичному напрямку в Україні вже доволі революційні

 

а) Якби це була соціалістична армія, все б залежало суто від командування та відносин між командирами та підлеглими. Але була б головна відмінність, життя підрозділу залежало б суто від рішень самого підрозділу, а не від якихось забаганок вищого командування. Говорити зараз про те якою б була соціалістична армія взагалі важко. Оскільки це залежить не лише від устрою соціалістичних збройних сил, а від економічної бази та те як влаштована робота державних адміністрацій. Тому насправді це дуже велике і комплексне питання, на яке зараз не можливо дати відповідь.

 

b) називати Збройні сили України на даний момент буржуазними це не те щоб не точне визначення, навіть трохи образливе. ЗСУ тримаються бо більшій мірі як раз за рахунок спільної роботи громадян України та допомоги платників податків інших країн. Ми народна армія. Серед нас лише одиниці є професійними солдатами. Ми воюємо не за буржуазну верхівку. Якби це була буржуазна армія, не було б таких черг у органах ТЦК на початку вторгнення. Ніхто тоді про грошове забезпечення і не думав. Це був виклик захистити не просто свою хатину, а врятувати всіх. Тому зараз війська України це навпаки, приклад зародження нового типу народної соціалістичної армії.

 

 

 

Dmitry Petrov: An Anti-Imperialist Fighter Has Fallen

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/.

 

Dmitry Petrov: ha caído un luchador antiimperialista

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/

 

Dmitry Petrov : mort d'un combattant anti-impérialiste

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 !

 

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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/.

Dmitry Petrov: a morte de um combatente anti-imperialista

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!

 

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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/.

Dmitry Petrov: la morte di un combattente antimperialista

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!

 

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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/.

 

Казахстан: социалистический подход к инфраструктурному кризису

 

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.

 

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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

 

 

 

Compulsory Vaccination in France: The Apartheid System Begins!

 

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.

 

 

 

From Cuba: a description of the protests

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.

 

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

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.

 

 

 



[1] Black in South Africa continues to be a reference to the collective of the Apartheid era population classification along the social category races: African (Indigenous Africans including the descendants of non-Bantu Africans who had been experienced cultural genocide and assimilation into the socio-racial category – Coloured; Indians the majority of whom are descendants of indentured labourers imported into British Natal from the 1860s and Coloured that includes people of mixed heritage and those who were brought to the Dutch Colonised Cape as slaves).

[3] tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/unemployment-rate; https://knoema.com/atlas/South-Africa/Unemployment-rate

[5] Statistics South Africa

[7] This is based on hourly rates of R21, 69 and R19, 08 respectively; for a 160 work month. www.labour .gov.za

[8] This is the minimum amount to purchase the minimum required daily energy intake. www.timeslive 2019-08-06

[9] World Inequality Database.

 

“It’s about our Identity!”

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 isqā an-niām” ("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!

 

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

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.

 

 

 

 

 

GOVERNANÇA GLOBAL DO CAPITAL FINANCEIRO: O “IMPÉRIO DO BIG MONEY”, ACIMA DO IMPERIALISMO E DOS ESTADOS NACIONAIS, FOI O ELEMENTO QUE POSSIBILITOU A DECRETAÇÃO DA PANDEMIA E CONFINAMENTO EM TODO MUNDO

 

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!