Socialist World Issue 2 - October 2019

Read more from Socialist Alternative.

If you like what you read in Socialist World check out our more developed material on a range of topics including the fight for black liberation, the emerging women’s movement, the privatization of education, and much more.

Find these and more on www.socialistalternative.org PUBLISHED BY: Socialist Alternative EDITOR: Tom Crean EDITORIAL BOARD: George Brown, Eljeer Hawkins,

Joshua Koritz, Ty Moore, Keely Mullen, Kailyn Nicholson, Calvin Priest, Tony Wilsdon

/SocialistAlternativeUSA

www.socialistalternative.org

editors@socialistalternative.org

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Contents

p. 5

feature

15

Continuing the Fight for International Socialism

inside

2 5

p. 10

Editorial and Argentina Update Climate Catastrophe and the Case for a Planned Economy

10 22 Brexit 1989: Revolutionary with 27 Movement Counter-Revolutionary Global Recession Looming

Consequences

review

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People’s Republic of Walmart

p. 15

p. 27

Editorial

A World in Turmoil

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n front of you is the second issue of Socialist World, a new journal produced by Socialist Alternative. This issue explores key events which have helped create the world we live in now including the collapse of Stalinism and the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism beginning in 2008. The 2010s were a period of revolution and counter revolution particularly in the Middle East and Southern Europe. It is clear that the 2020s are going to be even more stormy. This issue takes up the key features of the looming economic crisis and looks at the Brexit crisis which is an example of how the capitalists have lost control of the political process. We show how the climate crisis and the growing, complex logistics networks at Amazon and Wal-Mart point to the necessity and possibility of socialist planning. Most importantly we elaborate the need for building the international socialist movement.

Looking back, thirty years ago, the collapse of the “Soviet bloc” led to enormous triumphalism by the representatives of capitalism including philosopher Francis Fukuyama who talked about the “end of history.” As Rob Jones explains on p. 27, 1989 was far more contradictory than the capitalist commentators presented. Ordinary people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were largely interested in maintaining a planned economy but with real democracy and an end to bureaucratic rule.

Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, it is capitalism that faces a deepening economic, social, and political crisis. The resistance from workers and youth internationally is growing on many fronts.

Fueling this resistance is fact that the fruits of the “recovery” since the Great Recession has gone to the billionaires and corporations. Now, the slowdown of the world economy (see p. 10), points clearly toward recession, including in the United States.

This crisis is triggered by Trump’s trade war with China but there are deeper causes. In fact, none of the issues that caused an almost complete meltdown of the economy ten years ago have been solved. If anything, capitalist governments are now less ready for the next crisis.

On top of that, the evidence of impending climate catastrophe is inciting anger, particularly among the global youth

who spearheaded the climate strikes of September 20 and 27. Again the capitalist elite are completely exposed,

demonstrating no capacity to organize the type of coordinated global response necessary to rapidly begin the transition to an economy based on renewable energy. As Keely Mullen explains on page 5 even basic steps will require the pressure of a mass movement which brings young people together with workers who have the power to shut the economy down. A real solution requires global socialist planning but this is only possible with the full democratic participation of working people at every lev-

el.

International Struggle

It is striking how ordinary people in country after country are fighting back against corrupt regimes and endless austerity even in advance of the full impact of the economic crisis. In Ecuador, a movement centered on indigenous people demanded the withdrawal of an austerity package being imposed in return for loans from the IMF. After ten days of protests - which drove the president from the capital - they succeeded in getting the austerity package, including the ending of a fuel price subsidy, withdrawn.

In Argentina, the economy is already in a deep recession and upcoming elections are likely to see a decisive rejection of neoliberal candidates. This issue contains a statement from the Committee for a Workers International, with which Socialist Alternative in the U.S. is in solidarity, supporting the electoral slate of socialist organizations in these elections.

In Haiti, there have been weeks of protests against a corrupt regime backed by the U.S. and the European Union. In Iraq young protesters demanding jobs and an end to corruption were attacked by the military who shot over 100 dead. In Indonesia, there were mass youth-centered protests against the withdrawal of anti-corruption legislation and also demanding that the companies setting fires in the rainforest be brought to account and that anti-LGBTQ legislation be withdrawn. The heroic struggle in Hong Kong continues. This is by no mean a complete list.

In the U.S., we have also seen dramatic developments. In 2018, more workers went on strike than in any year since 1986. Now teachers in Chicago are going on strike demanding lower class size and more resources for support staff. The UAW strike at General Motors involving 49,000 workers, is the longest auto strike in the U.S. in 50 years. Workers on the picket lines see this as an opportunity to reverse concessions made by the union leadership over many years.

As we go to press, a tentative agreement has been reached between GM and the UAW and it is still unclear as to how much workers have gained. A victory for the auto workers would have a huge impact but a defeat would cut across the fragile momentum of this strike wave. In reality, we are only at the beginning of the rebuilding of a fighting labor movement in the U.S. which could be temporarily cut across by a recession but which also reflects deeper processes.

Political Crisis

This issue of Socialist World focuses heavily on the international situation and does not get into the many important components of American politics. However we felt it was important to highlight some of those developments in this introduction.

Editorial The loss of legitimacy of capitalist institutions seen around the world especially since 2008 is also undermining the U.S. two-party system. As we have said many times both Trump and Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 in different ways reflected the rejection of the political establishment. Trump’s dangerously reactionary and increasingly unstable regime is intensely opposed by tens of millions but he has succeeded in capturing the Republican Party with an economic nationalist agenda.

On the other side we have seen the further development of a new left in the U.S. which at the moment remains largely within the parameters of the Democratic Party. This includes the remarkable ascendancy of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the massive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America.

While the likelihood of Trump being impeached grows by the day, we need to note the process taking place in the Democratic presidential primary. The Democratic establishment’s favored candidate, Joe Biden, is sinking fast. We can’t exclude that they will make a concerted effort to push someone else if Biden really begins to flail but it may soon be too late. This could open a remarkable situation in which Elizabeth Warren and Sanders are the two frontrunners. This reflects the dramatic shift to the left in the base of the Democratic Party, even since 2016.

Warren focuses on “accountable capitalism.” She has received a mixed reaction from the ruling class but the corporate establishment may be forced to back her to block Bernie. Sanders speaks directly to working class people. He says gains won’t be won without a mass movement and that if elected he will be the “organizer in chief.” Sanders is running a more radical campaign than in 2016 and is getting a big boost with the endorsement of AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.

Of course, Sanders is not challenging the dominance of capital but rather arguing for pro-working class reforms. However,

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the attitude of the ruling class is unequivocal: they would prefer a second term for Trump than a Sanders presidency. That’s because a Sanders victory would massively raise the expectations of working people.

Another political battle that has national and international implications is happening in Seattle. Jeff Bezos and Amazon are spending millions on local races. Their key aim is to defeat socialist councilmember Kshama Sawant. The Chamber of Commerce and Amazon pursue their class interests by sparing no expense to remove the councilmember who helped lead the fight for the first citywide $15 minimum wage and led the fight for the “Amazon tax” to make big business to pay for affordable housing. We must be crystal clear where our class interest lies in doing everything possible to hold onto every gain we have made and to use this election to help build a wider unity of the left.

What is needed here and internationally are fighting organizations of our class in the workplaces, in our communities and on the electoral plane. We need broad organizations that unite as many people as possible around a basic fighting program. That’s why we urge turning Sanders’ campaign into the beginnings of a new party with a membership structures and democratically accountable leadership.

But as socialists we also see the paramount need for building an international organization with a clear revolutionary program.

The CWI has recently gone through a serious internal crisis that has helped to clarify our key tasks in this period. As Danny Byrne explains on p. 15, despite some losses, we are emerging stronger politically and with enormous optimism about our potential to grow and play a key role in the struggles that are opening up across the world. J Read more on SocialistAlternative.org and WorldSocialist.net.

Build a Socialist Alternative for the Struggles to Come!

Argentina Elections: Vote for “FIT-Unidad” Declaration from the CWI Provisional Committee Latin America is experiencing a deepening of its economic, political, and social crisis. A new phase of resistance and struggle against the attacks of imperialism, big capital and its local lackeys has begun in the region.

The indigenous, popular, and workers’ uprising in Ecuador, which forced the government of Lenín Moreno to retreat from the implementation of the plans imposed by the IMF, is a clear example of the seriousness of the crisis, the willingness to fight, and the strength of the oppressed and exploited in the region.

Crises and massive mobilizations have taken place in countries

such as Haiti, Honduras, and many others, in addition to the example of Puerto Rico. This should deepen in the next period.

In this scenario, the October 27 elections in Argentina and the examples of popular and workers’ resistance to the attacks imposed by the government of Mauricio Macri are of fundamental importance. All conscious workers and the international socialist left must assume a clear position on these processes.

The seriousness of the crisis in this key country in the region could have a strong impact on the Latin American and international scenario. The Argentinian crisis is part of the international crisis of capitalism, but it is also a potential trigger for new crises beyond its borders.

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Macri’s agreement with the IMF last year for a $56 billion mega loan has not alleviated the situation. The loans already granted have only filled the pockets of the speculators and creditors of the debt at the expense of the poor and working people.

But the neoliberal policies implemented by Macri with the direct interference of the IMF in government decisions, only served to deepen the economic and social crisis.

The cocktail of recession and high inflation has enormous social costs. Unemployment, precarious jobs, falling family income, worsening living conditions are the hallmarks of the country after almost four years of Macri administration. There is 35.4% of the population officially below the poverty line. This represents 8% more than a year ago. There are more than 15 million people (25.4% of families) who cannot pay for basic food.

Poverty affects 51% of children in Argentina.

This scenario is very similar to the one that, in December 2001, resulted in the social explosion of the “Argentinazo,” when the then president Fernando De La Rua had to resign and flee in a helicopter from the Casa Rosada which was surrounded by demonstrators.

Argentina is now the world’s largest debtor to the IMF. It is symptomatic that the second place on this list is precisely Ecuador, a country that has just seen the popular, indigenous, and workers’ uprising detonated exactly by the neoliberal adjustment policies imposed by this international organization.

In the case of Argentina, many important struggles have already taken place, including five general strikes during the Macri administration and the great confrontation of December 2017 in front of Congress in the struggle against the counter-reform of social security. The women’s movement – in both Ni Una Menos and the powerful abortion rights movement has also been an inspiration internationally. The public sector workers’ strike in Chubut, Argentina’s Patagonia, had national repercussions and shows the potential for generalizing the struggles.

Macri Headed for Defeat

From an electoral point of view, the crisis has made Macri’s reelection chances extremely unlikely. His decisive primary elections defeat in August, heralds an even worse result on October 27.

Macri came to power in the December 2015 elections, building an image of a modern manager, detached from the supposedly ideological concerns of his opponents in “Kirchnerism,” the Peronist wing of then-president Cristina Kirchner.

His electoral victory represented the return of the explicit neoliberal right to power after many years of Peronist governments that opted for class conciliation, often having to make concessions to workers.

Macri’s arrival in power was a less traumatic process than the one that took place in Brazil, for example. In this neighboring country, the explicit neoliberal right regained full control of the government through an institutional coup in 2016 and had to turn to Bolsonaro, an extreme-right candidate with proto-fascist characteristics, in the 2018 elections.

The absolute fiasco of Macri’s administration and its probable coming electoral fiasco represent a serious defeat for the new

right wing that came to power in several countries in Latin, replacing worn-out center-left governments that ruled on the basis of class conciliation and that never broke with capitalism.

Fernandez-Fernandez Offer No Real Alternative

It is understandable that millions of Argentinian workers today see the goal of defeating Macri in the elections as their priority. To this end, a vote for the list that brings together Alberto Fernandez and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner seems to many people to be the easiest way forward.

But the Fernandez-Fernandez slate does not represent an effective break with Macri’s policies and does not offer a real way out of the crisis from the point of view of the workers and the poor.

Fernandez insists on the policy of conciliation and social pacts involving workers and the bourgeoisie, and reaffirmed that he will continue to maintain the agreement with the IMF. Moreover, in the coming years, Argentina will not exist in the international scenario that favoured economic growth after the 2001 default, largely based on the boom in commodities and debt renegotiation. The idea that these supposed years of economic growth and relative stability will return has no basis in reality.

The broad unity of action and struggle against Macri’s attacks and any attack on workers does not eliminate the need to build an independent, socialist and mass left-wing political project.

In these Argentinian elections, the fundamental task is the accumulation of forces for the struggles that will inevitably come and be decisive. A vote for the candidates of the Frente de Izquierda y de los Trabajadores – Unidad (FIT-U) is, in our opinion, part of this process of accumulation of forces for the clashes that will come. The more votes the presidential slate of Nicolás del Caño and Romina del Plá obtain and the more members of the FIT-U who are elected, the better for the subsequent struggles.

The FIT-Unidad defends the class independence of workers and does not stimulate illusions in class conciliation. By defending the need to break with the IMF and suspend payment of the debt so that popular demands can be met, they point in the right direction.

We also see as positive the efforts to expand the FIT (previously composed of PTS, PO and IS) to other sectors of the left, such as the MST, and groups of popular and social fighters. We understand, however, that the task of building a mass political reference of the socialist left is still a task to be accomplished by the left and the workers’ movement in Argentina.

This task will have to be carried out in the social struggles within the framework of the crisis that is deepening. The concrete experience of broad sectors of the masses with the fiasco of the right in power and with the limits of Kirchnerism can make way for this alternative of the left. It is necessary to rise to this challenge and prepare for it. The Committee for a Workers International is at the service of this struggle right now!

For more about the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) see our article on page 15. We salute all workers and youth in struggle in Argentina and invite all to read our analysis and commentary on worldsocialist.net. J

Workers Movement

Smoke emanating from the forest fires in the Amazon basin in Northwest Brazil.

Climate Catastrophe and the Case for a Planned Economy Keely Mullen

T

he 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 22 years, and rising temperatures are just one symptom of the climate catastrophe that we are now staring down the barrel of.

Eight percent of Earth’s species are threatened with extinction.

The Amazon rainforest is in flames. The state of Louisiana loses a football field worth of land every 45 minutes due to rising sea levels. Wildfires are ravaging the western U.S., and hurricanes have pummeled the Southeastern coast.

Humanity is at a crossroads. Report after report warns that, unless decisive action is taken to reduce carbon emissions, we risk triggering a series of “tipping points” after which the effects on the environment cannot be reversed. A report from Columbia Engineering projects that the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide could begin to decline in 2060. Our built-in safety net against excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is eroding, dramatically accelerating the worst effects of climate change.

Another of these tipping points is melting polar ice. The ice at the poles acts as a reflector that sends some of the sun’s rays back into space and cools the planet. When this ice melts, the darker water beneath it is revealed, absorbing substantially more heat than the ice did and setting off a feedback loop of greater and greater warming. Another danger is the melting of the existing layers of permafrost in the Arctic, which currently keep in huge amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. If the permafrost melts, that methane — which has a far more serious warming effect than carbon dioxide — will be released into the

atmosphere.

At risk with the worsening climate crisis is not just our comfort, but access to the earth’s collective resources, including water, land, and clean air. This in turn risks displacing millions of people, making them into climate refugees.

Of all the effects of climate change, climate scientists have expressed particular concern about how it impacts Earth’s water cycle. Rising temperatures have led to more water vapor being held in the atmosphere, which has in turn made water availability very difficult to predict. This can lead to both more intense rainstorms and more severe droughts.

While tropical storms, hurricanes, and monsoonal rain storms are part of normal weather patterns in the U.S., the increased frequency and severity of these events means more intense flooding, which poses a threat to overall water quality. This is because flood water picks up sewage, pesticides, motor oil, industrial wastewater, and other contaminants and delivers them straight into our waterways. In 2014, Hurricane Sandy flooded 10 out of New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment plants, causing them to release partially treated or untreated sewage into local waterways.

Responsibility Lies with Corporations

When Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, it was groundbreaking, explaining in simple language the science behind global warming and the danger it posed to humanity. This movie opened up a real conversation given that for decades ma-

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jor corporations, especially the big energy companies, engaged in a determined campaign to hide the facts about climate change in order to prevent any disruption to their enormously profitable business. This criminal campaign of theirs has no doubt already led to the deaths of thousands.

Al Gore’s conclusion was that the key to slowing or reversing the effects of climate change rested on the shoulders of individuals and their consumer choices. Change your light bulbs, take shorter showers, get a hybrid car, don’t use plastic straws. While some of these changes to our daily consumption could have an impact, even if everyone in the U.S. followed every suggestion in An Inconvenient Truth, U.S. carbon emissions would only fall by 22%! The scientific consensus is that it needs to be reduced by 75% globally. This poses the question, who are the real drivers of the climate crisis and how do we take them on?

Reports have found that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988, most of those being coal, oil, and gas-producing companies like Exxon, Shell, and BP. It is not a coincidence or an accident that these corporations are the major drivers of global warming. It is inherent in the logic of capitalism that, in order to remain viable, companies have to maximize profit. This means looking for any corners that can be cut, any expenses that can be avoided, and any safety measures that can be bypassed.

The horrific Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 emptied 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was confirmed by a White House commission that, in the lead up to the explosion, BP, Transocean, and Halliburton made a series of decisions in an effort to cut costs that ultimately caused the blow-out and the death of 11 workers. This White House commission itself confirmed that this was likely to happen again due to “industry complacency.” In other words, this will likely happen again because the cost of cleaning up a disaster is nothing compared to the profits made by the business model that led to the disaster in the first place. In the capitalist framework, disasters like this are simply a normal “cost of doing business.”

A variety of different policy initiatives have been proposed to address this crisis, most of which have fallen laughably short of what is needed. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND) goes the furthest, calling for a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy, an overhaul of transportation systems, and for progressive taxation. Winning the GND would represent a huge step forward in moving toward a sustainable society, but where it falls short is in actually dealing with the structural power of the energy sector. If the energy sector remains in private hands, the owners will work overtime to undermine the GND, which would effectively bring the value of their unexploited reserves, worth hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars, to zero. The conflicting goals of business leaders, whose objective is to make a profit, and the forces trying to implement the GND will make a rapid transition to renewable energy nearly impossible.

The Case for Public Ownership

It is certainly not ruled out that mass pressure could lead to steps that begin the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy even under capitalism. However, without bringing important sectors of the economy, beginning with the energy sector, into public ownership, that transition would be slow-moving and largely disorganized. In order to do what is needed to radically change course and avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to move onto war footing. This means a rapid and organized approach to take the energy sector into public ownership and retool it on a sustainable basis.

Carrying out a rapid transition away from fossil fuels – even with a publicly owned energy sector – would also require bringing other sectors of the economy into public ownership. Taking over important parts of the manufacturing sector would allow for rapid expansion of electric cars and public transport. Beyond that, we need the banks in public hands in order to assist ordinary people and small businesses in making the transition to energy efficient homes and shops. Such profound change points toward a complete reorganization of production on a socialist basis, with a democratically planned economy.

Historically, capitalism unleashed human productivity on a massive scale. However, the defining features of capitalism – private ownership and the nation state – have now become a fetter to the further development of our economy and society.

This is evident with the series of international agreements on the climate, which have had very little effect because of the unwillingness of competing nation states to make concessions that could benefit their rivals.

Right now, all the major decisions about how to deploy society’s resources are made by a select few extremely wealthy business leaders. The decisions are made on the basis of whatever they believe will bring in the highest rate of profit. This often means using completely inefficient methods to produce things.

For example, when a car is being assembled, almost every single component part will travel to Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. over and over before the parts come together to form a car. The metal base of a steering wheel that’s produced in the U.S. is sent to Mexico to get covered and stitched up before being sent back to the U.S. This is entirely so the company can find the cheapest supplies and labor to make their final product.

Another example of inefficient and wasteful production under capitalism comes from the so called “fast fashion” industry.

The fashion industry is the second-largest polluter in the world.

Creating trends that change so quickly that no one can keep up ensures that people will continue to buy cheap, disposable clothing — dump those clothes — and then buy more. Eighty billion garments are mass-produced each year, almost exclusively using water-guzzling but cheap textiles, like cotton. In order to get the right color for a pair of jeans, 2,866 gallons of water are used!

Without bringing important sectors of the economy into public ownership, a transition away from fossil fuels would be slow-moving and largely disorganized.

Environment While these may be shocking examples of waste and complete innovation-starvation, this is typical of the way society is organized under capitalism. So the question is, what’s the alternative? How can we organize society more efficiently and in the interests of people and the planet rather than profit?

Planned System Needed

We need a democratically planned economy where the top 500 corporations are brought into public ownership and decisions about how a given industry is run are made with the direct input of workers in the industry as well as consumers. The climate crisis may be the most existential crisis humanity faces, but capitalism inevitably produces massive inequality, poverty, and structural racism. To address all these questions requires a society where key economic decisions are democratically made by the masses of people.

Bringing a company or economic sector into public ownership means taking both its material resources – factories, tools, distribution networks, technologies, infrastructure – and its existing financial reserves out of the hands of wealthy investors and into the hands of society as a whole. But we need to go further than this. Democratic councils of workers should be formed at the workplace level who elect representatives to company- or industry-wide councils. These councils would have a direct role in management, reflecting the expertise of the workers in that industry who are intimately familiar with how it operates, what it produces, and what can be improved.

These councils would not aim to maximize the profitability of their given industry, but rather to maximize the ability of that in-

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dustry to meet the needs of society. This points towards a democratically planned economy, where workplace and neighborhood councils would make local decisions and similar elected and accountable councils would plan at a national level. In our view this is not a question of bringing every enterprise into public ownership, but rather the key sectors which are currently small planned economies anyway (see review of People’s Republic of Walmart, p.----) but where planning is subordinated to profit. As in the early years after the Russian Revolution, before Stalinism, anyone elected to a workers’ council should make no more money than the average worker in that industry and would be subject to immediate recall.

This transition would lead immediately lead to a significant improvement in the lives of the vast majority of people because there would be no reason to keep wages down, workweeks unnecessarily long, or social services starved.

The transition to a planned economy may well start in one country, but, in order for it to succeed, it will need to spread internationally. We live in a globally integrated economy thanks to capitalism, but to take full advantage of this requires global socialist planning. Under a democratically planned economy, international structures would need to be established to facilitate the maximum coordination of workers’ councils in different industries across borders.

As was detailed earlier, most major industries under capitalism are completely held back by the constant competitive pressure to cut costs. Bosses will go to tremendous lengths in order to ensure they’re getting the cheapest goods and labor. The task of democratically elected councils in overseeing workplaces and industries would be to identify where things can be made

Amazon workers walked off the job on September 20th, 2019 in solidarity with the climate strikes happening around the world.

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more efficient and more environmentally sustainable. For example, right now, the vast logistics and supply-chain networks at Amazon and Walmart are completely divorced from one another because the two companies are in direct competition. When this competition is eliminated, these incredibly useful networks can be combined and retooled for maximum benefit to workers and consumers. The just-in-time model adopted by Amazon and other major retailers, where a product can be ordered and delivered in a matter of days, could be of tremendous use to society if separated from the profit motive. Walmart’s vast enterprise is itself planned – with coordination at all levels of the supply chain.

This lays the basis for a relatively painless transition to a cooperative, democratically planned enterprise.

So, how does all of this connect to the existential threat of climate change, and how could a planned economy help?

improve the standard of living for many people, it would also be a leap forward in transforming society on a green basis.

A society freed from the constraints of profit could take up a number of ground-breaking projects to change society: creating energy-efficient housing designs with more effective insulation, researching direct air-capture stations to clean and re-emit currently polluted air, and developing electrified roads to charge electric vehicles as they drive.

The solution to this crisis will not be handed down from on high; it will not be innovated by Elon Musk; it will not come as a result of simply voting every four years. Retooling society on a truly sustainable basis and ensuring a future for humanity rests on ending the anarchic and chaotic rule of capitalism and replacing it with a truly democratic planned economy.

Planning a Green Future

Winning revolutionary change and transforming our society on a socialist basis will require mounting a historic challenge against the super-rich who currently dominate our society. There are very exciting signs in the U.S. and internationally of the potential to develop that challenge. From the historic teachers strikes that have taken place in the past year and a half, which could spread into other sectors, to the growing youth climate movement, which recently held an international day of action on September 20 of this year.

It is the united and organized strength of working and young people that can usher in socialist change. A critical step in this process will be the building of our own mass political party with a clear socialist program and determined leadership. Since 2015 we’ve emphasized the role that Bernie Sanders – and now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – could play in that process by using their huge base of support for progressive, working-class politics and launching a new mass party.

We need to continue building and strengthening the organizations of the working class in preparation for the decisive struggles ahead. This means building fighting unions in our workplaces that are well organized, truly democratic, have the active participation of all workers, and are willing to do whatever it takes to defend against attacks from our bosses. The unions need to link up with the vibrant social movements currently taking place against climate change, and the growing fightback against sexism and racism, and point the way forward on a working-class basis.

In order to take the leaps necessary to save the planet from the ruin of profit we need to fundamentally break with capitalism and fight for the socialist transformation of society on the basis of true innovation, cooperation, and equality. J

Capitalism produces significant innovations. However, these are subordinated to what is profitable, not necessarily what is needed to defend and improve the lives of Earth’s inhabitants.

On the basis of a democratically planned economy, innovation can be unleashed in the interests of ordinary people and the climate. We can invest in a genuine transformation of major industries on a sustainable basis. We can invest in the retraining of millions of workers in currently polluting industries and create millions of good-paying union jobs harnessing renewable energy through solar, wind, and wave technology. There will no doubt be new forms of renewable energy that will be discovered, and perfecting the technology to harness this energy will require the training of more scientists and engineers as well as moving scientists currently working on weapons development to far more useful work.

In order to reverse some of the worst effects of the climate crisis, a global reforestation project would need to be taken up.

Restocking forests by planting millions of native trees would dramatically reduce pollution in the air and would rebuild natural habitats and ecosystems that have been lost to deforestation.

Alongside this, there will need to be a significant reorganization of global agriculture, to reduce the land given over to cattle ranches, as well as further research to develop healthy alternatives to meat.

Public transportation in most major cities is completely eroding. Meanwhile, the average American spends the equivalent of 19 full days a year stuck in traffic on their way to work. While people should have the choice to own and use their own vehicles, massively expanding public transit and making it entirely electric would allow many more people to travel faster and more easily than driving. Beyond local public transit, long-distance trains need to be expanded as well. High-speed electric trains could provide a cheaper and far less environmentally damaging alternative to air travel.

Expanding sustainable public transportation would not only

What Next?

Environment

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Students at the September 20 climate strike in NYC.

On the Ground at the Climate Strike Grace Fors

O

n Friday, September 20, over seven million people in 164 countries took part in the Climate Strike, the largest mobilization for the environment in history. The movement has exploded in the past year following increasingly dire reports from the IPCC and escalating youth involvement. The first global day of action on March 15 drew 1.6 million, and in just a few months participation more than tripled for the Climate Strike.

Greta Thunberg has risen to international prominence through the school strike movement and her fiery speeches have galvanized a whole generation. Equal credit is due to the thousands of young people who have formed the backbone of the movement on the ground, mobilizing their classmates and carrying out relentless agitation. By flyering public transportation, organizing in schools, and using social media to get the word out they have built up the numbers to wield an enormous impact.

Inheriting an existential crisis, this generation of climate activists are taking up a systemic analysis. They know protest alone is not enough and are ready for bold action. There is a strong mood to hold accountable the 100 corporations responsible for 71% of emissions. On the protests, Socialist Alternative encountered a lot of openness to our demand to take them into democratic public ownership, run by elected bodies of workers and civilians, not wealthy executives.

While today’s youth have a particular material stake in reversing the crisis, a livable planet is in the interest of workers all over the world. The working class has the most to lose

from environmental destruction, and the most to gain from the millions of jobs created in the course of transitioning to renewable energy, building eco-friendly mass transit, and restoring communities and ecosystems ravaged by natural disasters.

Unions have started to take up this issue. 350.org reports 73 unions internationally endorsed the strike, including Public Services International and the 200-million strong International Trade Unions Congress. U.S. unions such as SEIU and the American Federation of Teachers supported the strikes, and many unions had contingents at the demonstrations. 1,000 workers at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters walked off the job in solidarity with the climate strikes providing a stunning example of what is needed. Amazon responded with new targets for transition to renewables and carbon neutrality, proving the effectiveness of workplace action to win concrete victories.

While endorsements from unions represent a major step forward for the climate strikes, greater solidarity and coordination is needed between the youth movement and the broader working class. With the momentum of the developing strike wave in the U.S., there is great potential for unions to continue to step up involvement in the climate strikes. Organized working-class participation will be the single most decisive factor in winning the demands of the climate strikes.

The Climate Strike captured the seething anger of millions who will not back down until something is done. This moment can’t be allowed to dissipate, but must be escalated until we see with our own eyes a real transformation. Workers and youth united have the power to build a socialist alternative that guarantees a livable planet for future generations. J

The IMF and World Bank now estimate that 90% of the world economy is experiencing a slowdown.

Global Recession Looming Tom Crean “The way our economic and political systems work must change, or they will perish” (Martin Wolff, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, 9/18/19).

T

en years after the Great Recession of 2008-9 which had catastrophic consequences for tens of millions, it is becoming increasingly evident that the world economy is entering another serious crisis.

The new head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, recently declared, “The global economy is now in a synchronized slowdown,” (Wall Street Journal, 10/8/19). The IMF and World Bank now estimate that 90% of the world economy is experiencing a slowdown compared to 75% experiencing accelerating growth just two years ago. This includes the massive Chinese economy whose rate of growth has slowed to the lowest level in 25 years and may well be significantly below the officially reported numbers. Germany, the key industrial power in Europe, is teetering on the edge of a recession. Some countries, like Argentina and Turkey, are facing an even sharper crisis. Global trade is expanding at its lowest rate since 2009.

The main trigger for this downturn is the trade war between the U.S. and China, which reflects a deeper conflict between rising Chinese capitalism and a weakened but still dominant U.S. imperialism. But trying to reduce this crisis to Trump’s imposition of tariffs would be false. There are deeper causes which flow from the increasingly parasitical character of capitalism in this period.

While the U.S. economy continues to grow, it is also slowing down. The latest reports indicate that manufacturing, agriculture and shipping, accounting for one-fifth of the U.S. economy, are already in recession (Paul Krugman, New York Times, 10/4/19).

While consumer spending which accounts for two thirds of economic activity continues to grow, this will not continue if there are significant layoffs in manufacturing and other sectors directly affected by the trade war.

The Crisis Last Time

To understand the looming crisis it is worth reminding ourselves of how the Great Recession unfolded since it is a key part of the context of current developments.

The crisis last time actually began in 2007 with the increasing problems in the massive global derivatives market due to finan-

Economy 11 cial institutions loading up on repackaged “sub prime” loans in the housing sector. Once this “bubble” of drastically inflated assets imploded, other bubbles began bursting including overvalued stocks and shares and real estate as a whole.

A key moment was the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank in September 2008 due to the amount of sub prime loan assets they were holding. This caused the titans of Wall Street to convene a meeting lasting late into the night as panic spread that the collapse of a bank of Lehman’s size could trigger a more general collapse in the banking sector. Their fear was absolutely warranted. The Bear Stearns investment bank had already collapsed.

Lehman in turn was followed by AIG, the world’s largest insurance bank. In each case the question was posed: are the banks “too big to fail?” The American government, reflecting the interests of the capitalist class, chose to bail out Bear Stearns, AIG, and eventually the banking sector as a whole. The total cost of the bailout is a matter of dispute but, according to an article in Forbes in 2015, at that point $4.6 trillion had been paid out.

In one sense it’s true that bailing out the banks prevented a complete collapse, but it was done at the expense of working-class people who received no bailout as they lost their jobs and homes.

In reality it was the bailout of a failed system.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8.8 million people in the U.S. lost their jobs during the Great Recession. More than nine million families lost their homes due to foreclosure or short sale between 2006 and 2014 (Wall Street Journal, 4/20/15).

The gamblers in the global casino whose activity led to the crisis

were protected at every stage.

As the crisis spread internationally, the pattern was repeated. Serious measures were taken to stabilize the system but it was always working people who paid the price. The people of Spain, Ireland, and especially Greece were forced by the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund to accept massive cuts (“austerity”) in social services in order to ensure the regular payment of their country’s debts to foreign banks. Vicious austerity was not just imposed in poorer countries like Greece but in Britain as well.

In the U.S., whole swathes of the country were left to rot as local industries collapsed. There were massive cuts to education and other social services. Even 10 years later, as the teachers revolt began, it was estimated that staffing levels in k-12 education were 400,000 below where they were in 2008 (The Nation, 4/23/18).

The vast sums of money pumped into the banks by the bailout or Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy have overwhelmingly gone back into the casino rather than into productive investment.

The Deeper Causes

The crisis of 2008-9 exposed the underlying realities of capitalism in this period. The neoliberal era, which began after the collapse of the post World War II expansion in the mid-‘70s, led to the attempt to restore profitability through an increasing role for financial capital (“financialization”); the massive expansion of credit; privatization of large sections of the public sector; and of course globalization. In total all these features reflected a ruling class unable to expand the forces of production or offer a better future, resorting to looting society, particularly by radically reducing the share of wealth going to working people, in order to restore profits, the lifeblood of their system.

The result was a staggering increase in inequality, with three men now owning as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the American population. While Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his family have amassed $160 billion, hundreds of thousands of Americans are homeless and millions more are one lost paycheck away from disaster. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on poverty last year stated that 18.5 million live in “extreme poverty” in the U.S. But even many “middle class” people are in an increasingly precarious position. An estimated 40% of the population would find it difficult to afford a $400 emergency.

For years we have been told that a “recovery” is underway.

The U.S. has had the longest continuous economic expansion The trade conflict between the U.S. and China is the trigger of the new crisis. on record, now standing at 124

12 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 months. But the reality is that the benefits of this expansion have gone overwhelmingly to the capitalist elite. The vast sums of money pumped into the banks by the bailout or Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy have overwhelmingly gone back into the casino rather than into productive investment. The infamous global derivatives market today has a nominal value of $1.2 quadrillion ($1,200,000,000,000,000)! Meanwhile real wages have barely grown.

The inability of capitalism to show a way towards a better life for the mass of people – in fact the reverse – is exacerbated by the increasingly dire threat of climate catastrophe. Large areas of the planet could in the coming decades become uninhabitable. A recent United Nations report warned that “A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming...A particular danger is that food shortages could develop on several continents at once,” (New York Times, 8/8/19). This will also contribute to desperate mass migrations. Drought caused by climate change, which has devastated agriculture in Honduras and Guatemala, has been a direct contributor to the mass migration of people from Central America to the U.S. border this year.

This all points to economic slumps becoming deeper and recoveries ever more shallow as the very basis of the world economy is undermined.

The Crisis This Time It is not yet clear whether the new phase of economic and social crisis will be on the same scale as that of 2008-9. As we go to press it appears that the U.S. and China have negotiated a pause in the trade conflict but it is very hard to see an overall resolution any time soon. And there are other triggers which could worsen

the crisis, including if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal (“No Deal Brexit,” see article on p. 22) or if a war begins in the Middle East leading to a sharp rise in the price of oil.

There are several factors that point to this crisis being even more difficult to address if it worsens. First of all, compared to 2008-9, the ability of central banks to respond effectively has been severely undermined. Ten years ago, interest rates could be cut to encourage businesses to spend. Indeed they were cut in many countries until they were effectively negative interest rates, meaning businesses were being paid to take money. On top of that, Quantitative Easing (QE) policies in Europe and the U.S. meant that central banks effectively printed vast amounts of money.

While the monetary “economic toolbox” has been severely depleted, there is a bigger problem. In the wake of 2008, the capitalists relied on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), whose economies were relatively dynamic, to pull the world economy out of the ditch. China, in particular, invested in massive infrastructure projects and imported vast amounts of raw materials. Today, facing its own debt crisis, China is not able to play this role. Its “Belt and Road” program of infrastructure investments abroad have also created crises for countries now having to repay the Chinese loans that financed the projects. In fact, all the BRIC countries are facing slowdown (China and India) or are in danger of going into recession in the coming year (Russia and Brazil). Brazil has barely emerged from the most brutal recession in its history and 13 million are still unemployed with millions more underemployed.

Ten years ago, there was a coordinated international response led by Obama. This is almost inconceivable today with Trump at the helm. U.S. tariffs on imports are now at a higher level than at any point since the 1930s and could eclipse the 1930s (Barrons, 5/10/19). However, Trump also came to power after a decade in which protectionist measures were increasing internationally. In reality we are experiencing the partial unwinding of globalization. There are limits to this given the complexity of international production chains, but it is remarkable that we are already seeing the beginnings of a partial “decoupling” of the U.S. and Chinese economies.

And while globalization and its neoliberal trade deals were done at the expense of workers and the environment, a resurgence of economic nationalism and protectionism is also very dangerous, pointing toward increasing international tension and conflict between capitalist states.

An Untenable Situation

The UAW workers strike of GM in 2019 was the longest auto-industry strike in decades.

Recessions are normal under capitalism, but the situation we find ourselves in is not the boom and bust

Economy 13

As a result of the 2008-9 recession, millions of homes were foreclosed, throwing community members out on the street. cycle of a forward-moving system but rather the increasing paroxysms of a system in decline. In the ten years since 2008 none of the underlying issues that caused the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s were resolved. One of the expressions of this is the massive overproduction and overcapacity in the global economy as working people, whose share of the wealth has shrunk, are unable to buy the products they make. Another is the massive levels of state indebtedness which some pro-capitalist commentators are falsely trying to convince themselves is not a problem.

But the biggest danger facing the ruling class is that they enter this crisis with a staggering loss of legitimacy. This is rooted in the savage attacks on working people and the staggering corruption of a political system awash in corporate money. A turning point in the U.S. was the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 which popularized the idea of “the 99% versus the 1%.” Occupy occurred at the same time as popular uprisings against corrupt regimes in the Middle East and North Africa and the beginning of massive struggles against endless austerity in Southern Europe. The weakness of the left and lack of leadership from the unions or left parties meant these struggles largely failed but they left a lasting imprint on mass consciousness.

Now young people in this country favor socialism over capitalism when asked by pollsters. There is massive support for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal and taxing the rich to pay for it. Some are beginning to realize that what is needed is to bring key economic sectors into public ownership. Working people - beginning with teachers in 2018 but since joined by hotel workers, grocery workers and now auto workers - are showing

their willingness to fight back and use their collective power as workers.

A number of more far-sighted supporters of capitalism recognize that sticking with neoliberal policies is unsustainable. In the piece by Martin Wolff of the Financial Times, quoted at the start of this article, he also says: “We need a dynamic capitalist economy that gives everybody a justified belief that they can share in the benefits. What we increasingly seem to have instead is an unstable rentier capitalism, weakened competition, feeble productivity growth, high inequality and, not coincidentally, an increasingly degraded democracy.”

Wolff is right that the political and economic system is seen as rigged and corrupt (because it is) and also to point to the role of monopolization, including in the financial sector, as creating further problems for capitalism’s credibility.

He points positively to the recent declaration by the Business Roundtable, made up of key U.S. CEOs, that corporations “share a fundamental commitment to all their stakeholders” including communities where they operate and employees as opposed to their previous line that “corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders,” i.e. maximize profits at all costs.

Of course the leopard won’t really change its spots, but this is recognition from the highest level that the system needs a makeover. Elizabeth Warren, whose key theme as a presidential candidate is “accountable capitalism,” takes this a step further, saying that American companies should be forced to apply for charters that would oblige them to – in the words of the Economist – “look after stakeholders especially local ones. Those who let the

14 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 side down would have their charters revoked.” The issue is not whether this is likely to become reality or whether it would really change things, but rather that a candidate who may wind up being backed by the Democratic political establishment to block Bernie Sanders is saying this. The contrast between Warren’s rhetoric and that of the unapologetic neoliberal Hillary Clinton in 2016 is stark.

In the next period, due to mass pressure, but also due to the climate crisis and growing inter-imperialist competition, we could see a move toward more state intervention, even an element of Chinese-type industrial policy or “state capitalism.” Capitalism has gone through different eras or “regimes” with different balances of class forces and policies. Neoliberalism has survived past its sell-by date in large part because of the general weakness of working-class organizations since the collapse of Stalinism, but particularly since the crisis of ‘08, despite the willingness of working people and young people to fight.

The Effects of the Coming Crisis

But that may be beginning to change. Even before the full crisis breaks out there has been an astonishing development of strug-

gle by working people and youth internationally including the Yellow Vests movement in France; the revolutionary struggles in Algeria and the Sudan; and new movements against corrupt regimes in Haiti, Egypt, Iraq and Indonesia. In Ecuador, the president fled the capital after mass protests against cuts ordered by the IMF as part of a bailout plan. This is not to mention the movements of women in country after country, as well as the global days of protest by millions of young people demanding action on climate change.

Working people will not be as shocked by the next crisis. While a serious slump can have a “stunning effect” especially as people cope with mass unemployment and evictions, this phase will be of far shorter duration than after 2008. When struggle resumes, it will very quickly be on a wider scale, more determined, and with more far-reaching demands. What is clearly needed in the U.S. is the rebuilding of a fighting labor movement and a new political party based on the interests of working people and the poor.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president, while trapped inside the corporate Democratic Party, points in this direction. Building the foundations for this new party out of his campaign is the key step we can take to prepare for the onslaught of the next phase of capitalist crisis. J

Socialist Action (CWI China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) demonstrate in January 2019.

Continuing the Fight for International Socialism Danny Byrne

Provisional Committee of the CWI and Socialist Alternative (England, Wales, and Scotland)

A

s many of our readers are aware, the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), the socialist international organization with which Socialist Alternative in the U.S. is in political solidarity, has been through a serious internal crisis since the end of 2018.

This crisis related to political debates on crucial questions for socialists including how we should orient ourselves in this new period and to a process of bureaucratization which affected a layer of the organization’s long-standing leaders. Unfortunately, and against the wishes of the majority of the CWI, this led to a division in our forces.

Following seven months of discussion and debate, the overwhelming majority of the active membership rallied around the majority of the CWI’s broad leadership body, the International Executive Committee (IEC) while a minority, organized around a section of the CWI’s leaders in Britain and on the International

Secretariat, decided to desert the ranks of the CWI, rather than abide by the democratic political decisions of the organization’s structures.

This article attempts to provide a partial balance sheet of this important debate, and some lessons it holds for the socialist and wider working-class movement. Further material can be found on our international website (WorldSocialist.net) with more to be published soon, including a selection of key political internal documents from both sides.

A Challenging but Necessary Debate

This crisis has been an extremely challenging one for the whole of the CWI. Internal crises cast a stark light on all aspects of any organization, and often an unforgiving one. An organization’s political ideas, tactics, and methods, as well as its internal democratic functioning are put to a strenuous test, in the face of robust debate and criticism.

Internal crises also represent a challenge to the integrity and morale of a revolutionary organization, to the enthusiastic fighting spirit which is fundamentally necessary for all revolution-

16 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 aries. In such situations, workers and young people who have become organized, active socialists struggling together against the capitalist class and to change the world, are forced to turn their attention somewhat “inwards,” in what can often be taxing and tense debates with our own comrades. People can be forgiven for thinking, “this isn’t what I signed up for!”

However, political debates and discussions, especially major and even heated ones, always have a purpose. In the dynamic of a robust debate, all participants tend to examine, to think through, to research, and consolidate their own arguments and views, in an even deeper way than otherwise. This can lead to theories and lines of argument being further developed and taken to firmer and more clarifying conclusions.

It has often been the case in debates throughout the history of the Marxist movement that it has taken a robust debate for the real essence of of differences in policy, perspectives, and methods to be clearly brought to the surface. What start as differences of emphasis, or clashes over accidental issues, can reveal a deeper political meaning, and a substantial political difference which must be debated and resolved.

The experience of the recent crisis for most of our members was in many ways very frustrating given the complete unwillingness of the minority who left in July to engage in a meaningful or constructive debate as they resorted increasingly to slandering those who disagreed with them, making up all sorts of accusations wholesale.

Despite this terrible approach to debate, political issues did emerge that forced the majority to clarify its approach on a number of key issues.

These included how we assess the development of consciousness of broad masses of workers and young people in this period; how we relate to the powerful new movements against women’s and LGBTQ oppression as well as against climate change that have been a feature in country after country; how we relate to the trade unions; and how we build and renew a democratic and cohesive international.

As a result we have emerged with a remarkable degree of political cohesion. Crucially, as this crisis unfolded in our ranks, important developments unfolded in the world political situation, which gave a concrete context and backdrop to the debates we were engaged in, showing what was at stake. These included the developing economic crisis as well as revolutionary upheavals in Algeria and Sudan and mass movements in Hong Kong as well as the enormous youth strikes against climate change.

Meanwhile the political arguments, positions, and methods of those who departed our ranks evolved rapidly and dramatically.

Statements were made and actions carried out by them which would have seemed unimaginable at the outset of the discussion.

In short, a rapid and alarming political degeneration, along sectarian and bureaucratic lines, was revealed. This at bottom reflected a loss of confidence and demoralization in the face of the challenges of this new period.

On the other hand, the majority of the CWI, has, despite a certain weakening of our forces numerically in some countries,

emerged from this crisis in a polar opposite state. The debate has given us a greater political understanding of the situation in the world, a clearer vision of the challenges to come, and, crucially, the incredibly formative experience of having engaged in a bold and principled struggle, based on a revolt of hundreds of leaders in many key sections, which reclaimed our international organization from destructive degeneration.

At the meeting that took place of the CWI’s IEC in August 2019, in the immediate aftermath of the minority splitting away, this side of the crisis and its effects were clear as day. While a challenging and, in many senses, damaging episode in our history, this crisis will be seen in years to come as a fundamentally necessary part of the political preparation of the CWI for the stormy period ahead, full of revolutionary opportunity.

Why a Socialist International?

Many of the central lessons of this crisis for our organization have to do with the challenges of building a revolutionary socialist international organization. This, the most crucial of tasks for our movement today, is also one of the most challenging.

Indeed, as CWI members around the world engaged in the debate, many observers and friends of our organization will have looked on puzzled as to why a discussion with fellow socialists in far flung corners of the world was occupying so much of our comrades’ time, energy, and thoughts. Weren’t there more pressing matters to get on with at home?

Internationalism is part of the ABCs of the socialist and working-class movement, woven into its fabric from its origins. However, in the last few decades, in complete contrast with the outlook of the masses of workers and youth, and with the reality of global capitalism, real internationalism has become less and less of a feature of life on the left and international organizations have not been built.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist regimes, the ruling class went on a relentless campaign to discredit the idea that any alternative to capitalism was viable.

This was combined with the neoliberal offensive on the gains won by working people. Together these had a major impact on consciousness for a whole period but especially on the leaders of historic “left” parties and the unions. This is the context for the retreat of official internationalism.

In practice, for many socialist and so-called socialist organizations, internationalism has no more than a symbolic significance - something to sing about once a year at convention time, for example. For others, it is put forward in a totally abstract way - a really nice, lofty, and romantic idea - appealing to the profound internationalist sentiments of solidarity and struggle among the ranks of the labor movement and youth, but drawing no real political or practical conclusions.

Revolutionary socialists see things fundamentally differently.

For us, internationalism is not a nice idea, but a burning objective necessity arising from the reality of world capitalism. In analysing capitalist development, Marx explained that a funda-

Internationalism is part of the ABCs of the socialist and workingclass movement, woven into its fabric from its origins.

Politics 17 mental feature of that system is the tendency for the economy and market to outgrow the limits of the nation state. At the same time of course, this same feature is the source of many of capitalism’s problems and crises, as the conflict between the different gangs of national capitalists prevents this process from being fully completed. We see this today in the rise of economic nationalism, including in the U.S., challenging the process of globalization.

Nonetheless, as Marx explained capitalism took massive strides forward toward the real internationalization of the economy - and has gone much further since - and thus of its system of exploitation. An international - though chaotic - organization of the economy and an international division of labor in industry have become fundamental to capitalist production as revealed by the wide impact of the current trade war between the U.S. and China.

Capitalism also gave birth to the modern working class which from the beginning of its struggle against oppression and exploitation has strived to link together across national and ethnic lines. In the 1860s, Marx and other socialists appealed to the English working class to support the North in the American Civil War against the slaveholding South despite the dependence of the English textile industry on cotton from the South. This successful appeal was very important because of the threat of England intervening on the side of the South.

Every major struggle of working people from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War to the fight against apartheid in South Africa has depended on international solidarity.

While mass international organizations of the left have not been built in the past period, the movements of women in country after country and now the instinctive internationalism, and international coordination of youth in a movement against climate change shows the basis for a renewed type of internationalism on the left.

International is Primary for Socialists

This is why the international dimension has always come first for revolutionary socialists. Starting from the economic and political reality of the world around us, we develop a political program and forms of organization to respond accordingly. Politically, it is completely impossible to arrive at a sufficient understanding of the situation in any single country or region without starting from a world understanding and perspective.

Therefore, socialists first seek to identify the main international processes and phenomena, in order to be able to correctly approach the situation in a given country. For example, it was not primarily studying domestic politics that led socialists to foresee how millions would radicalize after 2008-9 but rather the international and historical experience.

Similarly today, we see that despite the superficial “health� of the American economy, the global downturn spurred by geopolitical factors especially the conflict between the U.S. and China, is also pushing the domestic economy here into crisis. This will have enormous social and political consequences as after the 2008 recession.

Organizational forms and structures flow from political neces-

Weeks after the Marikana Massacre, CWI activists address striking miners at Mponeng Gold Mine in South Africa in 2012.

18 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 sity. For socialists, this means that our political and organizational starting point is international. We see the building of a mass, revolutionary, working-class international party, as a prerequisite for success in the struggle for a socialist world. Nevertheless, the nation state remains the key political form under capitalism and revolutionaries must also organize on a national basis, and develop a full and concrete national perspective, for real internationalism to be effective.

In the middle of the 19th century, when seeking to organize to fight for his ideas, Marx himself sought first and above all else to build an international organization. In 1864, he and Frederick Engels helped found the International Workingmen’s Association - later known as the “First International” - which grew to eight million members. Ever since, genuine Marxists have continued in the same vein. The “Second,” “Third,” and “Fourth” internationals followed, as generation after generation of revolutionary fighters embraced the same revolutionary mission. All of the great battles waged by socialists throughout the 20th century, most especially the 1917 Russian Revolution which gave birth to the Third International, were conducted with the goal of building of a mass revolutionary international organization front and center.

The need for this fundamental principle was dramatically confirmed by the experience of the first ever successful socialist revolution in Russia. The international isolation of the young Russian workers’ state, which made the achievement of genuine socialism impossible, was the central reason for its eventual strangulation, first by a Stalinist counterrevolution and then by capitalist restoration.

However, this was in no way inevitable and there was no shortage of revolutionary opportunities around the world in the years after 1917, as revolution swept through Europe and beyond.

Ultimately, it was the lack of revolutionary parties which had

fully assimilated the lessons of the Russian Revolution in the countries where revolutionary explosions took place, most importantly Germany, Italy, France, and China, which proved decisive in the working class stopping short of completing a socialist transformation.

The heroic efforts of thousands of unnamed revolutionaries in all of these countries to forge revolutionary parties in the heat of battle ultimately proved insufficient. The central lesson of this for Marxists is a simple one. It is the need for the greatest possible preparation and building, in advance of revolutionary explosions, of powerful revolutionary parties in as many countries of the world as possible.

This makes the building of a revolutionary international a life or death matter for serious Marxists. The impossibility of building socialism in one country or of any revolutionary socialist government being able to consolidate its position in the modern capitalist world without a successful international movement for socialist change, is ten times clearer than in 1917.

A Brief History of the CWI

This internationalist approach has always been part of the CWI’s DNA. Although our tradition originated in one country, Britain, in the 1940s, those who founded it understood that to effectively pursue its aims, it had to be international or it would be nothing. Chiefly organized around Ted Grant, they engaged in debates, collaboration, and joint struggle with other revolutionary socialists around the world in what then was a unified “Fourth International” - the international founded by Trotsky in 1938. The Trotskyist movement had great promise, developing a mass base in countries like Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Bolivia as well as a significant presence in the U.S. But Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940 and the leadership of the movement in Europe was decimated during World War II by the fascists as well as the Stalinists.

The challenges of the post-war period, during which the capitalist economy had its most sustained phase of expansion and both Stalinism and Social Democracy were enormously strengthened around the world, led to the political disorientation and fragmentation of the Fourth International.

Important trends within it embraced a deeply pessimistic perspective, arguing that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries had become accommodated to the system. This led them toward an adaptation and capitulation to resurgent Stalinism and Social Democracy.

By the 1960s, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) demonstrating against the fascist British led by Ernest Mandel, the biggest sec-

National Party in 1994.

Politics 19 tion of the Trotskyist movement, embraced the idea that other sections of society, such as students, or peasants (oppressed rural populations in the neo-colonial world) - as opposed to the organized working class - were the main agent of social change.

Similar ideas were adopted by the Maoist currents which became a very significant part of the “New Left” of the ‘60s and ‘70s including in the U.S. The Maoists also saw the majority of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries as “bought off” and incapable of revolutionary action.

In this context, our predecessors, who had established themselves around Militant newspaper in Britain in 1964, set about the building of a distinct revolutionary socialist current internationally. While they started from a realistic assessment of the world situation, their view was rooted in fundamental revolutionary optimism and an unshakeable belief in the revolutionary potential of the world working class to overthrow capitalism in the post-war period.

They explained that the working class globally had been enormously strengthened by the economic boom, and that coming economic storms would see this power unleashed. This was dramatically borne out when a revolutionary general strike shook France in 1968, opening the way for revolutionary movements in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal in the years to follow which brought down dictatorships and saw mass working-class support for revolutionary socialist measures.

At the same time, Militant resolved to orientate toward the living workers’ movement and its organizations, in a non sectarian manner. Its watchword was: “go where the workers (and youth) are.” While making a principled and devastating Marxist critique of reformism of all variants, Militant fought within the rank and file of the mass British Labour Party, where hundreds of thousands of working-class activists struggled together, as well as in the trade union movement, where many were searching for a revolutionary socialist program.

These political foundations led Militant to become the most successful revolutionary Marxist organization in the post-war period in Europe. Militant won the leadership of the Labour Party’s youth wing in the early 1970s, won the leadership of the Liverpool City Council in the 1980s, and led the mass anti-Poll Tax revolt in the early 1990s which brought down Margaret Thatcher.

However, the success of its international endeavours was equally important. Following patient work and discussions with Marxists in a number of countries over several years, Militant and its co-thinkers launched the Committee for a Workers’ International in 1974 at a meeting in London. This was attended by only a few dozen comrades from less than one dozen countries.

While other revolutionary currents went into decline after the collapse of Stalinism, the CWI kept fighting to sink roots and by the 2000s was the largest and most influential revolutionary international organization, with sections in over 40 countries, on all continents. Our sections played leading roles in mass struggles in several countries, from Ireland and the U.S., to Sri Lanka.

We built Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE) in the ‘90s which organized the biggest international anti-fascist mobilization to date in Europe. In Ireland, we led the successful struggle against water charges in the ‘90s and more recently played a key role in the victorious campaign to legalize abortion. In the U.S.

after Socialist Alternative member Kshama Sawant was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013, we built the grassroots campaign 15 Now which won $15 an hour minimum wage for the first time in a major city, inspiring similar fights and victories around the country. In South Africa, our comrades played a key role in the heroic miners’ strikes in 2012.

In struggles against capitalist misery of all kinds, from wage disputes, to parliamentary election campaigns, to mass insurrectionary movements against brutal dictatorships, the CWI fought to place a revolutionary socialist leadership at the head of the class struggle. It is this heritage, which we still consider to be of great value to the workers and oppressed of the world, which the CWI majority has struggled to defend, and successfully so, over the course of the last half year.

Against Dogmatic Methods in Thought and in Action

A crucial part of the crisis which has shaken the CWI in recent months has been the failure of central figures in our organization’s historic leadership to face up to the demands of a new situation. It was this, along with the failure to provide the necessary renewal of leadership which could guard against such a situation, that laid the basis for the explosive crisis.

It revealed a failure by the old leadership to provide an “up to date” political perspective, to understand sufficiently the new features of the world situation opened up by the 2008 economic crisis. Instead, old formulae were repeated, and the importance of the explosive events of our time was played down. This was connected to a pessimistic perspective which emphasised the need for socialists to “dig in” and await better times, which would bear greater resemblance to past historical periods for which these formulas were fashioned.

In truth, this reflected a disconnect with the real situation. The last decade has seen a tumultuous period of chronic crisis and instability for capitalism, of revolution and counter revolution on a world scale. Capitalism was exposed and discredited in the eyes of tens of millions. From the “Arab Spring” of 2010-11, to the movement against austerity in Greece after 2008, to the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the continuing revolutionary upheavals in Sudan and Algeria today, the question of social revolution was put on the agenda. In the “advanced” capitalist world, there has been a resurgence in mass movements of different types and a pronounced period of political radicalization and polarization.

Of course, events have borne the stamp of the preceding period. The effects of the 1990s and early 2000s, which in most of the world saw a historic ideological retreat and weakening of the organized working class and socialist movement after the collapse of Stalinism, have not been fully overcome. The masses in a number of countries sought the way forward but were sold out by the leadership of “socialist” and “communist” parties and conservative trade union leaders.

However, beyond these complications, the most important trend in the world situation has been the ingenuity, creativity and innovation of the masses, who in innumerable mass struggles including those against various forms of oppression have sought to put their stamp on events. The task of Marxists is to engage with these struggles, defending a socialist program which points all struggles in the direction of a united fightback, based on the

20 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 power of the working class, with the goal of abolishing capitalism and building a new socialist society.

Far from a period fit for “digging in” and awaiting more favorable conditions, this is a world epoch fit for energetic intervention, to win the ear of millions engaged in struggle, and win the leadership of mass movements. This was the perspective, the emphasis, which defined the political position of the CWI majority in this debate.

Our former comrades, on the other hand, were very much affected by disappointment with the failure of the working class to make a more decisive breakthrough in the period after 2008. On the one hand they sought shortcuts but on the other they looked on events with increasing pessimism, seeing only complications, especially in the developing struggles by women and LGBTQ people against oppression. This led them away from energetic intervention, toward a passive approach. They particularly feared our members becoming “infected” by radical identity politics. They turned away from our historic approach of going to the youth, engaging alongside them in struggle and winning the best to the necessity of socialist revolution.

Comrades of the CWI in Ireland, the U.S., Brazil, and elsewhere who had pioneered a creative, principled Marxist analysis and intervention into real mass struggles against oppression taking place around the world were accused of “facing the wrong way,” abandoning a working-class orientation, turning away from the trade unions, and a litany of other heresies. The truth is that for revolutionary socialists, facing toward millions of people, fighting against the oppression constantly generated by the capitalist system, is precisely “facing the right way!”

Often accused of representing “old and archaic” ideas, Marxism in no way represents a disdain for the lessons of the past.

Marxism is built on the historical contributions of generations

of socialist fighters to a body of theory, analysis and revolutionary practice. However equally central to Marxism as an appreciation of history and theory, is a disdain for dogma. Marxism, pioneered as “scientific socialism” is a living scientific method, which starts not with ready-made formulas, but from a careful and precise analysis of the real world before us. It represents a guiding method, theory and set of principles, which assist new generations in understanding reality and in developing a path to overcome capitalism and all class society.

A dogmatic approach, on the other hand, begins from a method of analysis which starts with rigid formulas, elaborated on the basis of a past reality, and then seeks to make the real situation fit into them. It is a recipe for conservatism and disorientation.

In reality, the CWI’s old leadership, which had played such a tremendous and healthy role in a past period, resisted renewal and lacked connection to the new reality. They tragically fell into the trap of a dogmatic, conservative method.

Ironically, key figures within the same leadership, especially Peter Taaffe the General Secretary of the England & Wales Socialist Party, had waged an historic political battle against dogmatic methods in thought and action, in the last major international crisis to rock the CWI. At the beginning of the 1990s, a period of massive changes in the world situation with the collapse of the Stalinist states in Russia and Eastern Europe and a major neo-liberal offensive on a world scale, key figures in the CWI’s leadership, especially Ted Grant, similarly failed to face up to a changed situation, and clung to the political and tactical formulas of the previous period. A factional political struggle followed, after which a minority organized around these former leaders departed from the CWI. On that occasion as well as in 2019, the majority of the CWI was capable of identifying this fundamental mistake, and winning the political debate which followed, ensuring the continuation of the healthy methods of Marxism. It is no coincidence, however, that on both these occasions, major internal crises and debates in the CWI coincided with a major historical turning point and the failure of an ossified political leadership to face up to them.

What are the lessons for Marxists today? Chiefly that any leadership, regardless of its past achievements, is tested by every new development and change in the situation. Regular renewal and a healthy atmosphere of questioning and scrutiny of all leaders, and most Brazilian section of the CWI, Liberdade, Socialismo e Revolução, protesting Bolsonaro in

June 2019.

21 importantly an active, healthy, thinking and politically educated membership of workers and young people, are key to safeguarding against the danger of dogmatism, conservatism and their political consequences in a socialist organization.

Socialists Fighting Oppression

The essence of the following paragraph, written by Lenin in 1901, was an important part of our political debate.

“The Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat” (What Is To Be Done?).

Capitalism seeks to divide working people along racial, gender, sexual orientation and other lines. It uses racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia as ideological props to maintain its class rule. Today many young people have become radicalized around fighting these forms of oppression which directly impact them in their day to day lives. This has been the case throughout capitalist history, but has been an especially sharp feature of the current world situation.

Most significant has been the development of mass movements opposed to differing forms of women’s oppression in country after country, from Ireland to Bangladesh and from Brazil to China. Given the growing role of women and young women in the global working class, this revolt has tended to increasingly overlap and spur workers’ struggles, from the mines of South Africa to new “tech” workforces in Google, Amazon etc.

What is the essence of Lenin’s approach as outlined above? He is arguing against those he termed the “economists,” who dismissed the importance of “political” as opposed to “economic” struggle. He views the role of a revolutionary party, not in excluding one struggle at the expense of another, or dismissing the struggle against any form of oppression. Rather its role should be to unite all struggles against oppression with the broader working class which has the social power to end capitalism and thereby to lay the basis for ending all forms of oppression.

Our former comrades, once defenders of this, the Bolshevik approach to fighting oppression, moved away from it in an alarming fashion. The Irish section of the CWI, in line with Lenin’s method, played a leading role in the historic struggle for abortion rights which led to the referendum victory in 2018. At the same time, they fought to build a socialist feminist wing of the movement which won mass influence, and to build real links of solidarity and struggle between the women’s movement and the battle of the wider working class against capitalist austerity, industrially and politically.

For this, they were attacked by our former comrades… for orientating to the women’s movement at the expense of economic working class struggle! This seems to imply that leading a strug-

gle against the oppression of a section of the working class is not true work among the class. In reality the comrades intervention into the women’s movement represented an opportunity to raise the need for mass working class action to win decisive victories against the capitalist establishment. Their work in the struggle to win abortion rights strengthened their ties with workers moving into struggle and taking strike action such as the nurses and midwives who went on strike in 2019. This strike cannot be separated from the victories won by the women’s movement.

Membership Revolt against Bureaucratism Bureaucratic methods and actions always have a political basis. Ultimately, they are driven by a lack of political confidence, political weakness, and fear of losing a democratic debate. This was borne out in the CWI in an alarming manner. Having built an immense political authority over decades based on political strength and ability, a leadership which now lacked these attributes embarked on a bureaucratic rampage to defend the same authority and prestige by other means.

Their first target at the December 2018 meeting of our International Executive Committee (IEC) was our Irish organization whom they once lauded but now saw as a threat. The majority of the IEC rejected this unwarranted assault and the majority of the International Secretariat then declared a faction.

An alarming bureaucratic degeneration over the following seven months saw over 130 members of the England & Wales Socialist Party summarily expelled for the crime of politically disagreeing with their leadership’s faction. They declared the democratic structures which they were accountable to (the IEC and World Congress) to be “illegitimate”, and refused to participate in them, explicitly stating that the reason was to avoid “regime change.” On the basis of ignoring the organization’s democratic structures, they then proceeded to walk away, taking our financial reserves, website, social media accounts, and premises with them.

While these criminal bureaucratic manoeuvers and degeneration showed the worst of the history of the socialist movement, the majority of the CWI, from its rank and file membership (over 75% of which opposed this breakaway group) to the IEC, showed the best. Thousands of workers and youth, rather than succumb to demoralization, stood up and fought for their organization, ensuring that the overwhelming majority of the CWI remains intact, and politically stronger than ever despite this important setback.

We know that the road to building a mass working class international that will be fit for the needs of this period will be enormously challenging and will not proceed in a straight line. But we also see, as do millions of workers and young people, that capitalism only offers savage inequality, oppression and a looming climate catastrophe. Millions are moving towards socialist conclusions. Our task is to renew and elaborate the Marxist program and to demonstrate in practice that these ideas, while not new, show the only way forward. As Marx said, “theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” J

In 2018, over 700,000 people protested against a Tory Brexit and for a new referendum. The sign is likely the only sentiment all British people agree with.

Understanding Britain’s Brexit Crisis Claire Laker Mansfield As we go to press, a new deal on Brexit has been announced between British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the EU. Johnson still needs to get his deal through parliament which is far from certain. One of the key problems is that it addresses the question of the “Irish backstop” by putting a de facto border between the island of Ireland and Britain. This will meet with strong opposition from Protestants in Northern Ireland. As explained in this article, either a hard border within Ireland or in the Irish Sea has the potential to seriously worsen sectarian division in Northern Ireland.

B

ritain's ongoing Brexit crisis has entered a new and spectacularly explosive phase. Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government is in a state of chaos. His attempts to regain control, including via the dissolution of Parliament, have so far failed.

Johnson’s first week in parliament as Prime Minister saw him lose six parliamentary votes in six days, including two failed attempts at calling a general election.

It was also a week in which the thin thread that had been holding together the Tory (Conservative) Party's warring factions

finally broke. Twenty-one Conservative MPs, including Philip Hammond, who just weeks ago held the office of chancellor under Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, were thrown out of the party by Johnson. Hammond's name sits alongside a series of former cabinet ministers and several notable "grandees" who have all been de facto expelled by the prime minister.

Chaos ensued in the House of Commons as the archaic rituals associated with proroguing – or suspending Parliament - were carried out. Chants of "shame on you" came from Parliament's benches. The speaker of the house, himself a Tory MP, described Johnson's decision as an act of "executive fiat."

But far more important than any of the MPs’ stunts or Tory machinations have been the thousands of workers and young people who have turned out on protests against what is commonly referred to as Boris' "coup." Up to 100,000 people took part in protests across Britain in the week the proroguing was announced. And the Tory party conference was also marked with a major protest through the streets of Manchester. While the demonstrations have inevitably reflected the confusion that exists around the question of Brexit, and while they have sometimes been led by middle-class and pro-capitalist forces, these protests have offered a small outlet for the tremendous pent-up anger that exists within society. They hint at the huge potential

23 for working-class people to be mobilised against Tory rule, to fight for an end to austerity, and to demand much more than that.

This was followed in late September by the U.K. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the proroguing declaring it “unlawful.” But while this was certainly a setback for Johnson it did not lead to any clarity on how the Brexit crisis would be resolved.

The political implosion that took place in September had been brewing for a long time. In June 2016, a majority of British people voted in a referendum to leave the European Union, thus ushering in a new era in British politics - one of profound crisis and uncertainty

Three Years of Drift

Three years later, the issue of Britain's relationship with the EU has only increased in dominance. And the Brexit crisis and the utter malaise in which British capitalism finds itself, has continued to deepen.

Mere hours separated the counting of ballots in the 2016 referendum and the resignation of the then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron. His replacement, Theresa May, who in the end faced no serious challenger, was the almost unanimous choice of the capitalist establishment. She was the chosen "safe pair of hands" - trusted to prioritize their interests in deeply uncertain times.

May was chosen for an historic task: the task of delivering a "Brexit in name only," of mitigating and minimizing the damage done to Britain's capitalist class by the “Leave” vote. In practice, this meant securing a deal that would maintain Britain's membership of, or at least close relationship with, the EU's Single Market and Customs Union, meanwhile respecting the result of the referendum in a formal sense.

In short, her mission was to regain control of the situation for the capitalist class. But far from succeeding, she resigned her office in utter defeat. She became the second Tory Prime Minister to fall victim to the Brexit crisis. But the cost of her failure to Britain's capitalist class was far greater.

May's inability to deliver did not stem fundamentally from personal weakness. This incredible loss of control by the capitalist class - symbolized in the maverick figure of her Trump-idolizing successor, Boris Johnson - was not caused by personalities and egos. Instead, this situation has arisen out of the deep, global crisis of the capitalist system, combined with the more specific, long-term decline of British capitalism.

Once known as the workshop of the world, Britain now has lower levels of productivity than impoverished Greece. Rather than investing in the development of new technology and technique, Britain's capitalists instead tend to rely on low wages for the maintenance of profitability. Meanwhile, ten years on from the crisis of 2008, amidst stagnant living standards, the UK is once again heading for recession, with negative growth reported for the first quarter of 2019.

It is this malaise which was the underlying cause of the initial defeat suffered by the establishment in the referendum. It's this which explains the profound difficulty the capitalists have in winning a stable social base of support for politics which represent their interests.

The explanations most commonly offered in the capitalist media for the Brexit vote are centered around the issue of immigration. But, while capitalist politicians on both sides of the debate used anti-migrant and, in some cases, openly racist rhetoric, it is not accurate to describe racism as the central feature of the Leave vote. In actual fact, in a confused and inchoate way, the Leave vote represented a revolt by primarily working-class voters. It was a revolt against a capitalist establishment responsible for a decade of austerity, for the decimation of communities through de-industrialisation, for wrecked public services, privatization, slashed benefits, and food-bank Britain.

The most important factor determining how likely someone was to vote Leave in the referendum was class. Almost twothirds of low-paid workers – classified as “C2DE” in surveys in Britain – did so. When surveyed about their reasons for voting the way they did, only a third of Leave voters cited the issue of immigration as their main reason for doing so. By far the most common factor referred to – the reason given by almost 50% – was the issue of democratic control, the desire for a proper say over the decisions that affect our lives. What is this, if not an acknowledgement that the society we live in is “rigged” in favour of the super-wealthy – that working-class people lack a genuine voice in the way our society is run? Surely underlying this sentiment, even if it is not always clearly articulated, is an understanding that the European Union plays its part in the “rigging” that is inherent in capitalism – that it is part and parcel of this establishment.

Nevertheless, in the absence of a clear lead coming from the workers' movement outlining a socialist and internationalist Leave position, many working-class and young people supported Remain - repulsed by the bigotry of Johnson and Farage. But this instinctive internationalism of many workers and youth has nothing in common with the neoliberal capitalist project that is the EU, nor with the Tory leaders of the official Remain campaign, who themselves used anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout.

What we have witnessed in the past years has been a process of slow disintegration within the Tory Party. This is a process which Boris Johnson's election as leader has now accelerated to a dramatic climax. The Conservative Party is the oldest and, in many ways, the most successful capitalist party in the world. And its falling apart, especially at the same time as the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn occupies the leadership of the Labour Party, leaves the capitalist class without any reliable and stable form of political representation.

This has resulted in a situation where the capitalist class which overwhelmingly supports Britain remaining in the EU - is currently unable to guarantee against a no-deal crash out.

Looming General Election

Indeed, very avenue available for attempting to stop such an outcome is fraught with problems for them. In normal circumstances, a general election would be the chosen "way out" of such a deadlock. But the lack of reliable political representation for the capitalists means this is not straightforward.

It's possible a general election could deliver Johnson a larger majority. Or that the newly formed right populist Brexit Party

24 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 could become a significant parliamentary force, with what remains of the Tories reliant on their votes for a majority.

Another possible scenario - one which the capitalist class is toying with as a potential way out - is the possibility of Corbyn coming to power.

Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 based on a massive upsurge of working-class and young people who wanted to see a voice for anti-austerity politics expressed in the mainstream. But Corbyn’s emergence as leader was not the result of a steady transformation of the Labour Party from the ground up. Instead, Corbyn emerged at the head of a party which, in Parliament, in local government, and in its apparatus and machinery remained completely dominated by neoliberals linked to former party leader Tony Blair. Under Blair’s leadership, the party renounced its commitment to socialism and sought to move in the direction of the U.S. Democrats. And despite having led the party for four years, and the tens of thousands of Corbyn-supporters who have joined the party to support him, Corbyn has failed to mobilize these forces to conduct a campaign to wrest control of the party - including through the reselection of MPs and so on from the hands of the neoliberals.

That’s why elements within the capitalist class are now weighing up whether a Corbyn-led government, if it were adequately restrained by the presence of the Blairite fifth column which has been allowed to remain dominant in the parliamentary party, might be preferable. Its potential merits are being openly discussed among the more serious capitalist commentators. But they are playing with fire. Especially if it came on the back of another Corbyn "surge" like the one which brought him into the leadership, such a government could inspire huge expectations among workers and young people. It could generate a confidence and willingness to fight for pro-working-class policies, and an appetite for more far-reaching, socialist change. This type of surge also occurred in the 2017 general election when Corbyn ran on a program of bold pro-working-class reforms and shocked

Fighting Racism the establishment by leading Labour to a far stronger result than they expected.

In any case, such an outcome is far from guaranteed. The failure of both Jeremy Corbyn and the trade union leaderships to adopt an independent, class-based approach toward the question of Britain's relationship with the EU has contributed to a situation in which tremendous confusion exists over the issue.

As far back as 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn first stood for the leadership of the Labour Party, this was among the issues on which he came under most pressure to retreat. By abandoning his historic position of opposition to the EU as a neoliberal bosses' club, instead taking a type of "soft Remain” line, Corbyn played a part in allowing the development of the contradictory and in many ways false polarization that currently exists on the question of Brexit - polarization which does not sit neatly along class lines. Indeed, the failure of the labor movement to put its mark on the issue has opened a door to the racist and xenophobic right.

Johnson spent the summer seeking to shore up a base for himself in the context of an insurgent right-populist force in the form of Nigel Farage's Brexit party, which romped home in the European elections in May winning nearly a third of the vote. In attempting to undercut this serious electoral threat to the Tories, Johnson has made sacrosanct the 31 October withdrawal date for Britain leaving the European union - with or without a deal.

This has been combined with a series of pledges for increased public spending aimed at creating the impression that a Johnson government will move away from austerity.

What Would A No-Deal Brexit Mean?

Despite his self-presentation as a determined hard Brexiteer, it's clear Johnson would prefer to arrive at some form of agreement with the European Union. But for him to be able to justify such a deal to his own support base, both in parliament and outside it, this would need to be one which included significant concessions, particularly on extremely the thorny question of the “Irish backstop.” This refers to the border between Southern Ireland, part of the EU, and Northern Ireland which is part of the U.K. The Good Friday Agreement in 1997 brought an end to the “Troubles,” the previous period where the Irish Republican Army waged an armed campaign to force the British state to relinquish control of Northern Ireland and reunite the North with the South. Part of the Good Friday Agreement involved the withdrawal of British troops from the streets and patrolling the border while the IRA disarmed.

But the Good Friday Agreement also created a Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive which enshrined sectarian, communal division. Today Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the IRA, dominates in the Catholic community while the hardline Democratic Right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson seeks Brexit at all costs.

Unionist Party dominates in the Protes-

25 tant community. The underlying sectarian division in the North has actually become more entrenched in the past 20 years. As a result of this polarization, the institutions created by the Agreement have ceased functioning.

If Brexit leads to a hard border between the North and South of Ireland it will create mass opposition among the Catholic population and even has the potential to reignite the troubles.

But the alternative of creating a border between the whole of the island and Britain across the Irish Sea (an “East-West” border as opposed to a “North-South” border) would lead to strong opposition among Protestants who would see it as part of the drift towards a united Ireland.

On a capitalist basis, this problem is in many ways intractable. From the perspective of the EU, any arrangement in which the UK ends up outside of the Single Market or Customs Union without a deal which closely aligns Britain to its central regulations and agreements, would necessitate some form of border.

Socialists strongly oppose hardening the border within Ireland or creating a new border in the Irish Sea. From Johnson's perspective, agreeing to the proposed "backstop," which would essentially keep Britain in the Customs Union for an indefinite period and which would make impossible the negotiation of new trade deals, would be seen as a huge climbdown. What's more, it would open the door for the far right-wing leader of the new “Brexit Party” Nigel Farage to paint him as a Brexit traitor in an upcoming election. Johnson’s latest proposal for how to square this circle seems dead on arrival with the Irish government and the EU. On the other hand, Farage's strategy - simple and effective - is to call for a "clean break Brexit," which is another way of saying no deal. He and his acolytes link this to the idea of a renaissance in British manufacturing, and the return of well-paid, skilled jobs to areas of the country that have been laid waste by more than thirty years of neoliberalism. This approach is combined with a conscious attempt to whip up anti-migrant and racist sentiment.

In the context of a huge fog surrounding the question of Brexit, and of a correct sense among many working-class Leave supporters that the capitalist establishment is attempting to overturn the 2016 referendum result, the seeming clarity of this approach cuts ice with many ordinary people. A recent ComRes poll found that 38% of voters would favour a no-deal exit on October 31 if an agreement has not been reached before then. This growing sentiment not only threatens to eat into the Tories' base, but Labour's as well - especially in many of the party's working-class heartlands in the north of the country, many of which voted by a large margin to leave the EU. The threat posed by Farage has pushed Johnson to at least pretend to take a harder and harder line on the negotiations, leaving him with little room to manoeuvre. Johnson hoped that by dissolving parliament he could buy himself space to seek a new deal with the EU. The plan was to put a take-it-or-leave-it style bill to parliament with just one week left to prevent a crash out.

Despite the setback for Johnson caused by the Supreme Court ruling, his basic strategy seems unchanged. Nonetheless, he has now indicated he may be forced to request an extension to the deadline, and he could be potentially be jailed for defying parliament should he refuse.

In threatening a no-deal exit he has placed his own ambition and narrow electoral interests ahead of those of the capitalist class more widely.

While the stories hitting headlines threatening economic Armageddon in the event of a no-deal Brexit do contain a large element of “project fear,” they are not a pure fantasy. There would be real consequences.Even a two minute delay for each truck coming in from Europe at the port of Dover, something which could easily be caused by the necessary new customs checks, would be likely to result in a queue stretching back for more than seventeen miles!

The potential for the capitalists to carry out closures and job losses based on the disruption of supply chains is also not simple scaremongering. But neither are these outcomes inevitable. The reality is that many of the firms threatening job cuts and closures related to Brexit were in many cases planning them anyway with Brexit a handy “excuse” - part of an attempt to shift blame for economic distress onto working-class Leave voters. Equally, relocations are costly and take time. The more extreme threats of a potential mass exodus of companies from the UK almost overnight are exaggerated. It would be possible for a left government to intervene to prevent closures and job losses – if it was prepared to take companies threatening such measures into public ownership, guaranteeing the jobs and the conditions of those who work there.

This emphasises the importance of Corbyn intervening now with a clear program on these issues. It underlines the need for an independent, pro-working-class approach to the issue of Brexit.

Political Realignment

As we have explained, he British ruling class is seeking to regain some semblance of control over the situation. In particular they want to use of the parliamentary Remain majority, which in reality consists of a coalition of pro-capitalist MPs from all the main political parties, to tie Johnson's hands.

Combined with the breaking up of the Tory Party and the ongoing (if rather one-sided) war within Labour, the "Remain coalition" that has developed in parliament in the last weeks hints strongly at the potential for the broader political realignment that has been inherent within the situation for some time, but which has so far failed to crystallize.

The parliamentary campaign to stop a no-deal outcome has resulted in a bill being passed which requires Johnson to seek an extension of article 50 (delaying Brexit) should he fail to reach an agreement ahead of October 31. So far, his approach has been to say that he will defy this law if there is no agreement. Theoretically, this would make it possible for him to be jailed for allowing a no-deal outcome.

This parliamentary rebellion has also resulted in MPs blocking, on two occasions, Johnson's attempts to call a general election.

With his parliamentary majority gone - down from +1 to -43 there is ultimately no way for him to continue to govern without a new election.

Meanwhile, Corbyn has participated in the cross-party approach to stopping a no-deal Brexit and whipped Labour MPs to participate in blocking a general election both times it was put to the vote. There are grave dangers posed for Corbynism in

26 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 the current situation. And with an autumn general election still overwhelmingly likely, the importance of him resisting the tremendous pressure he is under to capitulate, both on Brexit and on a myriad of other issues, is heightened.

While it is not necessarily wrong for Corbyn to have opposed Johnson's general election on the basis of it potentially allowing him to maintain control over the Brexit process, the Labour leader's failure to seize the initiative on this question has allowed him to "blend into the background" of Remain MPs. There is potential for another "Corbyn surge" to take place.

This could be combined with a huge mood of revolt against Tory austerity, and particularly against the bigoted and reactionary figure of Boris Johnson. But there should be no complacency about the outcome of a general election. Any hint of Corbyn participating in some form of "rainbow Remain alliance" would be toxic for him and would likely end in catastrophe.

That's why Corbyn needs to spend the next weeks speaking directly to and for working-class people. He needs to, in a clear way, outline an independent, class-based approach on all the central questions facing society.

This should begin with calling on trade unions, climate strikers, and all those suffering under austerity, to take to the streets in mass protests against Johnson's government - fighting to kick out the Tories.

Fighting Racism

public ownership, with compensation only paid to shareholders on the basis of need.

Corbyn's approach should include fighting to re-open negotiations on a totally different basis - laying down as red lines not the interests of big business, but those of workers, young people, and pensioners. This means opposing all the treaties and agreements that the EU has institutionalised which act to encourage a race-tothe-bottom in pay, or which would place obstacles in the way of a left government carrying out pro-working-class policies such as bringing sector like the railways which were privatized back into public ownership. It means opposing racism and attacks on migrants, as well as the erection of any new borders in relation to Ireland. It means taking a clearly internationalist approach appealing over the heads of pro-capitalist EU negotiators to the workers of Europe, many of whom are already engaged in battle against austerity. In short, it means posing the question of a new collaboration of the peoples of Europe - one only possible on the basis of socialism.

Such an approach, if it were linked to a bold program to end cuts, introduce free education, give workers a real living wage and carry out huge investment in public services, would gain tremendous support.

But the reality is that getting elected would only be the first of a whole series of major challenges faced by Corbyn. The context of crisis in which he could come to power means there will be a ferocious campaign of sabotage by the neoliberals and the right against any attempt by him to implement a genuinely pro-working-class program.

A Socialist Program That's why it's necessary to use the next five weeks, as well as On Brexit, Corbyn can offer clarity and unity. A socialist apany future election campaign, to prepare for what could come. proach to the issue has the potential to cut through the false poFaced with direct economic sabotage, or with the immediate larization that has been created, uniting working-class Leave and fall out of a chaotic Brexit, Corbyn would need to take swift Remain voters behind a common program. As a starting point, measures to defend the interests of working and middle-class Corbyn must make clear that a government led by him would people. Within a short time frame, that would mean being preact to guarantee jobs and protect living standards, whatever the pared to take control of the key levers of economic power within outcome of the Brexit process. In particular, that means pledging society - starting with bringing the banks into democratic public now to bring any company threatening closures or layoffs into ownership. It would require taking into public ownership the big monopolies that currently dominate the economy and consequently the lives of millions, allowing for society's resources used to the benefit of people and planet.

Crucially, for Corbyn to succeed in this, he would need to be prepared to decisively break with the representatives of capitalism who currently sit behind him in the Commons. He would need to rely not on a Parliament stuffed with pro-capitalist MPs, but on the mass of working-class people who, when mobilised and organized, represent the most important force needed to change society.

It is this approach and this program which members of the CWI in England, Wales, and Scotland will be organizing around in the next period. And while Britain's capitalist class trembles in fear at what the future holds, we are confident in the tremendous opportunities that are opening up for us to build the forces of Jeremy Corbyn has struggled to put forward a clear working-class position on socialism in capitalism's birthplace. J

Brexit.

East Berlin border guards on top of the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989.

1989 Collapse of Soviet Block

Revolutionary Movement with Counter-Revolutionary Consequences Rob Jones Sotsialisticheskaya Alternativa (CWI in Russia)

I

n Poland, on the September 13, 1989, the “Solidarnosc” trade union, after winning an overwhelming majority in an election, formed the first “non-communist” government in the former Soviet bloc since 1948. Two months later the Berlin Wall was pulled down. The spectacular events of 1989 in Eastern Europe, at least at the time, inspired the working class of the whole world, even though the year ended with the execution by firing squad of the hated dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena, televised across the world on Christmas Day. Within just two years the former East Germany was taken over by the West, Yugoslavia broke up, and after the failed hard line coup d’état in August 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Capitalism was being restored across the region. The Cold War ended as the “Warsaw Pact,” the military bloc set up to oppose American imperialism, was disbanded. The bourgeois philosopher Francis

Fukuyama announced the “end of history.”

Post 1989 Disaster

The mass movements were driven by the hope that by getting rid of the abhorrent bureaucratic dictatorships that ruled the Soviet bloc life would be dramatically improved. Yet the region spent the next decade in a horrific economic depression, worse than the 1930s, as the formerly centrally planned economies were replaced by free market chaos, with features more usually found in the developing world. Even the World Bank, one of the main architects of the transition, reported that by 2000 there was a 15% decline in GDP in Central and Eastern Europe and a 40% collapse in the former USSR. The number living in absolute poverty grew from 4% to 20%.

For the first time since 1945, wars between nations broke out in Europe and Central Asia. Brutal ethnic conflicts took the lives of an estimated 140,000 people and left 4 million displaced as the imperialist powers and the new national elites fought over the

28 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 wreckage of the former Yugoslavia. At least 150,000 died in the two Russia-Chechen wars and another 60,000 in the Tadjik Civil War. The conflicts in Moldova, in Georgia, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and in East Ukraine remain unresolved.

First Signs of Soviet Discontent

The former Stalinist states were authoritarian regimes with large scale surveillance and repression of opponents. Often, the first signs of discontent in the Soviet Union followed accidental events or secondary issues. The explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 heightened concerns over the environment. In the three Baltic states, whose incorporation into the USSR as part of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 had left a very bitter legacy, nationalist protests initially developed on environmental issues – in Estonia, over plans to begin phosphate mining; in Latvia, against the building of a huge hydro-electric station. People started to sing “patriotic” songs after official music festivals. Elsewhere, the notorious shortages of food and other household products fueled discontent. In the Caucasian republics, an earthquake which left 50,000 dead in an area near a nuclear power station revealed a lack of medical facilities and badly-built housing. This led to a massive escalation of nationalist sentiments and the start of the Nagorno-Karabakh war.

East European Experience

But in the rest of Eastern Europe, protests in the late 1980s built on earlier experiences of opposition to Stalinist rule. In the former GDR (East Germany) in 1953, and then Hungary in 1956, the working class took part in insurrectionary general strikes to demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops and free elections whilst maintaining the socialist ownership of industry but run by workers’ councils, with free trade unions, the right to strike and assembly, freedom of the press and religion, and so on.

These demands, basic requirements in a democratic workers’ republic, were unacceptable to Moscow. Both these 1950s upris-

ings were brutally put down by Soviet tanks. Workers were left bitterly angry, whilst the Soviet system was discredited internationally. Communist party members became known as “tankies.”

The roots of Stalinism The actions of the then Soviet leadership - created by Stalin, who died in 1952, and his successor, the so-called reformer Khrushchev - were far removed from the ideals of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks in 1917. The Russian Revolution was intended to establish a genuine democratic and socialist society in which the wealth and resources of the country were taken into public ownership, with production and distribution planned by elected workers’ committees. The Bolsheviks were internationalists, guaranteeing the right of self-determination to the nations of the former Russian Empire while arguing for a voluntary federation of socialist states. The Bolsheviks were convinced that the new workers’ republic could only survive and move towards socialism if revolution developed in the more advanced countries.

Unfortunately, the revolutionary wave that ended the war, saw the overthrow of the German monarchy, Soviet republics formed in Hungary and Bavaria, and soviets formed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, failed. The new Russian republic was invaded by 15 imperialist armies and they - assisting the reactionary White Guard movement - wreaked havoc. Many of the best workers were drawn into the fighting and perished. Others had to leave the factories to manage the new state. Revolutionary Russia ended the civil war exhausted, devastated, and isolated.

A layer of bureaucrats, many of whom had opposed the revolution developed and strengthened in the absence of international revolution. They found a leader in Joseph Stalin and seized political power from the working class. The bureaucracy consolidated its power through a new civil war using mass arrests, terror, and executions against the old Bolsheviks, overturning their internationalism and replacing it with the ideology “socialism in one country”. In effect, this was a political counter-revolution which left a bureaucratic state apparatus reflecting large elements of tsarist and even capitalist society overseeing the nationalized, planned economy. As Trotsky explained, to restore genuine Soviet democracy required not a social revolution to change the economic basis of society but a political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy.

Stalinism Extends to Eastern Europe

Lech Walesa being carried on the sholders of Polish workers in 1980.

Due to the planned economy and determination of the Soviet people and despite the incompetence of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the USSR

Theory 29 came out of the war victorious. Eastern Europe, including part of Germany, was controlled by the Soviet army. As it advanced, the old bourgeois states collapsed and, in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, a nascent revolutionary movement developed. Initially Stalin intended to maintain capitalism in the region with puppet governments as a buffer between East and West. But this position proved unviable. Fearing the development of independent socialist republics would undermine the rule of the bureaucracy in the USSR, the Soviet army disbanded independent action by workers and insurgents. The bureaucratically planned economy was extended across the region. Whereas the Russian revolution degenerated, in Eastern Europe the new regimes were deformed from the very beginning.

Although the planned economy suffered from terrible bureaucratic mismanagement and waste, for a period it still proved more efficient than the market economy of the West. In the Soviet Union itself, the economy forged ahead. By the 1970s living standards almost reached western levels. In the war-devastated economies of Eastern Europe per capita growth in the twenty years after the war was approximately 2.4 times higher than in Europe as a whole.

This to a large degree explains why in the GDR and Hungary, where workers remembered the reality of the pre-war fascist regimes, the uprisings did not take a markedly anti-socialist character. The dominant demands were for the withdrawal of the Soviet army and for workers’ democracy to end bureaucratic rule.

When Stalin came to power, the bureaucracy numbered a few hundred thousand. By the 1980s it had become a 20 million-strong all-consuming monster. Without workers’ democracy to manage and control the economy, the bureaucracy creamed off part of society’s wealth through theft and bribery, and their bureaucratic mismanagement wasted up to 30% of industrial and agricultural production. You could not even get buried without a bribe. At their head a smaller elite whose horribly affluent lifestyle was exemplified by Brezhnev’s huge collection of luxury cars.

The Prague Spring

In Eastern Europe the situation was more difficult. The Stalinists demanded these countries pay huge reparations for the war damage inflicted on Soviet territory. Imbalances developed as the Soviet regime placed great emphasis on developing heavy industry, particularly in the defense sector at the expense of consumer goods.

These imbalances hit Czechoslovakia particularly hard, which before the war had a relatively developed industrial economy. In 1953 the Kremlin ordered a currency devaluation which cut living standards by 11%. The economy struggled to grow over the next decade. When Alexander Dubcek became head of the Czech Communist Party in 1968, he launched a program to liberalize the economy and introduce limited democratic rights – “socialism with a human face.” During the Prague Spring of 1968 his moves to open up society gained a mass echo.

At first the Kremlin attempted to persuade Dubcek to back down, but by August, pressured by the neighboring Stalinist states, who feared the protests would spread, the Prague spring

was crushed under the tracks of Soviet-bloc tanks.

“Solidarnosc”

In neighboring Poland, however, another process was developing. In December 1970, the ruling bureaucracy was shaken when workers in Gdynia struck against rising prices. Dozens, if not hundreds, were massacred by the army. A new “reformer” Premier Gierek was appointed who accepted large amounts of Western credit. State debt mushroomed and dramatic food price increases made life difficult for Poland’s working class. In 1976, labour discontent was again put down by force. But underground, opposition circles were forming a new independent trade union.

When, in 1980, strikes broke out at the iconic Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, the trade union ‘Solidarnosc’ was founded. By 1981, they had organized a successful 4-hour general strike involving 14 million workers, including many rank-and-file communists.

Inter-factory committees were set up – soviets in all but name.

The regime was left hanging by a thread and could only save itself by declaring martial law and subjecting the working class to widespread repression in December.

“Solidarnosc” was formed to organize workers against price rises, for proper wages, against repression, and against the Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland. Fueled by Poland’s long history under Tsarist rule and reinforced by Stalinist repression, “Solidarnosc’ also campaigned against the Soviet presence in Poland.

Many workers were looking in the direction of a political revolution. But the influence of intellectuals around the “KOR” group and increasingly the catholic church, led the union not just in an anti-Stalinist direction but increasingly against socialism in principle.

This was not inevitable. At the first Congress of ‘Solidarnosc’ held before martial law, the leadership positioned the union as an instrument to negotiate concessions from the government.

It even proposed that members work voluntarily on Saturdays to help the country out of its economic crisis. However, a radical minority, maybe 40% of delegates, argued that “genuine workers’ self-management will be the basis for a self-governing republic…the creation of genuine workers’ self-management councils, which would make each workforce into an authentic manager of the enterprise [is the way out of the crisis].” This was included in the ‘Solidarnosc’ program.

Mistaken Position

Although demonstrating a more radical path, self-management in the way they suggested opened the way to enterprises becoming economically independent and subject to market forces, which would have eventually, as seen in Yugoslavia, become a major factor leading to capitalist restoration. Nor did the radicals present any program for removing the Stalinist bureaucracy that ruled Poland.

General Jaruzelski, who declared martial law, later claimed that the Kremlin had refused to help him and implied that the U.S. approved his take-over. His difficulty was that pressures to change were building up in the USSR. After Brezhnev’s death, Yuri Andropov took over. He had led the suppression of the Hungarian uprising and also headed the KGB. He had concluded that

30 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 change was needed if the Soviet bureaucracy was to maintain its rule. His short rule, followed by the even shorter term of the elderly Viktor Chernenko, paved the way for the 1985 appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev to head the USSR. With the hard-liners in retreat within the USSR, Jaruzelski couldn’t risk provoking an open uprising against his authoritarian rule. He started a dialogue with ‘Solidarnosc’ which as time passed saw the radicals isolated and the union adopt an openly pro-market, pro-capitalist position. A dramatic turning point occurred in November 1988 when Margaret Thatcher visited Gdansk, meeting first with the Communist leadership and then with “Solidarnosc.” Just ten months later, after round table negotiations, a multi-party election in Poland was held, which “Solidarnosc” won overwhelmingly.

ers, laid the ground for the inter-ethnic conflicts of the 1990s.

“Perestroika” and “Glasnost” Cause Chaos

But now a serious crisis was opening up in the Soviet Union itself. Gorbachev represented those bureaucrats who saw the need to reinvigorate the economy. He started by banning alcohol, which backfired when sugar shortages developed as people distilled moonshine. Then his reform program “glasnost” [openness] and “perestroika” [restructuring], which allowed work-forces, under certain conditions, to elect their directors and allowed cooperatives and joint enterprises to be established, led to increasing economic chaos. The workers grew increasingly dissatisfied, but the bureaucracy could not meet their needs.

When the Soviet masses saw that the ruling elite was in crisis, they began to gain confidence to speak out. For 60 years, the Roots of Ethnic Conflict ruling elite had excluded the masses from politics. As they reA different crisis was unfolding in Yugoslavia. Since clashing turned, they stepped tentatively, but gaining confidence as prowith Stalin in 1948, Josip Tito had maintained bureaucratic rule, tests mushroomed. but with a certain independence from Moscow. Tito, using his In the late 1980s, protests initially broke out over the environment. The air in many cities was so polluted that life expectancy authority as partisan leader during the Second World War, manwas dropping. Lake Baikal and the Caspian Sea were filled with aged to maintain a balance between the seven diverse nations industrial waste. The Aral Sea in Central Asia, once the fourth in Yugoslavia. This was possible, in part, because the Yugoslav largest lake in the world, had practically disappeared thanks to economy was developing. By his death in 1980, however, his Brezhnev’s forced cotton planting scheme in Uzbekistan. model of “market socialism” based on “self-management” was These protests exposed massive discontent in Soviet society, experiencing a mushrooming foreign debt and a 20% unemployparticularly over the national question. Whilst the “bourgeois ment rate. This opened up the country to a series of IMF aid democracy” that ruled Russia from February to October 1917 packages accompanied by “reforms” intended to open the counimplied that they would grant freedom to the various nations and try’s economy to the West. peoples, it failed to deliver. In contrast, the new Bolshevik govWith Tito gone, leaders of the republics faced growing disconernment did all it could to implement the right of self-determitent. The new leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, tried to use nation. It took less than a week for them to recognize Finland’s the situation to strengthen Serbian domination. He met fierce reright to independence. This was quickly followed by support sistance from the leaders of the other republics, who faced mass pressure and wanted their share of the spoils as the country broke for the independence of Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Estonia, up. When Milosevic attempted to annul Kosovan autonomy in Transcaucasia, Belarus, Poland, and Latvia. Notwithstanding Serbia, the Kosovan miners came out on strike. These disputes, that, in general, most of these new independent countries were exacerbated by the intervention of the different imperialist powbourgeois nationalist rather than Soviet, the Bolshevik government respected these rights. But under Stalin and his successors, the rights of nationalities were trampled upon as everything was decided in the centralized state bureaucracy’s interests.

By the 1980s, pent-up resentments were released as the nationalities fought to escape repressive, centralized control. While the masses fought for national liberation, many among the ruling elite, sensing the imminent breakup of the Soviet Union, donned nationalist garb to exploit these sentiments in their own interests.

A bloody warning of later events was given in 1988. To dispel a mass movement demanding the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan to Armenia, the Communist Party organized a bloody pogrom – hundreds of Armenians were beaten to death.

Gorbachev and Reagan sign the International Nuclear Forces Treaty in The resulting ethnic war lasted several years

Washington in 1987.

Theory 31 and has still not been resolved.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Events in Eastern Europe led to a speeding up of events in the Soviet Union, which in turn accelerated the processes elsewhere. For decades the GDR had developed, until topdown bureaucratic methods began to strangle the economy. When East Germans saw the increase in public debate in Moscow, something which the GDR leadership tried to resist, together with the decision of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak governments to allow travel to Western Europe, a series of weekly demos culminating in a million strong turnout in East Berlin in November 1989.

Initially, people did not want reunification with capitalist West Miners in Kuzbass, Ukraine strike in 1989.

Germany. The protesters demanded The resources released by ending the bureaucracy’s waste and “free elections, free media, freedom excess consumption would have dramatically improved workers to travel, and democratic socialism.” There was, however, no orliving conditions. ganized force articulating these demands, and the West German The workers however were politically unprepared. As the bourgeois saw the opportunity to reunite the country under their strikes started, a layer of the miners were open to the ideas of control. After the Berlin Wall was pulled down a German version genuine socialism. Three important strike committees replied to of “shock therapy,” the rapid and brutal reintroduction of capitalsolidarity messages sent by Terry Fields, a British MP and memism, was introduced. ber of the CWI, agreeing with his proposals that a return to the ideas of Lenin was necessary. But these policies had no orgaSoviet Miners’ Strike nizational form. The Stalinist regime had suppressed any form The Soviet regime’s death knell sounded in July 1989 when of workers’ self-organization for 60 years. Although during the a mass miners’ strike affected the Kuzbass coalfield in Siberia, 1970s and ‘80s a number of underground “Leninist” and “MarxDonbass in Ukraine, Vorkuta in the polar circle, and Karaganda ist” circles had arisen, they proved incapable of transforming in the Kazakhstan steppe. from small circles to intervene in a mass working class moveThe ruling elite claimed the Soviet Union was a “developed ment. As a consequence, although the miners had no desire to socialist society” run in the working class’s interests. The realgo to capitalism, they lost confidence that the soviet system, deity was starkly different. Many workers faced Victorian living scribed by the bureaucracy as “socialist,” was going to be able to and working conditions. Miners in Siberia and the polar circle solve their problems. with relatively high wages had nothing to spend their money on.

But a growing layer of the bureaucracy had their own plans.

Often several families lived together in pre-revolution wooden Party bosses, especially the privileged Young Communists and barracks. members of the KGB, were attracted by Western lifestyles and Things came to a head after the soap ran out in the pithead had access to luxury goods. Many of these parasitic bureaucrats showers. Hundreds of thousands of miners struck demanding saw their system was floundering and looked to capitalism to improved living conditions and a slashing of the state and indussave their skins. Increasingly, they argued for market reforms. trial bureaucracy.

To restore “a civilized society”, industry should be turned over The miners faced a choice. If they and the wider working class to private hands, i.e. to them. had had their own political party, they could have overthrown the With no organized working class political alternative, these bureaucracy and established a genuine socialist society. There ideas gained ground throughout society, particularly when orwould have been workers’ control and management at every levdinary people compared the poor quality and shortages of basic el, from the planned economy to the shop floor. consumer goods with the superficially attractive and overloaded There would have been freedom for trade unions and politishop-shelves in the West. cal parties, freedom to travel, freedom to protest. Nations would Although Gorbachev’s “perestroika” was intended to reduce have had the right to self-determination with a genuine union of the bureaucracy’s waste and mismanagement without taking free, equal socialist states the most advantageous option. power from them (reform from above to prevent revolution from

32 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 below) it opened the door to the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe.

Inspiration but Disappointment

Those involved in these events cannot help but be inspired by the determination and initiative of those who fought for a better society. The Budapest workers who in 1956 took just days to organize a nationwide political system based on elected workers’ councils and a workers’ parliament. Those who changed all the road signposts to confuse the Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Polish women who, in 1981, set up the underground resistance during martial law. The workers in 1989 Berlin who had no printer for making illegal leaflets so made one out of an old washing machine. The Azerbaijanis in Nagorno-Kharabakh who hid their Armenian neighbors from the Stalinist inspired pogroms. The Siberian miners who went on strike and took control of a whole city – the list is endless.

Also remarkable is how quickly events unfold, often triggered by apparently innocuous issues, whether the construction of a new phosphate mine or the rigging of local elections, the destruction caused by an earthquake, or the lack of soap in showers. Boris Popovkin, a Vorkuta miner (and later a member of the CWI),demonstrated the need for decisive action in July 1989 when he persuaded his comrades at a mass meeting to reject the city strike committee compromise proposal warning that “compromise tactics never lead to success.” The movement grew from there and within two years brought down the seemingly all-powerful Stalinist bureaucracy.

As events move at break-neck speed, so too develops consciousness. But as the events of 1989 demonstrate, there is an ideological struggle for political leadership of the movement.

What started as a potentially revolutionary movement against Stalinism in Eastern Europe ended up handing power to open counter-revolutionaries. Workers need to have their own political alternative, a party armed with a socialist program, if they do not wish hostile class forces to win. The work to build such an

alternative cannot be put off until the movement starts. Revolutionary socialists need to gather their forces now to be prepared.

It was, of course, first and foremost the working class and youth - those who suffered as ethnic conflicts broke out as well as the millions of East Europeans who fled their own countries in search of work - who paid the price for the absence of a socialist alternative to Stalinism. But the collapse of Stalinism also had a profound effect on the workers’ movement internationally. Since the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917, even during the dark days of Stalin’s purges and then the Cold War, the existence of the Soviet bloc demonstrated that it was possible to have an alternative to capitalism. Once this apparent alternative disappeared we saw the abandoning, even in words, of a socialist orientation in former left parties throughout the world. Only now, after 30 years, is there a beginning of the resurrection of support for socialist ideas particularly among the youth.

The revolutionary left, not insulated from this process, experienced theoretical turmoil and sharp internal controversies as a result. The Committee for a Workers’ International as a whole had underestimated the decay of Stalinism and even, in the 1970s and ‘80s, considered the restoration of capitalism to be impossible. Collective discussions during these momentous events, enriched by the experience of new members from this region, helped to correct this mistake. Nevertheless, a conservative layer within the CWI around Ted Grant and Alan Woods proved incapable of adjusting to this sharp change in the world situation, clinging instead to the old “fundamental” formulae before splitting to form their own organization (the International Marxist Tendency), which for years refused to accept that capitalist restoration had taken place.

The tremendous events of 1989 demonstrated the power of the organized working class. Our task now is to ensure that next time we are ready to channel that energy into defeating all forms of capitalist reaction and create a genuinely democratic and internationalist socialist society. J

Book Review

The Logistics Industry and the Case for Socialism People’s Republic of Walmart: How the Wordl’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Founding for Socialism

By Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski Verso Books, 2019

Eli Fox and Kele Cable Among the most common arguments conservatives hurl at socialism is that planned economies always fail. Typically capitalists argue that, despite the flaws of the free market, it’s far better than any other system that has existed or could exist, because any system which tries to overcome the market will inevitably lead to authoritarianism and inefficiency. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to lend credence to this argument. Even many in the resurgent left, such as Bernie Sanders, while arguing for very significant reforms including taking health insurance and utilities into public ownership, still fundamentally accept leaving most of the economy in private hands.

However, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, in their new book People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundations for Socialism, have helped show how the very examples of efficiency in capitalist society itself disprove the arguments against planning. Their argument runs as follows: despite operating in an external market, the internal life of corporations, such as Walmart, rely upon internal cooperation and sharing of information through the use of computerized information technology. Unlike a socialist planned economy, this planning is done for the sake of profit, rather than

for human need, and relies upon the tyrannical exploitation of their workforces. Nonetheless, this reveals that large-scale planning is not only possible, but necessary even under globalized capitalism.

The book unfortunately falls short on providing a program to achieve a democratically planned economy, but it nonetheless provides a set of useful case studies of economic planning to prove its viability.

The Economic Calculation Debate

Throughout the book, the authors return to the question of the so-called “economic calculation debate” which questioned whether planning a national-scale economy is possible. This debate arose largely because of the rise of the Soviet Union, which seemed in the early 20th century to demonstrate the viability of large-scale planning. In response, right-wing “Austrian school” economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek formulated the most well-known arguments against the possibility of economic planning.

Mises directed his attacks against the anti-capitalist, but non-Marxist economist Otto Neurath, who believed that the entire economy could be organized on a similar basis as the German wartime economy - planned by a central body where “money and markets play no role in the allocation of goods” (p. 24).

Contrary to Neurath, Mises claimed - in Phillips and Rozworski’s words - that “No human process could possibly gather all the necessary data, assess it in real time, and produce plans that accurately describe supply and demand across all sectors...These

34 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 tions have vast internally planned economies. Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue (exceeding the Soviet Union at its height), by workforce with 1.5 million U.S. workers alone, and by U.S. imports. Their physical network of supply chains, from overseas suppliers to 11,000 stores, requires planning on a global scale.

Walmart’s and Amazon’s success depend on the technological and organizational innovations that drove the logistics revolution, such as mechanized inventory control, bar codes, and shipping containers. Amazon, riding Walmart’s coattails, has made special use of “Big Data” collected from its surveillance mechaWalMart worker during a one day strike in Pico Rivera, California in 2012. nisms - not only knowing what you bought, but what you thought inefficiencies would result in such social and economic barbarabout buying to carve and expand its own planned empire withities - shortages, starvation, frustration, and chaos - that even if in retail markets. one accepts the inevitability of inequalities and attendant myriad The authors point to a counter-example in the form of Sears’ other horrors of capitalism, the market will still appear benign CEO, Edward Lampert, who, inspired by the free market guru by comparison” (p. 28). By contrast, Mises claimed that, the free Ayn Rand, ruined Sears by eschewing planning and instead havmarket, in spite of its limitations, used prices to automatically ing different divisions mimic separate firms competing in a marcalculate optimal resource allocation. ket.

The appliance division, for example, had to pay fees to the Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, attacked socialism on branding division to use Sears’ Kenmore brand, but discovered a different basis. He differed from some other capitalist econothat it was cheaper to market third-party appliance brands inmists in that he questioned the longstanding capitalist assumpstead (pp.

41-43).

Needless to say, the company became at war tion of rational, omniscient, and self-interested market actors. with itself and has since succumbed and declared bankruptcy.

Instead, he argued that humans are often irrational. From this he Thus the authors reveal capitalism’s “dirty secret”: “the market concluded that a key role of markets was that they actually proeconomy is not only rife with planning, but with authoritarian duced information, and that central planners would not be able planning [within firms] that concentrates economic decision to produce all of the information necessary to make judgements. making in the hands of wealth owners and keeps workers in Throughout the book, Phillips and Rozworski deal with othline” (p.

50).

These are “islands of tyranny” in a sea of misery. er aspects of the economic calculation debate, going into more Beyond the individual firm, the authors claim, financial markets depth regarding Neurath and others’ ideas. But much of the and banks allocate and redistribute resources throughout the debate took place through the language of abstract formalism. economy, adjusting the pace of economic activity, in a role akin Regardless of theoretical debates over economic calculation, to central planners: “Interest rates, financial sector regulations Walmart and Amazon have in practice settled the issue: huge and loan decisions are capitalism’s way of choosing between difeconomies can be planned. As Phillips and Rozworski put it: ferent possible economic plans.”

“If something works in theory but not in practice, then there is It is true that important actors in the financial system, and espeusually something wrong with the theory. But it is equally true cially central banks, make decisions that affect the whole econthat if something in theory does not work, but in practice it does, omy and have access to a wealth of detailed economic informathen again, something must be wrong with the theory. And here tion in the same way that a central planner might. Marx once is where the villainous Walmart enters our story. Walmart is perremarked that “The banking system possesses, indeed, the form haps the best evidence we have that while planning appears not of universal book-keeping and distribution of means of producto work in Mises’s theory, it certainly does in practice. And then tion on a social scale, but solely the form,” (Capital Vol. 3, Ch. some” (p. 30).

36). Socialist planning will require a democratic system analogous to a bank for making investment decisions. But ultimateWalmart/Amazon ly a direct comparison to central planners is somewhat fraught, Socialist Alternative has long pointed out that despite capitalist because of the extent to which competition between different society’s reliance on markets, Walmart and other mega-corpora-

Book Review 35 groups of financial capitalists dominates in investment decisions.

This is especially true on an international scale, where the financial capitalists of different imperialist powers, such as China and America, compete for control of world markets. The authors underemphasize the role that competition within the financial sector plays, and don’t even mention the role of competition between imperialist powers in shaping investment decisions.

What About Russia?

While the internal planning in Walmart and Amazon may show the viability of a planned economy, the planning in these companies is thoroughly undemocratic. This leaves open the question of whether democratic planning is viable. For opponents of a planned economy, the example of the Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet Union is held up as a warning. Phillips and Rozworski come to a different conclusion: “Mises and Hayek have it backwards: it is not that degradation of economic information as a result of planning leads to authoritarianism, but that authoritarianism drives degradation of information, which undermines planning” (p. 150).

The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought workers to power on a national scale for the first time in history. In the early days of the Soviet Union rapid shifts were made to the economic and social life of the country. Huge social gains were made for working people, especially oppressed nationalities, women and LGBTQ people and the rule of the tyrannical czar was defeated. Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders made clear from the start that if the revolution did not spread across Europe into more advanced countries, it was doomed to fail.

There were many heroic attempts made at revolutions in the years following 1917, all of which ended in bloody counter revolution. Unfortunately, because of the isolation and desperate economic conditions of the Soviet Union in the years after the revolution, a bureaucracy was able to win control, with Stalin as its chosen representative. With workers and officials afraid of political consequences for speaking frankly, the bureaucracy’s ability to plan was continuously degraded. The information available to planners was of limited quality, and the interests of bureaucrats in retaining their privileges and surviving dominated over the interests of society.

A chilling example is given in the book: during the forced collectivization of agriculture, where peasants were conscripted onto collective farms with inadequate equipment and training, volunteer technicians were dispatched to educate them on technical matters. Realizing quickly that the pace of collectivization was far too rapid and heading toward disaster, the technicians warned central authorities. Instead of heeding their warning, the technicians were denounced as wreckers and enemies of the revolution, and executed or sent to labor camps. The result was mass starvation, especially in the Ukraine.

In explaining the failure of bureaucratic planning, Phillips and Rozworski echo the analysis of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who lead the struggle against Stalinism: “Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative – conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies, and flattery,”

(The Revolution Betrayed, 1936, Ch. 11).

While Phillips and Rozworski successfully demonstrate that economic planning does not inevitably lead to dictatorship, they stumble when it comes to explaining why the Soviet bureaucracy came to power. Specifically, the authors criticize the Bolsheviks for their supposed lack of a coherent strategy for economic planning in this period. They contrast the Bolsheviks with Otto Neurath, who had constructed a “detailed theorization of how socialist industries would have to be organized” (p. 151).

The Bolsheviks economic program in 1917 focused on demands such as transferring state power to the emerging soviets (workers councils), confiscating the profits of the capitalists, nationalizing the banks, and allowing workers to inspect and hold accountable all operations of the capitalist enterprises. While Neurath’s schemes are interesting, and perhaps useful for an advanced capitalist economy, they would have been of limited utility in the semi-feudal economy of Russia in 1917.

The Bolsheviks were faced with civil war and foreign invasions, as well as the semi-feudal economy of pre-revolutionary Russia.

Initially it was hoped that the revolution would take hold elsewhere, and indeed it did spread to Germany and Hungary. The combination of Russian resources and German industry could have been the basis for a powerful planned economy across the Eurasian landmass. This would have been the beginning of the global transition to socialism.

But tragically those movements were quashed, leaving the revolution isolated. This isolation, and the death of many workers during the war, allowed the bureaucracy to develop. Here, the authors would have done well to look more into Trotsky’s explanation of Stalinism. He argued that bureaucracy developed to control the distribution of goods during times of scarcity (The Revolution Betrayed, Ch. 5).

However, even despite this bureaucracy, the planned economy was still able to deliver significant gains to workers as the living standards of the Soviet population were raised at a faster rate than they would have under capitalism, especially in the Central Asian republics. For example, homelessness was almost completely eliminated in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union went from having a largely agrarian economy to sending the first person to space in a matter of three decades, achieving unprecedented levels of growth, albeit at tremendous human cost due to bureaucratic ineptitude.

There were of course serious limits to what an isolated workers state could accomplish, especially without workers democracy.

Still, after its collapse and privatization, numerous problems began to re-emerge, such as a sharp increase in infant mortality, collapse in wages, and a rise in ethnic conflict.

Limits of Social Planning Within Capitalism

The authors look at attempts to implement planning through reforms within capitalism. For example, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), won as a concession to the powerful mid-century workers’ movement, is a massive state-run public institution, designed to serve a public need without being driven by the profit motive. However, the authors argue lack of community and worker control left NHS susceptible to continuous erosion

36 Socialist World Issue 2, 2019 from neoliberal reforms installed under Margaret Thatcher and since then (p. 146). Thus, control of the industry must not only be wrested from the capitalists though nationalization, but then must be democratized.

However, the authors don’t sufficiently acknowledge what a huge boon even this somewhat technocratic NHS was for the working class. Simply taking health care out of the realm of the market allowed millions of working-class people to avoid illness and premature death. In addition, the authors focus on the lack of democracy as the chief cause of the NHS’s erosion. More important, though, is the capitalists never accepted the NHS as a permanent reality and saw it as a “bad example.” They sought to run it down and also saw it as a potential market to be exploited. As the labor movement retreated in the past thirty years, the British elite advanced a neoliberal offensive that has led to significant cuts and privatization of parts of the NHS. The authors also examine a dynamic but short-lived instance of planning in Salvador Allende’s Chile. Allende, a left-wing reformist, came to power in 1970 and initiated a series of radical changes spurred on by workers, such as nationalization of parts of the economy and the development of a “proto-internet” called Cybersyn. This system connected various factories and facilities via telephone lines to a central computer. Although the authors correctly highlight the radical possibilities of both Cybersyn and the NHS, they do not describe what would’ve been necessary to keep these reforms from being eroded or destroyed by the capitalist class.

Nationalizing a large section of the economy could be a step toward socialism, but only if the state power itself is firmly committed to that transition. This requires breaking the political power of the capitalists and establishing a workers government.

We will not be able to establish democratic planning through a series of reforms. Allende envisaged a peaceful and gradual

Amazon warehouse in Romeoville, IL.

implementation of socialist planning, which left him unprepared for the U.S.-backed military coup that installed a military dictatorship for more than 25 years.

The authors see the example of Cybersyn as a possible way forward to avoid the dangers of a bureaucratic system like the one that arose in the Soviet Union. They argue that this example shows that “contemporary processing power and telecommunications networks can work to overcome the economic calculation challenge” (p. 229).

Unfortunately, while the authors do present a vision of a new society, they offer no clear program as to how to get there. They present global democratic planning as a goal, but they present this as something to work toward “over generations.” Reforms are often peeled back by the capitalists and a threat of global democratic planning would be met with iron resistance, as happened in Chile. Bafflingly, in a book about Walmart that emphasizes public ownership, the authors do not explicitly state the need to bring Walmart into public ownership. The very act of nationalizing the world’s largest private employer could have revolutionary implications. Ultimately, a revolutionary program will be necessary to implement any large-scale democratic planning. The authors emphasize the technical developments that make planning more efficient, but even more important is the organization of working class power to take planning into our own hands.

That being said, The People’s Republic of Walmart presents a series of useful case studies, ranging from contemporary capitalist practices to historical socialist societies, that demonstrate that not only is large-scale economic planning feasible, it is actually preferable. The book is a useful demonstration of the old adage from Marx that capitalism, in this case Walmart and Amazon, ultimately produces its own gravediggers, but only if the working class wields the shovels. J

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