Crisis and Class Struggle: Present Trends and Tasks

AS on past occasions, the current crisis has been accompanied – or should we say complemented – by powerful mass movements everywhere against job loss, wage freeze, food crisis, price rise, subsidy withdrawal, corporate capture of natural resources as a means of legalised loot, and so on. Let us briefly examine some of the more important dimensions of these political fallouts of the economic crisis.

Lessons of the Occupy Movement

The occupy movement announced the return of agitational politics in the US in the hands of a new generation, and in a changed context, drawing inspiration from the then recent outbursts in Spain, UK and other countries and the concurrent Arab Spring. The strong and clear battle cry “99% against the 1%” reverberated through America and beyond for the better part of 2011, the international year of street protests. It featured a rich variety of issues and forms of struggle. Oakland (USA) for example distinguished itself by organising highly successful dock strikes and blockades – actually it based the movement on concrete demands of the local dockworkers rather than on the general “99%” slogan.

But why target just “1% “? Does the rest belong entirely to the working and middle classes? No, the “99%” does include many rich people. But to pinpoint the “1%” at the top of the economic pyramid is to concentrate fire on those who actually command both the economy and the politics of the United States: those who own controlling stakes in largest corporations and often double up as influential senators, highest campaign contributors, advisers to the President, and so on. As the recently deceased progressive American writer Gore Vidal said in a BBC interview back in July 2002, “One percent owns everything – like the CEOs who now seem to be queuing up to go to gaol! Under them there is a further twenty percent who support the Empire. These are the lawyers, the journalists, politicians and bankers and so on. The one percent hires the twenty percent.”Quoted by Alan Woods in The decline and fall of the American Empire in the web magazine “In Defence of Marxism”, 16 July 2002, accessed on 14 August 2012. The reference to “CEOs ... queuing up to go to gaol” is based on the incidence of several top executives being charged for corruption and/or sent to jail. By identifying only the 1% as the main enemy, the slogan seeks to neutralize the 20% at this primary stage of struggle.

Anyway, what is the present state of the great social movement? Events like families occupying schools in Oakland to prevent their closure, Occupiers across the country working to prevent evictions and foreclosures, are often reported in the independent (non-main-stream) media. On 17 September, as part of a three-day (15-17) action programme, protesters converged near the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the first anniversary, marking the day they began camping out in Zuccotti Park. Marches and rallies were organized in several other cities around the world to commemorate the day. People joined concerts. Lectures were delivered. But there is no denying that the very broad movement has fragmented into several mini-movements, with some preoccupied with ecology, some with pressing local problems and so on, rarely coordinating among themselves.

What went wrong? One-sided emphasis on political open-endedness, horizontalism in organisation and decision-making by consensus contributed to the initial successes of the movement but prevented it from gaining the sharper political focus and strike power necessary for going over to the new, post-crackdown stage. In the absence of democratically formulated common goals and a unifying centre, the enormous amount of social energy that was mobilised under the “Occupy” banner remained in the nebulous state for far too long, failed to solidify and, with the inevitability of a natural law, got dispersed in a political vacuum.

But energy is never destroyed, it cannot be. It can undergo endless transformations and get condensed into solid mass when certain conditions are present. At the moment part of the occupy energy is working at local levels as indicated earlier; a part goes into higher political actions like protests against NATO and G8 summits; and probably the major part has been inducted into the Obama presidential campaign under the guise of warding off the threat of a more anti-people Republican takeover. However, since the basic source of the movement of 99% – the crisis of neoliberal order making life intolerably harder for the average American – is only going to get worse, it is reasonable to expect that sooner or later the movement will rediscover itself in a new situation in a new format. A lively discussion is going on about what is to done now (see box).

The occupy movement was a spark that did not find the objective and subjective condition to immediately start a prairie fire. But, with all its historical limitations, it’s continuing, even spreading. Many in the movement are proud to see the Jal Satyagraha in Khandwa district in MP district of India and protests against the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant in TN as part of their struggle; why shouldn’t we?

 

Workers, Students and Farmers Against Neoliberal Offensive

Capital seeks to wriggle out of the crisis and bolster its position and profits by different means affecting different cross sections of people, pushing the latter on to desperate resistance struggles. Right from the days of the PATCO struggle and the UK coal workers’ strike, the neoliberal state as the agency of capital has been trying to snatch the rights and wage levels gained by the working class through more than a century of bitter struggle at the cost of much blood and sweat. Naturally workers are fighting back everywhere against these “flexible labour policies” and “labour market reforms”. In our country we have witnessed national industrial actions as well as powerful struggles of industrial workers in the Gurgaon-Manesar belt, in Coimbatore and Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu and dozens of other places; of construction workers and other sections of casual unorganised workers including growing contingents of women workers; of bank and government employees and so on.

On top of a series of militant movements throughout the world, miners’ strikes in Spain in early 2012 and in South Africa in August – the latter resulting in the death of some 34 workers – won widest popular support at home and abroad. In China, TNCs have long been accustomed to carrying on super exploitation of the super disciplined workforce thanks to the absence of an independent trade union movement, but in recent years workers have started asserting themselves. The massive clash between workers and security guards at a Foxconn plant in September was one of many instances.

Severe cutbacks on education budgets as part of the austerity overdrive and further opening up of the education industry to private profiteers have emerged as major fighting issues before the global academic community including students, teachers (recently in Chicago for example) and others. From UK in 2010-11 through Chile, France and some other countries and this year in Canada students have placed themselves firmly at the forefront of a spreading youth rebellion. The Canadian students have earned widespread support linking their tuition protests to other popular struggles against higher fees for health care, the firing of public sector employees, the closure of factories, new restrictions on union organizing, etc.

Worldwide corporate land and resource grab have brought agriculturists (from big farmers through middle and small peasants to agrarian labourers) and indigenous communities into intense collision course with capital and its state. Struggles against various agro-business companies like Pepsi and Monsanto as well as multinational retail chains like Wal-Mart are also growing.

The Bolivarian Alternative to Neoliberalism

Our survey of struggles against capital in crisis would remain unpardonably incomplete if we did not mention Latin America. Because it is here that long and hard struggles on the streets have culminated in the emergence of popular governments in a number of countries which try and follow heterodox anti-neoliberal economic policies to the extent possible in a hostile US-dominated world economic environment. In Venezuela for example, as James Petras points out, “Despite crime and official inefficiencies and corruption, the Chavez era has been a period extremely favorable for the lower class and sectors of business, commerce and finance. This year – 2012 – is no exception. According to the UN, Venezuela’s growth rate (5%) exceeds that of Argentina (2%), Brazil (1.5%) and Mexico (4%). Private consumption has been the main driver of growth thanks to the growth of labor markets, increased credit and public investment.” (Venezuelan Elections: a Choice and Not an Echo, Oct 4, 2012)

The impressive progress countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador have made and the difficult challenges they face are too vast a subject to be covered here, but certainly they are a great source of inspiration for all who are struggling to break the bondage of capital and move toward a saner society.

BIG Picture and Basic Message

Behind periodic crises – we learned in our brief dialogue with Marx – lurks a complex interplay of myriad forces, the most important being “the epidemic of overproduction” or overaccumulation of capital going hand in hand with increasingly skewed distribution of income and wealth.

Marx developed a perfectly dialectical approach to crises. On one hand, they constitute capitalism’s inbuilt mechanism for spontaneously and ruthlessly eliminating excess or over-accumulated capital, ‘so that the cycle would run its course anew’ (Capital). On the other hand, they achieve this in a manner that ‘paves the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and diminishes the means whereby crises are prevented’ (Communist Manifesto) and leads finally to the ‘violent overthrow’ of the rule of capital (Grundrisse). It is from this approach that we have tried to comprehend the crisis of neoliberalism.

The central message emanating from the financial catastrophe and its aftermath is that global capitalism’s strategic response to the crisis of 1970s has failed. That was a three-pronged strategy comprising deregulation or market fundamentalism, globalisation and financialisation. Since these were the three pillars on which post-1970s capitalism stood – and, in a certain sense, and in certain parts of the world, flourished – the extensive damage they have suffered have left the whole imposing edifice tottering. This is why there is no end to aftershocks like the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. This is why, full five years after the onset of the crisis, the world economy is still in the doldrums.

But even a systemic crisis like the present one does not necessarily mean that the system is going to collapse anytime soon. However, if past experience is any guide, some sort of restructuring is likely to be in the offing, the basic content and direction (pro- or anti-labour) of which will depend mainly on the outcome of the class battles – defensive and offensive, extra-parliamentary and parliamentary – now raging across the globe. Shall we see a repeat performance of the masses in US and Europe forcing respectively the New Deal and the welfare state policies on their ruling elites? Will the non-financial interests among the bourgeoisie, in league with their farsighted organic intellectuals, assert whatever relative independence they still enjoy to try and put in place regulatory policies and reforms that could salvage some of the lost legitimacy of capitalism? Or will the financial oligarchies succeed in dishing out cosmetic changes in policy that actually consolidate their own hegemonic positions and megaprofits?

No, we must not just wait and see.

As we write these lines, the people of India are up in arms against a booster dose of neoliberal ‘reforms’ administered by Dr. Manmohan Singh and his masters. So are the masses across the world. On 26 September, upwards of 200,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Athens, as part of a general strike. “People, fight, they’re drinking your blood,” protesters chanted as they banged drums. Police clashed with protesters hurling petrol bombs and bottles. The same day, a € 11.5 billion ($14.87 billion) package of spending cuts was announced as demanded by the country’s international lenders. Almost simultaneously, thousands besieged the parliament in Madrid and more than half a million people marched in cities across Portugal to protest against cuts in social security.

All of us must join the fight with all our might, for a rollback of the neoliberal policy regime and progressive reform now and ultimately for a radical transformation of this irrational, oppressive, inhuman social order.