We are sad to inform our readers of the death of our comrade Mac Intosh on 27 August after a very short illness.
His unexpected death has shocked us. We shall write more about him and intend to prepare an edited collection of his writings.
Angry Workers Editorial on the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Below is an editorial published by our comrades in Angry Workers about the latest eruption of conflict between Israel and Palestine. While we obviously condemn the brutal occupation and the conditions imposed on the people in Gaza, we remain critical of all nationalist movements. As the article makes clear, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas organizations are no heroes and hostile to proletarian class interests.
We wholeheartedly agree with the Angry Workers’ conclusion that the only way out of this mess is through an internationalist convergence of working class struggles.
José
Over the last two weeks, the Israeli state has launched devastating aerial attacks on Gaza, and Hamas have fired over 3,000 rockets towards Israel. The dead now number 13 from Israel (including 1 child and two migrant workers from Thailand) and 248 in the Palestinian territory (including 66 children) with a further 1,900 wounded. Everywhere, the bourgeoisie and middle classes, along with their representatives in the press and state, have wept over the mounting corpses in the hopes that their crocodile tears will wash away the evidence of their complicity in this barbarism. It is crucial that the working class, both in the Middle East and the world over, sees through this pantomime.
Read More →
First of May: Memory and Perspectives
At the occasion of May First, the Argentina-based group La Oveja Negra (‘The Black Sheep’) draws up a balance sheet of past struggles against capitalism and finds a perspective of the future in the present ones.
A new commemoration of May Day, 1886, allows us to remember, share, inspire, debate, reflect and agitate.
We commemorate another anti-capitalist May Day struggle many years ago for which five comrades were executed at the hands of the State and another three sentenced to life imprisonment, later known as the “Chicago Martyrs”.
The anti-capitalist struggle is as necessary today as yesterday for those of us who suffer the consequences of Capitalism in our everyday life: every working day, whether inside or outside of where we live, with or without wages, with or without fixed hours, every time we look for work we suffer the deficiencies, every time our relations with other human beings are mediated by money which turns them into relations between things.
For centuries the proletariat has been waging battles; however, those May days in Chicago were part of a struggle for which proletarians organized with an emancipatory perspective. George Engel, a typographer and anarchist hanged in 1887, expressed it this way: “I do not fight the capitalists individually; I fight the system that gives rise to privilege.
Read More →
A SIGH OF RELIEF?
Half of America breathed a sigh of relief when power was finally transferred from, the would be autocrat Donald J. Trump, to the less colorful but entirely predictable Joe Biden. The Biden half believe his ascension represents a return to rationality, to social justice, to the standards of comportment expected of a liberal democracy, indeed, to civility itself. This half of America hopes we can end this chapter of American history and return to normal. But, what of the other half, the half for whom normal is not working, the millions who voted for Trump? Where will they go, what will they do, how will their anger be manifest? Will “Trumpism” turn into a proto-fascist movement as many fear? Are the conditions ripe for such a movement? It would seem so. Trumpism seems to share some important features with historical fascism:
- The adoration of a strong leader (Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Peron etc.)
- The fear and hostility towards an outsider group (Jews, immigrants, Muslims)
- Nostalgia for and identity with a mythical past (MAGA, Pax Romana, Aryan civilization, the old South, etc.)
- An obsession with guns and the second amendment (Black Shirts, Proud Boys, militarization of civil society, militias)
- A belief in conspiracies (The Elders of Zion, Q-anon, communist subversion etc.)
Read More →
A Second Pandemic: Madness
The whole world looked on with astonishment at the events at the US Capitol on 6 January. The commentators and politicians berated the orgiastic attack on the ‘beacon of democracy’; this attack gave a performance usually associated with other parts of the world (and often paid for by the US government). However, another thought went through millions of minds: have Americans gone mad?
This question arose not simply because of the violence on the day but because the participants were unrestrained in expressing their beliefs about what was going on in the US, and crystallising five years’ worth of tirades about conspiracy and ‘fake news.’ But this was only the tip of the iceberg. There has been a ready acceptance in a growing proportion of the American population to believe the most bizarre stories about what is going on in their country. Consider these: that the ‘deep state’ ruling the country is composed of (Democratic, of course) Satan-worshipping cannibalistic paedophiles; Californian wildfires were started by alien Jewish lasers; the Parkland school shooting was staged to attack the gun lobby; the Covid vaccination campaign aims to inject Bill Gates’s microchips into the population. All these went alongside the Trump ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington.
Read More →
Coronavirus: Why the Bourgeoisie is Unfit to Rule
The plague of SARS-Covid-19 that has spread everywhere in 2020 brings into stark relief the natural behaviour of the bourgeoisie which defends only its own class interests and has no inclination to defend the interests of humanity; indeed, its very participation in dealing with the virus heightens the problems we all confront. The scrabbling for profits or political benefits, the bureaucratic infighting, the competition, the corruption, the drive for centralisation and the maintenance of power structures, the indifference to the needs of populations: all these facets of bourgeois rule are alive and active in their response to the pandemic. It could not be otherwise.
Behind the many faces the bourgeoisie presents to its national populations – democratic or authoritarian in varying degrees – is the historic enemy of humanity: the capitalist socio-economic system which dominates all aspects of human life. And this system, which has everyone in its grip, gives its ruling class the power to determine how the current pandemic is dealt with. The nature of the bourgeoisie is shown in its actions and is clearly revealed in its handling of the various chapters of the pandemic story to date. Indeed, the behaviour of the bourgeoisie in this pandemic highlights why the working class must rid the world of this parasitic system of exploitation which poses an existential threat to humanity.
Read More →
The Storm That Gave Biden Wings
A failed coup d’etat or a succesful coup de theatre?
Was what happened in Washington on January 6 a failed coup? An armed insurrection against the state? A terrorist attack of the caliber of 9/11? A sacrilege in the temple of democracy? A slap in the face of America like Pearl Harbor? The equivalent of the Nazi Crystal Night? Was it “one of the darkest days in American history”? The media and politicians were not lacking superlatives to describe the event. Even the Murdoch press (Fox News etc.) participated (reluctantly).
But a coup d’etat is something else. If thousands had caught the Capitol by force and taken politicians hostage as part of a coordinated plan to seize power, it would have been a coup attempt. But that was not what we saw on January 6.
Terrorists or tourists?
“Surreal” is a word that comes to mind when describing the circus. Trump set it in motion, exhorting his jamboree of thousands of hardcore followers to go to the Capitol to pressure Congressmen to reject the election results. “I will walk with you!”, he promised, after which he quickly returned to the White House to watch what happened next on TV. But even without him, the Trumpists arrived in an excited and determined mood at the Congress building where the undermanned police could not stop them.
Read More →
Streets and Workplaces, Race and Class (Part 3)
A caste system
Slavery in Roman times was not racial. Slaves were not considered subhuman, not even a different kind of human. Their skin color didn’t matter. It could be the same as their masters or not.They were exploited, obviously, but their workload was limited by the needs of their masters. They, and more so their progeny, could often become ‘free’ citizens. By contrast, in capitalist slavery, skin color was all important, the visual justification of the treatment of people as beasts of burden. Only Africans were enslaved, ‘black’ became a synonym for slave. Profit was the driving force. Unlike slaves in antiquity and the middle ages, the modern slaves were exclusively bought as a means to the production of other commodities. As long as the demand for the products of their labor was high, their workload was only limited by their physical strength and often went beyond it.
And the demand was very high. Capitalist slavery was very profitable and so it expanded. The construction of racism, its indispensable ideology (see part 2), created a rigid caste system in the western hemisphere. It was a complex, blood-based hierarchy of Others that dictated that for each caste member, the ceiling was the floor of the caste above his.
Read More →
Four Horsemen of Capitalism: Racism, Plague, Poverty and … Democracy
American workers have been on the receiving end of an onslaught of astonishing proportions, all of it caused by the bourgeoisie which considers the rest of the population to be a free-fire zone. In past months, the extra-juridical executions of black people by the police, the deaths of a quarter of a million people from Covid-19, the accelerated impoverishment brought about by the economic crisis and the refusal to send relief to the unemployed and hungry have intensified social distress. Added to which the elections and events around them have seemingly bludgeoned the population into the most extraordinary mindsets.
Clearly, faced with this barrage, the workers have been on the defensive. So, how do we assess their ability to fight back? To do this we have to unravel several themes in the social situation; in so doing we encounter its several unusual features.
Racism, Plague and Poverty
Throughout American history, racism has been an integral part of the social reality and as capitalism developed so this poison was used to divide the working class. The US party system with its Republican and Democratic organisations have each had what we might label their progressive and reactionary wings. But, especially since the Nixon era, their alignments have moved.
Read More →
Streets and Workplaces, Race and Class (Part 2)
Like in their earlier text on the site Ill Will , “Theses on the George Floyd rebellion” , in their more recent essay “The Return of John Brown: White Race-Traitors in the 2020 Uprising “, Shemon and Arturo describe the social unrest of this year as a big step forward towards revolution. Less because of the mostly peaceful daytime mass protests than because of the nighttime violent insurgency. “Riots, looting, and arson have accomplished more in one summer than what activists have been able to accomplish in decades”, they write. And: “Experiencing this has been unlike anything we’ve experienced before. In the nerve-centers of the American empire, disparate fractions of the proletariat came together to attack the police and storm the commercial corridors of dozens of cities. In the “Theses,” we argued that the self-activity of the Black proletariat is the driving force of this revolutionary trajectory. In this essay, we explore the role of the white proletariat in this process.”
The authors are apologetic for even addressing this subject. They expect resistance from non-white proletarians “who cannot, on principle, stand any discussion of poor and working class whites”, who “think that it [the white proletariat] is eternally lost to racism”.
Read More →