World Capitalist Crisis Spurs Workers’ Fight-back

The international working class is fighting back, from North Africa to the Mid-East, to Europe to the U.S., against the effects of capitalism’s world economic and political crisis. It has sparked social movements that have captured the imagination, with many comparing 2011 to 1968. Wherever PLP is present it is playing a political role in these movements.

Four billion working-class families are trying to exist on $1 to $2 a day under the weight of the International Monetary Fund-induced austerity. This global economic crisis was fed by capitalism’s drive for maximum profits, centered on Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2011 upsurge.

‘68 General Strike Rocked France

“The French 1968 upheaval took the French ruling class by surprise,” said Alan Woods, the English Marxist historian. Students in France responded both to U.S. imperialism’s Vietnam War genocide) and to French bosses’ university repression. When linked up with the working class — suffering as the lowest-paid industrial workers in Europe — it resulted in a general strike which rocked the very foundations of French capitalism. This qualitative change stemmed from quantitative internal contradictions in French capitalism.

The General Strike paralyzed France. The French National Police could barely contain the insurrection. French bosses feared that an Army call-up might induce many working-class soldiers to side with the strikers and mutiny, so they called up reservists but restricted them to military bases and away from television and radio. DeGaulle almost lost his grip on state power and called on the German military to be ready with tank warfare to put down the revolt.

Ultimately the insurrection failed because, without a viable communist party to lead the working class to revolution, the French “Communist” Party made a deal with DeGaulle and took the electoral road, relying on “lesser evil” bosses.

Woods mentions that DeGaulle so feared revolution that he planned to imprison 20,000 left-wing activists in the Winter Stadium where they would have met a similar fate that Chilean workers and students would face five years later.”

Also in ’68, left-wing students in Mexico used the approaching Olympics to champion needed social reforms: freedom for political prisoners, dismissal of the fascist Mexico City Police Chief, and use of tax money for Mexico’s working class instead of for the Olympics.

Their fight-back began in Mexico City, trying to free an imprisoned railway union leader. The fascist Mexican President Gustavo Ordaz refused to meet with the students’ Strike Council but instead ordered the police and the Army to shoot to kill. Hundreds died or were wounded. October 2nd became known as “The Night of Sorrows.”

The students had three political weaknesses: (1) No revolutionary communist party; (2) No link-up with workers in a general strike; and (3) no ties to working-class Army troops which might have prevented the massacre.

IMF Austerity Takes Its Toll

Now in 2011, the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Mid-East erupted — as with France 1968 — because of capitalism’s insoluble contradictions. Tunisia, like many North African nations, suffered from the 2008 global capitalist crisis. The IMF austerity was taking its toll on the working class. The self-immolation of Mohammed in Sidi Bouazizi, frustrated and poverty-stricken, was the final straw. The section of the Tunisian bosses represented by President Ben Ali was overthrown. Insurgencies soon spread to Egypt, Syria, Libya and Bahrain.

This was a positive development; Arab workers were fighting back, but again, there was no communist party to lead to the overthrow of ALL bosses. One capitalist group was simply replaced by another in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The Arab Spring is a bourgeois revolution. Anything short of communist revolution is a defeat for the international working class, unless in the course of that class struggle workers and youth are won to building a communist party that aims to overthrow capitalism.

In the U.S., the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement began in September, 2011, responding to the increasing economic inequality and mass unemployment precipitated by the capitalist crisis. Globally over 200 million workers lost their jobs because of the instability of capitalism. Wall Street was the flashpoint for the crisis, hence the name OWS, but it soon spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. and then around the world.

Rulers Trying to Co-opt OWS

While many OWS rank-and-filers have political disagreements with capitalism, the OWS leadership is reformist. Ruling-class influences (George Soros, Obama, the Democrats) are trying to co-opt the movement, to keep it within capitalist bounds, away from becoming radicalized and posing a danger to capitalism itself. The pro-capitalist leadership of unions like the SEIU pulls OWS toward reformist tactics, preventing it from openly challenging the capitalist system.

Rank-and-file Occupiers include workers — employed and unemployed — students, union activists and soldiers, black, white and Latino, women and men.

Many PL’ers trying to move the rank-and-file toward a communist class analysis, explaining why capitalist reforms cannot work, given the system’s internal contradictions centered on racism, sexism and imperialism. Thousands of CHALLENGES distributed to OWS workers and students across the U.S. play a vital role in that effort.

Election Circus vs.
Smash Capitalism

PLP’ers in OWS go beyond the language of the “99%,” terms Democrats cynically use to steer OWS class struggle toward re-electing Obama. PLP’s message is clear: Capitalism is a crisis-ridden system which only serves the interests of the billionaires. Because of its racist and sexist nature, it can never be reformed, never help billions of workers. It must be smashed with communist revolution led by the international PLP to create a communist society with the Party as its leading force. This goes beyond OWS bourgeois reforms.

The 2011-12 class struggles of OWS, the trade union fights in Wisconsin and Ohio and the Arab Spring are important because they demonstrate that workers will fight back against all odds. But workers from OWS to Cairo’s Tahir Square need a winning Marxist class analysis and revolutionary strategy that only PLP can offer.

There are some historical similarities between current global class struggles and the social explosions of 1968. There are also important political lessons:

   • The international working class needs a revolutionary communist party, the PLP, to win state power. The absence of such leadership in 1968 France doomed a valiant insurrection to failure. Workers can have the material conditions necessary for a revolutionary situation, but without communist leadership the capitalist bosses will live to continue their oppression.

   • PLP must be prepared to lead the masses of workers to revolution. At some point a social explosion in North America — the heart of capitalist imperialism — on the scale of 1968 France could offer the opportunity to violently overthrow U.S. bosses. As Mao said, “One spark can start a prairie fire,” but it requires a mass base for communist ideas.

   • In order for a communist revolution to succeed, all sections of the working class must be united — workers, students, men and women, black, white, Latino and Asian. 

   • The PLP must win working-class members in the military away from defending the bosses, which contradicts their class interests. This did not happen in France and Mexico.

With hard work, PLP can and will win our class to be on the right side of history. We, the international working class, have a world to win! Dare to struggle! Dare to win!

Bibliography:

• The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 by George Katsiaficas; (South End Press)

• The French Revolution of May 1968, by Alan Woods (Well-red Books)

• Arab Spring by Hamid Alizadeh in the journal Socialist Appeal (Issue 65 January/February 2012)

• A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000 by Michel Beaud (Monthly Review Press)