The Rot is Growing in Great Britain

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A year ago in the pages of this newspaper (and later in our English-language publication, The Internationalist), we called attention to the serious social situation in Great Britain, particularly with regard to the “housing issue” and the anti-proletarian measures being passed or planned 1. This was well before the “Brexit” case hit the scene in Europe. In addition, in the editorial to issue 4/2016 of this same newspaper 2, we stressed the fact that the predictable decline in the living and working conditions of British proletarians (whether natives or immigrants) should not be attributed to Great Britain leaving Europe (i.e. to Brexit as such) but to the complex of measures that every national capital is obliged to adopt to deal with its own crisis – measures amongst which “Brexit” itself can be counted. What has actually changed since then? Not much really, apart from social contradictions becoming even more acute: even the mere insistence with which some local institutions in London (such as, to quote one example, the local library of Tower Hamlets, one of London’s traditionally proletarian areas most affected by the relentless march of property and financial speculation – so-called gentrification) are returning to the burning issue of housing, with ample documentation on the squat movements, which were particularly widespread and combative in the 1920s and ‘30s, but also later in the 1960s and 1970s.

The World of Capital Increasingly Adrift

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It is a historical fact that in certain phases, after long periods of apparent inertia, the economic and

social dynamics produced by capitalism itself in its most aggressive and destructive phase (that of imperialism) suddenly accelerate, with violent repercussions and unexpected breaks, coming closer and closer to the time of reckoning in the world of capitalist production and involving the world proletariat. It is too soon to tell whether we are now in one of these phases and in fact our task (theoretical and practical, political and organizational) must be to follow and analyse step by step the evolution of the world economic crisis, in terms of its reflections on society and the way classes (and groups and factions within them) move, operate and start to align. The fact is, and we cannot help but dwell on this, that the world economic crisis is constantly at work deep down, wearing away certainties and conventions (and, above all, those fictitious economic reserves – savings, pensions, homes – as well as the social – pensions, healthcare, education – which constituted the real illusion of all reformism), breaking down what was supposed to be solid and provoking a situation of growing uncertainty and instability in terms of hard economic facts and daily life. Observers and opinion-makers of limited intelligence fall back on medical-psychiatric terminology to define the “human condition” today: they speak of the “onset of global anxiety”, “globalization and crises of rejection”. This is a sorry demonstration of the depths to which the caste of power ideologists has sunk! Behind this demonstration of historical, theoretical and conceptual ignorance loom deep tension and lacerations, which affect and cause harm to our proletarian class itself.

The Prostrate and the Exultant. Or the new US President and the Convenient Idiots

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And now what will the convenient idiots do on both sides of the ocean (whatever ocean), still convinced as they are that what decides politics (domestic, foreign, economic, social, etc. etc.) is the Man (Woman) sent by Providence, elected every few years or so to the beating of drums and showers of streamers, fireworks and sequins, flag-waving, thirty-four-tooth smiles and handfuls of all sorts of promises, like sweets?

What will the prostrate do, now that the only programme that remains to them is a whining “vote the least objectionable, but vote”, thrashing about in a tormented dilemma of “what have (haven’t) we done? What should (shouldn’t) we have done?” Barely concealing a touch of rancour towards Democracy, so highly praised, by Whom they have been punished (“Ah, how ungrateful! After all we’ve done for you!”)?

Class War

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“Capitalism is war!” we have always stated, to the scandal of right-thinking people and fine souls. It is enough to look back over three centuries of history for confirmation. Yet we communists are not pacifists. We know quite well (and have always said so, what’s more) that the wars at the beginning of the age of capitalism and for the affirmation of the new class, the bourgeoisie, were not only necessary but also progressive: they plucked humanity from the rule of the old feudal mode of production, which was by then superfluous and destructive, thus allowing it to take an enormous step forward in history. Nonetheless they were wars, with their dead, their destruction, their suffering: and those who celebrate the rule of capitalism in an abstract way as the “best of all possible worlds” must not forget this – the bourgeoisie came into being and imposed its own mode of production amidst bloodshed and by means of weapons, spreading it throughout the world by means of weapons and bloodshed.

U.S. proletarians of all origins and colours, like proletarians everywhere in the world, are increasingly in need of the revolutionary party

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The Dallas shooting (the lone gunman who, exasperated by the constant murder of black people by the police, shot 5 police officers) reveals that there are many issues here to reflect upon.

First of all, as we have stated more than once in our newspaper over the past months, referring to the cold-blooded murders by the US forces of repression, the problem is not one of race but of class. Racism is a tool that the ruling class has always used to divide and weaken the proletariat, setting large sectors of the population one against the other. This has happened ever since the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War (1861-1865): the relentless development of capitalism and the creation of a national market needed a scapegoat for social frustration, thus dividing and ruling: white workers against black workers, but also “native” workers against immigrant workers, the white, working-class aristocracy against the “poor whites” and so on. To cite another example, the “divide and rule” carried forward by the British ruling class within the English working classes against the Irish proletariat was no different: we only need read the pages that Marx and Engels devoted to this issue, insisting that the English working class could only have carried out its revolutionary role by freeing itself from anti-Irish prejudice and taking up arms against capital as a single proletarian front united in the struggle. Racism is one of capitalism’s poisonous by-products and this is why we declare openly, using a paraphrase, that “those who don’t want to talk about capitalism, can’t talk about racism”!