capitalism, keynes, socialism

by Nathan Coombs

In reaction to the global economic crisis, in his cover story for the current issue of Prospect magazine Geoff Mulgan tantalisingly holds out the promise of what life would look like ‘After Capitalism’[i]. The only problem is that his hodgepodge of possible routes beyond capitalism – foremost the vague vision of “servant capitalism” – not only do not transcend capitalism, are not only being articulated by those with the greatest stake in promulgating capitalism (he even cites David Cameron as playing a part), but are even aspects of capitalism with us today: the same aspects to have played their part in inducing the global crisis that supposedly marks the beginning of a new epoch.

Amongst his suggestions of routes beyond capitalism he includes Keynesian investment in green industries, the pluralisation of company governance and the introduction of “personal welfare counts” (previously called the welfare state?) It does not take a whole lot of nous to work out that this is hardly a portrait of a world ‘after capitalism,’ but simply an extrapolation of contemporary trends within capitalism: precisely those trends that have historically prevented the possibility of any ‘after’.

repression of anti-fascists in ukraine

Dear friends and colleagues,

I wish to draw to your attention an increasingly worrying situation which is developing in Ukraine as regards repression of Anti-Fascist Action following the death of a neo-Nazi. These neo-Nazis have operated freely for years and been linked to numerous racist murders – this has provoked none of this hysteria which is been launched against the anti-racists.

Please express your concern and solidarity with AFA as best you can. I shall if necessary be organising a demonstration in London.
Chris Kane

4th may reading group: parliamentary socialism

The next of The Commune’s London reading groups on ‘communism from below’ will be focusing on the subject of so-called ‘Parliamentary socialism’ and its historic failure. We will be discussing the questions:

– What problems were created in the British labour movement when it separated into ‘parliamentary’ and ‘industrial’ wings?
– In what ways and for what reasons does parliamentary activity lead to the accommodation of the workers’ movement to the existing system?
– Should we refuse to participate in all elections and bourgeois parliaments?

The recommended preparatory reading for the discussion is this chapter of Communism and Society by William Paul and Modernisation as domination in the Chilean and British Left. All are welcome. Comrades will give lead-offs on the text, followed by general discussion.

The meeting takes place from 6:30pm on Monday 4th May at [EDIT: The Lucas Arms, near King’s Cross]. Contact uncaptiveminds@gmail.com or 07595 245494 to register your interest, request printed copies of the texts or find out more information.

ukrainian fascist falls victim to own aggression

by Pavlo Shevchenko

On the 17th of April in Odessa 15 nazi-skinheads attacked 5 members of the anti-fascist movement with bottles and rocks. Nazis ran up to the antifascists sitting on a bench near the “Orech” club and started shouting threads and Nazis slogans and started a fight. “Antifa” activists were often before threatened by Nazi-skinheads; anti-fascists were victims of Nazi attacks. Therefore they realized that any conflict provoked by Nazis could be fatal. Protecting their lives one antifa had to use a pen-knife (a means of self-protection not prohibited by the law) and Nazi-skinhead Maksim Chaika -was wounded. He did not get proper medical aid and died. If the antifascists had not fought back to protect themselves they would have been in the morgue. The far right are trying to benefit from the incident by falsely presenting the facts and cynically lying to the public.

Far-right propagandists claim that the killing had a political subtext. Actually 5 antifa had to resist 15 aggressive Nazi-skinhead attackers. The police have confirmed what number of antifascists there were. Nazis are trying to present Maksim Chaika as our victim: however it was him and his friends who started the fighting.

update on the commune’s activities around britain

Communards in Wrexham have been busy pushing a May day march and rally through the local trade council. The theme will be around May day as a workers movement day as oppossed to the racism and hate of the BNP, who are active in the area.

After the march a series of meetings are being arranged around the title “Storming the heavens – alternatives to capitalism”.

Paper sales will also be launched in and around the town centre. Contact Steve Ryan via uncaptiveminds@gmail.com

In the West Midlands we take part in the Coventry Radical Network, whose  next meeting is on Monday April 27th from 7.30pm at Friends’ Meeting House, Hill Street, Coventry. 

The topic of the meeting is Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), with Dave Green (Northampton Save Our Services) on the fight against Schools PFIs in Northampton – the largest scheme in Europe and a speaker from Coventry Friends of the Earth arguing against the £1 billion PFI Incinerator scheme in Coventry. More info: call Dave Spencer on 02476-450027

of policemen and mad professors: communism and physical force

by Chris Kane

The Police operation around the G20 was entitled “Operation Glencoe” – named after the massacre in Scotland in 1692 when the order was given that “the rebels, the McDonalds of Glencoe” were to be “put all to the sword”. Operation Glencoe lived up to its namesake resulting in the Police manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson returning home from work. The G20 summit was surrounded by an atmosphere of hysteria whipped up by the media, the Police and mad professor Chris Knight, the self-appointed spokesman for the protests. This was done in a way that made protest and violence almost synonymous. These events have posed anew the question of violence and of legality as they relate to the project of creating a new society.

Most working class people abhor violence, particularly anti-social crime. Contrary to the lies of capitalist politicians communists also abhor violence, we seek a society fit for human beings where the social conditions which give rise to forms of violence will be uprooted, the need to resort to violence will be vastly diminished and subject to the interests of humanity. But this new society will not be achieved without physical force: this may seem a paradox but it flows directly from the nature of the society we live in today.

go forth and occupy! – editorial of the commune, part 1

The first week of April saw the leaders of world capitalism converge on London for the G20 summit, which agreed to a version of Gordon Brown’s latest plan to “save the world”. The Prime Minister boasted that a “historic” $1.1 trillion programme of investment and new regulation for international finance would mean a “new world order”.

Such efforts at state support for the financial giants and Brown’s “quantitative easing” (printing money) may indeed serve to relieve some rather constipated markets. And yet the slogan of the London summit “Stability. Growth. Jobs.” and the grandiose speeches of our rulers ring hollow to the many millions who are being put out of a job and whose services are being slashed as a result of the capitalists’ crisis in the here and now.

we can defy the jobs massacre – editorial of the commune, part 2

Workers have nothing to rely on other than our own strength. Petitions and charters, appeals to statesmen and grand plans for what we think a “workers’ government” would do in Gordon Brown’s place are not much use to anyone being put out of a job. They are little better for these workers than the TUC’s pamphlets on how to access the JobCentre, and will do no more to solve the greatest problem in the British labour movement today, which is not as much a lack of numbers-with some seven million trade unionists-as the lack of confidence which has afflicted unions and most social movements since the crushing of the miners’ strike a quarter of a century ago.

What really shows the way forward are the struggles coming from below, some of which are reported on in this issue of The Commune. We should not collapse into euphoria that capitalism is collapsing-most class fights at the moment are about resisting attacks rather than taking a punch at the employers-but there is certainly room for optimism, because the idea of taking collective action and fighting back is being popularised and confidence is being restored.

mitie cleaners take on city of london bosses

Today was the latest in a series of demos organised by Mitie cleaners working at Willis Group in the City of London, unfairly dismissed after standing up to management attacks. Such protests take place at the Willis building on Bank’s Lime Street every Friday at 1pm (email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for info). Jake Lagnado wrote this piece for The Commune about the importance of this fight.

The story

In mid-2007 around 25 cleaners at multinational insurance brokers the Willis Group based in the City of London began to organise under the umbrella of Unite’s Justice for Cleaners campaign, for the campaign’s main demands of the ‘living wage’ rather than the minimum wage.

the commune issue 4 – out now!

The fourth issue of our paper The Commune (May 2009) is now available. You can read the PDF online by clicking the image below, write to us at uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to request a printed copy, or look at the list of articles below as they are uploaded.

go forth and occupy! – editorial of The Commune, part 1

mitie cleaners resist city of london bosses – by Jake Lagnado

no to “no2eu”! – by Dave Spencer

we can defy the jobs massacre – editorial of The Commune, part 2

of policemen and mad professors: communism and physical force – by Chris Kane

workers occupy visteon factories – by Samantha O’Driscoll

dynamics of the struggle at visteon – by strike supporters at enfield

update on activities of the commune around the country

political parties and workers’ self-management – by Goran Markovic

the struggle for women’s emancipation today – by Liz Leicester

the g20 protests: the devil against the detail – by Nathan Coombs

leftist opposition gains ground in algeria poll – by Solomon Anker

another speaker confirmed for 20th april european elections meeting

We are pleased to announce another speaker for our upcoming London forum on ‘European elections: where should we turn our fire?’. RMT activist Andy Littlechild will be speaking alongside Mick Dooley (rank-and-file candidate for general secretary of the builders’ union UCATT) and Peter Gowan (Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University and a member of the editorial board of New Left Review)

The public meeting takes place from 7pm at the Lucas Arms, near King’s Cross on Monday 20th April.

We will be looking at the European Union’s response to the recession and its proposed constitution; whether there is any worth in contesting elections and whether they have any relevance to today’s workplace struggles; and the politics of the No2EU election campaign backed by the RMT, Morning Star and Socialist Party.

All are welcome. Email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for further details or to register your interest. See below for map of the venue.

kherson occupation: a requiem for nationalisation

A key feature of working class resistance to the recession has been a welcome revival of workers occupations In the USA, Ireland, Scotland, England and France we have seen workers occupy their workplaces to prevent closures and job cuts. One of the first and most militant occupations has been in Ukraine in the city of Kherson. Just as in the UK, the demand for nationalisation has been raised by sections of the labour movement in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly in a country which is living with the legacy of totalitarian state-socialism, where for decades the state was the universal capitalist of the whole economy, this slogan has caused some controversy. An article which has sparked debate on this question was published by comrades of the Union of Revolutionary Socialists, and The Commune is pleased to publish a translation this analysis by these Ukrainian and Russian Marxists.

Chris Kane

the g20 protests: the devil against the detail

(at The Bank of England, April 1st 2009)

by Nathan Coombs

First was the March 28^th ‘Jobs, justice, climate’ rally: a quickly forgotten TUC organised trot through central London. Second was the April 1^st protest at the Bank of England, where the four horsemen of the apocalypse descended on the Bank, against a fever pitch expectation set by the police and the media about the eruption of a ‘summer of rage.’ Something like 5,000 to 10,000 joined the protest at Bank, and conferring to a well recognised pattern the protest was not so much a unified event, as a conglomeration of events – in a similar vein to the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement of the 1990s and beyond.

In the sense of history repeating itself, Chris Knight, the ‘martyr’ of the G20 Meltdown movement, declared an impending “Velvet Revolution”[i] in the week running up the protest, and the media were quick to invoke parallels with the May Day riots and to label the assorted anarchists groups and hodgepodge of protestors as ‘anti-globalisation activists;’[ii] even in the absence of any anti-globalisation banners, chants or slogans. Needless to say, neither the revolution, nor the anti-globalisation protest materialised. Or in other words, the form of the protests might have stayed the same, but the content had not. Yet surveying the post-mortem commentary about the protest on the left, the blinkers still seem to be on those that only saw what they expected to see, nevermind what was simmering in a inarticulate bubble beneath the surface.

leftist opposition gains ground in algeria poll

by Solomon Anker

April 9th saw the Presidential Election in Algeria. The final result was an expected easy victory (90%) for the current President Boutiflika, in a country where he and his strong links to the military dominate the country’s political elites. Calling Boutiflika a dictator would be a bit harsh: however calling Algeria’s elections fully free would also not be totally true, but for the left-wing the results and the state of Algerian politics is quite interesting.

 
The election came 7 years after the end of the Algerian civil war which saw over 100,000 killed in a brutal conflict between government forces and Islamist militias. For the British media, Algeria is just another Muslim or African country in crisis and few people take any interest except for the marginal Western interests such as terrorist attacks linked to Al Qaeda or issues of immigration.