resolution on communist recomposition

Recently there have been discussions in an around The Commune about how communists should work together. At our recent conference we passed this motion on principles of communist recomposition.

“Recomposition” is a term used within The Commune to denote an organisational regroupment of existing communists in which we would participate.  Various conceptions have been suggested.  However, we should agree a few basic principles which will guide us as an
organisation:

cuba: the island of happiness ?

“Even Communist Cuba has got with the programme that we need to cut  the budget deficit and actually get spending under control. We’ve got comrade Castro on the same page as the the rest of us.  We’ve just got to get the Labour Party and the trade unions on to that planet at the same time.” – David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions, September 15th

This week the state-run Cuban trade union confederation announced government plans to lay off 1 million public sector employees, some 20% of the working population. Half of the cuts will be over the next six months alone, in what marks a stunning retreat for the Communist Party and a sharp attack on working-class living standards. President Raúl Castro has targeted workers’ “dependency” on the public sector: by which he means, the same bureaucratic and management apparatus which closely monitors many aspects of everyday life in the country.

In this article Eduardo Semtei, a former Venezuelan government bureaucrat, describes his impressions of ordinary Cuban citizens’ lives. Although The Commune does not share Semtei’s politics – for instance, he harshly criticises the Venezuelan government for subsidising Cuba – his comments do offer an insight into existing social relations and the warped model of “socialism” on the island.

bristol reading group on primitivism and eco-socialism

The next Bristol reading group session will be on Sunday 26th September at 6pm in Café Kino on Ninetree Hill, Stokes Croft, Bristol.

Note that we are back at Café Kino. The session will discuss anarchist primitivism and eco-socialism. Suggested background reading below. All welcome: email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info.

friday 17th: demo in solidarity with berns cleaners

There will be a mass demonstration outside the offices of London & Regional, 55 Baker Street, London W1U 8EW on  Friday 17th September 2010 from 4-6pm.

This follows a very successful mass demonstration on Friday 13th August. Since our action demonstrations in Sweden have gone up to 4 times a week. We want Berns Salonger and their parent company London Regional to know we too are not going away. Please speak to your comrades, colleagues, fellow workers and friends and mark the date in your diary. Let’s all set aside the time to make this an even bigger and more successful demonstration.

letter to the commune – a view from the periphery

A comrade from York writes

I have read recent issues of The Commune with excitement, interest and a degree of scepticism. My comments reflect, on the one hand the continuing influence of ‘Solidarity for Workers’ Power‘ in the 60s on my political ideas and, on the other, my desire to see some vehicle in the here and now through which I might express a sense of class solidarity and purpose.

They also reflect the material position of class struggle in this locality – isolated, defensive, fragmentary and unsure of itself. They express an aspiration for something better, more energising, courageous and collective. They imagine something communist, in the best sense of that word, beyond the present sense of powerlessness and alienation. They represent a rejection of the fossilised remnants of the left and parallel much of what is contained in The Commune’s statement of aims and principles, especially the desire to renew the communist project – as Solidarity sought to do fifty years ago.

marx, bakunin and the question of authoritarianism

David Adam casts doubt on the traditional narrative regarding the question of authoritarianism in the Marx-Bakunin conflict

Historically, Bakunin’s criticism of Marx’s “authoritarian” aims has tended to overshadow Marx’s critique of Bakunin’s “authoritarian” aims. This is in large part due to the fact that mainstream anarchism and Marxism have been polarized over a myth—that of Marx’s authoritarian statism—which they both share.1

Thus, the conflict in the First International is directly identified with a disagreement over anti-authoritarian principles, and Marx’s hostility toward Bakunin is said to stem from his rejection of these principles, his vanguardism, etc. Anarchism, not without justification, posits itself as the “libertarian” alternative to the “authoritarianism” of mainstream Marxism. Because of this, nothing could be easier than to see the famous conflict between the pioneering theorists of these movements—Bakunin and Marx—as a conflict between absolute liberty and authoritarianism. This essay will bring this narrative into question. It will not do this by making grand pronouncements about Anarchism and Marxism in the abstract, but simply by assembling some often neglected evidence. Bakunin’s ideas about revolutionary organization lie at the heart of this investigation.

impressions from the sandwell bin strike – 8 september 2010

by two (wasted?) workers from The Commune

We went to Sandwell near Birmingham for the second of a series of one day strike at the local waste depot. The strike is officially called for by Unite and GMB. Like the bin strike in Leeds this year, it is about the single status policy. Due to loss of bonuses and down-grading a loader with 20 years seniority would have to face a significant wage loss: from £21,000 to £17,900. Looming in the background of the dispute is the fact that the council will outsource the waste collection to the private company Serco in November this year. The take-over in Sandwell – waste management for around 125,000 households – is Serco’s biggest single job in the UK: a £650 million contract, running for 25 years. The company and council officially guarantee 12 months terms and conditions to the council workers. The take-over and single status effects around 130 council bin men.

Since July this year workers had been on work-to-rule. In response the council hired 15 extra trucks and engaged around 100 extra temp workers for clearing up unfinished rounds – before the dispute started temp workers accounted for only 15 per cent of the work-force. Currently the new temp workers work from a different depot in nearby Cradley Heath, around 10 kilometers from Sandwell. In August the work-to-rule has been lifted and a series of one day strikes has been announced. Normally around 35 trucks do the rounds in Sandwell. After the first one-day-strike in the previous week some of the council permanent workers decided not to join the second strike. They and temp workers hired by the council-run temp agency manage to staff 15 trucks. Currently 15 trucks leave the depot in Sandwell and 15 more trucks are run from the depot in nearby Cradley.

“i am not a man or a woman, i am a transexual”

Transcript of a speech given at Hackney Pride 2010. Transman and anarchist communist Jamrat Mason discusses gender, sexuality and sexism and the wider relevance of transgender issues in society. One paragraph that was omitted from the actual speech for reasons of length is included below in italics.

My name is Jamrat Mason and I have a vagina. I’m involved in East London Community Activism but today I’m here to speak “as a trans person” about transgender issues. The term “transgender” is a broad term that refers to to a massive spectrum of people who in some way veer away from the gender written on their birth certificate. So, I cannot, in any way whatsoever, be representative of transgendered people. I can only talk about the world as I see it, from where I’m standing, as a transexual.

french workers en masse against pension ‘reforms’

by David Broder

Early September in France means la rentrée, not just back to school but also the end of the holidays and no more long evenings in the sun. But in 2010 it also means a return to pitched battles between the right wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy and the working class.

This Saturday l’Humanité, semi-official daily of the French Communist Party, reported on the ‘summer school’ of the MEDEF, a bosses’ federation akin to our ‘own’ CBI. The rhetoric was of Thatcher, and the need to disenfranchise the ‘no longer
useful’ trade unions.

the wire faces inwards: ‘the security is to keep us in!’

Sharon Borthwick reviews Rivethead, a ‘book of tales from the assembly line’

Revealing a talent for writing poetry at school does not relieve Ben Hamper of his birthright.  Duplicating his father and his father’s father he awaits, ‘to be pronounced fit for active drudgery’ by the medics. It wasn’t the plan. As a child at factory open days, he bore witness to his father’s crappy lot at the General Motors plant in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. But failed stints at other ventures led him through GM’s grounds, past the barbed wire. Later a fellow “prisoner” becomes absorbed by the fact that the wire faces inwards, ‘the security is to keep us in!’

Other means to incarceration are the good wages, ‘that pay stub was like a pair of concrete loafers.’ Not that the security lasts, the men are regularly laid off due to economic downturns, though Jimmy Carter tops up their dole packets to the extent they can make light and even party right in the face of unemployment. Not so in the Reagan years, of course. Back at the plant amidst the noise,’very close to intolerable’ and the heat,’one complete bastard’, the men are ground down by still more humiliations. ‘Quality’ becomes the company’s new byword and a man donning a cat costume becomes quality’s personification.

support the tube strikes!

by Joe Thorne

See here for a full list of RMT picket times and locations – go down and visit from 22:00 Monday night or Tuesday morning!

Many of us will have been defending the tube strikes that begin on Monday evening, and continue – amongst different groups of workers – until the end of Tuesday to friends and fellow workers.  Many will be grumpy about their journey being disrupted; susceptible to TFL and government propaganda; and – perhaps without admitting it – somewhat jealous of the leverage, organisation, and (at least what they imagine to be) the superior terms and conditions of RMT members.  RMT General Secretary Bob Crow may be a figure of particular annoyance.

for communist workers’ inquiry

A working paper for our 11th September assembly examining communist potential within the crisis and challenges for revolutionaries.  All are welcome to the event – click here for more details.

The following notes are an individual contribution, they are not particularly sharp or structured, neither are they too funky in style. Nevertheless, they might help as a general ‘point of reference’ for the debate at the conference trying to phrase some thesis about how the ‘different class aspects’ (workplace, migration, university) are related both in terms of ‘class struggle’ and in terms of ‘crisis impact’. The social experience present at the conference will hopefully contribute to this open debate.

We start with looking at the ‘communist potential’ of this crisis and how the main problem for capital is to disguise the ‘abundant productive core’ of the crisis by segmenting the social cooperation of global labour. We then summarise some of the concrete crisis-induced changes in the different spheres of class. We end with a short polemic about the current stage of the left and challenges for working class revolutionaries.

The red jacobins : no substitute for workers’ freedom

Mark Hoskisson departs from the conventional Trotskyist interpretation of the Russian Revolution, in his analysis of Thermidor and the Russian Revolution. (Permanent Revolution issue 17). His conclusion is that the political counter-revolution took place inside the Bolshevik party in 1921 and was led by Lenin and supported by Trotsky.

Yet Mark still dismisses  the possibility of Bolshevik values, and methods of organisation, prior to 1921, contributing to the betrayal of the political aspirations of 1917. He still clings to the orthodox view that the Bolshevik Party could somehow be a custodian of workers’ power, despite substituting itself for the working class  following 1917, as long as the right to form factions were preserved. Hence, the banning of party factions in 1921 is seen as the historic turning point. Mark asserts that Bolshevism’s descent into counter-revolution marked a distinct break with, not a continuation of its fundamental character and politics in the period 1912 to 1920.

demonstration this friday in solidarity with ukrainian miners

Demonstrate outside Ferrexpo’s office in London on Friday 3rd September from 4:30pm at 2-4 King Street, SW1. Click here for flyer.

A major dispute is underway between mineworkers in Poltava in central Ukraine and Ferrexpo Plc, a major player on the global market mainly engaged in mining of iron ore. All three shifts in the open cast in the town of Komsomolsk, of more than 300 workers each are now involved in industrial action. Some railway locomotive drivers and workers on the iron ore concentrating factory have joined in solidarity.

The action started on 1st August at 10am when the workers at the ore-dressing open cast pit started at first with a go-slow and work-to-rule. The action began when haul trucks drivers on their way down to the 305 meter deep quarry reduce speed of the vehicles from normal 40-45 km/h to the more safe 10-15 km/h. Excavator and bulldozer operators, as well as drilling technicians then joined the action in solidarity. Within 24 hours of the workers’ action total rock production had fallen by less than 60% of normal volume. This impact of the workers resistance is continuing.