marković on social preconditions of self-management

intro by Chris Kane

The Commune is pleased to publish below an article by comrade Goran Marković, one of the editors of the magazine Novi Plamen (The New Flame) with whom we have fraternal relations.  This is a democratic socialist publication aimed at audiences across the territory of the former Yugoslavia.   Novi Plamen has been pro-active in developing discussion on the questions of workers’ self-management which has a long tradition in the labour movement in the Balkans.  This article was also published by comrades in Hungary in the journal Eszmelet (Consciousness) in a special issue dedicated to self-government and direct democracy.

self-management and the environment

Tomorrow sees the second Trade Union Conference on Climate Change – held at King’s College in London.  Ahead of the conference, Steve Ryan looks at the relationship between the recession, workers’ self-management, and climate change.

The recession is an important topic and is certainly preoccupying the minds of all from bosses through government to the Left.  This has very much put the debate about climate change and peak oil out of the limelight.

No doubt bosses and governments will be pleased with this. Buried in the news recently have been a number of disturbing items as regards the speed at which the poles are warming and the fact that Labour have watered down their commitment to carbon reduction under pressure from big business. Worse that the average temperature is now looking to rise by 4 degrees in the next 20/30 years… oh, and oil runs out in 2020!

the commune issue 3 – out now!

The March 2009 issue of The Commune is now on sale. £1 a copy, email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to order. Click here for pdf.

The new paper features the following articles:

Don’t moan, organise! – editorial on the recession

Factory occupation in Ukraine – by a comrade in Kyiv

Unions and left parties let down Greek youth uprising – by Valia Kaimaki

Lessons of the oil refinery wildcat strikes – by Gregor Gall

The impossibility of class struggle in the mind of the BBC – by Joe Thorne

Occupations for Gaza: activism goes back to university – by Taimour Lay

More arrests in Iran – by Sam Parsa

School students get organised – interview with Tali Janner-Klausner

Lassalle’s state socialism – from Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution

Self-management and the environment – by Steve Ryan

demo for reinstatement of mitie cleaners

On Thursday 5th was the latest in a series of protests in support of cleaners unfairly dismissed by Mitie. The sackings came when the workers objected to being forced to work their full-time shifts at night.

Despite management threats and the weak stance taken by the Unite union, the demo, outside the City of London offices of the insurance broker Willis, attracted over thirty people. This was an improvement on the previous actions on Tuesdays and Thursdays over the last couple of weeks. The noisy protest used chants such as “Mitie, shame on you!” and “The workers, united, will never be defeated” (in English and Spanish).

Some photos are posted below. For pictures, reports and a video of previous actions, see here.

unions and left parties let down greek youth uprising

The Commune has published two articles on the recent events on Greece: a detailed and sympathetic account by two Greek libertarian communist groups, TPTG and Blaumachen, who participated in the movement, and a critical piece by Dan Jakopovich. In this article, Valia Kaimaki, whose previous article on the subject has been widely reproduced, asks what lessons we can learn from the December uprising.

If anyone has managed to understand the causes and analyze the results of the uprising by Greek youth last December, it is surely not Greek society itself. After writing an article exclusively for foreigners trying to explain what exactly happened here I was amazed to realise how many Greeks, friends, neighbours and colleagues complimented me on opening a debate on the subject. Any analysis, social, political or economical remained marginal and incomplete. There are a number of questions that should have been addressed by political groups, journalists and the public and at least some answers should have been formulated. The reason why nothing of the sort happened is that nobody was ready to open Pandora’s box.

school students get organised

Tali Janner-Klausner spoke to us about the new London School Students’ Union

How did LSSU come into existence?

A group of school student activists from Edinburgh had already set up a group, and a loose group of school students down in London discussed the idea and agreed that it will be increasingly important for school students to organise in the next few years. We held a meeting in early February to discuss the need for a School Students’ Union and what issues we should be campaigning on. We also had a member of the Edinburgh School Students’ Union come down to talk about their group and campaigns, and about the student movements in Europe.

forum monday 9th march: women in the class struggle today

The next of The Commune’s ‘uncaptive minds‘ forums takes place in London the day after International Women’s Day, and is on the subject of women in the class struggle today.

Women workers have been struck particularly hard by the economic crisis, and are also a significant majority of the low-paid and casual workforce. So what are the ties between gender and class oppression? How can we fight back? What are the lessons of the movements of the past? All are welcome to join the debate.

Speakers include:

Clara Osagiede (RMT cleaners’ grade rep)

Liz Leicester (chair, Camden UNISON)

Sheila Cohen (author, Ramparts of Resistance)

Mary Partington (Left Women’s Network)

The meeting takes place from 6:30pm on Monday 9th March at the Old Red Lion theatre, near Angel tube station (click for map).

video of mitie cleaners’ protest

On Thursday 26th was held the second of this week’s demonstrations in the City of London in support of the cleaners working for Willis victimised by Mitie, and twenty people – including cleaner activists and their supporters – turned out and mounted a strong display of solidarity in spite of the Unite union’s failure to do anything to help them. See here for reports on previous protests and posts outlining the dispute.

pcs: vote for moloney – but independent rank and file action is the key

by Chris Kane

National elections are underway in the civil service trade union PCS.  In a twist of history an independent left candidate of rank and filist politics is standing against Hugh Lanning, for Deputy General Secretary.   In 2000 the same Hugh Lanning was the candidate defeated by the then independent left candidate Mark Serwotka for General Secretary.   Then the Trotskyist Socialist Party backed Lanning against Serwotka, demanding a re-count when he won!   Today, the Socialist Party are again backing Lanning.

Hugh Lanning is painted as some kind of left candidate who stands up for workers – in reality he is a fake-left rightwing bureaucrat who should have been dumped when the old CPSA moderate group were defeated.  The current hierarchy of the PCS – for all the militant language has failed to match the bosses’ offensive in the civil service with an effective strategy.  Some of the leadership are simply politically bankrupt, careerist opportunists or both.  Aloof and out of touch they are more at home with on a committee or with management than amongst the members.  Much of the responsibility for what has gone wrong in PCS in the years since Serwotka’s victory has been the failure to build an effective rank and file movement and the bureaucratic antics of the Socialist Party, who have little resemblance even to their Socialist Party comrades outside of the Civil Service.   

photo report: national student demo against fees

Wednesday 25th saw around 700 students march through London in protest against top-up fees and demanding free university education for all. The demo, predominantly organised by the Socialist Workers’ Party and Education is Not for Sale (involving independent socialists and anarchists but also led to a significant degree by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), was the first such demo in the last couple of years, given the National Union of Students’ virtual abandonment of any commitment to free education and its Labourite leaders’ cosying-up to the state bureaucracy, meekly making pleas that the government ought not increase fees beyond £3,000 upon its 2010 review.

Activists from across the country attended the demonstration, but the bulk of those attending were either from Trotskyist groups and their peripheries or a bloc of people with anarchist flags. Although most of the speakers at both the start and end of the protest called for student-worker unity, and many of the slogans advocated support for trade union struggles, in fact there were very few workers on the demo, even from the ranks of the UCU or NUT, since there is in reality little integration between workers’ organisations and the student movement, even its left wing. Nor did working-class students from sixth form/FE colleges attend in strong numbers, although some are building a London School Students’ Union.

Unfortunately, the mobilisation was also weakened somewhat by the fact that there were two separate organising committees (one for each group)… such is sectarianism. Furthermore, the Socialist Party’s shallow front “Campaign to Defeat Fees”, who mobilised several dozen on their contingent but were not really involved in organising the demo itself, voiced the “line” that we ought to use this national demo against fees as a springboard for a… national demo against fees.

Students have of course mobilised en masse in opposition to the Gaza war – 27 faculties having been occupied in the last couple of months – but when asked to protest in defence of specifically university-centred concerns seem to be rather less effective, no doubt in part due to the transitory nature of their spell in higher education and the extreme difficulty of successfully resisting measures such as fees, which cannot be pushed back in any one institution. Of course, more blandly “bread and butter” concerns such as free education should be at the heart of the student movement’s struggles, but it is also the case that so-called “big politics” around such issues as ecology or imperialism are of equal or greater importance for many young people.

Below are some photos and comments on the day:

iranian regime goes on the offensive against activists

On Tuesday 24th hundreds of Iranian students at the Polytechnic University (Amirkabir) rallied for the second day in a row in protest at the burial on the campus of the remains of five members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) left from the 1980-88 war with Iraq. At the demonstration students chanted anti-government slogans as they were attacked by the plain-clothes agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and members of the paramilitary Bassij students group dispatched from other Tehran school to help quell the protests, with slogans such as “Death to the dictator” and “We don’t want a fascist regime”.

Twenty-five students were arrested and transferred in police vans to unknown locations despite attempts by their classmates to get them released. This followed ten arrests of student activists in the last two weeks at the orders of the regime’s Ministry of Information. Four of the ten students, all of whom have been denied contact with lawyers or their families, are rumoured to be subject to psychological and physical torture. As this website reports in grim detail, these arrests are just the tip of the iceberg: already in 2009 many dozens of people have been hanged, stoned, lashed or jailed for standing up for the rights of workers, students and national minorities.

But at the same time as repression there are signs of hope, for example the powerful independent workers’ union which arose from last year’s 5000-strong strike at Haft Tapeh sugar and whose leading members are today being persecuted by the regime’s courts. For more information on how we can build solidarity with such movements, see the Hands Off the People of Iran site at www.hopoi.org.

philosophy and revolution

intro by Chris Kane

One of the most common forms of sectarian socialism today is the myriad of Trotskyist organisations based on the model of undemocratic centralism.   They claim the origin of their ideas not so much in Marx but Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution.  Trotsky came to be identified as one of the foremost opponents of Stalinism, but as opposed to bringing about a recomposition of the communist movement, Trotskyism compounded the crisis of Marxism. The legacy of Trotsky today is one of constant fragmentation and sectarian vanguardism, whose adherents often cut themselves off from practical service to the labour movement by their antics. How did this come about?  The following critical analysis of Trotsky is by Raya Dunayevskaya, the American Marxist who originated in Ukraine.   In 1937 she moved to Mexico to work with Trotsky, serving as his Russian language secretary.  Her closeness to Trotsky did not prevent her questioning his ideas – she later wrote: “Out of the Spanish Civil War there emerged a new kind of revolutionary who posed questions, not against Stalinism, but against Trotskyism, indeed against all established Marxists”.   After the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact she broke from Trotsky over his continued belief Stalin’s USSR was a ‘workers state’ and developed a theory of state-capitalism.  Later she developed a Marxist Humanist current in the USA, supported by Harry McShane in Scotland.  One of her most important books was Philosophy and Revolution, published in 1973 which contains a powerful critique of Leon Trotsky as a theoretician – this is republished below.

the nouveau parti anticapitaliste’s take on the crisis

On the weekend of 7th-8th February a new far-left party was formed in France, as 700 delegates representing 9,100 members held the first congress of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste. It was created at the instigation of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and its semi-autonomous youth wing Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires; the ex-Lutte Ouvrière minority faction l’Étincelle; a few other small groups, and thousands of previously unaffiliated individuals, many of them partisans of the anti-capitalist movements of the last decade. The moves coincide with the 29th January national strike day, and ongoing general strikes in the French-owned islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

The new party initiative, coming off the back of the LCR’s 1.5 million votes in the 2007 presidential race, has roused significant interest in the French media, and its election candidate Olivier Besancenot has become somewhat of a celebrity. It might be said that the NPA is the revolutionary group in Europe with the strongest hearing, repeatedly winning double-digit support in the polls, and its increased size, relative internal democracy and ‘openness’ as well as its radicalism and uncompromising hostility towards the idea of coalition government with the Parti Socialiste are to be welcomed.

But this rapid growth and the thrusting of one leading figure into the media spotlight creates significant political concerns as well as the positives of increased publicity. The LCR and its sister organisations around the world only a few years ago advocated ‘broad parties’ refusing to dilineate between reform and revolution, in a few cases disastrously supporting social-democrat governments who sold out their supporters. With Besancenot’s rhetoric about his heroes – from Che Guevara to Leon Trotsky – the mix of state-interventionist ideas and talk of workers’ self-management, and a largely politically ‘new’ membership,  the precise character of the NPA is all to play for, and here we publish the translation of an interesting NPA article responding to critiques by the right-wing weekly Challenges, which highlights some of these contradictions.

defend joseph stalin!

Frequent readers of The Commune may be surprised to read the above headline.  In fact, we have not decided to abandon reappraising the communist project for a merger with the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).   But we do support workers victimised for organising at work, an increasingly common phenomenon nowadays.

Joseph Stalin Bermudez, branch chair of SOAS Unison is battling to keep his job. Stalin a key activist in the justice for cleaners campaign (see more information, including videos of Joseph speaking here) has been suspended and has his disciplinary hearing is on Tuesday.

A mass meeting of SOAS Unison has called for a lobby of the hearing and is calling on trade unionists to offer support. We want to get as many trade union banners and delegations as possible to this event.

Don’t let SOAS management victimise key activists!

9.30am, Tuesday 24 February, SOAS main building, Thornhaugh St, Russel Square