Street Protests and Class Power

[Devrim]

From the ICT site:http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2013-07-09/street-protests-and-class-power-reflections-on-current-events-in-turkey-egypt

Devrim

[Luís Henrique]

From the ICT site:http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2013-07-09/street-protests-and-class-power-reflections-on-current-events-in-turkey-egypt

Very interesting article (and I have the feeling I know who wrote it...)

There are a few points that I think must be debated, some of which factual, and some more theoretic.


The ongoing events that set fire to Turkey from the end of May, the mass demonstrations in Brazil during the Confederations Cup, and the current events in Egypt with Tahrir Square once again full of demonstrators calling for the overthrown of the President, show very clearly that we still live in a world dominated by the events that were unleashed by a young man burning himself to death in Tunisia on 17th December 2010, which have become widely known as the 'Arab Spring'.

I think this is mistaken. We live in a world dominated by the deep crisis of the capitalist system that surfaced about 2008, of which the suicide of a young Tunisian man was one consequence.


At the end of May, demonstrations against the development of a shopping centre and the demolition of a park in the centre of Istanbul exploded into a movement which brought millions of people into the streets in 79 of Turkey's 81 provinces. Then, while the world's eyes were turned towards the football tournament in Brazil demonstrations against public transport fare rises in São Paulo quickly spread across the country capturing the front pages and pushing the football to the sidelines. In Egypt demonstrations successfully demanding the removal of President Mohammed Morsi occurred across the country apparently bring even larger numbers of people into the streets than those of two years ago. In addition, though less well reported in the media, Indonesia has been rocked by demonstrations against a 44% increase in petrol prices.

I am not really informed of the events in Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia. In Brazil, the demonstrations were sparked by a set of not-immediately-related circumstances (the rise on bus fares, the Confederations Cup, Congress discussing a few issues that managed to get the attention of press and public, especially now-deceased Constitutional Amendment Proposal #37). This seems similar to what happened in Turkey, and perhaps Indonesia, where apparently small issues (the destination of a public park in Turkey, a rise in oil prices in Indonesia) sparked huge demonstrations, disproportional to the rather trivial appearance of the issues that triggered them. This is possibly different from Egypt, where political discontent with Morsi's rule was apparently a more direct cause of the upheaval. In any way, the fact that apparently trivial events could spark huge street demonstrations clearly shows that we live in a volatile situation, where small sparks can result in huge fires.


Obviously this is a movement, if indeed it can be called a 'movement' that has gone far beyond any specifically Arab roots, and has also, at least on a superficial level, gone beyond protests against 'dictators' and for 'democracy' if only in that the countries currently affected are all democracies. What then, overriding all of the local detail, can be said to characterise these movements.

This is more problematic. I don't think these events (except of course in Egypt) have much to do with supposed "Arab roots". If they have something in common (and I do think so), that is the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system. In their immediate causes, they were remarkably local, and unlinked to each others, probably not even in an emulation chain.

Again I don't know the situation in any depth except in Brazil; but if what I have been reading about Turkey and Egypt is true, the situation there is remarkably different from the situation in Brazil. In Egypt the movement seems to have begun as a movement for the ousting of Morsi; in Turkey, while it was sparked by quite trivial events, it quickly rose to a movement against Erdoğan's government. In Brazil, there was nothing comparable. While Dilma was booed in one circumstance, and a few posters could be seen demanding her ousting, the protests remained remarkably pre-political, and when and where they surpassed that level, they took a general anti-political slant, with much rage being directed against the state-level right-wing governments, or against the "left-wing opposition" of the PSTU and PSOL as well as against the federal government and the PT. As a result, not only Dilma's government didn't fall, as Morsi's, but it was not ever really in any kind of danger, as I would guess Erdoğan's was, or is. This was also responsible for the evident brittle characteristic of the Brazilian protests: without an unifying political demand such as the ousting of Morsi and Erdoğan provided the Egyptian and Turkish protests, the Brazilian demonstration crackled into their constitutive elements, that asked for several conflicting and uncompatible sundry demands.


Demographics of Demonstrations

The most striking thing about this movement is how it is primarily of young people. The anarchist media may show pictures of a grandmother firing a catapult at the police in Taksim but such exceptions are merely proof of the rule. Of course, it is no surprise that young people make up the shock troops of any social struggle. What is more interesting is that these struggles are taking place in countries with an overwhelmingly young demographic. In Turkey, for example, 43.3% of the population are 24 or under. The comparative figures for Egypt, Brazil, and Indonesia are 40.7%, 41.5%, and 44.1% respectively. When you compare these figures with the statistics for countries in the 'West', the difference is very stark. The same figures for Germany, the UK, the US, and Japan are 24.1%, 30.3%, 33.8%, and 23.3%.

However, the figures for Greece would be much similar to those in Germany or the UK, and yet the events in Greece are, or were, closer to those in Turkey or Egypt than to those in Brazil or, even more, to those in Spain or the US. And, within each of these countries - or at least this is the case in Brazil - the protests were "big city" events, Brazilian big cities having different demographics that, while still more "young" than those of Europe, Japan, or US, are "older" than those of Brazil at large. This shows that the dynamics of the protests are linked to age considerations in a different way, closer to the traditional consideration that young people do often take the lead in mass demonstrations.


The countries where these events are taking place not only experience the global trends that are effecting young people across the whole world but also these trends are amplified by the much larger proportion of young people within the population. The expansion of university education is a worldwide phenomenon. In Turkey for example the number of university graduates has increased by 5% every year since 1995. As in Western countries there are an increasing number of graduates coming out of university and finding that compared to their parents generation their qualifications have much less chance of leading them into a job.

Again I don't think this is particularly the case in Brazil, where the economy is running close to full-employment. It seems rather that there is a kind of premonition, among the Brazilian masses, of an impending crisis.


This of course has been made even worse by the effects of the latest outbreak of the international economic crisis since 2008. According to the left-wing trade union DİSK unemployment is running at 17%. Obviously this affects not just university students, but also all young people who are caught up in the same dynamic of studying, exams, and cramming schools. It is the overwhelming mass of young people caught up in an education system which fails to fulfil any of its promises in terms of being able to offer people a future 'other than low paid and precarious jobs that is the social dynamic which is powering these sort of movements'.

While I think this can explain, in part, the participation of young people in the movements, it seems to me to be more a structural feature of capitalist economies than a conjunctural problem. Even when the system is functioning "well", the "youth" (which is itself a creation of capitalism) is always a crisis in the personal history of individuals. (Here (http://www.mrs-pt.com.br/ler_noticias.php?id_noticia=14), unfortunately in Portuguese, an analysis of "youth" as a capitalist phenomenon.)


Class Composition

The fact that the protesters are on the whole young is, though, hardly surprising. What is more important is to understand the class nature of these movements. Various different analysis have outlined how they see these movements according to their own ideological slant. This has ranged in Turkey from Erdoğan's supporters who would typify the movement as one of elites protesting against a government democratically elected by the countries poor, to the Turkish left, for some of whom, this is a completely proletarian movement. What is undoubtedly true is that many of the people who make up these sorts of movements come from the working class. That is unsurprising though. The majority of urban dwellers in these countries are working class, and no effective political movement, be it communist, fascist, religious, or nationalist, can exist if it doesn't get support from the working class. Certainly the composition of the pro-government rallies organised by Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP has also been working class, indeed one could even make an argument that they were even more so.

The question that needs to be asked before even trying to determine the class nature of these movements is what determines the class nature of a movement in general. The sociological composition of a movement alone is not enough to judge its nature. Workers can be mobilised behind completely reactionary movements, nor are the methods of the working class sufficient to make a judgement, as is shown by the Powell strikes in the UK in the 60s and the Ulster Workers' Council in 1974. Equally important are the aims, demands, and direction of a movement. In making this sort of judgement on a movement all of these factors need to be taken into consideration.


This is probably my biggest problem with the text - as with the leftist thought tradition in general.

The "sociologic" composition of movements, of course, is a problem for the left, for it is common that working-class individuals hold bourgeois, pro-capitalist, positions. This has lead a significant part of the left - under the direct influence of Lenin - to redefine the class issue as a political issue. It doesn't matter what individual proletarians, nor indeed what the majority of the workers, think or feel; the proletariat's defining characteristics are political, and relate to a set of ideas and demands that can be deducted, logically, from the supposedly "objective" interests of the class.

I think this kind of reasoning is extremely problematic, and cannot but have counter-revolutionary consequences. To me, the working class is not merely a collection of working individuals, but it is not also a teleological "subject" that relates to the real existing proletarians like a Platonic idea to its shadows in the corruptible world. The working class is a system, or a process, and if it is to be the subject of anything, it needs to start by being the subject of its own constitution as a class. And that constitution takes the form of actual, material, really-existing-in-the-real-world, organisational forms and traditions.

That is, in my opinion, what makes the difference between the participation of working class individuals in polyclassist movements and constitutionally proletarian movements. Both will have, of course, a majority of working class individuals, and both will have significant amounts of non-proletarian - petty bourgeois, lumpen, even bourgeois - elements among their ranks. Both will be, also of course, influenced by bourgeois dominant ideology; and it is not the presence of a purely intellectual "proletarian" dissent, much less its magical predominance among workers, that can circumvent or subvert this fact. It is the extent to which the class-as-a-process is present in the movements, and even the extent to which the movements are part of the self-construction of the working class, that makes the difference.


When looking at these considerations then how can we evaluate these movements. Certainly a certain section of the working class is predominant in them. As previously stated though, this is to be expected in any movement. The methods used, massive demonstrations, assemblies, and even some strikes are consistent with the methods of the working class. There is, though, a striking lack of activity in the workplace, which is a crucial part of any working class movement. Even in Turkey where there seems to have been the highest number of strikes, involving around half a million workers, the majority of unionised workers were not involved in strikes. As for the demands and aims of the movements, they have been a mixed bag. Certainly there have been demands relating to working class living standards such as those against public transport fare increases in Brazil, and opposition to state repression of demonstrators, but equally so there have been non-class demands such as those from the demonstrators in Egypt who were calling on the army to intervene and make a coup. If the Turkish army hadn't suffered a historic defeat over the last decade at the hands of the AKP government, it wouldn't have been a surprise to have heard some sections of the demonstrators raising similar demands there.

In Brazil at least, the movement was clearly a scenery for class struggle, within which the working class fought, with little success, against the bourgeois/petty-bourgeois for dominance. This doesn't mean, or at least does not predominantly mean, that petty-bourgeois ideas have imposed themselves over proletarian ideas in an abstract ideological battle, no more than that the number of petty-bourgeois individuals was bigger than that of the proletarian ones. The problem is, the working class as an organisational entity could not impose itself to the movement, being unable to frame the demands - whether they were "proletarian" or "petty-bourgeois" - within the process by which it constitutes itself as "the working class". Part of this is the "demonstrations, not strikes" phenomenon; part of this is the "no-parties" idea that spread among the demonstrations (and that quickly took a wider meaning, with flags of the UNE, the ANEL, the CUT, the feminist movement, which aren't parties, being torn or taken from their bearers). Within this process, the "petty-bourgeois" nature of the demands does not arise from an intellectual scheme in which we can "objectively" prove that the demands do not bring the capitalist system into question, but from the way people related to each others within the movement, not as fellow workers, but as "citizens", which in turn directly relates with how the people related themselves to the State or to the people not in the movement: as citizens demanding, not as workers struggling.


When trying to draw up a balance sheet of these movements, with their lack of activity at the point of production, mixed demands, and composition not made upon a class basis, but more on a demographic basis of the young, it is clear that they are cross-class movements. More to the point though, they are real mass movements, not small cross-class campaigns. Within these movements there are workers fighting for their own class demands. This was very evident in Egypt in 2011, when it was almost as if the strike wave in the factories was taking advantage of the 'Tahrir Square movement' to press its own interests. Equally so within these movements there are also workers on demonstrations backing all sorts of bourgeois demands.

I think it is important to notice that this cannot be framed as a "street x workplace" issue. Not all fights in the streets are unrelated to the self-making of the working class, just as not all workplace events are part of it. Of course, it is unlikely, to put it mildly, that a street movement can be anything but polyclassist if it is not preceded and intimately linked by a strong level of workplace organisation and struggle; but no workplace movement can ultimately succeed - as in being able to destroy the capitalist system - without taking to the streets and politically defeating the bourgeoisie and its allies there. Similarly, while movements like these can certainly be "influenced" from the outside by strikes and other workplace activities, they cannot be directed in this way.


It is important to understand what this means though. Just because a movement is a cross-class movement it doesn't mean that communist organisations should dismiss it and stand back highhandedly refusing to have anything to do with it. Of course communist organisations have a duty to be involved in these sort of movements, always working to encourage class autonomy and independence. Conversely, it is also important not to get carried away seeing some sort of pure proletarian movement, or pulled behind various bourgeois factions. These two things are closely interlinked as if you can't recognise and understand what sort of movement it is, and what tendencies are operating within it, it is possible to end up putting forth all sorts of nonsense.

As we have seen happening in practice.


'Occupy' and Assemblies

One thing that is quite clear is that while the movements of this summer are in continuity with the 'Arab Spring', and the 'Green movement' in Iran, the 'Occupy' movement has very little in common with these events, and was at most a very pale reflection of the events of the 'Arab Spring'. The most obvious level that this can be seen on is that while these movements are shaking societies, bringing in all sectors of the population, rocking governments (and in cases causing them to be toppled), and are genuinely massive movements, the Occupy movement essentially never went beyond a movement of activists. That it received the amount of media attention that it did, both in the mainstream and left press, is as much to do with it taking place in America, which is both the focus of the world's media, and a country where the working class is very weak, and where the level of struggle is extremely low. The US is obviously an important country, and communists can't ignore it. Nevertheless, understanding is, as ever, important. The amount of coverage given to these events by an American dominated world media, and the excitement felt by the American left after years of struggles being scarce are not sufficient data to judge the size of this movement. Of course 'Occupy' and even more so the events in Wisconsin are important, but their importance lies in the fact that they show the potential start of a resurgence in America, however small at the moment, and not in the events themselves.

This again is mistaken, in my opinion. The movement in Brazil, for one, stands to me as something clearly intermediate between the Occupy movement in the US, on one hand, and the Tunisian, Egyptian, Turkish, or Greek events. In that sence, I think there is a continuum, and that both Occupy and the "Egyptian revolution" (and, indeed, the Libyan uprising and the Syrian civil war) respond to the same issue, which is the international crisis of capitalism. The radicality of each response is, of course, different, as are different the delusions under which people act when engaging those movements. It is unlikely that the movement in Brazil or Greece delves with sectarian issues like those that complicate the situation in Syria, for instance.


One of the features of the 'Occupy' movement that has been trumpeted by many on the left has been its use of assemblies to 'run' the movement. These types of assemblies have also been seen in various countries in the 'Arab Spring', and in Turkey, and Brazil today. Many on the left seem to be eulogising these movements as if they are some sort of proto-Soviets. They are not.

Good. There is a confusion by the people you mention (if we are talking about the same people, that is) between an abstract form and the content it expresses. Of course "assemblies" are good things in and of themselves, especially where people are really allowed to speak and propose regardless of their affiliation with unions and political parties (which is very rarely the case); but an assembly held at 3:00 PM at a street demonstration while most workers are toiling because there is no general strike is not the same thing as an assembly held within a movement that has stopped the workplaces, or that can stop them for the exact purpose of having an assembly. It is of course the difference between a revolutionary situation, in which workers have ensured power within workplaces, and a non-revolutionary situation, in which the bosses remain very much in control within the workplaces. Being unable to see the difference is being unable to understand the strength relation between classes, and consequently mistaking enemy for friend.


The most important difference between these assemblies, and mass meetings held by workers is, who they represent. The mass meeting in a workplace clearly represents the people who work there. These assemblies aren't based upon workplaces. More often than not, although there have been some of them in working class neighbourhoods, they represent nobody but the demonstrators themselves, rather than being a class body, they are bodies of activists. How the demonstrators are represented varies from 'Taksim Solidarity', which is a top down amalgamation of mainstream and left political parties with NGOs and left trade unions to the worst of 'Occupy' which was a couple of dozen hippies in a circle discussing the report of the 'spiritual commission'. Of course, this doesn't mean that communists shouldn't try to present their arguments in these situations. It doesn't mean that they are the organisational form of the coming revolution either.

While I do agree to the general gist of this, I again must remark that this is not a "workplace vs street" issue. An "assembly" within a workplace may very well only represent the union bureaucrats and the workers under their influence, while an assembly held outside, in an circumstance where workers have collectively walked out, may be fully representative of the workers involved. More than that, assemblies held within workplaces can only be representative, at best, of workers who labour in each workplace respectively; an assembly representative of the working class as a whole must be an assembly at a public place, or an assembly in an occupied, liberated workplace, made open by such occupation/liberation to workers of other companies.


From Demonstration to Strikes

Nowhere has the nature of these assemblies been clearer than in their attempts to call strikes. An attempt during the 'Occupy' movement to call a general strike in Oakland, California failed to bring out masses of workers, and even in places where it had support amongst workers (port of Oakland, and teachers) only resulted in people taking a holiday, a personal day, or phoning in sick. What is clear from this is that committees of activists can't call the working class out on strike at will. Only workers themselves can do this, and while many of the activists in these sort of movements are workers, they tend to work, as many young people do today, in small workplaces, often in precarious jobs. However, the driving force behind large scale strike movements is not these sort of workplaces. It is in the large work places where movements of workers have the greatest influence.

Strikes are extremely difficult to organise and maintain, and doing it from the outside is nearly impossible. Of course, if a few strategic sectors go on strike (such as bus drivers, or journalists), it is possible to make people unable to reach their workplaces, or able to pretend that they were unable to. But while this can certainly be useful in forcing the bosses or the State to make concessions, and even to help people in other sectors to organise or discuss their problems, it is not the same thing as an actual general strike.


To speak in very general terms, the demonstrators are not the same part of the working class as the part that is necessary to make a successful mass strike. In contrast to thirty plus years ago when these sort of young people would have gone into large workplaces either in factories, or the state sector, today there are less of those jobs, young people are much more likely to be university-educated, and when they graduate are less likely to go into those jobs anyway. Indeed even where these jobs still exist many of them are 'downsizing' and not recruiting new workers. In the TEKEL (a state monopoly) struggle in Turkey over the winter of 2009-10, young workers were noticeable by their absence, which was explained by the fact that no new workers had been recruited in the last 12 years. Statistics concerning the demonstrations in Brazil have suggested that nearly three quarters of the demonstrators are university-educated. This in a country where only 19% of the population have set foot in a university classroom, and even though college attendance rates amongst young people have almost doubled over recent years, this three quarters is well above the level in the general population let alone the working class. There is clearly a gap. The question is how to bridge it.

One of the problems we face nowadays is exactly the systematic downsizing of workplaces that the bourgeoisie has been promoting for the latest three decades. It seems obvious that huge workplaces are easier to organise and mobilise into struggle, and, as long as they exist, they are, other things being equal, most strategic for our struggle. But it is likely that they are going to be fewer and smaller in the predictable future, and if we want to succeed, we need to learn how to organise smaller workplaces too.


There have, of course, been moments where this gap has been bridged. To go back to the 'Green movement' in Iran there was a point when workers at Khodro, Iran's largest factory, came out in solidarity with demonstrators suffering from state repression. During the 'Arab Spring' there were workers' strikes particularly in Tunisia, and Egypt. In Turkey the left unions called for 'general strikes', and around half a million workers took part in them. In Brazil at the moment the main union confederations are talking about holding a day of 'protests, strikes, and marches' on the 11th July.

While these are certainly positive developments, they remain within the limited scope of "influencing movements from the outside". This is great, and even necessary, especially as we see the bourgeoisie succesfully struggling to influence the movements from the outside through the press, but it still doesn't bridge the gap. Only if the movement comes under the actual control of the working class organisations, which means a direct participation of workers in them, which in turn means workers being effectively able to abandon production against the bosses orders.

As for the "union confederations" (which I take to mean the central unions, the confederations being a quite more complicated part of the unionist movement) calling for mass demonstrations in Brazil tomorrow, July 11th, this is quite likely to be reduced to a movement of activists. Generally speaking, they don't have the ability to effectively stop labour for a whole day in Brazil except perhaps in a few workplaces, quite certainly concentrated among a few categories of workers, and I am far from sure that they have the will, at least at this moment. The only actual possibility of a mass movement tomorrow is if a huge base of students, unemployed or semi-employed workers, housewives, and retired people, answers to their call. This will evidently prevent the expression of right-wing feelings and demands, and protect people waving red flags from being attacked, which is a good thing in itself.

But the Brazilian movement, again, has a peculiar specificity, which your distinction between "mass movements" and "activist movements" highlights. For in Brazil, these things have been, in June, not merely distinct, but have opposed each other in the streets, with the mass rejecting activists' leadership, and activists complaining about their exclusion from movements they had, after all, helped bring forth. This is clearer in the rhetoric battle about "sleep" and "wakening" that was fought in June, with the masses claiming "the giant has woken" and the activists retorting, "but we have never slept".


In Turkey, which has previously seen one-day 'general strikes' organised by the left unions, there seems to be a growing recognition that these strikes are neither widespread enough in terms of the amount of workers participating, nor long enough in terms of their limited duration to effectively challenge the state. A similar situation has been seen in Greece during the union organised one day strikes against the implementation of austerity programmes.

I don't know how things are in Greece (which by the way has come too late into the text in my opinion, probably because it disrupts the dichotomy between "young" radicalised countries and "old" still too quiet ones) or Turkey, but in Brazil one-day general strikes are an old and tired tactics to pretend we are doing something when we really aren't (and this, I fear, is what is going again to happen tomorrow). The idea has always been that we start by one-day strikes and this serves as a kind of training for longer, more radical strikes. But practice has shown it doesn't work, that one-day strikes are only effective when and if bus drivers join it, in which case most people are unable to reach their workplaces, and that bus drivers have learnt to only join such things when they can likely use them for their own specific, often quite backward, demands.


While the question of how to move beyond these strikes remains, the question of how to even call a one day strike is something that challenges the demonstrators. In all of these movements there have been calls for general strikes made over social media. Like in Oakland these have been largely unsuccessful. That is not to say that there is nothing at all positive here. It shows at least that there is a recognition that strikes are needed to push this sort of movement forward. In Brazil a Facebook call out for a general strike got more than half a million supporters, which shows that there is a level of support for strikes. However, there are problems with this approach in evidence from the fact that it has failed to be successful. Firstly, the demographic gap is something that is reflected in the usage of computers. Older workers are less likely to use computers than younger university-educated ones, and even where they do use computers they are less likely to use social media sites. Calls for a general strike on Facebook and Twitter are not even connecting to many of the people that they need to be aimed at.

Strikes are very unlikely to be succesfully called from the outside. This is not a problem of the medium; if a given group of workers effectively organise in the internet, this can result in the ability of calling a strike through the internet. But this requires a net of workers discussing their workplace problems in the internet, perhaps in Facebook, perhaps in a message board especially tailored for that exact use, perhaps something else. It needs to be completely different from someone who doesn't know what a lathe is telling welders they must strike "for the greater good", which is quite obviously impossible to do.


This is not to disparage the use of the Internet. It is today an important means of communication. The Turkish state certainly thinks that it is a dangerous one, given the amount of people that have been raided, and arrested for tweeting. They certainly realise its potential, and don't look condescendingly at 'keyboard revolutionaries' as some on the left do. They lock them up. It nevertheless remains that while these media can bring people out onto the street for demonstrations it is far less effective at calling people out on strike. As well as the fact that these media don't connect to many of the people that they need to, the fact is that it is easier to turn up to a demonstration than to go on strike at work.

The right certainly understands the internet better than we do, and knows how to use it more properly. It also fears the internet, and with good reason.


The first reason for this is that going to a demonstration is a decision that can be made individually. Of course there have been cases of people attending these protests collectively from their workplaces, schools or universities, it is not the majority experience. People can and do decide to go to them on their own. You can't decide to go on strike on your own, and it takes a lot more to decide to lose money and risk your job than it foes to turn up at a demonstration, which brings us the central question, the lack of experience, confidence, and consciousness within the workplace.

Agreed.


While there has been a resurgence in workplaces struggle on an international scale over the past decade or so, it is nevertheless a very small one. The fact that the last decade hasn't been as terrible as the 1990s were reflects more on how bad that decade was rather than how good the past one has been. Workplace struggles today are not at the level that they were in the eighties, let alone the seventies. The continuity with that period has gone. Workers with the experience of those struggles are already drawing their pensions, or at best approaching retirement. The experience has been lost, and newer workers are finding that they have to relearn things for themselves. In workplaces where they once held regular mass meetings to discuss things, these traditions have been lost and workers find themselves waiting for the unions to do something.

Yes, this is an important issue. The full-blown defeat that the bourgeoisie imposed to us in the eighties must be dealt with, but it isn't often that we hear the left even recognising the existence of such defeat, with some clinging to an apocalyptic view that capitalism is always in crisis and consequently a revolution is always at hand, merely needing the removal of the "treacherous" leadership we still have, while others take the phenomenon as a merely technological one, and echo the bourgeois claims of "end of history".


Future Expectations

It seems very clear that these sort of movements can be expected to continue to break out. The state has no solutions to offer. The removal of President Morsi in Egypt will not change the economic reality confronting any new government. The problems that are the underlining cause behind these movements can't be swept away. More specifically world capitalism does not have well paid secure jobs to give to the young people that it is churning out of its universities, and other educational establishments. Even though these movements may continue to explode, there is no way for them to move forward without activity in the workplace. Without that power, street movements will tend to burn themselves out, or even worse get transformed into conflicts turning workers against workers such as in Syria. The possibility of similar developments in Egypt, following the clashes caused by the military coup, are worrying to say the least.

The reason they may eventually turn into conflicts opposing workers against workers is that while the movements in themselves can and do contain explicitly working class demands and slogans (and consequently attract workers, especially disorganised workers), their internal dynamics don't favour the hegemony of the working class. Workplace movements, of course, can help in the sence they can force the movements to hear what the working class demands; but they cannot, by themselves, give a proletarian direction to the movements, unless they are able to not only stop labour, but to use labour interruption to take to the street themselves.


Workers, while being involved in these movements as individuals, have nowhere been able to stamp their authority upon them as workers. With the development of class struggle there is the possibility that they might be able to assert themselves in future outbreaks. Also possible, especially in the Middle East, is the possibility that working class people will be dragged into killing each other on behalf of different ideologies, such as sectarianism, religion, and nationalism. If the road on Egypt leads to civil war it would be a disaster not just for workers in Egypt, but across the entire region. The self-activity of the working class is the first step in determining which road will be taken. This self-activity has not only to find adequate organisational forms for mass participation but also give rise to a political instrument which gives voice to the need not just to change the government but the entire economic and political system which spawned it. Ultimately the idea that capitalism can be made fairer has to give way to the idea that it has to be superseded.

First we would have to spread the idea that there is something like an economic system, that such system is not a natural phenomenon, that its existence depends on our actions, etc. If so, we can manage to reach the point where we can collectively understand that the system cannot be reformed, but must be replaced as a whole. That is the task we have ahead of us, and it isn't an easy or simple one.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Just to notice, the demonstrations in Thursday, unhappily, fulfilled my prophecy. They were "activist" movements, of varied radicality and size in different cities of the country. They were by no means small*, but this only shows how big is the number of activists in Brazil, where they are certainly counted in the tens, probably the hundreds, of thousands. But the masses that participated in June were silent last Thursday, or participated only marginally.

Unlike the June movement, Thursday was not certainly polyclassist. But that only highlights the huge problems the Brazilian working class has, regardless of our relations to other social classes.

* and were certainly amplificated by their much superior protest "technology" when compared to June's semi-spontaneous movements: they locked streets and roads and disrupted urban services, and so indirectly impacted the lives of millions of people, in a way that never happened in June.

Luís Henrique

[Leo]

On the point about workplaces vs. the street, the essential point, it seems to me, is that the question is about the link between the workplace and the street rather than preferring one to another.

In the article (http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201306/8371/turkey-cure-state-terror-isnt-democracy)we wrote on the events in Turkey, we said: "[I]n Turkey, where the immense majority of the movement’s components belonged to the working class, above all the proletarian youth. Women had a visible numerical significance as well as a symbolic importance in the protests. Both in the clashes and in the local pot and pan demonstrations, women were in the front lines. The widest participation was shown by the strata called the 90's generation. Being apolitical was a label imposed on the demonstrators produced by this generation, some of whom couldn't remember the period before the AKP government. This generation, who were told not to get involved in the events and to look to save themselves, had noticed that they had no salvation alone and were tired of the government telling them what they should be and how they should live. Students, especially high school students, participated in the demonstrators in massive numbers. Young workers and unemployed were widely a part of the movement. Educated workers and unemployed were also present. In certain areas of the economy where mostly young people work under precarious conditions and it is difficult to struggle under normal conditions – especially in the service sector – the employees organized on a workplace-based way which transcended single workplaces, and participated in the protests together. The examples of such participation were delivery boys in kebab shops, bar employees, call center, office and plaza workers. On the other hand, the fact that workplace-based participation didn't outweigh the tendency of workers to go to the demonstrations individually was among the significant weaknesses of the movement. But this too was typical of the movements in other countries, where the primacy of the revolt on the street has been a practical expression of the need to overcome the social dispersal created by the existing conditions of capitalist production and crisis – in particular, the weight of unemployment and precarious employment. But these same conditions, coupled with the immense ideological assaults of the ruling class, have also made it difficult for the working class to see itself as a class and tends to reinforce the protesters’ notion that they are essentially a mass of individual citizens, legitimate members of the ‘national’ community, and not a class. Such is the contradictory path towards the proletariat re-constituting itself as a class, but there is no doubt that these movements are a step along this path."

On the assembly form, it is obviously evident that these aren't soviets, however in movements like this they are very important and needed. Heterogeneous social movements, not just like the one in Turkey but the movements in North Africa, Spain, Greece and as far as I can understand, Brazil, are movements where different classes sponteneously participate in. Necessarily, there is a tension between these different classes and obviously as communists, we are for this tension to turn into a conflict. Bourgeois ideology, with its appropriate organs always try to dominate these movements with the aim of blurring the slogans and essentially channelizing the movement into the area of bourgeois politics, where it is the bourgeois leaders steering the movement, and the workers who are a part of them follow them like sheep. It is much easier for them to do so in such movements compared to strike movements or other struggles related directly to a single workplace or industry. The reason for that is that in a strike movement, bourgeois ideology tends to lose its basis quite quickly when the workers are very clear about the fact that all that matters is their own living and working conditions. Ideological attacks are limited to attempts to weaken the movement and prevent the workers from taking control of their own struggle. The main conflict in a strike movement is the question of who has the control of the struggle. In an heterogenous social movement, the question of who will control the struggle is still there, but there is also the question of which class will dominate which is equally important. And these questions are vital for the future of these movements.

An example: a strike movement isn't likely to be channelized into an election campaign. The worse that will happen in a strike movement is that the workers won't be able to take control from the unions, that is the agents of the bourgeois state, and the unions will derail and destroy the struggle. However in a polyclassist movement, if the participants fail to take control from the self-proclaimed "leaders" and if they fail to dominate the movement with their own problems, then the movement might well become a bourgeois movement which, by definition, is very unlikely for a strike - though perhaps not impossible.

The reason assemblies are important in social movements is because they are to the adventage of those who want the moment to decide what to do by itself, as they are to those who want to put forward issues about workers living and working conditions. The assemblies are where these things are discussed - for without the assemblies, it is very difficult for the unorganized tendency of proletarians who want to focus on their own living conditions to the organized tendencies of bourgeois organizations who essentially have the most control simply because they don't have a rival with a much better claim to truly be the voice of the movement.

[CatsAttack]

Posting here to read the article later, I most likely won't be able to though, not enough time.

In general though, socialists must reject protest politics. It is a dead end/

[red flag over teeside]

One of the most important tasks of Communists is to provide the theoretical basis which will enable the working class to develop a Communist perspective. Historically while the workers have struggled for various rights they have usually done so within a pro capitalist perspective. That is workers collectively have looked for reforms to the capitalist system such as a right to vote. This is true today when the dominant perspective within the opposition is one of a fairer capitalism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The "sociologic" composition of movements, of course, is a problem for the left, for it is common that working-class individuals hold bourgeois, pro-capitalist, positions. This has lead a significant part of the left - under the direct influence of Lenin - to redefine the class issue as a political issue. It doesn't matter what individual proletarians, nor indeed what the majority of the workers, think or feel; the proletariat's defining characteristics are political, and relate to a set of ideas and demands that can be deducted, logically, from the supposedly "objective" interests of the class.

I think this kind of reasoning is extremely problematic, and cannot but have counter-revolutionary consequences. To me, the working class is not merely a collection of working individuals, but it is not also a teleological "subject" that relates to the real existing proletarians like a Platonic idea to its shadows in the corruptible world. The working class is a system, or a process, and if it is to be the subject of anything, it needs to start by being the subject of its own constitution as a class. And that constitution takes the form of actual, material, really-existing-in-the-real-world, organisational forms and traditions.

That is, in my opinion, what makes the difference between the participation of working class individuals in polyclassist movements and constitutionally proletarian movements. Both will have, of course, a majority of working class individuals, and both will have significant amounts of non-proletarian - petty bourgeois, lumpen, even bourgeois - elements among their ranks. Both will be, also of course, influenced by bourgeois dominant ideology; and it is not the presence of a purely intellectual "proletarian" dissent, much less its magical predominance among workers, that can circumvent or subvert this fact. It is the extent to which the class-as-a-process is present in the movements, and even the extent to which the movements are part of the self-construction of the working class, that makes the difference.

That's quite a long post, but there's a problem in how you've defined "constitutionally proletarian movements": it compromises the very notion of class independence.

There's a difference between non-worker elements providing support but from the outside, and those same elements organizing within. No matter the rhetoric, the movement is polyclassist if those same elements are not kept to providing support but from the outside.


I think it is important to notice that this cannot be framed as a "street x workplace" issue. Not all fights in the streets are unrelated to the self-making of the working class, just as not all workplace events are part of it. Of course, it is unlikely, to put it mildly, that a street movement can be anything but polyclassist if it is not preceded and intimately linked by a strong level of workplace organisation and struggle; but no workplace movement can ultimately succeed - as in being able to destroy the capitalist system - without taking to the streets and politically defeating the bourgeoisie and its allies there. Similarly, while movements like these can certainly be "influenced" from the outside by strikes and other workplace activities, they cannot be directed in this way.

Again, it's well and good, were it not for one word, "preceded." Smaller workplaces means rethinking labour disputes outside the box. The "street" and other avenues should inspire and be intimately liked with the workplace stuff, not the other way around.

[Devrim]

Very interesting article (and I have the feeling I know who wrote it...)

Yes, it is my article. Firstly, Luís, I would like to apologise for taking so long to reply to you after you obviously took a lot of time to comment. I had personal problems, so sorry.



I think this is mistaken. We live in a world dominated by the deep crisis of the capitalist system that surfaced about 2008, of which the suicide of a young Tunisian man was one consequence.

Well yes, of course the reemergence of the crisis in 2008 has a bearing on everything. That said left communists have a tendency to go on and on about the crisis. There is a joke about the ICC having predicated eight of the last three economic crises. To a certain extent I left that as read. On one level I took it as read then. On another level I think it is also important to refer not just to the economic background, but to treat the working class as a mover within its own history, not as a passive object. In that way the Arab spring does represent the period.


I am not really informed of the events in Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia. In Brazil, the demonstrations were sparked by a set of not-immediately-related circumstances (the rise on bus fares, the Confederations Cup, Congress discussing a few issues that managed to get the attention of press and public, especially now-deceased Constitutional Amendment Proposal #37). This seems similar to what happened in Turkey, and perhaps Indonesia, where apparently small issues (the destination of a public park in Turkey, a rise in oil prices in Indonesia) sparked huge demonstrations, disproportional to the rather trivial appearance of the issues that triggered them. This is possibly different from Egypt, where political discontent with Morsi's rule was apparently a more direct cause of the upheaval. In any way, the fact that apparently trivial events could spark huge street demonstrations clearly shows that we live in a volatile situation, where small sparks can result in huge fires.

I agree. The movement in Egypt didn't come about as 'out of the blue' as the ones in Turkey and Brazil. The point that as you put it "we live in a volatile situation, where small sparks can result in huge fires" is an important one.


This is more problematic. I don't think these events (except of course in Egypt) have much to do with supposed "Arab roots". If they have something in common (and I do think so), that is the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system. In their immediate causes, they were remarkably local, and unlinked to each others, probably not even in an emulation chain.

This is partially because I am planning to run the same article in Arabic, and in that environment that is a sort of understanding of the Arab spring as a sort of national movement. Obviously people don't see Brazil as part of that, but the events in Egypt are directly connected by them, and the events in Turkey, which is a neighbour of the Arab world, with considerable connections, is seen as a sort of overflow.

It probably makes more sense in that context.


As a result, not only Dilma's government didn't fall, as Morsi's, but it was not ever really in any kind of danger, as I would guess Erdoğan's was, or is. This was also responsible for the evident brittle characteristic of the Brazilian protests: without an unifying political demand such as the ousting of Morsi and Erdoğan provided the Egyptian and Turkish protests, the Brazilian demonstration crackled into their constitutive elements, that asked for several conflicting and uncompatible sundry demands.

Yes, this is an interesting point. I don't think though that the movement got to the point in Turkey where Tayip was in real danger of being forced out. In Egypt it was effectively a coup that changed the government, and it was also the army who had previously got rid of Mubarak. The Turkish army is too weak these days to make a coup.


However, the figures for Greece would be much similar to those in Germany or the UK, and yet the events in Greece are, or were, closer to those in Turkey or Egypt than to those in Brazil or, even more, to those in Spain or the US. And, within each of these countries - or at least this is the case in Brazil - the protests were "big city" events, Brazilian big cities having different demographics that, while still more "young" than those of Europe, Japan, or US, are "older" than those of Brazil at large. This shows that the dynamics of the protests are linked to age considerations in a different way, closer to the traditional consideration that young people do often take the lead in mass demonstrations.

Yes, certainly the Greek age demographics are much closer to the Western ones.

In away Greece is sort of different in that it wasn't just some spark that lit it, but a series of massive attacks upon the working class.

In Turkey, the protests spread all across the country (79 out of 81 provinces), but of course the driving force was the biggest cities. That is how things are.


This is probably my biggest problem with the text - as with the leftist thought tradition in general.

This is a big point, and I will address it in another post, perhaps in a new thread. It deserves attention.


I think it is important to notice that this cannot be framed as a "street x workplace" issue. Not all fights in the streets are unrelated to the self-making of the working class, just as not all workplace events are part of it. Of course, it is unlikely, to put it mildly, that a street movement can be anything but polyclassist if it is not preceded and intimately linked by a strong level of workplace organisation and struggle; but no workplace movement can ultimately succeed - as in being able to destroy the capitalist system - without taking to the streets and politically defeating the bourgeoisie and its allies there. Similarly, while movements like these can certainly be "influenced" from the outside by strikes and other workplace activities, they cannot be directed in this way.

I agree with most of this, but I am not sure about the last bit. I think that the workplace can potentially become the centre of such movements. Perhaps Iran in 1979 shows this.


This again is mistaken, in my opinion. The movement in Brazil, for one, stands to me as something clearly intermediate between the Occupy movement in the US, on one hand, and the Tunisian, Egyptian, Turkish, or Greek events. In that sence, I think there is a continuum, and that both Occupy and the "Egyptian revolution" (and, indeed, the Libyan uprising and the Syrian civil war) respond to the same issue, which is the international crisis of capitalism. The radicality of each response is, of course, different, as are different the delusions under which people act when engaging those movements. It is unlikely that the movement in Brazil or Greece delves with sectarian issues like those that complicate the situation in Syria, for instance.

Yes, you can frame it like this. It is logical to do so if you want to keep the crisis at the centre of your arguments. I think the occupy events were on a completely different scale though. Essentially they were movements that were a drawing together of activists, and not movements which drew in massive numbers of people from all sections of society. In essence, I think they are a very pale shadow of what is going on elsewhere in the world.


Good. There is a confusion by the people you mention (if we are talking about the same people, that is) between an abstract form and the content it expresses. Of course "assemblies" are good things in and of themselves, especially where people are really allowed to speak and propose regardless of their affiliation with unions and political parties (which is very rarely the case); but an assembly held at 3:00 PM at a street demonstration while most workers are toiling because there is no general strike is not the same thing as an assembly held within a movement that has stopped the workplaces, or that can stop them for the exact purpose of having an assembly. It is of course the difference between a revolutionary situation, in which workers have ensured power within workplaces, and a non-revolutionary situation, in which the bosses remain very much in control within the workplaces. Being unable to see the difference is being unable to understand the strength relation between classes, and consequently mistaking enemy for friend.

I agree with this.


Strikes are extremely difficult to organise and maintain, and doing it from the outside is nearly impossible. Of course, if a few strategic sectors go on strike (such as bus drivers, or journalists), it is possible to make people unable to reach their workplaces, or able to pretend that they were unable to. But while this can certainly be useful in forcing the bosses or the State to make concessions, and even to help people in other sectors to organise or discuss their problems, it is not the same thing as an actual general strike.

When I worked in London in the 80s, we were brought out on strike once 'from the outside'. There was a nurses strike, and two nurse stood outside our place and asked people not to go to work. Nobody did. This was quite common in those days, but it has things to do with traditions within the English working class. It is not impossible to do it from outside, but just extremely difficult.


One of the problems we face nowadays is exactly the systematic downsizing of workplaces that the bourgeoisie has been promoting for the latest three decades. It seems obvious that huge workplaces are easier to organise and mobilise into struggle, and, as long as they exist, they are, other things being equal, most strategic for our struggle. But it is likely that they are going to be fewer and smaller in the predictable future, and if we want to succeed, we need to learn how to organise smaller workplaces too.

This is clearly true, but also I think there will be, even if those smaller places are organised, a tendency for them to follow bigger workplaces.


Generally speaking, they don't have the ability to effectively stop labour for a whole day in Brazil except perhaps in a few workplaces, quite certainly concentrated among a few categories of workers, and I am far from sure that they have the will, at least at this moment.

Essentially this is true in Turkey too. The left unions can bring out at most half a million people "certainly concentrated among a few categories of workers".


I don't know how things are in Greece (which by the way has come too late into the text in my opinion, probably because it disrupts the dichotomy between "young" radicalised countries and "old" still too quiet ones) or Turkey,
:blushing:


but in Brazil one-day general strikes are an old and tired tactics to pretend we are doing something when we really aren't (and this, I fear, is what is going again to happen tomorrow). The idea has always been that we start by one-day strikes and this serves as a kind of training for longer, more radical strikes. But practice has shown it doesn't work, that one-day strikes are only effective when and if bus drivers join it, in which case most people are unable to reach their workplaces, and that bus drivers have learnt to only join such things when they can likely use them for their own specific, often quite backward, demands.

Yes, when I was a young worker we didn't really do 'one day strikes' like this. Generally strikes were all out. There is an interesting discussion here.


Strikes are very unlikely to be succesfully called from the outside. This is not a problem of the medium; if a given group of workers effectively organise in the internet, this can result in the ability of calling a strike through the internet. But this requires a net of workers discussing their workplace problems in the internet, perhaps in Facebook, perhaps in a message board especially tailored for that exact use, perhaps something else. It needs to be completely different from someone who doesn't know what a lathe is telling welders they must strike "for the greater good", which is quite obviously impossible to do.

Agreed, different workplaces are of course different. An example could be in the country where I am living now, where a new car factory (with a much younger workforce), had a strike, and workers there used social media themselves as a way to discuss the struggle. In a bigger and older car plant (with a correspondingly older workforce) this didn't happen.


Yes, this is an important issue. The full-blown defeat that the bourgeoisie imposed to us in the eighties must be dealt with, but it isn't often that we hear the left even recognising the existence of such defeat, with some clinging to an apocalyptic view that capitalism is always in crisis and consequently a revolution is always at hand, merely needing the removal of the "treacherous" leadership we still have, while others take the phenomenon as a merely technological one, and echo the bourgeois claims of "end of history".

I think this is very true. The nineties were certainly terrible years for both workers and communists. Perhaps one of the reasons for the lefts failure to address this is that their cadre in their late twenties to early forties (i.e. young enough, but also stable, as they have been there longer and are thus no longer subject to the massive turnover many left wing organisations have) came through in those in the 90s through things such as the anti-globalisation movement, and not as earlier generations would have through workplace struggles.


The reason they may eventually turn into conflicts opposing workers against workers is that while the movements in themselves can and do contain explicitly working class demands and slogans (and consequently attract workers, especially disorganised workers), their internal dynamics don't favour the hegemony of the working class. Workplace movements, of course, can help in the sence they can force the movements to hear what the working class demands; but they cannot, by themselves, give a proletarian direction to the movements, unless they are able to not only stop labour, but to use labour interruption to take to the street themselves.

I think that the workplace is of crucial importance here. Of course it can't save the world by itself, but it is key.

Devrim

[darkblues]

db

[Luís Henrique]

Yes, it is my article. Firstly, Luís, I would like to apologise for taking so long to reply to you after you obviously took a lot of time to comment. I had personal problems, so sorry.

No need to apologise.


Well yes, of course the reemergence of the crisis in 2008 has a bearing on everything. That said left communists have a tendency to go on and on about the crisis. There is a joke about the ICC having predicated eight of the last three economic crises. To a certain extent I left that as read. On one level I took it as read then. On another level I think it is also important to refer not just to the economic background, but to treat the working class as a mover within its own history, not as a passive object. In that way the Arab spring does represent the period.

[snip]

This is partially because I am planning to run the same article in Arabic, and in that environment that is a sort of understanding of the Arab spring as a sort of national movement. Obviously people don't see Brazil as part of that, but the events in Egypt are directly connected by them, and the events in Turkey, which is a neighbour of the Arab world, with considerable connections, is seen as a sort of overflow.

It probably makes more sense in that context.

I see. I think we are just addressing different problems within the left. If the ICC has predicted 8 of the latest 3 capitalist crises, there are Trotskyist organisations that have been predicting only one crisis since 1938. The problem, in my opinion, is one of having abandoned actual analysis of reality, in favour of some dogma, to which reality must be bended and stretched to fit into.


Yes, this is an interesting point. I don't think though that the movement got to the point in Turkey where Tayip was in real danger of being forced out. In Egypt it was effectively a coup that changed the government, and it was also the army who had previously got rid of Mubarak. The Turkish army is too weak these days to make a coup.

And thankfully so.

But while Morsi was evidently ousted by the military, it seems clear to me that the military wouldn't oust him if it were not for the strenght of the movement.


Yes, certainly the Greek age demographics are much closer to the Western ones.

In away Greece is sort of different in that it wasn't just some spark that lit it, but a series of massive attacks upon the working class.

Yup. But the depth and radicality of the Greek situation is still, at this moment, very different from that of other European countries were the working class has suffered/is suffering similar massive attack (most notoriously, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy). I do think that the difference is merely chronological - ie, that the situation in these countries will get increasingly similar to that in Greece - but that still requires a few steps.

Notoriously, in Greece, there was an electoral collapse of the natural governing parties, ND and PASOK, resulting in a political victory of a new organisation, Syriza. Portugal and Spain seem still locked in an older configuration, in which the dominant traditional party is regularly ousted in elections - in favour of the traditional opposition party (conservatives win when the government is social-democratic, social democrats win when the government is conservative). The crisis is deeper in Greece, of course; but the fact that ND and PASOK entered into a governing coalition probably helped breaking such dynamics there.

The only other country that comes close to the Greek electoral situation is Italy. But with all criticisms that we can make of Syriza, Bepe Grillo's Five Star Movement is a different critter; Syriza is evidently rooted in the traditions of working class struggle - if it is reformist, it is because the Greek working class is reformist itself. Grillo is rooted in something very different, probably in some kind of politics of ambiguity.


In Turkey, the protests spread all across the country (79 out of 81 provinces), but of course the driving force was the biggest cities. That is how things are.

That's how things are, agreed. But anyway, I am not sure of what relation the different age demographics of different countries bears to the radicality of the oppositional movements in each of them.


This is a big point, and I will address it in another post, perhaps in a new thread. It deserves attention.

Thank you. To me, this is a major point of contention, and the one where I clearly deviate from the leftist traditions in general. I think we read too much Gyorgy Lukacs, and too little E. P. Thompson. I think we are stuck into a false dichotomy between sociological (and social democrat) and politological (and Leninist) conceptions of "working class". I would argue for an "anthropological" conception of classes, to break with this dichotomy.


I agree with most of this, but I am not sure about the last bit. I think that the workplace can potentially become the centre of such movements. Perhaps Iran in 1979 shows this.

Perhaps, but I would argue that to really make those movements consequential from a working class point of view, it is necessary to break the boundaries between workplace and street - something that is only possible, of course, when and if the working class takes charge of the workplaces.


Yes, you can frame it like this. It is logical to do so if you want to keep the crisis at the centre of your arguments. I think the occupy events were on a completely different scale though. Essentially they were movements that were a drawing together of activists, and not movements which drew in massive numbers of people from all sections of society. In essence, I think they are a very pale shadow of what is going on elsewhere in the world.

As in the beginning, I think we are addressing different problems we perceive within the left. My worry, here, is with so many leftists trying to frame these movements as if they were completely unrelated to each others (and consequently, varying from a "legitimate" working class struggle in Greece to mere foreign interventions in Libya or Syria). To me, it is clear that all those movements have common, and quite deep roots. But of course, the movements have very different levels of radicality, the "occupies" being much less radical than the movements in Greece, Turkey, or Egypt. Or even Libya or Syria, for what is worth. My contention, however, would be that the Brazilian June journeys have been much closer to the "occupies" than to the events in Egypt or Turkey. Indeed, in some aspects at least, the Brazilian demonstrations fell short even of what the "occupies" were able to display in terms of radicality (in Oakland, for instance, there was something like a strike one day, something that was never even seriously discussed in Brazil - the evidently inidoneous attempts at calling a general strike via Facebook resulting in miserable failures, and the union movement only taking some action later, and in great part in opposition to the street demonstrations).


When I worked in London in the 80s, we were brought out on strike once 'from the outside'. There was a nurses strike, and two nurse stood outside our place and asked people not to go to work. Nobody did. This was quite common in those days, but it has things to do with traditions within the English working class. It is not impossible to do it from outside, but just extremely difficult.

Well, yes, there are such things as solidarity strikes, but they certainly require previous organisation within the workplace.


This is clearly true, but also I think there will be, even if those smaller places are organised, a tendency for them to follow bigger workplaces.

As long as we still have big workplaces, certainly. The real problem being the general downsizing. While evidently the bourgeoisie does this out of other, very different, reasons, related with the profit rates, it is certainly a very welcome bonus to them that such move reduces the working class ability to organise and fight back.

So yes, the biggest working places remain strategic for us as long as they exist, but we need to learn and prepare to organise and fight back in a situation where small workplaces are the rule, and where even the biggest workplaces are not as big as they used to be in the past.


:blushing:

Oh, that was perhaps excessively harsh. Sorry. But in general, I don't think the age demographics argument helps your article.


Yes, when I was a young worker we didn't really do 'one day strikes' like this. Generally strikes were all out. There is an interesting discussion here.

I think Brazil hasn't seen actual general strikes since the twenties, or perhaps the thirties, of the 20th century. The attempt to call one to counter the military coup in 1964 failed, and the "general strikes" in the 1980s were all one-day strikes. While they were thought and organised under the premise that they would prepare a general strike "for unlimited time", they never really worked like that; on the contrary, they gradually lost radicality, until they disappeared (under the combined push of their own irrelevancy and of the suppression of their usual trigger, high inflation) in the mid 1990s.


Agreed, different workplaces are of course different. An example could be in the country where I am living now, where a new car factory (with a much younger workforce), had a strike, and workers there used social media themselves as a way to discuss the struggle. In a bigger and older car plant (with a correspondingly older workforce) this didn't happen.

Ah yes, I can very well see how the age demographics would be very relevant in such a case. Yes, internet-organised strikes will probably be the privilege of workplaces with younger populations, until the generations that weren't accostumed to computers and internet simply fade out. More some twenty years, I guess.

But anyway, it is one thing to call your own co-workers (who know you and your positions, and your political labour) to strike using the internet, and another, completely different, to use the internet to call people who never heard of you to strike.


I think this is very true. The nineties were certainly terrible years for both workers and communists. Perhaps one of the reasons for the lefts failure to address this is that their cadre in their late twenties to early forties (i.e. young enough, but also stable, as they have been there longer and are thus no longer subject to the massive turnover many left wing organisations have) came through in those in the 90s through things such as the anti-globalisation movement, and not as earlier generations would have through workplace struggles.

Yes, this is a possible explanation.

The real problem, however, still is, actual analysis of reality is necessary. We can't win by merely saying to ourselves that we are winning, or that we are going to magically win in the near future because the system is always in a terminal crisis.


I think that the workplace is of crucial importance here. Of course it can't save the world by itself, but it is key.

Yup, I think the difference is merely of emphasis: whether it cannot save the world by itself, but it is key... or it is key, but cannot save the world by itself. Both things are true of course.

Luís Henrique