PART I

Introduction: What We Confront

by Cliff Slaughter

In every continent, countless thousands of men and women look for ways to organise and demonstrate for an escape from the oppression and exploitation inflicted upon them. Many of them find themselves victims of murderous wars between conflicting powers, with thousands dying or reduced to homelessness and hopeless poverty. Even in what used to be called the 'advanced capitalist countries' of Western Europe and North America, mass unemployment and attacks on basic standards of living in the name of 'austerity' to solve problems of 'sovereign debt' are more and more the order of the day. Everywhere in the struggles against these conditions youth have been to the fore, more and more of them insisting that the future of humanity is threatened and that a new social order must be founded. We shall argue in this short book that what is at stake everywhere is the necessity to end the rule of capital, and that it is possible to learn from past movements and mistakes in order to move towards that end.

For many years, it was only on very rare occasions that the word 'capitalism' and the name of Karl Marx could be found in our newspapers. Today, in 2015, hardly a day goes by without our seeing them in the European and North American press. We are told that there is too much polarisation of wealth, too much debt, that bankers are paid too much, that there is too much or too little credit or 'quantitative easing', and so on ad nauseam. Some of the commentators report all this as simply matter-of-fact news. Others appear radical, telling us that capitalism 'isn't working' and something should be done about it. But what? With very few exceptions, they offer only suggestions about how to manage the system better and more fairly. On 27 May 2014, TV news programmes informed us that an international conference on 'Inclusive Capitalism' was about to begin proceedings, its intention to deal with 'bad capitalism'! No doubt the initiators of this conference had in mind a 'good capitalism', to be rescued and properly organised. (Has anything been heard of this conference since? Let alone any news of its successes?) In this book we see the problem very differently. The problem is not how to manage the capital system, but how to get rid of it.

Along with the jeremiads about the faults and virtues of capitalism we find reports and commentaries on the state of the working class: has it disappeared? Do people still feel working-class? What happened to the 'old' working class and its culture and consciousness? And so on. Again, our approach here is very different. We do not mean by working-class consciousness the feeling of individual working people about whether or not they are working class. The workers are a class of wage-earners, the indispensable opposite of capital, its structural antagonist. And so, as for class-consciousness, we focus on the possibilities of a working-class movement aimed at overcoming wage-slavery, with the recognition in theory and in practice that capital has inescapably created, in that movement, what Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, referred to as 'its own gravediggers'.

The rule of capital now has global reach. In the nineteenth century, when modern socialist ideas and the socialist movement were born, the working class existed in England, soon in Western Europe and the United States, and then, in the last decades of the century, in Russia. Today the working class exists everywhere. In and alongside the working class in many countries there are millions of oppressed and exploited people struggling to find subsistence on the very minimum of resources, and falling victim in massive numbers to famine and disease, as well as the dispersal and destruction of thousands of communities in wars, which have become a savage method of social control. In the older, 'advanced' capitalist countries of Europe and North America, living standards, basic rights and any promise of a future are daily under attack, giving rise to movements of protest, especially of young people. In the countries where ex-Stalinist bureaucrats have become a new capitalist class (particularly China and Russia) a large and growing working class confronts employers who are inextricably integrated with the state machine, together with the transnational corporations who invest there because of the inhumanly low wages and the denial of political and organisational rights imposed by the state. In ex-colonial countries such as those in Africa and the Middle East, millions are awakening (as in the 'Arab Spring') to the necessity of getting rid of the nationalist leaders who abandoned their left-wing, even 'communist' rhetoric as soon as they were in power, turning on the working people, and keeping order on behalf of imperialist powers like the US and Britain.

Egypt provides a compelling recent example. When the workers and youth in Cairo massed in Tahrir Square demanding the ousting of President Mubarak, for decades the head of a government repressing all opposition and protecting US business and strategic interests, newspapers in Britain and the US carried the headline 'Obama: Mubarak Must Stay!' Only days later, as Mubarak's fate was sealed, Obama and the State Department presented the US as the guarantor of a new democracy and the rule of law. In fact the US and its allies have since then, as always, supported and armed the Egyptian military in the imprisonment of tens of thousands of protestors and the murder of some 2,000. US arms sales to Egypt had increased by over 80 per cent by 2014. In Cairo dozens of trade commissioners from the US, Canada and Britain are safely ensconced. Typically, the heroic youth and workers of Egypt are going through bitter experiences in order to absorb the lesson that it is the real source of their plight, the rule of capital, that they must find ways to confront and remove.

The Egyptian experience conforms to a pattern. The US has supported and armed the repressive regime of Saudi Arabia, ignoring its brutal suppression of any demand for human rights and its notorious oppression of women. After encouraging and arming the regime of Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Kuwait, the US claimed to discover 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq and, with the support of New Labour's Blair government in Britain, launched the...